Читать книгу The Footstop Cafe - Paulette Crosse - Страница 7

Karen Morton keeps her microwave in the bathroom. She does this because she’s afraid to get zapped by its radiation. The way she reasons it, she’s never in the bathroom while cooking and is therefore out of harm’s way. Before she hit upon this solution, whenever she used the microwave she could feel her ovaries writhing and shrinking somewhere in the vicinity of her kidneys, behind the bony flare of her pelvis, either side of the small of her back.

Her nine-year-old son Andy has inherited this terror of microwave radiation.

One evening while his mother is zapping a butternut squash for dinner, Andy has to defecate. It is the kind that can’t wait, the bloated-stomach kind that comes after eating porridge all day in an attempt to put muscle on a skinny frame.

A butternut squash takes approximately fifteen minutes to cook in the microwave; Andy can’t wait that long. He is desperate, but not desperate enough to risk cancer of the prostate by straining into the toilet alongside the microwave. (The microwave sits on a small, olive-coloured table that Karen purchased from the Salvation Army explicitly for this purpose.) Nor does he dare go into the bathroom to turn the microwave off — just standing before the activated device those scant few seconds, with his gonads right at radiation level, is a prospect that makes his wee hairless testicles shrivel.

Yet Andy has to go badly. He looks outside his bedroom window and scans the gloomy yard, then decides he also doesn’t want to risk Mrs. Baroudi seeing him crouch behind one of the rhododendrons that separates her yard from his. He needs a room, a room with a lock on it. The hall closet.

The hall closet has a lock because of Candice, who showers two to four times a day, depending whether it is a weekday or a weekend. With each shower, she uses a dozen or so towels to dry her budding body. Karen has installed a lock on the closet door in an attempt to reduce the massive laundry loads this shower fetish produces. Everyone in the house has a key to the door save Candice, a fact she resents as vocally as possible.

Andy needs something to poop in, a container of sorts. Preferably one with a lid, so he can whip the makeshift toilet outside and into the battered metal garbage can without someone smelling him out. He needs something like a margarine tub. Such a tub sits on his bookcase, where used batteries collect dust until his mother disposes of them.

A contraction grips his lower bowel. With a strangled gasp, he dumps the batteries out of the margarine tub and runs from his room. He slides to a stop outside the hall closet and pauses: Candice is in her room, listening to the radio and talking on her phone. Satisfied, Andy unlocks the closet, shuts himself in, and yanks down his pants.

There is something deeply gratifying — a monk-like contentedness — about producing a large, solid stool. Like everybody who’s ever spawned such a specimen, Andy feels the bigger his stool is, the more he has achieved.

In much the same way Dairy Queen employees fill cones with ice cream, he gently swirls the tub beneath him so the stool can fit completely inside. Through the tub’s yellow plastic he can feel the stool’s warmth. The stench is strong and worrisome — until now he he had no idea how much the water in a toilet bowl dampens such odours. Moving carefully in his crowded, dark quarters, he snaps the lid over the tub. Done. Relief.

Except ...

He forgot toilet paper! Panic descends upon him, the cold, clammy panic he feels during gym class as he waits, as if on a firing squad, to be chosen last again between two teams. It is the kind of panic that makes him stutter and blink repeatedly. It is the kind of panic that has started to elicit contempt from Candice, who once thought him so funny and smart, a cross between a Muppet and Albert Einstein. Better than a puppy, she used to say, ruffling his hair.

As panic injects adrenaline into his veins, he hears footsteps: Candice is walking down the hall in his direction, talking into her phone.

“No, I mean, she locks it. Honest to God, locks it. It’s like I’m not even a person in this house anymore, you know?”

Andy gropes wildly about him, finds something soft and cotton, gives a few vigorous wipes across his bum, and yanks up his pants.

“I mean, it’s so totally unfair. What am I supposed to do, go around — oh, my God, what is that stink? What? Just wait a minute. No, just wait a minute.”

Andy freezes in terror, margarine tub of stool cooling in his palm, eyes transfixed on the knob just visible from the light under the door. The knob turns.

In a blinding, horrifying flash, he realizes the flaw in his plan: the door locks only from the outside. Somehow his distracted mind overlooked this simple, devastating fact. His whole clever scheme shatters as Candice wrenches the door open.

He screams. Candice screams. He bursts into tears and darts by her.

