Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (18 page)

Mary Turlington is a chartered accountant. Morley and Mary view the world from opposite ends of just about any spectrum you could imagine—except motherhood, a continuum of common ground that allows them to enjoy each other’s company.

Dave and Mary, however, have not found a meeting ground. Dave thinks Mary is stiff. Mary thinks Dave is sanctimonious.

“He’s a phoney,” she said to Bert one Saturday morning as she cleared the breakfast dishes. “You watch . . . he’ll be dressed like one of Adam’s friends tonight. He’ll be wearing a plaid shirt. Or something stupid.”

Dave and Morley were coming to the Turlingtons’ for dinner that night. Morley was going to be late. She had to be at the theatre early on.

“I could leave as soon as the curtain goes up,” she had said when Mary had invited them. “I could be there soon after eight.”

They had agreed Dave would go earlier—around six. But now that it was Saturday morning, the prospect of entertaining Dave for two long hours without the redeeming presence of his wife didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. It was making Mary cranky.

“It’s like he’s still in college,” she said. “The music. All that lah-dee-dah anti-bourgeois crap.”

“I don’t think he
went
to college,” said Bert.

“Exactly,” said Mary.

Mary Turlington grew up in London, Ontario, and went to the University of Western Ontario. She was accepted at McGill and Queen’s but her family wasn’t well off, and anyway, her father, who was working in construction at the time, didn’t believe girls should go to university. Mary stayed at home and paid her own tuition. Thirty years later she was still anxious about money.

Money was why she became an accountant. When she was in high school her guidance counsellor had made her write down the stuff that she really loved.
You should do what you love,
he said. She wrote, “chocolate,
Columbo
on TV and books.” She became an accountant so she would always have enough money for chocolate and books.

It hadn’t turned out to be a bad choice. She liked the people she worked with. She liked the marble lobby and the gleaming windows of the office tower where she went every day. She liked the look of her business cards. After twenty-two years she had been made a partner in her firm—the first woman. She liked that. But if she was honest, if she was perfectly and completely honest, Mary would have to say that though she liked the order and comfort of numbers she didn’t like the day-to-day business of doing her job.

But what else could she have done? Bookstores were going broke everywhere you looked. Books wouldn’t have worked out. Right?
Right
.

And there was Dave, circling her life like an old lover—wandering down the street every morning in jeans and sneakers. Dave had turned
his
passion into a job. Why should his life be so easy?

Dave’s antipathy toward Mary was more personal. He didn’t like her politics. He didn’t like her make-up. He didn’t like the way she wore her hair. He didn’t like the cracks she made about his record store.
How would you figure out the depreciation on an ABBA album, Dave?
As if he ran his store the way a doctor might run a hobby farm. As if it was nothing more than a tax write-off. Dave didn’t know what the Turlingtons earned, but he figured he and Morley couldn’t be
that
far behind.

At two o’clock that afternoon—Saturday afternoon—four hours before Dave was due to arrive, Mary Turlington was about to climb into the shower. She was standing in the bathroom squinting suspiciously at a bottle of Rain Forest Nut Meat! shampoo.

Bert poked his head into the bathroom and said he was going to get beer. Mary waved him away impatiently. She had three things on her mind: her hair, dinner and the pots and pans. She didn’t have room for Bert and beer. She had bought some gunk advertised on television that was supposed to remove the rings from around the outside of her pots. She wanted to set her hair and then try the pot cleaner before she started cooking. And the shampoo. It was new too. She wanted to try it.

Mary has never liked her hair. Never. It is thin and brown and unless she fixes it, it hangs straight down,
like I have been buried for a week,
she is fond of saying.

When Mary was a girl, her mother taught her how to curl her hair using brown paper instead of curlers. Her mother ripped brown paper shopping bags into strips and while Mary’s hair was still wet after washing, she would roll it into curls and tie the curls in place with the strips of brown paper. Mary would sleep with the paper in her hair and undo it in the morning.

When Mary went to university, her mother gave her a curling iron. Since she married Bert she has always been the first up—so she can fix her hair alone—a sacrosanct morning ritual that he interrupted only once.

The Nut Meat! shampoo must have been some kind of Third World joke. On the container was a promise that she would step out of the shower as if she were stepping out of a tropical rain forest, with a shiny head of lustrous hair cascading down her back. “Just shake it dry,” read the instructions, “and the water droplets will bounce away like dew.” When Mary stepped out of the shower and shook her head, her hair moved in a sodden, helmet-like clump. Like a head of matted felt. As if she had just shampooed with Elmer’s glue.

“Damn,” she said.

It was two-thirty. She was planning to serve paella. It was going to take her half an hour to untangle her hair. She wasn’t going to have the time to clean the pots
and
get dinner ready. That didn’t make her happy.

The thought of preparing the paella in front of Dave, who would probably sit at the kitchen table with a beer and yak at her while she cooked, the thought of Dave watching her make dinner in stained cookware propelled Mary into doing something she had never done in her life. She bolted out of the bathroom with nothing on and ran downstairs stark naked. Mary had never ever been downstairs with no clothes on. Never. Ever. It’s not the sort of thing Mary Turlington does. But she was thinking that if she could get the gunk on the pots, they could season while she ran back upstairs and untangled her hair. And then she would be more or less back on schedule.

