The Gum Thief - cropped Page 12

  The Happy Whistler went silent ... a lone tumbleweed cartwheeled down Aisle 3-South.

  Mr. Rant went for a hat trick: "Who designed the lighting in this place-the Nazis? Jesus, it makes everybody's skin look like eggs Benedict. And how many different kinds of blue ballpoint pen does the world need? I think a whole aisle dedicated solely to blue pens is an unhealthy thing for society and the environment." He looked at me. "Hey, I need a replacement toner cartridge for an HP LaserJet 1320. Where do I find one?"

  Me: "Aisle 10-North, right-hand side."

  As Mr. Rant walked away, he began whistling a note perfect version of the "Mexican Hat Dance."

  He made my day.

  Roger

  Hi DeeDee, Bethany's at an age where she doesn't listen to anybody, so I don't think my opinion counts for squat here. But isn't it sick how she's ended up dead-ending here at Staples too, even though our lives are so different? Laugh! That was a joke.

  DeeDee, hey, I got to thinking about you back when we were in school. I remember you used to paint-you did that big mural with melting clocks and an angry winged unicorn in the stairwell that led down into the smokehole. How about following up painting again?

  Here's something: I've noticed that when you get 01de1; you not only have a To-Do list but you could start making a Things-I-Used-To-Do list, too. Yesterday I found an old chunk of ski wax in the back of a drawer, and I could barely look at it because waxing my skis was a Thing I Used To Do-and then I finally took the wax out and threw it away. Which is all to say, if getting out the brushes and linseed oil freaks you out, I totally understand. It's strange how things leave you one by one, isn't it? Old friends. Enthusiasms. Energy. But Bethany inspires me to do something new. At the moment, writing keeps me sane.

  R.

  Glove Pond

  Kyle was staring at his fork, Steve-like, trying to bend it by the use of his telekinetic rays. "You know, when we mentioned their kid, it was like we toasted Hitler at a bris or something."

  "There aren't any photos of him anywhere in here," Brittany said.

  "They don't seem like the kids type."

  "And they've been gone for ten minutes now. How long can it take to find a bottle of soy sauce?" "I didn't see any soy sauce in the fridge. Only that jar of pickle juice."

  They poked at the cold remains of the Chinese food.

  "What do you want to do?" asked Brittany.

  "Maybe we should just get out of here and cut our losses. These people are living car crashes."

  "Yes, but there has to be a reason they're such disasters. I'll go look for them. We can't leave without saying goodbye."

  "Be my guest. In the meantime, I'll be here reading a-" Kyle reached over for a magazine on a nearby table "-June 197I issue of The New Yorker."

  Brittany went into the kitchen. It was empty, and the back door was open. She looked outside. The smell of rotting leaves was delicious, and she could see her breath in the porch light. On the back lawn, lit by a street lamp, two sets of footprints broke the frost. They led to the back alley. She followed them and, while doing so, caught her reflection in the window of a Ford Explorer parked in the rear lane. So that's me.

  She shivered and looked at her feet, where there lay a Halloween residue of blown-up pumpkin chunks, dead fireworks and candy wrappers. She thought about her new makeup and the way she looked tonight. She thought of how rare it is that we catch glimpses of ourselves in mirrors-usually in public spaces-and see ourselves first as strangers see us. Then, upon recognizing ourselves, we're back to being stuck inside our bodies again, and back to having just a fuzzy sense of our being.

  She carried on tracking the footprints until she lost them in a thicket of weeds.

  Which way should I go?

  Damn-it's that interior voice again, never shutting up.

  She strained to hear Steve and Gloria, but all she heard was an electrical humming sound. She looked up and saw transformers atop the utility poles. She had never noticed transformers before, but now she saw that they were as pervasive in the urban world as street lights, parked cars and trees. Why are they everywhere? Aside from simply being called transformers, what do they actually do? What do they transform? How do they do it?

  She stopped and huffed out a breath, and it hung there in the cold as though in a museum's showcase. She was cold.

