Spin Dry

by Greg Hollingshead

  “Mother, why are you talking about large sums of money?”

  “Elmer found four hundred and thirty-seven Stanley Jardines.”

  “Where?”

  “Phone books of Europe and North America.”

  “And—?”

  “He says he can do it for two per city plus expenses.”

  “Two what? How many cities?”

  “Thousand. Twenty-three. And then there’s the long distance. He says he can probably come in under fifty.”

  “Mother, you’re not—”

  “I’ll tell myself I’ve gone to Reno with fifty, that’s all. Maybe I lose it, maybe I hit the jackpot. Who wants to go to Reno? I’m happier sitting here with six months of reasonable hope.”

  “Mother, do you still keep dad’s drawer in the big dresser?”

  “I never look in there. I’m a hoarder, that’s all. Get off my back.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “You know perfectly well what’s in it.”

  “Mother, I haven’t looked in that drawer for twenty-five years!”

  “Well, it happens I’m in bed, so it’s right here. If the phone cord stretches that far I’ll tell you what’s in it.” Her mother then, like a clerk recording the contents of the prisoner’s pockets, went through the drawer. By the time Rachel was begging her to stop she had named quite a few of the paragon items from that dream plus many others more mundane that the dreamer, a selective child, had overlooked: a pencil stub with a collapsed metal tip. Three rusty paperclips clinging to splayed scissors. An eraser dusky and moistureless with time. Scattered, linty Aspirin. Loose change, mostly nickels and pennies. Assorted keys. Petrified Wrigley’s Spearmint. Petrified Smith Brothers Cough Drops. Petrified Sheik condoms. Cheque book. Matches in a box …

  “Junk,” her mother said. She was weeping. “What is it you want? Oh, here’s his dog tag. I’ll send it to you.”

  “It’s OK—”

  “Why are you making me do this?”

  After talking to her mother, Rachel got dressed and drove over to Village Market Square for her final session with Alex Silver. She found him roaming around his office like a caged panda.

  “Rachel, those two are driving me crazy!” The sun was hitting him from behind, making a wild blond aureole for his face.

  “As crazy as you’re driving us?” Rachel replied, breathless. “What’s in it for them, anyway?”

  “For me to answer that question would be unprofessional.”

  “Oh, right, I—”“Babs is working on her problems with authority figures, Frankie on how to come to terms with a world full of assholes.”

  “Should have guessed. Alex, I remembered that dream.”

  “What dream?” But Silver wasn’t interested. “Rachel, we’re after the one you haven’t properly had yet!” He was staring at his watch. “Oh God, there’s no time. Already we’ve blown ten minutes. Why don’t the bunch upstairs give us all a break and take the wings off the chariot once in a while—”

  “Pardon?”

  “So tell me what happened when Leon came back that once. That’ll bring us up to speed. And then you go beyond. That’s our plan. Stick to it. Don’t mind me.” Silver was strapping himself into a pair of brackets on his office ceiling. “Helps me concentrate,” and he proceeded to hang upside down while Rachel concluded her story.

  ——

  When Rachel got back home from Share That Dream, Leon was sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee and a cigarette, the first tobacco cigarette she had ever seen him smoke. He was using the fingertips of his right hand to compress and lift ashes from the arborite surface of the table, then holding that hand out over the floor and brushing his thumb against the appropriate fingers.

  “Leon, where have you been?”

  Leon’s other hand came up to remove a shred of tobacco from his tongue. This he examined. As he did so, something in Rachel’s not-so-unconscious rolled over. Plain tips.

  “Your mother called,” Leon said. “I hung up.”

  “Where have you been?”

  Leon was wearing his red plaid shirt, his quilted vest, and a peaked cap that said Prime Northern Turkey. “Rachel, sit down. I have something to say.”

  Rachel sat down across the table.

  “We’re practically middle-aged,” Leon began. “We’ve got a nice little place here. We get along fairly well. Not great but fairly well. We’ve both played the field. We know the score. It’s not as if we were born yesterday. More to the point, we understand that life doesn’t last forever.”

  Leon stubbed out his cigarette and took the package from his shirt pocket.

  Player’s Plain. The cunt.