Bert and Mary have a galley kitchen. It is small by any standards and cut off from the rest of the house by an island counter. You have to go through the family room to get to the kitchen, through the family room and past the sliding glass doors that lead to the patio, past the table where the Turlingtons eat most of their meals, past the island counter and then you are there, in Mary’s kitchen, which is not unlike being in a dead-end alley.

Mary flew naked by the patio door without even considering that someone could see her from outside. She
was
alone after all. Bert was getting beer. The twins were at a movie. God knows where Adam was. Then she began pulling all the pots and pans out of the pot cupboard, moving so fast she didn’t even notice what it felt like to be nude in the kitchen.

It hardly took her a minute to get all the pots and pans arranged upside down on the counter in front of her. She was squinting at the instructions on the spray when someone knocked on the patio door.

This can’t be happening,
she thought.

Actually she didn’t really think anything. She gasped and leapt back a good three feet, launching the can of cleaner across the kitchen. She came down in a crouch, alarmingly aware that
she wasn’t wearing any clothes!

One summer night soon after they were married, Bert had taken Mary to his family’s cottage for a week. He had talked her into going skinny-dipping. It had felt surprisingly exotic, the water cool and flawless on her skin, her body strong and liberated.

This didn’t feel anything like that. This felt like a chilly breeze moving along her backside, this felt like the hairs on her arms sticking up, like an unpleasant prickling that seemed to be cen terd around her waist and was spreading up her spine. Her skin felt tight. And cold.

Whoever it was knocked again.

Mary looked desperately around for something to cover herself. The only thing she could see was a tea towel hanging on the handle of the stove. She reached out, snatched it and held it in front of her . . . her what? It seemed no bigger than a handkerchief. First up and then down. The tea towel clearly wasn’t up to the job. Her heart was racing.
Don’t panic,
she thought as she backed into a corner of the kitchen, panicking, waving the towel in front of her like a bullfighter. Like something pathetic from the Playboy Channel.
Don’t panic
. Whoever was knocking couldn’t see her from the door. If she didn’t do anything, surely they would go away.

There was a silent moment that seemed to stretch forever. Mary barely breathed. Maybe they had given up. Maybe they had gone away.

And then, whoever was knocking slid the screen open and knocked on the glass. Mary hid behind the only thing available. Her knees.

Then the glass door slid open.

And Mary draped the tea towel over her head.

“Hello,” said a voice. “Is anyone home?”

It was Dave.

Who else?

If she didn’t move, surely he would go away.

“Hello,” said Dave louder, stepping into the family room.

“Yo, Dave.” It was Bert, coming up the basement stairs.
Back from the beer store already?

Mary was not at this moment acting rationally. She knew only two things: she was nude, and soon she would be surrounded by men. When the glass door slid open, she had moved beyond rational thought into a world of primal instincts.

Her instinct told her there was one thing to do and that was
to get out of sight!
Sadly there was no way out of the kitchen without passing Dave. That left one place to go. And so, with lizard-like agility, that’s where Mary went—headfirst into the cupboard she had just emptied of pots.

The cupboard was directly under the countertop stove. It was not much larger than a dishwasher. It had two doors separated by a four-inch wooden post. Mary snaked around the post and folded herself up like a croissant. There was one shelf—it had always annoyed her because it wasn’t nailed down, and it rattled whenever she removed a pot. If it hadn’t been loose she would not have fitted. She wouldn’t have fitted under normal circumstances. She was carried into the cupboard on the wave of her anxiety. She lay there, in the fetal position, with her back pressed against one wall and her feet pressing against the other. Her knees pushing into her chest. Her face smushed against the cupboard door.

Dave was standing only a few feet away.

“No one is home at my place,” he was saying. “I’ve locked myself out. I’m not sure if you guys still have a key.”

“It’s in the dining-room cupboard,” said Mary desperately under her breath.

“I don’t think so,” said Bert. “But I’ll ask Mary. She’ll know.”

“The dining-room cupboard, you idiot,” hissed Mary.

She tried to will her husband to the dining room.

Bert disappeared. He returned almost immediately. “I thought she was upstairs,” he said. “She must have gone to pick stuff up for dinner. I was just going to fix some lunch. Are you hungry? I can make you an omelette.”

Then he said, “I wonder why she has all the pots out like this?”

He is going to open the cupboard,
thought Mary.
He is going to open the cupboard to check if there are any pots left
.

What,
she thought,
is going to happen when he reaches into the cupboard looking for a pan and comes up with a handful of his wife? What would he think had been going on? Walking into his house and finding his neighbor standing in his kitchen and his naked wife stuffed into the cupboard
.

If he opened the door she was going to have to act fast.

She decided she would jump out, yell
Surprise!
and let the chips fall where they may. It was the best she could think of.