Love and Other Perishable Items Page 7

  “What did your parents say?”

  “I don’t even think they’ve noticed. I did it when they went to a meeting with Jamie’s doctors.”

  Penny’s older brother Jamie is in his senior year and had some kind of meltdown a few months ago. Now he is living in an adolescent mental health unit—Banksia House, it’s called. They have a school there and everything.

  “Well, shit, Penny, I’m … surprised, I guess. Surprised that you stuck a needle through both your earlobes.”

  She shrugs again.

  After the final bell I make my way to work in a state of adrenaline-fueled anticipation mixed with dread. Maybe tonight Chris will cool off from the teasing and welcome me back into the fold. Maybe he’ll have grown tired of it. One can only hope.

  I walk into work and see him chatting to Ed at the service desk. He says hello in a perfectly civil manner and allows me to continue on to the locker room unmolested. All evening I brace myself for another barrage. None is forthcoming. The shift passes without incident. At nine o’clock I put up my CLOSED sign, pack up my cash drawer and set off to take it up to the cashier’s office. I’m about halfway there when I hear Chris’s voice over the store PA system.

  “Attention, staff.” His disembodied voice is business-like. “Ahem, attention, staff. If staff members have any hard surfaces in their homes in need of a polish, a member of the checkout team is offering her services in this area. She will polish wooden surfaces, plastic, glass, linoleum, ceramic tiling, even cork tiling, and will only expect a bottle of wine for payment. Bookings are essential, through myself, Chris Harvey, at the service desk.”

  I stand stock-still, clutching my cash drawer, a hot blush creeping up the back of my neck. Then I turn and walk briskly back to the service desk, the coins in my cash drawer rattling with each step.

  There he is, counting out his own cash drawer, innocent as a newborn lamb. He looks up and regards me benignly.

  “You don’t have to book yourself, Youngster.”

  “Will you STOP this?”

  “Settle down, tiger. You’ll pop a blood vessel. It’s all in good fun.”

  “Fun for who?” I bellow.

  He looks down at the wad of twenties he is counting. It’s maddening the way he won’t even acknowledge that he is taking things too far.

  “Why, why are you so pissed off about the Jeremy thing?”

  “Like I said, it’s all in good fun. You take everything so seriously.” He drawls over the e in seriously, in the manner of one who is extremely put-upon in tolerating my adolescent spats.

  I take a deep breath and do something brave.

  “Why aren’t you going at Kathy or Stuart the way you’re going at me? That’s what you’re really mad about.”

  It’s a good ten seconds before he replies, quietly and, for the first time this week, without belligerence.

  “Because girls like Kathy eat guys like me for breakfast. And Stuart could and would squash me like a fly.”

  He looks gutted.

  “Ah, Chris,” I say, melting. “I’m sorry it went … badly. She must be out of her mind.”

  I wonder briefly if I could somehow broker a deal with God whereby if I put both my arms around Chris, his suffering would be transferred to me via skin-to-skin osmosis at a rate directly proportionate to how much I love him. But that’s right, I don’t believe in God.

  “You know what happened, don’t you? Stuart took credit for my flowers and poem and then fucked her on Bianca’s parents’ bed.”

  I nod. I’d figured.

  “Can’t you tell her they were from you?”

  “No!” he says vehemently. “If she wants to be with a guy like Stuart, I’m not chasing her around telling tales about him. He’s a mean bastard, though. Got his girlfriend pregnant last year and didn’t want to know about it.”

  “He has a girlfriend?”

  “Well, they’re broken up now.”

  An awkward truce seems to be forming.

  “So will you ease up about—”

  “—the polished mahogany incident?”

  I grit my teeth.

  “Yes. Will you stop being such a prick about it?”

  He smiles. “No.”

  “Jerk.”

  “Steady on now. That’s no way for a youngster to talk. And the thing is—what are you going to do about it?”

  I breathe out a large breath.

  “Jerksville.” But now I am smiling slightly.

