Larry's Party (10 page)

After Ryan was born, she stayed home for three months and earned the odd bit of money by making follow-up calls for repair service. The way it worked, Manitoba Motors sent her out a list of completed repairs once a week, and her job was to phone the clients and ask if they were satisfied with the work. A public relations kind of thing, making the customer feel valued and looked after. She got paid so much a call, and she was able to squeeze in maybe fifteen or so calls while Ryan napped in the afternoon. Even so, the pay was peanuts, and half the time no one was at home or else they chewed her out for disturbing them in the middle of the day.

She decided to go back to work full-time. Russell LaFleur, the head honcho, surprised her by asking if she’d ever thought of going on the sales floor. Times had changed. Women were out there buying their own vehicles now, single women with careers and money to spend on extras. Women valued the judgment of other women. They appreciated a woman’s point of view. When Dorrie pulls out the literature showing the cross-sections of engines, they stand at attention, taking in every word. Type of transmission, power brakes, cruise control - she ticks these items off on the tips of her nicely manicured fingers. She is deeply sympathetic when it comes to color and upholstery combinations, and she’s able to give complete concentration to seat comfort, leg room, the convenience of the glove compartment with its own little overhead light. “We all have to live within a budget,” she says, prefacing her pitch on fuel consumption, and giving a resigned shrug and a wrinkling of her small nose, signaling complicity.
Hey, we’re in this together, we can work this out, these are the figures, trust me.

Right away she bought herself two perky little suits from a designer’s outlet she knows, a soft gray wool flannel and a brisk blue houndstooth check. Professional apparel, she calls it. An investment. Women working for other dealers in town go in for pant suits, but Dorrie sticks to skirts and coordinated pantyhose. After all, there are men customers out there too, and with them, as well as with women, she has an enviable sales completion record. At the end of every three-month sales period, Mr. LaFleur takes the whole gang out for a steak and beans dinner at The Loft. The high-commission sales staff get served steak, and those on the bottom of the chart get a plate of beans. It’s a riot, Dorrie tells Larry, but then she’s always on the steak-eating end of things. Twice she’s been salesperson of the month, and once, last April, she was tops in the city. For that she got a plaque with her name engraved on it and a weekend for two at the Hecla Island resort hotel. And she went straight out and bought a third suit, a raspberry linen blend, nice for summer, and a pair of high-heeled sandals.

She’d like another baby; she’d like to be a lady of leisure, so she says anyway, and she tells Larry she’s going to quit Manitoba Motors and give her aching feet a rest as soon as they’ve got enough money in the bank. But how much is enough, that’s the question. She can’t wait to move off Lipton Street with its rinkydink houses and busy traffic. She’s got her eye on the Linden Woods subdivision west of town, a double garage, en-suite bathrooms, a family room with fireplace and wet bar. And what she’d really like, even though it sounds crazy, is a spiral staircase with a wrought-iron railing. She and Larry saw one last Sunday at a real estate open house they attended, and she said afterwards that walking down that staircase with her hand on the rail felt exactly like being a movie star. “If we could live in a house like this,” she told Larry, “I’d never work another day in my life.”

Larry doesn’t want to move out of his house. He admits it’s no palace, but he’s just finished insulating the basement and he’s thinking about doing the roof. He’s installed a new garbage disposal unit too. He points this out to Dorrie, what he’s invested in terms of money and work.

“You just don’t want to leave your crazy yard,” she charges.

Sighing, shrugging, he acknowledges the truth of what she says.

He’s worked hard on the yard. It’s a small lot, thirty-foot frontage and ninety in depth, that’s all, but there’s nothing else like it in the city of Winnipeg, and probably not even in the province of Manitoba. Every inch of it is filled with hedges, and these hedges are planted in the intricate pattern of a maze. There’s a direct access route for the mailman, of course, but there’s also a sinuous alternate path that winds twice around the house with half a dozen false turning points.

