The gum thief: a novel

by Douglas Coupland

  Our fridge was filled with fatty, sugary crap, and no wonder I'm turning out the way I am. No wonder Bethany's going in the same direction. Why couldn't she have been a vegetarian? That might have whipped me into shape. But no, when this Goth thing began, we were at the IGA and she asked the butcher how to order blood by the quart. It was one of those few moments in life when you literally freeze. And now she's dating way too high up the food chain and I'm at my wits' end. Who is this guy? What does he want?

  If you ever tell Bethany I wrote this, I will kill you.

  DD

  Glove Pond

  "The soy sauce has mummified," said Kyle.

  "What do you mean?" asked Gloria.

  He shook the La Choy bottle. "It's turned into a little black hockey puck, bonded onto the bottom." He handed the bottle to Gloria.

  "It needs to be warmed up a bit is all. I'll go put it in the double boiler for a few minutes. It'll melt in no time." "There was no soy sauce in the fridge or cupboards,"

  said Kyle, under his breath. "I looked."

  "Of course not. This bottle was part of our honeymoon gift from Daddy's lawyer. It was a Japanese home cooking kit, and I've been keeping it down in the nice cool basement so it would be fresh for a festive occasion such as this."

  "How long have you been married?" Brittany asked.

  "Thirty-six years."

  "It's okay," said Brittany. "I don't need soy sauce."

  "Me neither," said Kyle.

  "Let me see that bottle," said Steve. He opened it and began digging at its contents with a disposable chopstick. "It's not hard," he said. "It's granular." Steve sprinkled some soy shavings onto the cold, oily glacier that was once moo goo gai pan, and then ate a fork load.

  "Delicious. A good soy sauce is like a good wine. Gets better with age." "So, Kyle," said Gloria, unaware that she was batting her lashes, "is your family literary?"

  "Literary? "

  "Do they, you know, read books? Are they like me, for example-and live for nothing but art and music and masterful writing?" "Kyle doesn't like discussing his family," said Brittany.

  "Why not?" asked Steve.

  "I don't think it's anyone's business," said Kyle.

  Brittany said, "Kyle thinks his family is nothing but a collection of emotionally frozen, passive-aggressive hillbillies."

  "Really?" asked Steve.

  "That's not true," said Kyle.

  "But it is," Brittany said, "and never discussing them won't make it untrue." She looked at Gloria. "Our place is like your place. No family photos anywhere. Not even stuck to the fridge with a magnet. When I try to ask about his family, the subject gets changed."

  "Gloria," said Kyle, "tell me more about your upcoming role as Lady Windermere in the local dinner theatre production of Lady Windermere's Fan."

  "It's the lead role, you know."

  "It must be difficult."

  "She can't remember her lines," said Steve.

  Gloria spun around to Steve. "That's not true! One doesn't remember lines, Steve. One internalizes them. One doesn't rattle off lines like an idiot savant. There must be a soul and music to them. Please pass me some Scotch." Gloria poured.

  "I had to memorize half of human knowledge to become a surgeon," said Brittany. "But I could never memorize a script. And Lady Windermere's Fan is a long play with complex nuances."

  Kyle asked, "How do you remember your lines? Do you have any techniques?" "I try to read the lines and have the emotions behind them fill my body."

  "Hooey," said Steve. "You have no technique. Trying to get memories to stick to your brain is like trying to get Ping-Pong balls to stick to a brick wall."

  "I'll make a very good Lady Windermere," said Gloria. "I will."

  Brittany changed the subject. "Before you went to fetch the soy sauce, we were discussing your son," she said. "The one in college."

  "Ah, yes." Steve and Gloria spoke in unison.

  "What's his name?" Kyle asked.

  Steve and Gloria looked as though they were deciding whether to accept a plea bargain. "Yes," said Brittany. "I bet you chose a good name." Gloria sipped her Scotch and Steve idly scraped more flecks of mummified soy sauce from its diseased flask.

  There was a silence.

  Finally, Steve said, "Kendall. His name is Kendall."

  Gloria looked at him as if to say, Really?, but quickly snapped to and said, "Yes, young Kendall. Such a good son."

