The Checkout Girl (14 page)

When Roy's not cooking and cleaning (and making love), he's reading hockey stats wherever he can find them, and player biographies, and team histories. He told Sally, who told Kathy, there wasn't girls' hockey at the NHL level, not even close. There were pretty active teams in Montreal, for sure, but Montreal's a long way from home and not very safe these days. If Kathy went to university, Queen's or Toronto or McMaster, say, they had teams and even some money to support them. There were teams scattered through the area, one in Guelph, he thought, used to be a good team in Preston. Season's over, he said, but come fall, practices would start again, and Kathy would be able to find someone to talk to. There wasn't an organized league for girls like there was for boys, so she'd have to do some legwork on her own.

Before Kathy can apologize and say she hasn't done any legwork, they're distracted by Marvin, who is letting himself in the front door. He stops near the first cash register, unzips his jacket and takes his comb out of his pocket protector. He fixes his hair, centre forward with a dangly bit in front, uplift on each side and curl over the centre, duck's ass in back.

“For being so pug-ugly,” Sally says, “he's a vain one.”

“He asked me out,” Kathy says. As soon as the words pass her lips, she wishes she hadn't said them. “I'm not going, of course.”

“Poor bastard,” Sally says. “And I don't mean because he wants to go out with you. He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he has a heart like anyone else, so it's natural enough for him to ask.

“What do you bet the guys put him up to it?” Sally asks. “They'd all like to ask you out. You're pretty, you're smart and you can out-hockey every one of them. They talk about you when you aren't around. I've been here for so long I'm invisible to them now, so they say stuff as if I'm not there, or don't count. Because I'm old.

“Even Brian would go out with you, and he's happily married,” Sally adds.

“Do you think I should go out with Marvin?” Kathy asks, feeling sorry for him now that Sally's pointed out he has a heart.

“Never settle for second best,” Sally says without hesitation.

On Monday morning, Kathy arrives early for work. It's her routine these days, to catch whoever is in the break room before they punch in, and give them her zis-boom-ba, rah-rah-rah, join-the-union lecture. She's just inside the back door when Howard Zell, the regional personnel supervisor, approaches her and tells her she is to go back outside and not return to the premises. Ever.

“As of this moment, you are no longer our employee, Miss Rausch,” he says, “and you are not to set foot in this store again.”

“Are you firing me, Mr. Zell?” Kathy asks. “Is it because I'm gathering signatures for a union?”

Howard tells her, yes, he's firing her, but it has nothing to do with her union work. The chain respects the right of employees to petition a union. We have nothing against unions, he says. Though, he adds, we prefer to work in good faith directly with our employees, not through intermediaries, to bring about satisfactory changes in workplace conditions. But really, he says, it has nothing to do with the union petition, it has to do with Kathy and the bare fact that her till regularly doesn't balance at the end of the day.

Kathy explains that she's not the only person who works on her till. That when she takes breaks, or goes to lunch, one or another of the stock boys takes over for her on her cash register. And when she places her cigarette orders, then later stocks them on the shelf, once again, someone else works on her till. Sometimes her manager, sometimes the office girl, whoever is available when she must be away from her cash register, works on her till because she is the only dedicated full-time checkout girl. We have a small staff, as you know, she explains, so practically every employee in the store is partly responsible if her till doesn't balance at the end of the day.

Howard Zell says, as far as her supervisors are concerned, her till doesn't balance, and it is
entirely
her responsibility. In discussion, he says, the issue of theft arose — sometimes her till is short — but he would like her to know right here and now that he was the one who suggested management not pursue a criminal investigation, for compassionate reasons, because a criminal record would have dire consequences and limit Kathy's ability to find another job.

Kathy says she is innocent until proven guilty, and asks Howard to please put in writing the reasons for her dismissal. He says he doesn't have to. It is his prerogative to fire her. But, he says, head office is way ahead of the game and has already sent the paperwork regarding the firing to the Labour Board; it is a legitimate case of termination due to incompetence. I repeat, he says, your firing has nothing to do with union recruitment. He tells her again the decision is final, and she should leave. There will be no reversal, Miss Rausch, he says, you should go home now.

