Things Withered (17 page)

It got good. I missed him more than I thought, but by the time I recognized that, the world was topsy-turvy and people were gone, and missing Dick got tangled in missing the way everything used to be, and it was easier just to have a drink.

When I was good and drunk I got the flashlight and went stumbling along the great wall of fish. I saved that in my head.

I thought
I have to tell Donna that one, Great Wall of Fish, she’ll like that.

I found her about a mile up the beach. Her body was caught in the tide, swooshing up against the Great Wall of Fish and sweeping back out to sea because there was nowhere for her to go, her bathing suit a bright spot in all that grey. She’d gone for a swim.

I watched her for a long time.

Mensch. Mensch. Mensch.

Now I’ve finished writing this all down. I’m glad I did. I have no one left to tell it all to, and I proved to be a poor talker anyway, unless you like a joke more than a story.

The sky’s a little darker today. The fish have really started to smell. I haven’t seen or heard a thing other than the regular movement of the ocean, in days.

I have a few things I have to do. I found the shovel Dick bought last year for the deep flower beds I was going to try my hand at and never really did. It’s got a red handle. Pretty red. I notice things like that now.

Donna was my friend and I don’t think she wants to be left where she is, washed up on the shore. Her hairline and the tips of her fingers were blackened.

The house is tidier than it’s ever been. I’ve closed down the genny and I like the quiet, but actually preferred the smell of gas to the smell of the fish. It’s getting bad.

I’ve changed.

There are no good bottles of wine left, I’ve saved nothing for a special occasion. The bottle I’ve brought to the beach with me is pedestrian and impersonal. No notes of humility, no bite of regret, no nose of resignation. It’s just a dry red. Open, of course.

I think about karma. I know somehow that we did all of this. The fish are like chickens, coming home to roost. It’s all coming home to roost. The beach is silent. Everything is silent. I’m alone. Alone. Alone.

I put my head back and swallow the long swallow. When I’m done I grind the bottle into the sand so that it stands upright, not spilling. You never know.

I hope I don’t see Coolidge. I’d hate to see that dog now. I’m a dog person.

I’ve changed into my bathing suit. I’m going for a swim.

Poor Janet lay in bed listening to the alarm, trying to ignore it and knowing it would never, ever go away. In the first few blinks of waking up she had nudged at Les, curled up on his side beside her. When he slept on his side, he didn’t snore as badly. She nudged him and felt his body roll with the force of it, but otherwise, gave no other response. She was about to speak
Les get up time for work
when she remembered that Les wasn’t working these days and then the day ahead washed over her and her stomach tightened and any thoughts of sleeping in or not getting up were lost in churning waves of stomach acid and tightened shoulders.

I’m being audited.

The alarm kept up its tinny shriek, a cross between bells and a rattling aluminium door. It sounded just like one of those wind-up alarm clocks of the sort that she remembered in her parent’s room from when she was a kid, but it wasn’t. It was a plug in. The wind-up clocks wound down eventually, and after a minute of the ringing, you could go back to sleep. If you could stand a minute. In January you could; when the floor was cold and the car had to run a full fifteen minutes before you could drive it without stalling, and if the coffee had to be made and if you forgot to make your lunch for work before going to bed, you could stand it. Probably you could stand two minutes of ringing if it meant not putting your bare feet on to the cold January floor. The plug in alarm didn’t run down. It rang until the little button was pushed. It was Les’ mom’s old alarm clock. She gave it to them when Jan complained about Les not getting up for work. The clock was procured like magic, practically out of a hat. Les’s work record embarrassed his mom. They fought about it all the time. When he wasn’t working, they avoided his mom’s place.

Les-than-a-man.
That was what Jan’s mom called him.

It was all the way across the room. To shut it off, you had to get out of bed. You couldn’t even crawl to the end of the bed and reach out to the dresser and shut it off. He’d done that too many times. They started to put it on the chair in the corner. Something about the chair made it sound louder too.
It’s the acoustics
, Les-than-a-man had said, grinning.
Makes the chair vibrate with it.

Janet didn’t know if that was true, but it did seem louder.

“Shut off the fucking alarm,” Les mumbled from under the blanket. Jan was already half-way out of bed by then, so she didn’t say anything back. The bedroom was freezing. They all but shut the heat off at night
save a little dough
, Les said. Les-than-a-man.

It was 5:30. She had five hours to get her shit together before her meeting with the government accountant. She was being audited.

I’m being audited.
Jan thought it to herself as she pushed in the little button on the back of Les’s mom’s alarm clock in hopes that the words would lose some of their power, the power they had held over her for the last two weeks, but in spite of the two weeks that she had to get used to the idea, it all still made her stomach tight and sore and her head ache.