  Bethany

  c/o YHA London-Hampstead Heath Hostel 4 Wellgarth Road London, England

  VIA FEDEX

  Hi, Roger. Surprise! I'm in jolly olde London. I made the jailbreak! Farewell, Shtooples! Sorry I didn't say goodbye to you. I didn't want to make a big deal out of leaving. Getting my passport took a week, and I talked myself in and out of this maybe fifty times while I was waiting for it. Was there a new chapter of Glove Pond to read-or a diary entry? I'll have missed it. Sorry.

  It's great here, Roger, art and beauty and music and stuff everywhere-I feel like Gloria, which is scary-except every time I look at the price on anything I faint. How can these people afford to live in their own country? We got here a week ago and are staying in this hostel in a place called Hampstead, which is where Wallace and Gromit would live if they were here: nice little stone houses, and behind every door I can clearly sense the presence of various kinds of exotic cheddars. All they eat in this country is sandwiches-the kind you got in your lunch box in school, cut diagonally and sold in sets of two inside vacuum packed containers at corner stores and train stations. I bet even the car dealerships and kidney dialysis centres here sell them. It's all we're eating because it's all we can afford. By "we," I mean Kyle and me. There was a, well, er, uh ... a scene before I went to the airport. Poor DeeDee. She has it in her head that I'm throwing my life away and that I'm going to end up like her unless I go back to school. Right. As if I want the rest of my life to be nothing but watching TV reruns with a mild headache. Not if I can help it. I had a bit of money stashed away, and Kyle sold his Mom's OxyContins and a few other things, and tiddly-dee-dee, pip-pip, we're in England!

  Highlights:

  We saw a Punch and Judy show in the park, which was depressing because it's November and cold and cloudy, and the kids are all in school, so I don't know what the puppeteers were thinking-unless it was only a practice run. But good Lord, it's nothing but wife beating. Have you ever seen one of these? They obviously didn't have women's shelters in the Middle Ages. What a disaster to have been born before 1980.

  We've gone to a few pubs, and they're actually not as pubby as I'd hoped. I'd been expecting sawdust on the floors - crusty factory workers playing darts and an eccentric woman in a tweed coat sitting in the corner with a duck on her lap. Instead, everything is digital, high-tech and beautifully lit, and when you order a beer, it's like being at Lord Twindlebury's beer smorgasbord. It's all so deluxe and polished, even the dives, though people smoke here and every night before bed I have to rinse out my hair.

  Oh! I had jet lag for the first time, and it was almost fun-it made things that were weird to me feel even weirder-enhanced. It's like MSG.

  There aren't nearly as many girls here my age who are into pursuing Johnny Depp as a husband. Everybody's so rich-looking. And how can somebody be rich in a place where everything is so insanely expensive? The people my age all have their money act together. I'm feeling a bit freakish right now and may tone down my look a notch. Or maybe I'll amp it up. No idea.

  Enough already. I have yet to meet Count Chocula and his jewel-encrusted dildo from the Crusades. Keep working on Glove Pond. Kyle is jealous I'm writing you, so maybe I'll write you more than ever. Ta for now,

  B.

  PS: As you can see, I've moved up in the world and am using FedEx. There's a storefront down the street here in Hampstead and, even better, in my address book I've got the account number of Mom's creepy boss, who stuck his tongue in my ear at their office do three years ago. He's a perv, and I'm not going to let it wreck my life, bu
t I'm certainly going to use his account while I'm here. ;)

  Joan

  Roger, the wedding is this weekend, and rather than throw five hundred bucks into the shredder and have my lawyer draft you something, I'm sending you this myself instead. I know the past years have been rough on you, but they've been rough on me, too-and I don't count, it's Zoe who counts, and frankly, this wedding is mostly about Zoe having some nice pictures in her head when she thinks of the word "marriage." I'd have been quite happy to go to the counter where they issue dog tags at city hall and fill out a form and have it done with. So yes, I'm asking you not to rent the Fuji Blimp and print scary shit on its digital sign board, or rent a WWI Sopwith Camel with a crude message trailing after it, or hire a jet to skywrite a skull and bones over the church. Please leave us alone and get on with something else. Okay?