Kathy doesn't go home. She gets in her car and drives straight to her mother's because she knows she has to tell Connie in person, and she wants to get it over with as quickly as possible. When Kathy arrives, Connie's making egg salad sandwiches and Shelly's trying to drown the strawberries left bobbing in her Cheerios milk.

“Day off, Kathy?” Connie asks. “Here, clean this out.” She hands Kathy the egg salad bowl. Kathy automatically runs her finger along the inside of the bowl and is about to lick it when she realizes she can't eat it.

“I got fired,” she says scraping the egg off her finger back into the bowl. She sets the bowl in the sink and washes her hands.

“The union,” Connie says to Kathy's back.

“Howard Zell says not,” Kathy says. She turns to face her mother as she dries her hands. Connie's eyes are floating, but the tears don't spill out.

“Howard says my till doesn't balance at the end of the day,” Kathy says. “It's an excuse; of course it's the union. I'll call my organizer and we'll file an appeal. Don't worry, Mom, it'll be fine. ”

“Kathy,” Connie says, and stops. She looks at Kathy. “It'll be fine,” she echoes, but no one would believe her. “I have to go. I'm driving Shelly to school today.”

“I'll take her,” Kathy says, relieved to be able to get away so easily. “You go to bed. I'll call later.”

Kathy does call, after a calming evening of road hockey. It was still light when she grabbed her stick and one of Rhettbutler's striped rubber balls and headed outside. She pinned an old blanket to a laundry rack she found in the basement and set it up as a goal. She danced the ball on the end of her stick, whacked it into the towel net and whooped. Within minutes Pete and Rhettbutler were out to see what was going on. They went back inside. Then Rhettbutler was beside her, a child's red-handled broom in his hands, and Pete had one of Kathy's old sticks. They tussled and turned, scuffled for the breakaway, laughed and shouted their way to the goal.

Kids came first, aluminum doors whapping behind them, and joined in the game. Fathers arrived to watch, then went inside and got their sticks. A small goalie net appeared and replaced Kathy's towel net; a second net arrived with a father-son team. Grunts and shouts, kids crying, cheers from the sidelines where women sat on lawn chairs smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee, dabbing at cuts and dirt with Kleenex and spit, gossiping. They played until the streetlights came on, until mothers called husbands and children in. Tomorrow, they said as they left. Tomorrow.

When Kathy finally called Connie, Mary answered the phone.

“She's putting her coat on,” Mary told her, and she shouted away from the mouthpiece. “Connie, it's Kathy.”

Kathy told her mother she'd be over on Sunday to cook supper for Mother's Day. And they could watch the Stanley Cup playoff, St. Louis and Boston, and the amazing Bobby Orr.

Marvin's sitting on Connie's sagging rec room couch. It's colonial, with varnish chipping from the arm rests, and covered wagons and grazing cattle fading into the landscape of its thinning upholstery. His right hand, bandaged across the knuckles, holds a beer and his feet are trying to avoid Shelly. Shelly lies on her side under the wagon wheel coffee table and picks at the threads of the unraveling braided rug. She looks like a piglet, her pale pink arms and soft pink tummy bulging out of a too-small T-shirt. Sitting in the middle of the coffee table is the huge white lily in its purple plastic planter that Marvin brought for Kathy.

Connie leans into the other end of the couch, her legs propped on the table — skin-tight, lime green pedal pushers, stop-sign-red toenails, dark green flip-flops.

“I'd love a beer right about now,” she told Marvin when he offered her one, “but I can't. No rest for the weary, not even on Mother's Day. Unlike you, Marvin, and my unemployed daughter here, I have to work tonight. Maybe Kathy will have one with you.”