Larry’s maze craze (as Dorrie calls it) started three and a half years ago when they got married and went to England for their honeymoon. The highlight of the trip was a tour through the famous Hampton Court maze outside London, and ever since then Larry’s been reading library books about mazes. And adapting his classic maze design so that it’s tailored to the size of the Lipton Street lot. He’s acquired nursery stock from a cut-rate greenhouse and learned just what shrubs work best in this climate and how to keep them alive during a long winter by burying the young shoots under heaps of leaves. Right now the hedges are thinly distributed and so short they can be easily overstepped; it’ll be another four or five years before the hedge walls get high enough for his liking, but meanwhile he’s nursing them along. The last thing he wants is to move to Linden Woods,where he’d have to start over and where the by-laws probably prohibit eccentric gardening.

Whereas anything goes in this neighborhood. The people around here are a mixed bag. His friend Bill Herschel, who lives two streets over, works full-time for the Manitoba Endangered Species Alert and sometimes gives Larry a hand on the weekend. The Gilshammers across the lane (he’s in cut-rate electronics; she works at a unisex hair salon) have just donated the raked leaves from their property. So have the two guys down the street. (Larry can’t remember their names offhand, but he knows they do stage carpentry for a theatre downtown, which he figures must be a pretty interesting line of work.) Lucy Warkenten, who’s got the upstairs apartment next door, doesn’t have any leaves to offer, but she takes a keen interest in Larry’s maze, and has walked through it half a dozen times, stepping along in her purple leather boots. (She’s a self-employed bookbinder working out of her apartment.) Beneath Lucy live the Lees with their three little kids. Ken Lee delivers pizzas for Bella Vista and gives Larry all his leaves and grass clippings, and plenty of advice on the subject of propagating shrubs, which must be planted in a shallow but wide trench so that the roots can spread out sideways and help anchor the branches against prevailing winds. The Grangers, Gord and Moira, live on the other side of Larry’s house. Moira’s a housewife, a semi-invalid, with an interest in spelling reform (she’d like to see the letter X eliminated), and Gord designs ergonomic work gloves, his most recent breakthrough featuring reduced padding at the finger joints so that the gloved hand can grasp objects more readily in cold weather. The good-hearted Grangers, too, have contributed their fall rakings to the survival of Larry Weller’s baby hedges, and now, with winter about to crash down, Larry’s and Dorrie’s yard looks like a series of Indian burial mounds with their mushroom of a house poking through.

In the dark November evenings people in this neighborhood tend to stay home with their families, enjoying their hamburger suppers and favorite TV shows. Generally speaking, the house lights go out along the street somewhere between ten o’clock and eleven-thirty. There are, Larry assumes, starbursts of sex or of hospitality or late-night comings and goings and probably even acts of violence, but nights in the neighborhood are quiet for the most part, and heavy with sleep. Under a depthless navy-blue sky, beneath a cold bone of a moon, this small segment of the world is renewing itself, restoring its emptied-out substance, getting ready for tomorrow. Ready to go back to work.

 

Working for Flowercity and married to Dorrie and living on Lipton Street, Larry had no idea that technology was about to bulldoze the job market. In the early eighties, that enchanted, stupid time, almost everyone had a job, or if they didn’t they expected they’d find one any minute. No one dreamed of the redundancies and dehirings and downsizings the end of the century would bring, where in a mean, lean, bottom-line world, a day’s work would become as rare and as exotic as the prized orchids Larry keeps swaddled in insulation at the back of the cool unit.

Larry, himself, was slow to wake up to the idea of work. At twelve he took over another kid’s paper route and lasted a week. During his final year of high school, hungry for money, longing for name-brand jeans and a leather jacket, he worked at a neighborhood McDonald’s, adding up orders, and ringing in cash, hating every minute of it. He didn’t like to think in those days that he’d have to spend the rest of his life working. But then he got lucky. He fell into the right line of work: flowers, plants.

And now, ever since Viv Bondurant’s left Flowercity, Larry’s been in charge down at the store, and that means getting up at six o’clock three mornings a week and driving out to Stems Inc., the wholesalers. They’re open for business at seven, and Larry likes to be in and out in half an hour. He’s got his standard orders, of course, his poms, daisies, roses, carnations, and so on, and then he likes to spend a few minutes looking around at what’s just come in from the flower brokers in Montreal. Stems has about 140 accounts, so it’s not surprising he bumps into some of the other florists around town, Sally Ullrich, Jim Carmody, and catches up on what’s new. Over in the corner there’s coffee going and a basket of donuts - a nice touch, Larry thinks, since he skips breakfast at home these days, and Dorrie’s too busy, anyway, getting Ryan ready for daycare, to stop and make coffee.

