Vinyl Cafe Turns the Page

by Stuart McLean

  It took a few weeks, but things slowly returned to normal. Though not in Morley’s mind.

  As far as Morley was concerned, everything had changed. She could see things were better, but she knew it had been a near miss, and Morley didn’t know that near misses were possible.

  She didn’t even know that shots could be fired.

  She kept waiting for the end of the world. And then came Saturday, July the first. Firecracker Day.

  Darkness comes slowly when you’re seven years old and you’re waiting on fireworks. In the morning Morley went over to Sarah Lochead’s house. When she got there, Sarah took her into the kitchen and showed her the box of fireworks on top of the refrigerator. Then Sarah got out her pencil crayons and she and Morley started to draw, but the minutes ticked by so sluggishly that by ten a.m. Morley was ready to go home. She spent the afternoon reading in her room. When it was finally time for supper she was too excited to eat. When she was finally allowed up from the table, she ran outside and saw what she feared in her heart: that the sky was not yet dark. Once again, she was forced to pace in the lobby of the church of delayed pleasure.

  Ever so slowly, neighbours began to appear—the older children first, followed by the mothers, holding the younger ones in their arms, and finally, the fathers. They stood in clusters in the Hampsons’ driveway, everyone adding their fireworks to the pile in the wagon by the side door.

  The big silver tub of sand. The dads like army captains, planning a campaign. The older kids hovering and being shooed away. The mothers and younger ones sitting on the lawn chairs.

  Until Sarah’s father caught Sarah’s mother’s raised eyebrow and said, “Okay, everyone. Stand back.”

  And it began.

  The Cobalt Cannon. The Sky Storm. The Screaming Banshee.

  Little explosions on the driveway. Some of them reaching as high as the Hampsons’ second-floor windows.

  They ended with sparklers. The kids dancing around like pixies, fountains of little stars following them, just as this night would follow them for the rest of their lives.

  And then to bed.

  And that was that.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Helen tucked her in, but Morley was too excited to sleep. She lay in her bed staring at the ceiling. When she heard her parents’ voices in the backyard she got out of bed and went to her window to spy on them.

  The sky was black now. All she could see of the yard through the leaves of the maple were shadows. All she could hear was the murmur of her parents mixed with the murmur of the radio. The murmur of their voices and the music drifting through the branches. It was Bing Crosby. He was singing “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams.”

  There was a sudden whoosh, and a flare that scared her, and she gasped and pulled back. Then she saw her mother in outline, sitting on the porch holding a sparkler. As she watched, a second one flared, and her mother got up and walked over to the tree where her father was standing. He took a sparkler in one hand and wrapped his other around her mother’s waist. And they began to dance, right there on the lawn, by the sandbox, each of them holding a sparkler in their hands. Her mom was laughing, except it didn’t sound like her mom. It sounded like someone younger.

  Then she saw Helen put her head on Roy’s shoulder. And the stars from the sparklers fell about them like little comets, as if her parents were floating in the sky.

  It didn’t make sense to Morley.

  How could they dance like that? Didn’t they realize how upset they were? Didn’t they know about the divorce?

  Morley fell asleep in the chair she was kneeling on. The chair by the window. Curled up with her little stuffed hippo. Her popo she called it.

  She woke a few hours later to see her mother and father standing in the doorway staring at her. She pretended she was still asleep when her father picked her up and carried her to her bed. He laid her down and her mother tucked the blankets around her and kissed her on the forehead. She pretended she was asleep the whole time.

  She always thinks of that night whenever she sees fireworks. The flares, the flashes, all the floating bits, Bing Crosby, and her mother and father dancing on the lawn.

  “How could I forget that?” said Dave.

  She never had. Forgotten it, I mean. Of all the things that her parents tried to teach her, all the little lectures, all the talkings to, all the summer trips and all the dinners, nothing had coloured her life like that moment.

  It was the star-showered solidity of them. The rock-solid certainty. They were dancing before she came, and they would be dancing when she left. She was just passing through their lives. But they would always be in hers.

