The Gum Thief Read online

  She looked at herself in the mirror and pursed her Falling Blossom Pink lips. I could easily be Elizabeth Taylor circa 1972, approximately three weeks after abandoning a strict diet.

  The doorbell rang.

  Bethany

  Okay, Roger, here's my deal.

  My best friend in grade four was Becky Garnett. She didn't show up for school one day, and within a month she was gone from this freaky stomach cancer that prepubescent girls get. Dead? I was used to people vanishing, to people going out for cigarettes and never returning, but not to people dying. Becky?

  After Becky came this five-year death fiesta. Both my grandfathers in the same year (car crash; kidney failure); my twenty-year-old stepsister (internal injuries sustained in an assault by her now behind-bars-for-thirty-years ex); my grandmother (emphysema); my favourite music teacher, Mr. Van Buren (car crash on the 99, driving up to Whistler); Kurt Cobain; both my cats (Ginger and Snowbelle); two of my smokehole friends, Chris and Mark, who smoked some pot cut with PCP and were found waterlogged two days later in the lagoon beside the sand traps at the local pitch and-putt; my step brothel; Devon (hanged himself); and then my eerily, disturbingly, relentlessly perky Aunt Paulette. She had lightning-onset breast cancer, and all the money we raised doing car washes to send her to the Revlon Center in Los Angeles didn't work, and she wobbled away into nothingness-no drama, only silence.

  At the end of all of this death, death, death, I began to find myself dreaming about all of these dead people at night-pretty much to the exclusion of living people. It scared me that I was spending so much time with dead people, and then I realized this was snobbery. Why should only living people count in your dreams, while dead people get relegated to "filler" status, unable to be taken seriously? Imagine the dreams of a thirty-year-old living a century ago. There couldn't have been a living soul in their dreams. I think we forget that growing old is as much an invention as electricity or birth control pills. Long lives aren't natural. God or Whoever didn't want millions of ninety somethings hanging around forever, and if he did, there had to be a reason beyond simply staying alive for the sake of staying alive.

  Me? I expect people to die soon. Dying is what people do in my universe-I'm a statistical freak. Most young people don't know a single person who's died. I'm a throwback.

  Last week, Kyle wanted to know if I worshipped the devil or something like that, and I wanted to blow him off, but then I realized maybe he was worried about something, so I calmed down and asked him how things were going. Turns out his grandmother died and he doesn't know how to deal with it. What you were saying about not having faith in place when things go bad-well, there's your proof. I asked him what he thought the afterlife might be like, and I got the impression that he thinks death is like a resort where everything is pre-decided for you and all you have to do is lie back and submit to the regime.

  I disagree.

  Much of the time I want to be dead. It must be nice to be dead, to know that the sheer work of having to constantly learn lesson after lesson is over and you can coast for a while. I think our souls are totally rigged for this.

  Here's something that happened to me last summer. I was visiting Katie in the house beside our condo building the Divorcee Who Got the House-and she'd installed a fish pond where the barbecue used to be. Katie, despite her bimbo demeanour, is tough as nails, and smart. She said, "A pond needs to be an ecosystem, and it has to be able to take care of itself in case I have to fly to Cabo for a week or something." So she had these jumbo snails put into the pond to balance the ecosystem. I'd never spent much time looking at snails, so I lay down on my stomach and put my head close to the water's surface and looked deep into the water-it was dark but not too dark, like decaf coffee and I saw the snails sliming their way over rocks and across the pond's rounded concrete bottom.

  And that was that.

  And then, for the next five nights, I had snail dreams snails crawling over everything-not in a gross way but in a natural "that's what snails do" way.

  I mention this because in total I've watched maybe five years of TV in my life and I don't remember once having a TV dream, and yet I look at snails for five minutes and I'm having snail dreams all over the place.

  So I guess the point is that our brains are rigged to respond to what's natural, not what's man-made. Snails will always win over sitcoms. And the dead will always win over the living.

