Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

by Stuart McLean

  And so he wore socks to bed. And when he wanted to check his feet—which he did frequently, because they looked so good—he’d go into the bathroom and lock the door and take his socks off. Once he took the People magazine with him and compared his feet to Harrison Ford’s. He thought he didn’t come out so bad. Maybe not Hollywood, but not Hamilton either.

  All the time he was doing this—sneaking in and out of the bathroom with a nail file to do maintenance, or to have a quick peek—Morley was sneaking in and out of the same room to feed the Tamagotchi.

  This went on for a week, both of them so self-absorbed they were totally unaware of the other’s preoccupation.

  Only Stephanie, who needed the bathroom more than either of them, seemed bothered.

  “WHAT IS GOING ON?” she said one night, while Morley scooted in as Dave slipped out.

  The first time Morley answered that question it was to a woman she had never met. It was a Friday night. She was grocery shopping. She was feeding the Tamagotchi as she moved down the cereal aisle, so she had her head down and wasn’t paying attention when she knocked into the woman who was coming the other way. They smiled at each other and Morley ruefully held up the Tamagotchi and said, “My son’s. Alien chicken.”

  “Let’s see,” said the women.

  As Morley held the toy out, the chicken started to chirp.

  “Don’t worry,” said the woman. “It requires less attention as it grows.”

  It was a true moment of motherhood.

  It was the very next evening that Stephanie came downstairs wearing Dave’s blue sweater.

  Morley stared at her. “Where did you get that?” she demanded.

  “It was in my drawer,” said Stephanie defensively. “Why?”

  That night as they lay in bed Morley reached out for Dave and said, “Do you remember last Christmas when I couldn’t find the present your mother sent Sam?”

  She got out of bed and opened her T-shirt drawer and picked out the Tamagotchi and handed it to Dave.

  She showed him how she fed it and how she cleaned it and how she played with it.

  As they sat there in their bed the toy started to beep.

  “What else does it do?” asked Dave, handing it back.

  “It beeps,” said Morley, pushing the buttons expertly. “Then it dies.”

  She fiddled with the buttons for a few moments and carried it back to the bureau.

  She came back to bed and snuggled up to Dave.

  Ten minutes later the Tamagotchi began beeping again.

  Morley started to get out of bed.

  Dave grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her back.

  “I have to,” she said, trying to pull free. “I won’t be able to sleep if I think that thing is going to die tonight.”

  “I’ll get it,” said Dave. “I always did the night feedings.”

  The polish on Dave’s toes began to chip two weeks after his pedicure. The morning he noticed the first missing flake he thought of touching them up himself. He sneaked into Stephanie’s room looking for clear polish. All he could find was blue glitter and black.

  He considered buying his own bottle of polish, but decided against it. It didn’t feel at all right. The polish, after all, hadn’t been his fault—Ulla had applied it without asking. To go out and buy a bottle would make him entirely complicit. True, he had been enjoying the secret of his perfect toes—his feet had given him a ridiculous sense of sophistication and he wasn’t in a hurry to let the feeling go—but he wasn’t prepared to visit Ulla every two weeks and he wasn’t about to start buying bottles of nail polish either. If this was how Harrison Ford spent his time, so be it. It was just a step too far from The Temple of Doom for Dave. Anyway, he couldn’t wear socks to bed for the rest of his life—surely Morley would eventually notice. Dave didn’t want to be there for that. What was the point?

  He did go to the drugstore, however. He walked in one afternoon and quietly examined the bottles of polish. But he didn’t buy any. Another day, on his way home from work, he passed a cigar store that had a little leather-cased manicure set in the window. He walked in and asked how much and the clerk told him, “Two hundred and fifty dollars, sir.”

  “Two hundred and fifty dollars!” said Dave.

  “It’s made in Germany, sir,” said the clerk, who had made a move to fetch the case from the window but was now turning back to other things. More important things.

  Dave wandered over and looked at the case again. It was such a perfect-looking thing. So perfect he was sure it would inoculate elegance through his entire being—if he owned this one thing, more than his nails would be better, his entire life would change. He, too, could be as elegant as Harrison Ford.

