Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  “It’s not that long,” Audrey said, although it probably had been. “Anyway, it’s different for you. Nobody minds young folks living together nowadays, not like when I was young. And at least you’re getting a bit of nooky out of it.”

  “Nan!”

  “What, did I embarrass you?”

  “Nobody else’s grandmother says things like that. And also, nobody calls it nooky anymore.”

  “Well, whatever you calls it, there’s nothing wrong with it. I know there’s still people my age goes on like it’s something shocking, young people living together before marriage. Or instead of marriage. I mean, not everyone goes on to get married. You and Jake might not. And I think that’s fine. No, it is,” she added, although Rachel hadn’t contradicted her. Maybe she was arguing with the voice of Ellen in her head. “Not everyone who falls in love, or falls into bed together, is meant to be married. Me and Harry Pickens should have never got married. If we could have just lived together for awhile, had a good roll in the hay—is that better than saying nooky?—we would have realized it wasn’t meant to be. And then how much trouble would we have been spared?”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re not shocked. Grandmothers aren’t as easy to shock as they used to be,” said Rachel. “And I think you should go stay at Richard’s till this is all over. Or maybe for good.” She hung the dishtowel back on its hook and picked up her knapsack. She had a proper full-time job now but she still went around carrying a knapsack like a teenager, and wearing jeans and T-shirts all the time. And that choppy short new cut she had made her hair look like a birch broom in the fits. But Audrey bit her tongue when she got the urge to tell Rachel how she should dress or wear her hair. She had missed the girl more than she’d want to admit during those years she was away.

  “Are you going on now?”

  “In a few minutes. Jake’s got a gig tonight and I’m going down to hear him.”

  “Do you sing with him like you used to do with Larry?”

  “He’s after me to, but I don’t think so, no.”

  “You got a lovely voice.” Funny how Rachel used to be so into the music when she was with Larry Kennedy, like singing and playing the guitar was the only thing that mattered, the same way her father used to be. Now she was working at the hospital, doing music with sick youngsters. Music therapy, she called it, and she was taking courses too to get a degree in it all the while she was working. It was all a bit complicated and sometimes when Audrey thought it was too much trouble to explain to people she just told them Rachel worked at the hospital. Half the neighbours assumed she was a nurse, but what harm in that?

  “Well, I don’t know, I might start singing again. I never missed it when I was up in Halifax but back here…I guess because I used to play and sing so much when I lived here before, I find I do miss it now sometimes,” said Rachel.

  “Nothing wrong with it, as long as you got a day job to put food on the table.” In the little silence that followed Audrey’s words, the evening news from the TV seeped into the edges of their day. Someone in a suit said that the TAGS program was failing people in rural Newfoundland, retraining them for jobs that didn’t exist.

  “They say there’s some place on the Southern Shore where twenty-five women that used to work in the fish plant went and got their TAGS money and got trained to be hairdressers,” Audrey says. “And the town only ever had the one hairdresser, and even she don’t have enough work to keep going with so many people moving away, so what’s the good of twenty-five trained hairdressers? You tell me. The government got this whole business arsed up if you ask me.”

  “Hard to see what’s going to happen to places like that,” Rachel said. “Or like this, for that matter.”

  Audrey drained her teacup and looked down. Doris used to claim she could read tea leaves; right now, Audrey almost wished she could read them too, although as she always used teabags there wasn’t much chance of that. “Well, this one is going to turn into a pizza parlour, so it seems.”

  “Pizza parlour is like nooky, Nan—nobody calls it that anymore.”

  After Rachel left, picking her way out through the chaos of the shop downstairs and locking the door behind her, Audrey put her feet up and watched the end of The National. There wasn’t much good news on the go, but it was always better to stay on top of it.

  The phone rang just as Peter Mansbridge was saying goodnight on the television. Audrey expected it to be Marilyn, who phoned once or twice a week at about this time of the night—her rates went down after nine. Audrey, picked up the receiver, ready to pitch into her litany of complaints about Frank, Frankie Junior, and the mess downstairs.

