Larry’s Party
Larry’s Party
Carol Shields
The Orange Prize-winning novel of Larry Weller, a man who discovers the passion of his life in the ordered riotousness of Hampton Court’s Maze.Larry and his naive young wife, Dorrie, spend their honeymoon in England. At Hampton Court Larry discovers a new passion. Perhaps his ever-growing obsession with mazes may help him find a way through the bewilderment deepening about him as – through twenty years and two failed marriages – he endeavours to understand his own needs. And those of friends, parents, lovers, a growing son.
Larry’s Party
Carol Shields
Contents
Cover (#u20c90ce4-4c6b-50aa-9b17-92c47e03a387)
Dedication (#ue7e9ba67-6b3c-5c22-89a6-b200280b14b1)
CHAPTER ONE: Fifteen Minutes in the Life of Larry Weller 1977 (#ube831d3a-7dc9-59d0-b0e9-c96f09d7e6d4)
CHAPTER TWO: Larry’s Love 1978 (#udcf35765-5026-5440-8bb2-a6d407b871bc)
CHAPTER THREE: Larry’s Folks 1980 (#u84746499-ad28-56f2-8e23-67558ef796b2)
CHAPTER FOUR: Larry’s Work 1981 (#u70881878-7389-55f7-a5e7-0badf6d520b9)
CHAPTER FIVE: Larry’s Words 1983 (#ub203eaa6-8c68-56f7-adb3-c4d83f1d29c0)
CHAPTER SIX: Larry’s Friends 1984 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN: Larry’s Penis 1986 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT: Larry Inc. 1988 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE: Larry So Far 1990 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN: Larry’s Kid 1991 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Larry’s Search for the Wonderful and the Good 1992 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE: Larry’s Threads 1993–4 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Men Called Larry 1995 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Larry’s Living Tissues 1996 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Larry’s Party 1997 (#litres_trial_promo)
Larry’s Party (#litres_trial_promo)
THE WORK OF CAROL SHIELDS (#litres_trial_promo)
Carol Shields: The Stone Diaries (#litres_trial_promo)
Carol Shields: Unless (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher
For Joseph, Nicholas, and Sofia (#ulink_c4ee0078-756c-5d5e-a822-af7711840c0b)
With thanks to a few men who have offered suggestions in the writing of this book: David Arnason, Tommy Banks, Tony Giardini, Jack Hodgins, Robin Hoople, Don Huband, Steve Hunt, Dayv James-French, the late Jim Keller, Joseph Krotz, Jake MacDonald, Brian MacKinnon, Don McCarthy, Bill Neville, Mark Morton, Doug Pepper, Gord Peters, John Ralston Saul, Donald Shields, John Shields, Ray Singer, Harry Strub and Max Wyman.
Thanks, too, to Maggie Dwyer and Jane Gralen and to the staff at the Winnipeg Public Library.
What is this mighty labyrinth – the earth, But a wild maze the moment of our birth?
(“Reflections on Walking in the Maze at Hampton Court” British Magazine, 1747)
CHAPTER ONE Fifteen Minutes in the Life of Larry Weller 1977 (#ulink_ae13697f-8871-57af-99d1-9a6af67d7ed4)
By mistake Larry Weller took someone else’s Harris tweed jacket instead of his own, and it wasn’t till he jammed his hand in the pocket that he knew something was wrong.
His hand was traveling straight into a silky void. His five fingers pushed down, looking for the balled-up Kleenex from his own familiar worn-out pocket, the nickels and dimes, the ticket receipts from all the movies he and Dorrie had been seeing lately. Also those hard little bits of lint, like meteor grit, that never seem to lose themselves once they’ve worked into the seams.
This pocket – today’s pocket – was different. Clean, a slippery valley. The stitches he touched at the bottom weren’t his stitches. His fingertips glided now on a sweet little sea of lining. He grabbed for the buttons. Leather, the real thing. And something else – the sleeves were a good half inch longer than they should have been.
This jacket was twice the value of his own. The texture, the seams. You could see it got sent all the time to the cleaners. Another thing, you could tell by the way the shoulders sprang out that this jacket got parked on a thick wooden hanger at night. Above a row of polished shoes. Refilling its tweedy warp and woof with oxygenated air.
He should have run back to the coffee shop to see if his own jacket was still scrunched there on the back of his chair, but it was already quarter to six, and Dorrie was expecting him at six sharp, and it was rush hour and he wasn’t anywhere near the bus stop.
And – the thought came to him – what’s the point? A jacket’s a jacket. A person who patronizes a place like Cafe Capri is almost asking to get his jacket copped. This way all that’s happened is a kind of exchange.
Forget the bus, he decided. He’d walk. He’d stroll. In his hot new Harris tweed apparel. He’d push his shoulders along, letting them roll loose in their sockets. Forward with the right shoulder, bam, then the left shoulder coming up from behind. He’d let his arms swing wide. Fan his fingers out. Here comes the Big Guy, watch out for the Big Guy.
The sleeves rubbed light across the back of his hands, scratchy but not too scratchy.
And then he saw that the cuff buttons were leather too, a smaller-size version of the main buttons, but the same design, a sort of cross-pattern like a pecan pie cut in quarters, only the slices overlapped this little bit. You could feel the raised design with your finger, the way the four quadrants of leather crossed over and over each other, their edges cut wavy on the inside margin. These waves intersected in the middle, dived down there in a dark center and disappeared. A black hole in the button universe. Zero.
Quadrant was a word Larry hadn’t even thought of for about ten years, not since geometry class, grade eleven.
The color of the jacket was mixed shades of brown, a strong background of freckled tobacco tones with subtle orange flecks. Very subtle. No one would say: hey, here comes this person with orange flecks distributed across his jacket. You’d have to be one inch away before you took in those flecks.
Orange wasn’t Larry’s favorite color, at least not in the clothing line. He remembered he’d had orange swim trunks back in high school, MacDonald Secondary, probably about two sizes too big, since he was always worrying at that time in his life about his bulge showing, which was exactly the opposite of most guys, who made a big point of showing what they had. Modesty ran in his family, his mum, his dad, his sister, Midge, and once modesty gets into your veins you’re stuck with it. Dorrie, on the other hand, doesn’t even shut the bathroom door when she’s in there, going. A different kind of family altogether.
He’d had orange socks once too, neon orange. That didn’t last too long. Pretty soon he was back to white socks. Sports socks. You got a choice between a red stripe around the top, a blue stripe, or no stripe at all. Even geeks like Larry and his friend Bill Herschel, who didn’t go in for sports, they still wore those thick cotton sports socks every single day. You bought them three in a pack and they lasted about a week before they fell into holes. You always thought, hey, what a bargain, three pairs of socks at this fantastic price!
White socks went on for a long time in Larry’s life. A whole era.
Usually he didn’t button a jacket, but it just came to him as he was walking along that he wanted to do up one of those leather buttons, the middle one. It felt good, not too tight over the gut. The guy must be about his own size, 40 medium, which is lucky for him. If, for example, he’d picked up Larry’s old jacket, he could throw it in the garbage tomorrow, but at least he wasn’t walking around Winnipeg with just his shirt on his back. The nights got cool this time of year. Rain was forecast too.
A lot of people don’t know that Harris tweed is virtually waterproof. You’d think cloth this thick and woolly would soak up water like a sponge, but, in actual fact, rain slides right off the surface. This was explained to Larry by a knowledgeable old guy who worked in menswear at Hector’s. That would be, what, nine, ten years ago, before Hector’s went out of business. Larry could tell that this wasn’t just a sales pitch. The guy – he wore a lapel button that said “Salesman of the Year” – talked about how the sheep they’ve got over there are covered with special long oily hair that repels water. This made sense to Larry, a sheep standing out in the rain day and night. That was his protection.
Dorrie kept wanting him to buy a khaki trenchcoat, but he doesn’t need one, not with his Harris tweed. You don’t want bulk when you’re walking along. He walks a lot. It’s when he does his thinking. He hums his thoughts out on the air like music; they’ve got a disco beat: My name is Larry Weller. I’m a floral designer, twenty-six years old, and I’m walking down Notre Dame Avenue, in the city of Winnipeg, in the country of Canada, in the month of April, in the year 1977, and I’m thinking hard. About being hungry, about being late, about having sex later on tonight. About how great I feel in this other guy’s Harris tweed jacket.
Cars were zipping along, horns honking, trucks going by every couple of seconds, people yelling at each other. Not a quiet neighborhood. But even with all the noise blaring out, Larry kept hearing this tiny slidey little underneath noise. He’d been hearing it for the last couple of minutes. Whoosh, wash, whoosh, wash. It was coming out of the body of Larry J. Weller. It wasn’t that he found it objectionable. He liked it, as a matter of fact, but he just wanted to know what it was.
He whooshed past the Triple Value Store, past the Portuguese Funeral Home, past Big Mike’s where they had their windows full of ski equipment on sale. The store was packed with people wearing spring clothes, denim jackets, super-flare pants, and so on, but they were already thinking ahead to next winter. They had snow in their heads instead of a nice hot beach. That’s one thing Larry appreciates about Dorrie. She lives in the moment. When it’s snowing she thinks about snow. When it’s spring, like right now, she’s thinking about getting some new sandals. That’s what she’s doing this very minute: buying sandals at Shoes Express, their two-for-one sale. Larry knows she’s probably made up her mind already, but she told him she’d wait till he got to the store before buying. She wants to make sure Larry likes what she decides on, even though sandals are just sandals to him. Just a bunch of straps.
Dorrie knows how to stretch money. She saves the fifty-cents-off coupons from Ponderosa – which’ll give you a rib eye steak, baked potato and salad, all for $1.69. Or she’ll hear a rumor that next week shoe prices are going to get slashed double. So she’ll say to the guy at Shoes Express, “Look, can you hold these for me till next Wednesday or Thursday or whatever, so I can get in on the sale price?”
It comes to Larry, what the noise is. It’s the lining of his jacket moving back and forth across his shoulders as he strolls along, also the lining material sliding up and down against his shirt-sleeves. He can make it softer if he slows down. Or louder if he lifts his arm and waves at that guy across the street that he doesn’t even know. The guy’s waving back, he’s trying to figure out who Larry is – hey, who’s that man striding along over there, that man in the very top-line Harris tweed jacket?
Actually no one wears Harris tweed much anymore. In fact, they never did, no one Larry ever knew. It’s vintage almost, like a costume. What happened was, Larry was about to graduate from Red River College (Floral Arts Diploma), just two guys and twenty-four girls. The ceremony was in the cafeteria instead of the general-purpose room, and dress was supposed to be informal. So what’s informal? Suits or what? The girls ended up wearing just regular dresses, and the two guys opted for jackets and dress pants.
Larry and his mother went to Hector’s, which she swears by, and that’s where they found the Harris tweed, this nubby-dubby wool cloth, smooth and rough at the same time, heavy but also light, with the look of money and the feel of a grain sack, and everywhere these soft little hairs riding on top of the weave. The salesman said: “Hey, you could wear that jacket to a do at the Prime Minister’s.” Larry had never heard of Harris tweed, but the salesman said it was a classic. That it would never go out of style. That it would wear like iron. Then his mother chimed in about how it wouldn’t show the dirt, and the salesman said he’d try real hard to get them twenty percent off, and that clinched it.
Larry wears the Harris tweed to Flowerfolks almost every day over a pair of jeans, and it’s hardly worn out at all. It never looks wrinkled or dirty. Or at least it didn’t until today when Larry put on this other jacket by mistake. So! There’s Harris tweed and Harris tweed, uh-huh.
It was an accident how Larry got into floral design. A fluke. He’d been out of school for a few weeks, just goofing off, and finally his mother phoned Red River College one day and asked them to mail out their brochure on the Furnace Repair course. She figured everyone’s got a furnace, so even with the economy up and down, furnaces were a good thing to get into. Well, someone must have been sleeping at the switch, because along came a pamphlet from Floral Arts, flowers instead of furnaces. Larry’s mother, Dot, sat right down in the breakfast nook and read it straight through, tapping her foot as she turned the pages, and nodding her head at the ivy wallpaper as if she was saying, yes, yes, floral design really is the future.
Larry’s father, though, wasn’t too overwhelmed. Larry could tell he was thinking that flowers were for girls, not boys. Like maybe his only son was a homo and it was just starting to show. In the end, he did come to Larry’s graduation in the cafeteria but he didn’t know where to look. Even when Mrs. Starr presented Larry with the Rose Wreath for having the top point average, Larry’s father just sat there with his chin scraping the floor.
Larry was offered a job right off at Flowerfolks, and he’s been there ever since. Last October he got to do the centerpieces for the mayor’s banquet. It was even on television, Channel 13. You saw the mayor standing up to give his speech and there were these sprays of wheat, eucalyptus branches, and baby orchids right there on the table. Orchids! So much for your average taxpayer. But Flowerfolks has a policy of delivering their flowers to hospital wards if their clients don’t want them afterwards, so it’s really not a waste. They’re a chain with a social conscience, and also an emphasis on professionalism. They like the employees to look good. Shoulder-length hair’s okay for male staff, but not a quarter inch longer. A tie’s optional, but jackets are required. That’s where the Harris tweed comes in.
Larry can’t help thinking how this new, new jacket will knock their eyebrows off down at work.
Or maybe not, maybe they won’t even notice. He hadn’t noticed himself when he picked it up, so why should they? What happened was he went up to the counter to order his cappuccino. Not that he had to order it. He takes the same thing every day, a double cappuccino. He used to go to a bar for a few beers after work, but Dorrie got worried about all the booze he was soaking up. She was convinced his brain cells were getting killed off. One by one they were going out, like Christmas lights on a string, only there weren’t any replacements available.
“Why don’t you switch to coffee?” she said, and that’s when Larry started dropping into Cafe Capri, which is just around the corner from Flowerfolks. A nothing place, but they’ve brought cappuccino to this town. Nobody knew what it was at first, and some people, like Larry’s folks, still don’t. Larry’s tried it, and now he’s on a streak with double cappuccinos. They start making it when they see him come through the door at five-thirty.
He likes to put on his own cinnamon. He likes it spread out thin across the entire foam area, not just sitting in a wet clump in the middle. You take the shaker, hold it sideways about two inches to the right of the cup and tap it twice, lightly. A soft little cinnamon cloud forms in the air – you can almost see it hanging there – and then the little grains drift down evenly into the cup. Total coverage. Like the dust storm in Winnipeg last summer, how it coated every ledge and leaf and petunia petal with this beautiful, evenly distributed layer of powdery dust.
Lots of coffee places have switched over to disposable plastic, but Cafe Capri still uses those old white cups and saucers with the green rims. You put one of those cups up to your mouth and the thickness feels exactly right, the same dimensions as your own tongue and lips. You and your cup melt together, it’s like a kiss. Customers appreciate that. They’re so grateful for regular cups and saucers that they carry their own empties up to the counter on their way out. That’s what Larry must have done. Taken his cup back up, put his fifty-five cents by the cash, and picked up a jacket from the chair. Only it was someone else’s chair. Or maybe the other guy had already made off with Larry’s jacket at that point. A mistake can work both ways. Larry was probably busy thinking about meeting Dorrie, about the movie they were going to see that night, Marathon Man, their third time, and then coming back to her place after, his prick stirring at the thought.
When they first started going together they’d be lying there on top of her bed and she’d say, “Let’s fuck and fuck and fuck forever.”
“Do you have to say that?” Larry said to her after he’d known her a couple of months. “Can’t you just say ‘making love'?”
She got her hurt look. Parts of her face tended to lose their shape, especially around her mouth. “You say ‘fuck,'” she said to Larry. “You say it all the time.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Come off it. You’re always saying ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck that.'”
“Maybe. Maybe I do. But I don’t say it literally.”
“What?” She looked baffled.
“Notliterally.”
“There you go again,” she said, “with those college words.”
Larry stared at her. She actually thinks flower college is college.
It was sort of a mistake the way they got together. Larry had taken another girl to a Halloween party at St. Anthony’s Hall. She, the other girl, had a pirate suit on, with a patch over the eye, a sword, the whole thing. And she’d made herself a moustache with an eyebrow pencil or something. That bothered Larry, turning his head around quick, and looking into the face of a girl wearing a moustache. A costume is supposed to change you, but you can go too far. Larry was a clown that night. He had the floppy shoes and the hat and the white paint on his face, but he’d skipped the red nose. Who’s going to score points with a red nose? There was another girl, Dorrie, at the table who’d come with her girlfriends. She was dressed like a Martian, but only a little bit like a Martian. You got the general idea, but you didn’t think when you were dancing with her that she was some weird extraterrestrial. She was just this skinny, swervy, good-looking girl who happened to be wearing a rented Martian suit.
“You in love with this Dorrie?” That’s what Larry’s father asked him a couple of months ago. They were sitting there in the stands. As usual the Jets were winning. Everyone around them was cheering like crazy, and Larry’s father said to Larry, not quite turning his face: “So, you in love with this girl? This Dorrie person?”
“What?” Larry said. He had his eyes on the goalie all alone out there on the ice, big as a Japanese wrestler in his mask and shin pads, putting on a tap-dance show while the puck was coming down the ice.
“Love,” Larry’s father said. “You heard me.”
“I like her,” Larry said after a few seconds. He didn’t know what else to say. The question set a flange around his thoughts, holding back his recent worrying days and nights, keeping them separate from right-now time.
“But you’re not in love?”
“I guess not.”
“You just like her?”
“Yes. But a lot.”
“You’re twenty-six years old,” Larry’s father said. “I married Mum when I was twenty-five.”
Like a deadline’s been missed, that was his tone of voice.
“Yeah,” Larry said. “Twenty-six years old, and the kid’s still living at home!”
He felt his bony face fall into confusion. And yet he loved this confusion, it was so unexpected, so full of thrill and danger. Love, love.
“Nothing wrong with living at home,” Larry’s father said, huffing a little, looking off sideways. “Did I say there was anything wrong with that?”
Larry was running this conversation through his head while he walked along Notre Dame Avenue in his stolen Harris tweed jacket, seeing himself in his self’s silver mirror. The fabric swayed around him, shifting and reshifting on his shoulders with every step he took. It seemed like something alive. Inside him, and outside him too. It was like an apartment. He could move into this jacket and live there. Take up residence, get himself a new phone number and a set of cereal bowls.
That’s when he realized he was in love with dopey smart Dorrie. In love. He was. He really was. Knowing it was like running into a wall of heat, his head and hands pushing right through it. This surprised him, but not completely. You can fall in love all by yourself. You don’t have to be standing next to the person; you can do it alone, walking down a street with the wind blowing in your face, a whole lot of people you don’t even know going by and they’re kind of half bumping into you but you don’t notice because you’re in a trancelike state. He forgot, suddenly, how Dorrie had this too-little face with too much hair around it and how he always used to get turned on by girls with bigger faces and just average hair size.
He looked at his watch, worried. He knew she’d still be standing there, though, next to the cash with her arms full of shoes and she’d be pissed off for about two seconds and then she’d get an eyeful of Larry’s jacket and before you knew it she’d be rubbing her hands up and down the cloth and fingering the buttons.
The problem, though, was tomorrow. Larry and his new jacket weren’t going to make it tomorrow. He could go to work in this jacket, but no way could he go back to the Capri at five o’clock. They’d grab him the minute he walked in. Hey, buddy, there’s a call out for that jacket. That jacket’s been reported.
Wait a minute, it’s all a mistake.
A mistake that led to another mistake that led to another. People make mistakes all the time, so many mistakes that they aren’t mistakes anymore, they’re just positive and negative charges shooting back and forth and moving you along. Like good luck and bad luck. Like a tunnel you’re walking through, with all your pores wide open. When it turns, you turn too.
Larry remembers seeing a patient in the Winnipeg Chronic Care Unit when he delivered the flowers after the mayor’s banquet. This guy didn’t have any arms or legs, just little buds growing out of his body. He was one bad mistake, like a human salt shaker perched there on the edge of a bed. Larry, set the flowers down on the table next to him, and the guy leaned over a couple of inches and brushed them with his forehead, then he smelled them, then he stuck his tongue out and licked the leaves and petals, all the while giving Larry a look, almost a wink but not quite. Larry took a lick too, lightly. What he found was, eucalyptus tastes like horse medicine. And orchids don’t taste at all.
The sun was dipping low, and Larry was at the corner now, only half a block from Shoes Express. There was a great big rubbish receptacle standing there with a sign on it: Help Keep Our City Clean.
Larry unbuttoned the Harris tweed jacket, slipped it off fast and rolled it up in a sweet little ball. He stuffed it into the rubbish bin. He had to cram it in. He didn’t know if he was making a mistake or not, getting rid of that jacket, and he didn’t care. The jacket had to go.
And that’s when he really knew how cold the wind had got. It puffed his shirt-sleeves up like a couple of balloons, so that all of a sudden he had these huge brand-new muscles. Superman. Then it shifted around quick, and there he was with his shirt pressed flat against his arms and chest, puny and shrunk-up. The next minute he was inflated again. Then it all got sucked out. In and out, in and out. The windiest city in the country, in North America. It really was.
There were plenty of eyes on him, he could feel them boring through to his skin. In about two minutes some guy was going to pull that Harris tweed jacket out of the garbage and put it on. But by that time Larry would be around the corner, walking straight toward the next thing that was going to happen to him.
CHAPTER TWO Larry’s Love 1978 (#ulink_f5c18d5e-ec4b-5b03-8ef4-35d57451b841)
On a Wednesday in winter Larry walked over to a barber shop on Sargent Avenue and asked for a cut. “Just a regular cut,” he told the barber in an unsmiling, muttering tone of voice that was altogether unlike his usual manner. This was after a decade of having shoulder-length hair. He came out of the barber shop half an hour later with hair that was short around the ears and cropped close at the neck. Even the color seemed different – darker, denser, and without shadows, a color hard to put a name to.
He was shivery with cold for hours after his haircut, lonely for his hair, shrunken in his upper body, but he also felt stronger, braver. The new look made him want to bunch his fists like a prizefighter or cross his arms over his chest. He stood in front of the bathroom mirror working on new expressions, moving his mouth and eyebrows around, and trying to settle on something friendly.
Vivian and Marcie who work with Larry at Flowerfolks were both bursting with compliments. Vivian, the store manager, said the new cut made him look “younger and healthier,” and that started Larry wondering about how he’d been looking lately. He was only twenty-seven, which was not really old enough to show up on his face and body – or was it? His own opinion was that he was in pretty fair shape what with all the walking he did to and from work, plus the weekend hikes out at Birds Hill with his friend Bill Herschel. Marcie chimed in then about how the new hairstyle made him look more “with-it” “It’s 1978,” she said. “The sixties are over.”
What would she know, Larry thought – she was only a kid, seventeen, eighteen.
Larry, at twenty-seven, still lived with his parents, Dot and Stu, in their bungalow on Ella Street, but this was his last week; he was set to move out on Friday, at long last. Both Dot and Stu approved of their son’s haircut. Not that they jumped up and down and waved their arms. It was more a case of pretend nonchalance. “About bloody time,” Larry’s father said, and started in about the number of times he’d had to open the bathtub drain and clean out all the hair and muck. “Why, you’re handsome as can be,” Dot said, reaching out and testing the flat of her hand against the new springiness of Larry’s hair. It had been some time since she’d touched the top of her son’s head, years in fact, and now it was like she couldn’t stop herself. “If this is Dorrie’s influence,” she said, “then I say more power to her.”
On Friday afternoon – blizzards, high winds – Larry and his folks, and his girlfriend, Dorrie, and her family, went downtown to the Law Courts and got married. Dorrie (Dora) Marie Shaw and Laurence John Weller became the Wellers, husband and wife. And on Saturday morning the bridal couple boarded an Air Canada jet for London, England.
Most of the passengers on the plane were wearing jeans and sweaters, but Dorrie had chosen for her travel outfit a new rose-colored polyester blend suit. Now she regretted it, she told Larry. The suit’s straight skirt was restrictive so that she couldn’t relax and enjoy the trip, and she worried about the hard wrinkles that had formed across her lap. She should have invested in one of those folding travel irons she’d seen on sale. And she’d been a dope not to bring along some spot-lifter for the stain on her jacket lapel. By the time they got to England it would be permanently set. They put dye in airplane food, coloring the gravy dark brown so it looked richer and more appetizing. One of the salesmen at Manitoba Motors, where she works, told her about it. He also told her not to drink carbonated drinks on the flight because of gas. People pass a lot of gas on planes, he’d informed her. It had to do with air pressure. Also, one alcoholic drink on land equals three in the air. This is important information.
If only someone had filled her in about what to wear for a trip like this. She’d never been on a plane before – neither had Larry for that matter – but somehow she’d got the idea that air travel was dressy, especially if you were headed for an international destination, such as London, England. She was all for being casual, as she told Larry, she loved comfortable clothes, he knew that, but wouldn’t you think people would make an effort to look nice when they went somewhere important?
“Not everyone’s on their honeymoon,” he reminded her.
And that was the moment they heard a special announcement over the P.A. system, the pilot’s chuckly, good-sport voice coming at them from the cockpit. “Ladies and gents, we thought you’d like to know we’ve got a brand-new married couple aboard our flight today. How about a round of applause, everyone, for Mr. and Mrs. Larry Weller of Winnipeg, Manitoba.”
A stewardess was suddenly standing next to the bride and groom with a bottle of champagne and two glasses and also a corsage to pin on Dorrie’s shoulder, compliments of Air Canada.
“Ohh!’ Dorrie gave a little shriek. She glowed bright pink. She squirmed in her seat with pleasure. “This is fabulous. How did you know? Baby roses, I love baby roses, and, look, they match my outfit. It’s perfect.”
“I almost died of embarrassment,” Dorrie would tell Larry’s mother two weeks later, back home in Winnipeg. “I bet you anything I was blushing from head to foot. Everyone was just staring at the two of us, and then they started cheering and clapping and peering around their seats at us or standing up so they could see who we were and what we looked like. Was I ever glad I had my new pink outfit on. And Larry with his hair restyled. The newly-weds!”
The champagne sent Dorrie straight to sleep, her feet tucked up under her on the seat, and her head flopped over on Larry’s shoulder. The sweet perfume of the roses, which were already darkening, got stirred in with the drone of voices and the dimmed cabin lights and the steady, sleepy vibrations of the plane as it nosed through the night sky.
A little drunk, stranded between the old day and the new, between one continent and another, Larry felt the proprietorial pleasure of having a hushed and satisfied companion by his side. He and Dorrie had boarded the plane under a weight of anticlimax, worn out after the wedding and the wedding lunch at the Delta and from moving his things over to Dorrie’s apartment. And they were hollowed out too – that’s how it felt – after a long, ecstatic night of sex, then the alarm clock going off at five-thirty, the last-minute packing to do, and Larry’s folks arriving, too early, to drive them out to the airport. It was a lot to absorb. But now this unexpected tribute had come to them, to himself and to his wife, Dorrie. A wife, a wife. He breathed the word into the rubbery patterned upholstery of the seat ahead of him – wife.
A daze of contentment fell over him, numbing and fateful, and he shook his head violently to clear his senses – but in the excitement of the last few hours he had forgotten about his recent haircut. Instead of the movement of soft hair flying outward and then landing with a bounce on his neck, that comforting silky familiar flick against his cheek, he sensed only the abruptness of his cold, clean face, how exposed it was beneath the tiny cabin light and how stupidly rigid.
An hour ago he had felt the tug of drowsiness, but now he pledged himself to stay awake. Grief was involved in this decision, and possibly a crude form of gallantry. Staying awake seemed a portion of what was expected of him, part of the new role he had undertaken a mere thirty-six hours earlier, standing in front of a marriage commissioner at the Law Courts with his family and Dorrie’s family looking on. “Marriage is not to be entered into lightly, but with certainty, mutual respect, and a sense of reverence.” These words had been part of the civil ceremony, printed on a little souvenir card he and Dorrie had been given.
He was a husband now, and his chattering, fretful Dorrie, no longer a girlfriend but a wife, was slipping down sideways against his arm, her face damp, pared-down, and sealed shut with sleep. He felt her shoulder lift on every third or fourth breath, lift and then fall in a catching, irregular way, as though her dreams had brought her up against a new, puzzling form of exhaustion, something she would soon be getting used to.
For her sake he would stay alert. He would keep guard over her, drawing himself as straight as possible in his seat without disturbing her sleeping body. He’d clamp his jaw firmly shut in a husbandlike way, patient, forbearing, and keep his eyes steady in the dark. He would do this in order to keep panic at a distance. All that was required of him was to outstare the image in the floating black glass of the window, that shorn, bewildered, fresh-faced stranger whose profile, for all its raw boyishness, reminded him, alarmingly, of – of who?
