On the Saturday that Sandy brings in the slippers, not just her but all the salesgirls have a lineup of customers. This is because it’s Bargain Bonanza Day. If a customer purchases three yards of any material, she gets two yards of another material of similar value, free. By ten-thirty Sandy has racked up sixty dollars’ worth of sales.
“It’s like a ceremonial war,” a man says.
Sandy looks at him, surprised. You don’t get many men in here.
He picks up a bolt of paisley. “All you girls running around
with your clubs,” he says, tapping the bolt on her shoulder. “Barging into each other. But no injuries. No deaths.”
“Not yet,” she says.
He laughs, a genuinely amused laugh that is suddenly bouncing inside her chest. She’s in the middle of cutting three yards of pink silk, and she has to stop halfway and wait for the ball behind her heart to go still.
“Three yards,” her customer says impatiently.
When she finishes cutting, she keeps her head lowered as she folds the material. His legs are before her eyes. Rust-brown tweed trousers, expensive-looking. Made in Italy, she’d bet.
He puts the bolt of paisley down and follows her to the front desk. Her fingers on the cash register keys are wet. Even out of the tips of her fingers she’s perspiring.
But he’s not good-looking, she thinks. As she hands the customer her change, she glances at him. Stocky, balding, old—thirty-five, maybe forty.
He smiles. His eyes are forest green with primrose yellow flecks. Like a sweater she’s knitting. “Do they let you out for coffee?” he asks quietly.
She nods.
“When?”
“Oh, any time now.”
“Meet me at the doughnut shop,” he says. “Five minutes.”
She checks the watch hanging on the side of the cash register. “Half an hour,” she says.
He’s already walking out. He raises his fist, thumb up, to show that half an hour is fine.
“I’ll be right with you,” she says to the next customer. She goes to the back of the store, into the washroom, shuts the door, sits on the toilet seat and covers her face with her hands. Her hands are still wet. She turns them over and studies each perfect, Peach Blossom Pink nail with the feeling that she’s looking at them for the last time.
*
After supper and washing the dishes, making lunches for the next day and maybe putting through a load of laundry, Norma has about fifteen minutes left to do what she wants. Usually she’s so exhausted, she just lies on the floor in front of the t?. At eight o’clock she has to get up, go to her and Lou’s room, and sit at her desk until it’s time for bed.
Those two and a half hours of studying every night, Sunday to Friday, are her regime. Their father summoned that bombshelter word back after she failed grade twelve last year. Before then she kept her grades from him by getting their mother to sign her report cards. But when you fail, both parents have to sign, and there are meetings with the vice-principal, and letters back and forth.
On the long walk home last spring, on the final day of school, Norma didn’t bother asking God for the miracle that their father wouldn’t hit her. She deliberately stepped out into traffic, but all the cars stopped, and a truck driver hung out his window and yelled,“Get outta the road, fat ass.” Running back to the curb, she found herself whimpering their dead brother’s name.
She will always believe that Jimmy heard her. No matter what else she will later renounce, she will always hold it in her heart that it was because of Jimmy that their father didn’t lift a finger.
Their father was between girlfriends, and it took nothing to get him mad, but all he did after looking over her report card that evening was deliver a speech, featuring examples from his life in the army, about the need for a person to stick to a rigid routine of work. “Do you read me?” he asked every few minutes, and she answered,“Yes, yes.” Naturally, she didn’t ruin a good thing by telling him what she really needs.
Which, most likely, is a psychiatrist. She has a mental illness that she’s never heard of. Exam-room phobia, she calls it. The
instant she enters the gym, where exams are written, and she sees those lines of desks, vertigo strikes her. Her head spins, and sweat seems to flood out from under her arms and between her breasts, and she feels that if the flood doesn’t stop, it will become an avalanche of sweat, and she will be swept down with the torrent.
Once, two years ago, she fainted at the gym doors and was carried by three boys (“It
took
three boys,” was how she was informed) to the nurse’s office. But she passed the exam. She got honours, in fact, because she was allowed to write it after school, by herself in an empty classroom. That was how she learned that exam rooms, not exams, are what she is terrified of.