  A man’s rough voice, familiar and unfamiliar, crackling with long-distance. “Hello…is this Audrey Holloway?”

  It was like the floor had dropped out from under her feet. No amount of time and change could prevent her from recognizing the voice, even before he added, “Mom?”

  “Henry.”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “My God, Henry, the turn you gave me.”

  Weak laughter down the line. “Had me given up for dead, I s’pose, did you?”

  “As good as. Sure it’s been—how long?”

  Silence on the other end, then, “Must be ten years, isn’t it?”

  Twelve years and seven months since the last phone call. “All of that and more,” she said. “Are you...you’re all right?”

  “I’m all right now. Good enough, anyway.”

  “Is there...do you need anything?”

  Another silence, this one longer. Audrey’s heart pounded in her chest and she thought of her father Wes: heart attacks ran in the family.

  “No, Mom,” Henry said at last. “I didn’t want to call just because I needed anything. I s’pose it’s the other way round—I was waiting to call till I didn’t need help. I didn’t want to come home till—well, the time just wasn’t right before, that’s all.”

  “Come home? Where are you—are you in town now?”

  “No, no, I’m up in Toronto. I—the thing is, I wasn’t sure I was going to come home, or even get in touch, or anything. It’s hard to know—where to pick up, I guess. But the other day I was on the GO Train and I saw this fella looking at me, staring really, and then I realized it was Randy. He made me come back to his place for supper with him, wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I was all evening talking to him and Denise, and then—well, I told them I’d call you. Denise would have picked up the phone right then and told you, but I said I needed a day or so, and I promised her I’d call.”

  “Well, God love Denise. You’re OK, though. That’s the main thing. You’re all right.”

  “I’m all right. I’ve been worse and I’ve been better, but I’m all right. But Mom...how is Rachel? Is she OK?”

  “She’s all right. She was just here, she’s doing fine.” All the while thinking, How the hell am I going to tell Rachel?

  RACHEL

  Rachel and Jake were recording an album. Well, Jake’s band, Muscles in the Corner, was recording an album, and Rachel was doing backup vocals. Jake was right, there was a lot going on in the St. John’s music scene now, as if the slump in the economy had stirred up the musical action. Maybe there was a correlation: more people with time on their hands led to more people trying to make a career in the arts. Or maybe it was something to do with people being angry about the moratorium, like poking a stick into a wasp’s nest.

  Not that Muscles in the Corner was playing anything particularly angry or political. The band did a mix of covers of traditional tunes and 70s rock classics. No original music, because nobody in the band wrote lyrics, although Jake told Rachel she should try her hand at writing something for some of the tunes his lead guitarist, Roddy, came up with.

  “I’m not a songwriter,” Rachel said, and Jake accepted that. Not like Larry would have done, poking and prodding at her (the hornet
’s nest again), telling her she really was a songwriter, a soloist, whatever he believed she could be. It was restful to be with someone who accepted her own assessment of her limitations. Mostly restful.

  So the band thing was going OK; and she liked her job; she was taking courses towards a master’s degree. Even living with Jake was going OK, though the relationship had been accelerated by her need to get away from the construction at Nan’s place.

  Nan was drove nuts without the store. Or without the store as it used to be, the hub of the neighbourhood, the place that gave a shape to her days. When Rachel dropped into the store now it didn’t look anything like the place she grew up in. The renovations were finished and Holloway’s Grocery and Confectionary had become Pizza Presto! Most of the shelves were gone; new tile was laid down and a fresh yellow paint job covered the walls. The old wooden sign that once hung outside and then got moved inside had disappeared altogether.