  And then she heard what sounded like small drums beating a few backyards over. In spite of the chill, she went to investigate. Peering over the fence in a neighbour's yard, she saw Steve and Gloria under the moonlight, stealing armloads of plastic children's toys-a Fisher-Price plastic scooter, a hula hoop, a red plastic pony-shaped rocking toy and other coloured vinyl forms she couldn't make out. They were so loaded down with stolen swag that in silhouette they resembled deformed Christmas trees.

  Brittany ducked behind a shed as the couple began heading back to their own house. The plastic toys, bouncing against each other, sounded like bamboo wind chimes. It was a pretty sound, blameless and kind.

  Brittany followed. At the back door, Steve removed a key, and he and Gloria took the load of stolen toys into the basement. This was her chance to get back into the house unnoticed. She darted back to sit beside Kyle.

  Steve and Gloria ever so casually came into the dining room. "The soy sauce was a little bit hard to find," said Gloria, "But voila!" With the air of someone producing difficult-to-obtain food-fugu livers, say, or absinthe-she dropped a six-ounce bottle of La Choy soy sauce on the table, a sauce so old that it had turned solid inside the bottle.

  "Soy sauce. I hope the food hasn't gone cold."

  Glove Pond

  Steve and Gloria had hastily grabbed a series of sweaters and overcoats from the alcove beside the rear kitchen door and were trying to don gardening gloves caked with brittle summer dirt.

  "Bloody guests-they're never anything but trouble. First they arrive, and then they sit there and eat your food."

  "You invited them. And it's been so many years now without guests."

  "Well, I had to invite them. You know how interdepartmental politics are. Everything was going just fine until that young maverick, Fraser, from Humanities brought in his ergonomically correct Balans chair to meetings. I've been out of kilter ever since. And then I turn around, blink, and suddenly I'm railroaded into having this Falconcrest idiot here for dinner."

  "Balans chairs? Those are those chairs with no backs and all the pressure is on your knee-"

  "Yes, yes."

  "I saw a PBS documentary on them. They'll soon be replacing every chair on earth."

  "Wretched things. God, I hate the present."

  They stepped out into their backyard, the frost-covered lawn altering the night air in a way that made Steve feel as if all sounds were moving away from his ears.

  Gloria asked, "What are we going to do now?"

  "Same thing as last time."

  "Last time we did this it was summer. I'm cold."

  "So am 1."

  "Let's just hurry, then."

  The couple walked down the rear alley, peeking into

  successive yards in pursuit of something decidedly specific. "There?" asked Gloria, pointing to a white plastic pony with a pink fringe and a purple tail.

  "Gloria, Kendall was a boy."

  "I'm not stupid, Steve. I just thought it looked ... cheerful." "Don't think about it too much, Gloria. You know it'll only make you hurt." "Steve, I keep waiting for that to change. But it never does."

  "It doesn't. It won't."

  "How can you be sure?"

  "Because I've read everything I can about it. The important books, the unimportant books. Even an article in The New Yorker. The most you can ever expect is that you'll simply get used to it." Steve stopped looking into other yards and looked only at his toes.

  Gloria stopped and said, "But it's been so long now, and I'm not used to it. How could a person possibly become used to it?"

  "Don't ask me, Gloria. I'm not there yet, and let's change the subject. It
never goes anywhere but down."

  Gloria nodded towards a yard. "I see some toys over there." "Jesus, those people must have triplets. Look at all

  that plastic."

  "Let's just do this quickly, Steve."

  "Right."

  Glove Pond: Kyle

  While everyone was gone, Kyle had used the opportunity to investigate the secret life of Steve.

  That turkey-cocking fraud must have an office here somewhere.

  He found the guest bathroom with its white sink coated in dust. In the soap dish were some cracked and splintering hotel soaps from the distant past. Beside the toilet was the first chapter of Love in the Age of Office Superstores. Kyle was astounded: First he steals my manuscript, and then he leaves it beside the toilet?