Kathy would like to have a beer, many, in fact, but she thinks it would be a mistake now that Marvin's arrived. Kathy's sitting in the reproduction rocker to the left of Connie. Two milk-bucket lamps cast a low yellow light, while the blue-screen glow of the TV flickers across their faces.

Shelly stops picking at the rug and starts to rub her cheeks. Tiny beads of sweat dot her upper lip. The hair around her face is damp. She whispers, “Bobby Orr, #4, Bobby Orr, #4,” under her breath, a monotone that's lost in the jangly, pre-game banter.

When a commercial comes on, Connie taps the purple planter with a red toenail and asks Marvin where he got the beautiful lily. She says she sure does wish it had been for her for Mother's Day considering nobody in her family got her flowers this year, though she didn't want to seem ungrateful for the cards from her daughters sitting there on the table. One is from Kathy and has a twenty-dollar bill in it, and the one from Shelly is painted entirely yellow, inside and out. It represents the sun, Shelly's teacher told Connie.

“At the store,” Marvin says. “Left over,” he adds. “From Easter.” He's been talking in choppy, nervous sentences since he arrived.

“Oh,” Connie drawls, “how very generous of you. Kathy's so lucky to have a workmate and friend like you.”

“Everybody chipped in,” Marvin says. “Wasn't just me.”

“Well, then,” Connie says, and she leans forward to give Marvin her full attention. “Kathy has many, many fine friends. And what an appropriate choice for a firing, an Easter lily. Perhaps Kathy will emerge from the tomb of joblessness alive and well and once again check out the groceries of the masses. Maybe she'll bodily ascend into checkout girl heaven and become the patron saint of workers who have attempted to start unions but failed. Maybe, Marvin. Or maybe she'll go hungry the rest of her days, stealing wilted lettuce leaves and rotting tomatoes from produce garbage bins.

“What do you think, Marvin?” Connie asks. “Do you have an opinion on Kathy's future?”

Kathy is staring at her mother. Her mother is staring at Marvin. Marvin looks at the TV. Shelly picks at the rug.

Because Marvin isn't looking at Connie, he doesn't see the smile that stretches like a tight, pink elastic across her face. Connie waits. Kathy watches to see what Marvin will do.

Marvin sets his beer on the end table and touches his hair. He reaches for the comb in his pocket protector. Mid-reach he thinks better of combing his hair and grabs the beer. He takes a swig and foam bubbles up over the top. He covers the foaming top with one hand and cups the dripping bottom with the other. Holding the bottle, top and bottom, in front of him, he watches the TV.

Without looking down, Marvin wipes one hand, and then the other, on his jeans. He furtively glances down at his damp jeans, then up from his jeans to the TV, then down again at Shelly, whose sweaty body is as close to his feet as is possible without actually touching them. Looking up again, Marvin leans forward and sets his beer on the table in front of him. While he's there he sniffs the lily. He jerks his head away, moves the plant a few inches closer to Connie's red toenails, thinks better of that and moves it to where it had been. He leans back then, hands on his thighs, and once and for all concentrates on the hockey players skating across the TV screen.

The Easter lily Marvin moved sideways, then moved back, is one tree-like leafy green stalk with seven enormous snow-white trumpets filled with anthers so laden, the pollen is dropping onto the table in little orange pyramids. It's in such full and fabulous bloom that it seems only seconds before it must collapse in upon itself and die. And it's smelly. Putrid and thick, like chicken that is turning, only sweeter.

The lily is a gift from the guys at the store, an embarrassed, guilty apology for Kathy's firing. There's also a card on the end table that Kathy put beside Connie's Mother's Day cards. On Kathy's card, a kitten stands beside a puddle of milk. Inside the card says,
Don't cry over spilled milk…
And to illustrate this optimism, the inside kitten is drinking from the milk puddle. Around the kitten are the signatures of the men from the store, with little notes saying, “Don't forget us!” and “Good luck!”

“That's mine,” Marvin said when Kathy opened the card, pointing to an oversized, block-printed message that read, “Howard Zell — go to HELL!”