I’m just a dumb waitress
, she thought.
I’m a big nobody. What do they care what I have?
She’d said this and more to everyone who would listen for the last two weeks, until Les-than-a-man told her to can it. She scuffled a foot under the end of the bed fishing for her slippers and found one and put it on. She got down on all fours to find the other one. Les had pulled it off her in a stupid gesture (it was supposed to be romantic or something but it had just been
stoopid
) last night when he wanted to have sex. She told him she wasn’t in the mood, but he said
I’ll make
you in the mood
and then what was she supposed to do? But her slipper had gone flying.

He always did the wrong thing at the wrong time. Like mornings, when he slept instead of going to work.

The house was cold enough that she wrapped her robe around her middle tight and hugged her arms to her middle. She slipped out of the bedroom and closed the door behind her. The first thing she did was turn the heat up. No way was she doing bullshit paper work in a cold house. Then she made coffee. Strong.

It was still dark out when she went down into the basement and started hauling boxes of receipts upstairs. She brought the first two up and even just the sight of them, with their box tops folded in on each other in a pinwheel felt so overwhelming that she decided to start with just the two of them and then work her way up to the other box, still in the basement, and then the assorted bags and folders with the other papers in them.

The boxes were from the liquor store, from when they moved. One was a Captain Morgan’s Rum box and the other a Canadian Club. Scratched out with black marker was the notation “kitchen” in her handwriting. Written under that was “tax shit,” in Les’s handwriting.
Ha ha
, she thought, Les-than-a-man. That’s what it was, though. Shit.

The coffee maker gurgled as though there wasn’t a care in the world that couldn’t be taken care of by Maxwell House in the Morning, but it filled the kitchen with such a warm and homey smell, that Janet thought she might cry. It reminded her—the dark, the coffee smell, the tight stomach—of when she was in school. Her dad would get up and make coffee
come on girls
and then call her and her sister to breakfast. Her mom worked a night shift at a bakery and she slept while the three of them ate and mumbled quietly at the table before school and work. Jan hadn’t done well in school, mornings before she went filled her with a familiar, comfortable sort of dread, based more on the tedium of the long day ahead than any real fear. It wasn’t she was worried about failing a test, or a grade or getting a bad mark on a paper. She didn’t do well, and wasn’t expected to by either her parents or teachers. Sometimes it just worked that way. She left after tenth grade, not exactly with her parent’s blessings, but with a basic understanding that neither she nor school were doing each other any favours. She went right to work at a diner on Rail Road, making $3.25 an hour. She’d been a waitress ever since. And she was a damn good one. She even liked it. Her parents had her sister to be proud of. Betty had gone all the way through school and then, in a move that was incomprehensible to Jan, went on to more school. She was a medical secretary now, and worked at one of the hospitals in the city. She was married with two kids. Her husband was a mechanic. He made good money too.

But no tips
, was their joke together. Not very funny, considering it was the tips that got her into this mess.

I could just kill Terri Pringle
.

Janet had been waitressing for ten years. Never once had she claimed any tips. Not once. Ten years, ten tax reports filed, not once had anyone said fuck all about tips. Then she was talking to a new waitress, Terri Pringle, who said, in passing one day, that you had to claim your tips on your income tax.

“They’ll come after you, if you don’t,” she’d said. Terri worked part-time. She was a student at the community college and she had said the whole thing with such confidence that it shook Janet up.

Tentatively she had said to Terri, “I’ve never claimed my tips.” She’d tried to say it with as much mustered confidence as the younger, student-y Terri, but hadn’t managed as well.

“My dad’s an accountant,” she said. “They’ll come after you for that.” Then the shift had changed and everybody went home. Terri didn’t even work there long.

Jan had asked around after that. She asked the other waitresses and they would sigh and the debate would start, but most of them said they never claimed their tips. One girl said they automatically assume tips on top of your wages. “Ten per cent,” she said. “Look over your last year’s return. Where it says: undeclared income?’ Look there. They’ll have added ten per cent.”

They hadn’t. Her mother and dad said not to worry about it. “You get it done at the H and R Block, don’t you?” She did.

“They do it for you there.” But her mom had looked a little frowny over the whole thing
you don’t want to do anything to get into trouble,
she’d said later, when they were alone.

Don’t be such a putz,
Les-than-a-man said. “Declaring your tips would be like when we borrow ten bucks from my mom and then declaring it as income.” He laughed at the very thought and then watched tv. He reminded her, though, when they were going to the H and R Block to get their taxes done.
Don’t be a putz
, he’d said, and he shook his finger at her and raised his eyebrows in a perfect imitation of his mother when she said to him,
You get a job now, you hear? Don’t be a bum like your father.