He’s got a lot of wedding orders coming up, so today he picks up a good supply of baby’s breath. He prefers the stuff from Peru, which is as pure a product as you can get. The wedding bulge across the North American continent is in June and July, but there’s a major blip in the city of Winnipeg, where winter weddings have come to the fore. That way newly married couples can get away for a tropical honeymoon. Larry does a nice bridal semi-cascade; average price $120. Brides want roses nine times out of ten. You can’t talk them out of it. They think flowers, and, bingo, roses come to mind. Roses are romantic, also generic. Winnipeg roses originate in southern Ontario, where they’ve got acres of them under glass.

The gingers get shipped to Manitoba from South Africa, freesia from Holland, and carnations from California. People think carnations are a cheapy flower, but it’s not true; sometimes, depending on weather fluctuations, they’re more expensive than roses, and they last a hell of a lot longer. Some nationalities hate carnations, that’s something to remember. Tree fern is trucked in from Florida in warmed vehicles. They’re always good for funeral baskets. You don’t see a lot of camellias anymore, that old corsage staple, but then Larry doesn’t do anything like the number of corsages he did when he started in the business back in the late sixties. To tell the truth, corsages were old-fashioned even then, relics from the thirties and forties. How’s a woman supposed to button her coat over a corsage? And what if it doesn’t match her outfit? - actually, there’s an old florist’s law that says a corsage is doomed to be the wrong color, something women have always known, just as they know there’s no way to secure a corsage without at least a small fuss, not to mention permanent damage to their silk blouses. If a customer absolutely insists on going the corsage route, Larry encourages them to think about a small wrist arrangement he’s perfected, which is sturdy, attractive, and comfortable to wear.

He’s happy to give advice about prolonging the life of cut flowers, but warns his customers that they mustn’t have unrealistic expectations. Flowers are fragile, flowers are needy. There are people who put their flowers in dirty vases. You can actually see the green scum line from the last bunch. Would you drink out of that vase? No way. You want to put your flowers in a disinfected container; that’s all the magic white powder in the little envelope is - a disinfectant. Of course you’ve already cut your flowers with a knife and on an angle before putting them in water. Don’t expect dafs to go more than three days, though, no matter what you do to them and for them.

Poinsettias will start selling in a week’s time; Larry gets his delivered from Carmen, Manitoba, just an hour away. Then it’s Valentine’s Day, then your Easter lilies - they come from Carmen too. Mother’s Day is crazy, the biggest day of the year, and right after that you’re into graduation tributes, retirements, and a spate of summer weddings. It’s a funny business with its ups and downs, but Larry’s grateful for the way the main holidays are strung out over the year. He’s always hearing about photo opportunities, but what about flower opportunities? They come and they go; they keep him buoyed up and alive and working, and he welcomes the noise of daily bustle in his life.

When Viv first left, she phoned the store occasionally to see how business was going. After a while, though, she stopped checking in. Larry’s heard somewhere that she dropped out of the social work program and was selling flowers in a corner of a Safeway in North Kildonan. He’s also heard that she’s pregnant and has quit work altogether. He hasn’t seen her for ages now, but he thinks of her at least once every day, and wonders what she’s doing at that very moment. He didn’t notice it happening at the time, but it must have been that they said goodbye to each other and really meant it, and maybe that’s the way it goes with friends you have from work.

Sometimes down at the store he’ll be holding a stemmed alstroemeria in his hand. More often than not, this will be the flamingo variety, his favorite, a rose color streaked with lavender, a floppy uneven head of fragile petals spread out to reveal a colony of tender stamen threads, their pinks, their golds. This flower, an herb really, started out as a seed way down in South America in Colombia. Some Spanish-speaking guy, as Larry imagines him, harvested the seed of this flower and someone else put it back into the earth, carefully, using his hands probably, to push the soil in place. They earned their daily bread doing that, fed their families, kept themselves alert. It’s South American rain that drenches the Colombian earth and foreign sunshine that falls on the first green shoots, and it all happens, it all works.