  “If you calm down”—he fits the lid on the top of his cash drawer with a decisive thwack—“I could be persuaded to accompany you to Rino’s for a pepperoni extravaganza. I may even pay for it.”

  It is a school night and I haven’t done my math homework.

  “No more teasing,” I say, not smiling anymore.

  He looks at me.

  “No more teasing,” I repeat.

  “Okay. No more teasing.”

  Special Treat

  Chris buys a six-pack of beer on the way to Rino’s.

  “Special treat,” he says, parting with a twenty-dollar bill. “You like beer, don’t you?”

  I hate beer. Hate it. “Yeah!”

  Oh well. Love is pain. Or is it beauty is pain? I wouldn’t know about the latter, but the former makes my sternum ache.

  We pass a pay phone, which makes me think I should call home to tell them I’m going out for dinner. But then, it is after nine, so Mum and Jess will be asleep. Dad will still be up if he is back from rehearsal, but I doubt my lateness will cause any consternation there.

  We sit in a booth at the back of the restaurant and order a family-size pepperoni pizza. My stomach muscles slowly unclench one by one as the relief of being back in Chris’s good books floods through me.

  He extracts a couple of beers from their cardboard pack and flicks off their tops with two satisfying hissing sounds. To the casual observer we must appear as … well, as equals, I guess. We are both wearing our work uniforms. I and I alone have Chris’s undivided attention lavished upon me across the Formica tabletop. My cup runneth over.

  “What shall we drink to?” he asks, pouring the richly glinting amber into frosted glasses.

  I think for a moment, then raise my glass. “To the girls who eat boys like you for breakfast. May they suffer from severe indigestion.”

  “Right on, sister.”

  The honest clink of thick glass on glass.

  “So, Amelia, what do you hate?” he says, leaning back in his side of the booth.

  “Hate?”

  “Yes, hate. You know, despise, loathe, abhor. What erodes you from the inside?”

  “What, about myself, or the world in general?”

  “Let’s start with you, then move on to the world in general.”

  “I hate that I am fat and ugly and stupid.”

  Chris takes a swig of his beer. “You are none of those things, but I can dig irrational self-loathing. What else?”

  “I hate that I want so many things I can’t have. Just … don’t like that sensation.”

  “What else?”

  “I hate that I’m angry a lot of the time. It’s exhausting. I hate that no one takes me seriously. I hate that I must sound like such a whiner right now. But, really, it’s your fault for asking me.”

  “Hmmm. Yes, I take full responsibility. What about the world in general?”

  I sit back in my chair and take a sip of my own beer. “I know I should say that I hate wars and starvation and inequity. And I do. But on a day-to-day basis, what I hate most is that both my parents smoke. Our house is small and there’s only one living room where the TV and everything is. It smells bad, it gets into my clothes and my hair and I know it makes my asthma worse. My father actually gets angry at me when I complain about it. My mother just looks away and pretends she hasn’t heard. The room gets hazy. They do it around my three-year-old sister. It really pisses me off.”

  “My sister smokes,” Chris says. “But Mum and Dad make her smoke outside.”
>
  “I wouldn’t mind if they smoked outside. But they act like it’s me that’s being unreasonable. When I was little, I made all these signs with red Magic Marker and stuck them around the house. SMOKE-FREE ZONE, SMOKING CAUSES CANCER and stuff like that. My dad made me take them down. That pissed me off too. I thought I should be able to express my opinion.”

  “By putting up signs around their house?”

  “It’s my house too, isn’t it? And my lungs as well. And did I mention the asthma?”

  “Dramatic much, Youngster? Maybe you’d have asthma regardless.”

  “Well, it will be pretty dramatic when they both get cancer. You asked me what I hate, and I really hate that.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I hate that Pip still believes that Estella secretly loves him and that she’ll come around one day. She won’t.”

  “Are you still reading G.E.?”

