by Eva Crocker
“Sorry, were you out there long?” I held the door for her.
She dropped the bin on the front desk. “There’s programs in there, can we get them spread around, a few here, a few in the other room? Parents like to keep them.”
The programs were a folded piece of yellow paper with a photo of all the child dancers in their leotards arranged in rows by height on the cover. Inside was a schedule of the different class performances with every child’s name listed. I took a big stack and fanned them out on the front desk. Krista Rice walked into the bar and started flipping light switches. She turned on some music, a tinkling indie song with a broody-boy singer. As the space brightened up I felt that morning’s invasion slide out of my body.
Soon parents and child dancers started arriving. The younger children wore tutus under rain jackets and winter coats; the oldest ones were nine and ten, they wore leotards, their hair in buns with sequined fascinators bobby-pinned to them.
The kids danced in rotation — the younger ones finished first and ran down over the stairs after their set. Then they waited with their parents in the bar for the after-show pizza party. They howled and jumped around the room, chasing and shoving. Some of them took their tutus off and flung them at the ceiling over and over. The layers of taffeta fluttered against each other on the way down. Lots of the parents were in their late twenties, just a bit older than me. I helped the dads unfold a row of card tables in the centre of the room. After the pizza I helped the moms pass out squares of sheet cake on paper plates.
I spent most of my shift making instant hot chocolate in Styrofoam cups. I dumped a tablespoon of crystals into each cup and poured water from the electric kettle over it. The dehydrated marshmallows softened as I swirled them with a spoon. I lost myself in the routine and the chaos of the kids racing around. My pulse slowed to a steady beat and I was mostly able to keep thoughts of the cops roaming through my house smothered by the thrum of familiar tasks.
A wave of downtown businesses had closed that fall. I’d lost my job at the restaurant. A lot of the storefront windows on Water Street got papered over with a collage of taped-together newspapers and flyers. Shops that had been open for half a century went under. People who could afford to leave the island were moving to the mainland in droves. I’d hated working at the restaurant, mostly because I was bad at it, but I cried after I got fired. Everyone and their dog was looking for a job.
Viv told me about the theatre — a friend of hers had quit to work at the front desk of an art gallery in Toronto and left an opening that wasn’t advertised yet. I did the interview in the dressing room, me and Michelle Dodd reflected in a series of mirrors ringed in light bulbs. I sat on the edge of a tall chair with my jacket in my lap. Michelle was wearing a sundress with a hoodie zipped over it. She had a clipboard and a pen; she made a couple of notes and then looked up at me.
“So why do you want this job?” she said.
I had prepared for this question.
“I want to work in an arts space, a space —”
“I don’t know if Alison told you, this job is just bartending and box office, the creative side, that’s more the theatre company.” Michelle’s phone started vibrating in her lap. She picked it up and read the screen and said, “Fuck, sorry, I just have to, fuck, okay, I’m going to deal with that later.”
She made the screen go dark and slid the phone into her pocket. “Sorry, it’s a hectic day, what were we saying?”
“I like the idea of working in a space where art is happening.” I was afraid I was sounding too touchy-feely-hippyish now. “A community-oriented space.”
Michelle made a mark on her paper, still frowning from the message on her phone. “Right, good. Okay, and what motivates you?”
“What motivates me . . . in life?”
“Yeah.” Michelle was focused on me now; she’d shaken off the text. “What motivates you in life?”
I felt the pause in the conversation stretching out as I tried to think of something to say. “That’s a good question, great question.”
Michelle nodded; her full attention was unnerving. I saw myself in the mirror behind her and straightened up. “I guess, I try to be a curious person, curious about life, so even if something doesn’t seem interesting, I try to think of it as a learning experience, just learning about life, about how the world works.”
Michelle made a tick mark on the paper.
“You have to be really detail-oriented for this job, there are a lot of details,” she said.
“I totally get that, from my job at the folk festival. You have to keep track of everything for when the final reporting comes up.” I had prepared for this one too.
“Exactly,” Michelle said.
“I have some administrative experience from the festival and also serving, my serving jobs are on the second page there,” I said.
Michelle flicked the top page on her clipboard over and looked quickly down the list of restaurants and cafés on my resumé.
“It’s just minimum wage, did Alison tell you that?”
“I’m not sure if she mentioned, but —”
“It’s very flexible, it’s all dependent on what shows are on, so some weeks it could be twenty hours, others it might just be ten, but the flip side is we understand people have other commitments,” Michelle said. “Oh, the other thing is you have to close up by yourself, so some nights you could be leaving here at midnight or one a.m.”
“That’s fine, I’m fine with that,” I said. The interview was going well. I felt proud of my what-motivates-you-in-life answer.
“Me too. I’m from Calgary and I always walked home alone at night,” Michelle said. She got off her stool so I stood up too. We started walking towards the big, bright front entrance of the building.
“I mean, I understand people being freaked out but I’ve always lived downtown and I’ve always walked home alone,” I said, feeling like we were bonding, two tough girls.
“I have a couple more interviews to do,” Michelle said, but the way she said it meant I’d got the job.
