Show Them a Good Time Read online

  For my grandmother

  There was, finally, only so much one woman on the vast and wicked stage could do.

  From ‘Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens’

  by Lorrie Moore

  Contents

  Show Them a Good Time

  Sweet Talk

  Hump

  Abortion, a Love Story

  Track

  Parrot

  You’re Going to Forget Me Before I Forget You

  Not the End Yet

  Acknowledgements

  Note on the Author

  Show Them a Good Time

  The schemes were for people with plenty of time, or people not totally unfamiliar with being treated like shit. I was intimate with both situations. Management interviewed me – bizarre questions through an inch of plexiglass: How long, in hours, have you been unemployed? Did you misspend your youth throwing stones at passing cars?

  ‘This can be a tangential process,’ Management explained and I said sorry.

  ‘Only peasants apologise,’ Management stated and returned to her obscure markings.

  The interview was an all-nighter, designed to break my spirit and ensure I pledged organisation and responsibility for the rest of my days. I emerged from it, not completely sure of anything except my own name and my age, which I knew was somewhere in my late twenties. In the morning, I was taken to the bathroom to be measured for a uniform. The toilet stall had the dark, depthless feel of a place where a body may have lain undiscovered for days. The shirt gave me breasts, the regulation boots gave me legs. All those parts I had worked so hard to forget were now reunited under surprising polyester circumstances. When I was dressed, Management offered me a manic thumbs-up. Management was round, almost perfectly so, and given to spontaneous bursts of laughter. She looked at me, at my white and empty face, and asked, ‘Isn’t it a great thing to be able to give yourself a giggle?’ I saw in that gesture her former life as a farmhand, the crazy ease with which she sent animals off to be slaughtered.

  Management explained the procedure again. Our function was to be near the till, maintain the appearance of the garage and, most importantly, believe. Management left the room as I screened the demonstration video. In it three participants, with the sexless good looks of catalogue models, spoke of the joy of being back at work. Whenever they did something spontaneous, or something considered outside their remit, a large X popped up on screen. As I watched I felt giddy and ashamed, as if I were witnessing a particular type of vicious pornography.

  Management suggested if I ever felt like I didn’t believe, I should go for a short, furious walk – maybe up and down the motorway path – and stay away from my colleagues, as my attitudes and sulky face could be hazardous. She said I seemed like a nice person and if we had customers they would probably like me. I had a personality that was best suited to short interactions.

  ‘Should I get a business card made?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s something to consider,’ Management said and she repeated her manic thumbs-up.

  *

  Before the garage, my hometown was famous amongst people with car-sickness. It was here they stood retching and spewing before moving on somewhere better. When I came back from the city I thought we both might have changed in bright and glamorous ways, but we hadn’t. We were both long acquainted with disappointment and the joys of being used.

  I’d been home two months and the house felt strangely empty to me, as if all our furniture had been sold. Somehow, a hundred tiny, unspeakable events had happened in my absence. I was reunited with my mother: two flirts; two women who might find themselves in abusive relationships and not even notice; two true suckers – back together.

  Every dinnertime, she questioned why I ate the way I did, why I stuck my fingers in so many jars and rooted around. Did I eat vegetables at all? Did they serve peas in many restaurants in that city? I said I didn’t know, it wasn’t something I thought much about, and she pointed her fork at me, that absurd vegetable speared on it, as if we shared a private joke.

  ‘Were there boys there? Did you have a boyfriend?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Was he nice?’

  ‘Not really. He was irritating, you know. He said things like: I will have a small espresso. Stuff about coffee that people already just know. He wasn’t funny at all. And he kind of hit me, sometimes, in my sleep. Though I suppose I was just pretending to be asleep so it wasn’t totally honest of me either.’

  ‘It’s important for a man to have a sense of humour.’ A confiding, motherly smile. Her optimism was of the terrifying, impenetrable variety. It could burn through entire periods of history.

  My parents had a fierce bond I admired. They had refined the habits of the long-married – saying nothing and then saying everything twice. They disregarded me, but in a practical way: the way you might ignore the weakling in a bomb shelter. Their days had their own sedate, private rhythm, punctuated by the sharp slam of the dishwasher. There was a strange, daily pattern: amble down the street; go to the supermarket; wave at a slight acquaintance; glance at the same patch of sky; come back home. They had seen boredom, stared it straight down, and survived. And still, they were less drained, less aged than I was. My father, who had always worn black, suddenly had the energy and enthusiasm for colours, and sported a pink shirt under a red golf jumper. My mother encouraged me to support his developing style. They had new friends, couples they had allegedly met in the supermarket. When these new people called on the telephone, I answered and said, ‘Who is this?’ and they said, ‘No. Who is this?’ like they might have stumbled across a burglary scene, a dramatic horror show that would strengthen their ties to my parents.

  I lay on my lumpy bed and dreamt up inventive ways of leaving my own body. I looked down at it – slack, star-shaped – and closed my eyes, re-opened them. Still there. It didn’t seem to be going away. I was restless. I made many visits to the rain barrel in the yard. I felt the rain barrel was a measure of time – all the rain collected in my two-year absence. My mother sensed the world might run out of water and this cracked, aluminium barrel was our security, our secret plan. I wanted to say, ‘It’s the twenty-first century,’ but it sounded self-important and foreign in our hostile little house.