  “Three-quarters through. And Pip needs to grow up. It’s never going to happen. He clings to this belief that they are not together because of cruel circumstance and because Estella feels that she owes it to Miss Havisham to do as she’s told so she can’t be with Pip, blah, blah, blah. When the real reason is that she doesn’t love him, plain and simple. What’s more, she’s a bitch and she doesn’t deserve him. But Biddy does. Biddy is a great girl and Pip doesn’t even notice her. The Biddys of this world never get the guy.” I pause for breath.

  “Don’t worry too much about Biddy. She does fine in the end.”

  “Don’t tell me the end!”

  “You’re pretty hard on old Pip. You think he can just decide not to be in love with Estella anymore? He can just decide that?”

  “I don’t know. I guess sometimes it’s”—I look directly into his eyes—“out of our control.”

  “Yep. I wish”—he breaks the gaze—“we could just decide to stop.”

  “Fancy yourself as a bit of a Pip, do you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Because of Kathy?”

  “Nah. The Kathy thing is a means to an end.”

  “I thought you really dug her.”

  “I do. I did. I have for a long time. In a way. But the crux of the matter is that I’m seeking distraction from … well, from the real issue.”

  After a few swallows this beer doesn’t taste too bad. I take a generous swig before inquiring as to the nature of the real issue.

  “The real issue is that I’m in love with someone else. Actual love, not a crush that makes the shifts go faster and feeds my addiction to misery.”

  Well. I’d figured from the get-go that I had no chance with Chris because (a) he is too old, (b) he would never be interested in me in that way and (c) he has some jerk-off crush on vacuous Kathy from work, but now add (d) he’s in “actual love” with … hey, with who? He didn’t say who. Maybe it’s me! Maybe he can’t bear to tell me because … because he’s worried my father would shoot him or something. I lean in and say, I hope casually, “Actual love?”

  “You’d better not be mocking me.”

  “I’m not mocking. So why aren’t you with this girl?”

  “Was with her. Am not now.” Again Chris has that gutted look that he does so well. He sort of looks down into his glass and then over my shoulder and into the distance, swallowing hard. He broods good.

  “Anyways, Youngster,” he says. “Moving swiftly on, you say that Pip should grow the fuck up and see things as they are.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Gatsby did that, right? He grew the fuck up at long last—realized that everything he’d hoped for was for shit, that despite all his elaborate efforts to be the kind of man that Daisy would want to hook up with again, despite all his longing and obsession, the object of his affection had chosen that Tom fuckwit and had no intention of leaving him. And then what did he do? He killed himself. So you know maybe it’s better for Pip to keep this whole fantasy going in his head. Even being in unrequited love might be better than the cold hard light of day. He probably doesn’t even know who he is without his Estella obsession.”

  “Gatsby doesn’t kill himself.”

  “Yes, he does. He shoots himself and they find him in the pool.”

  “No … he gets shot in the pool by Wilson, who thinks that Gatsby screwed his wife and then ran her over with the car. Then Wilson turns the gun on himself.”

  “Good God, Youngster, you’re right.”

  “There’s no realization. He goes down to the pool saying that Daisy will call, to put the call through to him down there. Yuh-huh, Gatsby, that could totally happen—not. He dies waiting in self-deluded—”

  “I think deep down, he knew.”

  “I think you are ‘projecting,’ as the headshrinkers would say. I can’t believe I knew something that you didn’t know.”

  “I knew!” he said sharply. “I just forgot that I knew.”

  The pizza arrives. We load our plates with as many slices as will fit, and Chris opens himself another beer. To my surprise I’ve almost finished mine too.

  “So what else do you hate?” he asks between chews.

  “How come you keep asking me that?”

  “I’m interested. You interest me. I endorse your product.”

  No further invitation needed. I launch into my next pet peeve—perhaps a little less inhibited after the beer on an empty stomach.

  “Well. I hate—I hate my mum—”

  “You hate your mum?”

  “No, no!” I say hastily. “No way. I hate my mum’s despair.”

  “Her despair.”

  “Right.” It’s a struggle to express this one. I lean down to my schoolbag under the table, haul it up onto my lap and fumble around inside it.