  They were the beginning and the end of time.

  They were home now.

  She and Dave.

  “I would never forget that,” said Dave—meaning the story of her mom and dad dancing in the yard. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two sparklers.

  “Where did you get those?” said Morley, laughing like a younger version of herself.

  “Back there,” said Dave, nodding up the street. “At the party. When I talked to the father.”

  And he said, “Wait here.” And he ran inside and got a match. He lit one, and then he lit the second one with the tip of the first. When the second one flared, he gave it to Morley, and then he held out his arms. “May I have this dance?”

  And so they danced, on their lawn, and while they danced he hummed “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams,” quietly and endearingly off-key.

  BOY WANTED

  It took a long time.

  Three months in all.

  A lot of people would have given up.

  Most of them, probably.

  Well, the fact is, most people wouldn’t have started. Louis, for instance. Louis certainly wouldn’t have started.

  “It’s crazy,” said Louis. “Why don’t you just offer him the job? If you want him to work here so much, why don’t you make him an offer?”

  “Because,” said Mr. Harmon, “that’s not how things are done. It’s important, where work is involved, for a person to apply for a job. Better for him if it goes that way.”

  And so, every morning, just before the boy walked by the store on his way to school, Mr. Harmon slipped the sign into his grocery store window.

  BOY WANTED.

  As soon as the boy passed by, Mr. Harmon took the sign down.

  He didn’t want any other applicants.

  “Why would you want such a clueless boy?” said Louis.

  “He’s not clueless,” said Mr. Harmon. “He has seen the sign. He’s thinking about it. He is building his courage. It’s not an easy thing to do, to apply for a job.”

  Mr. Harmon, wise in the ways of boys, was wiser than most in the way of this boy.

  But he couldn’t be certain.

  So when the boy finally did come in one day after school, wearing a white shirt, one of his father’s ties, and a pair of dress shoes, and said, “Mr. Harmon? I saw the sign in the window. I’d like to apply for the job,” Mr. Harmon almost hugged him.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he stood there beside the pomegranates, which he’d been stacking into a pyramid, and he said, “Do you have a résumé?”

  Of course the boy had a résumé. Typed. It was five pages long.

  It was Sam’s first year in high school. And it was not going well. He’d headed off in September feeling like he was finally a big guy. He’d found out soon enough that he wasn’t a big guy at all. He’d been a big guy in his old school. Now he’d returned to the underclass. A minor niner. He felt off balance, unsure and awkward.

  And if that wasn’t enough, something was wrong with his voice. At the most inopportune moments it would go crackly. And there were spots on his face, as if his body, which he’d never even noticed before, had suddenly turned against him.

  One day at lunch a kid in grade ten knocked into him on purpose and his books went flying down the hall.

  This wasn’t the way he had imagin
ed high school at all.

  Mr. Harmon waited a week before he called him in for an interview.

  “I will never understand you,” said Louis. “Never. He applied. What are you waiting for? Give him the job already.”

  Eventually, he did. Four days a week, after school. All day Saturday.

  Sam set off to work the same way he set off to school—with great hope. And just as at school, hope abandoned him almost from the start.

  Let’s begin with the uniform: beige pants, a white shirt, and a green apron.

  “I look like a lime popsicle,” he said to his best friend, Murphy—his gangly beige legs sticking out the bottom of the apron like little wooden sticks.

  On the first day Mr. Harmon put him in charge of fruit. He had to sweep the section. He had to take the garbage outside. He had to restock, getting stuff from Estelle in the back. And he had to keep an ear open for Louis on cash, calling for a carry out. If he saw there was a lineup, he was supposed to help bag.

  It sounded easy enough. But there was no training. And, truth be told, it wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounded. It wasn’t easy at all.

  To make things worse, every time he turned around, there was Mr. Harmon—hovering, eager to point out his mistakes.

  “No, no, no,” said Mr. Harmon, nudging him aside as he bagged an order.

  “You keep one hand in the bag so that you can set everything down carefully.” Mr. Harmon was pulling things out of the bag that Sam had already carefully placed in there.

