by Jan Conn
Della decided Stacey should watch Sesame Street every morning, and Della and Molly the Nose watched it with her. Stacey got up and danced when lower case n sat lonely on a mountain top with no wind, or a crew who lived inside capital I came out for daily cleaning, and she always stared transfixed when Grover had a hissy fit, while outside the snowflakes continued to fall on top of one another so Della couldn’t drive anywhere.
Sage always, and Della sometimes, smoked dope at night. The summer before they found Stacey, Sage wanted to drive all the way to Woodstock, but Della said it was too far to travel. Sage insisted this was a chance of a lifetime and threatened to go by himself, but still Della refused. He told her she was stubborn as a mule, and Della asked when was the last time he’d ridden a mule? When he didn’t respond, she told him it was better to be stubborn as a mule than dumb as an ass. Sage never forgave Della, and to make up for not going, he smoked dope nightly and listened to The Who, Creedence Clearwater, Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix. It wasn’t the same, though. People who made it to Woodstock were permanently branded in a way Sage could only dream about.
Della always had cookies around the house, chocolate chip cookies, some made with peanut butter, and lately, some without. The music never bothered Stacey. When she was tired, she went to bed and fell asleep without a care. Marijuana smoke lay thick in the air of the house, but no one factored this into Stacey’s compliant behaviour. Sage never had a problem finding enough dope to smoke, and others in Fernie liked to hang around the Howard house on weekends because they knew Sage was always well-supplied. Sage didn’t sidle up to people easily but was never happier than on party nights, when all the blemishes of humanity had soft edges and grew tolerable. Most of these people were younger than Sage and Della and didn’t have kids of their own, so everyone took turns giving Stacey her a nightly bath, and they brought so many toys and stuffed animals, as compensation for the dope, that soon Chatty Cathy had plenty of friends to talk to in her crowded room. Stacey had memorized everything the doll had to say, and Chatty Cathy had family around her now, willing to listen, but they had to listen carefully because Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band played louder than usual in the room next door.
4
Some of the men Sage worked with in the mine liked being there, but he thought that was only because they’d gotten used to it. Some of the jobs appealed to him, too, but the men who owned them had worked twenty years or more for the privilege. Della was against his taking a job there in the first place. She imagined Sage on his hands and knees with a pick and shovel, exposed to noxious gases and coal dust that would graduate to black lung. Only parts of her idea of coal mining were true. Gases floated around, and despite the efforts of safety precautions, coal dust was unavoidable, but with continuous mining, the days of massive crews with picks and shovels had ended. Sage wasn’t employed in the act of mining anyway. To begin with, he worked as a labourer on construction and maintenance, keeping the mine safe for those running the machines that did most of the work. He came home dirty and tired every night, but he carpooled with Emery, who had been certified in first aid and spent most of his day at the mine in a clean and climate-friendly office. Emery kept a blanket on the passenger seat of his car for when he drove Sage home. It didn’t take much convincing for Sage to consider taking courses on Saturdays so that one day he too could walk out of the mine looking clean.
Had they not found Stacey, it might have only taken a few weeks for Sage to quit the mine and look for something else. He’d done just about every kind of job a man could do over the last fifteen years, and restlessness always sent him looking for another occupation with better pay or better working conditions or something else. But now things had changed. His marriage had flattened out, and he knew it. Now that Stacey lived in the house, Della had come back to life, back to a different version of the woman she had been when Sage had married her. Stacey wasn’t his biological daughter, but the roles he and Della worked at were the ones his wife had planned all along, so Sage considered the family matter closed.
Emery played pool better than Sage, but even so, it became a ritual after their Friday shifts to stop at the pub and play a few games and drink a few beers.
Will that be all for you fellas? Selma said, bending over and moving two glasses of beer from her tray to the small table where Sage and Emery sat, pool cues in hand. Emery always sat before the beer arrived. Selma had what Emery described as outstanding knockers, and the tops of them, threatening to rise like the morning sun out and onto the table, came into full view when she bent over. Emery always ordered small glasses of beer so Selma’s service to humanity would be as frequent as possible.
