The Gum Thief - cropped Read online

  Bethany's first friend, Becky, died of cancer. I remember that, but if I'm honest, I was more wrapped up in taking Bethany's father to the cleaners after he left us. I can't even put a face on Becky, though she was doubtless cute as a button.

  I got zippo in the divorce because Reid (that was his name) was a shitty-businessman broke-oh, there was some furniture, and the minivan was paid for, but that was it.

  A year later, both of Bethany's grandfathers died within five days of each other. What are the chances of that? My father hit an oncoming semi-trailer loaded with raw telephone poles on the 99. Grandpa Mike, Reid's father, had a kidney stone so big and sharp it sliced his kidney from within. The slice got infected with some drug resistant bug, and within thirty-six hours it was curtains. Ever done two funerals in one week? Not fun. Especially if you're not wanted at one of them, and especially if all the family members involved with the other funeral are unstabilized psychos off their meds.

  About a year after the funerals I married Catastrophe Number Two, Eamon, a handsome devil, but a devil. His daughter was a sweet thing named Julie, and her nineteenth birthday was the same day as our wedding, I remember that. A few months later her life partner, Jed, clobbered her and then threw her out a window. Her shinbone punctured her lung. He's eligible for parole in 2028.

  That Thanksgiving my mother died of emphysema. We knew Mom's death was coming. Bethany, I might add, pretty much lived in the hospital for a month, taking care of Mom. She is a good kid. I don't deserve her. That is my mantra: I don't deserve her.

  If I remember correctly, next Mr. Van Buren, Bethany's band teacher, got killed-another car crash on the 99, driving up to Whistler. They should throw that highway into the trash and build a new one. It's cursed.

  Oh, hell, then Kurt Cobain blew out his brains, and then Ginger and Snowbelle-our pair of twin Persians got diabetes and we couldn't afford the treatment and that was that. Bethany was sixteen or so when two of her pals smoked dope laced with angel dust. Cops found their bodies in the duck lagoon at Ambleside.

  By then I'd divorced Eamon and married Kenny, and a year after that is when Devon hanged himself from the chandelier with an electrical cord.

  Shit.

  I'm going to pour myself a drink.

  My sister Paulette, was next, and she is, I promise, the last death I'm going to tell you about. I hated that woman, but boy, I loved her too. Her primary means of expressing emotion was sponging stencilled Mother Gooses onto the dado of your guest bedroom. Or showing up at barbecues with potpourri gift baskets shaped like frogs wearing RayBans. She had no sense of humour; none!!!

  But then at the dinner table one night (Paulette cooked, even when she came over to my house), Kenny made a joke about Muppets in a leather bar and Paulette laughed, and the two of them hit it off, and I was so jealous I thought my eyeballs would pop like popcorn. Paulette had married some wimpy dude named Miles back when she was twenty-two, divorced after three months and never remarried. I think she was a dyke, but what's done is done.

  Even after Kenny and I divorced, he remained the best of pals with Paulette. I bumped into them once, coming out of a Meg Ryan movie at the Esplanade Six theatre. Almost in stereo, they said, "I don't buy that Meg/perkiness thing anymore," and off they went, riffing away while I shot invisible Drano-tipped pitchforks at their backs from my forehead.

  During Paulette's breast cancer, I was a wreck, but so was Kenny. It was almost like a sitcom, the way the two of us tried to "out-care" each other on Paulette's behalf, while at the same time avoiding each other. We were both seeking out the usual stuff: vitamin therapies, inspirational paperbacks, online breaking news on experimental treatments, wacky get-well cards and lymph masseuses-all of this while Bethany did the meat and mashed potatoes stuff like picking things up and delivering Paulette to the chemo sessions. Yet again, I was drunk with self-centredness and Bethany paid the price.

  In the end, we did the usual nothing-ventured-nothing-gained stuff: Mexico, herbalists in Manitoba, a child in South Carolina who would breathe a miracle onto your loved one's photo for a twenty-dollar donation. But the cancer was one of those forest-fire varieties.

  Roger, I am not a monster, but I am tired and I am now officially drunk.

  If Bethany helps you in writing your novel, then that's a wonderful thing. But if you hurt her in any way, I will kill you.

