Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  Why has Larry committed to memory the Latin names for his shrubs? Because he senses - vaguely - that they deserve the full dignity of his attention. They’ve survived a couple of tough Manitoba winters, and they’re looking good. Really good. So far, not one has shriveled and died. They seem, in fact, to love him. Shrubs, he feels, are shy exiles in the plant kingdom. They’re not quite trees, not quite anything, really, but they have, nevertheless, been awarded by the experts out there, your professors, your writers of gardening books, full botanical classification. (He sees them even in the wintertime with a kind of love, their elegance and sprigged look of surprise.)

  He loves the Latin roll of the words in his mouth - Leguminosae - and he loves himself for being a man capable of remembering these rare words, for being alert, for paying attention, particularly since he has not always in his life paid sufficient attention. This is something entirely new. His jittery spirits are soothed by the little Latinate sighs and bumps. He hopes, optimistically, that the words that live in his head will eventually find their way to his mouth. Perhaps he’ll even learn to flip them off his tongue unselfconsciously, to secrete them through his pores. What else, really, does he need in his life but more words? When you add up the world and its words you get a kind of cosmic sandwich, two thick slices of meaning with nothing required in between. Sometimes, though, he wishes he wouldn’t: wouldn’t try so hard. What did he used to think about before he tried? What was it that stood behind his eyes - before he figured out how to find the right words?

  There are a few words that are missing even from Larry’s new under-the-counter dictionary. His sister, Midge, for instance, is divorced from her husband, but she’s living with him again. What’s the word for her status now? And for her husband? And for what passes between them?

  What can he call the feeling he has for his son, Ryan? That mixture of guilt and longing, that ballooning ever-protective, multi-limbed force that’s too big to cram into the category of love.

  When he hits a traffic light on his way home from work, sitting at an intersection in the near-dark, ten seconds, twenty seconds - what does he call the rapturous seizure he feels as he counts off on his fingers the essential description of where he is in the world? Here I am, but no one knows my location at this moment. No one knows my eyes are blinking, adjusting, making leaps, asking the question inside the question inside the question—

  And what’s the word for that spasm of panic that strikes Larry as he unlocks his back door on a winter night? He enters with his house keys in one hand, a boxed pizza or a bag of takeout chicken in the other. In the tiny linoleum-floored vestibule he stamps the snow off his boots, and stoops to remove them, feeling as he leans forward that the air has dangerously thinned and that he could easily topple over dead on the spot.

  He hums Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean” to scatter the silence, an aerosol spray. The silence contributes to his plummeting faith in his own arrangements. Still air, empty rooms. It was as though he and Dorrie had never embarked on a life of house and children, but had been brought to this spiritless edge by force. The walls, the kitchen floor, the tight circle of second-hand appliances, the tiny corner table with its chairs pushed neatly in - these objects refuse to acknowledge him, though he’s the one - isn’t he? - who brought the scene into being, and who is now trapped in the bubble of his own dread. He ought to rejoice in the settledness of this room, but he doesn’t. He should see it as a sequestered cave hidden away in the tall immensity of winter. What is the word for the slow, airless, unrelieved absence he feels? It’s coming to him, this word, winging its way as though guided by radar, but it hasn’t quite arrived.

  Dorrie will be home from her sales job at Manitoba Motors in ten minutes, after she picks up Ryan from daycare. Her mouth will bear a mere trace of her Frankly Fuchsia lipstick. Her quick kiss against his cheek delivers the smallest of electric shocks. A shock of this order doesn’t really hurt, but then it doesn’t feel good either. Is there a word for a sensation as fleeting and as useless as this?

  It strikes Larry that language may not yet have evolved to the point where it represents the world fully.

  Recognizing this gap brings him a rush of anxiety. Perhaps we’re waiting, all of us, he thinks, longing to hear “something” but not knowing what it is.

  Down at Flowercity a guy’s come in and ordered an immense gift bouquet of cut flowers for his aged aunt, and on the card he wants the words: Happy Spring!

