The only chore Lou will still do is the grocery shopping, because that’s when she picks up her weekly supply of pop and candy. Saturday mornings their father drives her and her wagon to the store on his way to work—“The early bird catches the worm,” he says (you can stake your life on it)—but she usually goes straight from the car to Sherry’s place in the apartment buildings behind the shopping centre and doesn’t get around to buying the groceries until the afternoon.
One Saturday she leaves it a bit late and flies through the supermarket doors just as the manager is about to lock up. “Five minutes,” he warns.
“See ya in three,” Lou says, dropping her wagon handle and grabbing a cart. Since she buys the same things every week, she moves fast.
She seems to be the last customer in the store. It increases her speed. But as she’s racing to the meat counter, she sees two people standing in front of the hotdog section, right in front of where she’s headed. One is a woman in a clerk’s coat, and one is a man in a black topcoat.
A strange woman.
And their father.
Lou comes to a stop, her running shoes squealing. Their father doesn’t turn around. The woman, who is standing too near to their father, facing him and Lou, glances over. Her name is written on her breast pocket. Lou reads it, she’s that close. “Vera Produce,” she reads.
She says,“Dad.” But the word seems to slam into a brick wall just outside her mouth. Their father is gripping Vera Produce’s left hand, holding it low and tight against her red skirt.
Against her hip. She has wide hips and big white legs with no nylons. Red high heels. She glances at Lou again, glances at someone else who is walking up the next aisle.
“The store is closing,” a voice says over the PA. “Please take your purchases to the checkout. The store is closing.” Vera Produce combs her fingers through her black hair. Their father whispers something to her. She shakes her head at the ground, looking crabby, then looks back up at him with a sprawling, wet face.
“Honey,” their father says. He lays his hand on the side of her head. She drops her red lips to the cuff of his shirt that yesterday Norma scorched with the iron and soaked in straight bleach. Tears pouring out of her eyes, Vera Produce kisses a line from their father’s cuff to the tips of his fingers.
Lou lets go of her shopping cart. She turns, leaving the cart and her groceries, and marches back down the aisle to the front of the store. The manager has to unlock the door for her. “Don’t forget your wagon,” he says.
The minute she steps outside, the parking-lot lights come on. In the farthest row, by the Salvation Army bin, she spots their father’s station wagon. Hiding there, like dirty underpants thrown behind a door. She won’t go past it. She goes the other way, the long way home. She is familiar with the calm she is feeling; she recognizes it as temporary. She walks slowly, pulling her empty wagon, starting and stopping, looking into windows that she has no inclination to break. Everyone is having supper around kitchen tables. In front of one house, which is exactly like theirs—it even has a spindly willow tree in the middle of the lawn, and the same front door with three round windows going up at a slant like how you know a character in a comic book is thinking—she sits down in her wagon. Then she lies down, testing out what kind of bed it’ll make.
*
His car isn’t in the garage. Lou has a quick, repellent image of him and Vera necking in the parking lot. Vera Produce has fat white legs like the pillars in front of a mansion. What does their father see in her? What does she see in him?—that’s the real question. Vera Produce must be crazy. A crazy piece of tail.
Lou pulls the wagon into the middle of the garage for him to crash into, then kicks it over to the wall out of the way. It makes her sick to think how he’s been playing them all for suckers with his nice-guy act. Who will pay the bills if he runs off? After Sherry’s father ran off with the Negro woman, Sherry’s mother was forced to sell the house.
Inside, the t? is blaring. Norma is hammering.
“Why can’t we ever have any goddamn peace and quiet around here!” Lou screams.
Instantly there is silence. A moment later Norma comes up from the basement and into the front hall. She’s wearing a pair of their father’s old work pants with the cuffs rolled up and one of their cousin Mary Jane’s gigantic cardigans, flaked with sawdust. “Where are the groceries?” she asks.
Lou takes her jacket off. Instead of dropping it on the bench, she hangs it on a hanger in the closet.
