* * *
Charlene kept herself apart from a lot of the drama that went on at the Shack, the entanglements, feuds, and drunken couplings. She’d been married for the better part of a decade, and to her high school boyfriend no less, which made her feel as though she were decades older than everyone else on staff, part of some other generation that was more predictable and conventional. She had photos at home of herself in the exact kind of bright white, head-turning bridal dress that some of the younger girls imagined themselves wearing one day, or swore they never would. She’d been a bride, she’d stood there and said the words. She had an actual husband at home. She shared furniture and a bank account with someone, and had reasonable expectations of being a mother within a few years, maybe.
She’d been in the Shack a few times before she ever worked there, and had noticed how the staff seemed to be performing the whole time, playing the roles of servers in a bar-restaurant. They greeted each other with high-fives and fist-bumps, but did so as if they were making fun of the idea of greeting each other with high-fives and fist-bumps. Maybe they were – even after working there for a while she couldn’t tell. She remembered seeing Jeremy moving through this happy, performing clan, talking to each of them like the playfully scornful head of a musical family, the bar’s Baron von Trapp. The staff would sometimes swirl around him excitedly, as if begging for a song. She could imagine him striding onto the floor with a sly grin on his face, singing “Edelweiss” while the waitresses swayed.
Years later, after everything happened and the Shack was long gone, that was the image she liked to conjure up of her former boss: smiling, confident despite everything, and fully in charge of the situation.
When she told him about the lunch counter hippies and all the nastiness that went on, he didn’t laugh like most people did, like her friends did. Instead, he got visibly tense.
Owners like that made it hard for the rest of them, he said. They all got painted with the same brush. “You shouldn’t have had to put up with that kind of bullshit,” he said angrily.
“That’s why I quit.”
“I mean you should’ve just walked as soon as it got weird.”
“It was weird right from the start – he interviewed me with no shirt on. Just his apron and a pair of jeans.”
Jeremy didn’t know what to say. “Jesus, I’ve worked for guys who were pretty bad, but even the worst ones mostly kept it out of the place a little bit. There was one who was always getting waitresses to sit in the car with him in the parking lot. Just to chat, right? I thought for sure we were going to get sued.”
Charlene wanted to know why hadn’t he tried to stop things like that. Why hadn’t he warned those girls? He said it wouldn’t have been any use – he simply would’ve been fired, and the nastiness would’ve continued no matter what.
“You could’ve said something at the time, though.”
He showed her the palms of his hands. “Look: I’m totally on board with all the feminism business. Maybe not to the absolute craziest degree, but as far as being treated with respect and all that goes, I’ve always been right on the money. I actually prefer to hire women than men. Not in the kitchen – that’s like throwing somebody to the wolves – but out here on the floor? Every time. Women don’t have to worry about me.”
When she’d first started the job, Jeremy gave her a tour of the bar that ended with him showing her the photos. He wanted to impress upon her how important it was to understand the culture of the Shack – as important as knowing where to find extra napkins or how to get the ice machine working again if it crapped out. Maybe more.
“You know these two, obviously,” he said, pointing at the photo of himself with the mayor. Next to it was a shot of him wearing an oversized foam leprechaun’s hat and being kissed on either cheek by two young women. He touched each of the people in the photos in turn: “She was a lab assistant at the hospital, maybe she still is, and she was studying to be a teacher. The dopey-looking guy with the muscles there was her boyfriend. Pretty sure he was a carpenter. Or no, wait: it was that he talked about Jesus a lot. And he was a bodybuilder. That’s right: he was really into Jesus and Arnold Schwarzenegger, knew everything about both of them, all these little facts. Weird guy.”
“You remember all this?”
Jeremy said he could tell her exactly what was happening in every one of the pictures, and exactly when they were taken. He pointed to a group of mallet-headed guys toasting the camera: a rugby team from Kingston, in town for a tournament and caught in a freak April snowstorm. One of Jeremy wearing a fake white beard and a bright red baseball cap: Christmas Eve, five years ago. Raised glasses at a New Year’s Eve party, the one where the power died five minutes before midnight and they all sang that Nirvana song in the dark. There were a few pictures from the notorious Halloween party in which Jeremy, dressed as a cop, had had to step between two women dressed like pirates who were squaring off in the middle of the floor, brandishing their wooden swords. In the photo he was smiling and holding his handcuffs up to the camera.
Charlene smiled and pointed to a photo showing Jeremy and a few other men wearing dark suits and ties. “What’s going on here?” They looked as though they might be part of some theatre production, either as ushers or as a chorus of 1920s gangsters. All they needed were fedoras and cardboard machine guns.
“That was after a funeral for a guy who came in here almost every night at the start,” Jeremy said, suddenly sombre.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry.”
“It happens.”
“Was he sick?”
“In the head, maybe.” He pointed one loaded finger at the underside of his chin and silently fired it. “I heard his wife found him – I hope it wasn’t a mess, for her sake. He wasn’t always the most considerate guy in the world, so you never know. People surprise you. So that’s the tour. Any questions?”