We’ll run a tab, love, Emery said. He slipped a dollar bill into her bosom. That’s just so you’ll remember to come back again. Selma retrieved the dollar bill and adjusted the balance of her main attractions before heading back to the bar. Sage’s game had been improving of late, and Emery had talked him into considering the weekly afternoon beer a wager. Most times this meant Sage paid for every beer they consumed.
What a man wouldn’t do to fall asleep with his head buried between those soft pillows, Emery said. I wouldn’t care if I ever woke up again.
Your wife might have something to say about that, Sage said.
I know. I know. I’m just saying. A man should never stop dreaming.
Foremen are assholes, Emery said after Sage told him that no matter what he and the carpenter he worked with did, they could never satisfy Brigsby, the foreman in charge. Being an asshole is the first thing they look for in a foreman. That’s why I’ve got my ticket in first aid. There’s no one breathing down my neck, and everything I do comes with some kind of appreciation. A fellow came in a couple of months ago with a finger from his right hand sitting in his left hand. I wrapped it in ice and sent him off the hospital, and they sewed it back on. He came in four or five times after that on his way to work to thank me. I told him it was just part of my job, and he looked at me like I was a god.
I see they hired a woman a few weeks ago, Sage said. First time ever, so I’m told.
She’s a looker, Emery said, but you’ve got to be careful with a woman that wants to work in a place like that. My guess is she’s loaded with male hormones and prefers women over men.
But you don’t know that.
I’m just saying. They’re out to prove something to the world. Mind you, it’ll make my day if she’s injured down the road. I might not be in such a hurry to send her off for repairs.
Most of the time Sage and Emery talked, the results felt less than satisfactory. Everything Emery said seemed skewed, and Sage couldn’t quite own his part of the conversation. When Emery got his mind all wrapped around a topic, his pool playing suffered; Sage was down to one ball but missed, and he stood by and watched Emery put an end to the game. I should get going, Sage said. He felt he had a right to say that because he was driving that day, and Emery never put up an argument so long as he had two beers paid for. Sage handed his friend the money because Emery liked to be the one to pay Selma. Sage stood for a moment at the door and imagined Stacey growing up to be a woman needing work. He wouldn’t want her to end up working in the mine. He wouldn’t be too fond of her being a barmaid with her tits hanging out, begging for tips, either.
Della had been employed in the past. The longest she had stayed in one job was at a fish-packing plant in Prince Rupert, but that was a long time ago. She wanted the best for Stacey so she didn’t argue with Sage’s mounting campaign that she find a job. Most of the couples they knew had two jobs, sometimes three. Still, she struggled to contemplate any other life than that of a stay-at-home mom.
Della could only relate to numbers that represented amounts of money she could spend. She had heard about the new math they were teaching in schools but doubted she would like it any better than the old math that paralyzed her growing up. She liked the phrase “new math” because it suggested that the old math, which she had no use for, had been a mi
stake all along. Following her husband’s counsel, she reluctantly applied for and got a job posted at their local Bank of Commerce.
The job would be part-time, which suited Della just fine, but it required a full week of teller training. Molly the Nose offered to look after Stacey while this happened, but it didn’t happen for long.
Della lasted halfway into her second day before the manager decided banking and Della weren’t compatible. She came home when Molly the Nose and Stacey were halfway through Sesame Street and said she hated banking and had quit. Molly the Nose frowned because she had already imagined the new curling iron she planned to buy with her babysitting money. Sage had the family bank account at the Bank of Commerce, but Della insisted he switch to a different bank. She wouldn’t walk back in there every month to take money out.
