Interference (11 page)

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Bitch

John, please don't act rash. Think it over. I will be in touch with you through my lawyer. You should note that I am keeping all threatening emails or correspondence. Carrie is fine. Please wait until we can figure something out legally.

Dayton

...

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Re: [email protected]

Your email has been returned to you. The person you are trying to contact no longer works at Cress Company. Please change your files accordingly.

Cress Company Finances

California, USA

7

They meet for the first time at the grocery store and have no idea that they have so much in common. Claire lets Dayton take her spot in line because Dayton's baby is grumpy and whining, sitting in the front of the cart with her legs dangling down, kicking her mother over and over. Shouting. Claire says, “You go first,” and helps push the cart into the lane, both women avoiding the slushy, kicking winter boots.

Claire remembers those times — not fondly. If someone had let her go ahead, just once, it would have made a difference. Jude would kick her; Caroline would be pulling things off the shelf. Claire would end up buying them candy to shut them up, or cookies, or chips, or something awful.

“Thank you.” Dayton stands in the lane, staring down at the groceries in her cart. “You would think they could have devised a better way to do this.”

“Pardon?” Claire itches her head. The wig is horribly scratchy.

“Grocery shopping. Seriously, think about it.” Dayton starts unloading her cart but continues talking. Her daughter keeps kicking and Claire keeps her distance. The line behind them gets longer.

“First you take the groceries from the shelf,” Dayton says. “Then you put them in your cart. Then you take them from your cart and put them up on the checkout thingee here,” Dayton signals the conveyor as it moves slowly carrying her canned tuna with it. “Then you put your stuff in a bag. Then take the bag to your car. Then carry the bag into your house. Then unload your groceries into your fridge and cupboards. What is that?”

“What is what?” Claire says. This woman is attractive in a thin, awkward way. Her long, blond hair swoops in front of her face. She talks with her hands. Waving the oranges around, boxes of granola bars. She pauses all the time, between words, as if she's trying to remember what it is she wants to say.

“That's six times.”

“Six times?”

“Six times that you hold whatever you buy and transfer it from one place to the other. Six times.”

Claire says, “I never thought about it that way.” But she's right. This woman is absolutely right. It's ridiculous. Like most things in life.

“Think about it.” Dayton stops and turns towards Claire. The man behind them in line sighs and rolls his eyes. The checkout woman calls for a price check on the oranges. “If someone would invent something. Say . . .” Dayton thinks. “Say a little do-hickey that might scan the item. No, wait. What about if we had a do-hickey —”

“A scanner?” Claire is watching Dayton's hands as she mimes what she means. It's like playing Pictionary. Claire thinks, I haven't played Pictionary in a long time. She wonders if Jude and Caroline would want to play sometime or maybe they are too old now. There is a small amount of time, between the age of this little baby in the cart and Jude and Caroline's age, a tiny time where your kids want to do things with you, where they actually enjoy your company.

“Yes. That's right. If we had a scanner, each of us,” Dayton waves her hands around the store. “And maybe there is only one of each item on the shelf. So you'd save retail space too. The stores could charge less for the products —”

“And then we scan it.”

“Yes. We scan it, enter it into our own little scanner. Whatever we need.” Dayton's daughter stops kicking and watches her mother's animated face. She giggles. She picks at her nose, which is leaking.

“That's $
232
.
50
,” the checkout girl says. She cracks her gum. There is a loud pop. Claire marvels that the girl can chew gum with braces like that. And what's wrong with the girl's braces? They are greenish in colour.

Dayton hands over her credit card. “We could bring our scanners to the counter. Then pay and go wait outside and —”

“And someone from the back would have put our grocery order together and would be there loading the bags into our cars. Oh,” Claire claps her hands together. She can't help herself. “I really like that idea. I'd shop at that store.” Claire beams.

Dayton signs her receipt and looks pleased with herself. She goes to the end of the line and starts packing her groceries into the bags she has brought from home. The man behind Claire clears his throat and sighs again. Claire enters the checkout line and begins putting her items — soy milk, organic broccoli, yogurt — onto the counter. She watches Dayton as she puts all her items in her bags. She doesn't care about the order. Eggs go on the bottom. Bread squished under bananas. She is distracted and chewing her hair. Her daughter is chewing and sucking and generally making a mess of a granola bar she has ripped open out of the box. Claire joins Dayton at the end of the conveyor belt and begins loading her own few groceries into her bags.