At some point Charlene felt comfortable enough to admit that the whole thing she’d told him at her interview about opening a café was a lie. He replied that he’d known it at the time and didn’t care, but looked slightly hurt. To make up for it, she quickly said that the idea of owning her own place sounded fun, that it must be exciting and scary to be your own boss.
“That’s not how it works,” he said, a little defensively. “Everyone who works here, and everyone who comes in – they’re all my bosses. I work for all of you. The higher up you get, the more bosses you get. It never stops. Is that what you want?”
She said it wasn’t.
“It’s not something you do because it sounds fun or for the money, because there isn’t any. A lot of people find that out too late.”
That night, instead of insisting she join him for dinner after her shift, he embedded himself within a group of older men who were having some kind of reunion. He didn’t even look at her as she left the bar.
* * *
There were only a few things Charlene could remember ever truly wanting to be. When she was seven or eight, it was Wonder Woman. She would walk around the apartment wearing her blue-and-red swimsuit with a set of her mother’s heavy bracelets around her wrists, a shoelace whip coiled on her hip, a paper tiara on her head. She kept the swimsuit under her clothes when she played in the park, or even at school, and it gave her a sense of secret power, the knowledge that she could whip everything off at the first sign of trouble and start windmilling her arms through a storm of bullets. After that, she wanted to be an African tribeswoman, leading all her children down to the river. She’d watched a documentary with her mother about a drought-ravaged village, and immediately felt an intense desire for that kind of silent, stoic nobility. She wanted to be tall and thin, the colour of no-milk coffee, with the soles of her feet as hard as a tire. She wanted six or seven children of wildly varying ages trailing behind. She wanted a baby in a sling around her, barely covering her chest – she was 11, and getting the first, faint swellings of brea
sts, like two anthills. That wish lasted an embarrassingly long time, almost an entire summer. She told no one, thank God.
In high school, she’d been fairly sure she wanted to be a doctor of some kind. That dream came with obstacles, one being that she hated science: it all felt too arbitrary and unmagical, and whenever she lost her place or got confused, the equations and formulas became like rolls of barbed wire that snagged her and stopped her from going forward. Numbers were inimical, so she loaded herself up with empathy in an effort to compensate, having decided that empathy was the greater part of medicine – the better part, the indispensable part, the unteachable part. She became the most empathetic person around. She sat out beyond the soccer field with girls she didn’t even like who had just been dumped by their thuggish boyfriends and would rub their backs and listen, glowing with empathy, stinking of it. In Grade 9, her friend Stephanie’s older brother was diagnosed with leukemia, and Charlene almost fainted from all the empathizing she was called on to do. She eventually had to draw back a little and stop hanging out in Stephanie’s bedroom, where the two of them would lie on the bed for hours, sobbing and talking about how amazing and wonderful and special her brother was. When her mother asked her why she wasn’t hanging out with her friend anymore, Charlene said she thought Stephanie was being overly melodramatic – from what she’d heard, the doctors had given her brother a 50-50 chance of recovery, which seemed like good odds, as simple as flipping a coin. Charlene was invited to the brother’s funeral, but didn’t go.
She went to school to become a nurse, and dropped out after less than a year. She came close to reapplying a few times, once getting so far as to request all the required documents and begin writing the slightly desperate-sounding letter explaining why she had left the program the first time, but the fact was the idea of a being a nurse held even less interest for her than being a doctor. She flirted with the idea of becoming a veterinarian, but she didn’t think she could handle being Kyle’s professional colleague as well as his wife. He wasn’t crazy about the idea, either, though he was always pushing her to do something. He went on job and career sites and listed off the kinds of positions that seemed always to be in demand, and with large starting salaries attached. A lot of companies were advertising for research analysts, with only minimal experience required.
She said, “Those are telemarketing jobs.”
“What? Seriously?” He read the rest of the ad, the parts about needing a confident phone manner and about the astronomical wages available through the miracle of commissions, and was silent.
“You think I’m wasting my life.”
That wasn’t fair, he said. He didn’t think that, and he hadn’t said that. Maybe she wasn’t using her time the best way, but it wasn’t like she was never going to do anything. She was too smart to let that happen.
“So if I’m not becoming a doctor, I must be a retard. Is that what you think?”
“All I said was that you’re too smart to do nothing. Why would you ask me that?”
“But you think I am doing nothing. Right now I’m doing nothing, is that it? Going to work, cleaning the apartment, eating dinner with you, having a life that isn’t working all the time and studying every night – that’s nothing. I get it. Being with you is nothing. Okay.”
“I just, no, I just meant that you are not the kind of person who will end up doing nothing, not that what you are doing now is nothing.”
“That isn’t what you said.”
“It’s what I meant, though. You didn’t hear me right.”
“So I’m supposed to read your mind and not pay attention to the words coming out of your mouth. That makes total sense.”