Losing the job opportunity at the bank felt to Della like coming down with a serious virus. She hung around the house for the next week, claiming faintness and no energy. She also found the behaviour of her neighbours disturbing. Hart from next door had been lobbying for weeks to get a TV so he could watch his Westerns, but Molly the Nose had resisted because she thought they were cliché and she didn’t want to encourage Hart’s fetish. But with Della laid up for a week of employment-failure-recovery, Molly the Nose had to miss her daily fix of Sesame Street, and that was the catalyst that caused the Fergusons to finally get a TV bigger than the one the Howards owned. That hastened Della’s recovery. A week later she tried another job on for size at a bakery downtown.
Della loved to bake and loved being around the smell of baking, so it was a perfect fit, especially the part where she had to go in early and help stock the glass cases with breads and delectable treats. As a bonus, she brought home bread and Eccles cakes and whatever else hadn’t sold during the day.
So long as customers came to the store in an orderly manner and she could deal with them one at a time, everything worked out fine, but once the store filled with three or four people, pointing, asking questions, their kids smearing their hands on the glass cases (which she was somehow supposed to prevent), the job became too stressful, and by the end of her fourth day, before her kind and mostly patient boss could intervene, Della told him she wouldn’t be back the next day. Molly the Nose was doubly disappointed because once again her source of babysitting money had disappeared along with the supply of free doughnuts she had come to rely on.
Another week in bed resulted, and twice Sage had to cook dinner. He complained about it and headed to the pub to fill the evening in protest, and Della felt like a complete failure. If Sage hated anything more than a bad thing happening, it was when two or three came one after another, creating an overriding sense that others were waiting in queue. They needed an influx of something that didn’t smell of defeat, and he came home late from work with a dog in tow. Sage claimed he brought the dog home to lift Della’s spirits, to get her out of bed at least so she could be functional again, but he also missed Barker. The new dog, already four years old, had a name, but Sage decided they should call him Hart. This didn’t go over well with Molly the Nose, who felt slighted because whenever they called Hart in from digging in the yard, everyone thought they were calling their next-door neighbour. But Hart the neighbour didn’t mind. He liked the name Hart, and sharing it with a dog didn’t seem unreasonable.
Hart the dog looked as if he had every breed of dog mixed in him somewhere, and Sage had got him for nothing because one of his co-workers had to give him up when he and his wife had a child. Hart was the colour of Neapolitan ice cream, and if Stacey stood close to him in the summer, his happy tail cooled her off. Hart slept on the linoleum in Stacey’s bedroom every night despite Sage laying a dog blanket next to his bed. Della complained about Hart daily in her journal because the dog shed hair everywhere and left slimy dog toys underfoot for her to trip over. Sage just laughed when she said anything. It was like having another kid in the house, he said. They say a dog is man’s best friend for a reason, he claimed, and Della said because a man is never around to clean up after them.
Sage stopped pestering Della about getting a job of any kind once he got Hart, almost as if the dog made up for their relative poverty, but a few months later, the dog came down with distemper and wandered off to a nearby pond to die on his own. His disappearance left a discernible emptiness around the house. Della felt it as much as anyone, and while she adored her mothering role, she decided that rather than take a job with a thankless boss serving people who treated her as a slave, she would stay at home and babysit at the same time. Sage thought this was a great idea and said if the money she brought in paid for her cigarettes and his dope and kept the purple car on the road, then they might have a chance to build a future after all. He wanted to celebrate, but they didn’t know anyone who might pop in for a few hours to babysit except Molly next door and Sage refused to ask her, so he set off for the pub on foot to celebrate by himself.
And so began a series of surrogate brothers and sisters living at the Howards during the daytime and sometimes overnight during a weekend. Della documented every one of them and devoted two or three pages in her family album to people like Edwin the red-headed baby or Laura the little French girl who wanted to grow up to be an Irish dancer. Pictures of the kids’ parents shared space in the album along with pictures of the kids with Stacey at various stages of development. Stacey asked why the pictures in the album didn’t go back to when she was little, and Della said because the book that had all of her baby pictures went missing on one of their moves and that was a sad loss, not having a record of all those years, a most sorrowful loss she was still coming to grips with.
