Читать книгу The Footstop Cafe - Paulette Crosse - Страница 9

With some difficulty, Karen lowers herself into her steaming bathtub. Her left foot, encased in plaster, a plastic Safeway bag, and a pink towel, is balanced precariously on a metal crutch that stretches like a bridge from one side of the tub to the other. Curls of plastic advertisements for Pillsbury Dough peel from the crutch.

At eleven o’clock the previous night, Karen and Morris discovered that the hospital no longer sent crutches home with their disabled outpatients. A nurse sternly informed them that far too many crutches left the emergency ward, never again to return. In the wake of all the budget cutbacks, the hospital saw fit to revoke the privilege of sending crutches home with the lame. Instead, a local supermarket rented Karen a pair of crutches for a nominal fee, thus the Pillsbury Dough advertisements plastered on its surface.

Karen is now indulging in a hot bath because Morris magnanimously told her to take the day off from the teahouse. He wrote a note and stuck it in the window: “Closed for today due to affliction. Will reopen tomorrow. Sorry for any inconvenience.” From the sound of the rain battering the roof, Karen doubts that the suspension bridge, and therefore the Footstop, will receive any customers today.

Arms trembling slightly from bearing the brunt of her weight, she levers herself into the foamy water, groaning as her skin turns a delicious scalded red. From the bathroom floor Dilly meows.

“Just wait,” Karen murmurs, leaning back and closing her eyes. “It’s too hot for you. Wait.”

She lets her thoughts drift as tiny bubbles pop and crackle around her, releasing apple-scented steam. She thinks back to the previous night’s occurrence, to the indignity of backing out of the bush in front of a stranger with her buttocks exposed. Blushing, she begins to shampoo her hair.

By the time Karen finishes, the water has cooled enough for Dilly to climb in. The cat stretches across her stomach, purring as she kneads her breasts and butts her chin. Bubbles adhere to the cat’s fur like foam to a sandy beach.

Seven years ago Karen found four kittens stuffed inside a plastic ice-cream bucket on the doorstep of the Footstop. Two of the kittens were dead, not from lack of oxygen (someone had thoughtfully made holes in the lid of the ice-cream bucket) but from lack of blood: fleas swarmed over them. Karen immediately took control of one kitten and Candice the other.

Upon the advice of a local veterinarian, they purchased a pair of flea combs and spent the next few hours combing the kittens and drowning the captured fleas in a cup of bleach. (Andy, only two, tried to drink it.) Regardless of their efforts, the kittens weakened. The fleas crawled down their ears, up their nostrils, and into their half-closed eyes, hiding from the combs with a canniness that bordered on higher intelligence.

“They need to be flea-bathed,” Karen muttered, angrily squashing a flea between her thumbnail and the kitchen counter. It made a satisfying pop.

Candice frowned. “But the vet said we can’t do that. The kittens are too young. The chemicals will kill them.”

“Chemicals or fleas — either way they’re going to die. Watch your brother. I’m going to the pet store.”

Karen defied the veterinarian’s instructions and bathed her languid, flea-infested kitten in chemical shampoo; Candice staunchly continued with the flea comb. By nightfall Karen’s kitten was tentatively sucking on a doll’s bottle of milk; Candice’s kitten was buried in the backyard.

Since then Dilly insists on sharing the bath with whomever is currently in it.

The bathwater is beginning to cool. Karen lifts a sopping Dilly from her stomach and drops the cat onto the floor, where she promptly shakes like a dog and proceeds to groom. After a great struggle, Karen extracts herself from the bathtub. She scrubs her rosy, rounded flesh with a towel (does the towel smell faintly of Andy poop, or is that her imagination?), sits on the toilet, and works her panties over the bulbous cast on her left foot. It isn’t until the black cotton slides over the birthmarks on her inner thighs that she remembers the white hart by the creek.

Immediately, she freezes. Her birthmarks begin to buzz, much as an elbow tingles if the funny bone is walloped.

Ah, yes, those birthmarks. Mei-ling (aka Petra) Woodruff had plenty to say about them during Karen’s childhood: “Karma. They are there because of karma. All Buddhists know that a person’s physical features are influenced by karma.”