  I want to confirm that Zoe's coming with us on the trip to Hawaii after the service (you'll notice I didn't use the word "honeymoon"? Honeymoons, like Trix, are for kids), so your three hours with her will be postponed for two weeks.

  That's about it.

  Oh, I forgot to remind you that you're the one who had the affair with the cheesy actress in the local dinner theatre production of Same Time, Next Year, and that's what started this whole ball rolling.

  Joan

  PS: I never heard again from young Lily Munster who showed up on my doorstep a few weeks ago.

  PPS: It kills me that you won't be making child support payments any more, but I'm remarrying, so that's the law. Think of all the extra beer you can now drink by yourself in your basement apartment. Woohoo! Life's a blast.

  Bethany

  c/o YHA London-Hampstead Heath Hostel 4 Wellgarth Road London, England

  VIAFEDEX

  Hi, Roger. You'll notice I'm using paper and pen again. Screw email. I want to keep our noble storyteller's tradition alive. Kyle is already homesick and lives in the nearby Internet cafe, which is beside a kebab restaurant, so it all smells like grease and those spices that normal people buy and put in their spice rack but never use from one decade to the next. Question: Have you ever looked closely at a donair? Answer: Don't.

  It's been ten days now, and I think I might actually be burning out on London. We spend all our time in subways and standing on corners looking at maps and feeling like hillbilly tourists. Question: Roger, have you ever felt depressed? Answer: Pigeons. Those poor creatures and the lives they lead. I ... don't want to go into it. If London is a meal, then pigeons are the parsley on top of it, except instead of being green and crisp, they're grey and hobbling and missing toes, and while they may appear to be technically cute, they also appear to be riddled with disease and mites.

  We've been trying to meet locals, but we're citizens of London's weird parasitic shadow economy. It's composed of people like us who have the notion that we can use our grandmother's EU birth certificate to scam our way into genuine European jobs. The only people we're likely to encounter are fellow tribe members, none of whom are locals. Mostly they're foreigners our age with either no job or a sketchy one, who go to these parties that go on all night. It's dawning on me that there's not much I'm equipped to do for a living-either here or back home and so all I have is my attitude and my skin, which has not been touched by the sun for over five years. Today I walked past a Staples on Oxford High Street and broke out laughing: they're identical to the ones back home.

  Do you think Kyle could ever be a provider?

  As I write this, he's emailing everybody he ever went to school with or worked with to fish for more emails in return. I don't think he's used to being uncomfortable this in the man I love. He's had two stepmoms and he milked them both for all the buy-my-silence money he could-and if you factor in how totally guilty his real mom and his father felt, you can imagine the shower of comfort and trinkets that has rained down on him since the cradle. Was that last sentence too long? He's used to being a prince, and here he's merely another lame tourist.

  Well, Bethany, Roger thanks you for the champagne flute full of negative energy you just chucked into his face.

  ". Sorry about that, Roger. ".

  There are things here that I like! The Museum of Natural History. A small display case filled with ultra-deep sea creatures was worth the admission alone-tiny, monstrous personalities frozen into animal shapes. The museum had a recreation of a dinosaur's nest, and somebody had put extinguished cigarette butts in it, and it was like that Far Side cartoon of dinosaurs smoking, with the caption, "Why dinosaurs became extinct."

  But enticing golden boy to show a whiff of adventurous spirit is proving hard to do. If nothing else, I want to take the Chunnel to France. I can dream. The hostel is really wearing on me. I think I'm one-point-six years too old to really care about the stuff most of the hostellers care about (cheap beer; cheap tickets; an even cheaper hostel), and even something simple like doing laundry takes roughly the same amount of time, energy and money as buying and assembling a large IKEA bookshelf. And then I walk around the city and see the amazing houses people live in, and I look at my own life and I feel like a hamster.

  How are Steve and Gloria? Have we met Kendall yet? And where does Gloria get tonic for her gin? I think that's a plot point you missed. Maybe her family set her up with a beverage endowment. I've met a few trust-fund kids here, and I can already tell that there's nothing a fucked-up rich family won't do with their money.