“It's for you, Kathy,” Connie had called when Marvin arrived.

“Marvin?” Kathy had said as she neared the door.

Marvin had shuffled around the wet porch looking like he was going to bolt. Except Kathy knew he couldn't, because there at his feet was a case of twelve beer, and he'd never leave that behind. Marvin drank twenty-four beer every weekend, breaking them into even lots: eight for Friday, eight for Saturday and eight for Sunday.

“Marvin?” Kathy repeated.

“We picked straws,” Marvin said. “I lost.”

“Well,” Kathy said. “Aren't you the lucky one? Let me take that plant from you.”

“Hey, what happened?” she asked, balancing the plant on her hip and touching his bandaged knuckles. Marvin pulled his hand back.

“Hit an immoveable object at great speed,” Marvin said. Sometimes Marvin said the most wonderful things, but Sally had already told Kathy what happened and this was her explanation:

Sally said they were in shock when they heard Kathy had been fired. She immediately called a florist and sent Kathy flowers, a dozen red roses, while the guys walked around swearing. We'll have a protest, a sit-in, they said. We'll picket the store, boycott the chain, slash Howard Zell's tires. It was crazy, Sally said, the ideas they came up with. Then Marvin smashed his fist through the fibreboard wall separating the bathroom stalls and ripped open his knuckles and Brian had to take him to the hospital for stitches. When they returned, and the accident report had been filed, Brian sent them all back to work, Sally said, so in the end, they did nothing for Kathy.

Until now.

“How'd you find me?” she asked.

“You a cop?” Marvin asked back.

Kathy laughed loudly. Maybe too loudly.

“Some little guy at your boarding house. Said his name was Barry Bender and he told me you'd be here.” This last was his longest and fullest sentence yet.

Kathy motioned Marvin in.

“Mom, Marvin's coming in,” she called, and then said to Marvin, “We're watching the Stanley Cup.”

“Isn't everybody,” he said as he grabbed his case of beer and moved past Kathy into the house.

Once Connie stops grilling Marvin and they settle into watching the pre-game warm-up, Kathy slips upstairs and calls Darlyn.

“Darlyn, guess who's here?” Kathy says without saying hello.

“Bobby Orr? Except he's supposed to be playing hockey, so I guess it can't be him.”

“Marvin,” Kathy says.

“Marvin? Who's…? Oh shit, Kathy,
the
Marvin? Pocket Protector Marvin?”

“The one and only.”

“Can I come see?” Darlyn asks.

“Please,” Kathy says. “I need you to rescue me. Mom's putting him through the wringer about me getting fired. And Shelly's scaring him by practically lying on his feet, but acting as if he isn't there.”

“Can Donny come?”

“Of course,” Kathy says.

“What about Dad?”

“More the merrier,” Kathy says, hoping Connie won't be too put out about Al sitting around in their rec room.

“What about your mom? It's Mother's Day,” Kathy asks.

“Mother will be happy to be rid of us,” Darlyn says. “She now says Mother's Day is a
construct
— she uses words like that, Kathy — a capitalist
construct
of Hallmark Cards created for the specific reason of stealing money from the deluded. Besides which, she told us when we brought her breakfast in bed, Mother's Day is an insult to all women, not just mothers, as it doesn't honour the work women do all the other days of the year.

“And,” Darlyn adds, “she'll be doubly happy to have us gone because she doesn't watch sports now. She thinks hockey is men being boys and the boys are play-acting war. She thinks all contact sports are deliberate and staged acts of belligerence that mimic war. That they're displays of patriarchal dominance put on for other men to see — pissing contests, she calls them. They're also reminders to women about who has the strength and power in the world.

“That's the way she talks now, Kathy,” Darlyn sighs. “Those are the kinds of things she tells us. Dad looks confused and sad and goes into the basement. He pulls his chair right up to the TV screen and tries to keep the volume very, very low when he's watching
Wide
World
of Sports
, hoping Mom doesn't hear so he won't get another lecture. I'm not sure how long this can go on.”