Tell the vice-principal, her girlfriends said. Ask permission to write every exam alone.
“I’ll get over it,” Norma said, and her friends knew that this meant she didn’t want to draw attention to herself.
Her friends are in the same boat. One of them is six foot three, one has chronic acne, and one is the adenoidal girl. Like Norma, they wear thick glasses, and that’s all the four of them have in common, aside from being considered lepers.
Of the many things Norma regrets about herself, she regrets most not having the guts to drop these girls. She’s never disliked anybody who tormented her, yet she can’t stand these girls, who are loyal and protective and haven’t once hurt her feelings.
Everyone thinks they’re as nice as they pretend to be, as nice as girls compensating for their appearance are supposed to be. But the truth is, they’re vicious. They hate any girl who doesn’t have a socially debilitating defect. All some normal girl has to do is walk by their table in the cafeteria and the three of them are off, nattering to each other about how stupid, loose and, underneath the clothes and makeup, how really homely the girl is. Listening to them, Norma longs for a pretty friend. Pretty girls, like her sister Sandy, stay sweet as babies. Ugly girls are rotten; their outer ugliness rots them inside.
Norma doesn’t exempt herself. She isn’t hateful, but she feels that what she is inside is worse, in a way—that she is cowardly and secretive and that this is even more despicable than being cruel. She never tells her friends anything important about herself. At giving vague, misleading answers she is masterful. Even where she lives she keeps secret, each afternoon parting with her friends at the bottom of her street and then meeting them there the next morning. Once, when the tall girl asked if she could stop by Norma’s house to go to the bathroom, Norma just said lamely,“Oh, you can hold it,” and walked away. She might have dredged up that old story about their mother being sick, but she has become incapable of the direct lie. Because she is so sneaky and cowardly, she thinks.
She thinks that all the crosses she bears, all the housework, the study regime, the name-calling, the loneliness, are her just deserts.
He’s the only customer in the doughnut shop. He’s in the last booth, facing the door, smoking a cigarette.
“Well, what do you know about that?” he says, smiling. “She showed up.”
“I always take my break here,” Sandy says, sliding into the seat across from him.
“Want one?” He extends the pack of Players.
“I don’t smoke.” She twists around to study the doughnut menu, although she always orders a chocolate glaze. When he offered her a cigarette, she noticed that he was wearing a chain bracelet. She doesn’t like jewellery on men. She doesn’t like bald spots.
“You’re one beautiful doll,” he says.
She twists back round.
“Has anyone ever told you you’re beautiful?”
She nods. Does he think he’s the first? She tried to see what
it is about him that made her perspire in the store, but she only sees how old he is.
“What are those big blue eyes staring at?” he says, laughing.
Her face burns. That’s what she likes—his laugh.
He orders two coffees and two cherry-filled donuts. When the waitress leaves them, he lights another cigarette and says,“Sandra Field. Sweet sixteen. Youngest of three sisters. Popular as hell but no steady boyfriend, though I find that hard to believe.”
She feels a rush of familiar dread. “How do you know all that?”
“I asked.”
“Who?”
He shakes his head, smiling.
She leans into the table.
“Who?”
“Can’t reveal my sources, now, can I?”
She clings to the edge of the seat, touching the ridge of hard chewing gum underneath. Has he found out that their mother dropped their brother over Niagara Falls? No, that’s crazy. Who would tell him that? But this is what happens when boys—men—pry into her life. “I want to know everything about you,” they say, and what always happens is that her mind plunges straight down to her deepest secret.
“Hey. Doll.” He attempts to lift her chin. She doesn’t let him. His thumb traces the line of her jaw, and then his hand is gone and picking his cigarette out of the aluminum ashtray.
“Okay,” he says. “Fair’s fair. Reg Sherman. Thirty-eight years young. Only child. Former Albert Park High School quarterback. Present proprietor of Sherman Shoes.”
She looks at him. Sherman Shoes is next to the fabric store, and now she remembers that she’s seen him before. He’s the man who sold her her blue ankle-strap heels. She remembers that he held her foot for too long and squeezed her toes, but so gently, the way a doctor feels for breaks.
