Home from the Vinyl Cafe (6 page)

His wife was upstairs. Cameron was sitting in the kitchen with his youngest boy in his arms. He threw the boy in the air and caught him over his head.

He reached out and touched her arm. “Nice sweater. It’s a sweater for walking along a beach in the wind.”

She said, “I love the wind.”

When the kids were in bed, she ignored the
Reader’s Digest
and wandered around the house imagining what it would be like to live there with him. There was a picture in his bedroom of him standing beside his wife. They were on a beach. The wind was in her hair. Stephanie opened the frame and slid the picture out. With her heart pounding, she found a pair of nail scissors in his wife’s bureau. She took out her bus pass and cut her picture out and taped it over his wife’s face, putting the altered photo back in the frame. Then she lay on the bed, his bed, and closed her eyes, pretending she was asleep. When she opened her eyes, she saw herself in the frame, standing beside him, the wind in
her
hair.

The phone rang. She ran to get it, and then one of the children called. Stephanie forgot about the picture until it was too late—until after the Flemmings got home and were standing in the living room. Stephanie was putting her sweater back on, and Cameron Flemming was saying, “I’ll walk you home.”

She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t think of any reason to go up into their bedroom to retrieve her picture. So she didn’t do anything. When she got home, she thought of killing herself. Instead, she stopped sitting on the lawn in the evenings. No one ever said anything about the picture. But the Flemmings never asked her to babysit again.

Grade ten was Doug. Stephanie kept a Doug book in her bedroom. She wrote poems to Doug and kept a list in the back of the book of all the things that made Doug cool: his sneakers, his backpack, the way he carried his backpack, the things that he probably carried in his backpack, his ski jacket, his earring, his ears, how he opened his locker, the things he probably had in his locker, his hair.

When Doug had a science project and was going to the library after school, Stephanie made up a project so she would have a reason to go to the library, too—but she didn’t give him her work the way Jessica Aims did. Jessica gave Doug her math homework every lunchtime. Stephanie thought this was contemptible. Though she wished he would ask her.

One day at lunch, Doug said Oasis was contemptible, and Stephanie panicked and prayed that no one would tell him that she used to like Oasis. Had liked them in fact until that day. It never occurred to her to defend her taste.

The Doug period of her life ended abruptly in the spring when Stephanie left her backpack in the gym and someone found her Doug book. Whoever it was tore out the back page and taped it to her locker. It was up for two periods before she found out about it. There were eighty-four entries of Doug coolness for everyone to read.

Paul had arrived this September. He sat directly in front of Stephanie in history. They were doing Canada. Again. By Halloween they were at Louis Riel. Again. And Stephanie knew everything there was to know about Paul’s neck.

She had memorized his neck. She would know his neck anywhere. As Riel rode toward oblivion, she thought, For the rest of my life, I will know this neck.

She joined the debating team. So did Paul. She didn’t even
know she liked him until November, when he was away one Monday and stayed away for the rest of the week. The next Monday, when he still wasn’t back, she began to worry. She was worried that he would never come back.

She couldn’t ask anyone about him, or they would figure out she liked him. All she could do was worry. In history she stared at the empty space in front of her where his neck should have been. She wrote his name on a piece of paper and then wrote her name below his and crossed out the letters that they had in common. She got an E and an A in their first names. When she added their last names, she got an S, an N, a T, an H, and an M.

She counted off the letters left over. “Love, hate, friendship, marriage. Love, hate, friendship, marriage.” She got “friendship.” In math, she worked out that if she cheated and used his nickname and her middle name, she got “love.” She was startled by how pleased that made her. She wrote over his name, again and again, “Love, hate, friendship, marriage,” until it was a blue smudge. She didn’t want anyone to be able to read what she had been doing.

That night she phoned his house and hung up before anyone answered. She phoned again an hour later, and this time got his mother on the second ring. She hung up again.

Then Becky Toma had a Christmas party. Paul and Stephanie danced together all night.

On Wednesday after supper, Sam and Stephanie had a huge fight.