His father, that’s who.
“The very image of his mother,” people used to say about Larry Weller. Same blue eyes. The freckled skin. Dot’s gestures. That mouth.
Larry could not recall any mention of a resemblance to his father. He was his mother’s boy. Heir to her body, her intensity, and to her frantic private pleasures and glooms.
But now, twenty-seven and a half years into his life, he found that his father had moved in beneath his bones. That nameless part of his face, the hinged area where the jaw approaches the lower ear – he could see now what his flowing hair had hidden: that his father’s genes were alive in his body. Even his earlobes, their fleshiness and color. What was that color? A hint of strawberry that spread from the ears up the veins to the cheeks, his father’s cheeks, curving and surprisingly soft in a man’s hard face.
His father’s solid, ruddy presence. It arrived, sudden and shocking, and stayed with him throughout the two weeks of his and
Dorrie’s honeymoon. He met it each morning in the shaving mirror of the various modest hotels where they stayed. What kind of trick was this? He’d turn his eyes slowly toward the mirror, creeping up on his face, and there the old guy would be, larger and more substantial than a simple genetic flicker. His father’s flexible loose skin pressed up against the glass, a fully formed image, yawning, hoisting up his sleepy lids, dressed in his work clothes with the bus factory’s insignia on the pocket, Air-Rider, his broad shoulders and back bunching forward under Larry’s pajamas, and his large red hands reaching out, every finger scarred in one way or another from the upholstery work he did at the plant. And Larry could hear the voice too, his father’s high, querulous voice, with the Lancashire notes still in place after twenty-seven years in Canada.
Stu Weller. Master upholsterer. Husband of Dot, father of Midge and Larry.
It was Stu, with Dot’s blessing, who had the idea of giving the young couple a package tour of England. A wedding present, gruffly, unceremoniously offered. “We did the same for your sister when she got herself married.”
Never mind that Midge and her husband got divorced after two years. That Paul turned out to like men more than women.
Dorrie would have preferred a honeymoon in Los Angeles or maybe Mexico, somewhere hot, a nice hotel on the beach, but how can a person say no to free tickets, everything paid for, the plane fare, plus a twelve-day bus trip, Sunbrite Tours, breakfast and dinner, all the way up to the Pennines, then down to Land’s End, the very south-west tip of England, then back to London for the final three days. Stu and Dot had taken a similar package tour a few years back, a twenty-fifth anniversary present to themselves, a “journey back to our roots,” as Dot put it, though the real roots for both of them were in the industrial northern town of Bolton, not the green sprawling English countryside.
And when Larry and Dorrie got there it was green, unimaginably green – a bright variegated green that made Larry think of Brussels sprouts. Everyone back home had said: What? – you’re going to England in March? Are you crazy?
But here they were, carried over England’s green hills, ferried down into narrow green valleys, pulling up in the parking lots of green medieval villages where thick-towered castles threw greenish shadows across their squat Sunbrite coach (they had got over their terror of riding along on the left side of the highway with the traffic thundering straight at them).
The tour began in London and headed north-east. Rain, and then episodes of brilliant slanting sunshine accompanied them as they set off, then rain again, pelting the bare trees and hedges, bringing violent, pressing changes of light, as though the day itself was about to offer up an immense idea. They stopped at the picture-postcard town of Saffron Walden, where they were led on a quick march through the old twisted streets and served lunch in a tearoom called the Silken Cat. Dorrie was staunchly brave about the steak and kidney pie, leaving only a few polite scraps on her plate.
“Take notice of these ceiling beams,” their guide instructed. His name was Arthur, a stout, broad-faced man, a Londoner with a beer-roughened voice and a school teacher’s patient explaining manner. “Late fifteenth century. Possibly earlier.”
Dorrie copied this information into a little travel diary she pulled from her purse – “Late 15th century.”
Larry found his wife’s note-taking touching and also surprising. Where had that diary come from? Its cover was red leather. The narrow ruled pages were edged in gold. One of her girlfriends at Manitoba Motors must have given it to her, a going-away present, something she wouldn’t have thought of herself, not in a million years. It moved him to see his Dorrie in a pose of studentlike concentration, pausing over her choice of words, and keeping her writing neat and small. That she would busy herself recording this chip of historical information – late fifteenth century – record it for him, for their life together, stirred a lever of love in his heart.
But he remembered from school that fifteenth century really meant the fourteen-hundreds, how confusing that could be, and he wondered if Dorrie knew the difference and whether he should clarify the point for her. But no. She had already closed the diary and recapped her pen. Looking up at him, catching his eyes on her, she sent a kiss through the air, her small coral lips pushing out.
The first night the tour group was installed in a hotel in Norwich (sixteenth century, more beams) which was said to have been visited on at least one occasion by Edward VII and a “lady friend.” There were snowdrops blooming in the hotel’s front garden. Flowers in March. This took Larry a moment to register, the impossibility of flowers – but here they were. Back home in Canada it was twenty below zero. “Snowdrops,” Dorrie wrote in her diary when she was told what the flowers were called.
“Snowdrops are only the beginning,” Arthur told Larry and Dorrie. “You’ll be seeing daffodils before we’re done.”
The tour, it turned out, was only half booked. The other travelers were mostly retired New Zealanders and Australians, and an ancient deaf Romanian couple who never let go of each other’s hands. “Everyone’s so old,” Dorrie whispered to Larry. She had a gift for disappointment, and now she was wrinkling up her face. “Everyone’s old and fat except for us.”
It was true. Or close to being true. The eighteen passengers, men as well as women, shared the spongy carelessness of flesh that accompanies late middle age. The white permed heads of the wives, their husbands’ rosy baldness, framed faces that were, to Larry’s eyes at least, remarkably similar, softened, and blurred in outline, with their features melted to a kind of putty.
“I’ll bet we’re the only ones who screw all night,” Dorrie said, looking around. “Or screw at all.”
“Probably.” He smiled down at her.
“Notice I said screw and not fuck.”
“Congratulations.”
“I’m a married woman now. Respectable.”
“Ha.” Still smiling.
“Ha yourself.”
A white-haired husband and wife from Arizona had signed on to the tour. They were in England on their sabbatical leave. She, the wife, pronounced the word “sabbatical” as though the syllables were beads on a string. She explained to Dorrie, who had never heard of a sabbatical, that she and Dr. Edwards, her husband, had been to Thailand “last time” and before that to Berkeley in California. “We see these occasions as opportunities to replenish ourselves every seven years,” she said, “and take stock.”
The members of the tour group were wakened early each morning in their various freezing hotel rooms by a knock on the door, then Arthur calling out an upbeat “Morning!”
“Oh, God!” Dorrie came up from under the blankets.
Larry, shaving, washing, attempted to avoid his father’s eyes in the mirror, that ghostly presence floating beneath the steamed-over surface. He tried, through the lather, to blink the face away, and by the time he was fully dressed, two sweaters plus a jacket, he had mostly succeeded.
Invariably he and Dorrie were the last ones down to the hotel dining room, and every morning they were greeted by the same teasing cries of welcome. “Here come the honeymooners.” “Late again.” “Hail to the bride and groom!” Dorrie, ducking her head, her mouth puckering up with happiness and embarrassment, slid into a chair, while Larry accepted pats on the back or thumbs-up signs from the men.
There were hot plates of bacon and sausages and egg – although Dorrie, who was feeling “off,” made do with tea and toast. After that the tour members took their places on the coach and set off for the day’s destination. The New Zealanders and Australians – Heather and Gregory, Joan and Douglas, Marjorie and Brian, Larry never did get all their names straight – preferred to sit near the front of the bus where they bantered genially back and forth, observing silence only when Arthur drew their attention to points of interest. The Romanians sat at the back, the same seat every day. Larry and Dorrie found themselves in the middle of the coach – Dorrie next to the window, taking it as her rightful place since she was shorter than Larry, and because the window seat made her feel less queasy.
Dr. and Mrs. Edwards sat across the aisle from them, their maps and guidebooks spread out on their laps. “We don’t want to miss a thing,” Mrs. Edwards told them. She had her suspicions about Arthur. He was lazy, she said. He “recited” instead of “interpreting.” And he left items off the itinerary, a certain twelfth-century abbey that was definitely starred in their guidebook. She planned to write to Sunbrite’s head office about it when she got home.
“Now, now, Sweetheart,” Dr. Edwards said, patting her hand.
Dr. Edwards told Larry to call him Robin. He asked Larry what he did professionally, what his “field of endeavor” was. Larry told him about the Flowerfolks chain of florists back in Winnipeg, about how he’d got started in the business by taking a floral arts course at a local college. “Ah, botany!” Dr. Edwards said. “Or would that be horticulture?” He turned his body stiffly toward Larry, awaiting his reply. “A little of each,” Larry said, thinking. “But not quite.”
Dr. Edwards was a sociologist; population, urban patterns. A perfect dunce in the garden, he told Larry. Didn’t know a primrose from a lily. He’d never developed an interest. He hadn’t had the leisure. He and Mrs. Edwards lived in an apartment in Tucson, always had, so there wasn’t the need. But someday, when he retired, he might look into it. A hobby kind of thing. A person had to keep learning.
“Maybe I should take up sociology as a hobby,” Larry said. He meant it as a joke, but Dr. Edwards drew back, startled.
One afternoon the coach came to a halt beside a rutted field, the site of an old Roman town, its houses and temples and public spaces outlined on the grass with flat red bricks. Dorrie sat down on a corner of a house foundation and wrote in her diary: “Second Century.” She underlined the entry twice, and looked up at Larry, blankly. He could see it was hard for her to believe that this ruined site had once been a real town bursting with men and women.
She was cold, she told Larry. She’d had enough for one day. More than enough. Later Larry thought of that moment of exhaustion, Dorrie huddled on the foundations of an ancient Roman dwelling, how it seemed to split their honeymoon in two.
They were ushered as the days went by through castles, churches, through stately homes and crumbling tithe barns, and they tramped one morning, in a soft gray rain, along the top of the medieval walls of the city of York. That day, in a vast museum, they looked at coins and furniture and agricultural implements and, spread out in an immense glass case, more than fifty different kinds of scissors for trimming the wicks of lamps. History, it seemed to Larry, left strange details behind, mostly meaningless: odd and foolish gadgets, tools that had become separated from their purpose, whimsical notions, curious turnings, a surprising number of dead ends.
But it was outdoor England that took Larry by surprise and filled him with a kind of anxiety as the coach traveled further and further north. This anxiety he identified, finally, as a welling up of happiness. The greenness of England. It seemed there was not one part of this island that was not under cultivation, not one piece of land so exposed or unfavorable that something could not be made to take root and grow. Their guide, Arthur, joked that in the city of Leeds the birds wake up coughing, but even there, between the factories and dark smudged houses, Larry glimpsed the winter trunks of oaks and chestnuts. Leafless now, thrust up against smoking chimneys and blackened air, these trees seemed to Larry magisterial presences, rich in dignity and entitlement. He thought, mournfully, of the spindly, skinny poplars back home, the impoverished jack pines and stunted spruce, their slow annual growth in a difficult climate and their lopsided, unlovely shapes.
But it was the hedges of England, even more than the trees, that brought him a sense of wonderment. Such shady density, like an artist’s soft pencil, working its way across the English terrain. Why hadn’t his parents told him about this astonishing thing they’d grown up with? The hedges were everywhere. Out in the countryside they separated fields from pasture land, snaking up and down the tilted landscape, criss-crossing each other or angling wildly out of sight, dividing one patch of green from another, providing a barrier between cattle and sheep and flocks of geese. These hedges were stock-proof, Arthur explained, meaning sheep couldn’t slip through – they were every bit as effective as stone walls or barbed wire, and some of them had roots that were hundreds of years old.
In the towns the clipped hedges served as fences between houses, a stitching of fine green seams, and gave protection and privacy to tiny garden plots. Luxurious and shapely, they seemed pieces of tended sculpture, and now, late in a mild winter, their woody fullness was enveloped by a pale furred cloud of green. Buds in March. It seemed impossible. Young leaves unfolding.
Back home you hardly ever saw a hedge, or if you did it was only common spirea or the weedy, fernlike caragana, which was almost impossible to keep in trim. Larry’s father had surrounded the Ella Street house with a chainlink fence, top quality – that was years ago. Like the aluminum siding he’d put on top of the house’s old clapboard, it did the job and there was zero upkeep.
“What are all these hedges made of?” Larry asked Arthur, tossing back the hair he didn’t have anymore. “I mean, what kind of plants do they use?”
Arthur didn’t know. He knew history stuff, he knew his kings and queens, but he was a Londoner. He didn’t know green stuff.
In a brilliantly lit bookstore in Manchester Larry found a book about hedges. It was in a bargain bin. Over a hundred colored, badly bound illustrations instructed the reader on the varieties and uses of hornbeam, butcher’s broom, laurel, cypress, juniper, lime, whitethorn, privet, holly, hawthorn, yew, dwarf box, and sycamore. How to plant them, how to nourish them, and tricks to keep them trim and tidy. How certain plants can be intertwined with others to make a sturdier or more beautiful hedge; plashing, this artful mixing of varieties was called. Larry studied the pages of Hedges of England and Scotland while the coach made its way south, heading toward Devon and Cornwall. In a mere day or two he was able to distinguish from the bus window the various species. This easy mastery surprised him, but then he remembered how he had won the class prize back in his floral arts course, that one of his teachers had commented on his excellent memory and another on his observation skills.
The clues to identifying hedges lay in the density and distribution of thicket, the hue of the green foliage, and the form of the developing leaves. He pronounced the names out loud as he spotted them, and then he wrote them on the inside of the book’s cover. He’d forgotten in the last two or three years that he was like this, always wanting to know things he didn’t need to know.
Dorrie, seated next to him on the coach, had fallen into the doldrums. She was homesick, she said. And tired of being stuck with all these old biddies. Their teasing at breakfast, always the same old thing, it was getting on her nerves, it was driving her bananas.
Each day was greener than the one before. One morning, halfway through the two-week tour, Arthur leapt from his seat at the front of the coach and excitedly pointed out a long sloping field of daffodils. “Didn’t I promise you, ladies and gents, that we’d be seeing daffodils on this holiday!” Everyone crowded to the windows for a look, everyone except for Mrs. Edwards, who was sleeping soundly with her head thrown straight back and her mouth open.
Dorrie pulled her diary out of her purse and wrote a single word on the page: “Daffodils.” (Years later when Larry came across the little book, he found three-quarters of the pages empty. “Daffodils” was the final entry.)
On the same day that they saw the daffodils Dr. Edwards bought Larry a pint of beer – this was in a pub early in the evening, a ten minutes’ rest stop – and said, out of the blue, “Our sabbatical leave doesn’t actually come up for another two years, but Mrs. Edwards has a problem with prescription drugs, also over-the-counter drugs. It’s a terrible business and getting worse, and so it seemed a good idea for us to get away.”
Larry peered into the remains of his dark foamless beer. He wished he were standing at the other end of the polished bar where the New Zealand and Australian couples were laughing loudly and arguing about how many miles it was to the hotel in Bath. Full of rivalrous good feeling, they liked to joke back and forth, shouting out about the relative merits of kiwis and kangaroos, soccer teams and politics. Larry was drawn to their good spirits, but felt shy in their presence, especially the men with their bluff, hearty conviviality, so different from Dr. Edwards’ sly, stiff questioning.
And yet Dr. Edwards, Robin, had seen fit to divulge his unhappy situation to Larry, to a stranger young enough to be his son.
“She hides them. They’re so small, you see. The pills. So easy to conceal.”
“Is she addicted to them?” This seemed to Larry a foolish, obvious question, but he felt a response of some kind was required.
“Yes, addicted, of course. She can’t help herself.”
“That’s terrible. It must be awfully difficult –”
“It’s heartening to see a couple like yourself,” Dr. Edwards said, steering the conversation in a more positive direction. “Just starting off in your life, free as a pair of birds.”
Larry swallowed down the rest of his beer. “We’re going to have a baby,” he said. “My wife, I mean.”
Dr. Edwards received the news politely: “I see,” he said. His fingers twirled a button on his raincoat.
“Maybe you’ve noticed that she’s not feeling all that great,” Larry said. “In the mornings especially.”
“I hadn’t actually noticed.”
“Morning sickness.”
He and Dorrie had agreed that the baby was going to be a secret, at least until they got back home and told their families. It startled him now to hear the words running so loosely out of his mouth: the baby. He’d scarcely thought of “the baby” since leaving home. It was hard enough to remember he was a husband, much less a father. He had to remind himself, announcing the fact to the mirror every morning as he blinked away the ghost of his father’s face. Husband, husband – one husband face pushing its way through another, blunt, self-satisfied, but never quite losing its look of surprise.
Lately he’d found he could dispel the face by filling up his head with the greenness of hedgerows. It was like switching channels. Holly, lime, whitethorn, box, a string of names like the chorus of a popular song. He let their shrubby patterns press down on his brain, their smooth stiff dignified shapes and rounded perfection.
“We were going to wait and get married in June. But then – this happened – so here we are. March.”
He could see he had lost Dr. Edwards’ interest, and certainly the opportunity to offer comforting remarks about Mrs. Edwards’ problems.
“Well,” Dr. Edwards said. He spoke briskly now, more like a sportscaster than a sociology teacher. “Time we got back on the coach or we’ll be left behind.”
“We’ve been going together for over a year,” Larry explained. He hung on to his beer glass. “We’d already talked about marriage. We’d already made up our minds, so this didn’t make any real difference.”
Dr. Edwards’ face had pulled into a frown. He put his hand on Larry’s shoulder, bearing down heavily with his fingertips. “About my wife?” he said. “I’d appreciate it if you regarded what I said as confidential.”
“Why?” Dorrie yelled at Larry. “Why would you go and tell that old professor jerk about us?”
They were in Devon, in the town of Barnstable, the King’s Inn. Their room was at the front of the hotel overlooking a street of busy shops.
“I don’t know,” Larry said.
“We fucking decided we weren’t going to tell anyone. And don’t tell me not to say fuck. I’ll say fuck all I fucking want.”
“It just came out. We were talking, and it slipped out.”
“My mother doesn’t even know. My own mother. And you had to go and tell that jerk. Did you honestly think he wasn’t going to tell that snot of a wife? My ‘condition’ she said to me, I shouldn’t be having a beer in my ‘condition.’ And now the whole bus is going to know. I’ll bet you anything they already do.”
“What does it matter?”
“We’re on our honeymoon, that’s why it matters. We’re the lovey-dovey honeymooners, for God’s sake, only now the little bride person is pregnant.”
“No one even thinks like that anymore.”
“Oh yeah? What about your mother and father? They think like that.”
“How do you know what they think?”
“They think no one’s good enough for their precious little Larry, that’s what they think. Especially girls dumb enough to go and get themselves preggo.”
“They’ll get used to it.”
“Like it’s my fault. Like you didn’t have one little thing to do with it, right?” She sank down on the bed, moaning, her head rolling back and forth. “I can just see your dad looking at me. That look of his, oh boy. Like don’t I have any brains? Like why wasn’t I on the pill?”
“We’ll tell them as soon as we get back. It’ll take them a day or two, that’s all. Then they’ll get used to it.”
She turned and gave him a shrewd look. “What about you? When are you going to get used to it?”
“I am used to it.”
“Oh yeah, sure. I’m like sitting there on the bus, day after day, thinking up names. Girls’ names. Boys’ names. That’s what’s in my head. I like Victoria for a girl. For a boy I like Troy. Those kinds of thoughts. And you’re jumping up and down looking at bushes. Writing them down. That’s all you care about. Goddamn fucking bushes.”
He pulled her close to him, rocking her back and forth, patting her hair.
Startled, he recognized that pat, its cruel economy and monumental detachment. It was the sign of someone who was distracted, weary. A husband’s pat. He’d seen his father touch his mother in exactly the same way when she fell into one of her blue days. Only patting wasn’t really the same thing as touching. Patting a person was like going on automatic pilot, you just reached out and did it. There, there. Looking covertly at his watch. Almost dinnertime. Pat, stroke, pat.
It calmed her. She collapsed against him. They lay back on the bed, hanging on to each other limply and not saying anything. In ten minutes it would be time to go down to the dining room. He was ravenous.
A single day remained – and one more major historical site to take in: Hampton Court.
“This palace is unrivaled,” Arthur said, gathering his charges in a tight circle around him, “for its high state of preservation.” He pointed out Anne Boleyn’s Gateway, the Astronomical Clock (electrified two years ago), the Great Hall, the Fountain Court, the Chapel Royal with its intricately carved roof. “Note the quality of the workmanship,” he said. “What you behold is a monument to the finest artists and artisans in the land.”
The members of the tour group had taken up a collection, and the evening before they’d presented Arthur with a set of silver cufflinks. He had blinked when he opened the jeweler’s box, blinked and looked up into their waiting faces. “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” one of the Australians sang out, trying to get a round going. The man’s name was Brian. He was large, kindly, and elegantly bald. It was he who had taken up the collection for Arthur and passed around a thank-you card for everyone to sign. But he launched the song in a faltering key that no one could follow.
Surprisingly, it was Dorrie who moved forward and picked up the melody, drawing in the others with her strong, clear voice. She came from a musical family; her father sang baritone with the Police Chorale; her mother, after a few drinks, belted out a torchy rendition of “You Light Up My Life.” And Dorrie’s voice, despite her size, a mere one hundred pounds, was true and forceful.
For he’s a jolly good fellow
Which nobody can deny.
At that moment Larry loved her terribly. His helpless Dorrie. He froze the frame in his mind. This was something he needed to remember. The upward tilt of her chin as she risked a minor feat of descant on the final words. The way her hands curled inside her raincoat pockets, plunging straight forward into a second chorus, as though she’d been anointed, for a brief second or two, Miss Harmony of Sunbrite Tours.
Mrs. Edwards had wondered aloud about the appropriateness of cufflinks for Arthur. “He doesn’t look like a man who is particularly intimate with French cuffs,” she whispered to her husband and to Larry and Dorrie. But this morning, following Arthur into Hampton Court gardens, Larry glimpsed a flash of silver at Arthur’s wrist. “Before you,” Arthur said, pointing, “is the oldest surviving hedge maze in England.”
A what? Larry had never heard of a hedge maze.
“We’ve got three-quarters of an hour,” Arthur announced in his jolly voice. “If you get lost, just give us a shout and we’ll come and rescue you.”
Later, Larry memorized the formula for getting through the maze. He could recite it easily for anyone who cared to listen. Turn left as you enter the maze, then right, right again, then left, left, left and yet another left. That brings you to the centre. To get out, you unwind, turning right, then three more rights, then a left at the next two turnings, and you’re home free.
But on the day he first visited the Hampton Court maze, March 24, 1978, a young, untraveled floral designer from the middle of Canada, the newly married husband of Dorrie Shaw who was four months pregnant with his son Ryan – on that day he took every wrong turning. He was, in fact, the last of the tour group to come stumbling out of the maze’s exit.
Dorrie in her perky blue raincoat was standing, waiting. “We were worried,” she said to him crossly. Then, “You look dizzy.”
It was true. The interior of the maze had made him dizzy. It was very early in the morning, a frosty day, so cold he could see his breath as it left his mouth and widened out in the air. It seemed a wonder that the tender needlelike leaves could withstand such cold. The green walls rose about him, too high to see over. Who would have expected such height and density? And he hadn’t anticipated the sensation of feeling unplugged from the world or the heightened state of panicked awareness that was, nevertheless, repairable. Without thinking, he had slowed his pace, falling behind the others, willing himself to be lost, to be alone. He could see Mrs. Edwards ahead of him on the narrow path, walking side by side with Dorrie, their heads together, talking, and Mr. Edwards following close behind. Larry watched the three of them take a right-hand turn and disappear behind a bank of foliage.
He wondered exactly how lost a person could get. Lost at sea, lost in the woods. Fatally lost.
“You look lost in thought,” Vivian had said to him on his last day at Flowerfolks, the day before he and Dorrie were married. He had been in the back of the store, staring into a blaze of dyed blue carnations. “I was just thinking,” he told her, and she had floated him a lazy smile. “Communing with the merchandise?” she said, touching the sleeve of his jacket. “I do it all the time.”
He had been reflecting, while staring at the fringed blue petals, about love, about the long steady way his imperfect parents managed to love each other, and about his own deficient love for Dorrie, how it came and went, how he kept finding it and losing it again.
And now, here in this garden maze, getting lost, and then found, seemed the whole point, that and the moment of willed abandonment, the unexpected rapture of being blindly led.
In the distance he could hear a larky Australian accented voice – one of their own group – calling “This way, this way.” He shrank from the sound, its pulsating jollity, wanting to push deeper and deeper into the thicket and surrender himself to the maze’s cunning, this closed, expansive contrivance. He observed how his feet chose each wrong turning, working against his navigational instincts, circling and repeating, and bringing on a feverish detachment. Someone older than himself paced inside his body, someone stronger too, cut loose from the common bonds of sex, of responsibility. Looking back he would remember a brief moment when time felt mute and motionless. This hour of solitary wandering seemed a gift, and part of the gift was an old greedy grammar flapping in his ears: lost, more lost, utterly lost. He felt the fourteen days of his marriage collapsing backward and becoming an invented artifact, a curved space he must learn to fit into. Love was not protected. No, it wasn’t. It sat out in the open like anything else.
Forty-five minutes, Arthur had given them. But Larry Weller had lingered inside the green walls for a full hour.
“We were worried,” Dorrie said. Scolding.
He followed her into the coach for the ride back to London. “How could you get yourself so lost?” she kept asking. The next day they boarded a plane that carried them across a wide ocean, then over the immense empty stretches of Labrador and the sunlit cities and villages of Ontario, an endless afternoon of flight. Frozen lakes and woodlands spread beneath them, thinning finally, flattening out to a corridor of snow-covered fields and then the dark knowable labyrinth of tangled roadways and rooftops and clouds of cold air rising up to greet them.
A sweet soprano bell dinged for attention. Seat belts buckled, tables up, the landing gear grinding down, a small suite of engineering miracles carefully sequenced. Dorrie gave Larry’s hand an excited, distracted squeeze that said: almost home. They were about to be matter-of-factly claimed by familiar streets and houses and the life they’d chosen or which had chosen them.
Departures and arrivals: he didn’t know it then, but these two forces would form the twin bolts of his existence – as would the brief moments of clarity that rose up in between, offering stillness. A suspension of breath. His life held in his own hands.
CHAPTER THREE Larry’s Folks 1980 (#ulink_efbe6e57-d1bb-5fab-b785-2b66bb269cd3)
Shortly before Larry’s thirtieth birthday he managed to get enough money together for a down payment on a small house over on Lipton Street, a handyman special, just five rooms and a glassed-in front porch, and now he spends most evenings and weekends working on it. He and his wife, Dorrie, moved in two months ago, and ever since then she’s been after him to lay new tiles in the kitchen, and after that there’s the bathroom fixtures to replace, and maybe some ceiling insulation before winter comes along. A list as long as your arm. But this summer Larry’s been using every spare minute to work on the yard, sometimes with the help of his friend Bill Herschel, but more often alone. Might as well do it while the weather’s still good, Larry says. And he wants the whole yard closed in so Ryan can play out there next spring, unsupervised.
He’d be working at it today, only his folks have invited him and Dorrie and the baby over for the birthday festivities. Sunday dinner, opening his presents from the family, blowing out the candles, the usual. It’s 1980; he’s about to enter the decade of decadence, only he doesn’t know that yet, no one does; he only knows he feels the good hum of almost continuous anticipation in his chest, even though Dorrie griped all the way over to his folks’ place about how they were probably going to have a hot dinner, gravy and everything, when here it was, the bitch end of a sizzling day. Her own idea of hot weather fare is a big bowl of ice-cream and a glass of iced tea.
A brutal bored silence had fallen between them these last weeks.
A mere three years ago he was a young buck walking down a Winnipeg street in his shirt-sleeves. He remembers how that felt, no wife, no kid, no house, no yard. Now the whole picture’s changed, but that’s okay, especially his kid, Ryan. Another thing: he’s supposed to be sunk in gloom at the thought of turning thirty, but he isn’t. He’s unique and mortal, he knows that, and he’s got this sweet little babe of a house, and a yard that’s slowly taking shape, all its corners filling up with transplanted shrubs from the wholesaler down in Carmen. There’re some flowers too, and a few sweet peppers, but it’s mainly the shrubs he loves. Dorrie keeps calling them bushes, and he keeps having to correct her. “You’ve got shrub mania,” she says, but her lips smile when she’s saying it. “You want to be the shrub king of the universe.”