  And today is spring, March 21, the equinox. The strengthening sun, the melting snow. Everything on earth testifies to the newly arrived season, but Larry’s been too sunk in gloom to notice. Things couldn’t be worse at home. Dorrie’s hardly spoken to him in the last month except to grump about the draft from the north wall of the kitchen. And the lack of closet space. And how she hates their hell-hole of a house.

  Solstice, equinox. He loves the sound of those words, and remembers how a teacher back in high school once wrote them on the blackboard, putting a slash across the middle of equinox, equal nights, night and day. What beautiful logic. The twice-yearly miracle. And here it is. Today. The vernal equinox. About time.

  “Larry Weller?”

  “Yes?”

  “Larry. This is Lucy calling. Lucy Warkenten.”

  “Lucy!”

  Larry’s next-door neighbor, Lucy Warkenten, has never phoned him at work before. He and his latest trainee from Red River College, Bob Buxtead, are standing at the work counter doing centerpieces for a Lions’ banquet. They’ve decided to go for a spring theme, even though the snow’s still hanging on here and there, and the daffodils that arrived from British Columbia this morning look faintly puckered at the base of the petals.

  Lucy sounds worried, and also excited. “I hope I’m not interrupting you,” she tells Larry carefully.

  “No, not at all.”

  “I was just wondering -”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I was looking out my window just now, just a few minutes ago, and I was wondering about your maze, Larry. If you’ve changed your mind or something.”

  “About what?”

  “If you, you know, decided to start over or something? With a new design. A new concept?”

  “No,” Larry said, baffled, fiddling with a pile of bear grass on his work counter, their sharp green edges. “No, I’m thinking of maybe putting in a new node in the south-east corner when the weather breaks, something a little fancier that I’ve been working out, but for now — ”

  “Larry, listen.” He heard her take a long breath before continuing. “Larry, there’s a bulldozer in your yard. Or a, what d’ya call it? - one of those machines. It’s been there for about fifteen minutes.”

  “A what? Did you say a bulldozer?”

  “It’s already - I’m so sorry to have to tell you this” - another sharp breath, a trembling inhalation - “but it, this machine, it’s already dug up the whole front part of — ”

  “Never mind, Lucy. I’ll be right there.”

  Traffic was bad, even in the dead middle of a Monday afternoon. It was twenty minutes before Larry pulled up in front of his house on Lipton Street.

  He saw the ruin of his front yard, the plowed-up furrows of mud and snow, the leveled ground, and the thrusting image of his wooden front steps, suddenly, grotesquely, revealed. A yellow backhoe, not a bulldozer but just as purposeful, sat silent at the side of the house, and directly in front of it stood the wobbly stick figure of Lucy Warkenten in her flowered parka and purple skirt and boots, her arms held straight out sideways like a crossing guard at attention, the cold spring wind booming off her anxious face. Her posture was defiant and disturbed, as if she were a crazy woman, semaphoring for help.

  He remembered later how he shut his eyes against Lucy, and against the pale sunlight coloring the flattened yard. It was not disbelief that assaulted him; on the contrary, he believed at once. He comprehended. He knew. What he felt was the steady, tough pummeling of words against his body: knowledge, pain,
shame, emptiness, sorrow, and, curiously, like rain falling on the other side of the city, that oxygen-laden word relief. A portion of what he knew was over. The end.

  Lucy was moving toward him then, the late afternoon sun striking her face, her eyes, her working lips and teeth. Sorry, sorry, she seemed to be saying through the width of empty air.

  And Larry himself, stunned, battered, and opening his mouth at last, giving way not to speech, but to language’s smashed, broken syllables and attenuated vowel sounds: the piercing cries and howls of a man injured beyond words.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Larry’s Friends 1984

  Emerging from the cramped crawlspace of his first marriage, Larry Weller was talked into attending his sixteenth high school reunion, which was to be a reception and dinner held in the school’s newly spruced up gymnasium. He went along with his old classmate, Bill Herschel, and Bill’s wife, Heather. Both Bill and Heather had been in the same 1968 graduating class with Larry at MacDonald Secondary.