  One end of the room was the pizza take-out counter, with the oven in back where the storage room used to be. Another wall had glass-fronted coolers filled with two-litres of pop and two-fours of beer. One shelf held a few cartons of milk, the only nod to anything you might consider groceries. Frankie Junior worked the pizza ovens, and by the front door Frankie’s girlfriend, Lisa, slouched behind a shrunken, half-sized counter with cigarettes shelved behind it and chocolate bars and chips in the front. People got their pizza, grabbed a dozen beer or a two-litre of Coke, picked up smokes and chips and lotto tickets at the cash, and paid. That was all that was left of Nan’s store, the store that used to supply three blocks of families with everything they needed for dinners and suppers, seven days a week.

  Rachel didn’t come over to see Nan as much as she probably should. Nan was not the kind of grandmother you felt guilty about; even with her hours cut back at the shop, Rachel didn’t imagine Audrey sitting alone in the house waiting for Rachel to drop over. But she went there tonight for supper—canned pork and beans, a stack of white Wonder bread on the plate in the middle of the table, tub of Eversweet margarine. Audrey was no more dedicated a cook than she had ever been.

  A week had passed since Audrey had called to tell her about Henry’s phone call, to tell her that he was alive and reasonably well. That he’d asked for Rachel’s phone number, but Audrey had said she would talk to Rachel first. “I didn’t want to go ahead and give it to him without letting you know.”

  That had been the right thing to do. Rachel told her grandmother she needed to think about it. Now, over supper, she told Audrey that the next time Henry called, she could give him Rachel’s number.

  “It gave me a turn to hear his voice on the phone, I don’t mind saying,” Audrey admitted.

  “It would have given me a turn too. I’m glad you told me first.”

  “Are you mad at him? Seems to me like you’d have every right to be.”

  Rachel pushed beans around on her plate, took a piece of bread to sop up the sauce. “I’m a little mad, I guess. I don’t really know. You said he’s talking about coming home?”

  “Well, he mentioned it. I don’t know why. There’s not much on the go back here. Of course if Henry’s anything like he used to be, he don’t even know what kind of work he’s out of, so that might not make much difference to him.”

  “I can’t think about him here in St. John’s. I mean, I can’t even picture it.”

  “What did Jake have to say about it?”

  Rachel looked up, blinking a little. “I didn’t…tell him, yet. I mean, I never thought about it. It’s kind of a private thing.”

  “And who do you talk about private things with? He’s your boyfriend, isn’t he?”

  “Boyfriend sounds like we’re teenagers.”

  “Well, I don’t know what else to call it. What do they say now, do they say partner or is that only for the gays?”

  The Gays. Rachel pictured them as Audrey named them, a glitzy army of Liberace lookalikes, arms hooked over each other’s shoulders, sashaying down Merrymeeting Road kicking up their legs can-can style. Here Come The Gays.

  “Anyway,” she said aloud, “Jake’s going back up to Alberta for work soon.”

  “Are you staying in his place or moving back in here?”

  “Not sure yet…can I move back in, if I can’t afford the rent on his place? It might be better for him to sublet.”

  “You always got a home here, you know that, girl.”

  Always a home here, but home was always changing. The shop downstairs more often filled with Frankie Junior’s crew of friends than with the familiar neighbourhood shoppers, but at least Frankie didn’t live over the store; he and his father had a place on Freshwater Road. If Henry came home, surely he would expect to move back here. Would the three of them, three generations of Holloways, be under the one roof? Rachel finished the last bit of bread, thinking of all the things she had chased around these Corningware plates on this table, sauces she had sopped up with bits of bread. Ketchup, egg yolks, gravy. In the background, on what might be the last functioning vinyl record player in St. John’s, George Jones sang “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” The comfortable predictability of meals at Audrey’s table, country music in the background, the ping of the shop door downstairs punctuating it all.

  After supper they turned on the TV and watched Wheel of Fortune, which Audrey was good at, and Jeopardy, which Rachel was good at. Loud voices drifted up from the street below as people came and went, ordering pizza by the box or by the slice.

  On her way out, Rachel stopped to buy smokes for Jake at the counter downstairs—she had quit smoking, herself, back in Nova Scotia, figuring it was bad for her voice. Though living with Jake it was hard not to take it up again. Lisa rang her in and Frankie said, “How’s it hangin’, Rae?”

