Home from the Vinyl Cafe

by Stuart McLean

  At the end of May, the two schools arranged a field day so they could bring all the pen pals together. Everyone knew the highlight was going to be the moment when Sam met Aidan. Everyone knew how excited Sam was about the meeting, and about the plans he and Aidan had made.

  “I’m going up to his cottage,” said Sam. A statement of fact, not a question.

  They met on the sidewalk beside a large yellow school bus.

  “I’m Aidan,” said the skinny, freckled eight-year-old girl holding out her hand. She had stringy straw-colored hair that hung down to her shoulders. She was wearing a grubby T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. She looked as if she could throw a ball. She also looked undeniably like a girl.

  “I’m Aidan,” she said again.

  “No, you’re not,” said Sam.

  “Aidan is a girl,” sang Lawrence Hillside. “Aidan’s a girl.”

  It was a fact beyond Sam’s comprehension; outside his realm of the possible. His friend Aidan was a boy. His friend Aidan could not be a girl.

  “Yes, I could,” said Aidan, holding her ground.

  There was a circle of kids around them.

  Sam was dumbfounded. He said, “I have to go.” He turned and pushed desperately through the crowd, pain on his face. He never mentioned Aidan again. Dave knows this much because he heard it from Sam’s teacher.

  “We had a fat boy in our class,” said Morley. “His name was Norman Minguy. Did I ever tell you about Norman? He got along better with the girls than the boys. But he didn’t get picked on. Probably because he always had lots of money. He used it to buy penny candy. The year we were in grade four, we had Mrs. Merrill, who was strict but nice. Norman sat in the middle of the class, and when Mrs. Merrill was writing on the blackboard and her back was toward the class and the room was quiet because everyone was copying what she was writing on the board into their exercise books, sometimes Norman would reach into his desk and take a handful of penny candy and toss it in the air. It was like someone had lobbed a grenade into the class—one minute dead silence and the next, bedlam. Kids on the floor, kids under desks, everybody fighting for candy. Mrs. Merrill would turn around, mystified, because except for these unexpected explosions, we were a well-behaved class. She would put her hands on her hips and ask what was going on, and of course no one would tell her. No one would turn Norman in, because no one wanted him to stop. It was too good to be true.”

  In the middle of her second week of early mornings at work, Morley dreamed she was sitting on a bench in a crowded waiting room.

  “All the parents were there,” she said to Dave on the telephone the next morning. “Everyone looked so worried. I was sitting right across from Ted and Polly Anderson. But they wouldn’t look at me. No one would. Polly was wringing her hands like something awful was about to happen. It felt like we were there because we had done something terribly wrong. Do you think it means I shouldn’t have gone back to work?”

  Sam had never been so far out of her orbit. He was moving into a universe that soon she would hardly be allowed to visit. And he was moving so fast. Morley began to think more and more about her own childhood—to compare her experiences to her son’s. It was dangerous ground: Even the happy memories could make her sad. She was feeling guilty that she was not walking Sam to school, that he was eating lunch in the cafeteria for the first time.

  She kept coming back to Norman Minguy and the utter joy of those classroom scrambles. Morley wanted the same thing for Sam. And that was what led her into the school yard at six A.M. on a Monday in September with two rolls of quarters and a roll of dimes and nickels. If she couldn’t lob candy around Sam’s classroom, she could scatter change around his schoolyard. Morley imagined that a schoolyard full of coins—like pirate’s treasure—would create the same joy for her son as Norman Minguy’s penny candy had for her.

  She scattered twenty dollars in loose change around the yard. Under the play structure and in the sandbox and by the toolshed and under the stairs where the little kids gathered. She felt wonderful and light and alive. It didn’t matter, she thought, if Sam didn’t get any of the money—although she was planning to head home as soon as she finished and do her best to get him to school early. But it didn’t matter, because school yards exist in stories as much as real life, and Sam would be part of the story, and the story would become a legend, and it would grow in the telling. Before long it would be hundreds of dollars—they would talk about the morning when there was hundreds of dollars in the school yard. Kids would be at school early for weeks in the sure knowledge that it would happen again.