A job — and I’d only really been unemployed for a week. It was a scrap of a job but it was a bit of income secured. Something to add to the spattering of cheques I got from doing Standardized Patient work and radio ads. Even if it was just bartending and selling tickets, I would be spending time at the theatre. I’d know what auditions were coming up. I’d be there on closing night when everyone got wasted and people fought and hooked up for the first time. I’d spring to mind when people were casting. I’d go to more shows, improve my craft by observation and osmosis.
* * *
The year after I graduated from theatre school in Corner Brook I was in two plays. Grease and a play about the seal hunt. The one about sealing toured around the Atlantic provinces for a few months. I played the daughter of a fisherman who died on the ice. I got to ride a school bus through Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec with real actors, people who mostly just act for a living, who’ve been doing that for a long time. We ate chili together and shared hotel rooms. I didn’t have many lines but I had a big moment: I learned about my father’s death on my wedding day. I walked downstage towards the audience, emoting. I wore a white gown that smelled like basement and held a bouquet of plastic flowers against my chest. Wires stuck out of the bottom of the stems and I had to be careful they didn’t get caught in the dress’s crocheted sleeves. Every night I stood at the edge of the stage and let my eyes go blurry with tears. To make the tears I thought about visiting my cousin Gabrielle in the hospital after she was flung off the back of her drunk boyfriend’s dirt bike. She had to ring a buzzer to get two nurses to help her out of bed when she needed the bathroom. Sometimes I felt guilty about using the memory; it wasn’t even a good script.
I would remember hearing the nurses coaxing her behind the bathroom door, her half-eaten tray of hospital dinner, Big Brother Canada pla
ying on the TV above the bed. People had paid to be in those seats. A real actor could make art with a bad script. Gabrielle would never know. At the edge of the stage in Halifax and Moncton and Quebec City I couldn’t see the audience’s faces but I could feel the energy coming off people. Some nights I felt a wall of boredom, some nights it worked. I believed I was going to spend the rest of my life driving around the Atlantic provinces touring shows, probably a lot of them mediocre, eating chili and sleeping on top of scratchy motel bedspreads. I was fucking excited about it.
But when I got back to St. John’s, I found it hard to get in with the close-knit theatre and film crowd. I had people on Facebook and Instagram from my university class who’d moved to Toronto to pursue acting. That’s the phrase they used, “to pursue acting,” or, worse, “to pursue an acting career.” Some of them were doing fancy commercials or had roles in important plays. One girl was in a new CBC series about time travel.
I still did some small things, my friends were always asking me to be in their short films. I was on a list for voice acting and every couple of months I’d get a call to record a radio ad for a local business. I did ads for a convenience store chain, a labour union, a bridal parlour, a tanning salon.
I also did Standardized Patient Testing gigs at the hospital, where you help train student doctors by reciting a list of symptoms and having them guess what’s wrong with you. It’s supposed to help them develop bedside manner. You don’t have to be an actor to do it, they’ll give pretty much anyone the job, but I received a lot of compliments about how believable I was.
You get paid more if you tick “yes” to “invasive” exams. I did a pelvic exam and insertion-of-the-speculum session once. There were eight student doctors in the room taking notes while one eased the speculum into me. They were all wearing paper masks over their mouths; my family doctor never wore one of those to do a pap. The student slowly cranked the speculum open, paused, and then did one extra, unexpected crank. I sucked in a breath and he looked horrified. One of the other student doctors looked away. When I left that day I asked to be removed from the invasive exams list but went back to clarify I would still do the breast exams.
* * *
Once I got into the swing of it I loved working at the theatre. I loved working alone. I loved wearing the swipe card that let me into every room in the building. I couldn’t help feeling a bit important wearing the lanyard with the swipe card.
I started every bar shift by getting the grey metal cash box out of the safe. I counted the money and did inventory, unloaded the dishwasher and moved tabs on the lighting board around until the room was dim and atmospheric. Just before people started arriving I’d put on some music and plug in the string of white Christmas lights that were thumbtacked along the outside of the counter.
I started being able to gauge which nights people would stick around after the show and if it was a wine or a beer audience. At the end of the night the two tech guys would come down and let me know they’d set the alarms upstairs and were leaving the building. When the last drinkers climbed into their cabs, I’d turn the music down. I tried not to be frightened by my own reflection moving on the framed posters across from the bar. I concentrated on getting through the end-of-the-night tasks without thinking about the cavernous space above me. Everyone agreed the theatre was haunted by a multitude of ghosts. When I got the job my grandmother told me her grandfather had helped build the theatre and died by falling off the roof.
“So he’ll be looking out for you,” she’d said.
Normally I didn’t mind being alone in the theatre in the daytime. The morning of the dance recital, I was planning to call my mom at the end of my shift and tell her about the cops. But when everyone cleared out, I started thinking about Holly coming home and finding her bedroom torn apart, her hard drive gone. She would think we’d been robbed. I did a half-assed job of closing up; I stomped the pizza boxes down into the recycle bin and didn’t unload the dishwasher. I jogged back to the house.