“What’s going on?” Norma says.
Lou shoves by her into the kitchen. She wonders whether or not to tell the truth. Norma follows her, asking about the groceries again. Sighing, Lou drops onto a chair. She looks at Norma’s anxious face and notices for the first time that it’s their father’s, only with glasses and younger and fatter. And nicer. Sandy’s face is their mother’s. Mine, Lou thinks, is nobody’s. It’s going to be awful, she thinks, not doing anything that might make him mad, being good all the time so that he’ll want to stay here. She folds her arms on the kitchen table and rests her head on her hands. Right now she hasn’t the energy or the heart to give Norma the bad news. “I forgot,” she says.
“Forgot?”
“Yeah, forgot. Okay?”
More than the obvious lie, more than no groceries and hanging up the jacket, the tone of Lou’s voice worries Norma. What has Lou done? Lou was the one who scrawled that filth all over the roads and fences a couple of weeks ago. (Norma wiped off as much as she could with her scarf.) Aside from recognizing the writing—the same F, like the twice-crossed T that Lou uses to sign their last name—Norma can’t think of anyone else who would go that far. She knows that Lou steals and hangs around with the loose girl from Chicago. “Protect your sisters,” their brother, Jimmy, advises from heaven. Easy to say.
“Well,” Norma says, sighing, helpless as always,“I guess it’s mustard sandwiches for dinner.”
They wait for their father before starting to eat. Every few minutes Lou checks at the window. After a quarter of an hour she says quietly,“The son of a bitch isn’t coming back,” and Norma wraps his sandwich in wax paper for him to eat later.
His car pulls up just as they’re sitting down at the table. “Come on,” Lou says, dashing out to the front hall.
Their father seems surprised to see them. “Fine, at ease,” he says without inspecting their outstretched hands. He frowns past them at the dining room, as if he’s in the wrong house.
“I got sick, so there’s no groceries,” Lou says. She can’t keep the resentment out of her voice. As he’s hanging up his coat, she sees Vera’s red lipstick on his shirt cuff.
“What?” he says remotely, turning around.
When Lou doesn’t answer, Norma murmurs,“Lou was too sick to do the shopping.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” their father says. He pats Lou on the shoulder, then walks down the hall to his and their mother’s bedroom, going in and shutting the door without a sound, as they have never known him to shut a door.
Mortified by Desire 1967
Sandy goes out with lots of boys, almost any boy who asks her. A couple of nights ago a boy told her he loved her and pleaded with her to go steady.
“Well, okay,” she said at last, seeing as he loved her.
They were sitting in his car in her driveway. They kissed, and she floated a long way away from all of him except for his mouth. She forgot who he was—she thought he was the boy she went out with the week before—and when she opened her eyes, his face gave her a start.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She said,“I’ve changed my mind,” thinking she’d better.
“Why?”
But she wouldn’t tell him, she wouldn’t be that mean. He slammed his hand on the steering wheel and called her a tease. He said she had come between him and his best friend, did she know that? She shook her head. She didn’t even know who his best friend was. At this point the kitchen light came on, and she ju
mped out of the car, afraid that their father had been spying from the window.
Their father hates her going out on dates. But when she was thirteen and getting asked out, he said: “When you’re sixteen.” And when she turned sixteen, and he tried to go back on his word, their mother surprised them both with one of her rare interventions. “Let the child kick up her heels,” she said, quoting something, her sad, lost voice evidently striking their father where it counted, because he gave in.
But he still delivers lectures about male hormones running wild. And the home for unwed mothers is never far from his thoughts. (He claims that the girls there have to eat without knives because they’re so depressed and ashamed, they’re liable to stab themselves.) When he catches Sandy wearing makeup, he demands that she hand over her tubes and eye pencils. If she wears a tight skirt or sweater, or even if she wears high heels, he calls her Hooker and Pickup Artist.