  The phone rang.

  He looked at her. “Aren’t you going to answer the phone?”

  “Tell me first what you’re going to say.”

  “It can wait.”

  Rachel went to the phone. “Mother? I’ll call you back. Soon. As soon as I can…. You must have had the wrong number. I just got in. That’s right…. An hour…. I’m fine…. No. Mother? I’ll call you…. Out. Mother? I’m hanging up now…. Yes. Soon. Goodbye.”

  “OK,” said Rachel, resuming her seat. “Say it now.”

  Leon’s fingers went for more ash.

  Rachel got up to find him his favourite dope ashtray, set in a miniature Firestone tire.

  “What I want to say is—”

  The phone rang.

  “The phone’s ringing,” Leon pointed out.

  “Let it ring. I’m waiting.”

  “What if it’s important.”

  “You answer it. I’m tired of always being the one.”

  “On second thought—”

  They listened to it ring. “Leon? Maybe you should. It’s been more than fifteen.”

  Leon stood up. “If they hang up when I lift the receiver I’m going to smash it.” Slowly he left the kitchen. “Hello? Oh, uh, hi—Actually, no. That’s right. OK. Right. Me too. Bye.” Leon returned.

  “Who was that?”

  “Nobody,” lowering himself to his seat. “Wrong number—”

  “You say hi to wrong numbers?”

  “Rachel, there’s something I want to say.”

  “So I understand.”

  The phone rang.

  “My turn?”

  Leon nodded.

  It was Cam Wilkes, drunk. He and Jane, still on their marathon date, had progressed from The Buhrstone to the Reservoir Bar, upstairs at the Olde Mill.

  “Rachel? We found a way around our problem! We’re getting married!”

  “Cam, that’s wonderful! What a good idea! Of course! Congratulations!”

  “Rachel, this moment is the Mount Everest of my happiness!”

  “Cam, I wish you the very best, and I’m so relieved Jane’s going to be spared shock.”

  “She’ll never miss it! I’ll be all the shock she needs.”

  “I’m sure you will, Cam. Thanks for telling me right away.”

  “Rachel, do you believe in developmental leaps for adults?”

  “Why not?”

  “Yippee!”

  Rachel returned to the kitchen table.

  “What’d Wilkes want?” Leon asked. “Calling to say he’s sold his bus yard to Mortprop through another realtor?”

  “No. He’s getting married,” and Rachel told Leon about Jane.

  Before she had finished, a certain smugness entered Leon’s features, the kind a person might be inclined to punch off. Several moments of reflection had no appreciable effect on that look. “Isn’t it funny,” Leon said, “how there’s always a woman right there to step in when a void opens up in a man’s life. Boy, they sure do have a nose.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “All I’m saying is, he wanted you. You were taken. So for a while there we had a classic case of desire without an object. As is the guy’s wont under stress, he goes even deeper into retreat. And before you know it a woman has sniffed him out. Women are like some kind o
f primitive life form, able to scent musk at ten miles. Men bumble around in the clouds with this vague ideathat women are aloof and unattainable, and yet it happens all the time. They know everything, they’re all-cunning, they’re a bunch of predatory animals. You know what I say to myself every time I go into a public washroom for a leak? They can’t get me in here!”

  “Is this what you sat me down to tell me?”

  “Rachel, let’s have a kid.”

  “A what?”

  “Why are you acting surprised? The whole idea when we moved out here—”

  “Leon, where were you last night?”

  “There’s so much bullshit in the world, Rachel. The only justification for leaving the house is a family in it. The best reasons are the ones made out of flesh. Memories, ideas, goals, role models are fragile things, insubstantial as dreams. But a kid is something real. And it’s alive. Growing, every day. I know this sounds corny, but a kid is a stake in the future, a future that otherwise is fast-diminishing for both of us. Anyway, isn’t this what women are all about, when you get right down to facts? You need some fact in your life, Rachel. You can’t go on at Millpond Indemnity, betting people they’ll live and them betting you they’ll die. It’s not a healthy dynamic. And think of your body. It’s only got so many years left. I mean, the biological clock is really ticking away. Especially lately—”

  “Leon, where were you last night?”