  Kyle is ready to go. We're headed to Piccadilly to meet up with some deejay we met at a party in Wimbledon two nights ago. The previous sentence sounds way more glamorous than it is.

  Write me a letter, why don't you? Paper is more old

  fashioned and warped, even when sent FedEx. My email address is blackchandelier@gmail.com in case you're feeling modern and lazy. I check the address daily.

  Bye, Roger.

  Ta!

  B.

  DeeDee

  Roger, I came to Staples but it was your day off. They wouldn't give me your home address, your phone's unlisted, and you have no Google existence. Are you a Unabomber or something?

  Bethany left with that wretch, Kyle. She told me she was going to England the morning before the afternoon flight, and I botched it and screamed all the things you're not supposed to scream, which gave her the moral high ground and allowed her to slip into dignified silence mode-which inflamed me more. When numbnuts came to pick her up, I threw the Braun coffeemaker at him from the balcony. But what-I was supposed to let her run away and do something stupid, and say nothing? What sort of mother would I be if I did that?

  What the hell is she going to do in England? England? Who goes to England? High school choirs, soccer hooligans, tea salesmen and pansies. She said she's going to Europe for half a year and she's going to get a job there because her father's mother was born in Brussels-some sort of European visa boondoggle. Yeah, right. They're going to smoke pot, meet losers, sit on trains and eat junk food. That's all young people do there, along with fucking around. I did the Europe thing once, except I had no illusions about what it was about. Sex and drugs. Period.

  Oh God, I'm jealous. And I'm utterly sick with worry, though I think Bethany could hold her own in the gutters of Hanoi if she had to. I'm so lonely I can barely think. I got a terse little mini-email from her today, and it was way worse than hate mail. "Mom. I'm fine. Relax."

  She's there with somebody else, and even if that somebody is that scheming prick, at least she has somebody.

  Has she written you? Is she writing you? I hope she is. I think it's good she has one adult in her life she can talk to. I want you to grill all those twerps there at Staples and find out what you can about Kyle. Does Bethany email them? Did she get a job? Does she hate every minute of it and plan on coming home soon?

  Sorry, I didn't ask you if you were fine. Bethany said you didn't have the flu, but that you were depressed about something, and she didn't know what, but now you're back at work. How is your novel coming? How can you concentrate on something that takes so long to do?


  I'm off to a doctor's appointment.

  I appreciate whatever help you can give me.

  Bye. DD

  Roger

  DeeDee, I'm not going to act as a go-between between a mother and her daughter. Let Bethany enjoy Europe. She's hasn't written me, but she also isn't the type to do freaky, crazy shit like we might have done in the seventies. Yes, she wears vampire makeup, but it's only makeup-it's make-believe it's something to tide her over until something more real comes along. As for Kyle? He's a blank. A generic good looking kid with zero ambition and grades that stink-why else would he be working at Staples at, what, twenty-four? Kyles like him will be selling cellphone packages at twenty five, and by thirty they'll have their shit together enough to get a pickup and start a half-assed gardening service, and by forty they'll be in coke or meth rehab, but by then our Kyle will be almost two decades out of Bethany's picture. Whatever is between them, it's not going to last. You know it. I know it. So relax.

  Today has been strange for me. To be honest, I miss my mother, which is something I never experienced when she was alive. Missing that mean spirited, sour judgmental old battle-axe is the last thing I would have expected, but today I was in an ATM line up at the bank, and there was this woman in front of me who, from behind, was the spitting image of my mother-the same hair colour and cut, and she held herself the way my mother did, her whole body bent in an arc. And she was wearing yellow ochre, my mother's favourite colour. I had no idea a simple colour could mean so much. Anyway, for the first thirty seconds I was looking at this woman from behind, I didn't make the connection that it wasn't my mother or that my mother was dead. I felt as if I were a teenager again, and I'd bumped into her there in the bank, and the moment she turned around and saw me I was going to catch shit for something I'd done wrong. But then the woman moved, and it wasn't my mother, and I felt socked on the jaw. My body felt all boneless and my eyes teared up, and then I got mad because the last thing I want in my life right now is more grief or memories. I'm sick of everything leaving my life, and nothing new ever coming my way.