Some kids she babysat for a month or two and some over a period of several years. The end of their street became a haven for young kids because Molly the Nose still wanted that curling iron and she started taking in kids in as well. Sage built two swings under a tree in the backyard, and Hart next door put in a teeter-totter and built a playhouse, which looked like a fort from the days of the Wild West. Molly the Nose was okay with the fort but was against war and violence, so all the toy guns had to stay on Howard property, a long way from the fort, which didn’t make sense to most of the kids.
Della called these kids her clients. She saw her job as important, as if she were an informal social worker toiling to improve society. She kept notes on anything she considered significant during the day. 11:45. Meghan complained of being hot and feverish. Temperature taken. 100.1. Napped on the outside cot for half an hour (cool cloth on forehead) and seemed fine after.
Her clients came in two categories. Those who could walk and talk and play, and helpless babies that got served first and took up most of Della’s time. Stacey preferred walking, talking clients as she got older, preferably girls her own age, though boys were fine too because they played mostly with the boy toys Della had around the house and were less prone to hogging her favourite dolls and stuffed animals. Tommy was one such boy, and the two of them drank Kool-Aid daily, laced with Fizzies tablets, and went out to the woodshed and had burping contests.
Most burps wins, Tommy said. You go first. Stacey didn’t like the taste of the Fizzies tablets because they added a root beer flavour to perfectly good Kool-Aid. She waited until her stomach settled a little so she wouldn’t barf all over the woodshed. She managed seven burps, enough that Tommy didn’t laugh in her face like he usually did. Tommy popped his Fizzie tablets and downed the Kool-Aid and started his burping saga immediately. Stacey always expected him to get sick, but he never did. Tommy tied his previous record of sixteen burps and looked disappointed when he finished. This common ritual amused them for most of one summer, but then Della couldn’t buy Fizzies anymore because it turned out they were bad for you, according to someone.
Stacey knew there had to be something she could do better than Tommy, and one day when they were helping Della make lunch, she discovered her talent. Just a whiff of onion, and tears streamed down her face, and so began another daily challenge where the two of
them went to the woodshed and cut an onion in half to see who could cry the most. Tommy didn’t take to Stacey’s idea easily, and when he couldn’t match her river-on-demand tear production, he decided they should see who could hold an onion under their nose and cry the least. I don’t see why we have to change the rules, Stacey said, but went along with it anyway. Still, she could only compete if she followed Molly the Nose’s recommendation and surreptitiously started off with lemon juice dabbed around her mouth and nose and a piece of bread hidden under her tongue.
Birthdays were a big deal for anyone in Della’s flock. She baked a cake, even if the kid was too young to eat any of it. She went all out: presents, goody bags, balloons. She tried to impress the parents more than anything, but she disguised it well. Stacey’s birthday, deliberated upon soon after they got her, was September 7th. They’d missed her first two birthdays, they guessed. Stacey’s birthday presents every year came from a specific category. Sage always bought something she could play with, and Della gave her store-bought clothes to wear. Sage bought her a series of tricycles sized to fit her growth spurts but scabby in places, though one year he went all out and Stacey woke to a new tricycle and, sitting on the seat, a blue-eyed Stacey Doll with long red hair dressed in a provocative blue and pink party dress that looked more like a negligee. Stacey held the doll in her hands but didn’t know what to make of it and neither did Della. Sage explained that the doll had a bendable waist, legs and arms and came with real eyelashes. She’s the real deal, he said.
As time passed, they marked Stacey’s growth on the door frame leading into the kitchen, and with every passing year, Della’s journals reflected hope and contentment and a sense that life was as it should be. Life as a surrogate mom in various extensions matched Della’s employment needs perfectly, so that she felt content and satisfied, but as the precious years melted into the past, Sage could not say the same.