  “Maybe I’m just getting old, but just now the thought of actually having my own son chokes me right up. Think of it, Rachel. My own son!” Tears stood in Leon’s eyes.

  “How about your own daughter?”

  He shrugged. “Sure, daughter. I can live with a daughter. We could always try again.”

  Rachel nodded, watching him. “I’d have trouble with guys with acne and a mickey of Kahlua in their windbreakers showing up at the door to take her to a club,” Leon continued. “But I could ask for references, or something. So what do you say?”

  “I’m not saying anything until you tell me where you were last night.”

  “Driving around. Thinking. The past twenty-four hours has been a major watershed in my life, Rachel. Getting dumped by Mortprop was the best thing that could have happened to me. It’s turned me back to my old dream of a family. If you want to know the truth, I’m sure that for me this is what Harry has been all about from the beginning. What Wilkes’ need for you stirred in me was not memories of my father, or Alex Silver, but the anticipation of my own unborn son, who I’ll be like a brother to. None of this hierarchical authority stuff. I’m talking about forging allegiances against the powers of darkness. A family is where you dig your primary trenches. Otherwise the Siroccos and the women get you. They eat you up, they lay waste to your soul.”

  Leon reflected awhile. “There’s something else. You and I … we’ve been … drifting apart lately, Rachel. I don’t know. I’ve been feeling so undirected, basically, so lost. Just clutching at straws. And when I get that way, I get scared and when I’m scared I know I can be a pretty distant kind of a guy. You don’t have to tell me it’s been hard on you. But a kid, Rachel! A kid would give me areason for going out there again and smashing my head against the wall for twenty-five more years. A kid would yoke us. Bringing up a kid would be a project we’d work on as a team. You’d handle the daily stuff and I’d be there for those crucial moments of inspiration. And it would be so easy for me! That’s what I’m saying! I’d love it! My kid and I would inspire each other! We’d move mountains! So what do you say, Rachel? Why don’t we go upstairs and start right now on our little dynasty? Rip off our clothes and do what we came to the Millpond to do in the first place? A set-up like the Millpond only doesn’t make sense at all when you leave out kids. Come on. What do you say?”

  “What do I say? What do I say?”

  “Why are you getting excited?”

  “Leon, where were you last night?”

  Leon stood up. “OK. If that’s all it is. Your veins are sticking out because there’s a few hours of my life you don’t happen to have track of—More convoluted maternalism. You’re not God, Rachel! You’re just a frustrated mother—”

  Here Rachel threw that ashtray—it bounced off the top of Leon’s head—then came around the table to strangle him. Leon’s chair went over backwards, and they hit the floor, Rachel on top, beating him with her fists. This went on for some time, Leon’s head inside a helmet of forearms. When fatigue rendered further pummeling ineffective, Rachel slumped against the cupboards to weep. Leon got up, tucked in his shirt, and staggered from the house. Leon did not come home that night. At work next day panic gave a little fillip to Rachel’s clerical style. Home again to a waiting 201 Dell Drive, she did not have the resolve to turn on a light, did not want to be too blatantly confronted by the fact of Leon’s renewed absence in the form of her own undisturbed chaos from the morning—bed unmade, taps dripping, scummy coffee on the kitchen counter …

  Maybe if she had something to eat. In the brightly lit fridge a rancid half of lemon, hard-skinned; cream cheese cracked and yellow; a zucchini broken out in white fur. On the other hand, why eat if you’re not hungry?

  Instead she called Alex Silver, got his answering machine.

  “Alex here. I’m not in right now, but if you’d like to leave a message, please do so when you hear the beep. The tape runs three minutes, so there’s no reason to freeze. Three minutes is a heck of a long time, even for an incredibly complex state of mind. Got a watch with a timer function? Great. See for yourself.”

  Pause.

  “If you’re thinking you can’t do it, consider this: It’s only a machine. It has no expectations and therefore no feelings to be hurt as a result of your failure to respond to its ‘invitation’ to leave a message. Hang up now, and there is no reason in the world to feel guilty. None whatsoever. Any click you leave behind will fall into precision sequence with dozens of others just like it, a domino in a falling row.