Maybe it’s true. Maybe he wants to make his yard a real shrub showplace. Somewhere Larry’s heard that almost everyone in the world is allowed one minute of fame in their lives, or maybe that’s one hour.
Stu Weller, Larry’s dad, got written up once in the weekend section of the Winnipeg Tribune on the subject of his corkscrew and bottle-opener collection, which included 600 items at the time of the interview, and has almost doubled since. Larry’s older sister, Midge, won a thousand dollars last year in the art gallery raffle – enough for a trip to Hawaii with a girlfriend – and she actually appeared on Channel 13 talking about how surprised she was, and how she didn’t usually waste money on raffle tickets unless it was for a good cause like expanding the gallery’s exhibition space or something.
Larry’s own moment of fame is still some years in the future, and that’s fine with him. He’s got enough on his mind these days, his young family – Dorrie, little Ryan – and his job at Flowerfolks, and his current preoccupation with transforming his yard. As for his mother, Dot, she’s had enough celebrity for a lifetime. Don’t even talk to her about being famous, especially not the kind of fame that comes boiling out of ignorance, and haunts you for the rest of your life. Dumb Dot. Careless Dot. Dot the murderer. Of course, that was a long time ago.
When Larry was a little kid his mother warned him about the dangers of public drinking fountains. “No one ever, ever puts their mouth right on the spout,” she said, “because they can pick up other people’s germs, and who knows what kind of disease you’ll get.”
This was bad news for Larry. At that age he liked to stand on tiptoe and press his lips directly on the cool silvery water spout, rather than trying to catch the spray in his mouth as it looped unpredictably upward. Besides, his mother’s caution didn’t make sense, since if no one ever touched the spout, how could there be any germs? He recalls – he must have been six or seven at the time – that he presented this piece of logic to his mother, but she only shook her headful of squashed curls and said sadly, wisely, “There will always be people in this world who don’t know any better.”
He pictured these people – the people who didn’t know any better – as a race of clumsy unfortunates, and according to his mother there were plenty of them living right here on Ella Street in Winnipeg’s West End: those people who mowed their lawns but failed to rake up the clippings, for instance. People who didn’t know any better stored cake flour and other staples in their original paper bags so that their cupboards swarmed with ants and beetles. They never got around to replacing the crumbling rubber-backed placemats from the Lake of the Woods with “The Story of Wood Pulp” stamped in the middle. That was the problem with people who didn’t know any better: they never threw things away, not even their stained tea-towels, not even their oven mitts with holes burnt right through the fingers.
People who didn’t know any better actually ate the coleslaw that came with their hamburgers, poking it out of those miniature pleated paper cups with their stabbing forks. Someone, their well-meaning mothers probably, told them they should eat any and all green vegetables that were put in front of them, not that there’s anything very green about coleslaw, especially when it’s been sitting in a puddle of wet salad dressing and improperly refrigerated for heaven only knows how many days. These people have never heard of the word salmonella, or if they have, they probably can’t pronounce it.
Whereas Dot (Dorothy) Woolsey Weller, wife of Stu Weller, mother of Larry and Midge, grandmother of Ryan, knows about food poisoning intimately, tragically. She was, early in her life, an ignorant and careless person, one of those very people who didn’t know any better and who will never be allowed, now, to forget her lack of knowledge. She’s obliged to remember every day, either for a fleeting moment – her good days – or for long suffering afternoons of gloom. “Your mother’s got a nip of the blues today,” Stu Weller used to tell his kids while they were growing up in the Ella Street house, and they knew what that meant. There sat their mother at the kitchen table, again, still in her chenille robe, again, when they got home from school, her hands rubbing back and forth across her face, and her eyes blank and glassy, reliving her single terrifying act of infamy.
Even today, August 17th, her son’s thirtieth birthday, she’s remembering. Larry knows the signs. It’s five-thirty on a Sunday afternoon, and there she is, high-rumped and perspiring in her creased cotton sundress, busying herself in the kitchen, setting the dinner plates on top of the stove to warm, as if they weren’t already hot from being in a hot kitchen. She’s peering into the oven at the bubbling casserole, and she’s floating back and forth, fridge to counter, counter to sink. Her large airy gestures seem to have sprung not from her life as wife and mother, but from a sunny, creamy, abundant girlhood, which Larry doubts she ever had. She smiles and she chats and she even flirts a little with her thirty-year-old son, who looks on, a bottle of cold beer in his hand, but he knows the old warnings. Her jittery detachment gives her away. She picks up a jar of pickles and bangs it hard on the breadboard to loosen the lid. She’s thinking and fretting and knowing and feeling sick with the poison of memory.
This my mother, Larry thinks, my sad soft mother. Most of her life has involved the absorbing of her grievous history, of trying to go forward when all this heaviness lies inside. One ancient mistake, one hour gone wrong, and now she pays and pays.
She’s a housewife, Larry’s mother, a maker of custard sauce, a knitter of scarves, a fervent keeper of baby pictures and family scrapbooks, but this is her real work: sorrowing, remembering. The loose shuttle of her pain flies back and forth so that sometimes she seems just fine, just like anyone else’s mother. Today she’s made Larry a lemon meringue pie for his birthday instead of a cake; she could have made it yesterday and kept it on the top shelf of the fridge just under the freezer section, but with her history she wouldn’t dream of taking a chance like that, and who could blame her? Her anxieties about food are built into the Weller family chronicle – as is Larry’s passion for lemon meringue pie. Dot makes her son a big one every year on his birthday, with a circle of birthday candles poking up through the golden-tipped meringue. A sight to behold.
There’ll be Lancashire hotpot too, that’s what’s bubbling away in the oven right now. It’s a simple oldtime recipe that Dot’s mother used to make on Saturday nights back in England: chunks of stewing lamb arranged across the bottom of a Pyrex casserole, then a layer of sliced potatoes, another of carrots, then more lamb, and all this topped with a handful of finely diced onions. Next you add plenty of salt, pepper, and parsley flakes, and a cup of Oxo, and bake covered for an hour and a half. Larry’s crazy about Lancashire hotpot, or at least he pretends he is, for the sake of his sad and perpetually grieving and remembering mother. Mum, he calls her; he always has. Americans say Mom or Ma. People in movies and books say Mother.
She’s set the dropleaf table in the living room for six, her best damask cloth and the good cutlery and china. There’ll be just the family, her loved ones, as she likes to call them, as though they were characters out of an obituary – her husband Stu, Larry, Dorrie, and little Ryan in his booster seat. Her daughter Midge is coming too, but here it is, almost time to sit down at the table, and she hasn’t turned up yet. Three years ago Midge kicked her husband out after receiving an anonymous note saying that Paul frequented a certain gay bar, and now she swears she’s never going to get married again. She says, with her eyes rolling upward, that she knew something was funny-bunny about him from day one.
Larry worries about his mum. She’s not getting out enough lately, hardly at all in fact, unless you call a trip to Sears’ mattress sale “getting out.” It also worries Larry that his mother frets so much about other people. She worries about Midge, that at the age of thirty-two she’s starting to get bitter, always sounding off like a regular women’s libber, and going on marches and so forth. She also worries about Larry and Dorrie, the way they’re half the time bickering, and Dorrie working full-time for Manitoba Motors instead of staying home with Ryan, who’s still in diapers at twenty-three months, and she worries about her husband who right this minute is in the bedroom putting on a clean sports shirt because she nagged him into it, and is in a bad mood. As a matter of fact, he’s done nothing but grumble all day, the heat, the mosquitoes, his lower back pain, not enough sugar in his afternoon coffee, the mess in the backyard because of the compost pile Larry’s talked him into, and now having to eat at the dropleaf table in the living room instead of the kitchen nook. So far he hasn’t even said happy birthday to Larry, to his own son.
She checks the oven, looks at the clock, glances out the kitchen window to see if Midge’s car is coming down the back lane. Where is that girl? Next she pours boiling water over the silver pie server in case of lurking germs, then sets it on a paper towel to dry. Immaculate. So’s the speckled linoleum. So is Dot’s cutlery drawer. In this house you would never see a tea-bag tossed wet and leaking into the sink, or a pile of coffee grounds. People who let a skin of mold accumulate on the hem of their shower curtain are not her kind of people. This is a woman who carries her meat home from the butcher’s and washes it at the sink. Larry is watching her rinse her hands under the tap, and at the same time he’s kicking his foot against the table leg the way he used to do when he was little. The upholstered breakfast nook where he sits has the wiped hygienic smell of on old marriage. He’s blowing a little tune into his empty beer bottle.
Is there room in the tilting, rotating world for a thirty-year-old man who sits blowing into a bottle? He thinks this, and so does his mother, who reaches over and takes it from him, not so much with an air of rebuke as with resolution, and places it under the counter. What deprivation, her expression asks, what injury has stalled her son at the age of thirty? Something’s been subtracted too soon, but what? And is it her fault?
Of course it’s her fault.
Worry, worry, a circle of worry. And these are her loved ones, these five. Her grumbling husband, her errant daughter, her baffling son, and in the living room her daughter-in-law Dorrie, whose neatness of body, whose sharpness of eye and chin and shoulder, is bent over the weekend paper, scouting the ads and cutting out dollars-off coupons, while little Ryan sits on the floor and plays with the paper scraps, tearing them into tiny flakes. This small and insufficient family. This is all Larry’s mother’s got to cushion her against the damage of her own life.
The history of Dot Weller, and how she killed her mother-in-law, came to Larry in small pieces, by installments as it were. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t know at least part of the story, and he’s not sure, in fact, if he’s ever been presented with a full account, start to finish, all at once.
In one of his mother’s albums there’s an old photograph of Larry himself taken at nine months. Little Larry wearing a white smocked nightgown is wedged into an old-fashioned wooden highchair which for some reason has been carried out of doors. Blurred trees and a suggestion of lawn fill in a background lit with a glare of ominous light that falls across the infant’s fine frizz of hair and on to the glossy wood of the chair. Can a head think when it’s that size? Can a baby’s face be this wise and unfoolable? His hands, which look like nothing so much as a pair of crimped shells, grip the edge of the highchair’s tray, and his expression is pulled into a knit of absorbed anguish. He can’t possibly know at this age, or can he, that a calamity has occurred in his mother’s life? And yet, the comprehending orbits of his soft eyes, the small roundness of his mouth, already hold a full level of bruising knowledge. He has a mother who cries in her sleep. A mother who’s missing the kind of cold, saving curiosity that would hold her steady after a tragic event and whose contagion of grief has spread to him. Through her milk, through her skin and fingertips.
Or it may have been, in the beginning, no more than a series of silences that accrued around certain topics, which in the life of his mother could not be approached openly. Looking back, Larry seems almost certain that the story, when it came, was presented through the agency of intense whispering toneless voices – but whose? his father’s? his sister’s? – and that behind the recital of events lay a sense of driving urgency: this was information that he was going to need in order to live in the Weller family, in order to walk around in the world. The calamity that occurred in the autumn of 1949, one year before he was born, was inescapable, housed as it was in the walls like a layer of formaldehyde insulation, an always present, tightly lashed narrative embracing everyone who lived under the family roof. And so Larry knows his mother’s suffering. He’s always known it, filling in around the known bits with his imagination. He would like to put his arms around her, and she would like this too. But he doesn’t know where to begin, doesn’t know if she knows that he knows or how much he knows or what weight he attaches to it. So he’s silent and she’s silent. He sits fiddling with his beer bottle, until it’s firmly taken from him, and she checks the clock for the umpteenth time, as if each ticking minute places an extra weight on her sadness.
Dot Weller was twenty-five years old at the time of the accident and married to young Stu Weller who worked as an upholsterer for British Railways in the northern town of Bolton. Their infant daughter Midge, short for Marjorie, had just taken her first steps, a happy little kid tottering from chair to chair, and chortling in tune with her acrobatic daring. The most contented baby in the world, everyone said. A perfect sweetie.
The family lived in a newish council house, four airy rooms and a tiny garden where in the summer Dot grew lettuce, radishes, carrots, blackcurrants, and a wavy row of runner beans. She would have preferred a patch of fine lawn and a bed of flowers – she was partial to lupines – but an anxious, learned frugality kept her concentration on what she and Stu and baby Midge could consume. The blackcurrants she made into a rather sour jam, since sugar was still rationed and hard to come by, and the runner beans she stewed up and preserved in sealed jars. This made her happy, gazing at her row of bottled fruit and vegetables, twelve pints in all, the beans blue-green in colour, gleaming from the pantry shelf.
Stu was down at the Works six days a week, but on Sundays he stayed at home and made morning tea for his pretty young wife and himself. The least he could do, he liked to say. He tossed little Midge in the air, read the Sunday Mirror straight through, and cleaned out the grates, and just before noon went up the road to the pub for a quick gin and tonic, which he fancied in those days to be a gentleman’s drink. After that he and Dot and their little dumpling of a daughter boarded a bus and crossed town to where his mother and dad lived in their two-up, two-down, and where a Sunday joint awaited them. These were happy days. Each of them felt the privilege of it. “But they ought to come to us for Sunday dinner the odd time,” Dot said. “It isn’t right, your mother doing all the work.”
She prevailed on them, and at last they agreed. The Sunday journey was reversed, Mum and Dad Weller crossing town one late October morning on the number 16 bus and arriving at the door drenched from cold rain, but cheerful, and ready for a hot meal. There was roast beef and mash and gravy, and a choice of Brussels sprouts or runner beans. There was horseradish sauce served in a little sweet-dish, a wedding gift. And for pudding a homemade sponge topped with Golden Syrup.
It was a blessing, people said afterward, that they didn’t all choose beans over sprouts. Only Mum Weller helped herself, and rather generously, to the beans. “And Dot here’s the one who bottled them,” said Stu, the proud young husband. “Have a little more, Mum, you haven’t made but half a dent.”
An hour later, drinking a cup of tea, the old woman complained of double vision, of having trouble swallowing. Nevertheless, Stu and his father bundled a sleepy Midge into her pram and wandered off to the stretch of waste ground by the railway yards, leaving Dot alone with her distressed mother-in-law. Dot offered more tea, but it was waved away. She produced a hot-water bottle and a blanket to fold over her mother-in-law’s trunky knees. Mum Weller rocked back and forth a few times, then groaned suddenly, and fell forward with a crash on to the hearth rug, her head missing by an inch the metal fender. Dot ran to her side, kneeling on the rug. Mother Weller’s head was twisted grotesquely to one side, and her face held a look of throttled purple. Dot remembers crying out, but doesn’t know what she said. (Probably help, help, but who was there to help?) And then she passed her hand back and forth before the dead woman’s eyes.
She was indeed dead. The young Dot had never seen a dead person, but she knew this bulky presence on her floor had passed to the other side, as folks said back then. There she lay, face down on the ash-strewn carpet, a heavy woman, stiffly corseted, and padded with layer upon layer of woolen clothes, her checked skirt immense across her buttocks and her knitted jumper rucked up. Her hips and calves were bunched clumsy and lifeless as meat beneath her, and the pink edge of her knickers obscenely revealed. A queerish smell of rubbish rose from the body. It can’t be, it can‘t be, Dot remembers thinking as she tugged at the inert figure, its solid, unmovable heft. Then a thought occurred to her: heart attack. The words formed in her head, bringing a rush of relief – so this is what happened! – and, even in the midst of her comprehension, she experienced a whiff, no more, of shameful self-congratulations, for she had recognized and named the phantom before her. She had been witness, moreover, to one of the body’s great dramas.
But it wasn’t a heart attack that brought on her mother-in-law’s cataclysmic end. Oh, if only it had been, if only! Mum Weller’s death – as was revealed later through laboratory testing – was caused by severe type C botulism. The source of the botulism was Dot’s stewed runner beans, inadequately sealed, insufficiently heated – the same beans that had been standing in their pretty glass jar for the last two months, as purely green and sweet as innocence itself.
Dot Weller is fifty-six now, and her husband Stu fifty-eight. Stu’s parents died in their mid-fifties, his mother from the botulism, and his father, two years later, from rage – though the death notice specified a massive stroke. His rage, closer to biblical wrath, had bloomed into existence on that terrible Sunday when his wife fell dead on the hearth rug, poisoned by her stupid imbecile of a daughter-in-law. Murder was the word Dad Weller used. Even, deliberate murder. He said as much to the reporter from the Manchester Evening News who sent a photographer to take a picture of the Wellers’ garden, catching in one corner the dark row of beans that had been the agent of evil. There was no reasoning with him, although he’d been all his life a reasonable man. His world had been cleft in two by calamity, and he refused to put down the finger of blame.
In the end that blaming finger drove Stu straight to the immigration office in Stockport, and soon after he brought his pregnant wife and child to Canada where, in fact, thousands of other English workers headed in the late forties. There were factory jobs to be had in Winnipeg. It was possible to aspire to a house and garden of one’s own, to buy a car in time, a washing machine, a refrigerator, to make a better life for the kids. And to escape the sourness of ugly scenes and family angers. When news came that the old man had died of a stroke, Stu didn’t trouble himself to go home for the funeral.
Larry knows the poison episode in all its tragic rhythms and reverberations. This is what it’s like to grow up with a bad chapter of someone else’s story, in the toxic glow of someone else’s guilt, a guilt that became a rooted sorrow. He’s had his fingers in the mouth of his mother’s sick grief and now it’s his; every crease and fold belong to him. He knows about the offered cup of tea and the hot-water bottle; his ears can hear the precise sound of the body thudding on the hearth rug; he sees the inky photograph in the newspaper and its headline: “Bolton Woman Poisons Mother-in-Law.” All this has entered the doors and windows of his childhood, without his really noticing. It was simply – there. Like the oxygen he breathed. Like a banked fire. And he can imagine even his mother’s most covert thoughts, that which could never be said: thank God little Midge refused the beans. And even: thank God I passed them up myself.
And for Larry, who was born just two months after his parents settled in Winnipeg, the flight from the home country has the flavor of Old Testament exodus. He finds it hard to believe. He looks at his solid, slow-moving parents and tries to imagine the force that urged them to gather up their possessions and voyage, sight unseen, to a new country. They were eight days on a rusty Greek liner, then three days by train to Manitoba. Dot Weller was sick every mile of the way, and she must have looked back over her shoulder more than once and wondered what she’d left behind and why. Catastrophe drove them out, catastrophe coupled with guilt that was cut like an incision on his mother’s brain. How were they to survive in the heat of a parent’s punishing anger?
When Larry thinks about his folks, this is the piece of their life he can never quite take in: that his father, out of love, out of the wish to protect his wife, would uproot himself, and turn his back on a guaranteed job, a snug house, his weekly gin and tonic, and all that was familiar, that he might have elected freedom or forgetfulness, but instead chose to witness his wife’s plodding, painful, affectless search for that thing that would pass as forgiveness. Larry glimpses something heroic at the heart of his obstinate and embarrassing father, who rescued his young wife, who stood by her. Stu Weller is a man who, without a gobbet of doubt, believes in bringing back the death penalty. He rattles on about welfare bums, and sometimes refers to blacks as nig-nogs, and maintains, somewhat illogically, that queers ought to be sterilized, the whole lot of them. Which is why it surprises Larry that his father has committed so manly and self-sacrificing an act, and he asks himself whether he could do the same for his wife Dorrie. Probably not. He admits his love will never be as pure as his father’s, and certainly not as good as the scripted golden love in his head.
Not that his parents, Stu and Dot, managed to blot out all recollection of the tragedy, far from it. Anything, even after all these years, will trip a switch in Dot’s head: the mention of Bolton, of food poisoning, of home preserving, of sponge cake, a reference to mothers-in-law, to hearth rugs, the specter of sudden death, the word beans – above all, the word beans, a substance banned from the Weller household and never, never spoken of. In all Larry’s thirty years he has not once tasted that treasonous vegetable.
Stu Weller loves his job. For thirty years now he’s worked as an upholsterer for a custom coach company in south Winnipeg, the largest of its kind in North America. He left school at fourteen, as soon as he legally could, and went straight on to the railways where he learned his trade. Right away he took to it, and it’s served him well. Switching from trains to buses, when coming to Canada, was easier than falling off a log, and he’s worked on some real beauties. A custom coach is a handmade object, that’s something most people don’t appreciate. You take a few basic sheets of metal, cut them, bend them, twist them, apply bracing and rivets, and there you’ve got something entirely different. Everything but the motor is built right on the Air-Rider factory floor, even the fuel tanks, even the decorative touches, which is where Stu Weller comes in.
It’s a fact that some of North America’s biggest and brightest names in the entertainment industry have ordered customized vehicles from Air-Rider, wondrous rolling homes and offices with white carpeting on the walls and Italian marble for flooring. A country-and-western singer – after a beer or two Stu Weller will drop the odd hint about who exactly this singer is – custom ordered a model with a bathroom floor that dropped open, bingo, to reveal a hot tub where the luggage compartment generally goes. A cool half-million dollars for that package. This same coach possessed a full kitchen with oak inlay cupboards and a hidden berth for the traveling cook. Last year Stu did the upholstery for a hospital coach, a traveling clinic for rural areas, and now he’s working on a coach for relocating prisoners, each seat transformed into a separate little jail cell with bars going right up to the ceiling. Slash-proof vinyl is what he’s installing at the moment, and the barest minimum of padding. Every order brings a new challenge. The floor supervisor always takes him aside and says, “Look, Stu, you’re the one with the experience. We need to have your particular expertise on this design.”
On weekends Stu Weller naps or creeps around the house, waiting for Monday morning to come. His hands understand the secrets of foam and spring and frame, how to make the under-structure invisible and at the same time strong. There’s a wide range of fabrics at his disposal, your velvets, your brocades, your suedes and leathers. For the president of an American television network he covered the coach walls with a shimmering mauve satin, and received a personal handwritten letter of thanks and appreciation. Next in the works is a special chapel coach for a well-known TV evangelist, and Stu’s planning to go heavy on plum-colored velour and white leather for the doors that separate the public part of the unit from the private. He’s learned that people are willing to spend money for quality; they want the best materials and they’re looking for top-notch workmanship. Over the years he’s been offered jobs in a number of Winnipeg’s better upholstery houses, but he’s never considered them for a minute. He knows the custom coach business inside and out, and can’t imagine working all day on mere furniture, on simple sofas or chairs.
Of course, he’s not above a weekend project at home. The breakfast nook in the kitchen, built in the early seventies, is his own design, a curving red vinyl bench with bright brass tacking. Smart, modern, comfortable. And last summer he took apart the living-room couch, reglued the frame and reupholstered it in a midnight-blue textured nylon. Visitors to the house think they’re seeing a brand-new piece of furniture. His wedding gift to Larry and Dorrie was a trip to England plus a first-class upholstery job on an old Hide-a-bed Larry had picked up at a garage sale. It looks good, too, done up in one of those abstract prints that’re all the rage now, and it’s Scotchguarded so that when Dorrie leaves one of Ryan’s messed diapers lying around, as she tends to do, there’s not too much damage.
He’s offered to do another upholstery job for Larry’s thirtieth. He could do a padded headboard, he suggested, in artificial leather, but Larry said no, he’d rather have a couple of loads of good topsoil for the yard. Well, if that’s what the kid wants, that’s what he gets. Christ Jesus. Dirt.
From the way Stu’s scratching his shirt-collar you can tell he can’t quite believe he’s got a son who’s thirty years old today. He doesn’t, it seems, know what to make of his son and his slapdash wife (Dorrie, Dor, Dorable) and Larry’s funny-bunny ideas about hiking and the environment and planting shrub “arrangements” in his yard and working in a florist shop year after year, fussing with little leaves and flowers all day long. But he keeps his mouth shut. The last thing Stu wants is a fight.
His son calls him Dad or Da; in return he calls Larry nothing, just you. Neither of them can remember when this started, but Larry recognizes his no-name status as a temporary form of shyness on his father’s part; ha! temporary for life. But shyness is all it amounts to. After all, his dad lent him money for his down payment, didn’t he? And he had a load of top-quality topsoil delivered to Larry’s house yesterday morning before Larry and Dorrie were even out of bed.
Six o’clock. Larry’s folks always sit down for supper at six sharp, even when it’s a special occasion like today, and even though Midge hasn’t turned up or had the courtesy to telephone. The drapes have been pulled shut all day to keep the heat down, and the light seeping into the living room is the color of dusty amber. It’s crowded with the table pulled out and with having to squeeze in extra chairs and the hot dishes lined up on the sideboard. Little Ryan starts making a fuss, grabbing at the tablecloth, and Dot frets about him knocking over the glass dish of pickled onions. She’s really worried about death, that her table of carefully prepared food will bring damage, not nourishment, to those she loves best in the world. “Sit down, Mum,” Larry says, as he pulls out her chair – a rare gesture in this house, an unbelievable gesture – and helps her to settle comfortably. He’d like to lean over and touch his cheek to the top of her freshly combed hair. “Well,” she says looking around, “pick up your forks, everyone.”
At that moment Midge in shorts and an orange and pink T-shirt bursts through the back door, her car keys jingling from the fingers of one hand, a bag of dinner rolls in the other, her contribution. She drops the rolls in the center of the table, still in their plastic Safeway bag. The next minute she’s dragging in an immense unwieldy wrapped parcel which is a birthday present for her brother, but which won’t be opened until after dessert, after the candles are blown out and the pie consumed. Larry already knows it will be something for the yard, a piece of gardening equipment or an exotic plant maybe. His sister has always known how to read him. Mits, he calls her, or Mit-Brain or Pigeon.
She takes her place at the table, squeezing in between her mother and Dorrie, waving her arms. She’s steaming with a jumble of excuses and fresh news, as well as with the humid heat of the day. Sorry, sorry, sorry, everyone, she says, but she’s been away all weekend to an anger workshop at a Gimli resort. Two hundred women took part. If you signed up early you got ten percent off, but she only heard of it on Friday afternoon, so she knocked off work early, said she had a headache, then packed up the car and hit the road. No time to phone, just a spur of the moment thing, an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. There was an anger workshop leader up from the States. Yeah, really, that’s her specialty. What a woman! Gray hair down to her waist, barefoot, and she’s got a PhD in something or other, she’s a doctor, that’s her title, travels all over the place, writes books, gives lectures, TV talk shows, Phil Donahue and so forth. Holler it out, that’s what she demands of her anger groups. Scream, yell, weep till you pee, hang on to each other. Tell your story, then bury it, and that’s what they did. They gathered on the beach early this morning, just as the sun was coming up over the horizon of Lake Winnipeg, two hundred shouting, half-clothed women, and in one orchestrated moment – there was a sort of drum roll provided and a loudspeaker – each of them threw into the mild waves a symbolic pebble, their compacted rage, their flinty little burdens of hoarded injustice. Oh, God, it was beautiful, the peace of it, the relief. Right there on the beach there were these gigantic urns of tea, it’s called peace tea, it’s made from apples and lichen, like it’s from seaweed too. And bread, these great gigantic loaves just passed around and torn apart and eaten like that out of the hand, no butter or anything, just pure grainy bread and the breeze coming off the lake and all those stones buried under the water, out of sight, out of mind, gone forever, and women dancing on the sand with their arms around each other, singing too, or maybe just sitting quietly while the sun bobbed up, the stillness, the light on the water. And then the fucking traffic coming home – it was a nightmare, you can just imagine, and in this everlasting heat!
Dot takes Ryan on her lap – her little Rye-Krisp, her little Ribena, her Mister Man, her Noodle-Doodle – and settles him against her peaceful chest.
“So what were all these chicks so angry about?” Dorrie asks Midge. She can’t stand her sister-in-law, and the feeling is mutual.
“Oh, God,” Midge shakes her head, and reaches for a pickled onion. “Don’t get me started.”
And no one does. They talk about the heat instead, and the ragweed count, and whether or not Quebec should separate. They’re trying to keep on being a family, after all. Nothing real will ever get said out loud in this house, though Midge will bleat and blast, and Larry will prod and suggest. It doesn’t matter; Larry understood this years ago. Today his dad tells a joke he heard at the plant, a long story about a Newfie visiting Quebec and trying to buy some cod liver oil from a Frenchie. Dot Weller hums Ryan to sleep, and Dorrie Weller tells everyone how she’s found this place in the North End where you can purchase cleaning products at twenty percent off.
Larry listens. This is how he’s learning about the world, exactly as everyone else does – from sideways comments over a lemon meringue pie, sudden bursts of comprehension or weird parallels that come curling out of the radio, out of a movie, off the pages of a newspaper, out of a joke – and his baffled self stands back and says: so this is how it works.