  DeeDee (DD)

  Glove Pond: Gloria

  Brittany followed Steve into the kitchen, leaving Kyle Falconcrest to sit on the sofa beside Gloria, who seized this opportunity to bombard the young author with question after question after question about his writing habits, his characters, his personal life and his opinions about her opinions. He was obviously riveted, and he chose to sit mostly silent, letting Gloria do the driving. All too soon, Brittany came back into the room, putting an end to their glorious engagement.

  "How's dinner coming?" Gloria asked.

  "It was hard to tell," Brittany said. "I'm not much of a cook. I work, so Kyle and I mostly eat deli food. Or order in-when we're not out at parties and galas and dinners." She sighed.

  Young Brittany looked unhappy. "Brittany, you appear troubled-"

  "It's nothing."

  "No," said Gloria. "Nothing is always something." She felt like Noel Coward for having uttered such a witticism-or Edward Albee, or the Bard. She stared up at her book collection. I love calling Shakespeare "the Bard. " It makes me feel like I have a personal relationship with him, one that's far superior to other peoples personal relationships with him. She looked at The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, a 259-volume set bound in unborn pigskin. I remember the day I bought those-Steve and I on our honeymoon in the swan-filled, ambiance-rich town of-Stratford-upon-Avon in England. Everywhere I looked-culture! Culture! Culture! And one of these days, pending a break in my busy acting schedule, I'm going to read one of those books.

  Oh, right. She'd been asking if Brittany was feeling troubled about something.

  "I think it's stress," the young woman confessed.

  "I thought you seemed blue," said Gloria, noticing that Kyle took this chance to pour himself a Scotch and excuse himself to look more closely at the bookcases.

  "Come on, Brittany, tell me everything."

  "It's just that ... I've been performing so many surgeries lately, and with Kyle's schedule, too, it's just so hard to keep on top of things."

  "Surgery? A woman performing surgery?"

  "Yes, I'm a surgeon."

  "Really! I'd never have guessed-a surgeon-we gals sure are coming a long way these days. Are you a specialist? "

  "I mostly do brain surgery-elective brain surgery. But I'm starting to move into oncological surgery-the removal of cancerous growths."

  "I think I have a remedy for your stress."

  "A remedy? Really?"

  "Yes. Come with me."

  Gloria motioned for Brittany to come with her up the stairs. Kyle looked up, but Gloria waved him off.

  "No, no, young man, gals only. You stay down here and have noble ideas and enjoy our large and diverse book collection."

  "Right. Will do." Kyle gulped a finger-and-a-half of Scotch while Gloria led Brittany up the stairs and into her boudoir. The smothering sensation of scents and dry powder on her face and in her nose made Brittany cough.

  "You poor thing," said Gloria. "Have a seat."

  Gloria pulled up a guest tuffet beside her chair, a chunky silk bonbon. "Let's put some makeup on you right now, young lady. Makeup is the answer to your problems."

  "Makeup? I never wear makeup."

  "Well, from now on you will. Your unmodified eyes remind me of newly born pink mice, and, my dear, I think you have approximately one-third of a pimple near the corner of your nose."

  "That's Helen."

  "You name your pimples?"

  "This one I do. Helen is this pimple that migrates around my face but never quite leaves." "My dear, Helen must die." "I don't understand makeup, Gloria-why wear it at all? Isn't
it dishonest?"

  "My dear, the reason we wear makeup is to prevent the world from seeing what we're like underneath." "What's wrong with that?" "What's wrong with that?" Gloria was in the midst

  of swishing about a small sand dune of face powder in a cerise lacquered box. "My dear, if you allow your feelings to be exposed, people will hurt you with them.

  They will use your feelings against you. Something once private and sacred to you will be transformed into a weapon. Something precious will be damaged. You will experience pain."

  Brittany looked sombre. "Now, may I put some powder on your forehead?" Gloria asked. "Yes."

  Roger

  Not the best day.

  This morning I had one of those from-hell wake-ups where all you can think of is fear and loss and the people you've hurt and all the damage you've done. You put your hand out from under the sheets and the air is cold. It's like not wanting to be born. And then, finally, your head can't stand lying there thinking anymore, so you jump up and run to the bathroom and put your head under the shower's jet, hoping it will fuzz out the feelings, but instead there's only a tiny amount of diversion.