  Dave desperately wanted to buy it. For a moment he tottered on the brink, thinking of the small but not insignificant pleasure it would give him to summon the smarmy little clerk and wave offhandedly at the window, as if he bought these sorts of things all the time. As if money was no object.

  He bought a four-dollar cigar instead, and a little box of wooden matches, which made him feel swank enough, walking home in the evening sun, smoking his cigar—until it started to make him feel ill.

  The very next morning, he dropped a milk case of records on his foot. The nail on his big toe turned black. There seemed no point in worrying about nail polish or imported manicure sets after that.

  It was that same week that the Tamagotchi died. Morley was not sure why or exactly when. She was at work and something made her check, and it was gone. Just like that. No warning. She couldn’t believe it. As she stared at the empty screen she felt like crying.

  When she got home she began supper immediately. Once it was under control, she went into the backyard and dug a little hole in the corner of the garden where they had buried the guinea pig. She took the Tamagotchi out of her pocket. It was wrapped in a piece of Kleenex. She put it in the hole and covered it with dirt.

  There was a time, and it wasn’t so long ago, when mothers had to accept that they would have to do this for at least one of their children. Influenza. Scarlet fever. Tuberculosis. Morley put her hand on the earth and shook her head. That was why she felt like crying. She stood up and looked around the garden, at the light of the autumn sun playing on the last leaves of the pear tree.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  She wasn’t sure if it was a prayer or an oath.

  She was remembering a tiny tombstone she had touched in a graveyard beside a stone church in a Newfoundland outport. She was thinking of all the mothers who had carried on. She was thinking of Sam and Stephanie.

  “Jesus,” she said again as she turned to go inside, folding her arms around her chest against the chill of the afternoon.

  It was a prayer.

  Dorothy

  The phone started ringing in the middle of the night. Ten past four by the clock radio. Dave jerked up before the first ring ended, his eyes closed, his heart pounding, struggling for the bedside table, overshooting and knocking his reading lamp onto the floor. The lamp landed on the dog, who was curled up on the floor, dreaming of food. In Arthur’s dream someone, a pair of legs—Arthur couldn’t see the rest of the body—was opening a never-ending stack of cans and, out of each can, pulling a leg of beef of improbable size. The bones were being dropped, one after the other, onto the sofa in the living room—the sofa that Arthur was, under normal circumstances, not allowed to go near. When the lamp bounced off Arthur’s rib cage he whooshed onto his feet, snarling, his head swivelling in all directions at once, determined to protect his mountain of bones from this thing that had dropped from the sky.

  Dave shrank from the edge of the bed, out of Arthur’s reach.

  And the phone kept ringing.

  Dave wondered, as he groped in the darkness, why this should be so difficult. To answer a telephone in the night. As he struggled closer to consciousness, it occurred to him that whoever was calling at this time was unlikely to be calling with good news.

  A spasm of
anxiety gripped him as his hand landed on the phone.

  He lifted the receiver.

  The room was suddenly and dramatically quiet. Arthur was heading for the stairs, glancing nervously over his shoulder, on his way to check the sofa. Morley was awake and sitting up, leaning on her elbow.

  Dave chirped cheerfully into the phone. He tried to sound as if everything was okay. As if all he had been doing at four in the morning was sitting around waiting for someone to call.

  “Hi?” he chirped.

  There was no one there.

  Just the unmistakable hiss of a long-distance line.

  “Hello?” said Dave, quieter, his heart sinking.

  Something horrible, he thought, had happened in Cape Breton. Someone was calling from Cape Breton with horrible news. His mother?

  “Dave?” said Morley, reaching out her hand.

  And then there was a voice on the phone, a voice with a British accent. “Hello? Hello. Is anyone there? HELLO. I’m coming to town in three weeks. HELLO. I was hoping I could stay with you. HELL-OH.”

  “Hello?” said Dave.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” said the voice, “but I can’t hear a BLESSED word you’re saying.”