As I turned the corner onto my street, I slowed and tried to calm my breathing. The unmarked car that had been lingering outside when I left the house wasn’t there, but I worried it might circle back. I wanted to be composed if I had to interact with the cops again. The small parking lot was empty except for the familiar cars that always parked behind the nurses’ union. No one was smoking outside the church.
I let myself into the house. Holly’s shoes weren’t in the porch. I called out to her anyway but there was no answer. I closed the living room curtains. I checked the back door; it was unlocked but undamaged. How had they opened it? Maybe they had a tool or maybe Holly had left it open, sometimes she smoked on the back deck. I locked it.
I went up to Holly’s bedroom. Snot and Courtney were sleeping in the sheets the cops had torn off her bed and left on the floor. Which asshole did that? The young one, probably. Probably his mother did his laundry for him. I scooped up my cats and closed the door on the cops’ mess.
Three
That fall had been cold, by September you couldn’t go around the house on Patrick Street without a second pair of socks. On a day when Viv and I were both off, we got the bus out to Kelsey Drive. We wanted to nail a blanket over the doorway between the living room and kitchen, to stymie a draft that came in through the windows in the front of the house and swept through the whole downstairs.
At Home Hardware, we stuffed a couple of handfuls of nails in our pockets and bought a window insulation kit. Viv had gone to court over a coffee-table book on rooftop gardens a few months before and we’d made a pact to never shoplift anything with a barcode again. Unless we really wanted it. We walked back along Kenmount Road, stepping into the scabby strips of grass between car dealerships and fast-food restaurants to let people power-walking to work at the big box stores pass us. We waited at the light by the Halloween Spirit for four lanes of traffic to stop so we could cross over to the Value Village side of the road. The air was cold, and thick with exhaust.
Viv pointed out an inflatable pumpkin strapped to the roof of the Halloween Spirit. It was at least eight feet tall. An orange light flashed inside the undulating fabric. A thick cord ran from the pumpkin’s base down the side of the building and in through the steel double doors on the front of the warehouse.
“Look at that. How much do you think that costs?” Viv said.
“The pumpkin? To buy?”
“To run it. Like, there’s the electricity, and I think there’s a steady flow of air being pumped in there too.”
“Kyle Patterson works there.”
“Holy shit, I almost forgot about Kyle Patterson. Doing what?”
“Driving a skid-steer.”
“How did he get that job?”
“I think he worked there last year. It’s seasonal. I guess he has some kind of special licence, maybe?”
“Just for Halloween?”
“For Halloween and Christmas — it turns into the Christmas Superstore after Halloween. He gets kept on until spring to clean the place out after Christmas.”
At Value Village, we found a light blue wool blanket with a silky hem. We picked it because it was thick and wide enough and because we liked the colour.
At home I stood on a chair in the kitchen with a nail between my finger and thumb, using the side of my hand to hold the corner of the blanket in place. I tapped the first nail into the moulding over the doorway. Viv passed the next nail up to me. When I got to the middle of the doorway I hopped down and scooted the chair over. Mike and his friend watched from the couch as I climbed back onto the chair and lifted the blanket to the opposite corner of the door frame, blocking their view. Viv handed me the final nail and I drove it in, cracking the white paint on the moulding. I stepped down and moved backwards to take in my work. Excess blanket hung down in a ruffle on the right side of the door.
“It’s kind of like the curtain at the theatre,” I said.
&nbs
p; “It makes it darker in here,” Viv said.
“We’ll take it down in the spring.” I went to the fridge and slid an open bottle of white wine out from under a bag of wilted spinach. Normally we would be able to see Mike and his friend from where we were sitting at the kitchen table; with the blanket up we could just smell the weed and hear the mumble of their conversation under the music.
“Are we going to the Rose?” Viv asked.
“We could stay here and hang out with the guys,” I said. “We could do the window kit.”
“I want to go,” Viv said, emptying the last of the wine into my glass. “Finish this and we’ll get dressed.”
It was warmer outside than in the house. A wave of fall leaves scuttled down the hill around us. When we got to the Rose the guy at the door held my hand and drew a big smiley on the back of it in permanent marker. I could smell the fumes as soon as he uncapped the marker. The tip was wide and soft; he pressed it into my hand so firmly that black ink bubbled out of the sponge.
The bar was crowded and clammy. I kept losing Viv. I saw her dancing in the front and shouldered my way up there. I moved through the spread-out crowd nodding along in the back, into the denser, swaying crowd closer to the stage. The front was all girls who’d thrown their jackets into a pile on the floor by the PA. At indie shows girls dance with each other in the front and the guys in the band make eyes at them. It’s different than at punk shows, where girls get elbowed out of the front.
I found a spot by Viv and concentrated on doing my one dance move in time to the beat — arms at my sides, head bowed, chest thrust forward, hips jutting side to side. I watched the bassist’s tapping foot and tried to move with it. Between songs the guitarist asked if someone could bring him a beer; I went to roll my eyes at Viv about it but she was gone. I stood on tiptoe and looked towards the bar. I couldn’t see her but I made my way back there anyway, the wall of bodies closing behind me as I went. I hauled open the door to the bathroom, startling a group of girls gathered around an upturned palm of pills.
