The Checkout Girl (9 page)

“We're going to Liberace Friday,” Doug says over the phone.

“Where are you?” Kathy asks.

“My mother's.”

He's called her at work. Go to the office, you've got an urgent call, her manager told her when he came down to the floor to get her. It's noontime and busy, and she had to ask her customers to wait until someone took over her till.

“Is your mother OK?”

“She says for you to come watch hockey some night. They miss you.”

Doug's mother, Blanche, cried, and his stepfather, Leon, gave her a big hug when Kathy visited them after she got back from Vancouver. Kathy told them that she'd left Doug, and she was sorry because Blanche and Leon had been so good to her. She promised to keep in touch, but she hadn't. It wasn't lost on Kathy that she'd told Blanche and Leon about the break-up when she never bothered to tell Doug.

“I'm not going,” Kathy says.

“I'll pick you up around supper on Friday.” He should be pleading, but he's not.

“You're not listening. I'm…”

“You owe me,” he interrupts.

She knows that. She wants to ask, why Liberace? but she knows that too. It was one of their things, to dress up, to have a toke and go to concerts, whatever was playing. Chuck Berry, the Vienna Boys' Choir, Tiny Tim, Paul Butterfield, they'd been to them all.

Doug says, “We'll talk after, and you can tell me what a terrible person I am and all the terrible things I did to make you leave.”

She doesn't say anything.

“I'll be there at six,” he says.

Even before she hears the click she knows she'll go. Not because there's anything to talk about. They stopped talking long before she packed her bag and drove back to Varnum. And she'd worn out the terrible-person, terrible-things accusations before that. She'll go because when she heard his voice on the phone, she was relieved. They will go to the concert; when it's over they'll say goodbye to each other. And that will be the end of that, because she'll have said what she had failed to say.

She calls Donny to see if he and Brenda will come to the concert too. It's not like Kathy and Doug are going on a date. Donny says yes for him, and he'll check with Brenda and let Kathy know.

When Penny lets Doug in the door on Friday night, Kathy, Pete, Teach, Donny and Barry are sitting at the kitchen table.

“So, you're Doug,” Penny says. “I can't believe we haven't met before, but I have heard a lot about you. Go in and have a seat. Pete's doing a party trick. He likes to pretend he's every mother's nightmare, but he's really a pussycat. And I've seen this one before, so if anyone asks, tell them Rhettbutler and I are slitting our wrists.”

Doug doesn't go in; he leans on the door frame. The group at the table is talking, ignoring Pete, who's chewing mashed potatoes with his mouth open. He's also grinning, the potatoes a soggy, white wad between his teeth. As he chews and grins, the potatoes ooze over his lips and plop, bit by bit, onto his plate.

When the potatoes start to fall out of Pete's mouth onto his plate, Barry stops talking and watches. Like Penny, he's seen the trick before, but he can't believe an adult would do it, and why they'd do it more than once. It's so lame, so pre-teen boy, like snorting milk out your nostrils. When Barry asked, Pete said, “I don't explain; I do.”

Pete picks up the regurgitated potatoes with his fork, and pops them into his mouth. He chews again. Without stopping talking, Kathy reaches over and pulls Pete's plate from its place. The potatoes plop onto the table.

“Oh sorry,” she says, “I thought you were done.” She's seen the trick, too. In fact they all have. Except Doug.

“Lovely Kathy, so smart, so witty,” Teach says.

From the doorway Doug says, “Hey, man, that's fucking nasty.” He's smiling as he walks into the room. He says to Pete. “I'm Doug, Kathy's friend. I'm told you've heard a lot about me.”

Donny, who has met Doug, nods in his direction. The rest
have
heard about him. But when Kathy told them Doug was coming she didn't mention the word friend; she said she had something to clear up. Pete keeps on chewing. He looks at Doug, looks at Kathy, looks back at Doug. Potatoes fall from his mouth. Doug backs away. Teach says, “Harold Markham, Markham with an ‘h.' Any friend of Kathy's is an enemy of mine.”

Barry, who stopped watching Pete to look at Doug, is now watching Teach. He'll tell Kathy later how much he loathes Teach, how condescending Teach is. Calls me “Ah, the Electrician,” as if that's my name. Teach asks Barry to do things, like come to his house and install a stereo system, or rewire a light switch, and Barry's supposed to do it. Because Teach is smart and Barry isn't. If Teach is so smart, Barry will ask her, why doesn't he do his own wiring?