  I get older. I grow old. Somebody starts to tell me about their dreams, and I get so bored I have to escape. I flee to the craft superstore down the street from the hardware superstore, down the parkway from the office superstore. I wander its aisles, looking for the seed of an idea to help me escape from myself-I walk past artificial lilies and unpainted birdhouses and crewel kits that allow me to make images of koi swimming in Tokyo ponds. And then, in the scrapbooking aisle, I see 79¢ sticker packs with little rainbows and unicorns that say DREAMS CAN COME TRUE! and it makes me want to cry the way we feed nonsense crap like this to kids, who are going to inherit a century of ugly wars started by people who died long ago, but who were sick and damaged enough to transmit their hatred down through the centuries. Dreams don't come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised. Dreams end up dealing meth in a booth at the back of the Olive Garden. Dreams choke to death on bay leaves. Dreams get spleen cancer.

  So there you have it-that's been my day until now. The Dell shipment got stuck at customs and won't be arriving until tomorrow, so I'm going to have a vodka snack and pretend to help customers in the office furniture department. Then I'll probably go through the aisles and look at all the plastic crap we sell and wonder about the chemicals in it, and what leftovers were flushed into the water system during manufacturing. I sometimes get the feeling that we're having full-time one-on-one unprotected sex with the twenty-first century, exchanging fluids with the era: antibiotics, swimming pool chlorine, long-chain molecules, gas fumes, new car smell-all of it one great big condom free involuntary love-in.

  Roger

  A half-hour later: Pete is away this afternoon, so we're all slacking off like crazy. We drew straws to see who works the till, and Kyle lost. I went down the road and bought a bottle of rotgut vodka and am going to work on Glove Pond in the loading bay. It's warm as long as you're not in the wind.

  R.

  Glove Pond: Kyle

  Steve and Gloria were psychic abortions. Steve's hour-long exegesis of his five grotesque, directionless and archaic novels reminded Kyle of his sulpha allergy-of that day at his sister's wedding barbecue when he took a tablet for his infected hangnail and suddenly felt as if he were itching and burning to death from the inside. Jumping in the pool only fed the fire. He remembered screaming for painkillers in the ambulance before he blacked out. He more or less blacked out during Steve's speech, only to wake up and find Gloria sitting beside him, her leftmost talon rubbing his right inner thigh. She informed him that he wasn't as in command of his father figure metaphors as he thought-but that was okay because Gloria had figured out how he could hone his skills on this matter in the future.

  Thank the Lord Brittany rescued him and a further encroachment of the talons, and thank the Lord she'd then gone upstairs. All the tea in China wouldn't make him go up and have a look at what that car crash of a souse was up to.

  His stomach gurgled. How come there was no odour of cooking? Nor evidence of catering? Nor even place settings at the dusty dining table? Kyle went to the kitchen to investigate. No Steve. All he could find was an empty box of Triscuits on the counter and a cookie sheet in the sink. An empty plastic Safeway cheddar cheese wrapper with little gouges in it lay on the floor, as though abandoned by teeny white-trash mice. The stove elements were cold. He looked in the fridge. How is possible to have nothing in a fridge except a jar of pickle juice?

  He wondered what the dinner strategy was, and then he realized that there was no dinner strategy. All these people had in the house was Scotch. This realization was shocking to Kyle, and he sat down at the kitchen table to collect his thoughts.

  A furnace kicked in with a faint hum. He heard a car pass on the road out front. The fridge burped into low gear, and Kyle had a depressing vision of penguins protecting stillborn eggs. This was possibly the creepiest room he had ever been in.

  What about the cupboards-could they be as empty as the fridge? No. That's simply not possible. There has to be food-some kind of food-somewhere in the kitchen.

  He went to the cupboards, and each one was revealed to be empty until behind the fifth door he saw a box Willamette’s Home style Pancake Batter Mix. On its front was the most shockingly inappropriate image of - there were no other words to describe it-a plantation darkie offering a platter of flapjacks to a lace-clad Nicole Kidman of yore, who hid behind both a pink fan and the easy knowledge that she could have her darkie flayed to death at whim. The box had no bar code. Kyle opened its flaps and saw what looked like tiny dancing flakes of oregano.

