Too Close to the Falls (3 page)

I'd never seen Roy show concern for things that had happened already. What was the big deal here! Why was Mr. Lombardy grouchy and why did Roy care? I was happy that I had the chance to be nice to Roy because he was always nice to me. “Don't worry, you did your best. I'll stay overnight at your house and tomorrow I'll go home.”

I'd never thought of Roy as having a life outside of my father's store. He never mentioned a mom or a wife or children. As we inched along I asked him if he lived with his mom and dad. He told me his mamma lived in Alabama. I figured that's why he often guessed Mobile in the Coke game. Maybe he missed her. When I asked if he had a wife he said, “No
way
!” I knew then that he wouldn't have children. As far as I could see God only gave children to people who were married. He was a little late with my parents but He did finally make me. I wondered aloud who made
Roy's dinner but he said he ate “round town,” mostly just across the street where we were to dine this very evening. I was surprised to find that Roy lived alone. He was so much fun I pictured him being part of a big happy family like the Canavans, who went to family picnics at Brock's monument. I'd never met anyone who lived alone. Even Father Flanagan had priests from the missions boarding there so he wouldn't be lonely.

We began travelling in a part of the city that I'd never seen before. As we turned into a parking lot I could see he lived in a long ranch-style house with lots of doors and a pink light that flashed his address:
Rainbow Inn — 24 rooms — vacancy
. He had more than one driveway. He had arranged for guest parking with white lines demarking all the extra parking spots. In fact, there was one in front of each of his doors. I had no idea why Roy was worried about having me over, because his house was big. He even had a hot plate in his bedroom — I guessed it was there so when he was tired he wouldn't have to go to the kitchen. Typical of Roy, when he opened his closet a bed fell out! I couldn't wait to see the rest of the place. We made hot chocolate with milk he took in from between the storm windows. He was always efficient. Roy went in to the bathroom and got dressed up in a starched shirt and pinstriped trousers. When I asked him if this was a fancy restaurant like a country club he said that he
had
to dress up to go out on the town with a girl in red taffeta.

We crossed a big slippery street which was deserted and lined with huge piles of snow on each side. When we climbed one mound we came upon orange flashing lights and I sounded out the name of the restaurant in my usual loud voice — Hot and Sassy's.

“That's where we goin' for one
big
meal,” Roy said, and we
agreed we had never been so hungry and that we deserved a good meal for the overtime we'd put in as “pioneers” in the storm.

As we entered I was flabbergasted to see a sea of faces that looked a lot like Roy's. I had never seen anyone who looked like Roy before, had his hair style or his accent. I was amazed on two counts: first, that he had such a large extended family, even the waiters and waitresses looked related, and, second, I was shocked that I had lived near this city for my entire life yet I had never run into any of his relatives before. I would have known in a second that they were related to Roy. I asked if this was a family reunion and Roy only laughed, later saying it was the first time he had ever seen me speechless.

When I got over the shock of seeing his huge family I realized they lived in the rest of his house across the street. I was so glad because I didn't want to think of him as being lonely. It was an odd restaurant with no small tables but only one long high table with stools for his big family and Hots was the waiter for everyone. It must have still been cocktail hour because he was busy serving drinks and people stood up three deep at the long table. “Well, well, look what Roy brought out of the storm, mmm-
mm
mm,” Hots said, shaking his head. Lots of Roy's friends came over and Roy lifted me up and put me on a stool and I remember exactly what he said to the crowd that had assembled. “This is my date for tonight. Her name is Dale Evans and we been out beatin' the trails today at work and we're mighty thirsty for a Shirley Temple and a Johnny Walker, so clear the way for Hots to move.” Hots yelled for Sass — his wife, I think — to come out of the kitchen. Sass was a fat woman who didn't buy into my mother's theory that overweight women should wear dull colours. It was
amazing to me that someone would be named “Sassy” since it was such a bad thing to be; but when I thought about names, it was not as bad as my father's aunt Fanny.

I was marooned outside of my life for a night and it was great. While swivelling on my stool, I had lots of pink Shirley Temples in cocktail glasses, with maraschino cherries and pineapple speared on tiny swords. I took the swords home for my dollhouse. Between Shirleys, Roy and I had a great dinner, a crispy chicken I'd never eaten before which Roy called “Sassy-fried.” I was amazed at how friendly everyone was and how much fun people seemed to be having. They were laughing really hard at things my parents failed to find even a little amusing. One guy was killing himself describing how his car slid on the ice and was wrapped around a pole like a donut. Things that had always seemed like big disasters were only funny events that were no longer threatening. It was a “we're-all-alive-so-what's-the-problem” attitude. I shared our disaster and how I'd driven out of the snowbank sitting on Roy's coat so I could see out the window and how Roy got covered in snow when I spun the wheels. We cried, we were laughing so hard.

Roy asked me to dance and I giggled, telling him I was too little, but he picked me up and we flew all over the dance floor, and I also danced with the bartender and his fat wife, who taught me some dance steps. I was relieved I was wearing my Mary Janes for the dance and because everyone else seemed to be dressed up in bright clothes so I was appropriately dressed in my red taffeta. I'd always liked bright colours and I never bought into my mother's concept of dressing up, which was changing from black-watch navy plaid to solid navy.

Finally it was time to go home and Roy and I trudged across
the street and waved to the snow plow as it passed. Roy pulled down the closet bed for me and when I asked him for extra pyjamas he said I was going to sleep in my clothes. He put me to bed in my party dress and Mary Janes. When I suggested I take off my shoes, he said we were going to leave everything “as is.” I woke up in the night with foot cramps and had to jump up and down to get them to stop. I saw Roy asleep in a chair with his party clothes still on.