And this: “Jesus was very open-minded, girl, very understanding of those who were confused about their sexuality. A prostitute was his closest friend — sex thrives on friendship.”

And this: “The Hevajra Tantra says great knowledge abides in the body, though it is not born of the body. Do you know what this means? This means that your body is a telephone between the human and the divine.”

Ah, yes, Mei-ling (aka Petra) Woodruff had a great deal to say about Karen’s birthmarks. None of it comprehensible.

Karen dresses in a daze, eats her scrambled eggs and toast in a daze, finishes mending the hole in Candice’s favourite plaid shirt in a daze, and hobbles into the teahouse in a daze. Yet she isn’t so dazed as to forget Morris’s edict to keep Dilly out. That she consciously chooses to ignore.

A door in the kitchen leads directly into Karen’s workshop nestled at the back of the teahouse. A heavy brocade curtain separates the workshop from the teahouse proper.

Glue, nails, chalk, papier mâché, sculpting burrs, and glitter spill from shelves; scissors, clay, oil paints, sanding belts, wood shavings, exacto knives, and Magic Markers overflow from stacked boxes. Upon a large, rough-hewn workbench lie beads, leather strips, pencils, hammers, chisels, turpentine, shrink-wrap plastic, and stacks of coloured paper. The room looks like a collision between a stationery store and a hardware depot and smells like the well-oiled wood of an old church.

In a corner of this room cowers a worn wicker basket lined with a hairy wool blanket. With a yawn Dilly walks into this basket, curls up, and proceeds to sleep. Karen flicks on a wire heater, leans her crutches against the workbench, and sinks onto a paint-flecked stool.

Almost twenty minutes go by as she sits and stares blankly at the heater’s red coils.

“I can’t do it,” she finally says aloud. “I can’t follow my Destiny. It will ruin the family. Candice will die of shame.”

Not true, a voice murmurs in her mind. Certainly, Candice may never speak to you again, may endure endless torment at school, and may even leave home, but she won’t actually die. Not unless, in running away, she ends up a heroin addict.

“What about Morris?” Karen argues. “It will destroy him. Who will run the teahouse? I owe him more than that.”

Why? What exactly has he done for you, other than bless you with an old one-level house, a foot-fetish fair, and two children? And besides, he’s been spending an awful lot of time at the office lately. And that honey-voiced, stout ’n single receptionist of his is always with him, isn’t she?

“But Andy will never understand! He’ll cry, he’ll beg me not to do it, it will affect his emotional stability.”

More so than the Footstop already affects it?

“I can’t do it, okay? I can’t.” Karen grabs the pillowy portion of her inner thighs and squeezes hard, trying to squelch the tingling in her birthmarks and the voice in her head. “I imagined it. I didn’t see the hart. It never existed! Now stop pestering me!”

Pinched into submission, her birthmarks quit prickling. But her long-denied aspirations continue to throb through her veins, newly awakened by the non-appearance of the white hart.

Someone else is likewise unable to concentrate on the task before him as the image of the white hart pops into his mind. But unlike Karen, Moey Thorpe doesn’t have the luxury of privacy when the memory of the fantastical beast returns to him. Instead, he stands before the serious, expectant eyes of twenty-four kickboxing students.

He gazes blankly at the far wall where mirrors reflect an orderly row of white uniforms: it is this sea of poised white that reminds him of the stag.

Jesus, he forgot all about it, what with helping the lady find her cat and all. How could he forget such a thing? (The image of smooth, pearly buttocks glinting up at him from beneath a halo of salmonberry leaves rises briefly in his mind.)

He shifts uncomfortably, then sends the students sprinting around the gym. But he can’t rid his mind of the stag. While teaching roundhouse kicks, he thinks about the beast. While demonstrating spinning back kicks, he thinks about Karen. While correcting a student’s epon kumite, he thinks about belly dancing. The thick, wiry hairs on the nape of his neck refuse to lie flat.

So it comes to pass that after finishing his classes, Moey Thorpe finds himself climbing into his Plymouth and heading towards Lynn Canyon, his skin prickling with presentiment. As he drives his exhaust-spouting car up Lynn Valley Road, the rain is so thick and fast from clouds so white that it seems as if heaven is hurling fat globs of cream onto his windshield. His wipers don’t so much improve visibility as draw attention to the lack of it.