Dave and Morley were in the kitchen. As the screaming escalated into slamming doors, Dave made a move toward the stairs.

“No,” said Morley. “Don’t. If the audience doesn’t show
up, the actors go home.” She was making coffee. “They love each other. These are battles for affection.”

Half an hour later, when things were quiet, she went upstairs. Both the children’s doors were shut. She knocked on Sam’s first.

“Hi,” she said. “Do you want a cookie?” He was lying on the floor moving trucks around.

In the room next door Stephanie was on her bed, reading a magazine.

Morley said, “Do you want to go shopping? Tomorrow after supper?”

Stephanie said, “Sam has my toothpaste.”

Morley said, “Oh.” She bent over and picked up a white blouse off the floor and hung it on the back of a chair. She was thinking maybe they could go somewhere and get a pair of chinos and a blouse for Stephanie.

Stephanie said, “I don’t want to go shopping.”

Morley sat on the edge of the bed and reached out to touch her daughter’s hair. “I was thinking,” she said, “that you might like something for Saturday night. For the dance.”

Stephanie pulled away from her mother. She rolled over. “I’m going to wear one of Dad’s white shirts and my black jeans.”

Morley said, “But your black jeans are ripped.”

Stephanie said, “I’m going to have
long underwear
on.”

It was a look that Morley hadn’t considered.

When Morley was sixteen, her mother had a dress made for her for a school dance. It was made by Elsie Steppich, a seamstress who was married to the caretaker of their church. The dress was sleeveless. It had layers of mauve chiffon over purple silk. Her mother said it was a wonderful dress. It probably
was—for a forty-five-year-old woman. When Morley put it on, she felt like she was playing dress-up. The material at the front was all gathered, puckering together to a center point so it looked like she had a massive target on her chest, with a bull’s-eye engulfing her breasts.

Morley was so horrified that she could barely speak all night. She found the darkest corner in the gym and stayed put, sitting on a bench with Elenore Pepper, who had a huge nose. Morley went to the girls’ room once and stared at herself in the mirror, but when she heard other girls coming down the hall, she locked herself in a stall and waited there, her feet lifted off the floor, until they had left and she could slip out without anyone seeing her. When Mickey Billingsley asked her to dance, she was so confused she said, “No, thank you,” not understanding that she was the only person he had asked, that it had taken him all night and several trips to the boys’ bathroom before he managed to summon the courage to approach her.

When Paul arrived to pick up Stephanie, he was holding flowers, a bouquet of twelve turquoise and green carnations.

“What a lovely thing,” said Morley, warmly.

Paul looked at her defensively. “It’s Valentine’s Day,” he said.

Morley had spent the night before helping Sam address forty-five
Jurassic Park
Valentines. Somehow she had disassociated that event from the actual holiday. She had forgotten it completely. So had Dave.

Dave looked at the flowers this boy had bought for his daughter and he winced.

Stephanie was still upstairs. Morley was struggling to make Paul feel at home while Dave glared at him.

Paul was wearing a pair of tight black jeans, a white dress
shirt, a tie, and a dark sport coat. The tie was too thin, the shirt rumpled, and the black shoes made his feet look enormous—but he was trying. Awkward, thought Morley, but sweet.

Dave was thinking, This boy doesn’t look a bit like me. He was muscled. His hair black. His face round. Dave felt a wave of relief. He had read that if a girl didn’t feel love from her father, she would look for someone just like her father to love her. He felt liberated. He was trying hard to act naturally. He was about to ask what Paul’s parents did for a living when he caught Morley sending him daggers. Paul couldn’t have cared less. Because at that moment, Stephanie came bouncing down the stairs, and whatever it was Morley had been saying was left hanging. Paul turned away from Morley and looked at Stephanie and smiled and said, “Hi.”

They went into the living room. Sam appeared, smirking, with a photo album and said to Paul, “Do you want to see a picture of Stephanie in a bunny costume at her ballet class?”

Stephanie glared at her brother. But five minutes later, she and Paul were hunched over the album.