  It did not, of course, work out like that. After she finished spreading the money, Morley went for coffee and a roll at a little place run by a Portuguese baker from Argentina. It was a happy little spot where you poured your own coffee from a pot on the counter and sat, if you felt like sitting, at one of the two tables in the rear of the store. Morley liked it there because everything was made of wood and you still got your bread in brown paper bags.

  On her way home, she detoured by the school to savor the sheer recklessness of what she had done. As she pulled up to the school fence, she saw a tall, bony man with a goatee standing by the swings, wiping his brow. It was Floyd, the school janitor, who was never seen within an inch of the school yard whenever there was broken glass to be picked up. As Morley watched, Floyd bent over and began plowing around the yard like a Zamboni, sucking up every coin she had dropped. Instead of going home and waking up her son, as she had intended, Morley went to a phone booth and called her husband.

  “Why didn’t you stop him?” asked Dave. “Why didn’t you tell him it was for the kids?”

  “I was too embarrassed,” said Morley. “It was too silly. I’m going to walk to work. The car is parked by the field. Will you pick it up when you take Sam?” And she hung up.

  All morning Dave imagined, with growing regret, what might have happened had Floyd not stumbled upon Morley’s money. By midafternoon he had worked himself into such a state that he was having trouble concentrating. He spent fifteen minutes sticking twenty-dollar price tags on a stack of albums he meant to label with two-dollar tags. It took him half an hour to peel the labels off and reprice them. When he caught himself filing The Best of Herman’s Hermits under soul, he knew it was time to stop. It wasn’t until he was almost home that he knew what to do about Morley—he was going to finish what his wife had started. But he wasn’t going to fill the school yard with spare change for Floyd to scoop. Dave had a better idea. He was going to fill it with frogs.

  “Catching frogs,” he said to Morley that night, waving his arms as he walked around the kitchen, “is the essence of childhood.”

  It had taken Dave only two phone calls to find frogs.

  “I called a pet store first,” he said, “but all they had was green tree frogs. For, like, pets.”

  “How much,” said Morley, “is a green tree frog?”

  “Nine ninety-nine each,” said Dave. “Fifteen dollars for two.”

  As she stared at her husband in trepidation, Morley did the math in her mind—six frogs … forty-five dollars. Surely he wouldn’t spend forty-five dollars on frogs. There wouldn’t be more than six.

  Dave was somewhere else. Going too fast to notice Morley’s growing apprehension. He was full steam ahead.

  “Anyway,” he said. “I had a better idea.”

  “Different idea,” said Morley. “You had a different idea.”

  “Bait store,” said Dave.

  “Bait store?” said Morley.

  “Leopard frogs,” said Dave. “The frogs we caught when we were kids.”

  “When you were a kid,” said Morley.

  There was silence. Morley and Dave in their kitchen looking at each other. Dave holding a dripping dish towel, beaming and proud. A little nervous. A lot excited. Morley, her hands up to the wrists in a bowl of raw hamburger, fearful of what she had created.

  “How much,” said Morley, “are leopard frogs?”

  �
�Only six ninety-nine a dozen,” said Dave.

  “How many are you getting?” said Morley, wiping meat off her fingers.

  “Three dozen,” said Dave.

  “Three dozen,” said Morley, walking toward the sink.

  “Maybe four?” said Dave. He said it like a question. Like he was asking permission. But he wasn’t asking permission. He had already been to the bait store. He had already bought the frogs. They were out in the garage in five large plastic boxes. Ten dozen of them. One hundred and twenty leopard frogs Dave intended to set loose in the morning.

  Morley might have stopped him then—should have stopped him—but he hadn’t stopped her. Dave imagined the school yard full of fast-moving children; imagined boys with frogs in their pockets, girls crouched in secret councils. If she had known how it would work out, Morley would have said something. But she didn’t. She was trying to be supportive.