Heart thudding hard against his chest, he pulls into the Lynn Canyon gravel parking lot and kills the ignition. His tongue turns into sand as he stares at the alabaster foot painted on the side of the house in front of him. His fingers turn ashen around the steering wheel. The prickly feeling of presentiment increases.

And, for the first time in his life, Moey Thorpe feels truly afraid.

He is scared of making a mistake and looking foolish. He is scared of trying to attain something that really matters to him because he is scared that he won’t be able to attain it. If he doesn’t voice his hopes, if he never tries to achieve what his heart truly wants, then at least the possibility that he can succeed if only he tries still exists. But once he tries and fails, then that possibility disappears; he will be faced with the stark reality that his dream is beyond him.

Moey has seen such fear grip kickboxing students prior to competitions. For the first time ever he truly understands their lock-jawed panic, their icy shivers, their loose bladders. “Your fear is only an imagined fear,” Master Zahbar always roars at Moey. “It’s a negative response that reinforces vulnerability and incompetence. Think positive! Don’t permit yourself to be afraid. Be victorious!”

For the past three years Moey has repeated those words to his terrified students. And yet now he understands there is nothing imagined about certain terrors, such as the terror that now seizes him as he looks at the Footstop. Trying to think positive thoughts while in the clutches of such a fear is like trying to tell a diabetic to produce enough insulin through sheer willpower. And trying to ignore his fear is like trying to ignore the impending 500-foot drop of a gondola that has lost its brakes.

Breathe, Moey instructs himself. Breathe.

This, at least, seems good advice. His watering, fixed eyes and swimming brain certainly agree — breathing is good.

He sucks in another lungful of air.

For a full five minutes Moey relishes the triumph of successfully breathing. Then, before his startled mind can react, his body launches itself out of the Plymouth and into the driving rain. His legs sprint along the rock path to the Footstop as his back obligingly ducks beneath dripping Douglas fir branches. His enormous hands grasp the quaint brass knob of the café and rattle the door. So paralyzed is his mind that he doesn’t notice the sign taped in the window, let alone the words inscribed on it. When the knob refuses to turn in his hands, his fingers ball into mallets and pound the door in a frenzy.

A light goes on in the café. A pale hand pulls a lacy drape to one side. A shock of frizzy red hair pops into view.

Only when Karen opens the door do Moey’s hands stop their frantic pummelling.

“You teach karate,” she says, blinking at his rain-splattered uniform. She is leaning on a pair of crutches.

“Kickboxing,” he gasps.

“Oh.” She shuffles back a pace or two, the rubber ends of her crutches squeaking on the hardwood floor. “Come in.”

Shivering, he does so and shuts the door behind himself.

“I didn’t expect to see you so soon. Not that it matters,” she adds hastily. “I’m grateful for your help last night.”

“No problem,” he says through chattering teeth.

“Would ... would you like a cup of tea? Officially, we’re closed, so I didn’t do any baking. Because of my foot, you see. But I can make you some tea...”

He wants to say no, to blurt out his purpose before his terror-spiked mind can resume control of his body.

“Tea would be great,” he says instead.

“I’ll put the kettle on.” She crutch-walks to the back of the café and ducks behind a heavy curtain. A moment later Moey hears the soft snick of a door closing.

The urge to flee overwhelms him. Karen doesn’t know where he lives, probably can’t even remember his name; if he leaves now, she’ll be none the wiser to his purpose and he can continue his safe existence as a kickboxing instructor without having threatened the fragility of his dream.

He turns to the door behind him. He imagines the Hand of Fate upon his shoulder, or more aptly, the breath of the white stag upon his neck. With a shiver he twists away from the door. And, for the first time, he becomes aware of his surroundings.

The café looks like a museum currently celebrating a Mexican festival. A flock of brightly coloured piSñatas dangles above a French Provincial trestle table. At either end of the table stands a pair of empty cake stands, book-ending an antique cash register, a pair of scissors, a roll of tape, and two rolls of wrapping paper.