You would have thought Larry’s folks would have turned themselves into a grief-hardened set of statuettes, but no. They’re moving, they’re breathing, they’re practicing rituals of their own tentative invention, and Larry’s sucking it up. His mother’s gorgeous bloom of guilt, his father’s stoic heart, his sister’s brilliant jets of anger, even the alternate sharpness and slack of his wife’s domestic habits – these burn around him, a ring of fluorescence, though the zone between such vividness and the plain familiar faces around the table seems too narrow to enter. He’s thirty years old, for Chrissake, old enough to know that he can’t know everything. All he wants is what he’s owed, what he’s lucky enough to find along the way. All he wants is to go on living and living until he’s a hundred years old and then he’ll lie down and die.
CHAPTER FOUR Larry’s Work 1981 (#ulink_1799d018-8b0c-5b83-afc6-92446560e71e)
Most of Larry’s friends have had half a dozen jobs in their lives, and quite a few of the guys have suffered spells of unemployment in between. But Larry’s been lucky. He’s worked at Flowerfolks for twelve years now, ever since he completed his Floral Arts Diploma back in ‘69.
Flowerfolks is a small chain with a reputation for friendly service and a quality product. Usually you can spot a Flowerfolks arrangement by its natural appearance. For instance, they don’t go in for bending stems into far-out shapes and positions, or for those Holly Hobby wreathes, et cetera, or weird combinations like, say, tulips and birds-of-paradise sticking out of the same arrangement. Even their Welcome-New-Baby floral offerings have a fresh earthy look to them. Larry says it makes him shudder just thinking about those styrofoam lamb shapes with pink and blue flowers poking out of their backs. Simplicity and integrity at a reasonable price – that’s what Flowerfolks has always stood for.
Well, that’s changed overnight.
All twelve Flowerfolks stores have been swallowed up by Flowercity, the California-based multinational. Suddenly there’s a new logo. Suddenly there are dyed carnations all over the place, whereas formerly they were carried reluctantly, on special order only. Suddenly the staff, even the guys, are wearing blue-and-white checked smocks with their names pinned to little round Peter-Pan collars. Half the floor area in the various outlets is given over now to artificial flowers, something Flowerfolks has always looked down on. As Vivian Bondurant says, “Why have something dead when you can have it alive?” A good question.
Vivian, the branch manager, gave notice two weeks after the Flowercity takeover. She dreads what she sees coming in the eighties, and, besides, she’s ready for a career change. “I’ve worked my tush off,” she told Larry, “building this place up, establishing a loyal clientele here in the West End, turning out a reliable product. I’ve definitely decided to go back to school. Social work – that’s where the jobs are going to be in the future. I was reading the other day about squirrels and I –”
“Squirrels?” Larry interrupts, scratching his chest through his checked smock. His wife’s washed it twice now, but it’s still stiff with sizing.
“Seventy-four percent of the nuts that a squirrel hides never get found. Amazing, isn’t it?”
“You mean –”
“I mean I’ve been hiding nuts, too, in a sense. Forever making little improvements in the business? Remembering people’s names. Following up after weddings. Sending those little anniversary reminders. Bringing in white balls from Toronto at Christmas when no other outlet in town would touch them. All that stuff.”
“And?”
“And where has it got me?”
“I thought you loved it here.”
“Like now they want daily time sheets. The whole ball of wax. Wouldn’t you think, if they kept up with modern management, that they’d have figured out that it’s people who matter! Computerized inventory. Good God! Not that there’s anything wrong with computers per se, but they want it just so. And I have to turn up every single day for work in this dumb schoolgirl get-up. A checked smock at my age. I mean!”
“What do you mean your age? You’re talking like you’re –”
“Like I’m thirty-eight years old. A mature woman. Ha! If I wanted to be Little Bo Peep I’d go work at Disneyland. It’s different for you, you’re –”
“I’m thirty-one.”
“A mere babe.”
“But social work, Viv! How do you know you’re going to like social work?”
“I don’t. I’ll probably hate it. Poor people, sick people. Omigod. But at least I’ll have my dignity. You know, doing something useful.”
“Hey, Viv, wait a minute. You’re the one who’s always saying how flowers are important. Remember your Chinese story –”
“Chinese story? What Chinese story?”
“You know – about the Chinaman who has two pennies –”
“Two yen, you mean.”
“And he spends one on a loaf of bread and the other to buy a flower.”
“Listen, Larry, I’ve got to tell you something. I hope it won’t hurt your feelings.”
“Go ahead. Shoot.”
“Look, you’re a sensitive guy, you really, truly are, but there’s something you’ve got to know, especially working in a business that’s ninety-nine percent customer relations.”
“I can take it. Just go ahead.”
“Well, look, you just can’t say Chinaman anymore. It sounds prejudiced. You have to say Chinese person.”
“Oh.”
“Saying Chinaman’s like saying Wop or Honky.”
“My old dad says Chink.”
“Exactly. There you have it. We’ve come a long way, baby.”
“I’ll remember.”
“You’ll have to, Larry. ‘Cause it looks like you’ll be in charge here when I go.”
“Me? Are you kidding?”
“It’s not for sure, but there’ve been these teensie-weensie hints from the head office, those bastards. Little inquiries, you know? Like is this Weller person reliable? Can he make decisions? What are his interpersonal skills? That kind of thing.”
“I can’t believe it. I never thought –”
“Like those squirrels I was mentioning earlier? You’ve been burying your nuts all along – nothing personal, pal – and now it’s time to go find a few. You deserve it, Larry. You’ll be a great boss. I’ve written a recommendation, as a matter of fact. A whole page, typed, single-spaced. He’s a great guy, I said, or words to that effect. With capital O-Original ideas. Does this man know how to make irises stand up or what? And he’s well organized, keeps a neat work table, doesn’t let the orders get backed up, doesn’t play royal highness with the trainees. Hey, what gives? You’re supposed to be looking happy. You’re going up the ladder, my laddie-boy. What’s the matter?”
“I just can’t,” Larry said, “imagine this place without you.”
Larry doesn’t talk much about his job, but he thinks about it a lot, and mostly he thinks he’s lucky. Work for him adds up to a whole lot more than the feel of ferns in his hands or the sight of sprigged baby’s breath gleaming through the glass of the cooler or even the green spongy cave of the store itself with its forest smells rising up to greet him when he comes in in the morning. How many people get to work in that kind of lushness, the air breaking out into fragrance and color all around you. The loose, light humidity of the place is part of being at work, a big part, but all these particularities are shaken loose by the good music of talk. He and Viv talk all day long. They’ve been talking for twelve years, an unceasing, seamless conversation.
There are always a couple of assistants around, but they come and go: Wendy, Kerri, Dawn, Sidney, Brenda, Lou-Anne, two or three Jennifers, a big fat guy called Tommy Enns, an endless procession of them, trainees from Red River College, young and confused, eager, stumbling, shrill or shy, it all depended. A new apprentice on an eight-week work stint tends to turn the place really hairy, at least at first, but Larry and Viv hold it steady and fluid with their voices, his, hers – talking, talking, all day the two of them talking.
While they stand at the bench “backing” bridal bouquets or improvising a winter arrangement to deliver to Victoria Hospital’s Palliative Care Unit or unpacking cedars (they come twenty bunches to a box) Larry and Viv discuss Michael Jackson’s stage style or Margaret Trudeau’s maternal instincts or lack thereof. Their fingers move and so do their mouths. Yammer, yammer. About economics they admit their ignorance, and their right to their ignorance. They talk about the penny shortage in the States, the danger of radon in basements, the inflated salaries of professional football players, and about the pros and cons of whooping cough shots – on this particular topic Viv managed to persuade Larry not to have his three-year-old son, Ryan, inoculated after all. The two of them reminisce about the time a guy walked in and ordered a dozen dead roses to send to his ex-wife, and how Vivian took the order, then calmly phoned the police.
They talk about the cost of air conditioners in the States versus the cost in Canada. About draft dodgers, whether they should be sent home. About pimples, whether to pop them or leave them alone. About mothers, their mood swings, their dumb sweetness. About Ronald Reagan, how good-hearted or stupid the man is. How hot it is outside, how rainy, how the back lane is blocked with snow. A whole decade has slid by, its weathers and transports and passing personalities, and all of it crystalized into the words that fly back and forth between Vivian Bondurant and Larry Weller. A million words, a zillion. Note for note, the biggest noise in Larry’s life is the noise that comes out of Viv Bondurant’s throat.
Her voice is a low, confidential rumble, but full of little runs and pauses. She knows how to build up to a story, and she knows exactly when it’s time to throw the ball into Larry’s court. “So what do you think, Lare?” What she brings him are bulletins from that layer of the world he seems doomed to miss, the anecdotes she gleans from CHOL’s call-in show or People Magazine exposés. She passes on, generously, with unstoppable authority, such things as cough remedies from somebody or other’s grandmother, the fact that Italians use mums only for funerals, or what can be said out loud these days and what’s verboten. Chinamen are now Chinese people. Indians are natives. And so on and so forth.
Certain topics between them are off limits. For instance, they never, never mention Larry’s wife, Dorrie; Viv, with her strong sense of intuition, probably suspects things aren’t working out too well in that department. On the other hand, she can be surprisingly upfront about herself, making a point, for instance, of keeping Larry up to date on her menstrual cycle. “It’s better you know when I’m having my rag days, kiddo, then you can keep out of my way.” In fact, she’s blessed with a remarkably even temperament, a woman whose running commentary on the world is underpinned by an easy acceptance of whatever comes her way. What she collects in her life is information, and it’s information too valuable not to be shared.
Larry’s grateful. He owes Viv a lot, and yet he hardly knows her. She and her husband, Hector, live quietly in a house in St. Vital. Hector’s older than Viv by a good fifteen years and he’s been married before – this slipped out one day when Viv was sorting through a box of holly at the store – and has fathered a couple of kids who grew up to be whiners and grabbers, which is why he doesn’t want to have any more, and that’s okay-José with Viv. Larry has only been to their house once, a Sunday morning a few years ago when he dropped off some screwed-up billing statements.
He’d never in his life seen such an airy house, everything dusted and polished and in perfect repair, and the pale beige drapes hanging with their pleats just so. Viv, wearing jeans and a turtleneck sweater, made coffee which she served to Hector and Larry at a shining kitchen table. She was quieter than she was at the store, sitting back and letting the men get acquainted. Afterward, Hector showed Larry the basement where he repaired clocks.
This was his job, not just a hobby. Against one wall stood a long workbench for Hector’s tools. They were astonishingly beautiful, these tools, brass tipped with dark wooden handles and a look of antiquity about them. A metal lathe gleamed, handsome as a museum piece, clean, polished, ready to go. A square of pegboard held drill bits arranged in the shape of a harp. “Every last thing you see here is European,” Hector said proudly. “German, mostly. You can’t beat the Krauts for machinery.”
“Yeah,” murmured Larry, his eyes on the metal teeth of a miniature saw.
Twenty or thirty clocks stood about the room or hung on the walls, some of them disemboweled, and others tagged and ready to be picked up by their owners. Hector explained to Larry, pointing out their burnished edges, how to tell a French clock from an English clock, how certain clocks have a regulator mechanism that allows for the expansion or contraction of their pendulums, and the reasons for the transition of pocket watches to wrist watches. Larry ran his hand appreciatively over the frame of a plain round wall clock.
“That’s a Seth Thomas you’re looking at,” Hector said. “The real thing.”
“Ah,” said Larry, who had never heard of a Seth Thomas.
The two men stood together for a minute in respectful silence. The air was full of the loud busy sound of ticking, and then suddenly – Hector held up a finger to Larry; here it comes! – there was a brief concert of chimes and bongs; twelve noon. “That’s my hourly concert,” Hector said, and Larry could tell it was something he said often and each time with pleasure. “That’s all the music I need.”
Larry looked around, then, at the low-ceilinged room which was dark in the corners but whitely lit under the cone of a green work light. Here was the domain of a man who had his name and trade listed in the Yellow Pages. The pervasive tang of machine oil lay over his ticking, working kingdom, and there in the middle stood Hector Bondurant himself, with his arms folded across his stomach, tapping his elbows, beaming broadly, a monarch in his chosen sphere.
Larry felt a stab of irrational jealousy. For the briefest of moments he wanted to own this space, this spacious house with its neat drapes and its stern white coffee mugs, and he yearned for the daily descent down linoleum-clad stairs to this warm, snug hideaway and its waiting workbench covered with sorted parts and beautifully aligned tools. He wanted all these things, but most of all he wanted Hector’s work, his clockmaker’s hands and the intricate mechanical promise he coaxes from mere wood and metal.
In the same instant, lapping up against Larry’s instant desire to become a clockmaker, was his longing to work side by side with his father down at Air-Rider Coach Works, transforming metal sheets into mobile palaces. The miracle of it, making something out of nothing. The pleasure at the end of the day to see what you’d constructed with your own hands.
And then there was his wife, Dorrie, who sold cars at Manitoba Motors – he’d never thought much about Dorrie’s job, but now he wanted a portion of that too. Himself in a snappy sports jacket with “Call Me Larry” on his lapel button. The lingo, the come-on, the bargains teasingly offered and withdrawn, the intensity of the minute-by-minute shifts, the decisive moment, and the thrill: the final solemnity, of signing on the dotted line and pocketing a fat commission.
There’s no getting around it: the rhapsody of work hums between Larry’s ears, its variables and strategies, its implements and its tightly focused skills. Sometimes he tries to scare himself with thoughts of worklessness, the long, vacant mornings of the unemployed – how would that feel? – and the mingled boredom and sadness of being broke and without accomplishment, without any way to deal with time. In the end, anything’s better than nothing, even the working stiff’s daily grind. Some work is graceless, he knows that. Work can be dirty, noisy, dangerous, degrading, but it’s still work, and that’s what turns the gears of life. He understands this spare, singular fact better than he will ever be able to understand the unguessable secrets of love and happiness.
Years later, when his life was going badly, he came to see work as the only consolation for persisting in the world.
Before Dorrie got married she was a clerk-receptionist in the parts division of Manitoba Motors. The pay wasn’t great, but she had a reputation for getting along with the customers, always commiserating with them over the size of their repair bills, taking their side. They appreciated that. They nicknamed her Dorable. The head of auto parts, a man named Al Leonard, said she was the most efficient employee he’d ever seen. She had a knack for keeping track of details and for remembering what was where and which parts were out of stock. In those days she wore jeans to work and a thick sweater since it was always drafty, what with the door to the repairs garage opening and closing all day long. Besides, she was stuck behind the counter, so what did it matter if she went casual or dressy?
After Ryan was born, she stayed home for three months and earned the odd bit of money by making follow-up calls for repair service. The way it worked, Manitoba Motors sent her out a list of completed repairs once a week, and her job was to phone the clients and ask if they were satisfied with the work. A public relations kind of thing, making the customer feel valued and looked after. She got paid so much a call, and she was able to squeeze in maybe fifteen or so calls while Ryan napped in the afternoon. Even so, the pay was peanuts, and half the time no one was at home or else they chewed her out for disturbing them in the middle of the day.
She decided to go back to work full-time. Russell LaFleur, the head honcho, surprised her by asking if she’d ever thought of going on the sales floor. Times had changed. Women were out there buying their own vehicles now, single women with careers and money to spend on extras. Women valued the judgment of other women. They appreciated a woman’s point of view. When Dorrie pulls out the literature showing the cross-sections of engines, they stand at attention, taking in every word. Type of transmission, power brakes, cruise control – she ticks these items off on the tips of her nicely manicured fingers. She is deeply sympathetic when it comes to color and upholstery combinations, and she’s able to give complete concentration to seat comfort, leg room, the convenience of the glove compartment with its own little overhead light. “We all have to live within a budget,” she says, prefacing her pitch on fuel consumption, and giving a resigned shrug and a wrinkling of her small nose, signaling complicity. Hey, we’re in this together, we can work this out, these are the figures, trust me.
Right away she bought herself two perky little suits from a designer’s outlet she knows, a soft gray wool flannel and a brisk blue houndstooth check. Professional apparel, she calls it. An investment. Women working for other dealers in town go in for pant suits, but Dorrie sticks to skirts and coordinated pantyhose. After all, there are men customers out there too, and with them, as well as with women, she has an enviable sales completion record. At the end of every three-month sales period, Mr. LaFleur takes the whole gang out for a steak and beans dinner at The Loft. The high-commission sales staff get served steak, and those on the bottom of the chart get a plate of beans. It’s a riot, Dorrie tells Larry, but then she’s always on the steak-eating end of things. Twice she’s been salesperson of the month, and once, last April, she was tops in the city. For that she got a plaque with her name engraved on it and a weekend for two at the Hecla Island resort hotel. And she went straight out and bought a third suit, a raspberry linen blend, nice for summer, and a pair of high-heeled sandals.
She’d like another baby; she’d like to be a lady of leisure, so she says anyway, and she tells Larry she’s going to quit Manitoba Motors and give her aching feet a rest as soon as they’ve got enough money in the bank. But how much is enough, that’s the question. She can’t wait to move off Lipton Street with its rinkydink houses and busy traffic. She’s got her eye on the Linden Woods subdivision west of town, a double garage, en-suite bathrooms, a family room with fireplace and wet bar. And what she’d really like, even though it sounds crazy, is a spiral staircase with a wrought-iron railing. She and Larry saw one last Sunday at a real estate open house they attended, and she said afterwards that walking down that staircase with her hand on the rail felt exactly like being a movie star. “If we could live in a house like this,” she told Larry, “I’d never work another day in my life.”
Larry doesn’t want to move out of his house. He admits it’s no palace, but he’s just finished insulating the basement and he’s thinking about doing the roof. He’s installed a new garbage disposal unit too. He points this out to Dorrie, what he’s invested in terms of money and work.
“You just don’t want to leave your crazy yard,” she charges.
Sighing, shrugging, he acknowledges the truth of what she says.
He’s worked hard on the yard. It’s a small lot, thirty-foot frontage and ninety in depth, that’s all, but there’s nothing else like it in the city of Winnipeg, and probably not even in the province of Manitoba. Every inch of it is filled with hedges, and these hedges are planted in the intricate pattern of a maze. There’s a direct access route for the mailman, of course, but there’s also a sinuous alternate path that winds twice around the house with half a dozen false turning points.
Larry’s maze craze (as Dorrie calls it) started three and a half years ago when they got married and went to England for their honeymoon. The highlight of the trip was a tour through the famous Hampton Court maze outside London, and ever since then Larry’s been reading library books about mazes. And adapting his classic maze design so that it’s tailored to the size of the Lipton Street lot. He’s acquired nursery stock from a cut-rate greenhouse and learned just what shrubs work best in this climate and how to keep them alive during a long winter by burying the young shoots under heaps of leaves. Right now the hedges are thinly distributed and so short they can be easily overstepped; it’ll be another four or five years before the hedge walls get high enough for his liking, but meanwhile he’s nursing them along. The last thing he wants is to move to Linden Woods,where he’d have to start over and where the by-laws probably prohibit eccentric gardening.
Whereas anything goes in this neighborhood. The people around here are a mixed bag. His friend Bill Herschel, who lives two streets over, works full-time for the Manitoba Endangered Species Alert and sometimes gives Larry a hand on the weekend. The Gilshammers across the lane (he’s in cut-rate electronics; she works at a unisex hair salon) have just donated the raked leaves from their property. So have the two guys down the street. (Larry can’t remember their names offhand, but he knows they do stage carpentry for a theatre downtown, which he figures must be a pretty interesting line of work.) Lucy Warkenten, who’s got the upstairs apartment next door, doesn’t have any leaves to offer, but she takes a keen interest in Larry’s maze, and has walked through it half a dozen times, stepping along in her purple leather boots. (She’s a self-employed bookbinder working out of her apartment.) Beneath Lucy live the Lees with their three little kids. Ken Lee delivers pizzas for Bella Vista and gives Larry all his leaves and grass clippings, and plenty of advice on the subject of propagating shrubs, which must be planted in a shallow but wide trench so that the roots can spread out sideways and help anchor the branches against prevailing winds. The Grangers, Gord and Moira, live on the other side of Larry’s house. Moira’s a housewife, a semi-invalid, with an interest in spelling reform (she’d like to see the letter X eliminated), and Gord designs ergonomic work gloves, his most recent breakthrough featuring reduced padding at the finger joints so that the gloved hand can grasp objects more readily in cold weather. The good-hearted Grangers, too, have contributed their fall rakings to the survival of Larry Weller’s baby hedges, and now, with winter about to crash down, Larry’s and Dorrie’s yard looks like a series of Indian burial mounds with their mushroom of a house poking through.
In the dark November evenings people in this neighborhood tend to stay home with their families, enjoying their hamburger suppers and favorite TV shows. Generally speaking, the house lights go out along the street somewhere between ten o’clock and eleven-thirty. There are, Larry assumes, starbursts of sex or of hospitality or late-night comings and goings and probably even acts of violence, but nights in the neighborhood are quiet for the most part, and heavy with sleep. Under a depthless navy-blue sky, beneath a cold bone of a moon, this small segment of the world is renewing itself, restoring its emptied-out substance, getting ready for tomorrow. Ready to go back to work.
Working for Flowercity and married to Dorrie and living on Lipton Street, Larry had no idea that technology was about to bulldoze the job market. In the early eighties, that enchanted, stupid time, almost everyone had a job, or if they didn’t they expected they’d find one any minute. No one dreamed of the redundancies and dehirings and downsizings the end of the century would bring, where in a mean, lean, bottom-line world, a day’s work would become as rare and as exotic as the prized orchids Larry keeps swaddled in insulation at the back of the cool unit.
Larry, himself, was slow to wake up to the idea of work. At twelve he took over another kid’s paper route and lasted a week. During his final year of high school, hungry for money, longing for name-brand jeans and a leather jacket, he worked at a neighborhood McDonald’s, adding up orders, and ringing in cash, hating every minute of it. He didn’t like to think in those days that he’d have to spend the rest of his life working. But then he got lucky. He fell into the right line of work: flowers, plants.
And now, ever since Viv Bondurant’s left Flowercity, Larry’s been in charge down at the store, and that means getting up at six o’clock three mornings a week and driving out to Stems Inc., the wholesalers. They’re open for business at seven, and Larry likes to be in and out in half an hour. He’s got his standard orders, of course, his poms, daisies, roses, carnations, and so on, and then he likes to spend a few minutes looking around at what’s just come in from the flower brokers in Montreal. Stems has about 140 accounts, so it’s not surprising he bumps into some of the other florists around town, Sally Ullrich, Jim Carmody, and catches up on what’s new. Over in the corner there’s coffee going and a basket of donuts – a nice touch, Larry thinks, since he skips breakfast at home these days, and Dorrie’s too busy, anyway, getting Ryan ready for daycare, to stop and make coffee.
He’s got a lot of wedding orders coming up, so today he picks up a good supply of baby’s breath. He prefers the stuff from Peru, which is as pure a product as you can get. The wedding bulge across the North American continent is in June and July, but there’s a major blip in the city of Winnipeg, where winter weddings have come to the fore. That way newly married couples can get away for a tropical honeymoon. Larry does a nice bridal semi-cascade; average price $120. Brides want roses nine times out of ten. You can’t talk them out of it. They think flowers, and, bingo, roses come to mind. Roses are romantic, also generic. Winnipeg roses originate in southern Ontario, where they’ve got acres of them under glass.
The gingers get shipped to Manitoba from South Africa, freesia from Holland, and carnations from California. People think carnations are a cheapy flower, but it’s not true; sometimes, depending on weather fluctuations, they’re more expensive than roses, and they last a hell of a lot longer. Some nationalities hate carnations, that’s something to remember. Tree fern is trucked in from Florida in warmed vehicles. They’re always good for funeral baskets. You don’t see a lot of camellias anymore, that old corsage staple, but then Larry doesn’t do anything like the number of corsages he did when he started in the business back in the late sixties. To tell the truth, corsages were old-fashioned even then, relics from the thirties and forties. How’s a woman supposed to button her coat over a corsage? And what if it doesn’t match her outfit? – actually, there’s an old florist’s law that says a corsage is doomed to be the wrong color, something women have always known, just as they know there’s no way to secure a corsage without at least a small fuss, not to mention permanent damage to their silk blouses. If a customer absolutely insists on going the corsage route, Larry encourages them to think about a small wrist arrangement he’s perfected, which is sturdy, attractive, and comfortable to wear.
He’s happy to give advice about prolonging the life of cut flowers, but warns his customers that they mustn’t have unrealistic expectations. Flowers are fragile, flowers are needy. There are people who put their flowers in dirty vases. You can actually see the green scum line from the last bunch. Would you drink out of that vase? No way. You want to put your flowers in a disinfected container; that’s all the magic white powder in the little envelope is – a disinfectant. Of course you’ve already cut your flowers with a knife and on an angle before putting them in water. Don’t expect dafs to go more than three days, though, no matter what you do to them and for them.
Poinsettias will start selling in a week’s time; Larry gets his delivered from Carmen, Manitoba, just an hour away. Then it’s Valentine’s Day, then your Easter lilies – they come from Carmen too. Mother’s Day is crazy, the biggest day of the year, and right after that you’re into graduation tributes, retirements, and a spate of summer weddings. It’s a funny business with its ups and downs, but Larry’s grateful for the way the main holidays are strung out over the year. He’s always hearing about photo opportunities, but what about flower opportunities? They come and they go; they keep him buoyed up and alive and working, and he welcomes the noise of daily bustle in his life.
When Viv first left, she phoned the store occasionally to see how business was going. After a while, though, she stopped checking in. Larry’s heard somewhere that she dropped out of the social work program and was selling flowers in a corner of a Safeway in North Kildonan. He’s also heard that she’s pregnant and has quit work altogether. He hasn’t seen her for ages now, but he thinks of her at least once every day, and wonders what she’s doing at that very moment. He didn’t notice it happening at the time, but it must have been that they said goodbye to each other and really meant it, and maybe that’s the way it goes with friends you have from work.
Sometimes down at the store he’ll be holding a stemmed alstroemeria in his hand. More often than not, this will be the flamingo variety, his favorite, a rose color streaked with lavender, a floppy uneven head of fragile petals spread out to reveal a colony of tender stamen threads, their pinks, their golds. This flower, an herb really, started out as a seed way down in South America in Colombia. Some Spanish-speaking guy, as Larry imagines him, harvested the seed of this flower and someone else put it back into the earth, carefully, using his hands probably, to push the soil in place. They earned their daily bread doing that, fed their families, kept themselves alert. It’s South American rain that drenches the Colombian earth and foreign sunshine that falls on the first green shoots, and it all happens, it all works.
And what next? Larry supposes that Spanish-speaking laborers equipped with hoes arrive to beat back the weeds, but are they men or women who do this work? Maybe both, and maybe children, too, in that part of the world. Larry wonders what goes on in their heads when they perform this tedious and backbreaking work, and whether they have any idea when they pack the cut flowers into insulated boxes, laying the heads end to end, that these living things are about to be carried aboard enormous jet aircraft, handled gently, handled like the treasure they are, that they will be transported across international frontiers, sorted, sold, inspected, sold again, and that without noticeable wilting or fading – except to an expert eye – they will come to rest in the hands of a young Canadian male in an ordinary mid-continental florist establishment, bringing with them a spot of organic color in a white and frozen country (where the mercury has fallen overnight to twenty degrees below zero and where the windchill factor has risen steadily all day so that no living matter has any right to exist, but it does and here it is – this astonishing object he holds in his grasp).
Larry thinks how the alstroemeria head he cups in his hand has no memory and no gratitude toward those who delivered it to this moment. It toils not, neither does it spin. It’s sprouted, grown, bloomed, that’s all. But Larry, placing it beside a branch of rosy kangaroo paw from British Columbia and a spray of Dutch leather leaf and a spear or two of local bear grass, feels himself a fortunate man. He’s worried sick at the moment about the distance that’s grown between himself and his wife, about the night terrors that trouble his only child, about money, about broken or neglected friendships, about the pressure of too much silence, about whether his hedges will weather the winter, but he is, nevertheless, plugged into the planet. He’s part of the action, part of the world’s work, a cog in the great turning wheel of desire and intention.
The day will arrive in his life when work – devotion to work, work’s steady pressure and application – will be all that stands between himself and the bankruptcy of his soul. “At least you have your work,” his worried, kind-hearted friends will murmur, and if they don’t, if they forget the availability of this single consolation – well then, he’ll say it to himself: at least I have my –work.
CHAPTER FIVE Larry’s Words 1983 (#ulink_10ad635f-6bbd-5014-a0da-8446471d1405)
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Carol Shields
The Orange Prize-winning novel of Larry Weller, a man who discovers the passion of his life in the ordered riotousness of Hampton Court’s Maze.Larry and his naive young wife, Dorrie, spend their honeymoon in England. At Hampton Court Larry discovers a new passion. Perhaps his ever-growing obsession with mazes may help him find a way through the bewilderment deepening about him as – through twenty years and two failed marriages – he endeavours to understand his own needs. And those of friends, parents, lovers, a growing son.