  Heather — she was Heather McPhail back then - had been class secretary, a member of the Honor Society, and a teenage beauty with flocks of good-looking boys vying for the privilege of leaning on her locker. She could have had any one of those muscular, lounging, spice-scented youths, but she opted instead for skinny Bill Herschel, math whiz and president of the Outdoor Club, whose clothes were never quite right and whose Jewish parents made him a problematic son-in-law for Heather’s High Anglican family, and vice versa. They married the day after Bill finished his degree in Environmental Studies - neither set of parents attended the ceremony - and now they have two little girls, Chantal, six, and Sophie, eight.

  The girls’ babysitter for the evening of the reunion is a Mrs. Carroll, a widow living next door to the Herschels, a sort of honorary grandmother to the Herschel children, who has also agreed to look after Larry’s six-year-old son, Ryan. Larry’s arrangement with his ex-wife, Dorrie, is that he has Ryan weekends —Friday night to Sunday night — and she has him during the week. Larry hasn’t told Dorrie about tonight’s babysitting arrangements or even the fact that he’s decided to go to his school reunion. She’s being extra picky these days. She likes things done a certain way, no exceptions, and she’d be sure to get herself into a knot if she knew Ryan was going to spend the night on a fold-out couch in the Herschels’ basement rec room. A damp basement was the last thing Ryan needed, with his runny nose and cough. Besides, the Herschel girls were little prima donnas, in Dorrie’s opinion, just like their mother.

  That part’s not true. Heather McPhail Herschel is all gentleness - melting eyes, wavy brown hair, and an ample risen-bread look about her body - and she has extended to Larry Weller a thousand kindnesses since his marriage to Dorrie broke up a year ago. “Listen,” she said in the first terrible days after Larry moved out, “Bill and I want to do everything we can to help you get through this. You know you’re welcome here any time, night or day, and that goes for Ryan too. You can phone, drop in, whatever. We’ll feed you, pour wine over your head, or you can just hang around and talk. You’re going to need to talk, Larry, and we’re here to listen. You can count on us, that’s all I want to say. That’s what friends are for.”

  Larry appreciates Heather’s kindness, appreciates especially her refusing to badmouth Dorrie, for not saying he’s had a lucky escape from a rotten marriage, which is what some of his other friends have hinted, have even told him outright. Back in high school he hadn’t been able to look I leather McPhail in the eye, and he still can’t quite manage it, even though she’s married to his oldest friend and he sees her at least once a week. For some reason he’s unable to wipe from his mind the fact that she’d been Heather McPhail in her former life, that terrifyingly popular school sweetheart and the second smartest and second-best looking girl in their class, second that is after Megsy Hicks, the number one queen of MacDonald’s 1968 graduating class.

  If Heather McPhail was soft and curved, Megsy Hicks was a hard, straight line. Megsy of the bold sexy sweaters and Cher-style hair, Megsy of the wide mobile lipglossed mouth in the middle of a face that was all quick sketch lines and strong severity - and attached to a moving, undulating, muscular woman’s body. The fact that Megsy Hicks wore glasses and was still popular set her in another constellation of praise altogether. Larry had dreamed of her every night back then, but had never so much as spoken to her in the four years of high school, nor even breathed in her direction an anonymous “Hi” while passing between classes. She stared straight through him in those days, and he expected to be stared through. It was what he deserved. He was part of the jerk squad, president of nothing, member of no organization, unathletic, with barely average marks, the dreamy owner of an unreliable voice and a face that wouldn’t behave; he was - he acknowledged as much - an unmernorable smudge in the 1968 yearbook, except for being a friend of Bill Herschel who had unaccountably landed Heather McPhail as a girlfriend.

  Only in his boyish dreams - his daydreams that is, those soft-focused films he projected on to his bedroom ceiling before falling asleep - did Megsy Hicks reach out for his hand and cup it against her hard, sweatered breast. Her mouth pressed damp kisses down the length of his body, while her fingers grew busy with his pajama bottoms. “I’ve been waiting for this,” she said over and over again, as if, with her glasses off, she didn’t notice what a drip he really was, as though she was oblivious to the honking embarrassment of being Larry Weller and what that might mean. Her voice rang thrillingly, ticklingly, in his ear. “Again,” she said in her bossy volleyball captain’s voice. “Touch me here. And here.”