  Outside on the hallway's flocked walls hung framed yellowed fox hunting prints above a demi-lune side table on which rested far more objects than it was ever meant to hold: a dusty wicker basket full of dusty keys, the locks they opened long since forgotten; five unmated men's gloves; middens of neglected bank statements and bills; piles of half-sucked white Scotch mints; a heap of injured reading glasses and sunglasses; a dozen or so cosmetic products that had evidently fallen into Gloria's disfavour; plus various hardware-like objects whose function was unclear to Kyle.

  At the hallway's end were two doors. One led into a parlour area, where, in a corner, sat a small black-and white Philco TV, sans cable hook-up, its antenna snapped in two. The room beside this was, bingo, Steve's office. It reminded Kyle of New Yorker cartoons of offices in which flapper-era plutocrats chased their melon breasted secretaries in circles around a large, document cluttered desk lit by a brass banker's light with a green glass shade. Closer inspection revealed a carpeting wear pattern from door to desk. A leather sofa groaned beneath its predictable load of yellowed newspapers and magazines. Kyle picked up a paper dated from a previous era ("President Touts 'Information Superhighway'; Naysayers See Only Speed Bumps"), and the paper crumbled in his hands. He rubbed a finger along the sofa's back and found that the dust in this particular room had fused with decades' worth of pipe tobacco smoke to form a greasy, borderline explosive substance not unlike the Alberta tar sands. He tried rubbing the molasses-y substance off on the ledge of a bookshelf beside the do01; only to accrue more noxious goo. He scraped his finger off on the bottom of his shoe.

  Say what you will about the old monster, he did manage to complete five novels, Kyle thought as he moved closer to Steve's desk, looking for evidence of the sixth, the one that allegedly took place in an office superstore.

  Kyle sat down in Steve's baronial leather desk chair. He expected a bit of bounce, but instead his coccyx slammed neatly into the chair's solid base, its interior foam latex stuffing having long ago encrusted into brittle yellow sand that dribbled out from frayed cushion corners.

  Kyle looked at the desk before him. Where to start? He searched for anything that resembled a manuscript, but saw only unopened bills, interdepartmental memos, nude sunbathing magazines from the early 1970s, and stacked phone books that became successively older as one descended through the strata. There was a pizza box in the midst of this, and Kleenexes stuffed into available nooks and crannies. To the right sat an ashtray the size of a hubcap, filled with a powder keg volume of ash, burnt matchsticks and scorched wads of spearmint chewing gum. Several pipes rested around its edge.

  Kyle opened the main drawer and found a couple of empty packages of gum and two old passports, the more recent of the two having expired in 1979. There was a menu from a Greek takeout restaurant, clipped newspaper articles on the theme of colon health, and dozens of empty matchbooks dating from the era when steak, jumbo lobsters, A-framed buildings and anything tiki were considered the peak of dining sophistication. There was no computer or typewriter, but by the window, leaning into the room's corner beneath its requisite nicotine wash, sat a 1980 Daewoo Heavy Industries OfficeWrite 2300 Word Processing System. Below it was an unopened carton of dot matrix tractor-edged paper. The corner was an eloquent haiku for yet another past era, one in which democracy remained under constant threat from female Soviet weightlifters and sleek East German technology.

  He opened the topmost of two large drawers on the desk's right-hand side. It contained mostly empty tins of pipe tobacco, plus framed desktop photos, their standing mechanisms folded inwards, the group of them stacked atop each other. Some were ancient, and their subjects unidentifiable. But there was one of a pubescent Gloria atop a hunter with a braided mane, and one of a post-pubescent Gloria clipped from a Town & Country-style magazine: Who will nab this year's jewel in the crown, the delightful Gloria Harrington? There was a shot of movie-star-handsome Steve and Gloria sharing a daiquiri at San Francisco's Top of the Mark. But, as with everywhere else in the house, there was no evidence of any remotely current time period. If Steve and Gloria had a child of any age, Kyle had yet to locate the evidence.

  Kyle closed the top drawer and reached for the handle of the bottom drawer. It occurred to him that in this drawer lay the secret of Steve-if one was only to open it, in a flash, the reason why both Steve and Gloria were disasters would be revealed.

  He was about to pull it open when he heard thumps from the basement.