Larry’s Party
Carol Shields
Contents
Cover (#u20c90ce4-4c6b-50aa-9b17-92c47e03a387)
Dedication (#ue7e9ba67-6b3c-5c22-89a6-b200280b14b1)
CHAPTER ONE: Fifteen Minutes in the Life of Larry Weller 1977 (#ube831d3a-7dc9-59d0-b0e9-c96f09d7e6d4)
CHAPTER TWO: Larry’s Love 1978 (#udcf35765-5026-5440-8bb2-a6d407b871bc)
CHAPTER THREE: Larry’s Folks 1980 (#u84746499-ad28-56f2-8e23-67558ef796b2)
CHAPTER FOUR: Larry’s Work 1981 (#u70881878-7389-55f7-a5e7-0badf6d520b9)
CHAPTER FIVE: Larry’s Words 1983 (#ub203eaa6-8c68-56f7-adb3-c4d83f1d29c0)
CHAPTER SIX: Larry’s Friends 1984 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN: Larry’s Penis 1986 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT: Larry Inc. 1988 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE: Larry So Far 1990 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN: Larry’s Kid 1991 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Larry’s Search for the Wonderful and the Good 1992 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE: Larry’s Threads 1993–4 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Men Called Larry 1995 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Larry’s Living Tissues 1996 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Larry’s Party 1997 (#litres_trial_promo)
Larry’s Party (#litres_trial_promo)
THE WORK OF CAROL SHIELDS (#litres_trial_promo)
Carol Shields: The Stone Diaries (#litres_trial_promo)
Carol Shields: Unless (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher
For Joseph, Nicholas, and Sofia (#ulink_c4ee0078-756c-5d5e-a822-af7711840c0b)
With thanks to a few men who have offered suggestions in the writing of this book: David Arnason, Tommy Banks, Tony Giardini, Jack Hodgins, Robin Hoople, Don Huband, Steve Hunt, Dayv James-French, the late Jim Keller, Joseph Krotz, Jake MacDonald, Brian MacKinnon, Don McCarthy, Bill Neville, Mark Morton, Doug Pepper, Gord Peters, John Ralston Saul, Donald Shields, John Shields, Ray Singer, Harry Strub and Max Wyman.
Thanks, too, to Maggie Dwyer and Jane Gralen and to the staff at the Winnipeg Public Library.
What is this mighty labyrinth – the earth, But a wild maze the moment of our birth?
(“Reflections on Walking in the Maze at Hampton Court” British Magazine, 1747)
CHAPTER ONE Fifteen Minutes in the Life of Larry Weller 1977 (#ulink_ae13697f-8871-57af-99d1-9a6af67d7ed4)
By mistake Larry Weller took someone else’s Harris tweed jacket instead of his own, and it wasn’t till he jammed his hand in the pocket that he knew something was wrong.
His hand was traveling straight into a silky void. His five fingers pushed down, looking for the balled-up Kleenex from his own familiar worn-out pocket, the nickels and dimes, the ticket receipts from all the movies he and Dorrie had been seeing lately. Also those hard little bits of lint, like meteor grit, that never seem to lose themselves once they’ve worked into the seams.
This pocket – today’s pocket – was different. Clean, a slippery valley. The stitches he touched at the bottom weren’t his stitches. His fingertips glided now on a sweet little sea of lining. He grabbed for the buttons. Leather, the real thing. And something else – the sleeves were a good half inch longer than they should have been.
This jacket was twice the value of his own. The texture, the seams. You could see it got sent all the time to the cleaners. Another thing, you could tell by the way the shoulders sprang out that this jacket got parked on a thick wooden hanger at night. Above a row of polished shoes. Refilling its tweedy warp and woof with oxygenated air.
He should have run back to the coffee shop to see if his own jacket was still scrunched there on the back of his chair, but it was already quarter to six, and Dorrie was expecting him at six sharp, and it was rush hour and he wasn’t anywhere near the bus stop.
And – the thought came to him – what’s the point? A jacket’s a jacket. A person who patronizes a place like Cafe Capri is almost asking to get his jacket copped. This way all that’s happened is a kind of exchange.
Forget the bus, he decided. He’d walk. He’d stroll. In his hot new Harris tweed apparel. He’d push his shoulders along, letting them roll loose in their sockets. Forward with the right shoulder, bam, then the left shoulder coming up from behind. He’d let his arms swing wide. Fan his fingers out. Here comes the Big Guy, watch out for the Big Guy.
The sleeves rubbed light across the back of his hands, scratchy but not too scratchy.
And then he saw that the cuff buttons were leather too, a smaller-size version of the main buttons, but the same design, a sort of cross-pattern like a pecan pie cut in quarters, only the slices overlapped this little bit. You could feel the raised design with your finger, the way the four quadrants of leather crossed over and over each other, their edges cut wavy on the inside margin. These waves intersected in the middle, dived down there in a dark center and disappeared. A black hole in the button universe. Zero.
Quadrant was a word Larry hadn’t even thought of for about ten years, not since geometry class, grade eleven.
The color of the jacket was mixed shades of brown, a strong background of freckled tobacco tones with subtle orange flecks. Very subtle. No one would say: hey, here comes this person with orange flecks distributed across his jacket. You’d have to be one inch away before you took in those flecks.
Orange wasn’t Larry’s favorite color, at least not in the clothing line. He remembered he’d had orange swim trunks back in high school, MacDonald Secondary, probably about two sizes too big, since he was always worrying at that time in his life about his bulge showing, which was exactly the opposite of most guys, who made a big point of showing what they had. Modesty ran in his family, his mum, his dad, his sister, Midge, and once modesty gets into your veins you’re stuck with it. Dorrie, on the other hand, doesn’t even shut the bathroom door when she’s in there, going. A different kind of family altogether.
He’d had orange socks once too, neon orange. That didn’t last too long. Pretty soon he was back to white socks. Sports socks. You got a choice between a red stripe around the top, a blue stripe, or no stripe at all. Even geeks like Larry and his friend Bill Herschel, who didn’t go in for sports, they still wore those thick cotton sports socks every single day. You bought them three in a pack and they lasted about a week before they fell into holes. You always thought, hey, what a bargain, three pairs of socks at this fantastic price!
White socks went on for a long time in Larry’s life. A whole era.
Usually he didn’t button a jacket, but it just came to him as he was walking along that he wanted to do up one of those leather buttons, the middle one. It felt good, not too tight over the gut. The guy must be about his own size, 40 medium, which is lucky for him. If, for example, he’d picked up Larry’s old jacket, he could throw it in the garbage tomorrow, but at least he wasn’t walking around Winnipeg with just his shirt on his back. The nights got cool this time of year. Rain was forecast too.
A lot of people don’t know that Harris tweed is virtually waterproof. You’d think cloth this thick and woolly would soak up water like a sponge, but, in actual fact, rain slides right off the surface. This was explained to Larry by a knowledgeable old guy who worked in menswear at Hector’s. That would be, what, nine, ten years ago, before Hector’s went out of business. Larry could tell that this wasn’t just a sales pitch. The guy – he wore a lapel button that said “Salesman of the Year” – talked about how the sheep they’ve got over there are covered with special long oily hair that repels water. This made sense to Larry, a sheep standing out in the rain day and night. That was his protection.
Dorrie kept wanting him to buy a khaki trenchcoat, but he doesn’t need one, not with his Harris tweed. You don’t want bulk when you’re walking along. He walks a lot. It’s when he does his thinking. He hums his thoughts out on the air like music; they’ve got a disco beat: My name is Larry Weller. I’m a floral designer, twenty-six years old, and I’m walking down Notre Dame Avenue, in the city of Winnipeg, in the country of Canada, in the month of April, in the year 1977, and I’m thinking hard. About being hungry, about being late, about having sex later on tonight. About how great I feel in this other guy’s Harris tweed jacket.
Cars were zipping along, horns honking, trucks going by every couple of seconds, people yelling at each other. Not a quiet neighborhood. But even with all the noise blaring out, Larry kept hearing this tiny slidey little underneath noise. He’d been hearing it for the last couple of minutes. Whoosh, wash, whoosh, wash. It was coming out of the body of Larry J. Weller. It wasn’t that he found it objectionable. He liked it, as a matter of fact, but he just wanted to know what it was.
He whooshed past the Triple Value Store, past the Portuguese Funeral Home, past Big Mike’s where they had their windows full of ski equipment on sale. The store was packed with people wearing spring clothes, denim jackets, super-flare pants, and so on, but they were already thinking ahead to next winter. They had snow in their heads instead of a nice hot beach. That’s one thing Larry appreciates about Dorrie. She lives in the moment. When it’s snowing she thinks about snow. When it’s spring, like right now, she’s thinking about getting some new sandals. That’s what she’s doing this very minute: buying sandals at Shoes Express, their two-for-one sale. Larry knows she’s probably made up her mind already, but she told him she’d wait till he got to the store before buying. She wants to make sure Larry likes what she decides on, even though sandals are just sandals to him. Just a bunch of straps.
Dorrie knows how to stretch money. She saves the fifty-cents-off coupons from Ponderosa – which’ll give you a rib eye steak, baked potato and salad, all for $1.69. Or she’ll hear a rumor that next week shoe prices are going to get slashed double. So she’ll say to the guy at Shoes Express, “Look, can you hold these for me till next Wednesday or Thursday or whatever, so I can get in on the sale price?”
It comes to Larry, what the noise is. It’s the lining of his jacket moving back and forth across his shoulders as he strolls along, also the lining material sliding up and down against his shirt-sleeves. He can make it softer if he slows down. Or louder if he lifts his arm and waves at that guy across the street that he doesn’t even know. The guy’s waving back, he’s trying to figure out who Larry is – hey, who’s that man striding along over there, that man in the very top-line Harris tweed jacket?
Actually no one wears Harris tweed much anymore. In fact, they never did, no one Larry ever knew. It’s vintage almost, like a costume. What happened was, Larry was about to graduate from Red River College (Floral Arts Diploma), just two guys and twenty-four girls. The ceremony was in the cafeteria instead of the general-purpose room, and dress was supposed to be informal. So what’s informal? Suits or what? The girls ended up wearing just regular dresses, and the two guys opted for jackets and dress pants.
Larry and his mother went to Hector’s, which she swears by, and that’s where they found the Harris tweed, this nubby-dubby wool cloth, smooth and rough at the same time, heavy but also light, with the look of money and the feel of a grain sack, and everywhere these soft little hairs riding on top of the weave. The salesman said: “Hey, you could wear that jacket to a do at the Prime Minister’s.” Larry had never heard of Harris tweed, but the salesman said it was a classic. That it would never go out of style. That it would wear like iron. Then his mother chimed in about how it wouldn’t show the dirt, and the salesman said he’d try real hard to get them twenty percent off, and that clinched it.
Larry wears the Harris tweed to Flowerfolks almost every day over a pair of jeans, and it’s hardly worn out at all. It never looks wrinkled or dirty. Or at least it didn’t until today when Larry put on this other jacket by mistake. So! There’s Harris tweed and Harris tweed, uh-huh.
It was an accident how Larry got into floral design. A fluke. He’d been out of school for a few weeks, just goofing off, and finally his mother phoned Red River College one day and asked them to mail out their brochure on the Furnace Repair course. She figured everyone’s got a furnace, so even with the economy up and down, furnaces were a good thing to get into. Well, someone must have been sleeping at the switch, because along came a pamphlet from Floral Arts, flowers instead of furnaces. Larry’s mother, Dot, sat right down in the breakfast nook and read it straight through, tapping her foot as she turned the pages, and nodding her head at the ivy wallpaper as if she was saying, yes, yes, floral design really is the future.
Larry’s father, though, wasn’t too overwhelmed. Larry could tell he was thinking that flowers were for girls, not boys. Like maybe his only son was a homo and it was just starting to show. In the end, he did come to Larry’s graduation in the cafeteria but he didn’t know where to look. Even when Mrs. Starr presented Larry with the Rose Wreath for having the top point average, Larry’s father just sat there with his chin scraping the floor.
Larry was offered a job right off at Flowerfolks, and he’s been there ever since. Last October he got to do the centerpieces for the mayor’s banquet. It was even on television, Channel 13. You saw the mayor standing up to give his speech and there were these sprays of wheat, eucalyptus branches, and baby orchids right there on the table. Orchids! So much for your average taxpayer. But Flowerfolks has a policy of delivering their flowers to hospital wards if their clients don’t want them afterwards, so it’s really not a waste. They’re a chain with a social conscience, and also an emphasis on professionalism. They like the employees to look good. Shoulder-length hair’s okay for male staff, but not a quarter inch longer. A tie’s optional, but jackets are required. That’s where the Harris tweed comes in.
Larry can’t help thinking how this new, new jacket will knock their eyebrows off down at work.
Or maybe not, maybe they won’t even notice. He hadn’t noticed himself when he picked it up, so why should they? What happened was he went up to the counter to order his cappuccino. Not that he had to order it. He takes the same thing every day, a double cappuccino. He used to go to a bar for a few beers after work, but Dorrie got worried about all the booze he was soaking up. She was convinced his brain cells were getting killed off. One by one they were going out, like Christmas lights on a string, only there weren’t any replacements available.
“Why don’t you switch to coffee?” she said, and that’s when Larry started dropping into Cafe Capri, which is just around the corner from Flowerfolks. A nothing place, but they’ve brought cappuccino to this town. Nobody knew what it was at first, and some people, like Larry’s folks, still don’t. Larry’s tried it, and now he’s on a streak with double cappuccinos. They start making it when they see him come through the door at five-thirty.
He likes to put on his own cinnamon. He likes it spread out thin across the entire foam area, not just sitting in a wet clump in the middle. You take the shaker, hold it sideways about two inches to the right of the cup and tap it twice, lightly. A soft little cinnamon cloud forms in the air – you can almost see it hanging there – and then the little grains drift down evenly into the cup. Total coverage. Like the dust storm in Winnipeg last summer, how it coated every ledge and leaf and petunia petal with this beautiful, evenly distributed layer of powdery dust.
Lots of coffee places have switched over to disposable plastic, but Cafe Capri still uses those old white cups and saucers with the green rims. You put one of those cups up to your mouth and the thickness feels exactly right, the same dimensions as your own tongue and lips. You and your cup melt together, it’s like a kiss. Customers appreciate that. They’re so grateful for regular cups and saucers that they carry their own empties up to the counter on their way out. That’s what Larry must have done. Taken his cup back up, put his fifty-five cents by the cash, and picked up a jacket from the chair. Only it was someone else’s chair. Or maybe the other guy had already made off with Larry’s jacket at that point. A mistake can work both ways. Larry was probably busy thinking about meeting Dorrie, about the movie they were going to see that night, Marathon Man, their third time, and then coming back to her place after, his prick stirring at the thought.
When they first started going together they’d be lying there on top of her bed and she’d say, “Let’s fuck and fuck and fuck forever.”
“Do you have to say that?” Larry said to her after he’d known her a couple of months. “Can’t you just say ‘making love'?”
She got her hurt look. Parts of her face tended to lose their shape, especially around her mouth. “You say ‘fuck,'” she said to Larry. “You say it all the time.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Come off it. You’re always saying ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck that.'”
“Maybe. Maybe I do. But I don’t say it literally.”
“What?” She looked baffled.
“Notliterally.”
“There you go again,” she said, “with those college words.”
Larry stared at her. She actually thinks flower college is college.
It was sort of a mistake the way they got together. Larry had taken another girl to a Halloween party at St. Anthony’s Hall. She, the other girl, had a pirate suit on, with a patch over the eye, a sword, the whole thing. And she’d made herself a moustache with an eyebrow pencil or something. That bothered Larry, turning his head around quick, and looking into the face of a girl wearing a moustache. A costume is supposed to change you, but you can go too far. Larry was a clown that night. He had the floppy shoes and the hat and the white paint on his face, but he’d skipped the red nose. Who’s going to score points with a red nose? There was another girl, Dorrie, at the table who’d come with her girlfriends. She was dressed like a Martian, but only a little bit like a Martian. You got the general idea, but you didn’t think when you were dancing with her that she was some weird extraterrestrial. She was just this skinny, swervy, good-looking girl who happened to be wearing a rented Martian suit.
“You in love with this Dorrie?” That’s what Larry’s father asked him a couple of months ago. They were sitting there in the stands. As usual the Jets were winning. Everyone around them was cheering like crazy, and Larry’s father said to Larry, not quite turning his face: “So, you in love with this girl? This Dorrie person?”
“What?” Larry said. He had his eyes on the goalie all alone out there on the ice, big as a Japanese wrestler in his mask and shin pads, putting on a tap-dance show while the puck was coming down the ice.
“Love,” Larry’s father said. “You heard me.”
“I like her,” Larry said after a few seconds. He didn’t know what else to say. The question set a flange around his thoughts, holding back his recent worrying days and nights, keeping them separate from right-now time.
“But you’re not in love?”
“I guess not.”
“You just like her?”
“Yes. But a lot.”
“You’re twenty-six years old,” Larry’s father said. “I married Mum when I was twenty-five.”
Like a deadline’s been missed, that was his tone of voice.
“Yeah,” Larry said. “Twenty-six years old, and the kid’s still living at home!”
He felt his bony face fall into confusion. And yet he loved this confusion, it was so unexpected, so full of thrill and danger. Love, love.
“Nothing wrong with living at home,” Larry’s father said, huffing a little, looking off sideways. “Did I say there was anything wrong with that?”
Larry was running this conversation through his head while he walked along Notre Dame Avenue in his stolen Harris tweed jacket, seeing himself in his self’s silver mirror. The fabric swayed around him, shifting and reshifting on his shoulders with every step he took. It seemed like something alive. Inside him, and outside him too. It was like an apartment. He could move into this jacket and live there. Take up residence, get himself a new phone number and a set of cereal bowls.
That’s when he realized he was in love with dopey smart Dorrie. In love. He was. He really was. Knowing it was like running into a wall of heat, his head and hands pushing right through it. This surprised him, but not completely. You can fall in love all by yourself. You don’t have to be standing next to the person; you can do it alone, walking down a street with the wind blowing in your face, a whole lot of people you don’t even know going by and they’re kind of half bumping into you but you don’t notice because you’re in a trancelike state. He forgot, suddenly, how Dorrie had this too-little face with too much hair around it and how he always used to get turned on by girls with bigger faces and just average hair size.
He looked at his watch, worried. He knew she’d still be standing there, though, next to the cash with her arms full of shoes and she’d be pissed off for about two seconds and then she’d get an eyeful of Larry’s jacket and before you knew it she’d be rubbing her hands up and down the cloth and fingering the buttons.
The problem, though, was tomorrow. Larry and his new jacket weren’t going to make it tomorrow. He could go to work in this jacket, but no way could he go back to the Capri at five o’clock. They’d grab him the minute he walked in. Hey, buddy, there’s a call out for that jacket. That jacket’s been reported.
Wait a minute, it’s all a mistake.
A mistake that led to another mistake that led to another. People make mistakes all the time, so many mistakes that they aren’t mistakes anymore, they’re just positive and negative charges shooting back and forth and moving you along. Like good luck and bad luck. Like a tunnel you’re walking through, with all your pores wide open. When it turns, you turn too.
Larry remembers seeing a patient in the Winnipeg Chronic Care Unit when he delivered the flowers after the mayor’s banquet. This guy didn’t have any arms or legs, just little buds growing out of his body. He was one bad mistake, like a human salt shaker perched there on the edge of a bed. Larry, set the flowers down on the table next to him, and the guy leaned over a couple of inches and brushed them with his forehead, then he smelled them, then he stuck his tongue out and licked the leaves and petals, all the while giving Larry a look, almost a wink but not quite. Larry took a lick too, lightly. What he found was, eucalyptus tastes like horse medicine. And orchids don’t taste at all.
The sun was dipping low, and Larry was at the corner now, only half a block from Shoes Express. There was a great big rubbish receptacle standing there with a sign on it: Help Keep Our City Clean.
Larry unbuttoned the Harris tweed jacket, slipped it off fast and rolled it up in a sweet little ball. He stuffed it into the rubbish bin. He had to cram it in. He didn’t know if he was making a mistake or not, getting rid of that jacket, and he didn’t care. The jacket had to go.
And that’s when he really knew how cold the wind had got. It puffed his shirt-sleeves up like a couple of balloons, so that all of a sudden he had these huge brand-new muscles. Superman. Then it shifted around quick, and there he was with his shirt pressed flat against his arms and chest, puny and shrunk-up. The next minute he was inflated again. Then it all got sucked out. In and out, in and out. The windiest city in the country, in North America. It really was.
There were plenty of eyes on him, he could feel them boring through to his skin. In about two minutes some guy was going to pull that Harris tweed jacket out of the garbage and put it on. But by that time Larry would be around the corner, walking straight toward the next thing that was going to happen to him.
CHAPTER TWO Larry’s Love 1978 (#ulink_f5c18d5e-ec4b-5b03-8ef4-35d57451b841)
On a Wednesday in winter Larry walked over to a barber shop on Sargent Avenue and asked for a cut. “Just a regular cut,” he told the barber in an unsmiling, muttering tone of voice that was altogether unlike his usual manner. This was after a decade of having shoulder-length hair. He came out of the barber shop half an hour later with hair that was short around the ears and cropped close at the neck. Even the color seemed different – darker, denser, and without shadows, a color hard to put a name to.
He was shivery with cold for hours after his haircut, lonely for his hair, shrunken in his upper body, but he also felt stronger, braver. The new look made him want to bunch his fists like a prizefighter or cross his arms over his chest. He stood in front of the bathroom mirror working on new expressions, moving his mouth and eyebrows around, and trying to settle on something friendly.
Vivian and Marcie who work with Larry at Flowerfolks were both bursting with compliments. Vivian, the store manager, said the new cut made him look “younger and healthier,” and that started Larry wondering about how he’d been looking lately. He was only twenty-seven, which was not really old enough to show up on his face and body – or was it? His own opinion was that he was in pretty fair shape what with all the walking he did to and from work, plus the weekend hikes out at Birds Hill with his friend Bill Herschel. Marcie chimed in then about how the new hairstyle made him look more “with-it” “It’s 1978,” she said. “The sixties are over.”
What would she know, Larry thought – she was only a kid, seventeen, eighteen.
Larry, at twenty-seven, still lived with his parents, Dot and Stu, in their bungalow on Ella Street, but this was his last week; he was set to move out on Friday, at long last. Both Dot and Stu approved of their son’s haircut. Not that they jumped up and down and waved their arms. It was more a case of pretend nonchalance. “About bloody time,” Larry’s father said, and started in about the number of times he’d had to open the bathtub drain and clean out all the hair and muck. “Why, you’re handsome as can be,” Dot said, reaching out and testing the flat of her hand against the new springiness of Larry’s hair. It had been some time since she’d touched the top of her son’s head, years in fact, and now it was like she couldn’t stop herself. “If this is Dorrie’s influence,” she said, “then I say more power to her.”
On Friday afternoon – blizzards, high winds – Larry and his folks, and his girlfriend, Dorrie, and her family, went downtown to the Law Courts and got married. Dorrie (Dora) Marie Shaw and Laurence John Weller became the Wellers, husband and wife. And on Saturday morning the bridal couple boarded an Air Canada jet for London, England.
Most of the passengers on the plane were wearing jeans and sweaters, but Dorrie had chosen for her travel outfit a new rose-colored polyester blend suit. Now she regretted it, she told Larry. The suit’s straight skirt was restrictive so that she couldn’t relax and enjoy the trip, and she worried about the hard wrinkles that had formed across her lap. She should have invested in one of those folding travel irons she’d seen on sale. And she’d been a dope not to bring along some spot-lifter for the stain on her jacket lapel. By the time they got to England it would be permanently set. They put dye in airplane food, coloring the gravy dark brown so it looked richer and more appetizing. One of the salesmen at Manitoba Motors, where she works, told her about it. He also told her not to drink carbonated drinks on the flight because of gas. People pass a lot of gas on planes, he’d informed her. It had to do with air pressure. Also, one alcoholic drink on land equals three in the air. This is important information.
If only someone had filled her in about what to wear for a trip like this. She’d never been on a plane before – neither had Larry for that matter – but somehow she’d got the idea that air travel was dressy, especially if you were headed for an international destination, such as London, England. She was all for being casual, as she told Larry, she loved comfortable clothes, he knew that, but wouldn’t you think people would make an effort to look nice when they went somewhere important?
“Not everyone’s on their honeymoon,” he reminded her.
And that was the moment they heard a special announcement over the P.A. system, the pilot’s chuckly, good-sport voice coming at them from the cockpit. “Ladies and gents, we thought you’d like to know we’ve got a brand-new married couple aboard our flight today. How about a round of applause, everyone, for Mr. and Mrs. Larry Weller of Winnipeg, Manitoba.”
A stewardess was suddenly standing next to the bride and groom with a bottle of champagne and two glasses and also a corsage to pin on Dorrie’s shoulder, compliments of Air Canada.
“Ohh!’ Dorrie gave a little shriek. She glowed bright pink. She squirmed in her seat with pleasure. “This is fabulous. How did you know? Baby roses, I love baby roses, and, look, they match my outfit. It’s perfect.”
“I almost died of embarrassment,” Dorrie would tell Larry’s mother two weeks later, back home in Winnipeg. “I bet you anything I was blushing from head to foot. Everyone was just staring at the two of us, and then they started cheering and clapping and peering around their seats at us or standing up so they could see who we were and what we looked like. Was I ever glad I had my new pink outfit on. And Larry with his hair restyled. The newly-weds!”
The champagne sent Dorrie straight to sleep, her feet tucked up under her on the seat, and her head flopped over on Larry’s shoulder. The sweet perfume of the roses, which were already darkening, got stirred in with the drone of voices and the dimmed cabin lights and the steady, sleepy vibrations of the plane as it nosed through the night sky.
A little drunk, stranded between the old day and the new, between one continent and another, Larry felt the proprietorial pleasure of having a hushed and satisfied companion by his side. He and Dorrie had boarded the plane under a weight of anticlimax, worn out after the wedding and the wedding lunch at the Delta and from moving his things over to Dorrie’s apartment. And they were hollowed out too – that’s how it felt – after a long, ecstatic night of sex, then the alarm clock going off at five-thirty, the last-minute packing to do, and Larry’s folks arriving, too early, to drive them out to the airport. It was a lot to absorb. But now this unexpected tribute had come to them, to himself and to his wife, Dorrie. A wife, a wife. He breathed the word into the rubbery patterned upholstery of the seat ahead of him – wife.
A daze of contentment fell over him, numbing and fateful, and he shook his head violently to clear his senses – but in the excitement of the last few hours he had forgotten about his recent haircut. Instead of the movement of soft hair flying outward and then landing with a bounce on his neck, that comforting silky familiar flick against his cheek, he sensed only the abruptness of his cold, clean face, how exposed it was beneath the tiny cabin light and how stupidly rigid.
An hour ago he had felt the tug of drowsiness, but now he pledged himself to stay awake. Grief was involved in this decision, and possibly a crude form of gallantry. Staying awake seemed a portion of what was expected of him, part of the new role he had undertaken a mere thirty-six hours earlier, standing in front of a marriage commissioner at the Law Courts with his family and Dorrie’s family looking on. “Marriage is not to be entered into lightly, but with certainty, mutual respect, and a sense of reverence.” These words had been part of the civil ceremony, printed on a little souvenir card he and Dorrie had been given.
He was a husband now, and his chattering, fretful Dorrie, no longer a girlfriend but a wife, was slipping down sideways against his arm, her face damp, pared-down, and sealed shut with sleep. He felt her shoulder lift on every third or fourth breath, lift and then fall in a catching, irregular way, as though her dreams had brought her up against a new, puzzling form of exhaustion, something she would soon be getting used to.
For her sake he would stay alert. He would keep guard over her, drawing himself as straight as possible in his seat without disturbing her sleeping body. He’d clamp his jaw firmly shut in a husbandlike way, patient, forbearing, and keep his eyes steady in the dark. He would do this in order to keep panic at a distance. All that was required of him was to outstare the image in the floating black glass of the window, that shorn, bewildered, fresh-faced stranger whose profile, for all its raw boyishness, reminded him, alarmingly, of – of who?
His father, that’s who.
“The very image of his mother,” people used to say about Larry Weller. Same blue eyes. The freckled skin. Dot’s gestures. That mouth.