  Dave said, “Who is this?” and the voice, which was a woman’s voice, said, “I CAN’T HEAR A BLESSED WORD.”

  And the line went dead.

  Dave hung up. He looked at Morley and he said, “I think cousin Dorothy is coming to visit.”

  Cousin Dorothy, from the village of Hawkhurst, South Kent, England. Dorothy who shouts instead of speaks. Overweight and overbearing Dorothy.

  Dorothy is the warden of South Kent. She has a desk on the second floor of the Hawkhurst Post Office, where she fields complaints from irate hikers about farmers who have let their crops overgrow the public footpaths. When a complaint lands on Dorothy’s desk she marches off to the offending field, and Lord pity the farmer who gets in her way.

  “I sue farmers,” she says. “I’m a right bitch.”

  Which is not completely true. Dorothy has never sued a farmer. She has never had to. The other wardens write letters to their farmers, and if the letters are ignored, initiate legal proceedings.

  Dorothy has never needed to turn to the law, because Dorothy’s farmers are afraid of her.

  Early in Dorothy’s tenure as warden, a farmer pastured his bull in an effort to discourage hikers from crossing his fields. Dorothy showed up after a few days, struggled over the stile in her wellies, marched up to the bull and clubbed it between the eyes with a cricket bat. The bull sank to its knees. Dorothy stood in the field, whacking it whenever it tried to get up. She stayed there until the stunned farmer appeared.

  He looked at Dorothy and his cowering bull and said, “Wot’s this then?” And Dorothy told him he had twenty minutes to get his bull back in the barn or she’d be clubbing him. Word of that sort of thing tends to get around a farming community.

  Dorothy has never married and lives in a flat beside the butcher’s. She is a fierce person, for whom the winds of passion eternally blow. A fervent monarchist, she began collecting royal china when she was a teenager. She specialized in Margaret. She amassed a mammoth collection of Margaret teacups, ashtrays and biscuit tins that became known in certain circles. Until Margaret divorced Lord Snowdon, and an indignant Dorothy sold her collection at auction.

  She continued to defend the royals, however. When Mount-batten, her cat, died, she rushed out and bought two corgis. She named them Elizabeth and Philip. Then when the Camilla tapes were leaked, she washed herself clean of the lot of them. It was over in a weekend. She lugged her china to the dump, had her corgis put to sleep and began talking about Diana as if she were a potted plant. If her IQ was ten points lower, she was fond of saying, they’ d have to water her. To her credit she didn’t change her tune after the accident.

  She filled the royal void by campaigning against the European Union and playing the soccer pools. She read all the football columnists in the Daily Mirror and subscribed to a number of dubious tip sheets.

  She lost interest in football when she began ringing the bells at the village church. There were three other bell ringers in Hawkhurst. They practiced Wednesday nights and performed on alternating Sundays. In the evenings she wrote lengthy rebuttals to the vicar’s sermons, which she left on the pulpit each week after practice.

  Dorothy was not technically Dave’s cousin, but she was the only relative he knew in Britain, and it seemed important to maintain the contact. He visited her in the early seventies when he was traveling with a disastrous James Brown European tour. She turned down his invitation to the show, sniffing when he offered. He took the train down from London, and they met for tea and sausage rolls. She made it abundantly clear that the idea of “America,” as she kept referring to Canada, held no interest for her whatsoever.

  But Dave kept in touch, phoning whenever he was in England, and when he and Morley were to be married they sent her an invitation.

  She didn’t reply, but three months after they were married, a package arrived from Kent, a royal teacup, smashed into three pieces. It crossed Dave’s mind that the cup might have been broken before it was mailed.

  “I can’t imagine,” said Dave the morning after her call, “why she’d be coming.”

  She arrived three weeks later, on the fourth of August, on a charter flight that landed at four-thirty in the morning.

  Dave was at the airport to pick her up.

  Cousin Dorothy, now in her seventies. Tweed jacket, ivory blouse, wool skirt, sensible shoes. Wearing a pair of Mountie earrings. She was coming to Canada to attend a convention, a worldwide get-together for fans of the Canadian television show Due South.