  “What’s up, Frankie? How’s business?”

  “Lookin’ good, lookin’ good. Aunt Audrey’s going to have to admit when she sees the numbers at the end of the month, this is the best decision she ever made.”

  “Yeah. Well, I don’t think she’s thinking that way right now.” Rachel moved from the checkout counter to the pizza counter, looking around again at the shelves of chips and cheezies, the coolers of beer and pop. “It just takes some getting used to, I guess. I pretty much grew up in this shop. It’s hard not to compare to how it used to be.”

  “Nothing is like it used to be no more, that’s just life. This is what people want.”

  “Smokes and junk food and lottery tickets,” Rachel said. “People used to get their groceries here, I remember the neighbours dropping in for bologna and eggs and loaves of bread, all that stuff.”

  Frankie Junior stared at her for a second, then said, “Well, don’t blame me.” In a nearly pitch-perfect nasally John Crosbie imitation he added, “I never took the baloney outta the goddam cooler!”

  The joke took Rachel by surprise, her laugh almost a whooping sound. Frankie laughed too; they were both cracking up, sharing a rare moment of camaraderie. Even Lisa, whose face Rachel had assumed to be incapable of registering complex emotions, laughed, and in the glow of that warm moment the door pinged and a guy covered in tattoos came up to the counter to order pizza.

  Rachel tried to hold to that laugher on the way home, to think that Frankie Junior was really all right and things would be OK with the store and with Nan. But Frankie’s joke was like that one warm day in April in St. John’s when it was still stony hard winter underneath. Underneath the joke was the reality, more insightful than she would have given Frankie credit for: it was all the same thing. The fish outta the goddam water and the baloney outta the goddam cooler; the moratorium and the death of the corner store. People were leaving on every ferry and every plane out of Torbay airport, and only Rachel was crazy enough to come back. At least she wasn’t as crazy as Frankie, trying to forestall the Decline and Fall of the Rabbittown Empire with pepperoni pizza by the slice. She didn’t know what woul
d be sadder, Frankie failing or Frankie succeeding.

  But the saddest thing of all, maybe, was knowing that Henry was alive up in Toronto, riding alone on a Go Train, recognized only by chance by a cousin, dreaming of coming home to his mother and his daughter and a world that no longer existed. If it ever had.

  musical interlude

  HENRY AND RACHEL

  (NOT A DUET)

  The Stetson. Never been up on this stage before, I’m not even sure this place was here when I lived home. And for obvious reasons I haven’t been to a lot of bars since I came back. Step up onto the stage, grip the neck of the guitar a little tighter to keep my hands from shaking.

  Blinking in the lights. That’s been awhile too. At least there’s not many people here yet. Four acts on tonight and I’m the first, and hardly anyone in the place except what you might call my entourage. Rachel and a couple of her friends, Mom and her—boyfriend? or something?— Richard. Mom’s friend Doris. Aunt Treese with Nancy and her husband. God love ’em for coming. The whole ragged-arsed family, gathering round. Not exactly the prodigal son, no fatted calves killed, but a Sunday dinner at Alf and Treese’s, steaks on the barbecue another evening over at Richard’s place. A room ready in the house I grew up in, and all the pizza I can eat downstairs. Oh yeah, sketchy little Frankie Junior and his girlfriend are here too somewhere. More than half the people in the bar are my family. Hell of a lot more than I deserve.

  —Good evening ladies and gentlemen, thanks for coming out. It’s good to be back home. Long time since I played in St. John’s.

  And never played here like this, never as a solo artist. Always backing up someone else, in someone’s band. Only reason I’m here tonight is because Bob Eveleigh somehow, against all odds, turned out to be kind of A Big Deal after he went to Nashville and recorded an album that made it into the Top Ten on the Canadian country charts. He’s the headliner tonight; in a couple of hours the place will be wall-to-wall with people coming out to hear him. It was all his idea, adding me into the lineup for tonight.