Candice spies the poop-smeared towel. “Oh, my God! Andrew Morton, did you shit in the closet? I don’t believe this! Mother! Mother! I do not believe this! Gloria? Guess what? My moronic little brother just shit in the closet! Yes! No, I’m not! Mother! Look, I gotta go. I can’t handle this. No, forget it. Bye.”

From where she hovers over a pan of frying mushrooms, gently sprinkling garlic powder onto their golden backs, Karen winces. What now? What, oh, what now?

Sputtering and crying, Andy stumbles into the kitchen, fumbles with the back door handle, and flings himself outside.

“Candice!” Karen cries in alarm. “What did you do to your brother?”

“What did I do? What did I do? For Christ’s sake, Mom, he just shit in the closet!” Red-faced, Candice marches into the kitchen, waving her cordless phone in the direction of the hall.

Karen grips the serving spoon beside the stove. “Don’t swear, please.”

“Jesus, Mom, are you deaf? Don’t you care that your precious son just shit in the closet?”

“I said don’t swear!” Karen lashes out without thought. The serving spoon makes a wet, slapping noise as it strikes Candice’s cheek. It leaves behind a smear of brown mushroom juice. Karen stares at the mark in horror — she doesn’t believe in spanking, has never struck her children in her life.

Candice stands still for all of three seconds, then bursts into tears. “I’m sick of living here! I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!” She hurls the phone to the floor. The plastic battery cover flies off and hits the fridge. “And I hate you!” She storms from the kitchen.

Karen waits — one, two, three, four, wham! The whole house shudders as Candice slams her bedroom door shut.

Swallowing, Karen places the serving spoon on the stove, then switches off the mushrooms and moves the cast-iron pan from the burner. She takes a slow, deep breath, turns around, picks the cordless phone off the floor, and retrieves the plastic backing. One of the little tabs that snaps it into place is missing. She puts both the plastic backing and the phone on the counter and leaves the kitchen.

As she walks down the hall and passes the bathroom, the microwave beeps. The butternut squash is ready.

Why? she wonders as the smell of stool grows stronger the closer she draws to the closet. My dear sweet Andy, why?

Karen leans on the closet door and stares at the pink cotton towel on the floor. Streaks of brown slick its fuzz like oil on cat’s fur. Moving methodically, she picks it up by one unsullied corner and carries it to the battered metal garbage can squatting at the back of the kitchen, adjacent to the teahouse.

Then she scrubs her hands with Pear’s Transparent Soap, goes into her bedroom, and masturbates.

When Karen masturbates, this is what she does.

She chooses a carrot, an organic one, from within a cello bag in her fridge. The carrot must not be too slim at the tapered end, or it will break off during its employment (she has learned this through experience, and there is nothing so sensuously dampening as poking around in one’s vagina in search of a lost carrot end).

Chosen carrot is then peeled and both ends are chopped off, being that the tapered end occasionally has wispy filaments attached to it and the blunt end is far too reminiscent of manure and farmers’ Wellington boots.

Thus amputated and denuded, the carrot is placed in the microwave for twenty-six seconds. This takes the refrigerator chill off the vegetable and endows it with a stimulating heat. Occasionally, the tapered end will sizzle at this point, sometimes steam. If in the correct mood, Karen likes to imagine the carrot is protesting, weeping like a virgin, and that she will ignore its feeble cries and thrust it into herself with a dominance that will silence it.

Into the bedroom Karen goes. She closes the drapes. She kicks off her sandals and socks and moves the full-length bedroom mirror (the same that has been in her possession since she was seven) in front of the bed. Then she lifts her cotton skirt up, pulls her panties down to her ankles, and half lies, half sits on the edge of the bed.

Her knees flop to either side, thighs spread. Exposed to the mirror, she slowly, soothingly, begins rubbing the warmed, peeled organic carrot over the fleshy pink bud that brings her such release, such frustration, and such despair. After a few languorous rubs, the carrot is inserted. Karen’s stomach muscles strain, far more so than they ever do while sweating through sit-ups in front of Susan Powter’s fitness videos.

Eyes fixed on the mirror image of the lodged carrot, her right hand comes into play. And mouth. Hand to mouth, to wet the fingers, to make them slippery. Hand to pink bud. Fingers moving fast, face the apoplectic red of an infant freshly squeezed from the womb. Such desperation written on her contorted face, such need. No, don’t look at the face — concentrate on the carrot, the sensations, the fingers.