  They were meeting for four days at a downtown hotel.

  “I didn’t know they got that show in Britain,” said Morley.

  The first thing Dorothy said to Dave, as she stormed past the airport security guards, was not Hello or It was good of you to meet me at the airport, in the middle of the night—the first words she uttered when they met on the arrivals level at five-ten on that Tuesday morning in August were “After lunch we’re going to meet the deaf wolf.”

  In Due South, the Mountie hero, Constable Benton Fraser, has a deaf, junk-food-eating pet wolf—played by a husky.

  Dorothy was still talking about the wolf ten minutes later, after they had talked their way past the security guards and back into the luggage area to fetch her suitcase.

  “His name is DIEFENBAKER,” said Dorothy.

  They were standing beside the carousel, waiting for her suitcase. GREEN, she had said.

  “That one?” asked Dave, pointing hopefully at a small green suitcase rounding the corner.

  Dorothy shook her head. No.

  “DIEFENBAKER is his TELEVISION name,” said Dorothy. “The crew calls him O.T.”

  “What?” said Dave.

  “O.T.,” said Dorothy. “That’s what the crew calls the wolf. The dog, actually.”

  “What about that one?” said Dave, pointing at the next green bag.

  Dorothy shook her head again.

  “O.T. is short for Overtime,” said Dorothy.

  Then she interrupted herself. “THERE,” she barked. “THAT ONE!” She was pointing at a huge red suitcase coming toward them. It was hanging half off the conveyor.

  “THAT ONE,” she said again, bouncing up and down.

  “I thought you said green,” said Dave.

  “I know my own suitcase,” said Dorothy, punching Dave’s shoulder as the bag rolled by them. “GET IT.”

  Dave grabbed the bag and jerked it off the belt. It landed at his feet with a thud.

  “Careful,” said Dorothy.

  When he tried to pick it up, he swayed unsteadily.

  “Which way?” said Dorothy over her shoulder. She was already walking. Barrelling off in the wrong direction, heading back toward her plane.

  Dave got her turned around and they set off for the car, Dorothy two steps ahead and go
ing maniacally on about the dog, Dave struggling along, his left arm extended from his body like a tightwire artist’s, counterbalancing the heavy bag that was bouncing off his right calf with each step.

  “The production crew gave him the nickname,” said Dorothy.

  They were halfway up a flight of stairs that seemed to stretch forever. Dave was paying more attention to the alarming acceleration of his heart than he was to Dorothy. He could feel the blood surging through his ears. He was wondering if he should stop and rest.

  “O.T.,” said Dorothy, “is short for Overtime. The husky they used for the first two seasons was so dumb it bungled every stunt. So they were always doing extra takes. Which meant lots of overtime for them. Let me take that.”

  She plucked the bag from Dave and swung it effortlessly up the rest of the staircase.

  “Where’s the car?” she asked at the top.

  Registration for the four-day Friends of Due South convention didn’t begin until that afternoon. It was only seven when Dave and Dorothy arrived home.

  Morley said, “I’ll fix tea.”

  Dave said, “I’ll show you your room.”

  Stephanie was sleeping with Sam for the duration of Dorothy’s ten-day visit.

  “WE ARE GOING TO MEET THE DEAF WOLF AT LUNCH,” said Dorothy to Stephanie as she dropped onto her bed.

  “Oh,” said Stephanie, who had given up her bedroom under protest.

  Fifteen minutes later everyone was sitting around the breakfast table.

  “I WANT TO GO SHOPPING FIRST,” said Dorothy, who, unlike Dave, didn’t seem any worse the wear from the night’s flight.

  When Morley set the mug of tea in front of Dorothy, bag in, Dorothy pointed at it in horror.

  “What’s that little bag?” she said. “What’s THAT?”

  “It’s a tea bag,” said Morley.

  “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” said Dorothy. “Tea doesn’t come in bags. Tea comes in a tea caddy.”