Moey slowly surveys the café. A half-dozen pairs of wingback chairs are strategically placed throughout the room. Between each pair of chairs stands an antique coffee table, and beneath each coffee table rest two plastic Scholl’s Footbath Massagers. Their electric cords disappear into slits cut into the thick Persian rug covering the hardwood floor.

Here and there sculptures of feet sit on white pedestals. Antique cabinets line the walls. Trancelike, Moey wanders towards the first cabinet. On its mahogany shelves stand rows of beaded moccasins, Dutch clogs, and woollen slippers. The next cabinet contains foot-shaped soap dishes, clay pots of foot balm and soaking salts, pumice stones, foot-shaped towels, and pearl-handled nail clippers.

On the shelves of an adjacent cupboard, scrolled charts of acupuncture, reflexology, and horoscopes-for-the-foot vie for space with handmade address books, each the shape of a foot and bearing the title Footnotes on its cover.

Flower vases in the shape of feet, foot-shaped oven mitts, stationery bearing winged feet, DVDs entitled Foot Care & You, earrings and necklaces of feet, foot pillows, foot stools, key chains, address labels, plant pots, picture frames ... everywhere Moey looks, he sees feet. Even the piñatas, he belatedly realizes, are bright papier mâché feet.

He picks up what looks like a small jam jar, its lid covered by a square of red gingham tied at the mouth with a big red bow. Aloud he reads the words: “Fresh Homemade Foot Butter.” He looks at the brown-speckled stuff in the jar, and his fingers tingle with revulsion.

“Cinnamon spread,” Karen says behind him.

Moey almost drops the jar as he spins around.

“Cinnamon spread,” Karen repeats, hobbling into the room. “It’s very good. Made with fresh butter, cinnamon, and brown sugar. Delicious on hot toast or scones. It’s one of our best sellers.”

He looks down at the jar in his hand. “Foot butter,” he repeats stupidly.

“I had to call it that, otherwise Morris wouldn’t let it in the shop.”

“Morris?”

“My husband.” She flushes. “I convinced him that as part of a balanced diet, essential oils and fatty acids maintain the health of the foot. In the summer I sell an average of twenty jars a day.”

“Ah.” He thinks for a moment. “How much?”

“Seven-fifty a jar. Costs me less than half that to make it.”

“Good profit.”

“Yes.” She shifts her weight on her crutches. “Uh, the tea is ready, but I can’t carry it in. Could you?”

“What? Sure. Of course.” He replaces the jar of foot butter on the shelf and, after giving himself a mental shake much as a dog physically does upon rousing from a slumber, he ducks after her behind the heavy curtain.

Dazed, he follows her through a small workshop (she must make everything, a small part of his mind computes), through a door, and into a small sun-yellow kitchen. On the yellow Formica table sits a pot of tea in a foot-shaped tea cozy beside a pot of sugar and a carton of cream.

“We could sit in here if you prefer ...”

“No,” he replies, so quickly and forcefully that her hazel eyes widen.

“I mean, if it’s okay with you,” he says, trying to smile reassuringly, “I’d like to go back to the café.”

She nods uncertainly. “Of course.”

He picks up the teapot, sugar, and cream and together they return to the teahouse. A few minutes of strained silence later, Moey finds himself slouched in one of the wingback chairs sipping a cup of Earl Grey. Karen sits beside him, her broken foot propped on a coffee table. They both resolutely study the piñatas dangling from the ceiling.

When the silence reaches the snapping point, Moey clears his throat. It is time to Listen to Fate. Karen looks at him expectantly.

“You, uh, you get many customers?” he asks. Even to himself, he sounds as if he’s been sucking on helium.

“Lots in the summer. Tourist season, you see. Some days there’s barely enough room to stand in here.”

“Oh.” He clears his throat again, trying to lower his tone an octave or seven. His vision jumps erratically, his heart pounds hard against his throat. “And the rest of the time?”

“When a tour bus pulls in, I’m swamped. And every holiday — Easter, Valentine’s Day, whatever — it gets busy with people showing their relatives around.”

“I see.”