  And that's why I am the way I am. It's why I shun the sun, wear my black lipstick and don't give a shit if my

  weight exceeds norms established by the government.

  And guess who got reprimanded for the dust all over the cardboard mechanical pen display? Yes, that's correct, me, even though it was technically Shawn's job to fix it.

  My voice is shot today-a cold or flu-and it sounds so damaged, but I like the sound of damage. It's like Patty and Selma from The Simpsons.

  I love Glove Pond more than ever.

  Hey-again, what happened with your family?

  Roger

  I'm sitting in my car in the parking lot, and the weather is changing outside; the sky's going from dry, crazy thrashing in all directions to something slow and wet, and my eyes are wet, and where did that come from?

  My Hyundai got keyed this afternoon, and I know who did it. I didn't get their licence plate number because I was too busy cutting them off in traffic. I guess they followed me to the lot here at work, which is all to say that I deserved it, but at the same time I'd like to kill the bastard. My Hyundai is-was-the only unflawed thing in my life. I'm actually more sad than I am pissed.

  No, I could kill.

  Death.

  Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want. I'm so tired of never getting what I want. Or of getting it with a monkey paw curse attached. All those Hollywood people are always saying to be careful what you wish for, yeah, but at least they first had a wish come true.

  Hang on, I'm venting here.

  One more breath.

  I imagine myself sitting in a glade surrounded by woodland creatures that rest on my arms and shoulders, sleeping, utterly comforted by existence.

  Breathe once more.

  Who am I fooling? I merely did whatever everyone else seemed to be doing. It'd be nice if we had a course in school called Real Life. Forget don't-drink-and-drive videos and plastic models of the uterus. Imagine a class where they sit you down and spell everything out, deploying all of that information delivered to us by our ever-growing army of wise, surviving ninety somethings ...

  · .. Falling out of love happens as quickly as falling in.

  · .. Good-looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters. · .. Animals spend time with you only if you feed them. · .. People armed with shopping carts who know what

  they want and where they're going will always cream clueless people standing in the middle of aisles holding vague shopping lists.

  · .. Time speeds up in a terrifying manner in your mid-thirties.

  My Theory of the Day is that the moment your brain locks into its permanent age, whoosh, it flips a time switch and your life zooms forward like a Japanese bullet train.

  Or the Road Runner. Or a 747. The point being that your soul is left behind in a cloud of dust.

  And all of those dead people in your life. I dream about Brendan every so often, but when he was alive, I never dreamed about him. Ever. How sick. When he was a toddler, I remember worrying about the fact that I never dreamed about him. If someone's big in your life, you dream about them. Is their absence from your dreams disloyal? Is it cheating? I dream about my old high school locker twice a week. I dream about our old next-door neighbour's poodle-dead twenty years now-twice a month, and I'm sure if I stared at snails, they'd become a nightly feature with me.

  The thing about dreaming about dead people is that you don't know they're dead-your brain makes you forget that one key fact. And then you wake up and remember they're dead, and you f
eel the loss all over again, every single time. You feel scooped out and hollow. I do. It's been three years now. Hit by a car while he was riding his bike. It was instant. Joan couldn't handle her Brendan dreams. Unlike me, she'd been dreaming about him since the moment she knew she was pregnant. Her counsellor kept trying to tell Joan that she should look at Brendan's dream visits as something wonderful, treasures to remember him by. That's when Joan stopped going to see the counsellor and went on autopilot taking care of Zoe. And then she was diagnosed with spleen cancer and she never really changed gears along the way, and the two years wore us ragged and we never recovered. Or, rather, I didn't-I think Joan did. Who knows? I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life. They merely get used to it.

  Glove Pond

  "You answer the door."

  "No, you answer the door."

  As their guests waited on the other side, no doubt bored as well as chilled by gusts of arctic air whooshing in to refrigerate the fall evening, Steve and Gloria bickered.