  “These figs are going to get crushed,” said Mr. Harmon. “Put delicate things in their own little bags. It stops them from falling to the bottom.”

  It wasn’t only Mr. Harmon chipping away at his confidence. Customers kept asking him for things he’d never even heard of. Did they have pimentón? Where was the rambutan?

  “I’ll have to ask,” he kept saying. “I’ll have to ask.”

  He felt like an imposter. He kept thinking, What am I doing here?

  The worst, however, was when Louis went on break, and Sam had to fill in on cash. Making change.

  “Don’t try to do the math in your head,” said Mr. Harmon.

  Mr. Harmon was standing beside him watching.

  “How much was the bill?”

  “Sixteen dollars and thirty-six cents, Mr. Harmon.”

  “And he gave you?”

  “A twenty-dollar bill, Mr. Harmon.”

  “Don’t subtract from the twenty. Count up,” said Mr. Harmon. “You begin with the $16 and the 36 cents. Okay? $16.36 plus one-two-three-four pennies makes 37, 38, 39, 40. $16.40.” Mr. Harmon smiled. “Then add a dime. $16.50.” Mr. Harmon was pulling the coins out of the cash and handing them to Sam. “Now two quarters, $17. A loonie, $18. And a toonie, $20. See. You don’t have to do any math.”

  Sam stared at him dumbly.

  “You’ll get it,” said Mr. Harmon.

  But he didn’t. Not at all. Just like at school, he felt as if he was always a step behind. He felt clumsy. He felt he was always missing the point.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Mr. Harmon.

  He’d found Sam gazing dreamily across the store.

  “Everything in here is alive.”

  Sam frowned.

  Mr. Harmon leaned closer. “In a butcher store,” whispered Mr. Harmon, “everything is dead!”

  Mr. Harmon was holding a carrot.

  Mr. Harmon said, “You could take the top of this carrot and put it in water and it will grow!”

  Sam said, “Actually, Mr. Harmon, I was thinking about lunch.”

  Specifically, he was thinking about whether he should eat the ham sandwich his mother had packed him or go next door and get a burrito.

  “Ah,” said Mr. Harmon. “Lunch.”

  One afternoon, during his first week, Sam cashed out an older woman with an armful of fresh-cut flowers.

  When she left, Mr. Harmon, who’d been standing by the cash watching, whispered, “You’re thinking, A waste of money, right?”

  Sam nodded. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  “And you are absolutely correct!” said Mr. Harmon. “A total waste of money.” Then he turned and walked toward the back of the store. But he stopped halfway and came back and whispered, “Of course, that’s the point.”

  Leaving Sam at the cash, scratching his head.

  Even alone in his section he felt anxious.

  Watering. Straightening. Fluffing.

  “Make it beautiful,” said Mr. Harmon on his first day.

  To make it beautiful meant to stack the boxes of berries perfectly straight. To lay the bunches of grapes one beside the other. To wrap the apples, and the oranges, and the lemons in tissue and pile them in pyramids.

  “Like in a picture book,” said Mr. Harmon. “I want my store to look like a picture book.”

  On this day, he was working on pineapples when Mr. Harmon appeared beside him.

  It was his third week. And he thought he was finally getting it.

  “No. No. No,” said Mr. Harmon. “Not like that. Rotate the pile as you build it. Move the ripe ones to the front, and put the hard ones on the bottom.” Mr. Harmon nudged him aside and started fussing with the fruit. “No empty spaces. Every pyramid full, square, and straight.”

  Mr. Harmon stood back and smiled at the pineapples. He was proud of himself. But not only because of what he’d just done. Mr. Harmon was thinking that Sam was working out even better than he’d hoped.

  Sam was thinking, This is my third week and I can’t even stack fruit.

  The next morning Sam was taking the garbage out when a group of his friends lurched past the store eating takeout. They didn’t see him standing in the alley watching them bumping along. But Mr. Harmon did. And he saw the wistful look that crossed Sam’s face.