  Neither of them imagined Rebecca Morton, five years old, kindergarten, on the sidewalk in front of the school clutching her mother’s leg, screaming loudly enough that she was heard a full block away.

  “Take me home,” she was crying.

  Certainly, neither of them—Dave nor Morley—imagined Duncan Sheppel, grade seven, would have a Swiss Army knife in his pocket. Or that Mrs. Jenkins, on yard duty that morning, would react with what Dave later described as hysteria when confronted with a frog head.

  “If she hadn’t fainted,” he said glumly to Morley that night, “things wouldn’t have gotten out of hand.” Even Dave had to admit things had gotten out of hand.

  Children were running wildly over the yard, girls chasing boys, boys chasing girls, everyone chasing frogs. Rebecca Morton provided the unfortunate sound track for the whole sorry scene.

  “What sort of idiot,” Dave overheard Rebecca’s mother saying, “would have done this?”

  “Out of hand?” said an icy Nancy Cassidy, the school principal, as Dave sat across from her desk the next morning. “It was like a prison riot.” Nancy Cassidy had always struck Dave as a gentle soul. Now she was reprimanding him as if he were a child.

  “What on earth did you think you were doing?” she demanded. “Perhaps you would consider some form of counseling?”

  Dave had already spent an hour on his knees in the school yard with Floyd, the janitor, scraping frogs up with a putty knife. Surely, he thought, this was enough. Clearly, it was not. And that was why, on the following Monday morning, the entire school gathered in the lunchroom so Dave could explain what he was thinking when he had brought the frogs. Why frogs were such a joyful memory—memories he had hoped they would capture as they went about capturing the frogs. And why it was wrong to remove a frog’s head. It was his idea to make this speech. It was one of the worst moments in his life.

  The next morning, when Duncan Sheppel saw Sam walking across the school yard, he fell in beside him and said, “Your dad’s pretty cool.”

  Sam didn’t know what to say. It felt odd to have this older boy walking beside him. He wasn’t sure if the boy was teasing him or not. He looked around to see if anyone was watching. “He’s all right,” he said.

  Then Duncan pulled out his Swiss Army knife. “I’m not supposed to have this,” he said. “I’m afraid they might take it away. Could you hold it until three o’clock?”

  Sam nodded dumbly and took the knife and stuffed it into his pocket. He had never had a knife in his pocket before. All day he could feel it, hard and full of potential. He returned it to Duncan after school, by the climber, carefully.

  Mostly, when they pass each other in the school yard now, Duncan ignores Sam, but from time to time he nods and says, “Hi.”

  This is what Sam will remember of everything. Not the thrill of finding treasures or the joys of catching frogs. Rather, that his father came to school one day and talked about memories and that Duncan Sheppel, who was in grade seven, lent him his knife once, and sometimes said hi to him.

  A Day Off

  The Seagull was extended for two weeks, and might have been held over for two more, had Anna Lindquist not had to be back in London by mid October.

  The week before she left, Anna appeared in Morley’s office and said she wanted to throw a cast party on closing night. She wanted a room at the Palazzo. And champagne. Could Morley help with the details?

  Organizing the party gradually took over Morley’s life. There were constant interruptions from Anna, and Morley ended up having to come in even earlier to keep up with her own work.

  When closing night finally arrived, Morley was so fed up with Anna Lindquist, and so utterly exhausted, that she said she wasn’t going to the party.

  “It’s her last night,” said Dave. “You’ll never have to see her again. Just go.”

  So Morley went. She spent most of the evening on the balcony, smoking Ralph’s cigarettes and drinking too much of Anna Lindquist’s white wine.

  “At least she’s paying,” she said.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” said Ralph.

  “I don’t,” said Morley, reaching for another cigarette.

  At midnight Anna Lindquist stood in the apartment doorway, a cigarette holder dangling from her right hand, her left running through Martin’s hair. Martin, who had played her young lover in The Seagull, was not yet thirty. Anna Lindquist was fifty-five if she was a day.

  “How long has that been going on?” asked Morley.