  He loved her. No one knew this, not even Bill Herschel, who’d been his best friend since they were seven years old, and what he felt for Megsy was not a simple crush, and not what his mother would have called puppy love, but the most radiant and tender of passions. Megsy, Megsy, sweet Megsy. Alone, he found himself deep in the schooling of love and love’s impossibility. He wanted to protect her, and she yearned for that protection — never mind that she was editor of the yearbook and class valedictorian. He, Larry Weller, would look after her. The silk of her dark hair fanned out each night on his pillow; her tiny exposed earlobes were starred with silver studs and these he lovingly touched, moving down then to her body, that long, elastic, tennis-toughened body that bent round him like a capital C —Yes, yes, she cried— warming the roughed, lonely sheets of his bed and holding him close.

  This kind of love doesn’t go away as easily as people think. It hangs in the head like a muzzy fog, sometimes for years. The only reason he’d gone to the fifth year reunion was to get a glimpse of Megsy Hicks, but she hadn’t turned up. Someone, Heather probably, reported that she’d moved to Toronto and had married into money, which figured. She wasn’t at the tenth reunion either, and Larry, who’d dragged his new wife, Dorrie, along, had spent a dazed evening, reworking through the filtration plant of his mind, just why his face should so suddenly lose its musculature on hearing Megsy Hicks’ name, and revert to that wayward, flesh-betraying wobble of unreason. Megsy Hicks, he was told, had planned to come, but her husband had to go off to Paris - Paris, uh-huh! - at the last minute, on business, and she’d decided to go along.

  There hadn’t been a fifteenth reunion. Somehow it never got organized, but now there was to be a sixteenth, and Larry had let himself get talked into going. “It’ll be fun for you to see some old friends,” Heather told him, meaning it would do him good to feel himself part of the ongoing world once again. So what if he was divorced, she said. So were a lot of other people who’d be there.

  And why, after all, should he worry? He was thirty-three years old, a father, a taxpayer, an employed citizen, the manager of Flowercity, a prospering florist shop which last week won first place in the provincial table decoration division. His foolish, puny body had filled out in his early twenties, and he’d learned, as most people do eventually, to fold his moments of terror into a wide and easy-breathing safety zone of his own devising. He’d made mistakes in his life
, one big mistake anyway, his marriage to Dorrie, but he had prospects, he had a future, though he’s not sure how much he really wants this new Larry self to come forward and identify itself. And most important, he had what really mattered in a person’s life: he had friends.

  A lot of friends or not quite enough? He isn’t sure. He stands at the back of his crowded life and ponders this question.

  One of his friends is a guy named Gene Chandler. Gene’s a jock who likes a beer and a good laugh. The two of them got to know each other at Red River College, where Larry was studying Floral Arts and Gene was doing the Basic Communications course that later landed him a reporter’s job at the Free Press. Now he’s writing editorials, moving on. They still get together now and then for a cappuccino at the Capri or maybe a hockey game - someone down at the paper’s always giving Gene free tickets. When Gene and his wife, Liz, heard about Larry’s marriage break-up, they had him over for seafood lasagna and urged him to share his feelings, which he tried hard to do, for their sake if not for his. He’d made a mistake. He’d married someone he had nothing in common with. He and Dorrie couldn’t talk, not the way married couples needed to talk. And they had different goals, it seemed. “That’s bad,” Liz said, serving out forkfuls of green salad. “Having different goals can be tough.”

  It happened that Gene Chandler had a golfing buddy called Big Bruce Sztuwark, and it was through Gene Chandler that Larry connected with Bruce Sztuwark, who wanted a hedge maze constructed on his riverside property west of the city, and the word was that Larry Weller was into mazes. Big Bruce weighs a good two hundred and fifty pounds and possesses the untroubled bluntness of a man with pockets of dough. He and his wife, Erleen, had been over to England last year where they’d seen a terrific classic style maze, a beauty, somewhere over near Wales, he’s forgotten the exact name of the place, but he was blown over by it, both of them were. Hey, Bruce said to Erleen at the time, we oughta get ourselves one of those for at home. Can’t you just imagine it - a real live maze in Winnipeg!