Every weekend when he arrives home, Barry asks Kathy if she's told anyone they're sleeping together.

“We're not sleeping together,” she tells Barry.

“Sometimes we are,” Barry says.

She hasn't told anyone, never would tell anyone, because she doesn't want anyone to know, but she doesn't tell Barry that. She likes to keep him on his toes. (Kathy does suspect Pete knows. There's something about the way he looks at her, dreamy and distant, but intimate, like he knows everything she's ever done, or ever will do. And none of it matters any more than the pile of twice-chewed potatoes growing cold on the table.)

“Sit down, Kathy's friend,” Teach tells Doug. “Join the Kathy fan club.”

“Don't you have a home?” Kathy says to Teach, and she gets up. “Didn't I hear somewhere you had a wife locked away in your basement?”

Pete gets up and stage-whispers in Kathy's ear, “I told you, he's is in love with you.”

His breath is hot and potatoey. He licks some strands of her hair into his mouth and holds them between his teeth, pulling her along, tugging her slowly after him to where Teach is sitting. He lets the hair fall against her face. It's wet. Teach stands, a look of longing in his eyes. Barry stands and clenches his fists. Kathy quickly moves away from the table to the sink. She grabs a dishcloth and scoops the chewed potatoes from the table.

“Did you want to finish these?” she says to Pete, holding the cloth out to him.

“Kathy,” he says, looking into her eyes.

Pete sits down, as do all of the men except Doug, who moves back to the doorway.

Doug asks, “Kathy, can we get out of here?” But it's not a question.

They turn then to look at him, really look. His coat is open, brown suede dissected into rectangles, shearling showing along the seams of each. Black jeans and a sky-blue silk shirt under an elaborately embroidered denim vest. His dark hair is parted in the middle and falls in wavy wedges onto his shoulders. He's grown a moustache; it's thin and weedy.

“Are you going out in that?” Doug asks Kathy.

The men look from him to Kathy. She wanted to make Liberace proud, not to out-dress him, but to be right there with him. She wanted a costume, something he'd wear if he was a girl. So that's what she shopped for when she went to the Sally Ann yesterday.

Kathy found a skirt so short — a mere band of crinkly black velvet — her pink underpants play peek-a-boo along the hem. She found white vinyl knee-high boots and black stockings. Her pink satin jacket, one size too small, fits like a skin and looks good over the translucent lime-green turtleneck she had in her closet.

Kathy looks down at herself. The cleft of her breasts is a dark shadow and her nipples, just visible under the green fabric, slip in and out of view as the jacket shifts. Her hair glistens on her shoulders; patchouli wafts from it when she moves. She can feel the slickness of her frosted lipstick, the weight of black mascara on her lashes.

“I said, Are you going out in that?”

“That's the plan, Doug,” she says.

Donny looks from Kathy to Doug and back again. “Hubba-hubba,” he says, “what a figure, two more legs you look like Trigger.”

They all laugh. Except Doug.

“Thanks, Donny,” Kathy says. And she whinnies and kisses him on the forehead, leaving a frosty set of lips.

Teach moves in for a kiss. Barry stands up and moves toward Teach. Penny comes down from Rhettbutler's room and walks between them. Pete sits and watches from his chair, leans back on two legs, teeters there.

“You look fab,” Penny says, putting her hands on Kathy's shoulders and running them down her shiny arms. “Want to borrow my midi coat? You're gonna need it tonight if you don't want to freeze your pretty pink ass.”

“Where's Brenda?” Penny asks Donny. Penny likes Brenda too, has told Kathy there's something open and innocent about her, like a Peter, Paul and Mary song, all harmony and sweetness with a little sadness at the edges.

“Teaching my mother how to crochet,” Donny says.

“That's sweet,” Penny says.

“Who wants some hash?” Pete says, and he plunks the chair legs on the floor and stands.

“Go up to the Games Room,” Penny says to him. “Open the window. And be quiet, Rhettbutler's asleep.” Penny never does drugs, doesn't like to be in the same room with people doing them. She occasionally has a drink, and if she does, it has to be something very pink and very sweet and frothy, umbrellas optional.

Pete winks at Penny. She walks over and stands before him, leans into him, her wonderful breasts pressed flat against his body. She looks sexy even in her work uniform, a white plasticky tunic tucked into draw-string pants, spongy white shoes like nurses wear.