  "Why should I?" Gloria was indignant. "You heard the doorbell first." "We both heard it at the same time." "That's not true. I was upstairs, so technically you heard it first."

  "No, I didn't," Steve said. "The doorbell's ring mechanism is directly beneath your makeup collection, and as sound travels more quickly through solids, chances are that you heard the doorbell ring first. And tell me, your Grace, why won't you answer the door?"

  "Because it's my role to be walking down the stairs in a gracious manner while you answer the door. That way, I can work on my character of Lady Windermere too. My devotion, my dear, is to my craft. And, tit-for-tat, why won't you open the door?"

  Steve was matter of fact: "I think it befits the director of a highly prestigious English faculty to be seated near the fireplace when his guests arrive, perhaps holding a snifter of highly exclusive brandy."

  "Let me get this straight," said Gloria. "You'd put your petty vanity ahead of my need to be an artist?"

  "Tell me, Gloria, does Lady Windermere actually descend a staircase in the play?"

  Checkmate. "No."

  Steve felt he could already taste Gloria's opening of the door. Then a voice inside his head said, Wait-can one actually taste the opening of a door?

  Gloria, however, surprised him. "Steve-if I agree to discuss your five novels with you, would you consent to opening the door?"

  It had been years since they had discussed his five critically acclaimed yet poorly selling novels. "Maybe." He was wary.

  "Is that a yes?"

  He chewed the lower knuckle of his right index finger. "Yes." Gloria climbed the stairs to position herself. "Not so quickly, Meryl Streep. You agreed to discuss my five novels."

  Gloria shrugged. "Very well, then. Shall we go in chronological order?" "Please." "Okay, novel number one, Infinity’s Passion." Steve's face bore the expression of a kindergartner

  just moments before the commencement of an Easter egg hunt. "Yes?"

  "Potent but impotent. A cuckold's vagina."

  Steve protested, "What the hell does that mean? Infinity's Passion established my career. Without Infinity's Passion, how would we have been able to live in a stately home built of Connecticut slate, with a steep staircase that allows you to descend to the front door like a hostess from another, more gracious era?"

  "Novel number two: Less Than Fewer. Forced. Anticlimactic. Emotionally arid and repetitive."

  "Nonsense. Critics compared it to Henry James."

  "Yes," taunted Gloria. "If I remember correctly, an embalmed Henry James-inasmuch as words can be embalmed." "Jesus, Gloria," shouted Steve. "Why do you have to be so caustic?"

  "Novel number three: Gumdrops, Lilies and Forceps."

  "That was a good book!"

  "Yes, well, whatever. Novel number four-Eagles and Seagulls-the story of my family, which you pilfered as easily as if it were a pack of gum."

  "Not true. Merely because its heroine has copper tinted kiss-curls like your mother's does not mean I strip-mined your family for material."

  "If you need to believe that, then please do. Let's discuss novel number five, Immigrant Living in a Small Town, which began your final decline into the creation of meaningless compost mounds of spew."

  Steve removed his hand from the door handle. "How dare you! The Times Literary Review called it a masterpiece of miniaturization. 'A Five-Year Plan of the Microscopic.' "

  "What have you written lately, my dear?"

  "Oh, for God's sake, is it that important to you that I be the one to answer the door?"

  "Yes, it is."

  The doorbell rang again.

  They looked at the door as though it were a coffin, with two bony claws about to crash through in pursuit of living souls upon which to feed. "You know I've had writer's block for a long time,

  Gloria."

  "Open the do01; Steve."

  "Yes, dear."

  Steve did.

  DeeDee

  I don't understand the human heart.

  Only pain makes it grow stronger. Only sorrow makes it kind. Contentment makes it wither, and joy seems to build walls around it. The heart is perverse, and it is cruel. I hate the heart and it seems to hate me.