The next day was sunny to beat the band and we got up and Roy told me to brush my teeth with my finger, a new manoeuvre which worked surprisingly well. I tried to use his comb for my tangled hair but it was shaped like a tiny pitchfork and didn't catch any snarls. It worked for his hair and his relatives'. I wondered how he'd found a comb that worked so well for his family and their unique hair. I was sure we didn't have them in the drugstore.

We grabbed a donut at Freddies' (a donut shop owned by two brothers
both
named Freddy: my father said they must've been from the Ozarks, not to be able to come up with another name) and ate as we buzzed along. Roy had little bumps on his face where he hadn't shaved and the whites of his eyes looked yellow as his cigarette dangled from his upper lip. The plows had sanded the escarpment hill and it was hard to believe that yesterday had been treacherous enough to knock me right out of my regular life.

As we turned onto my street we saw Mr. Lombardy's cruiser parked in our driveway. I opened the large oak door and the first thing I saw was something I'd never witnessed before; my mother was sitting on the couch crying, clutching a wad of scrunched-up Kleenexes. My father looked mad and worried at the same time. I'd never seen either of them even mildly upset before. I was
speechless. My father crouched down to my eye level and said through cigar breath, “We were very worried about you, young lady.” Then there was a big mess where everyone started talking at once and Mr. Lombardy said he had been going to get me and bring me down or put me in the police station for the night and had only moved away from our car for a minute to talk to someone when Roy had driven away. Roy said he had no choice but to take me to where he lived and there was no working phone. I had no idea why my mother was crying. What was the problem? I suddenly wished they'd lighten up and told them there was
no
problem. My father snapped to and actually agreed, saying emotions were running high at the moment and it was best to call it a day. He thanked Roy for his trouble and escorted him to the door, saying he was sorry for the misunderstanding. Mr. Lombardy tried to go on a bit more but my mother's crying drowned him out. Finally he and Roy left.

As I told my mother about my adventure, she cried at every new detail. As I got to dancing at Hot and Sassy's she was sobbing. My father said as long as I was safe it was best to save the details for another time when my mother was “not so under the weather.” She was weepy for two days and sat with me on her lap, something she never did, even before I was working! At last she was “in the pink” again and ready to return to her important work at the historical society.

The following week when Sam Noyes, the wrinkled, pipe-smoking editor of the local paper, heard that Roy and I had made it all the way to LaSalle in that gale, he wrote an editorial about it. He marvelled that despite the storm (in which two hundred people died), the school closings, and what he referred to as “the
infestation of the National Guard,” McClure's Drugs still managed same-day delivery, even in LaSalle. He wrote that he wished he could count on getting to heaven with as much certainty as he counted on our “intrepid” delivery service. I cut this out, taped it to our dashboard, and Roy and I laughed every time we read it. I referred to him as “intrepid” (a word I liked because they used it on
The Lone Ranger
to introduce the intrepid Tonto during the
William Tell Overture
) and he referred to me as “intrepidette.”

Roy was my best friend for a number of years. We went through rough times on the Tuscarora reservation, dined with millionaires when they visited the Falls, had lunch with Joseph Cotten, witnessed birth and death together, and helped each other out of scrapes — although now I realize he helped me out of more. Finally one day in grade six I went to work and Roy didn't show up. No one ever saw him again. Irene said that a few men had been in looking for him the day before. She said they didn't seem any too pleasant and she was sure gambling was involved. My father suggested to Irene that it was uncharitable to gossip about Roy's departure and told me if Roy could have said goodbye he would have. It was not like him to be rude and he must have had a good reason. When Irene “started up on him” — as Roy used to refer to her bossiness — my father said we would only remember Roy at his best. To me Roy was always at his best.

I went to Roy's office in the storage room. It was really a cove, separated by orange crates. He had a bulletin board with delivery dates on a clipboard and a picture from
Ebony
of Louis Armstrong smiling and waving from a white Cadillac. I carefully untacked it, knowing that it was Roy's goodbye note to me.

My father was a true lover of gadgets. He bought every new thing that came along, from hot-water birdbaths heated by the barbecue to nail polish that came in plastic sheets with nail-size perforations that you trimmed to fit your nail. At my grandmother's suggestion he invested lots of money in a newfangled
sort of handkerchief that people could throw away. He called them “disposable handy hankies.” Everyone in his Rotary told him that no one would be willing to blow money every time they blew their nose. My father said he'd read a book which prophesied that everything in America was headed toward efficiency. He also assumed that as the drug business goes, so goes the nation. For the Upjohn Drug Company, where he worked before he bought the store, efficiency meant disposability. My father bought into the disposable era because he was sick of the hassle and expense of using the autoclave every time he needed to sterilize something. He invested in a weirdly named product that would never catch on; even he agreed the name would have to be changed from the awkward “Kleenex.” He made lots of money on Kleenex and then he got another efficiency inspiration. He took all the money he made on Kleenex and more and invested in a company ingeniously titled Paper Pants. After all, who wanted to wash dirty underwear any more than used handkerchiefs? The runaway success of Kleenex proved we had a strong desire to be protected from our active orifices. My mother and I wore the paper pants for months, getting paper cuts if we crossed our legs too quickly, until the company went bankrupt. When my mother said my father was simply ahead of his time for disposables, Dolores, our cleaning lady, said she thought his ideas were disposable.