Her fingers strum fast and hard against her clitoris, battering the tiny protuberance until it swells and hardens. When climax comes, her legs stiffen. She doesn’t cry out, not in pleasure. She chokes, a dry, despairing sound. Occasionally, if she’s in that frame of mind, she will laugh for the joy of having independently brought herself to this pinnacle of self-indulgence, laugh for the sheer ridiculousness of her situation. But the laugh is always brief.

The carrot is withdrawn, panties tossed into the laundry basket (it is night, after all, and she will not need them much longer), and cotton skirt pulled back into place. Socks on, feet jammed back into sandals. Carrot washed in the bathroom sink. (Aptly, it is always limp at this point, which satisfies her: she has conquered the carrot completely.)

On her way back to the kitchen, she gives the carrot to Yogurt, Andy’s albino guinea pig. Waste not, want not, being her motto.

Karen’s husband, Morris, knows nothing about his wife’s masturbation, though this evening would have presented him with a prime opportunity to Learn a Thing or Two about his wife, for he lies upon the living-room sofa a mere room away, his evening newspaper scattered about him.

As usual he’s preoccupied with feet. In his mind he is back at the office, healing ram’s horn nails, diagnosing bunions, treating plantar’s warts. He wears the soft, rapt look of an antique dealer discovering a Chippendale in a farmer’s barn.

The same expression appears on his face while examining his patients’ appendages. It is noticed by everyone, men and women alike, but especially the women. The men — and there are few of these, Morris would be the first to admit — receive his attentions as they receive their morning coffee: it is a right due unto them for the money they have paid. No more, no less.

But the women, they each believe that no one else receives such tender touches, such reverence, from Morris. They need to believe this, need to believe that their podiatrist recognizes their fragility, their individuality, through the soles of their feet. His soft, dry, manicured hands sliding gently over the cracked calluses on their heels declare: You, my patient, are a creature like no other, and I treat you accordingly.

Now the smell of poop swirls towards his nostrils, mingling with that of fried mushrooms and baked butternut squash. Frowning, he sits up. “Karen? What’s that smell?”

Karen pauses on her way down the hall and sticks her head into the living room. “The cat had an accident in the closet. I’ve cleaned it up.”

“The cat?”

“Dilly.”

Alarm flickers across Morris’s cheeks, and he sits up straighter. “Good grief, you can’t let it into the teahouse anymore if it’s going to do that sort of thing.”

“I’m sure this was a onetime accident —”

“We can’t take any chances, though, can we? Imagine if it starts defecating all over the sculptures!”

“That won’t happen. Cats need something soft —”

“No, Karen, I’m sorry. The cat can’t go into the teahouse again. You understand, don’t you?”

Karen swallows, fingers twining around her skirt. Of course she understands. The shrine cannot be desecrated. She nods once, tersely, and returns to the kitchen. Deliberately, she burns the tofu burgers.

The teahouse: a shrine settled back among towering hemlocks and stately cedars. It exists because of Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge.

Only a quick drive from the bowels of downtown Vancouver, the bridge draws an endless number of tourists each year. Made of rattling wood, it is suspended by enormous wire cables draped across a fern-dripping gorge some 150 feet deep. Marilyn Monroe once crossed its creaky planks.

The North Shore, separated from downtown Vancouver by Burrard Inlet, boasts two such suspension bridges. One, Capilano Suspension Bridge, charges an exorbitant entry fee and has plastic tepees, carved Indians, and garish totem poles liberally decorating its grounds. Tour buses constantly clog its environs. The other one, Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge, is buried amid suburbia and forest, is free to walk across, and has headstones for decoration instead of covered wagons. The headstones commemorate those who have died in the park. There are many.

In 1985 Morris and Karen purchased a tiny house at the very end of Peters Road in North Vancouver. (Actually, Morris purchased it. Being eighteen and pregnant, Karen didn’t have a great deal of purchasing power.) The broadside of the small, neglected rancher bared its peeling clapboards to the large gravel parking lot of Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge. Together Morris and Karen sanded the clapboards and painted them powder blue. Following her husband’s instructions, Karen meticulously painted an enormous foot upon the broadside of the house.

“Welcome to the Footstop Café,” she calligraphied across the ankle. “Tea, scones, fresh cream, and soothing foot massages inside.”