In the end, she declared her tips. Or at least, a rough estimate of them. The H and R man had raised his eyebrows, too, and Jan had trouble deciding whether that was because she was claiming them, or because the number was so low, or too high. Her face had reddened and she felt like she’d been caught in a lie, but of course she had no real way of knowing if she was lying or not because Terri Pringle—
I could kill Terri Pringle
—hadn’t even mentioned declaring tips until nearly October. Jan had guessed based on what she made from around November-mid when she decided inside her head to play it right
to the end of the year. She thought she was safe in her guess because people tipped more around the holidays, and she counted them.

She poured coffee into her bunny mug and got down on her hands and knees on the floor in front of the first box. She cracked it open, not knowing even what year she was about to see, let alone whether or not it would be her stuff or his. Les had a business on the side sometimes, fixing bikes. His stuff was mixed in with hers, but he only claimed the money he made working extra for his buddy Tom, who had a bike shop, because Tom declared it.

The box was filled to the top with little pieces of paper. A musty smell came from the box, like old books at a garage sale. A couple of little pieces fluttered up and settled back down, like fall leaves when you swipe by them on your bike on the way to school. Thinking about school set her off again. She wanted a Tums, but she’d eaten the last of them the night before.

Gee-zus.

Her and Les were both savers of paper. Paper had some kind of authoritarian hold over her feral self. Paper made her feel more feral than human, or certainly sub-human in some way. Especially white paper. Around very white paper with lines and numbers or words on it, she felt stained and dusty and smudgy. The lines, even and black or blue, the careful tally of numbers in a row, the dots matching up with each other, they seemed like representatives of some kind of legal authority. She also felt this way about soldiers and policemen, doctors and dentists; pieces of paper felt like they could boss her, regardless of what was written on them. Could as easy be a receipt from the drugstore for tampax as a subpoena, didn’t matter. Coloured paper wasn’t so bad. She kept the pizza flyers and the two-for-one deals that came from the carpet cleaning people, and ads offering her fifteen per cent off her next oil change, with a sort of grown-up sigh, and filed them in a pile on the table beside the front door. Anything that came in a white envelope (especially a white envelope with a little window on the front) went reverently over to the desk in the corner, where she paid bills. She even kept the newsletters sent by her member of parliament, just in case. You never knew. Someone might ask. Something.

You never knew.

She didn’t claim much on her income tax. She claimed panty hose and her uniforms, of course. And shoes, but they were the special (ugly) orthopaedic shoes that she had to wear because of her bunions—an occupational hazard of working on your feet for ten years. In a few years she imagined she would have to have some sort of an operation on varicose veins. Annie had it done last year after she nearly couldn’t walk for the pain. The operation fixed her up pretty good, she said, but by the end of the year—
when Terri Pringle left never to return—I could kill Terri Pringle—
new ones were troubling her.

She claimed gas mileage whenever she had to work extra at a catering job that her mother sometimes got her through the bakery. Mostly Bridge Lady teas and things, but once a Sweet Sixteen party. That had been quite a bash. Not only had it been catered, but the whole place had been professionally decorated by one of those balloon joints. They turned the No. 16 Legion Hall into a pink cloud, with a real balloon waterfall in the corner. Not just streamers, either, but yards and yards of pink fabric had been draped over walls and tables and the whole thing had been just beautiful, although a little hard on the eyes after an hour or so. Most of the teenagers took off after the presents were opened, but that was okay because the mothers and aunts and old ladies had stayed for hours, wanting only more tea and the waitresses weren’t too taxed on their feet and were paid for the whole day. Her mom and the others had made tiny little cakes—twelve kinds—the sort that were just a bite and sickly sweet after the first couple, but lovely to look at. Just perfect. They were tipped as a group and shared after those events. She wondered if the others had claimed the tips on their income tax.

Janet started going through the receipts, one by one, noticing that while her whole body felt sick and tired, and shaky, it was only her hands where it showed.

Sometime over the next two hours, Les woke up and ambled into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. Janet, engrossed in 1996 fuel receipts didn’t even look up. In fact, didn’t realize he was up at all until he kicked and scattered a pile of health-relateds (Les’s filling, but paid for by her, ergo
her
health-related receipt, plus two massages and a visit to the chiropractor, all from 1998) receipts when he opened the fridge door to get the milk. They went flying towards the free-standing cabinet where she kept her baking stuff and Tupperware.

“
Don’t
,” she shrieked, shocking them both. She bent over double from her position, sitting on the floor surrounded by boxes and pieces of paper (almost of them white), and fished out two receipts that had slipped under the cabinet. “This took me
hours
,” she said.