  “I don’t even want to think about it,” said Ralph. “Let me get you another drink.”

  It was the last time Morley saw Anna—but not the last she heard of her.

  The next morning when Dave and Morley woke up, it was snowing. The snow turned to rain before breakfast. It was just a whiff of winter, but the warning shot propelled Morley to make the annual trip down into the basement. She headed into the darkness like a migrating goose, carrying a dim memory of Sam’s snow boots, which might have been blue and maybe still fit. She waved her arm in front of her in the darkness, as if trying to brush away a spider web. She groped for the string that turned on the storeroom light, then she reached up among the pipes, praying as she did that there was a lightbulb in the socket so she wouldn’t stick her finger in an empty socket and die.

  Morley knew she was on a fool’s mission. She knew in her heart that the boots weren’t down there. And if they were, she wasn’t going to find them. Not in October. She would find them in June. When she was down there looking for bathing suits. Sam’s boots had probably spent the spring at the bottom of a lost-and-found box at a school he never attended. And now? They weren’t in the basement. They were on the back of a shelf in a Goodwill store, miles from home.

  Morley trudged upstairs. “We’ll have to get Sam new winter boots on the weekend,” she said.

  Dave nodded.

  On Wednesday two unexpected letters arrived at the theater. The first, addressed to the accounting department, was from the Palazzo. It was a bill for Anna Lindquist’s party—$4,700.

  Morley threw the bill on Ralph’s desk. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “It was clear from the beginning. She was paying for the party, all of it.”

  Jennifer, who opened the mail, wasn’t sure what to do with the second letter. It was handwritten on pale blue vellum—a heartfelt thank-you from Anna Lindquist.

  Dear Morty, it began.

  Jennifer took it to Ralph.

  “We don’t have aMorty,” she said. “Who could she mean?”

  When Dave woke up the next morning, Morley was sitting in bed drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. This wasn’t part of the normal routine. Dave peered at the clock radio and then at his wife.

  “I’m sick,” she said.

  Dave propped himself up. She didn’t look sick to him.

  “I am,” she said.

  She put the paper down and stretched languidly. “So are you,” she said. “I think you should get someone to open the store.” Morley leaned forward and put her face close to Dave’s. “I don’t think you should go to work. Not the way
you’re feeling.”

  Dave reached up and touched his forehead. It was a reflex.

  Morley nodded. “I think it has a fever.” She jumped out of bed, wandered to the window, and stretched again. “We’re staying home. We’re taking a mental-health day.”

  Dave said, “I can’t do that.”

  Morley said, “Yes, you can. Phone Brian. He’s always looking for extra hours.”

  Dave said, “I’ve never done anything like that in my life. Ever.”

  Morley said, “Dave, you own the business. If you want to stay home, you’re allowed. If you really were sick, everything would work out.”

  Dave said, “Yeah, but …”

  It was not that the record store was too busy. Nor was it that Dave was the kind of man who couldn’t goof off. Dave had whiled away entire mornings at the Vinyl Cafe with a Rubik’s Cube, ignoring dusty shelves, piles of filing, and overdue accounts. Dave could goof off. It was his sense of himself that was affronted—his place in the world. Every morning, after he woke and showered and dressed and ate breakfast, Dave headed off to open his record store. If he didn’t have to do this today, then he didn’t have to do it tomorrow. Or, for that matter, ever. And if he didn’t have to do this, what did he have to do? By asking him to stay home, Morley was calling into question his place in the universe.

  She said, “We’ve been married fifteen years, Dave. It’s time for some spontaneity. We are going to spend one unplanned perfect day together. I am going to that gourmet-food store near Thea’s and buy supplies. I’m going to get some videos. We are going to eat and watch movies. And other things.”

  It was the “other things” that got Dave.

  He shoved a wad of Kleenex in his mouth and phoned Brian and said, “I’m sick. Can you open up?”

  Brian said, “Yeah. Sure. What are you eating, anyway? It sounds like your mouth is full of Kleenex.”

  Morley said, “I’m going to get the food and the videos. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  * * *