Silence again. Moey’s thoughts churn. His palms feel as slick as wet lasagna noodles. He gulps down a swallow of tea and scalds the back of his throat.

“Haugh ...” he begins, then coughs his throat clear and tries again. “How are you going to manage with your foot like that if you have to carry things from the kitchen and back?”

“Morris is going to buy a hot plate today to set up in here. And he’s going to help me do the baking each night.”

“Ah.” He sips his tea again. Another long, awkward silence descends. Karen studies the piñatas once more.

Do it, Moey tells himself fiercely. Ask her.

I can’t, a hitherto unknown portion of his person whines.

Don’t be a wimp, he answers, and takes a deep, quavering breath. Puts down his cup. Faces her. “Karen?”

She turns to him. “Yes?”

“I...I would like...” He wipes his sweaty palms on the knees of his kickboxing uniform, tries again. “I was wondering...”

“Yes?”

“I would like...”

She leans forward. “Yes?”

“I’d like to work here,” he blurts. “As a belly dancer.”

Magic — what exactly is it? Most people don’t recognize it when they see it, but Karen has always known about its existence, has been able to correctly identify it. She’s taught her children to recognize it, too.

“Look, Candice, magic! We push this silver thing, and voilà, warm water comes out. Clean, warm water to wash a baby’s hands in. Magic!”

And: “Shall we gaze into the crystal ball and see what pictures we can find? Press the magic button, Andy. There! Look, there’s Big Bird. You made Big Bird appear in the big glass window! How did you do that, you clever boy? And we can hear him, too!”

And: “With a flick of the magic wand I shall dispel darkness from this room. Let’s count together — one, two, three...”

Water faucets, television remotes, light switches — for Karen they represent magic. It exists all around her: telephones, automobiles, ice cubes tinkling in a glass of cold tea. Rather than explain these phenomena to her children in the technical language of the witches and wizards who have created them (a mathematical language she equates with spells), she defines them as magic.

A plumber in oil-slicked coveralls is a warlock who threads brass and copper tubes together and commands water to appear at her house whenever she desires. A gas fitter is a sorcerer who combines invisible gas, complex equations, and wire circuits to provide her with warmth on a frosty night. The midwife who assisted at the births of Candice and Andy is an earth goddess; the woman who taught them swimming lessons a water sprite; the Lynn Canyon forest ranger a sylvan deity. Godkins, fays, spellmasters, and shamans — this is how Karen sees car mechanics, nurses, teachers, and surgeons.

For as long as she has lived in her own house, she has left thumb-size portions of food on her kitchen windowsill. Not to please ethereal spirits, and certainly not to ward off werefolk or devilings; these offerings are instead a tangible, visual recognition of the abundance of her universe, of the constant miracles in her life.

Morris has grown so accustomed to this ritual that he reminds her to place a wee saucer of food on the sill if she forgets to do so; its absence makes him uncomfortable, like viewing a crooked picture on a wall. Candice, until she turned fifteen, would occasionally place a pretty feather, a handful of forget-me-nots, or an unusual stone upon that sill. (Now she has matured beyond such superstitions and chooses to ignore the saucer’s existence. She doesn’t dare deride it, though, beyond rolling her eyes.) Andy—straight A, encyclopedia-loving Andy — regards the saucer on the sill as something sound, something necessary. He justifies this feeling by telling himself that even the astronauts and technicians at NASA respect certain superstitions, especially after the flight of Apollo 13.

But the white hart is a magic too unusual for Karen; it’s an oddity far beyond the realm of her world. Despite the strangeness of her birthmarks, despite the way she views electricity and automation, despite her eclectic religious upbringing, she cannot accept the appearance of the white hart. It has to be a hallucination; things like that don’t happen in the real world. It isn’t magic; it’s ... imaginary.

Yet listening to Moey Thorpe talk about the connection he sees between belly dancing at the Footstop and the appearance of the white hart, she can’t deny that the hart appeared. Here this man sits before her admitting that he saw her hallucination. Ergo, it cannot have been a hallucination. That majestic white beast did materialize on the rocky banks of Lynn Canyon.

Ice feathers brush against Karen’s skin. Her life, she feels, will never be the same again.