Larry could not recall any mention of a resemblance to his father. He was his mother’s boy. Heir to her body, her intensity, and to her frantic private pleasures and glooms.
But now, twenty-seven and a half years into his life, he found that his father had moved in beneath his bones. That nameless part of his face, the hinged area where the jaw approaches the lower ear – he could see now what his flowing hair had hidden: that his father’s genes were alive in his body. Even his earlobes, their fleshiness and color. What was that color? A hint of strawberry that spread from the ears up the veins to the cheeks, his father’s cheeks, curving and surprisingly soft in a man’s hard face.
His father’s solid, ruddy presence. It arrived, sudden and shocking, and stayed with him throughout the two weeks of his and
Dorrie’s honeymoon. He met it each morning in the shaving mirror of the various modest hotels where they stayed. What kind of trick was this? He’d turn his eyes slowly toward the mirror, creeping up on his face, and there the old guy would be, larger and more substantial than a simple genetic flicker. His father’s flexible loose skin pressed up against the glass, a fully formed image, yawning, hoisting up his sleepy lids, dressed in his work clothes with the bus factory’s insignia on the pocket, Air-Rider, his broad shoulders and back bunching forward under Larry’s pajamas, and his large red hands reaching out, every finger scarred in one way or another from the upholstery work he did at the plant. And Larry could hear the voice too, his father’s high, querulous voice, with the Lancashire notes still in place after twenty-seven years in Canada.
Stu Weller. Master upholsterer. Husband of Dot, father of Midge and Larry.
It was Stu, with Dot’s blessing, who had the idea of giving the young couple a package tour of England. A wedding present, gruffly, unceremoniously offered. “We did the same for your sister when she got herself married.”
Never mind that Midge and her husband got divorced after two years. That Paul turned out to like men more than women.
Dorrie would have preferred a honeymoon in Los Angeles or maybe Mexico, somewhere hot, a nice hotel on the beach, but how can a person say no to free tickets, everything paid for, the plane fare, plus a twelve-day bus trip, Sunbrite Tours, breakfast and dinner, all the way up to the Pennines, then down to Land’s End, the very south-west tip of England, then back to London for the final three days. Stu and Dot had taken a similar package tour a few years back, a twenty-fifth anniversary present to themselves, a “journey back to our roots,” as Dot put it, though the real roots for both of them were in the industrial northern town of Bolton, not the green sprawling English countryside.
And when Larry and Dorrie got there it was green, unimaginably green – a bright variegated green that made Larry think of Brussels sprouts. Everyone back home had said: What? – you’re going to England in March? Are you crazy?
But here they were, carried over England’s green hills, ferried down into narrow green valleys, pulling up in the parking lots of green medieval villages where thick-towered castles threw greenish shadows across their squat Sunbrite coach (they had got over their terror of riding along on the left side of the highway with the traffic thundering straight at them).
The tour began in London and headed north-east. Rain, and then episodes of brilliant slanting sunshine accompanied them as they set off, then rain again, pelting the bare trees and hedges, bringing violent, pressing changes of light, as though the day itself was about to offer up an immense idea. They stopped at the picture-postcard town of Saffron Walden, where they were led on a quick march through the old twisted streets and served lunch in a tearoom called the Silken Cat. Dorrie was staunchly brave about the steak and kidney pie, leaving only a few polite scraps on her plate.
“Take notice of these ceiling beams,” their guide instructed. His name was Arthur, a stout, broad-faced man, a Londoner with a beer-roughened voice and a school teacher’s patient explaining manner. “Late fifteenth century. Possibly earlier.”
Dorrie copied this information into a little travel diary she pulled from her purse – “Late 15th century.”
Larry found his wife’s note-taking touching and also surprising. Where had that diary come from? Its cover was red leather. The narrow ruled pages were edged in gold. One of her girlfriends at Manitoba Motors must have given it to her, a going-away present, something she wouldn’t have thought of herself, not in a million years. It moved him to see his Dorrie in a pose of studentlike concentration, pausing over her choice of words, and keeping her writing neat and small. That she would busy herself recording this chip of historical information – late fifteenth century – record it for him, for their life together, stirred a lever of love in his heart.
But he remembered from school that fifteenth century really meant the fourteen-hundreds, how confusing that could be, and he wondered if Dorrie knew the difference and whether he should clarify the point for her. But no. She had already closed the diary and recapped her pen. Looking up at him, catching his eyes on her, she sent a kiss through the air, her small coral lips pushing out.
The first night the tour group was installed in a hotel in Norwich (sixteenth century, more beams) which was said to have been visited on at least one occasion by Edward VII and a “lady friend.” There were snowdrops blooming in the hotel’s front garden. Flowers in March. This took Larry a moment to register, the impossibility of flowers – but here they were. Back home in Canada it was twenty below zero. “Snowdrops,” Dorrie wrote in her diary when she was told what the flowers were called.
“Snowdrops are only the beginning,” Arthur told Larry and Dorrie. “You’ll be seeing daffodils before we’re done.”
The tour, it turned out, was only half booked. The other travelers were mostly retired New Zealanders and Australians, and an ancient deaf Romanian couple who never let go of each other’s hands. “Everyone’s so old,” Dorrie whispered to Larry. She had a gift for disappointment, and now she was wrinkling up her face. “Everyone’s old and fat except for us.”
It was true. Or close to being true. The eighteen passengers, men as well as women, shared the spongy carelessness of flesh that accompanies late middle age. The white permed heads of the wives, their husbands’ rosy baldness, framed faces that were, to Larry’s eyes at least, remarkably similar, softened, and blurred in outline, with their features melted to a kind of putty.
“I’ll bet we’re the only ones who screw all night,” Dorrie said, looking around. “Or screw at all.”
“Probably.” He smiled down at her.
“Notice I said screw and not fuck.”
“Congratulations.”
“I’m a married woman now. Respectable.”
“Ha.” Still smiling.
“Ha yourself.”
A white-haired husband and wife from Arizona had signed on to the tour. They were in England on their sabbatical leave. She, the wife, pronounced the word “sabbatical” as though the syllables were beads on a string. She explained to Dorrie, who had never heard of a sabbatical, that she and Dr. Edwards, her husband, had been to Thailand “last time” and before that to Berkeley in California. “We see these occasions as opportunities to replenish ourselves every seven years,” she said, “and take stock.”
The members of the tour group were wakened early each morning in their various freezing hotel rooms by a knock on the door, then Arthur calling out an upbeat “Morning!”
“Oh, God!” Dorrie came up from under the blankets.
Larry, shaving, washing, attempted to avoid his father’s eyes in the mirror, that ghostly presence floating beneath the steamed-over surface. He tried, through the lather, to blink the face away, and by the time he was fully dressed, two sweaters plus a jacket, he had mostly succeeded.
Invariably he and Dorrie were the last ones down to the hotel dining room, and every morning they were greeted by the same teasing cries of welcome. “Here come the honeymooners.” “Late again.” “Hail to the bride and groom!” Dorrie, ducking her head, her mouth puckering up with happiness and embarrassment, slid into a chair, while Larry accepted pats on the back or thumbs-up signs from the men.
There were hot plates of bacon and sausages and egg – although Dorrie, who was feeling “off,” made do with tea and toast. After that the tour members took their places on the coach and set off for the day’s destination. The New Zealanders and Australians – Heather and Gregory, Joan and Douglas, Marjorie and Brian, Larry never did get all their names straight – preferred to sit near the front of the bus where they bantered genially back and forth, observing silence only when Arthur drew their attention to points of interest. The Romanians sat at the back, the same seat every day. Larry and Dorrie found themselves in the middle of the coach – Dorrie next to the window, taking it as her rightful place since she was shorter than Larry, and because the window seat made her feel less queasy.
Dr. and Mrs. Edwards sat across the aisle from them, their maps and guidebooks spread out on their laps. “We don’t want to miss a thing,” Mrs. Edwards told them. She had her suspicions about Arthur. He was lazy, she said. He “recited” instead of “interpreting.” And he left items off the itinerary, a certain twelfth-century abbey that was definitely starred in their guidebook. She planned to write to Sunbrite’s head office about it when she got home.
“Now, now, Sweetheart,” Dr. Edwards said, patting her hand.
Dr. Edwards told Larry to call him Robin. He asked Larry what he did professionally, what his “field of endeavor” was. Larry told him about the Flowerfolks chain of florists back in Winnipeg, about how he’d got started in the business by taking a floral arts course at a local college. “Ah, botany!” Dr. Edwards said. “Or would that be horticulture?” He turned his body stiffly toward Larry, awaiting his reply. “A little of each,” Larry said, thinking. “But not quite.”
Dr. Edwards was a sociologist; population, urban patterns. A perfect dunce in the garden, he told Larry. Didn’t know a primrose from a lily. He’d never developed an interest. He hadn’t had the leisure. He and Mrs. Edwards lived in an apartment in Tucson, always had, so there wasn’t the need. But someday, when he retired, he might look into it. A hobby kind of thing. A person had to keep learning.
“Maybe I should take up sociology as a hobby,” Larry said. He meant it as a joke, but Dr. Edwards drew back, startled.
One afternoon the coach came to a halt beside a rutted field, the site of an old Roman town, its houses and temples and public spaces outlined on the grass with flat red bricks. Dorrie sat down on a corner of a house foundation and wrote in her diary: “Second Century.” She underlined the entry twice, and looked up at Larry, blankly. He could see it was hard for her to believe that this ruined site had once been a real town bursting with men and women.
She was cold, she told Larry. She’d had enough for one day. More than enough. Later Larry thought of that moment of exhaustion, Dorrie huddled on the foundations of an ancient Roman dwelling, how it seemed to split their honeymoon in two.
They were ushered as the days went by through castles, churches, through stately homes and crumbling tithe barns, and they tramped one morning, in a soft gray rain, along the top of the medieval walls of the city of York. That day, in a vast museum, they looked at coins and furniture and agricultural implements and, spread out in an immense glass case, more than fifty different kinds of scissors for trimming the wicks of lamps. History, it seemed to Larry, left strange details behind, mostly meaningless: odd and foolish gadgets, tools that had become separated from their purpose, whimsical notions, curious turnings, a surprising number of dead ends.
But it was outdoor England that took Larry by surprise and filled him with a kind of anxiety as the coach traveled further and further north. This anxiety he identified, finally, as a welling up of happiness. The greenness of England. It seemed there was not one part of this island that was not under cultivation, not one piece of land so exposed or unfavorable that something could not be made to take root and grow. Their guide, Arthur, joked that in the city of Leeds the birds wake up coughing, but even there, between the factories and dark smudged houses, Larry glimpsed the winter trunks of oaks and chestnuts. Leafless now, thrust up against smoking chimneys and blackened air, these trees seemed to Larry magisterial presences, rich in dignity and entitlement. He thought, mournfully, of the spindly, skinny poplars back home, the impoverished jack pines and stunted spruce, their slow annual growth in a difficult climate and their lopsided, unlovely shapes.
But it was the hedges of England, even more than the trees, that brought him a sense of wonderment. Such shady density, like an artist’s soft pencil, working its way across the English terrain. Why hadn’t his parents told him about this astonishing thing they’d grown up with? The hedges were everywhere. Out in the countryside they separated fields from pasture land, snaking up and down the tilted landscape, criss-crossing each other or angling wildly out of sight, dividing one patch of green from another, providing a barrier between cattle and sheep and flocks of geese. These hedges were stock-proof, Arthur explained, meaning sheep couldn’t slip through – they were every bit as effective as stone walls or barbed wire, and some of them had roots that were hundreds of years old.
In the towns the clipped hedges served as fences between houses, a stitching of fine green seams, and gave protection and privacy to tiny garden plots. Luxurious and shapely, they seemed pieces of tended sculpture, and now, late in a mild winter, their woody fullness was enveloped by a pale furred cloud of green. Buds in March. It seemed impossible. Young leaves unfolding.
Back home you hardly ever saw a hedge, or if you did it was only common spirea or the weedy, fernlike caragana, which was almost impossible to keep in trim. Larry’s father had surrounded the Ella Street house with a chainlink fence, top quality – that was years ago. Like the aluminum siding he’d put on top of the house’s old clapboard, it did the job and there was zero upkeep.
“What are all these hedges made of?” Larry asked Arthur, tossing back the hair he didn’t have anymore. “I mean, what kind of plants do they use?”
Arthur didn’t know. He knew history stuff, he knew his kings and queens, but he was a Londoner. He didn’t know green stuff.
In a brilliantly lit bookstore in Manchester Larry found a book about hedges. It was in a bargain bin. Over a hundred colored, badly bound illustrations instructed the reader on the varieties and uses of hornbeam, butcher’s broom, laurel, cypress, juniper, lime, whitethorn, privet, holly, hawthorn, yew, dwarf box, and sycamore. How to plant them, how to nourish them, and tricks to keep them trim and tidy. How certain plants can be intertwined with others to make a sturdier or more beautiful hedge; plashing, this artful mixing of varieties was called. Larry studied the pages of Hedges of England and Scotland while the coach made its way south, heading toward Devon and Cornwall. In a mere day or two he was able to distinguish from the bus window the various species. This easy mastery surprised him, but then he remembered how he had won the class prize back in his floral arts course, that one of his teachers had commented on his excellent memory and another on his observation skills.
The clues to identifying hedges lay in the density and distribution of thicket, the hue of the green foliage, and the form of the developing leaves. He pronounced the names out loud as he spotted them, and then he wrote them on the inside of the book’s cover. He’d forgotten in the last two or three years that he was like this, always wanting to know things he didn’t need to know.
Dorrie, seated next to him on the coach, had fallen into the doldrums. She was homesick, she said. And tired of being stuck with all these old biddies. Their teasing at breakfast, always the same old thing, it was getting on her nerves, it was driving her bananas.
Each day was greener than the one before. One morning, halfway through the two-week tour, Arthur leapt from his seat at the front of the coach and excitedly pointed out a long sloping field of daffodils. “Didn’t I promise you, ladies and gents, that we’d be seeing daffodils on this holiday!” Everyone crowded to the windows for a look, everyone except for Mrs. Edwards, who was sleeping soundly with her head thrown straight back and her mouth open.
Dorrie pulled her diary out of her purse and wrote a single word on the page: “Daffodils.” (Years later when Larry came across the little book, he found three-quarters of the pages empty. “Daffodils” was the final entry.)
On the same day that they saw the daffodils Dr. Edwards bought Larry a pint of beer – this was in a pub early in the evening, a ten minutes’ rest stop – and said, out of the blue, “Our sabbatical leave doesn’t actually come up for another two years, but Mrs. Edwards has a problem with prescription drugs, also over-the-counter drugs. It’s a terrible business and getting worse, and so it seemed a good idea for us to get away.”
Larry peered into the remains of his dark foamless beer. He wished he were standing at the other end of the polished bar where the New Zealand and Australian couples were laughing loudly and arguing about how many miles it was to the hotel in Bath. Full of rivalrous good feeling, they liked to joke back and forth, shouting out about the relative merits of kiwis and kangaroos, soccer teams and politics. Larry was drawn to their good spirits, but felt shy in their presence, especially the men with their bluff, hearty conviviality, so different from Dr. Edwards’ sly, stiff questioning.
And yet Dr. Edwards, Robin, had seen fit to divulge his unhappy situation to Larry, to a stranger young enough to be his son.
“She hides them. They’re so small, you see. The pills. So easy to conceal.”
“Is she addicted to them?” This seemed to Larry a foolish, obvious question, but he felt a response of some kind was required.
“Yes, addicted, of course. She can’t help herself.”
“That’s terrible. It must be awfully difficult –”
“It’s heartening to see a couple like yourself,” Dr. Edwards said, steering the conversation in a more positive direction. “Just starting off in your life, free as a pair of birds.”
Larry swallowed down the rest of his beer. “We’re going to have a baby,” he said. “My wife, I mean.”
Dr. Edwards received the news politely: “I see,” he said. His fingers twirled a button on his raincoat.
“Maybe you’ve noticed that she’s not feeling all that great,” Larry said. “In the mornings especially.”
“I hadn’t actually noticed.”
“Morning sickness.”
He and Dorrie had agreed that the baby was going to be a secret, at least until they got back home and told their families. It startled him now to hear the words running so loosely out of his mouth: the baby. He’d scarcely thought of “the baby” since leaving home. It was hard enough to remember he was a husband, much less a father. He had to remind himself, announcing the fact to the mirror every morning as he blinked away the ghost of his father’s face. Husband, husband – one husband face pushing its way through another, blunt, self-satisfied, but never quite losing its look of surprise.
Lately he’d found he could dispel the face by filling up his head with the greenness of hedgerows. It was like switching channels. Holly, lime, whitethorn, box, a string of names like the chorus of a popular song. He let their shrubby patterns press down on his brain, their smooth stiff dignified shapes and rounded perfection.
“We were going to wait and get married in June. But then – this happened – so here we are. March.”
He could see he had lost Dr. Edwards’ interest, and certainly the opportunity to offer comforting remarks about Mrs. Edwards’ problems.
“Well,” Dr. Edwards said. He spoke briskly now, more like a sportscaster than a sociology teacher. “Time we got back on the coach or we’ll be left behind.”
“We’ve been going together for over a year,” Larry explained. He hung on to his beer glass. “We’d already talked about marriage. We’d already made up our minds, so this didn’t make any real difference.”
Dr. Edwards’ face had pulled into a frown. He put his hand on Larry’s shoulder, bearing down heavily with his fingertips. “About my wife?” he said. “I’d appreciate it if you regarded what I said as confidential.”
“Why?” Dorrie yelled at Larry. “Why would you go and tell that old professor jerk about us?”
They were in Devon, in the town of Barnstable, the King’s Inn. Their room was at the front of the hotel overlooking a street of busy shops.
“I don’t know,” Larry said.
“We fucking decided we weren’t going to tell anyone. And don’t tell me not to say fuck. I’ll say fuck all I fucking want.”
“It just came out. We were talking, and it slipped out.”
“My mother doesn’t even know. My own mother. And you had to go and tell that jerk. Did you honestly think he wasn’t going to tell that snot of a wife? My ‘condition’ she said to me, I shouldn’t be having a beer in my ‘condition.’ And now the whole bus is going to know. I’ll bet you anything they already do.”
“What does it matter?”
“We’re on our honeymoon, that’s why it matters. We’re the lovey-dovey honeymooners, for God’s sake, only now the little bride person is pregnant.”
“No one even thinks like that anymore.”
“Oh yeah? What about your mother and father? They think like that.”
“How do you know what they think?”
“They think no one’s good enough for their precious little Larry, that’s what they think. Especially girls dumb enough to go and get themselves preggo.”
“They’ll get used to it.”
“Like it’s my fault. Like you didn’t have one little thing to do with it, right?” She sank down on the bed, moaning, her head rolling back and forth. “I can just see your dad looking at me. That look of his, oh boy. Like don’t I have any brains? Like why wasn’t I on the pill?”
“We’ll tell them as soon as we get back. It’ll take them a day or two, that’s all. Then they’ll get used to it.”
She turned and gave him a shrewd look. “What about you? When are you going to get used to it?”
“I am used to it.”
“Oh yeah, sure. I’m like sitting there on the bus, day after day, thinking up names. Girls’ names. Boys’ names. That’s what’s in my head. I like Victoria for a girl. For a boy I like Troy. Those kinds of thoughts. And you’re jumping up and down looking at bushes. Writing them down. That’s all you care about. Goddamn fucking bushes.”
He pulled her close to him, rocking her back and forth, patting her hair.
Startled, he recognized that pat, its cruel economy and monumental detachment. It was the sign of someone who was distracted, weary. A husband’s pat. He’d seen his father touch his mother in exactly the same way when she fell into one of her blue days. Only patting wasn’t really the same thing as touching. Patting a person was like going on automatic pilot, you just reached out and did it. There, there. Looking covertly at his watch. Almost dinnertime. Pat, stroke, pat.
It calmed her. She collapsed against him. They lay back on the bed, hanging on to each other limply and not saying anything. In ten minutes it would be time to go down to the dining room. He was ravenous.
A single day remained – and one more major historical site to take in: Hampton Court.
“This palace is unrivaled,” Arthur said, gathering his charges in a tight circle around him, “for its high state of preservation.” He pointed out Anne Boleyn’s Gateway, the Astronomical Clock (electrified two years ago), the Great Hall, the Fountain Court, the Chapel Royal with its intricately carved roof. “Note the quality of the workmanship,” he said. “What you behold is a monument to the finest artists and artisans in the land.”
The members of the tour group had taken up a collection, and the evening before they’d presented Arthur with a set of silver cufflinks. He had blinked when he opened the jeweler’s box, blinked and looked up into their waiting faces. “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” one of the Australians sang out, trying to get a round going. The man’s name was Brian. He was large, kindly, and elegantly bald. It was he who had taken up the collection for Arthur and passed around a thank-you card for everyone to sign. But he launched the song in a faltering key that no one could follow.
Surprisingly, it was Dorrie who moved forward and picked up the melody, drawing in the others with her strong, clear voice. She came from a musical family; her father sang baritone with the Police Chorale; her mother, after a few drinks, belted out a torchy rendition of “You Light Up My Life.” And Dorrie’s voice, despite her size, a mere one hundred pounds, was true and forceful.
For he’s a jolly good fellow
Which nobody can deny.
At that moment Larry loved her terribly. His helpless Dorrie. He froze the frame in his mind. This was something he needed to remember. The upward tilt of her chin as she risked a minor feat of descant on the final words. The way her hands curled inside her raincoat pockets, plunging straight forward into a second chorus, as though she’d been anointed, for a brief second or two, Miss Harmony of Sunbrite Tours.
Mrs. Edwards had wondered aloud about the appropriateness of cufflinks for Arthur. “He doesn’t look like a man who is particularly intimate with French cuffs,” she whispered to her husband and to Larry and Dorrie. But this morning, following Arthur into Hampton Court gardens, Larry glimpsed a flash of silver at Arthur’s wrist. “Before you,” Arthur said, pointing, “is the oldest surviving hedge maze in England.”
A what? Larry had never heard of a hedge maze.
“We’ve got three-quarters of an hour,” Arthur announced in his jolly voice. “If you get lost, just give us a shout and we’ll come and rescue you.”
Later, Larry memorized the formula for getting through the maze. He could recite it easily for anyone who cared to listen. Turn left as you enter the maze, then right, right again, then left, left, left and yet another left. That brings you to the centre. To get out, you unwind, turning right, then three more rights, then a left at the next two turnings, and you’re home free.
But on the day he first visited the Hampton Court maze, March 24, 1978, a young, untraveled floral designer from the middle of Canada, the newly married husband of Dorrie Shaw who was four months pregnant with his son Ryan – on that day he took every wrong turning. He was, in fact, the last of the tour group to come stumbling out of the maze’s exit.
Dorrie in her perky blue raincoat was standing, waiting. “We were worried,” she said to him crossly. Then, “You look dizzy.”
It was true. The interior of the maze had made him dizzy. It was very early in the morning, a frosty day, so cold he could see his breath as it left his mouth and widened out in the air. It seemed a wonder that the tender needlelike leaves could withstand such cold. The green walls rose about him, too high to see over. Who would have expected such height and density? And he hadn’t anticipated the sensation of feeling unplugged from the world or the heightened state of panicked awareness that was, nevertheless, repairable. Without thinking, he had slowed his pace, falling behind the others, willing himself to be lost, to be alone. He could see Mrs. Edwards ahead of him on the narrow path, walking side by side with Dorrie, their heads together, talking, and Mr. Edwards following close behind. Larry watched the three of them take a right-hand turn and disappear behind a bank of foliage.
He wondered exactly how lost a person could get. Lost at sea, lost in the woods. Fatally lost.
“You look lost in thought,” Vivian had said to him on his last day at Flowerfolks, the day before he and Dorrie were married. He had been in the back of the store, staring into a blaze of dyed blue carnations. “I was just thinking,” he told her, and she had floated him a lazy smile. “Communing with the merchandise?” she said, touching the sleeve of his jacket. “I do it all the time.”
He had been reflecting, while staring at the fringed blue petals, about love, about the long steady way his imperfect parents managed to love each other, and about his own deficient love for Dorrie, how it came and went, how he kept finding it and losing it again.
And now, here in this garden maze, getting lost, and then found, seemed the whole point, that and the moment of willed abandonment, the unexpected rapture of being blindly led.
In the distance he could hear a larky Australian accented voice – one of their own group – calling “This way, this way.” He shrank from the sound, its pulsating jollity, wanting to push deeper and deeper into the thicket and surrender himself to the maze’s cunning, this closed, expansive contrivance. He observed how his feet chose each wrong turning, working against his navigational instincts, circling and repeating, and bringing on a feverish detachment. Someone older than himself paced inside his body, someone stronger too, cut loose from the common bonds of sex, of responsibility. Looking back he would remember a brief moment when time felt mute and motionless. This hour of solitary wandering seemed a gift, and part of the gift was an old greedy grammar flapping in his ears: lost, more lost, utterly lost. He felt the fourteen days of his marriage collapsing backward and becoming an invented artifact, a curved space he must learn to fit into. Love was not protected. No, it wasn’t. It sat out in the open like anything else.
Forty-five minutes, Arthur had given them. But Larry Weller had lingered inside the green walls for a full hour.
“We were worried,” Dorrie said. Scolding.
He followed her into the coach for the ride back to London. “How could you get yourself so lost?” she kept asking. The next day they boarded a plane that carried them across a wide ocean, then over the immense empty stretches of Labrador and the sunlit cities and villages of Ontario, an endless afternoon of flight. Frozen lakes and woodlands spread beneath them, thinning finally, flattening out to a corridor of snow-covered fields and then the dark knowable labyrinth of tangled roadways and rooftops and clouds of cold air rising up to greet them.
A sweet soprano bell dinged for attention. Seat belts buckled, tables up, the landing gear grinding down, a small suite of engineering miracles carefully sequenced. Dorrie gave Larry’s hand an excited, distracted squeeze that said: almost home. They were about to be matter-of-factly claimed by familiar streets and houses and the life they’d chosen or which had chosen them.
Departures and arrivals: he didn’t know it then, but these two forces would form the twin bolts of his existence – as would the brief moments of clarity that rose up in between, offering stillness. A suspension of breath. His life held in his own hands.
CHAPTER THREE Larry’s Folks 1980 (#ulink_efbe6e57-d1bb-5fab-b785-2b66bb269cd3)
Shortly before Larry’s thirtieth birthday he managed to get enough money together for a down payment on a small house over on Lipton Street, a handyman special, just five rooms and a glassed-in front porch, and now he spends most evenings and weekends working on it. He and his wife, Dorrie, moved in two months ago, and ever since then she’s been after him to lay new tiles in the kitchen, and after that there’s the bathroom fixtures to replace, and maybe some ceiling insulation before winter comes along. A list as long as your arm. But this summer Larry’s been using every spare minute to work on the yard, sometimes with the help of his friend Bill Herschel, but more often alone. Might as well do it while the weather’s still good, Larry says. And he wants the whole yard closed in so Ryan can play out there next spring, unsupervised.
He’d be working at it today, only his folks have invited him and Dorrie and the baby over for the birthday festivities. Sunday dinner, opening his presents from the family, blowing out the candles, the usual. It’s 1980; he’s about to enter the decade of decadence, only he doesn’t know that yet, no one does; he only knows he feels the good hum of almost continuous anticipation in his chest, even though Dorrie griped all the way over to his folks’ place about how they were probably going to have a hot dinner, gravy and everything, when here it was, the bitch end of a sizzling day. Her own idea of hot weather fare is a big bowl of ice-cream and a glass of iced tea.
A brutal bored silence had fallen between them these last weeks.
A mere three years ago he was a young buck walking down a Winnipeg street in his shirt-sleeves. He remembers how that felt, no wife, no kid, no house, no yard. Now the whole picture’s changed, but that’s okay, especially his kid, Ryan. Another thing: he’s supposed to be sunk in gloom at the thought of turning thirty, but he isn’t. He’s unique and mortal, he knows that, and he’s got this sweet little babe of a house, and a yard that’s slowly taking shape, all its corners filling up with transplanted shrubs from the wholesaler down in Carmen. There’re some flowers too, and a few sweet peppers, but it’s mainly the shrubs he loves. Dorrie keeps calling them bushes, and he keeps having to correct her. “You’ve got shrub mania,” she says, but her lips smile when she’s saying it. “You want to be the shrub king of the universe.”
Maybe it’s true. Maybe he wants to make his yard a real shrub showplace. Somewhere Larry’s heard that almost everyone in the world is allowed one minute of fame in their lives, or maybe that’s one hour.