Charlene almost felt sorry for Kyle for not recognizing an unwinnable argument. Such a concept seemed wholly foreign to him. His arguments were regiments of smartly dressed soldiers marching in tight ranks up and down the main streets, unequipped to respond to counter-arguments that blew up cars, shot from windows, and sent women and children out with bombs under their shirts. His only response was to send in more regiments, keep parading, hold the line.
The one thing Charlene could not remember ever being fully certain she wanted to be was married to Kyle, to be his wife. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to marry him, just that she couldn’t remember ever having a moment when she looked at him and wanted nothing more than to have their lives sewn together. She never felt it as a physical need. The whole time they were a couple, it seemed as though they were headed that way anyway, so she never felt any need to actively hope for it to happen. Like hoping for the seasons to change, or for ice to melt in the sun. They were simply being moved up to the next level, which was appropriate.
Her mother, who had never fully accepted Kyle (she thought he was too angry, and a bit of a snob; his family obviously had money) made no protest when told about the upcoming wedding. She did not even suggest they ought to wait a few more years, to when their lives were a little more settled and they had both their careers on track. Charlene got the sense her mother’s concerns about Kyle were being overridden by her desire to finally get the apartment to herself – ever since Charlene was a little girl, they’d lived in the same small place. Before Charlene finally moved out, her mother started moving things into her room, stacking them in the corner in impatient piles.
The wedding was wonderful, even if it had been nearly wrecked by Kyle being sick with the flu and almost passing out during the reception because of all the medication he had taken. When she came down the aisle of the little schoolhouse to join him, it didn’t feel as though they were being brought together in any formal or intimate way, it was more like the final dress rehearsal for a performance they’d been planning for years. They went on a trip to Manitoulin Island as a honeymoon, during which they fought only once. When the fight was over, he helped her build a crude inuksuk out of stones on a secluded beach, which he then knocked over while getting out his phone to take a picture. She didn’t mind. They hadn’t built it to last. She was just happy to be so far from her mother, from her friends, from the apartment. By the time they got home, her back was patchy with bruises from having sex in the tent. She never once complained about the roots and random stones that dug into her while they quietly grappled. It was all part of it, part of the experience.
All of that was years ago, nearly a decade. Charlene sometimes had trouble remembering what had happened since then. She and Kyle had moved three times, into ever-larger apartments, and there’d been a lot of talk about possibly buying a house someday. Both of them had been hit with a vicious stomach flu two Christmases in a row, which Charlene took as a sign they should probably just ignore a holiday she’d never been all that crazy about in the first place. Kyle thought that making decisions based on either superstition or illness was a bad idea. It was just a coincidence. Small, bad things happened to them all the time, he argued. She broke her ankle falling off a playground slide one night when both of them had been out drinking sangria with another couple whom they didn’t see much of anymore. After Charlene got herself off the ground, laughing and crying and holding her ankle, Kyle piggybacked her out of the dark playground, up the hill and onto the city bus that was just pulling up to a stop, and then through the automatic sliding doors of the hospital emergency room. He placed her across a row of seats as gently as he could and argued with the nurse to see her quickly.
“At least give her some Tylenol or something!”
They did. He let her sleep on his shoulder while they waited.
* * *
It sometimes amazed Charlene’s friends when she told them, truthfully, that she had never fucked around on Kyle. Nobody admired her for it – being with the same person since high school and not having at least a quick fling once in a while seemed perverse, almost masochistic. There was something smug and superior about it, too, like being a sexual vegan. Mostly they felt sorry for her.
Just Kyle?
Just him. “And I’m totally, totally happy about that!”
She’d come close a few times, though. A few months after they’d started going out, while they were still in school, Charlene went to a cottage party out near Bobcaygeon. Kyle refused to go – they’d had a fight about something; she could barely remember what. At the party, she split a bottle of vodka with another girl and followed everyone down to the lake to skinny-dip. It was past midnight. There was one boy there, a blond music student whom she’d noticed during the night and had made a few attempts to sit near. He nearly fell over taking his shorts off, and when he regained his balance, he caught Charlene staring at him. She tried to think of an excuse, but there was no hiding the fact that she wanted to know what his cock and his ass looked like. They swam close together and gave each other a few meaningful pats as they moved back toward shore. In waist-high water, they came together and kissed. His skin was cold, and so was hers. He moved his tongue around in her mouth: she tasted beer. He touched her nipples with the tips of his fingers and let the back of his hand brush against her pubic hair – very lightly, as if his hand were a clumsy fish swimming by in the night. Then they separated. Nothing came of it, but she knew, as she went back over the night in her mind later, that she’d been prepared to go along with whatever was going to happen, and she still remembered the mix of disappointment and relief she felt when he rejoined the group on the beach and got dressed.
Kyle knew something had happened at the party, but he never mentioned it. He was conspicuously nice to her for a while, buying her flowers and rarely saying anything if she had to cancel a plan at the last minute.
Congratulations On Everything Page 8