At least he never hits her—Norma and Lou he would have. Lou says that what saves her is looking like their mother. She says,“Tell him to go fuck himself. What have you got to be afraid of?”
That one day he will hit her. When he yells at her, she cries in case he’s on the brink. And yet she’d rather stab herself like an unwed mother than leave the house dressed out of fashion. As treacherous as it makes her feel toward their mother, she wishes that he’d find another girlfriend and be nice again.
Not that their mother seems to mind about his girlfriends. She talks about them as if they’re the cars he borrows from the lot at work. It’s their mother, as a matter of fact, who told Sandy about the girlfriends. Sweetie pies, she calls them. One day, after six months of him not losing his temper once, he hit Lou across the face for taking cigarettes from his dresser drawer. Sandy ran crying into the t? room, and their mother said that he must have broken up with his latest sweetie pie.
“We’re all going to have to be patient with him,” she said, wiping Sandy’s tears. “We’re all going to have to dance on eggs for a while.”
That was a year ago. But last night he brought gifts home—three pairs of knitted duck-head slippers—so Sandy had her fingers crossed because, thinking back, she’s figured out that gifts are the first sign.
Only Norma put her slippers on. It struck Lou right away that she could sell hers to a kid she babysits, and Sandy decided to take hers into work, to show the other girls, she told their father, but actually to give them to Mrs. Dart, who has an eight-year-old daughter.
Mrs. Dart is Sandy’s boss at the fabric store. Thursday and Friday evenings and all day Saturday Sandy sells fabric on a straight commission basis. Last month she was the top parttime salesgirl in the entire chain, coast to coast, which meant that she won a bolt of fabric of her choice (she picked blue velvet) and got her picture on the front page of the store newsletter.
“You have a model’s face,” the other salesgirls told her. “Too bad you’re not taller.”
But Mrs. Dart said that Sandy was destined for greater things. Sandy was going to be a fashion designer, Mrs. Dart said.
Mrs. Dart is always praising Sandy to the skies. The least Sandy can do is to give her the slippers. Although Mrs. Dart is tall, black-haired, wears glasses and too much makeup, uses bad language and has Parkinson’s disease, she maintains that Sandy is her twenty years ago. Everything Sandy wears (Sandy designs and makes all her own clothes), Mrs. Dart raves about. “I used to sew like that,” she says,“before I got the shakes.” Her theory is that Sandy’s clothes are her magic sales formula, that they draw in customers like flies to horseshit, if Sandy will pardon her French. It seems to be the case. Sandy isn’t pushy, but she’s the one that most of the women approach.
On the Saturday that Sandy brings in the slippers, not just her but all the salesgirls have a lineup of customers. This is because it’s Bargain Bonanza Day. If a customer purchases three yards of any material, she gets two yards of another material of similar value, free. By ten-thirty Sandy has racked up sixty dollars’ worth of sales.
“It’s like a ceremonial war,” a man says.
Sandy looks at him, surprised. You don’t get many men in here.
He picks up a bolt of paisley. “All you girls running around with your clubs,” he says, tapping the bolt on her shoulder. “Barging into each other. But no injuries. No deaths.”
“Not yet,” she says.
He laughs, a genuinely amused laugh that is suddenly bouncing inside her chest. She’s in the middle of cutting three yards of pink silk, and she has to stop halfway and wait for the ball behind her heart to go still.
“Three yards,” her customer says impatiently.
When she finishes cutting, she keeps her head lowered as she folds the material. His legs are before her eyes. Rust-brown tweed trousers, expensive-looking. Made in Italy, she’d bet.
He puts the bolt of paisley down and follows her to the front desk. Her fingers on the cash register keys are wet. Even out of the tips of her fingers she’s perspiring.
But he’s not good-looking, she thinks. As she hands the customer her change, she glances at him. Stocky, balding, old—thirty-five, maybe forty.