Stu Weller, Larry’s dad, got written up once in the weekend section of the Winnipeg Tribune on the subject of his corkscrew and bottle-opener collection, which included 600 items at the time of the interview, and has almost doubled since. Larry’s older sister, Midge, won a thousand dollars last year in the art gallery raffle – enough for a trip to Hawaii with a girlfriend – and she actually appeared on Channel 13 talking about how surprised she was, and how she didn’t usually waste money on raffle tickets unless it was for a good cause like expanding the gallery’s exhibition space or something.
Larry’s own moment of fame is still some years in the future, and that’s fine with him. He’s got enough on his mind these days, his young family – Dorrie, little Ryan – and his job at Flowerfolks, and his current preoccupation with transforming his yard. As for his mother, Dot, she’s had enough celebrity for a lifetime. Don’t even talk to her about being famous, especially not the kind of fame that comes boiling out of ignorance, and haunts you for the rest of your life. Dumb Dot. Careless Dot. Dot the murderer. Of course, that was a long time ago.
When Larry was a little kid his mother warned him about the dangers of public drinking fountains. “No one ever, ever puts their mouth right on the spout,” she said, “because they can pick up other people’s germs, and who knows what kind of disease you’ll get.”
This was bad news for Larry. At that age he liked to stand on tiptoe and press his lips directly on the cool silvery water spout, rather than trying to catch the spray in his mouth as it looped unpredictably upward. Besides, his mother’s caution didn’t make sense, since if no one ever touched the spout, how could there be any germs? He recalls – he must have been six or seven at the time – that he presented this piece of logic to his mother, but she only shook her headful of squashed curls and said sadly, wisely, “There will always be people in this world who don’t know any better.”
He pictured these people – the people who didn’t know any better – as a race of clumsy unfortunates, and according to his mother there were plenty of them living right here on Ella Street in Winnipeg’s West End: those people who mowed their lawns but failed to rake up the clippings, for instance. People who didn’t know any better stored cake flour and other staples in their original paper bags so that their cupboards swarmed with ants and beetles. They never got around to replacing the crumbling rubber-backed placemats from the Lake of the Woods with “The Story of Wood Pulp” stamped in the middle. That was the problem with people who didn’t know any better: they never threw things away, not even their stained tea-towels, not even their oven mitts with holes burnt right through the fingers.
People who didn’t know any better actually ate the coleslaw that came with their hamburgers, poking it out of those miniature pleated paper cups with their stabbing forks. Someone, their well-meaning mothers probably, told them they should eat any and all green vegetables that were put in front of them, not that there’s anything very green about coleslaw, especially when it’s been sitting in a puddle of wet salad dressing and improperly refrigerated for heaven only knows how many days. These people have never heard of the word salmonella, or if they have, they probably can’t pronounce it.
Whereas Dot (Dorothy) Woolsey Weller, wife of Stu Weller, mother of Larry and Midge, grandmother of Ryan, knows about food poisoning intimately, tragically. She was, early in her life, an ignorant and careless person, one of those very people who didn’t know any better and who will never be allowed, now, to forget her lack of knowledge. She’s obliged to remember every day, either for a fleeting moment – her good days – or for long suffering afternoons of gloom. “Your mother’s got a nip of the blues today,” Stu Weller used to tell his kids while they were growing up in the Ella Street house, and they knew what that meant. There sat their mother at the kitchen table, again, still in her chenille robe, again, when they got home from school, her hands rubbing back and forth across her face, and her eyes blank and glassy, reliving her single terrifying act of infamy.
Even today, August 17th, her son’s thirtieth birthday, she’s remembering. Larry knows the signs. It’s five-thirty on a Sunday afternoon, and there she is, high-rumped and perspiring in her creased cotton sundress, busying herself in the kitchen, setting the dinner plates on top of the stove to warm, as if they weren’t already hot from being in a hot kitchen. She’s peering into the oven at the bubbling casserole, and she’s floating back and forth, fridge to counter, counter to sink. Her large airy gestures seem to have sprung not from her life as wife and mother, but from a sunny, creamy, abundant girlhood, which Larry doubts she ever had. She smiles and she chats and she even flirts a little with her thirty-year-old son, who looks on, a bottle of cold beer in his hand, but he knows the old warnings. Her jittery detachment gives her away. She picks up a jar of pickles and bangs it hard on the breadboard to loosen the lid. She’s thinking and fretting and knowing and feeling sick with the poison of memory.
This my mother, Larry thinks, my sad soft mother. Most of her life has involved the absorbing of her grievous history, of trying to go forward when all this heaviness lies inside. One ancient mistake, one hour gone wrong, and now she pays and pays.
She’s a housewife, Larry’s mother, a maker of custard sauce, a knitter of scarves, a fervent keeper of baby pictures and family scrapbooks, but this is her real work: sorrowing, remembering. The loose shuttle of her pain flies back and forth so that sometimes she seems just fine, just like anyone else’s mother. Today she’s made Larry a lemon meringue pie for his birthday instead of a cake; she could have made it yesterday and kept it on the top shelf of the fridge just under the freezer section, but with her history she wouldn’t dream of taking a chance like that, and who could blame her? Her anxieties about food are built into the Weller family chronicle – as is Larry’s passion for lemon meringue pie. Dot makes her son a big one every year on his birthday, with a circle of birthday candles poking up through the golden-tipped meringue. A sight to behold.
There’ll be Lancashire hotpot too, that’s what’s bubbling away in the oven right now. It’s a simple oldtime recipe that Dot’s mother used to make on Saturday nights back in England: chunks of stewing lamb arranged across the bottom of a Pyrex casserole, then a layer of sliced potatoes, another of carrots, then more lamb, and all this topped with a handful of finely diced onions. Next you add plenty of salt, pepper, and parsley flakes, and a cup of Oxo, and bake covered for an hour and a half. Larry’s crazy about Lancashire hotpot, or at least he pretends he is, for the sake of his sad and perpetually grieving and remembering mother. Mum, he calls her; he always has. Americans say Mom or Ma. People in movies and books say Mother.
She’s set the dropleaf table in the living room for six, her best damask cloth and the good cutlery and china. There’ll be just the family, her loved ones, as she likes to call them, as though they were characters out of an obituary – her husband Stu, Larry, Dorrie, and little Ryan in his booster seat. Her daughter Midge is coming too, but here it is, almost time to sit down at the table, and she hasn’t turned up yet. Three years ago Midge kicked her husband out after receiving an anonymous note saying that Paul frequented a certain gay bar, and now she swears she’s never going to get married again. She says, with her eyes rolling upward, that she knew something was funny-bunny about him from day one.
Larry worries about his mum. She’s not getting out enough lately, hardly at all in fact, unless you call a trip to Sears’ mattress sale “getting out.” It also worries Larry that his mother frets so much about other people. She worries about Midge, that at the age of thirty-two she’s starting to get bitter, always sounding off like a regular women’s libber, and going on marches and so forth. She also worries about Larry and Dorrie, the way they’re half the time bickering, and Dorrie working full-time for Manitoba Motors instead of staying home with Ryan, who’s still in diapers at twenty-three months, and she worries about her husband who right this minute is in the bedroom putting on a clean sports shirt because she nagged him into it, and is in a bad mood. As a matter of fact, he’s done nothing but grumble all day, the heat, the mosquitoes, his lower back pain, not enough sugar in his afternoon coffee, the mess in the backyard because of the compost pile Larry’s talked him into, and now having to eat at the dropleaf table in the living room instead of the kitchen nook. So far he hasn’t even said happy birthday to Larry, to his own son.
She checks the oven, looks at the clock, glances out the kitchen window to see if Midge’s car is coming down the back lane. Where is that girl? Next she pours boiling water over the silver pie server in case of lurking germs, then sets it on a paper towel to dry. Immaculate. So’s the speckled linoleum. So is Dot’s cutlery drawer. In this house you would never see a tea-bag tossed wet and leaking into the sink, or a pile of coffee grounds. People who let a skin of mold accumulate on the hem of their shower curtain are not her kind of people. This is a woman who carries her meat home from the butcher’s and washes it at the sink. Larry is watching her rinse her hands under the tap, and at the same time he’s kicking his foot against the table leg the way he used to do when he was little. The upholstered breakfast nook where he sits has the wiped hygienic smell of on old marriage. He’s blowing a little tune into his empty beer bottle.
Is there room in the tilting, rotating world for a thirty-year-old man who sits blowing into a bottle? He thinks this, and so does his mother, who reaches over and takes it from him, not so much with an air of rebuke as with resolution, and places it under the counter. What deprivation, her expression asks, what injury has stalled her son at the age of thirty? Something’s been subtracted too soon, but what? And is it her fault?
Of course it’s her fault.
Worry, worry, a circle of worry. And these are her loved ones, these five. Her grumbling husband, her errant daughter, her baffling son, and in the living room her daughter-in-law Dorrie, whose neatness of body, whose sharpness of eye and chin and shoulder, is bent over the weekend paper, scouting the ads and cutting out dollars-off coupons, while little Ryan sits on the floor and plays with the paper scraps, tearing them into tiny flakes. This small and insufficient family. This is all Larry’s mother’s got to cushion her against the damage of her own life.
The history of Dot Weller, and how she killed her mother-in-law, came to Larry in small pieces, by installments as it were. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t know at least part of the story, and he’s not sure, in fact, if he’s ever been presented with a full account, start to finish, all at once.
In one of his mother’s albums there’s an old photograph of Larry himself taken at nine months. Little Larry wearing a white smocked nightgown is wedged into an old-fashioned wooden highchair which for some reason has been carried out of doors. Blurred trees and a suggestion of lawn fill in a background lit with a glare of ominous light that falls across the infant’s fine frizz of hair and on to the glossy wood of the chair. Can a head think when it’s that size? Can a baby’s face be this wise and unfoolable? His hands, which look like nothing so much as a pair of crimped shells, grip the edge of the highchair’s tray, and his expression is pulled into a knit of absorbed anguish. He can’t possibly know at this age, or can he, that a calamity has occurred in his mother’s life? And yet, the comprehending orbits of his soft eyes, the small roundness of his mouth, already hold a full level of bruising knowledge. He has a mother who cries in her sleep. A mother who’s missing the kind of cold, saving curiosity that would hold her steady after a tragic event and whose contagion of grief has spread to him. Through her milk, through her skin and fingertips.
Or it may have been, in the beginning, no more than a series of silences that accrued around certain topics, which in the life of his mother could not be approached openly. Looking back, Larry seems almost certain that the story, when it came, was presented through the agency of intense whispering toneless voices – but whose? his father’s? his sister’s? – and that behind the recital of events lay a sense of driving urgency: this was information that he was going to need in order to live in the Weller family, in order to walk around in the world. The calamity that occurred in the autumn of 1949, one year before he was born, was inescapable, housed as it was in the walls like a layer of formaldehyde insulation, an always present, tightly lashed narrative embracing everyone who lived under the family roof. And so Larry knows his mother’s suffering. He’s always known it, filling in around the known bits with his imagination. He would like to put his arms around her, and she would like this too. But he doesn’t know where to begin, doesn’t know if she knows that he knows or how much he knows or what weight he attaches to it. So he’s silent and she’s silent. He sits fiddling with his beer bottle, until it’s firmly taken from him, and she checks the clock for the umpteenth time, as if each ticking minute places an extra weight on her sadness.
Dot Weller was twenty-five years old at the time of the accident and married to young Stu Weller who worked as an upholsterer for British Railways in the northern town of Bolton. Their infant daughter Midge, short for Marjorie, had just taken her first steps, a happy little kid tottering from chair to chair, and chortling in tune with her acrobatic daring. The most contented baby in the world, everyone said. A perfect sweetie.
The family lived in a newish council house, four airy rooms and a tiny garden where in the summer Dot grew lettuce, radishes, carrots, blackcurrants, and a wavy row of runner beans. She would have preferred a patch of fine lawn and a bed of flowers – she was partial to lupines – but an anxious, learned frugality kept her concentration on what she and Stu and baby Midge could consume. The blackcurrants she made into a rather sour jam, since sugar was still rationed and hard to come by, and the runner beans she stewed up and preserved in sealed jars. This made her happy, gazing at her row of bottled fruit and vegetables, twelve pints in all, the beans blue-green in colour, gleaming from the pantry shelf.
Stu was down at the Works six days a week, but on Sundays he stayed at home and made morning tea for his pretty young wife and himself. The least he could do, he liked to say. He tossed little Midge in the air, read the Sunday Mirror straight through, and cleaned out the grates, and just before noon went up the road to the pub for a quick gin and tonic, which he fancied in those days to be a gentleman’s drink. After that he and Dot and their little dumpling of a daughter boarded a bus and crossed town to where his mother and dad lived in their two-up, two-down, and where a Sunday joint awaited them. These were happy days. Each of them felt the privilege of it. “But they ought to come to us for Sunday dinner the odd time,” Dot said. “It isn’t right, your mother doing all the work.”
She prevailed on them, and at last they agreed. The Sunday journey was reversed, Mum and Dad Weller crossing town one late October morning on the number 16 bus and arriving at the door drenched from cold rain, but cheerful, and ready for a hot meal. There was roast beef and mash and gravy, and a choice of Brussels sprouts or runner beans. There was horseradish sauce served in a little sweet-dish, a wedding gift. And for pudding a homemade sponge topped with Golden Syrup.
It was a blessing, people said afterward, that they didn’t all choose beans over sprouts. Only Mum Weller helped herself, and rather generously, to the beans. “And Dot here’s the one who bottled them,” said Stu, the proud young husband. “Have a little more, Mum, you haven’t made but half a dent.”
An hour later, drinking a cup of tea, the old woman complained of double vision, of having trouble swallowing. Nevertheless, Stu and his father bundled a sleepy Midge into her pram and wandered off to the stretch of waste ground by the railway yards, leaving Dot alone with her distressed mother-in-law. Dot offered more tea, but it was waved away. She produced a hot-water bottle and a blanket to fold over her mother-in-law’s trunky knees. Mum Weller rocked back and forth a few times, then groaned suddenly, and fell forward with a crash on to the hearth rug, her head missing by an inch the metal fender. Dot ran to her side, kneeling on the rug. Mother Weller’s head was twisted grotesquely to one side, and her face held a look of throttled purple. Dot remembers crying out, but doesn’t know what she said. (Probably help, help, but who was there to help?) And then she passed her hand back and forth before the dead woman’s eyes.
She was indeed dead. The young Dot had never seen a dead person, but she knew this bulky presence on her floor had passed to the other side, as folks said back then. There she lay, face down on the ash-strewn carpet, a heavy woman, stiffly corseted, and padded with layer upon layer of woolen clothes, her checked skirt immense across her buttocks and her knitted jumper rucked up. Her hips and calves were bunched clumsy and lifeless as meat beneath her, and the pink edge of her knickers obscenely revealed. A queerish smell of rubbish rose from the body. It can’t be, it can‘t be, Dot remembers thinking as she tugged at the inert figure, its solid, unmovable heft. Then a thought occurred to her: heart attack. The words formed in her head, bringing a rush of relief – so this is what happened! – and, even in the midst of her comprehension, she experienced a whiff, no more, of shameful self-congratulations, for she had recognized and named the phantom before her. She had been witness, moreover, to one of the body’s great dramas.
But it wasn’t a heart attack that brought on her mother-in-law’s cataclysmic end. Oh, if only it had been, if only! Mum Weller’s death – as was revealed later through laboratory testing – was caused by severe type C botulism. The source of the botulism was Dot’s stewed runner beans, inadequately sealed, insufficiently heated – the same beans that had been standing in their pretty glass jar for the last two months, as purely green and sweet as innocence itself.
Dot Weller is fifty-six now, and her husband Stu fifty-eight. Stu’s parents died in their mid-fifties, his mother from the botulism, and his father, two years later, from rage – though the death notice specified a massive stroke. His rage, closer to biblical wrath, had bloomed into existence on that terrible Sunday when his wife fell dead on the hearth rug, poisoned by her stupid imbecile of a daughter-in-law. Murder was the word Dad Weller used. Even, deliberate murder. He said as much to the reporter from the Manchester Evening News who sent a photographer to take a picture of the Wellers’ garden, catching in one corner the dark row of beans that had been the agent of evil. There was no reasoning with him, although he’d been all his life a reasonable man. His world had been cleft in two by calamity, and he refused to put down the finger of blame.
In the end that blaming finger drove Stu straight to the immigration office in Stockport, and soon after he brought his pregnant wife and child to Canada where, in fact, thousands of other English workers headed in the late forties. There were factory jobs to be had in Winnipeg. It was possible to aspire to a house and garden of one’s own, to buy a car in time, a washing machine, a refrigerator, to make a better life for the kids. And to escape the sourness of ugly scenes and family angers. When news came that the old man had died of a stroke, Stu didn’t trouble himself to go home for the funeral.
Larry knows the poison episode in all its tragic rhythms and reverberations. This is what it’s like to grow up with a bad chapter of someone else’s story, in the toxic glow of someone else’s guilt, a guilt that became a rooted sorrow. He’s had his fingers in the mouth of his mother’s sick grief and now it’s his; every crease and fold belong to him. He knows about the offered cup of tea and the hot-water bottle; his ears can hear the precise sound of the body thudding on the hearth rug; he sees the inky photograph in the newspaper and its headline: “Bolton Woman Poisons Mother-in-Law.” All this has entered the doors and windows of his childhood, without his really noticing. It was simply – there. Like the oxygen he breathed. Like a banked fire. And he can imagine even his mother’s most covert thoughts, that which could never be said: thank God little Midge refused the beans. And even: thank God I passed them up myself.
And for Larry, who was born just two months after his parents settled in Winnipeg, the flight from the home country has the flavor of Old Testament exodus. He finds it hard to believe. He looks at his solid, slow-moving parents and tries to imagine the force that urged them to gather up their possessions and voyage, sight unseen, to a new country. They were eight days on a rusty Greek liner, then three days by train to Manitoba. Dot Weller was sick every mile of the way, and she must have looked back over her shoulder more than once and wondered what she’d left behind and why. Catastrophe drove them out, catastrophe coupled with guilt that was cut like an incision on his mother’s brain. How were they to survive in the heat of a parent’s punishing anger?
When Larry thinks about his folks, this is the piece of their life he can never quite take in: that his father, out of love, out of the wish to protect his wife, would uproot himself, and turn his back on a guaranteed job, a snug house, his weekly gin and tonic, and all that was familiar, that he might have elected freedom or forgetfulness, but instead chose to witness his wife’s plodding, painful, affectless search for that thing that would pass as forgiveness. Larry glimpses something heroic at the heart of his obstinate and embarrassing father, who rescued his young wife, who stood by her. Stu Weller is a man who, without a gobbet of doubt, believes in bringing back the death penalty. He rattles on about welfare bums, and sometimes refers to blacks as nig-nogs, and maintains, somewhat illogically, that queers ought to be sterilized, the whole lot of them. Which is why it surprises Larry that his father has committed so manly and self-sacrificing an act, and he asks himself whether he could do the same for his wife Dorrie. Probably not. He admits his love will never be as pure as his father’s, and certainly not as good as the scripted golden love in his head.
Not that his parents, Stu and Dot, managed to blot out all recollection of the tragedy, far from it. Anything, even after all these years, will trip a switch in Dot’s head: the mention of Bolton, of food poisoning, of home preserving, of sponge cake, a reference to mothers-in-law, to hearth rugs, the specter of sudden death, the word beans – above all, the word beans, a substance banned from the Weller household and never, never spoken of. In all Larry’s thirty years he has not once tasted that treasonous vegetable.
Stu Weller loves his job. For thirty years now he’s worked as an upholsterer for a custom coach company in south Winnipeg, the largest of its kind in North America. He left school at fourteen, as soon as he legally could, and went straight on to the railways where he learned his trade. Right away he took to it, and it’s served him well. Switching from trains to buses, when coming to Canada, was easier than falling off a log, and he’s worked on some real beauties. A custom coach is a handmade object, that’s something most people don’t appreciate. You take a few basic sheets of metal, cut them, bend them, twist them, apply bracing and rivets, and there you’ve got something entirely different. Everything but the motor is built right on the Air-Rider factory floor, even the fuel tanks, even the decorative touches, which is where Stu Weller comes in.
It’s a fact that some of North America’s biggest and brightest names in the entertainment industry have ordered customized vehicles from Air-Rider, wondrous rolling homes and offices with white carpeting on the walls and Italian marble for flooring. A country-and-western singer – after a beer or two Stu Weller will drop the odd hint about who exactly this singer is – custom ordered a model with a bathroom floor that dropped open, bingo, to reveal a hot tub where the luggage compartment generally goes. A cool half-million dollars for that package. This same coach possessed a full kitchen with oak inlay cupboards and a hidden berth for the traveling cook. Last year Stu did the upholstery for a hospital coach, a traveling clinic for rural areas, and now he’s working on a coach for relocating prisoners, each seat transformed into a separate little jail cell with bars going right up to the ceiling. Slash-proof vinyl is what he’s installing at the moment, and the barest minimum of padding. Every order brings a new challenge. The floor supervisor always takes him aside and says, “Look, Stu, you’re the one with the experience. We need to have your particular expertise on this design.”
On weekends Stu Weller naps or creeps around the house, waiting for Monday morning to come. His hands understand the secrets of foam and spring and frame, how to make the under-structure invisible and at the same time strong. There’s a wide range of fabrics at his disposal, your velvets, your brocades, your suedes and leathers. For the president of an American television network he covered the coach walls with a shimmering mauve satin, and received a personal handwritten letter of thanks and appreciation. Next in the works is a special chapel coach for a well-known TV evangelist, and Stu’s planning to go heavy on plum-colored velour and white leather for the doors that separate the public part of the unit from the private. He’s learned that people are willing to spend money for quality; they want the best materials and they’re looking for top-notch workmanship. Over the years he’s been offered jobs in a number of Winnipeg’s better upholstery houses, but he’s never considered them for a minute. He knows the custom coach business inside and out, and can’t imagine working all day on mere furniture, on simple sofas or chairs.
Of course, he’s not above a weekend project at home. The breakfast nook in the kitchen, built in the early seventies, is his own design, a curving red vinyl bench with bright brass tacking. Smart, modern, comfortable. And last summer he took apart the living-room couch, reglued the frame and reupholstered it in a midnight-blue textured nylon. Visitors to the house think they’re seeing a brand-new piece of furniture. His wedding gift to Larry and Dorrie was a trip to England plus a first-class upholstery job on an old Hide-a-bed Larry had picked up at a garage sale. It looks good, too, done up in one of those abstract prints that’re all the rage now, and it’s Scotchguarded so that when Dorrie leaves one of Ryan’s messed diapers lying around, as she tends to do, there’s not too much damage.
He’s offered to do another upholstery job for Larry’s thirtieth. He could do a padded headboard, he suggested, in artificial leather, but Larry said no, he’d rather have a couple of loads of good topsoil for the yard. Well, if that’s what the kid wants, that’s what he gets. Christ Jesus. Dirt.
From the way Stu’s scratching his shirt-collar you can tell he can’t quite believe he’s got a son who’s thirty years old today. He doesn’t, it seems, know what to make of his son and his slapdash wife (Dorrie, Dor, Dorable) and Larry’s funny-bunny ideas about hiking and the environment and planting shrub “arrangements” in his yard and working in a florist shop year after year, fussing with little leaves and flowers all day long. But he keeps his mouth shut. The last thing Stu wants is a fight.
His son calls him Dad or Da; in return he calls Larry nothing, just you. Neither of them can remember when this started, but Larry recognizes his no-name status as a temporary form of shyness on his father’s part; ha! temporary for life. But shyness is all it amounts to. After all, his dad lent him money for his down payment, didn’t he? And he had a load of top-quality topsoil delivered to Larry’s house yesterday morning before Larry and Dorrie were even out of bed.
Six o’clock. Larry’s folks always sit down for supper at six sharp, even when it’s a special occasion like today, and even though Midge hasn’t turned up or had the courtesy to telephone. The drapes have been pulled shut all day to keep the heat down, and the light seeping into the living room is the color of dusty amber. It’s crowded with the table pulled out and with having to squeeze in extra chairs and the hot dishes lined up on the sideboard. Little Ryan starts making a fuss, grabbing at the tablecloth, and Dot frets about him knocking over the glass dish of pickled onions. She’s really worried about death, that her table of carefully prepared food will bring damage, not nourishment, to those she loves best in the world. “Sit down, Mum,” Larry says, as he pulls out her chair – a rare gesture in this house, an unbelievable gesture – and helps her to settle comfortably. He’d like to lean over and touch his cheek to the top of her freshly combed hair. “Well,” she says looking around, “pick up your forks, everyone.”
At that moment Midge in shorts and an orange and pink T-shirt bursts through the back door, her car keys jingling from the fingers of one hand, a bag of dinner rolls in the other, her contribution. She drops the rolls in the center of the table, still in their plastic Safeway bag. The next minute she’s dragging in an immense unwieldy wrapped parcel which is a birthday present for her brother, but which won’t be opened until after dessert, after the candles are blown out and the pie consumed. Larry already knows it will be something for the yard, a piece of gardening equipment or an exotic plant maybe. His sister has always known how to read him. Mits, he calls her, or Mit-Brain or Pigeon.
She takes her place at the table, squeezing in between her mother and Dorrie, waving her arms. She’s steaming with a jumble of excuses and fresh news, as well as with the humid heat of the day. Sorry, sorry, sorry, everyone, she says, but she’s been away all weekend to an anger workshop at a Gimli resort. Two hundred women took part. If you signed up early you got ten percent off, but she only heard of it on Friday afternoon, so she knocked off work early, said she had a headache, then packed up the car and hit the road. No time to phone, just a spur of the moment thing, an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. There was an anger workshop leader up from the States. Yeah, really, that’s her specialty. What a woman! Gray hair down to her waist, barefoot, and she’s got a PhD in something or other, she’s a doctor, that’s her title, travels all over the place, writes books, gives lectures, TV talk shows, Phil Donahue and so forth. Holler it out, that’s what she demands of her anger groups. Scream, yell, weep till you pee, hang on to each other. Tell your story, then bury it, and that’s what they did. They gathered on the beach early this morning, just as the sun was coming up over the horizon of Lake Winnipeg, two hundred shouting, half-clothed women, and in one orchestrated moment – there was a sort of drum roll provided and a loudspeaker – each of them threw into the mild waves a symbolic pebble, their compacted rage, their flinty little burdens of hoarded injustice. Oh, God, it was beautiful, the peace of it, the relief. Right there on the beach there were these gigantic urns of tea, it’s called peace tea, it’s made from apples and lichen, like it’s from seaweed too. And bread, these great gigantic loaves just passed around and torn apart and eaten like that out of the hand, no butter or anything, just pure grainy bread and the breeze coming off the lake and all those stones buried under the water, out of sight, out of mind, gone forever, and women dancing on the sand with their arms around each other, singing too, or maybe just sitting quietly while the sun bobbed up, the stillness, the light on the water. And then the fucking traffic coming home – it was a nightmare, you can just imagine, and in this everlasting heat!
Dot takes Ryan on her lap – her little Rye-Krisp, her little Ribena, her Mister Man, her Noodle-Doodle – and settles him against her peaceful chest.
“So what were all these chicks so angry about?” Dorrie asks Midge. She can’t stand her sister-in-law, and the feeling is mutual.
“Oh, God,” Midge shakes her head, and reaches for a pickled onion. “Don’t get me started.”
And no one does. They talk about the heat instead, and the ragweed count, and whether or not Quebec should separate. They’re trying to keep on being a family, after all. Nothing real will ever get said out loud in this house, though Midge will bleat and blast, and Larry will prod and suggest. It doesn’t matter; Larry understood this years ago. Today his dad tells a joke he heard at the plant, a long story about a Newfie visiting Quebec and trying to buy some cod liver oil from a Frenchie. Dot Weller hums Ryan to sleep, and Dorrie Weller tells everyone how she’s found this place in the North End where you can purchase cleaning products at twenty percent off.
Larry listens. This is how he’s learning about the world, exactly as everyone else does – from sideways comments over a lemon meringue pie, sudden bursts of comprehension or weird parallels that come curling out of the radio, out of a movie, off the pages of a newspaper, out of a joke – and his baffled self stands back and says: so this is how it works.
You would have thought Larry’s folks would have turned themselves into a grief-hardened set of statuettes, but no. They’re moving, they’re breathing, they’re practicing rituals of their own tentative invention, and Larry’s sucking it up. His mother’s gorgeous bloom of guilt, his father’s stoic heart, his sister’s brilliant jets of anger, even the alternate sharpness and slack of his wife’s domestic habits – these burn around him, a ring of fluorescence, though the zone between such vividness and the plain familiar faces around the table seems too narrow to enter. He’s thirty years old, for Chrissake, old enough to know that he can’t know everything. All he wants is what he’s owed, what he’s lucky enough to find along the way. All he wants is to go on living and living until he’s a hundred years old and then he’ll lie down and die.