  At lunch Mr. Harmon wandered into his section and beckoned. Sam followed him to the little kitchen at the back of the store. Mr. Harmon nodded at a milk crate opposite the stove. Sam sat down. Sam was thinking, I am about to get fired.

  But it wasn’t his last supper. It was their first lunch. The beginning of their understanding. The beginning of their ritual.

  Every day from that day on, Mr. Harmon took Sam into the kitchen at the back, and Sam would watch Mr. Harmon cook. Well … listen more than watch—because while he cooked, Mr. Harmon talked.

  On this day, Mr. Harmon was holding a black knife over a ripe tomato.

  “When you cut a tomato,” he was saying, “you must always use a sharp knife. A dull knife will crush the flesh.”

  Then he said, “I used to be a barber.” This is the way he talked, seasoning his conversation with a sequence of non sequiturs.

  “I had my own barbershop,” said Mr. Harmon. “Customers who came every week. Fancy businessmen. Big tippers.”

  He lay the blade of the knife against the skin of the tomato and looked at Sam. “I shaved them. Cleaned their necks.”

  He pushed the knife forward and then pulled it back toward him. The tomato fell into two perfect halves, seeds and juice leaking onto the wooden cutting board. Mr. Harmon brought one half of the tomato to his nose, inhaled deeply, and smiled.

  He was easily distracted.

  Sam said, “What happened to the barbershop, Mr. Harmon?”

  Mr. Harmon was crinkling salt between his fingers.

  “Flaked salt,” said Mr. Harmon. “It’s from the sea. See how soft the flakes are?”

  Sam nodded. “But the barbershop, Mr. Harmon?”

  Mr. Harmon said, “The Beatles came.”

  Sam said, “They came to your barbershop?”

  Mr. Harmon shook his head.

  Mr. Harmon said, “Just, they came. No one wanted haircuts anymore.”

  Mr. Harmon picked up a second tomato.

  Sam said, “What did you do, Mr. Harmon?”

  Mr. Harmon said, “I closed the barbershop and got a job in a factory.”

  He had four tomatoes cut in half now. He poured a little olive oi
l on each one. Some salt, some pepper. Then he put them on a stained baking sheet and into the spattered black oven.

  “Three hundred degrees,” said Mr. Harmon.

  Sam looked at his watch.

  Mr. Harmon was down on his knees, staring into the oven.

  Mr. Harmon said, “After three hours they’ll look like shrunken heads. And they’ll taste like the essence of tomato.”

  But Sam didn’t hear that part. It was break time. Sam had gone to relieve Louis.

  Mr. Harmon didn’t like the factory. He stayed for a year. He took a pay cut to work in his cousin’s grocery store. After five years he bought the store.

  It was a regular little store until the moment of the arugula.

  “This was twenty years ago,” said Mr. Harmon to Sam during one of their lunches.

  A customer had come back from New York City, bursting with excitement.

  “A salad,” she said. “A salad with a spicy green leaf. A leaf that tastes like pepper. Fresh pepper.”

  “Arugula,” said Mr. Harmon, as if this was something everyone knew. But no one did. You couldn’t buy arugula back then.

  “Italians knew it,” said Mr. Harmon.

  Mr. Harmon’s Italian neighbour grew arugula in his backyard.

  “So does my neighbour,” said Sam. “Mr. Conte gives us arugula all the time.”

  “So I went to my neighbour,” said Mr. Harmon, “and I said, ‘Let me have some arugula.’”

  Mr. Harmon sold everything he’d been given the next day, before lunch. Five bunches at ninety-nine cents a bunch.

  That night he went back and cleaned out his neighbour’s garden.

  For two years he was the only grocer in the city who sold arugula. All the chefs used to come to his store.

  “That’s how I got my start,” he said. “Arugula.”

  He was the first with arugula and the first with olive oil. He had olive oil back when everyone thought it was bad for you.

  “They thought it would give them a heart attack,” said Mr. Harmon. “Buying olive oil was like committing a sin.”