  “If, however, you hang up at some point into the three minutes, then a little bit of guilt may be appropriate, because whenI play back my machine I must listen to anywhere up to three minutes of pointless silence as you waste exactly as much of my time as you have wasted of your own.

  “So. If you don’t want to feel guilty—and remember, guilt is just another way we have of feeling bad about ourselves—hang up now. Otherwise, when you hear the beep, you will have exactly three minutes.”

  Beeeeep.

  Rachel waited about a minute and hung up. She called back feeling guilty and for punishment had to listen to the message all over again.

  Beeeeep.

  “Um, Dr. Silver, this is Rachel Boseman. I really need to—”

  “Hello, hello?”

  “Dr. Silver?”

  ——

  Alex Silver explained that when he worked late at the office he sometimes used his machine to screen his mother’s calls. Rachel asked if she—

  “Rachel,” said Alex, still hanging from the ceiling. “You don’t have to tell me the rest. It was a conversation with me! I remember! We had a few sessions, and I brought you into the study. In other words, we are now here. We’ve arrived! We’re up to speed!”

  Alex unbuckled and swung down. He seemed distraught. His face was red with all the blood in it. He stumbled over to Rachel, breathing hard. His glasses lay on the floor behind him. Hiseyes were naked, scary. “Know what I still want to know from all this?” he asked.

  “No, Alex,” said Rachel, interested. “What?”

  “What Leon ever really saw in Nick Sirocco. It can’t just be success! Already a guy like Leon lives and breathes success! Oh sure, he’ll have setbacks, but that just makes him more human!”

  Rachel considered this. Then she said, “That’s all you want to know?”

  “I mean, with you I can understand it. Weak superego. Frustration, lust, and so on. But Leon? A man of Leon’s stature?”

  Already Rachel was on her feet, water gun drawn, shouting. “That does it,
Alex! This whole thing stinks, and I know exactly why! It’s all the alienated male bullshit in the air around here! Keep your goddamn heroes and your goddamn giant anthurium! Look after your own goddamn cat! And your own goddamn conscience too, if you’ve got one! I’m going back to my own life—!”

  While Rachel shouted, Silver went to his knees, his face contorted like a snake handler’s. “That’s just it, Rachel! Unless you find Harry, your life is nothing but alienated male bullshit! All our lives—!”

  Suddenly Rachel felt very weary. She lowered her gun. Sighed. “Now you’re just being dramatic,” she said quietly. “Alex, don’t count on seeing me back here or at the Dream Centre ever again. I’m really pissed off. I mean I’m finished here. You’ll just have to excuse me. Goodbye. I’ve got some shopping to do.”

  “Harry, Rachel!” Silver called as she passed out through his reception area. “What about Harry! Moving on won’t mean athing unless you find him! Remember Leon! Remember Cam Wilkes! Remember your mother! Remember me—eee!”

  The electronic door of the Mortprop Mall SuperSpend knew Rachel was coming. Just as she leaned into it it swung wide open. She staggered forward and on through the turnstile into the hangar-sized chamber of bright, orange-walled fluorescence. The air smelled of apples, clove-scented floor cleaner, cold shopping carts fresh from the lot. One of these she wrestled off the end of a fifty-metre telescope of the damn things and headed out around the checkouts, not wanting to think about the minimum of five fully-loaded carts that waited at each, discouraged shoppers leafing through People magazines they had snuck from the racks by the registers. Not wanting to think, either, about being in the hands of that maniac Silver for the past two weeks. Slipping the water gun into the pocket of her sweats, Rachel headed for the produce section. One of her mother’s main rules: Never go food shopping when you’re hungry. Rachel was ravenous, the produce dazzling. It had been waxed and buffed. Rachel could see her face in apples, peppers, eggplants. There were mirrors and spotlights. She needed sunglasses. Better pick up some of this fabulous food! Her eye fell on perfect pears, even perfecter cukes. Hmm. So smooth, so thick … Tore off a piece of plastic bagging, couldn’t get it open. Which end? Why doesn’t the fucker part? A man stepped forward from nowhere to show her how to do it. (Solution: From the corner of the end indicated.) But he was not Harry.