“Read my lips, Pete,” she says, looking up at him. “
BE. QUIET. RHETTBUTLER. IS. ASLEEP
.” She mouths each word, says it loudly. Pete grabs her around the waist and dips her over his arm, her hair brushing the floor. He leans, kisses her, and quick as that, she is up and walking away from him.

“Yes, my love,” he says.

They are impossibly stoned when Teach says, “Dear Kathy, tell us about your love life. Tell us about your boyfriends.”

Teach is just shit-disturbing, but Barry blanches. He can barely stand, but he gets up anyway and says he has to leave to pick up Rachel.

“Ah, the Electrician and the Virgin Goddess,” Teach says, “on your way then.” He dismisses Barry with a flap of his hand.

Pete draws dreamy circles along the grain of the hardwood floor. He looks at Kathy, smiles, and shrugs his shoulder slightly. They're sitting on cushions Penny made, beanbag chair knock-offs in bright shiny vinyl — reds and yellows and oranges — filled with Styrofoam pellets. But they're not filled full enough. The pellets separate and pile up on either side of their bums and they may as well be sitting on the wood.

“Tell them about the Frenchman,” Donny says, “the revolutionary.”

“Donny,” Kathy warns.

“Donny, you tell us,” Teach says.

“Donny,” Kathy says again, but decides not to stop him. Maybe it's not such a bad thing to remind Doug she had a life before him. After all, when she asked Donny along, she told him it was to help keep a distance between her and Doug, and maybe this is exactly what he's doing.

Donny's lying on the floor, his arms crossed on his chest, his head sunk between two mounds of beanbag chair. They can't see his face. Doug and Teach are looking at Kathy. Pete's eyes are closed; he's humming under his breath.

“We hitchhiked to Quebec City a couple of summers ago, me and Kath,” Donny says.

As Donny talks, Doug shifts in his chair toward Kathy. He places his hand over hers, as if by accident, and leans on it, as hard as he can. He presses Kathy's fingers into the floor. She doesn't look at him; she doesn't flinch. He takes his hand away from hers, casually, and she lifts it into her lap and cradles it there.

Donny's voice emerges from the vinyl chair, so detached that she could almost believe the story is about someone else.

“Not many rides, not great weather, but the people were far out…” Donny's voice says.

Kathy closes her eyes and remembers. She was supposed to go to Sauble Beach on a camping holiday with her then boyfriend. She'd booked vacation time from the store. The boyfriend changed his mind; he wanted to go camping with the guys, he needed some time on his own. She said going with the guys wasn't time on his own. He said she knew what he meant. She said he was selfish; he said she was. He said he was going anyway and she said if he went that was it. So the boyfriend became an ex. Kathy didn't want to waste a holiday sitting around crying, which was exactly what she was doing, so she talked Donny into taking off, hitchhiking. We'll go where the rides take us, she told him. The rides took them to Quebec City.

She fell in love with the city from the moment they drove off the highway and onto Pont de Québec, the newer Pont Frontenac almost complete beside it, metal over water. They were dropped off downtown near the Chateau, and she fell in love with it. She fell in love with the St. Lawrence River. Someday she'd go back to Quebec, and live somewhere along the river, she told Donny.

She fell in love with the boardwalk, with the milky coffee and the strong beer. The narrow streets that wound near the Chateau and down to Old Town. The smell of water and diesel from the port, the chugging and churning of the ferries, the wonderful impossible sounds of French being sung and laughed and shouted. She loved the artists selling paintings and carvings, the vendors selling Quebecois kitsch, the kids hanging out in the square selling dope, the transistor radios playing bilingual rock and roll.

She met a man by a fountain, Martin, who spoke a bit of English. He asked to share the joint she and Donny were smoking, and then offered an apartment for the night. It wasn't his, he said, it wasn't really anyone's, it belonged to an organization, but it was available and there were some mattresses and sometimes a bit of food.

They said, sure, and followed Martin to the apartment, which indeed had mattresses, five of them with three dingy pillows apiece, in a large living room that had little else except one shade-less lamp and an excellent stereo system. They drank cheap red wine, Yago, smoked rollies, talked about music, about hockey. They compared Bobby Orr and Maurice “the Rocket” Richard and agreed to disagree. They talked about unions and the wage controls Trudeau was talking about imposing, and they smoked more dope and talked about how good the dope was. People came and went, some speaking only French. Everyone was friendly; some shared a toke, most laughed. They listened to Jimi Hendrix.
There's too much confusion,
they sang with him,
we can't get no relief.