“I'm Claire,” she says, “by the way. And I like your idea a lot.”

“I'm Dayton. This is Carrie.”

Both women look at Carrie. Carrie smiles. There is a huge piece of granola bar rolled in her cheek. She looks like a chipmunk. Dayton reaches out and sticks her finger in Carrie's mouth and pulls it out. She breaks off a small piece of the mush and gives it back to Carrie. Carrie gurgles and smiles. Then Dayton pops the rest of the gooey mess in her own mouth. Claire feels slightly ill.

“I have a daughter named Caroline. We wanted to call her Carrie as a nickname, but she never let us. She always wanted to be Caroline.”

“Carrie is Carolina. But I just call her Carrie. Carolina is where my husband, my ex-husband, is from.”

“My Caroline is much older than this little one.” Claire feels sad saying that. “Seventeen.”

“Really?” Dayton smiles. “They grow up so fast, don't they? Sometimes I wish it was faster,” she pulls more granola bar from her daughter's mouth, eats it, “sometimes not. It was nice to meet you.”

“You too.”

The women leave at the same time but Dayton moves faster than Claire, who tires easily these days. The Tamoxifen she's on doesn't have the side effects of the chemo, but the whole process, the whole way of life, of living with knowing, of living like this, well, it makes her tired. Claire's wig is itchy because her hair is finally growing in. She imagines the hair pushing against the inside of the wig, trying to get out. Soon she won't wear a wig anymore. She only wears it when she goes out. And only because she hates the looks of pity she gets from everyone. Not because she cares about what she looks like. She'd go completely bald all day if people would just stop touching her arm, smiling sadly, giving her brave smiles.

In the parking lot Claire and Dayton are parked side by side.

“What a coincidence.”

“Yes,” says Dayton.

They get in their cars and drive opposite directions so when they meet up again at the dentist's office in the afternoon they are both surprised.

“Are you following me?” Dayton says.

Claire is taken aback but then realizes it's a joke. “Checkup?”

“I chipped a tooth playing hockey,” Dayton says. She points to her teeth. There is a small chip out of one of the front ones.

“Oh dear. Playing hockey?”

“I'm in this ladies' leisure league. It's really fun. I moved here in the fall and my neighbour introduced me to the game. I should really wear a mouthguard.”

“I have a woman friend who plays hockey. Trish Mantle. In fact, her husband, Frank, plays hockey with my husband, Ralph.”

“Trish? She's the friend who got me to play. She's my neighbour.”

“Small world. You live on Edgewood then? I'm right around the corner, a couple blocks away.”

The women laugh.

“What a coincidence.”

The street is iced over and it's hard to walk. The trees crack above her. Caroline walks clutching her homework to her chest. Friggin' cold, she thinks. The cold makes her eyes water. She has to pee. She always has to pee when it's cold outside. Although she wants the money, she kind of wishes her mom didn't tell this woman she would babysit. Caroline has a lot of homework and is feeling stressed all the time because her English teacher keeps piling on the projects. There's
Othello
now. And an Independent Studies Unit. There's something wrong with him, her teacher. He's angry all the time and takes it out on the class. One day he made a girl stand up in class and he tore her essay in half in front of her. She started to cry and the teacher said, “Don't be a sissy.” Caroline was shocked. Caroline needs to do well in all her courses this year so that she's set for applying to universities next year. Seventeen years old and she feels already as if she's had enough — she's worried all the time, angry, anxious, losing weight. There's just too much going on in her life right now.

Dayton meets her at the door and ushers her into the warm house.

“That's a huge tree,” Caroline says. “I walked past it every day going to school when I was a kid and I guess I never really noticed it.”

Dayton looks out at the tree and nods. “Sometimes we don't notice things if they are always in front of us.”

With the mood Caroline is in, with the sadness that always seems to follow her these days, the stress, Caroline thinks that this woman in front of her, this Dayton, is incredibly perceptive and, in fact, brilliant. Caroline gets a little teary and blushes. Everything makes her feel emotional these days — huge waves of highs and lows. Ever since her mother has been sick.

Dayton shows Caroline around the house. They tiptoe past little Carrie's room but Dayton doesn't take her in and instead shows her the sleeping child on the video baby monitor. Caroline has never seen one of these monitors before and she marvels at it.

“You can watch her all night long,” Caroline says. “Look, she rolled. Look, she's sucking her thumb.”