He smiles. His eyes are forest green with primrose yellow flecks. Like a sweater she’s knitting. “Do they let you out for coffee?” he asks quietly.
She nods.
“When?”
“Oh, any time now.”
“Meet me at the doughnut shop,” he says. “Five minutes.”
She checks the watch hanging on the side of the cash register. “Half an hour,” she says.
He’s already walking out. He raises his fist, thumb up, to show that half an hour is fine.
“I’ll be right with you,” she says to the next customer. She goes to the back of the store, into the washroom, shuts the door, sits on the toilet seat and covers her face with her hands. Her hands are still wet. She turns them over and studies each perfect, Peach Blossom Pink nail with the feeling that she’s looking at them for the last time.
*
After supper and washing the dishes, making lunches for the next day and maybe putting through a load of laundry, Norma has about fifteen minutes left to do what she wants. Usually she’s so exhausted, she just lies on the floor in front of the t?. At eight o’clock she has to get up, go to her and Lou’s room, and sit at her desk until it’s time for bed.
Those two and a half hours of studying every night, Sunday to Friday, are her regime. Their father summoned that bombshelter word back after she failed grade twelve last year. Before then she kept her grades from him by getting their mother to sign her report cards. But when you fail, both parents have to sign, and there are meetings with the vice-principal, and letters back and forth.
On the long walk home last spring, on the final day of school, Norma didn’t bother asking God for the miracle that their father wouldn’t hit her. She deliberately stepped out into traffic, but all the cars stopped, and a truck driver hung out his window and yelled,“Get outta the road, fat ass.” Running back to the curb, she found herself whimpering their dead brother’s name.
She will always believe that Jimmy heard her. No matter what else she will later renounce, she will always hold it in her heart that it was because of Jimmy that their father didn’t lift a finger.
Their father was between girlfriends, and it took nothing to get him mad, but all he did after looking over her report card that evening was deliver a speech, featuring examples from his life in the army, about the need for a person to stick to a rigid routine of work. “Do you read me?” he asked every few minutes, and she answered,“Yes, yes.” Naturally, she didn’t ruin a good thing by telling him what she really needs.
Which, most likely, is a psychiatrist. She has a mental illness that she’s never heard of. Exam-room phobia, she calls it. The instant she enters the gym, where exams are written, and she sees those lines of desks, vertigo strikes her. Her head spins, and sweat seems to flood out from under her arms and between her breasts, and she feels that if the flood doesn’t s
top, it will become an avalanche of sweat, and she will be swept down with the torrent.
Once, two years ago, she fainted at the gym doors and was carried by three boys (“It took three boys,” was how she was informed) to the nurse’s office. But she passed the exam. She got honours, in fact, because she was allowed to write it after school, by herself in an empty classroom. That was how she learned that exam rooms, not exams, are what she is terrified of.
Tell the vice-principal, her girlfriends said. Ask permission to write every exam alone.
“I’ll get over it,” Norma said, and her friends knew that this meant she didn’t want to draw attention to herself.
Her friends are in the same boat. One of them is six foot three, one has chronic acne, and one is the adenoidal girl. Like Norma, they wear thick glasses, and that’s all the four of them have in common, aside from being considered lepers.
Of the many things Norma regrets about herself, she regrets most not having the guts to drop these girls. She’s never disliked anybody who tormented her, yet she can’t stand these girls, who are loyal and protective and haven’t once hurt her feelings.
Everyone thinks they’re as nice as they pretend to be, as nice as girls compensating for their appearance are supposed to be. But the truth is, they’re vicious. They hate any girl who doesn’t have a socially debilitating defect. All some normal girl has to do is walk by their table in the cafeteria and the three of them are off, nattering to each other about how stupid, loose and, underneath the clothes and makeup, how really homely the girl is. Listening to them, Norma longs for a pretty friend. Pretty girls, like her sister Sandy, stay sweet as babies. Ugly girls are rotten; their outer ugliness rots them inside.
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