  Roger, you stay away from my daughter. She tells me you've been writing letters or something back and forth. Well, put a stop to that right now. She could be the only member to escape the curse of my loser family, and I won't have you stepping in and setting her on the road to failure. Bethany has not had an easy life, and much of that is my fault, and somehow she's managed to rise above it. She lives at home and is the only thing that keeps me going. I dread the day she leaves, because once she's out that door, I'm out the door too, except my body is left behind, here in this crummy condo, forever wondering what it was that walked out the door with Bethany.

  She was a quiet child, and I used to think it was because she was smart and had ideas too large to put into words, but now I think she kept quiet to avoid having to engage in her mother's sordid life.

  After she leaves, I'll have way too much time on my hands and will have no choice but to accept the fact that the chance of my falling in love again is zero. When did I reach that point? A few years ago?

  I know the moment I finally understood it. It was that night at Denny's with you. It was like I saw myself at the next booth, sixty-eight years old, eating breakfast alone at three in the afternoon, using a coupon for a discount, with the only thing on my horizon going back to my condo to wait for my next meal.

  So it's not like I haven't been thinking of you since that date. But when I do, I think about The Void. About loss. You may or may not deserve this, but that's what I see. You may well be the male equivalent of me-a certain age, a grocery list of bad decisions-whatever. Stay away from my daughter. She has a nice healthy thing maybe going with some guy there-Kyle?-and I don't want you messing with that. Act your age. Go get hammered at some bar. But leave my daughter alone.

  DD

  Glove Pond

  Gloria smiled at her guests. "Kyle Falconcrest! An honour to have you here in our charming, gracious home."

  "Thank you. This is my wife, Brittany."

  "Hello."

  Steve said, "I'm glad you could take the time to visit our small, modest university. Can I get either of you a drink?" The young couple looked at each other. Brittany said, "Do you have any white wine?" "All we have is Scotch. Would you like some Scotch? No wait-we have some gin, too." Gloria's eyes widened; she would never surrender her private stock. Steve recanted: "No, just Scotch."

  Kyle said, "Scotch is fine. On the rocks, please."

  "We're out of ice cubes."

  "Neat."

  Steve went to fetch the drinks, and Gloria ushered Kyle and Brittany into the living room. "Kyle, your novel is magnificent."

  "Thank you."

  "I read it twice. It deserves all the acclaim it gets, and the huge royalty cheques you receive must sweeten life too."

  Kyle blushed. Brittany said, "
He's just today signed a second book deal."

  Gloria veritably shrieked, half to her guests and half towards the kitchen, "A second book deal! How exciting! I can only imagine how much money it was for."

  Brittany said, "It hits the papers tomorrow, so it won't be much of a surprise then. Ten million dollars."

  Gloria almost fainted with pleasure. "Ten million dollars?" She called to Steve, coming in from the kitchen. "Young Kyle here is getting $10 million for his second novel."

  "Is he?" It was the most Steve could do not to break a highball glass on the table edge and slit his own throat. "Let's have a drink, then."

  He passed his guests their glasses and Gloria immediately proposed a toast: "To your $10 million book deal." Steve had no choice but to join in the clinking of glasses.

  "What is your new novel about?" Gloria asked.

  "It's a modern love story with a twist."

  "A twist? How thrilling."

  "It's about people who work in an office superstore."

  "An office superstore?" Gloria was confused.

  Steve, using the tone of voice adults use when proving to younger people that they know the current hip bands, said, "I was in one today, as a matter of fact. Staples."

  "You didn't tell me that." Gloria felt betrayed.

  Brittany volunteered a description. "They're those huge box stores near the freeway off-ramps. They're everywhere. Staples, Office Depot. Those kinds of places."

  Gloria took on the aspect of someone trying to attach a name to a face at a party. "I ..." Steve said, "For God's sake, Gloria, everyone knows about office superstores." "I buy my stationery at that store a few blocks from here. It never occurred to me to go to a ... an office ...