Dayton heads out the front door, clutching her hockey stick and bag. The bag is so big that she has to turn sideways but still she gets stuck. Caroline gives her a little push. They laugh.

“Thanks so much for doing this. I'm so glad I ran into your mom the other day. I won't be too late.” Dayton takes a step down the stairs then turns and says, “Oh, I forgot about Max. The kitten. Don't let him out. There he is. Watch it —”

A kitten sneaks up behind Caroline and she uses her foot to stop him from going outside. He looks up at Caroline. A snobby look. As if he knows who the boss is. She looks down at him. He walks back towards the kitchen, tail in the air.

Caroline watches as Dayton meets up with Trish next door, one of her mom's old friends from before the cancer, and they load their bags and sticks into Trish's car. They beep as they pull out. Caroline waves. They drive off. Caroline still watches. She watches the tree. It's so huge, it takes up the entire sky. How could she never have noticed it before? She's never seen anything so large and scary. If this tree fell, it would definitely kill someone. In fact, it would probably take out quite a few houses. Caroline thinks about how her mom doesn't have many friends anymore and how she used to have lots of them. The before-cancer friends and no after-cancer friends. It's weird. You'd think that after cancer is when you'd need your friends the most, but Caroline's mother doesn't seem to want to do anything with anyone other than Caroline's dad. She turns back to the baby monitor and watches that. Soon she gets bored and turns on the TV to watch instead. Her homework lies open on the coffee table in front of her. Her English essay. Her ISU book. A book about war because that's what the mean English teacher said he wanted her to read. “But it's independent study,” Caroline had said quietly, “shouldn't I pick it on my own?” And he exploded at her, shouted something about being a feminist. She teared up. Rushed out of the classroom. Now she's reading a book about war. And hating it.

When the phone rings it startles her. In the video monitor she sees little Carrie stir. The last thing she wants is for the baby to wake up. Caroline likes kids, but she really doesn't want to have to deal with tears or diapers right now. Besides, Carrie won't know who she is and might be startled.

“Hello?”

There is a sound. Like wind. Like wind in a tunnel. And then a shout. Click.

“Hello?” Caroline shrugs and hangs up the phone. A shout. A man's shout or a woman's shout? And would she call it a shout or a scream? Or just background noise, as if the caller was in a busy place? Caroline wraps her sweater tighter around her torso and looks around the big living room. She looks at the blackened windows. She looks at the front door. Did she lock it?

Caroline shakes her head. Wrong number, she thinks. In the video monitor little Carrie flicks off her sheets and rolls to one side of the crib. Caroline can see her breathing, that's how good the video is. Caroline turns back to the TV and then, suddenly, she begins to cry. Caroline's fear is palpable. She is seventeen years old and her mother is dying of breast cancer. Her mother had no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes even. It's growing back now, the hair, but still. Caroline sobs quietly. She stares straight ahead and just lets the tears roll down her cheeks. Her eyes hurt all the time. If they aren't actually swollen from crying they are tingling and she is about to cry. She wakes up with exhausted eyes. A headache. Dryness. As if she's leaked out all the water inside of her. Her chest and stomach hurt constantly. Caroline thought it would get better, that she would get used to this, but she hasn't. Her mother has been operated on, she has had chemo and radiation. Now there is peach fuzz on her head. And Caroline continues to cry.

The phone rings again.

Max chirps and jumps into Caroline's lap.

She startles and knocks the video monitor off the table.

“Hello?”

The same thing. A sound. Like wind. Coming at her from within a tunnel. A shout. Male? Female? Click.

“Fuck,” Caroline says and continues to cry. Max turns twice in her lap, his small claws digging into her jeans. They are sharp and they hurt. He settles himself and begins to purr. And then Caroline hears another sound. A howl that starts low and reaches higher into the air — a pitched, anxious howl. She looks around. What could it be? Then she sees the monitor on the floor and there it is, that's where the sound is coming from — the baby crying from upstairs. Caroline wipes her eyes and places Max on the other side of the sofa. He sticks to her and she has to wrench him off. He meows, annoyed. She reaches down and picks up the video monitor from the floor and looks at it. Little Carrie is standing in her crib, staring straight at the screen, straight at Caroline. Her mouth is a round, gaping hole. Her eyes are wide and ringed with tears, terrified. Caroline drops the monitor and rushes up the stairs.