  Oh dear God!

  He dropped the box on the counter; and weevils scattered away from it in all directions. Steve walked into the room. "Oh, so you're a chef then-what good luck for us."

  Bethany

  Kyle told me that he thinks Staples is a piece of shit and should burn. I'm shocked to find that Trail Mix Boy has an anarchist spark in him. Granted, he was baked on mushrooms when he said it, and he and I and eight others were ready to mutiny after a twenty-minute seminar on toner cartridge recycling. When I look back on my childhood and on the pictures I once had in my head about what adult life would be like, they weren't of Fahad squinting into a coffee spoon to see if his blackheads were visible while a Ricoh sales rep demonstrated by way of a PowerPoint presentation that cartridges take a thousand years to decompose in a landfill.

  Okay, then, Bethany, what were your images?

  Thank you, interior monologue. I thought that when I was an adult I'd somehow be a bit more connected to life and death-that when I went to bed at night, after drinking a cup of chilled blood with my husband, Johnny Depp, I would look back on a day filled with confessions and accidents and affairs and large amounts of money travelling in all directions. Instead, I get to watch the assistant manager's QuickTime loop of Blair being caught stealing Chiclets on the securi-cam. The soundtrack? "We Are Family" by Sister Sledge. At least in a possible future career as a nurse, the daily drudgery might be balanced by the possibility of genuine human drama.

  But here at Shtooples, there's no chance of drama, period.

  Thank you again, interior monologue. You are correct.

  So, then, what's keeping you here?

  Inertia. Laziness. Hormones. Habit.

  Habit? I thought you said you wanted drama.

  Yeah, well, aren't we human beings screwy creatures? At least at Shtooples the worst thing that can happen to you is that you get fired. Nobody dies at Shtooples. Nothing can ever truly fuck up in Aisle 5-South. It's safe. In its way.

  Are you finally sick of death?

  Please, don't ask me.

  But I have to, and I won't stop asking until you answer me.

  Okay, yeah, I am sick of it. Happy now?

  Happy is a hokey concept at best, Bethany.

  Okay, then, are you satisfied?

  The truth is always satisfying.

/>   Why is that?

  I don't know. It's the way the universe is built.

  Wouldn't it be great if we all lived in a world where everybody believed everyone else's lies? The lies would cancel each other out, and you'd be left with a massive ultratruth.

  Snorrrrrrre. Are you baked on mushrooms too, Bethany?

  No. I'm wondering how much longer I can handle working here at das Shtoop.

  Nursing school?

  I don't know. Anything. Unemployment? Unwed pregnancy?

  You're too classy to take the easy ways out, Bethany.

  Okay, interior monologue, if you're so smart, provide me with a suggestion.

  What's wrong with school?

  No response:

  ... Bethany? ... School?

  I'm thinking.

  Well, technically, I'm the one who's thinking here.

  I don't have any money, and I don't want my mother to

  sell her place merely to rescue me from prison.

  Now we're getting somewhere.

  Gee, thanks.

  What would be so wrong with your mother selling her condo? The market's good right now. She could rent a place.

  Let's stop right now.

  Bethany?

  Look, there's Fahad, and he's trying out a new pore cleansing strip by the sink. Gotta go.

  PS: Roger, my mother wrote you yet another letter? PPS: I think about Glove Pond all the time. I'm trying to figure out who is who. Am I Brittany? Is Kyle Kyle? Are you Steve? Or maybe I'm partially Kyle or ... you're so lucky to have an imagination, Roger. You can sit down and make shit up. I can't even make up my mind. ppps: As part of my efforts to help Kyle cope with death, we went to visit his grandmother's grave. We were reading tombstones together; and I said it must be nice to be dead and not have to worry about how you look any more-as a joke. And Kyle said to me, "I saw this show on the Discovery Channel, and it said that beauty isn't only about the traits you possess, it's also about the traits you don't possess." He then said, "You're really beautiful, Bethany, because there are so many bad traits a lot of girls have and you don't have any of them."