“It should read teahouse, not café,” Morris said, chewing on his knuckles in agitation. “Teahouse.”

“I didn’t have room.”

“But this has to be a teahouse, Karen, not a café. A place of leisure and beauty, of learning and comfort. Not a greasy spoon.”

“It will be a teahouse. I promise.”

They planted fuchsias, petunias, snapdragons, and delphiniums on either side of the river-rock path that wended its way to the refurbished potting shed at the back of their house. Above the shed’s crooked red door they hung a foot-shaped sign that declared: “Welcome to The Footstop.” (Karen, yet again, ran out of room, and rather than offend her husband by inscribing “Café” upon the board, she decided to punctuate after “Footstop.”) Quaint flower-print curtains hung in the windows, and red-and-white-checkered tablecloths beamed up from Formica tables. Vases of flowers and walls of sunny yellow invited tourists to enter. Mozart played in the background.

Within five years of opening, the Footstop became such a success that Morris and Karen expanded. The potting shed grew as large as their rancher. Shrouded by trees and shadow, exposed only to the gravel parking lot, the addition to the tiny house brought nary a peep from the local building inspectors. The neighbours watched and, bemused, attended the open-house party where Morris, Karen, and baby Candice personally massaged each and every foot present.

Although Morris was inclined to believe that the success of the Footstop was entirely due to its lofty merchandise, it was instead because most tourists, after the initial gasping at the bridge and canyon, were disappointed that the park was, indeed, little more than a park. They eagerly waddled to the Footstop in search of something to do.

No one left without buying at least one foot.

Control in a life where control is cloud-like, nebulous, blowing like cotton-tree fuzz and catching in snags of wood and piles of clay-clammy pebbles — that is why Karen masturbates. It isn’t that cleaning up her son’s defecation sparked some fetish deep within her, and it isn’t in defiance of the ugliness of his deed; it is a cry, a lifeline, a buoy thrown out from a pitching boat. To masturbate is to connect with herself, with all that she holds secret and longs for. It is mining, core-tapping, plunging into treasure-filled depths. She masturbates to remind herself that she exists. That in something she still has control.

They eat dinner in silence, Candice skewering each marrowfat pea on her plate with angry precision. Andy eats methodically, head lowered, eyes blurred behind smudged glasses. Oblivious to the tensions around the table, Morris savours each forkful of his food, contemplatively rolling it around his mouth before swallowing. Karen watches each of them closely, seeking evidence that she knows these people.

After dinner, Morris retires back to his sofa and Candice to her room. Andy — who never needs to be reminded when it’s his evening for dish duty — languidly fills the sink with steaming water.

“It’s okay,” Karen says, tousling his orange hair with one hand as she squirts blue liquid soap into the sink. “Your father thinks it was Dilly.”

“So?” He whirls on her, his face screwed up in an anger so intense that Karen steps back. “Does that mean I should thank you?” He starts weeping, his neck flushing crimson, his cheeks billowing in and out like the gills of a puffer fish. “What am I supposed to do, anyway, with that stupid microwave in the bathroom?”

“Andy —”

“She thinks I’m a moron! She hates me!” He throws himself against Karen’s bosom and blows small bubbles of mucus against her sweater. “She’ll never speak to me again!”

“Oh, Andy, that’s not true,” Karen murmurs, rocking him slightly. “She loves you. You’re her brother.”

“Big deal.”

“I’ll move the microwave somewhere else. The furnace room.”

“So? How will that fix anything?”

“I’ll talk to her —”

“No!” He pulls away and stares up at her in alarm. “You always make things way worse!”

Inwardly, Karen shrivels. She forces her face blank. “All right,” she says mechanically. “I won’t say anything.”

“Promise?”

“Really, Andy ...”

“No, Mom, you’ve got to promise! Promise me you won’t say anything!” His pale fingers embed themselves in her forearms.

“But —”

“Mom!”

“All right. I won’t talk to her. Promise.”

Andy shudders in relief and releases her. “Good.”

Karen washes the dishes in a daze. Beside her, Andy carefully polishes each one dry.

“I think I’ll go for a walk,” she whispers as she places the last dish in the cupboard.

“You okay, Mom?”

“What?” A bright, brittle smile creases her face. “Certainly. Go join your father now. I’ll be back in a bit.”