  Bethany

  Hi Roger, I guess I'd better confess that I actually know your ex-wife-Joan. Does that weird you out? She was in my aunt's cancer survivor group, and I remembered her because of the code word: "spleen." You're right, a spleen is a strange thing-we technically don't need one, but maybe spleens are kept in our bodies in case we mutate or evolve, and if we grow wings or tentacles we need to have the spleen in place in order for them to work. That's my theory.

  I don't know if Joan would remember me. That was back before I decided to win the heart of Johnny Depp through the inventive application of scary makeup. Also, my family overshadowed me at cancer meetings. Imagine a group of people even more annoying than mimes, with the added bonus of loud, grating speech and no sense of manners or propriety. That would be us. Mom and her ex-husband were in this war over who could do a better job of caring for Aunt Paulette (long story), and the caring portion got lost along the way. Cancer is, among many other things, a spectator sport.

  Like you need a depressing letter like this.

  How many times have you heard the expression about cancer patients, "They were never sick a day in their life, and suddenly, bang, they're gone"? Well, it turns out that being sick is actually good for you. Colds and flus are like these constant refresher courses that teach your body how to combat cancers when they first occur. Some people think that the moment you get your diagnosis you should run out to the children's coloured plastic ball pit at IKEA and coat your body with kiddy germs and get as sick as you can. While you're in the process of fighting the colds and flus, the cancer gets taken out with the trash. Cool, huh? You might think this sounds stupid, but after sixty years of antibiotics, we're right back to maggots as the best way to get rid of dead tissue. This was all to say that I can put a face on your ex, and isn't the world a small place?

  I'm on the cash register until closing tonight and am going to be one grouchy little Goth at the end of it. Something about Wednesdays makes people cruel.

  The Glove rocks. Keep it up.

  B.

  PS: Okay, I confess, I went to Joan's house. She was easy to find. Google. I was worried about you-you vanished, dammit!-but I promise I didn't come across as a stalker or a psycho, and I've seen enough nasty divorce shit in my life to know how to avoid accidentally inflaming people. So the encounter went smoothly, and you don't have to worry that I messed your life up. She was nice, and didn't say anything bad about you, and I was so worried about you, Roger.

  There.

  I feel better. But, Roger, you have a beautiful daughter you almost never mention. That's pretty great!

  DeeDee

  Roger, I've been doing some thinking, and what do you know about Kyle? It's great that Bethany's got a guy, but ... okay, here's what's
confusing me: he's way too good-looking to be working at a pit like Staples (sorry, Roger). He seems to like Bethany, but-and this is so cruel, and I am a bad, bad mother-isn't he really way out of her league? This from me, the thrice-divorced mess. But you know I have a point. Is he dumb? He doesn't strike me as a druggie. Maybe pot, because he's pretty mellow. Why couldn't Bethany fall for some pimpled stick figure at a record store? That's what I always had planned for her. But then, I don't know if record stores still exist. Do they? Maybe that's where my plan went wrong.

  Okay, there was a triggering incident. Kyle was over at our place and we were watching TV. He opened the fridge door to look for something to eat or drink, looked at what was inside, and then closed the door and came back into the living room like he'd never gone near the fridge. He didn't make a face or anything. He said nothing, as if he'd never looked inside it. So I got up (we were watching more reality crap, what else?) and looked for myself, and in my head I was seeing Kyle, raised by a succession of trophy wives, each of them primping in front of a mirror and selecting their daily sunglasses, and each of them saying words, to the effect of, "There's tons of expensive, nutritious food in the fridge, Kyle, but if you go to someone else's house, for the love of God, don't allow them to feed you crap. Otherwise, you'll end up like them."

  Our fridge was filled with fatty, sugary crap, and no wonder I'm turning out the way I am. No wonder Bethany's going in the same direction. Why couldn't she have been a vegetarian? That might have whipped me into shape. But no, when this Goth thing began, we were at the IGA and she asked the butcher how to order blood by the quart. It was one of those few moments in life when you literally freeze. And now she's dating way too high up the food chain and I'm at my wits' end. Who is this guy? What does he want?