Darlyn cheers up and asks, “Should we bring beer? Donny brought a 2-4 with him. We can bring it if you like.”

“Marvin brought a dozen,” Kathy says, “but eight of them are for him so that leaves one each for you and Donny and Al and me. So, yes to beer. Bring lots and lots of beer.”

Kathy gets back downstairs in time to watch the players line up on the ice for the national anthems. “Oh, Canada,” Shelly yells. “Oh, Canada.” It's the only part she knows.

The doorbell rings. Darlyn usually walks in, so Kathy gets up from the rocker to go upstairs. Connie double-steps up behind her, her flip-flops flip-flopping at double speed.

“Marvin's quite the loser,” she huffs right into Kathy's ear. “You're gaw-damn lucky to get out of that place even if it does mean no job. Are they all like that?”

“Marvin's OK,” Kathy says, more defensively than she'd like.

“Those flowers…”

Kathy's opening the front door; Connie's still hissing away.

“… are an insult.”

“Barry,” Kathy says. Connie peers over Kathy's shoulder.

“Another grocery boy?” Connie asks and gives Barry the once-over. Barry does the same to Connie.

“Mom, Barry Bender. Barry, this is my mother, Connie Rausch.”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Rausch,” Barry says in his best aspiring-to-Westmount way. “Happy Mother's Day,” he says, and he reaches his hand around Kathy to shake Connie's.

Connie leans past Kathy, grabs his hand. Hard. Too hard. Barry winces. “I'm not your mother,” Connie says.

“Barry's an electrician who works up at the Bruce,” Kathy says.

“Ah, an electrician, not a grocery boy,” Connie says. “Are you in the union?” she asks.

Loosening her grip a bit, but still holding Barry's hand, Connie tries to pull him past Kathy into the house. Kathy sticks her bum out and blocks Barry's way. She turns and scowls at her mother.

“Come in, Barry Bender. Come join our little party,” Connie says. She's ignoring Kathy's scowl, but she does let go of Barry's hand.

Kathy mouths,
Go away
, to her mother, and turns back to Barry.

“That's if Kathy will let you in,” Connie says. She shrugs her shoulders and twirls her finger beside her head. She mouths,
She's nuts,
to Barry.

Connie turns away then, and walks toward her bedroom. Barry leans past Kathy to watch her go, or more particularly to watch her bum inside the green pedal pushers. “I'm going to get changed for work. Get yourself a beer, Barry Bender. They're in the fridge.”

Once Connie's bedroom door clicks shut, Kathy nudges Barry back outside.

“What're you doing here?” she asks.

“Your mom looks great for a…” Barry says.

“Stop,” Kathy interrupts and holds up her hand. “Just tell me why you're here.”

“Some weird guy with a bandaged fist came looking for you at Pete's and I told him where you were. Then I got worried I shouldn't have, so I came over to make sure he wasn't bugging you.”

“Could have called,” Kathy says.

“Yeah, well, I didn't. Are you watching the game?”

“Downstairs. Marvin's there now with Shelly.”

“Marvin,” Barry says and nods. “Who's Shelly?”

“My sister.”

“You never told me you had a sister.”

“I never told you lots of things.”

“We could change that,” Barry says.

“Oh lord.” This is old territory and Kathy's tired of it. “Then what? You'll break up with Rachel and get engaged to me?”

“No,” Barry says. He's hurt. He tries not to whine. “I did think we were friends.”

“We are friends,” Kathy says very gently.

Barry, when he comes home from weekend dates with Rachel, still crawls into Kathy's bed. He still wakes her up and they talk until they fall asleep. Barry tells her about Rachel: shopping for The Trousseau, renting a hall for The Wedding, picking out patterns for china and silver. Kathy tells him what Pete and Penny and Rhettbutler have been up to over the last week. On Friday night she stayed awake to tell him about getting fired. Usually, when Kathy wakes up in the morning, Barry's still there beside her.