  “My mum has this really busy, really full-on job that she does Monday to Friday, plus she’s got Jess to look after, plus my dad, plus all the housework and … she’s really unhappy. The air in my home … is heavy with my mum’s unhappiness. And her exhaustion. And her sheer dissatisfaction with her life. And I hate it. I can be up in my room when she’s in the kitchen below and I feel her despair seeping up through the floorboards and into my room and throughout the whole house. You can hear her banging pots and pans, or cursing the vacuum cleaner.…”

  “What’s this thankless job that she does?”

  “She’s a high school teacher. English and history.”

  “Where?”

  “Riley Street High.”

  “Shit. Tough school.”

  “Yeah. But you know, I’ve worked out what’s really to blame for my mother’s lot in life.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Feminism.”

  “Feminism?” Chris raises one eyebrow. “Please explain.”

  I find what I was rummaging for in my bag—a tattered set of photocopied pages—fish them out and slam them down on the table.

  “Well, our English teacher, Mrs. Cumming, made us read this thing called The Feminine Mystique, by some feminist called—”

  “Betty Friedan.”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. It was published in 1963 and—”

  “Sorry, I need a judge’s ruling on this—your teacher gave you The Feminine Mystique for tenth-grade English?”

  “Yes.”

  “The same teacher that gave you The Bell Jar?”

  “Yes. She’s pretty wacky.”

  “I’ll say! Continue.”

  “So, yeah, from what I can gather, Betty was writing about how after the Second World War there was this massive campaign to get women—”

  “Middle-class white women, not women,” Chris interjects. “That’s who she was writing about really—she began her research on ex-classmates of hers from college.”

  “Whatever,” I say impatiently. “She said women had been kind of herded back into the home and told that femininity equals being a “stay-at-home wife and mum.” Apparently this lifestyle meant that most of them went insane with misery and developed Valium habits. Eventually a backlash movement developed called
second-wave feminism, which tried to get the women back out into the world and not just be wives and mothers and dependent on men. And thanks to second-wave feminism, my mum spends all day getting shoulder-charged by a bunch of delinquent teenagers, picks up Jess from preschool, goes to the supermarket, comes home, cleans up the day’s mess, gets the dinner on, gets Jess in the bath, folds the laundry, gets Jess out of the bath, serves the dinner, clears up after dinner, puts Jess to bed and collapses, waking up to do it all again the next day.”

  I pause for breath. Chris looks thoughtful.

  “Well. I guess you have a point,” he says. “It can seem like women like your mum got sold down the river by feminism, or at least caught in its wake. But really, don’t you think they are getting screwed by patriarchy, not feminism?”

  “I don’t know. But before feminism, at least she wouldn’t have had to do everything.”

  “Just the kids and the housework.”

  “Yeah. If she’d lived in the fifties, at least she could have had her Valium and her lie-down in peace once the kids were at school. She could have had a moment to read the paper and have a coffee in the sunshine. Maybe even see her friends. Go for a swim. All she’d have to worry about was how to work the latest ‘vacuum-cleaning machine.’ ”

  “Down with feminism!” Chris raises his beer in a toast.

  “Down with feminism!” I laugh, and do the same.

  “Seriously, though,” says Chris, gesturing for me to wipe some mozzarella off my chin. “The Stepford Wife thing would totally suck if that was your whole life. It’s not The Way. Let’s not blame poor Betty for the sexual division of labor in your household. Speaking of which, where does your dad fit into all of this?”

  “My dad.” I stop chewing. “I’ll tell you about him another time. I’m exhausted after all that—”

  “Ranting.”

  “Right.”

  “Grade A ranting.”

  “Whatever. So what about you, Brutae?”

  “What about me?” He raises one eyebrow, all film noir.

  “What do you hate?”

  “Well, I hate, you know … stuff.”

  “Stuff. I just bared my soul and you hate ‘stuff.’ ”

  “Betty Friedan and a dislike of smoking is your soul?”