“Part-time spy,” he goes on. “Current mission—get the lowdown on one Miss Sandra Field.” He laughs, and she does, too, because his laugh makes her delirious.
“Married,” he says.
She laughs into her paper napkin.
“Fifteen years,” he says, shaking his head, and she realizes he isn’t joking.
He grasps her arm. His married man’s hand on her arm is plum-coloured under the black hair. Why didn’t it occur to her that someone his age would be married?
“Look,” he says. “I want to be honest with you. I’m married. Unhappily, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve got two kids. Great kids.”
She waits.
“It doesn’t make any difference,” he says.
She doesn’t know what he means.
“Sandra …” He lets go of her arm. “God. Look at you. You’re a living doll, you know that?”
“I better get back,” she says, reading the time upside down on his wristwatch.
“Let’s go for a drive,” he says enthusiastically.
“Now?”
“Sunday. Sunday afternoon.”
So that’s what he’s after. A girlfriend on the side. A sweetie pie to keep him happy.
“Come on,” he says. “You’ll get to ride in my new car.”
“Oh, okay,” she says, partly because her break is over, partly because if he’s anything like their father, it’s not as though his wife and kids will care.
The insulation and two-by-fours and top-of-the-line knotty pine have been piled downstairs for over a year. Their father bought it all one day during a week of craziness. The next day he
decided to send it back but couldn’t because the sale was final. That got him so mad that he threw the vacuum cleaner through the wall between the dining room and the front hall, making a boot-shaped hole, which is still there. He gave Lou a shiner that week, ran the car into a streetlight, and one night, thinking he heard a prowler in the back yard, got his World War Two gun from the bomb shelter and accidentally shot himself in the foot. Now he’s lame.
Norma knows what the reason for his crackup is and for him being in a terrible mood ever since. Lou told her. Not realizing that their mother and Sandy also knew, they decided to keep it to themselves.
“They couldn’t take it,” Lou said.
“No,” Norma agreed. She wasn’t sure that she could take it either. She went down to their father’s workroom and made a footstool for their beautiful, prematurely white-haired little mother.
Now, a year later, the fact that their father fools around is just another secret. Norma had hoped he’d stopped, but a couple of weeks ago he brought home three pairs of duck-head slippers. To show him, and to take advantage of his good mood, she starts fixing up the basement. All year she’s been dying to get her hands on that wood, and one Saturday she goes downstairs and saws a piece of the knotty pine in half. It feels death-defying, though not brave. Out of control is more like it.
But not reckless, either. She wants to do the job right. She consults the man who owns the hardware store about the wiring and insulation, and she buys a book called
So You Want to Build a Rec Room?
What she can’t find out, she figures out. It only takes common sense, and common sense is her big attribute, the one thing about her that people find to praise. In three afternoons she installs fluorescent lighting and two new outlets. Then she begins to strap the walls.
Their father finally notices what’s going on. He arrives
home early one night, in time for supper (Lovergirl—Lou’s name for all his women—must be busy), and after inspection goes to the basement for a beer. “What the heck …” he says at the bottom of the stairs. A month ago, before Lovergirl, he’d have said what the hell. He calls Norma to come down. “Who did all this?” he asks.
“Me,” she says sullenly. She knows he won’t hit her.
“You? By yourself?”
She nods.
“But how the heck did you know how?” He is looking straight at her.
She won’t answer, she won’t tell him.
He goes over to the wall and grips a vertical support. His suit jacket is ripped up the back seam, she notices. And his pants—the cuffs still have mud on them from when it rained last week. She sighs. Evidence that she and her sisters are lousy substitutes for a wife always undoes her. “I bought a book about it,” she relents.
“Great,” he says. “This is just great.” He turns from the wall, smiling.
She remembers supper. “Oh, I’ve got the burner on high,” she cries and runs up to the kitchen.
He follows slowly. Going up and down stairs, he has to hop because of his shot foot. He calls that he’s bowled over. “The outlets work?” he calls.
“Yeah, sure.”
When he’s in the kitchen, he comes up behind her at the stove and drops his hand on her shoulder. “What say we work on it together? This Sunday.”