CHAPTER FOUR Larry’s Work 1981 (#ulink_1799d018-8b0c-5b83-afc6-92446560e71e)
Most of Larry’s friends have had half a dozen jobs in their lives, and quite a few of the guys have suffered spells of unemployment in between. But Larry’s been lucky. He’s worked at Flowerfolks for twelve years now, ever since he completed his Floral Arts Diploma back in ‘69.
Flowerfolks is a small chain with a reputation for friendly service and a quality product. Usually you can spot a Flowerfolks arrangement by its natural appearance. For instance, they don’t go in for bending stems into far-out shapes and positions, or for those Holly Hobby wreathes, et cetera, or weird combinations like, say, tulips and birds-of-paradise sticking out of the same arrangement. Even their Welcome-New-Baby floral offerings have a fresh earthy look to them. Larry says it makes him shudder just thinking about those styrofoam lamb shapes with pink and blue flowers poking out of their backs. Simplicity and integrity at a reasonable price – that’s what Flowerfolks has always stood for.
Well, that’s changed overnight.
All twelve Flowerfolks stores have been swallowed up by Flowercity, the California-based multinational. Suddenly there’s a new logo. Suddenly there are dyed carnations all over the place, whereas formerly they were carried reluctantly, on special order only. Suddenly the staff, even the guys, are wearing blue-and-white checked smocks with their names pinned to little round Peter-Pan collars. Half the floor area in the various outlets is given over now to artificial flowers, something Flowerfolks has always looked down on. As Vivian Bondurant says, “Why have something dead when you can have it alive?” A good question.
Vivian, the branch manager, gave notice two weeks after the Flowercity takeover. She dreads what she sees coming in the eighties, and, besides, she’s ready for a career change. “I’ve worked my tush off,” she told Larry, “building this place up, establishing a loyal clientele here in the West End, turning out a reliable product. I’ve definitely decided to go back to school. Social work – that’s where the jobs are going to be in the future. I was reading the other day about squirrels and I –”
“Squirrels?” Larry interrupts, scratching his chest through his checked smock. His wife’s washed it twice now, but it’s still stiff with sizing.
“Seventy-four percent of the nuts that a squirrel hides never get found. Amazing, isn’t it?”
“You mean –”
“I mean I’ve been hiding nuts, too, in a sense. Forever making little improvements in the business? Remembering people’s names. Following up after weddings. Sending those little anniversary reminders. Bringing in white balls from Toronto at Christmas when no other outlet in town would touch them. All that stuff.”
“And?”
“And where has it got me?”
“I thought you loved it here.”
“Like now they want daily time sheets. The whole ball of wax. Wouldn’t you think, if they kept up with modern management, that they’d have figured out that it’s people who matter! Computerized inventory. Good God! Not that there’s anything wrong with computers per se, but they want it just so. And I have to turn up every single day for work in this dumb schoolgirl get-up. A checked smock at my age. I mean!”
“What do you mean your age? You’re talking like you’re –”
“Like I’m thirty-eight years old. A mature woman. Ha! If I wanted to be Little Bo Peep I’d go work at Disneyland. It’s different for you, you’re –”
“I’m thirty-one.”
“A mere babe.”
“But social work, Viv! How do you know you’re going to like social work?”
“I don’t. I’ll probably hate it. Poor people, sick people. Omigod. But at least I’ll have my dignity. You know, doing something useful.”
“Hey, Viv, wait a minute. You’re the one who’s always saying how flowers are important. Remember your Chinese story –”
“Chinese story? What Chinese story?”
“You know – about the Chinaman who has two pennies –”
“Two yen, you mean.”
“And he spends one on a loaf of bread and the other to buy a flower.”
“Listen, Larry, I’ve got to tell you something. I hope it won’t hurt your feelings.”
“Go ahead. Shoot.”
“Look, you’re a sensitive guy, you really, truly are, but there’s something you’ve got to know, especially working in a business that’s ninety-nine percent customer relations.”
“I can take it. Just go ahead.”
“Well, look, you just can’t say Chinaman anymore. It sounds prejudiced. You have to say Chinese person.”
“Oh.”
“Saying Chinaman’s like saying Wop or Honky.”
“My old dad says Chink.”
“Exactly. There you have it. We’ve come a long way, baby.”
“I’ll remember.”
“You’ll have to, Larry. ‘Cause it looks like you’ll be in charge here when I go.”
“Me? Are you kidding?”
“It’s not for sure, but there’ve been these teensie-weensie hints from the head office, those bastards. Little inquiries, you know? Like is this Weller person reliable? Can he make decisions? What are his interpersonal skills? That kind of thing.”
“I can’t believe it. I never thought –”
“Like those squirrels I was mentioning earlier? You’ve been burying your nuts all along – nothing personal, pal – and now it’s time to go find a few. You deserve it, Larry. You’ll be a great boss. I’ve written a recommendation, as a matter of fact. A whole page, typed, single-spaced. He’s a great guy, I said, or words to that effect. With capital O-Original ideas. Does this man know how to make irises stand up or what? And he’s well organized, keeps a neat work table, doesn’t let the orders get backed up, doesn’t play royal highness with the trainees. Hey, what gives? You’re supposed to be looking happy. You’re going up the ladder, my laddie-boy. What’s the matter?”
“I just can’t,” Larry said, “imagine this place without you.”
Larry doesn’t talk much about his job, but he thinks about it a lot, and mostly he thinks he’s lucky. Work for him adds up to a whole lot more than the feel of ferns in his hands or the sight of sprigged baby’s breath gleaming through the glass of the cooler or even the green spongy cave of the store itself with its forest smells rising up to greet him when he comes in in the morning. How many people get to work in that kind of lushness, the air breaking out into fragrance and color all around you. The loose, light humidity of the place is part of being at work, a big part, but all these particularities are shaken loose by the good music of talk. He and Viv talk all day long. They’ve been talking for twelve years, an unceasing, seamless conversation.
There are always a couple of assistants around, but they come and go: Wendy, Kerri, Dawn, Sidney, Brenda, Lou-Anne, two or three Jennifers, a big fat guy called Tommy Enns, an endless procession of them, trainees from Red River College, young and confused, eager, stumbling, shrill or shy, it all depended. A new apprentice on an eight-week work stint tends to turn the place really hairy, at least at first, but Larry and Viv hold it steady and fluid with their voices, his, hers – talking, talking, all day the two of them talking.
While they stand at the bench “backing” bridal bouquets or improvising a winter arrangement to deliver to Victoria Hospital’s Palliative Care Unit or unpacking cedars (they come twenty bunches to a box) Larry and Viv discuss Michael Jackson’s stage style or Margaret Trudeau’s maternal instincts or lack thereof. Their fingers move and so do their mouths. Yammer, yammer. About economics they admit their ignorance, and their right to their ignorance. They talk about the penny shortage in the States, the danger of radon in basements, the inflated salaries of professional football players, and about the pros and cons of whooping cough shots – on this particular topic Viv managed to persuade Larry not to have his three-year-old son, Ryan, inoculated after all. The two of them reminisce about the time a guy walked in and ordered a dozen dead roses to send to his ex-wife, and how Vivian took the order, then calmly phoned the police.
They talk about the cost of air conditioners in the States versus the cost in Canada. About draft dodgers, whether they should be sent home. About pimples, whether to pop them or leave them alone. About mothers, their mood swings, their dumb sweetness. About Ronald Reagan, how good-hearted or stupid the man is. How hot it is outside, how rainy, how the back lane is blocked with snow. A whole decade has slid by, its weathers and transports and passing personalities, and all of it crystalized into the words that fly back and forth between Vivian Bondurant and Larry Weller. A million words, a zillion. Note for note, the biggest noise in Larry’s life is the noise that comes out of Viv Bondurant’s throat.
Her voice is a low, confidential rumble, but full of little runs and pauses. She knows how to build up to a story, and she knows exactly when it’s time to throw the ball into Larry’s court. “So what do you think, Lare?” What she brings him are bulletins from that layer of the world he seems doomed to miss, the anecdotes she gleans from CHOL’s call-in show or People Magazine exposés. She passes on, generously, with unstoppable authority, such things as cough remedies from somebody or other’s grandmother, the fact that Italians use mums only for funerals, or what can be said out loud these days and what’s verboten. Chinamen are now Chinese people. Indians are natives. And so on and so forth.
Certain topics between them are off limits. For instance, they never, never mention Larry’s wife, Dorrie; Viv, with her strong sense of intuition, probably suspects things aren’t working out too well in that department. On the other hand, she can be surprisingly upfront about herself, making a point, for instance, of keeping Larry up to date on her menstrual cycle. “It’s better you know when I’m having my rag days, kiddo, then you can keep out of my way.” In fact, she’s blessed with a remarkably even temperament, a woman whose running commentary on the world is underpinned by an easy acceptance of whatever comes her way. What she collects in her life is information, and it’s information too valuable not to be shared.
Larry’s grateful. He owes Viv a lot, and yet he hardly knows her. She and her husband, Hector, live quietly in a house in St. Vital. Hector’s older than Viv by a good fifteen years and he’s been married before – this slipped out one day when Viv was sorting through a box of holly at the store – and has fathered a couple of kids who grew up to be whiners and grabbers, which is why he doesn’t want to have any more, and that’s okay-José with Viv. Larry has only been to their house once, a Sunday morning a few years ago when he dropped off some screwed-up billing statements.
He’d never in his life seen such an airy house, everything dusted and polished and in perfect repair, and the pale beige drapes hanging with their pleats just so. Viv, wearing jeans and a turtleneck sweater, made coffee which she served to Hector and Larry at a shining kitchen table. She was quieter than she was at the store, sitting back and letting the men get acquainted. Afterward, Hector showed Larry the basement where he repaired clocks.
This was his job, not just a hobby. Against one wall stood a long workbench for Hector’s tools. They were astonishingly beautiful, these tools, brass tipped with dark wooden handles and a look of antiquity about them. A metal lathe gleamed, handsome as a museum piece, clean, polished, ready to go. A square of pegboard held drill bits arranged in the shape of a harp. “Every last thing you see here is European,” Hector said proudly. “German, mostly. You can’t beat the Krauts for machinery.”
“Yeah,” murmured Larry, his eyes on the metal teeth of a miniature saw.
Twenty or thirty clocks stood about the room or hung on the walls, some of them disemboweled, and others tagged and ready to be picked up by their owners. Hector explained to Larry, pointing out their burnished edges, how to tell a French clock from an English clock, how certain clocks have a regulator mechanism that allows for the expansion or contraction of their pendulums, and the reasons for the transition of pocket watches to wrist watches. Larry ran his hand appreciatively over the frame of a plain round wall clock.
“That’s a Seth Thomas you’re looking at,” Hector said. “The real thing.”
“Ah,” said Larry, who had never heard of a Seth Thomas.
The two men stood together for a minute in respectful silence. The air was full of the loud busy sound of ticking, and then suddenly – Hector held up a finger to Larry; here it comes! – there was a brief concert of chimes and bongs; twelve noon. “That’s my hourly concert,” Hector said, and Larry could tell it was something he said often and each time with pleasure. “That’s all the music I need.”
Larry looked around, then, at the low-ceilinged room which was dark in the corners but whitely lit under the cone of a green work light. Here was the domain of a man who had his name and trade listed in the Yellow Pages. The pervasive tang of machine oil lay over his ticking, working kingdom, and there in the middle stood Hector Bondurant himself, with his arms folded across his stomach, tapping his elbows, beaming broadly, a monarch in his chosen sphere.
Larry felt a stab of irrational jealousy. For the briefest of moments he wanted to own this space, this spacious house with its neat drapes and its stern white coffee mugs, and he yearned for the daily descent down linoleum-clad stairs to this warm, snug hideaway and its waiting workbench covered with sorted parts and beautifully aligned tools. He wanted all these things, but most of all he wanted Hector’s work, his clockmaker’s hands and the intricate mechanical promise he coaxes from mere wood and metal.
In the same instant, lapping up against Larry’s instant desire to become a clockmaker, was his longing to work side by side with his father down at Air-Rider Coach Works, transforming metal sheets into mobile palaces. The miracle of it, making something out of nothing. The pleasure at the end of the day to see what you’d constructed with your own hands.
And then there was his wife, Dorrie, who sold cars at Manitoba Motors – he’d never thought much about Dorrie’s job, but now he wanted a portion of that too. Himself in a snappy sports jacket with “Call Me Larry” on his lapel button. The lingo, the come-on, the bargains teasingly offered and withdrawn, the intensity of the minute-by-minute shifts, the decisive moment, and the thrill: the final solemnity, of signing on the dotted line and pocketing a fat commission.
There’s no getting around it: the rhapsody of work hums between Larry’s ears, its variables and strategies, its implements and its tightly focused skills. Sometimes he tries to scare himself with thoughts of worklessness, the long, vacant mornings of the unemployed – how would that feel? – and the mingled boredom and sadness of being broke and without accomplishment, without any way to deal with time. In the end, anything’s better than nothing, even the working stiff’s daily grind. Some work is graceless, he knows that. Work can be dirty, noisy, dangerous, degrading, but it’s still work, and that’s what turns the gears of life. He understands this spare, singular fact better than he will ever be able to understand the unguessable secrets of love and happiness.
Years later, when his life was going badly, he came to see work as the only consolation for persisting in the world.
Before Dorrie got married she was a clerk-receptionist in the parts division of Manitoba Motors. The pay wasn’t great, but she had a reputation for getting along with the customers, always commiserating with them over the size of their repair bills, taking their side. They appreciated that. They nicknamed her Dorable. The head of auto parts, a man named Al Leonard, said she was the most efficient employee he’d ever seen. She had a knack for keeping track of details and for remembering what was where and which parts were out of stock. In those days she wore jeans to work and a thick sweater since it was always drafty, what with the door to the repairs garage opening and closing all day long. Besides, she was stuck behind the counter, so what did it matter if she went casual or dressy?
After Ryan was born, she stayed home for three months and earned the odd bit of money by making follow-up calls for repair service. The way it worked, Manitoba Motors sent her out a list of completed repairs once a week, and her job was to phone the clients and ask if they were satisfied with the work. A public relations kind of thing, making the customer feel valued and looked after. She got paid so much a call, and she was able to squeeze in maybe fifteen or so calls while Ryan napped in the afternoon. Even so, the pay was peanuts, and half the time no one was at home or else they chewed her out for disturbing them in the middle of the day.
She decided to go back to work full-time. Russell LaFleur, the head honcho, surprised her by asking if she’d ever thought of going on the sales floor. Times had changed. Women were out there buying their own vehicles now, single women with careers and money to spend on extras. Women valued the judgment of other women. They appreciated a woman’s point of view. When Dorrie pulls out the literature showing the cross-sections of engines, they stand at attention, taking in every word. Type of transmission, power brakes, cruise control – she ticks these items off on the tips of her nicely manicured fingers. She is deeply sympathetic when it comes to color and upholstery combinations, and she’s able to give complete concentration to seat comfort, leg room, the convenience of the glove compartment with its own little overhead light. “We all have to live within a budget,” she says, prefacing her pitch on fuel consumption, and giving a resigned shrug and a wrinkling of her small nose, signaling complicity. Hey, we’re in this together, we can work this out, these are the figures, trust me.
Right away she bought herself two perky little suits from a designer’s outlet she knows, a soft gray wool flannel and a brisk blue houndstooth check. Professional apparel, she calls it. An investment. Women working for other dealers in town go in for pant suits, but Dorrie sticks to skirts and coordinated pantyhose. After all, there are men customers out there too, and with them, as well as with women, she has an enviable sales completion record. At the end of every three-month sales period, Mr. LaFleur takes the whole gang out for a steak and beans dinner at The Loft. The high-commission sales staff get served steak, and those on the bottom of the chart get a plate of beans. It’s a riot, Dorrie tells Larry, but then she’s always on the steak-eating end of things. Twice she’s been salesperson of the month, and once, last April, she was tops in the city. For that she got a plaque with her name engraved on it and a weekend for two at the Hecla Island resort hotel. And she went straight out and bought a third suit, a raspberry linen blend, nice for summer, and a pair of high-heeled sandals.
She’d like another baby; she’d like to be a lady of leisure, so she says anyway, and she tells Larry she’s going to quit Manitoba Motors and give her aching feet a rest as soon as they’ve got enough money in the bank. But how much is enough, that’s the question. She can’t wait to move off Lipton Street with its rinkydink houses and busy traffic. She’s got her eye on the Linden Woods subdivision west of town, a double garage, en-suite bathrooms, a family room with fireplace and wet bar. And what she’d really like, even though it sounds crazy, is a spiral staircase with a wrought-iron railing. She and Larry saw one last Sunday at a real estate open house they attended, and she said afterwards that walking down that staircase with her hand on the rail felt exactly like being a movie star. “If we could live in a house like this,” she told Larry, “I’d never work another day in my life.”
Larry doesn’t want to move out of his house. He admits it’s no palace, but he’s just finished insulating the basement and he’s thinking about doing the roof. He’s installed a new garbage disposal unit too. He points this out to Dorrie, what he’s invested in terms of money and work.
“You just don’t want to leave your crazy yard,” she charges.
Sighing, shrugging, he acknowledges the truth of what she says.
He’s worked hard on the yard. It’s a small lot, thirty-foot frontage and ninety in depth, that’s all, but there’s nothing else like it in the city of Winnipeg, and probably not even in the province of Manitoba. Every inch of it is filled with hedges, and these hedges are planted in the intricate pattern of a maze. There’s a direct access route for the mailman, of course, but there’s also a sinuous alternate path that winds twice around the house with half a dozen false turning points.
Larry’s maze craze (as Dorrie calls it) started three and a half years ago when they got married and went to England for their honeymoon. The highlight of the trip was a tour through the famous Hampton Court maze outside London, and ever since then Larry’s been reading library books about mazes. And adapting his classic maze design so that it’s tailored to the size of the Lipton Street lot. He’s acquired nursery stock from a cut-rate greenhouse and learned just what shrubs work best in this climate and how to keep them alive during a long winter by burying the young shoots under heaps of leaves. Right now the hedges are thinly distributed and so short they can be easily overstepped; it’ll be another four or five years before the hedge walls get high enough for his liking, but meanwhile he’s nursing them along. The last thing he wants is to move to Linden Woods,where he’d have to start over and where the by-laws probably prohibit eccentric gardening.
Whereas anything goes in this neighborhood. The people around here are a mixed bag. His friend Bill Herschel, who lives two streets over, works full-time for the Manitoba Endangered Species Alert and sometimes gives Larry a hand on the weekend. The Gilshammers across the lane (he’s in cut-rate electronics; she works at a unisex hair salon) have just donated the raked leaves from their property. So have the two guys down the street. (Larry can’t remember their names offhand, but he knows they do stage carpentry for a theatre downtown, which he figures must be a pretty interesting line of work.) Lucy Warkenten, who’s got the upstairs apartment next door, doesn’t have any leaves to offer, but she takes a keen interest in Larry’s maze, and has walked through it half a dozen times, stepping along in her purple leather boots. (She’s a self-employed bookbinder working out of her apartment.) Beneath Lucy live the Lees with their three little kids. Ken Lee delivers pizzas for Bella Vista and gives Larry all his leaves and grass clippings, and plenty of advice on the subject of propagating shrubs, which must be planted in a shallow but wide trench so that the roots can spread out sideways and help anchor the branches against prevailing winds. The Grangers, Gord and Moira, live on the other side of Larry’s house. Moira’s a housewife, a semi-invalid, with an interest in spelling reform (she’d like to see the letter X eliminated), and Gord designs ergonomic work gloves, his most recent breakthrough featuring reduced padding at the finger joints so that the gloved hand can grasp objects more readily in cold weather. The good-hearted Grangers, too, have contributed their fall rakings to the survival of Larry Weller’s baby hedges, and now, with winter about to crash down, Larry’s and Dorrie’s yard looks like a series of Indian burial mounds with their mushroom of a house poking through.
In the dark November evenings people in this neighborhood tend to stay home with their families, enjoying their hamburger suppers and favorite TV shows. Generally speaking, the house lights go out along the street somewhere between ten o’clock and eleven-thirty. There are, Larry assumes, starbursts of sex or of hospitality or late-night comings and goings and probably even acts of violence, but nights in the neighborhood are quiet for the most part, and heavy with sleep. Under a depthless navy-blue sky, beneath a cold bone of a moon, this small segment of the world is renewing itself, restoring its emptied-out substance, getting ready for tomorrow. Ready to go back to work.
Working for Flowercity and married to Dorrie and living on Lipton Street, Larry had no idea that technology was about to bulldoze the job market. In the early eighties, that enchanted, stupid time, almost everyone had a job, or if they didn’t they expected they’d find one any minute. No one dreamed of the redundancies and dehirings and downsizings the end of the century would bring, where in a mean, lean, bottom-line world, a day’s work would become as rare and as exotic as the prized orchids Larry keeps swaddled in insulation at the back of the cool unit.
Larry, himself, was slow to wake up to the idea of work. At twelve he took over another kid’s paper route and lasted a week. During his final year of high school, hungry for money, longing for name-brand jeans and a leather jacket, he worked at a neighborhood McDonald’s, adding up orders, and ringing in cash, hating every minute of it. He didn’t like to think in those days that he’d have to spend the rest of his life working. But then he got lucky. He fell into the right line of work: flowers, plants.
And now, ever since Viv Bondurant’s left Flowercity, Larry’s been in charge down at the store, and that means getting up at six o’clock three mornings a week and driving out to Stems Inc., the wholesalers. They’re open for business at seven, and Larry likes to be in and out in half an hour. He’s got his standard orders, of course, his poms, daisies, roses, carnations, and so on, and then he likes to spend a few minutes looking around at what’s just come in from the flower brokers in Montreal. Stems has about 140 accounts, so it’s not surprising he bumps into some of the other florists around town, Sally Ullrich, Jim Carmody, and catches up on what’s new. Over in the corner there’s coffee going and a basket of donuts – a nice touch, Larry thinks, since he skips breakfast at home these days, and Dorrie’s too busy, anyway, getting Ryan ready for daycare, to stop and make coffee.
He’s got a lot of wedding orders coming up, so today he picks up a good supply of baby’s breath. He prefers the stuff from Peru, which is as pure a product as you can get. The wedding bulge across the North American continent is in June and July, but there’s a major blip in the city of Winnipeg, where winter weddings have come to the fore. That way newly married couples can get away for a tropical honeymoon. Larry does a nice bridal semi-cascade; average price $120. Brides want roses nine times out of ten. You can’t talk them out of it. They think flowers, and, bingo, roses come to mind. Roses are romantic, also generic. Winnipeg roses originate in southern Ontario, where they’ve got acres of them under glass.
The gingers get shipped to Manitoba from South Africa, freesia from Holland, and carnations from California. People think carnations are a cheapy flower, but it’s not true; sometimes, depending on weather fluctuations, they’re more expensive than roses, and they last a hell of a lot longer. Some nationalities hate carnations, that’s something to remember. Tree fern is trucked in from Florida in warmed vehicles. They’re always good for funeral baskets. You don’t see a lot of camellias anymore, that old corsage staple, but then Larry doesn’t do anything like the number of corsages he did when he started in the business back in the late sixties. To tell the truth, corsages were old-fashioned even then, relics from the thirties and forties. How’s a woman supposed to button her coat over a corsage? And what if it doesn’t match her outfit? – actually, there’s an old florist’s law that says a corsage is doomed to be the wrong color, something women have always known, just as they know there’s no way to secure a corsage without at least a small fuss, not to mention permanent damage to their silk blouses. If a customer absolutely insists on going the corsage route, Larry encourages them to think about a small wrist arrangement he’s perfected, which is sturdy, attractive, and comfortable to wear.
He’s happy to give advice about prolonging the life of cut flowers, but warns his customers that they mustn’t have unrealistic expectations. Flowers are fragile, flowers are needy. There are people who put their flowers in dirty vases. You can actually see the green scum line from the last bunch. Would you drink out of that vase? No way. You want to put your flowers in a disinfected container; that’s all the magic white powder in the little envelope is – a disinfectant. Of course you’ve already cut your flowers with a knife and on an angle before putting them in water. Don’t expect dafs to go more than three days, though, no matter what you do to them and for them.
Poinsettias will start selling in a week’s time; Larry gets his delivered from Carmen, Manitoba, just an hour away. Then it’s Valentine’s Day, then your Easter lilies – they come from Carmen too. Mother’s Day is crazy, the biggest day of the year, and right after that you’re into graduation tributes, retirements, and a spate of summer weddings. It’s a funny business with its ups and downs, but Larry’s grateful for the way the main holidays are strung out over the year. He’s always hearing about photo opportunities, but what about flower opportunities? They come and they go; they keep him buoyed up and alive and working, and he welcomes the noise of daily bustle in his life.
When Viv first left, she phoned the store occasionally to see how business was going. After a while, though, she stopped checking in. Larry’s heard somewhere that she dropped out of the social work program and was selling flowers in a corner of a Safeway in North Kildonan. He’s also heard that she’s pregnant and has quit work altogether. He hasn’t seen her for ages now, but he thinks of her at least once every day, and wonders what she’s doing at that very moment. He didn’t notice it happening at the time, but it must have been that they said goodbye to each other and really meant it, and maybe that’s the way it goes with friends you have from work.
Sometimes down at the store he’ll be holding a stemmed alstroemeria in his hand. More often than not, this will be the flamingo variety, his favorite, a rose color streaked with lavender, a floppy uneven head of fragile petals spread out to reveal a colony of tender stamen threads, their pinks, their golds. This flower, an herb really, started out as a seed way down in South America in Colombia. Some Spanish-speaking guy, as Larry imagines him, harvested the seed of this flower and someone else put it back into the earth, carefully, using his hands probably, to push the soil in place. They earned their daily bread doing that, fed their families, kept themselves alert. It’s South American rain that drenches the Colombian earth and foreign sunshine that falls on the first green shoots, and it all happens, it all works.
And what next? Larry supposes that Spanish-speaking laborers equipped with hoes arrive to beat back the weeds, but are they men or women who do this work? Maybe both, and maybe children, too, in that part of the world. Larry wonders what goes on in their heads when they perform this tedious and backbreaking work, and whether they have any idea when they pack the cut flowers into insulated boxes, laying the heads end to end, that these living things are about to be carried aboard enormous jet aircraft, handled gently, handled like the treasure they are, that they will be transported across international frontiers, sorted, sold, inspected, sold again, and that without noticeable wilting or fading – except to an expert eye – they will come to rest in the hands of a young Canadian male in an ordinary mid-continental florist establishment, bringing with them a spot of organic color in a white and frozen country (where the mercury has fallen overnight to twenty degrees below zero and where the windchill factor has risen steadily all day so that no living matter has any right to exist, but it does and here it is – this astonishing object he holds in his grasp).
Larry thinks how the alstroemeria head he cups in his hand has no memory and no gratitude toward those who delivered it to this moment. It toils not, neither does it spin. It’s sprouted, grown, bloomed, that’s all. But Larry, placing it beside a branch of rosy kangaroo paw from British Columbia and a spray of Dutch leather leaf and a spear or two of local bear grass, feels himself a fortunate man. He’s worried sick at the moment about the distance that’s grown between himself and his wife, about the night terrors that trouble his only child, about money, about broken or neglected friendships, about the pressure of too much silence, about whether his hedges will weather the winter, but he is, nevertheless, plugged into the planet. He’s part of the action, part of the world’s work, a cog in the great turning wheel of desire and intention.
The day will arrive in his life when work – devotion to work, work’s steady pressure and application – will be all that stands between himself and the bankruptcy of his soul. “At least you have your work,” his worried, kind-hearted friends will murmur, and if they don’t, if they forget the availability of this single consolation – well then, he’ll say it to himself: at least I have my –work.
CHAPTER FIVE Larry’s Words 1983 (#ulink_10ad635f-6bbd-5014-a0da-8446471d1405)
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Carol Shields
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The Orange Prize-winning novel of Larry Weller, a man who discovers the passion of his life in the ordered riotousness of Hampton Court’s Maze.Larry and his naive young wife, Dorrie, spend their honeymoon in England. At Hampton Court Larry discovers a new passion. Perhaps his ever-growing obsession with mazes may help him find a way through the bewilderment deepening about him as – through twenty years and two failed marriages – he endeavours to understand his own needs. And those of friends, parents, lovers, a growing son.