  I had no interest in redemption. I didn’t believe in it – it was for crackpots, squares – but something about that rain barrel made me want to be reborn. I could see myself sailing through the murk, the dirty leaves framing my face, the blueness of the barrel bringing out my inner Virgin Mary.

  It was necessary for me to get out of the house.

  *

  Kevin arrived on the job exactly one week after me but immediately possessed an understanding of the garage that I lacked. He grasped its quiet romance, its rusty appeal. He knew the order we were meant to do our activities in – it was innate. I might put the mop in the bucket, or I might wring out the mop, and he would say, ‘We are not supposed to do that part yet,’ and he would be right. He worried about my non-linear mind but I felt we worked smoothly, as a perfect, synchronised team.

  I liked him far more than was strictly encouraged. I knew Management wanted us to have a more difficult relationship, with maybe a frisson of grim sexual tension, but it didn’t happen. From the beginning we shared a special atmosphere, a private connection that was pure and honest. For instance, he knew immediately whenever I was in the bathroom checking my face to see if I was still up-to-scratch, that all the waiting around hadn’t ruined me. He didn’t hate me for it. We both shared dim dreams of self-assertion, fantasies where we fought and emerged triumphant. We trusted each other. We made confessions. I was probably the sister he wanted to marry.

  As an older woman I felt it necessary
to encourage his self-esteem. I told him he looked incredible in his uniform, that it did wonders for his lanky nineteen-year-old frame. That was true. He looked like something out of a movie about bandits or serial killers on the run. Except he wasn’t a bandit or a serial killer. He was the gas station attendant who pointed helpfully and said, ‘They have gone that way!’ He enjoyed these comparisons, these tokens.

  He admitted – as we swept the garage forecourt, as we kept our eyes peeled for lucky pennies – that in his mind everything was television. There were ways of separating reality from fantasy but he did not know them. This could be a minor problem – like having trouble with directions, confusing north and south. Or it could be a major problem. Once, as we weeded the area around the rude, unnecessary fence, he told me he felt like a character being awkwardly written out of a sitcom.

  ‘You know when they are there but they don’t do or say anything? Like nobody has a clue what to do with them? Then they disappear and not a single person even bothers to mention it. That is happening to me, I think.’

  I was familiar with numb feelings of this type. In the garage I felt like anyone could step in and play me, if they were supplied with the correct expression of anguish, the sluggish reactions of someone baffled by their own poor choices. Often, in the evenings, when self-pity set in, talking seemed like a good idea. I would say ‘Talk to me, Kevin,’ and he would oblige. Kevin’s cinematic knowledge was both detailed and absurd. It left slim room in his brain for anything else, but I was grateful for it. It eased the spectral silence of the garage. I liked to make a big show of listening to him. I think it made him feel better, like he had done more than mark a time-card, weed the yard, wait.

  I wanted to impress him. It was just something in the air between us.

  ‘You know, I did some films, small parts, but I was on set.’

  Both of us, perfectly unmoving in the motorway breeze.

  ‘What was it like?’ he asked.

  ‘Like everything else after a while. Almost boring. Unpleasant. A lot of hanging around.’

  ‘Is that why you left?’

  ‘Yeah. And all the good roles started drying up.’

  ‘Oh, that happens.’ Kevin agreed earnestly. ‘I have heard of that happening to women.’

  Within a few weeks, I developed a nightly routine of walking briskly, guiltily, past the house where Kevin still lived with his father. I did not like the conclusions I came to. I could picture him inside, folded over his single bed, staring intently at a screen. Some mornings, I could imagine a faint trace of a television glow on his body.

  *

  It seemed embarrassing to go out looking for people I knew on my grubby, old streets, but I did it. I was past pride at this point anyway. I had put it behind me, no plans to see it again. My friends, what remained of them, were sweet girls – transparent, tame – but likeable. I assembled us together in a bar for one sorry night. Since we grew up with mothers who sat, dour, over their annual wine, we all drank like our fathers. It was our great generational decision.

  Every now and then, they asked, in an offhand way, what I had done during my time away. They were furious that this was it, that they were still here, that they would never know their fully realised selves. They were ready to turn on me in a moment. In a wishy-washy attempt at sensitivity, I said that I had to leave to discover things about myself. I withheld the fact that there wasn’t much to discover. Just ordinary surface and, beneath that, more desperate surface. I begged them to consider my new walk. It was a city walk. I did a demonstration. ‘This is it,’ I shouted as I traversed the length of their favourite and most tragic town bar.

  I stressed that in the city I had worked for a number of wealthy people. I had seen my share of spectacular views because looking at things was simple and easy. I had been brought to several penthouse apartments, all of them stubbornly identical, stared out the glass and exhaled in appreciation of beauty. I took my life apart for them with a cheerful contempt. It was amusing to me.

  I sensed a certain exasperation with my stories. My girls, my sweet girls, suddenly all had the searching, exhausted faces of the precariously employed. They sighed, slurped their drinks in an unladylike manner, repeated my name hundreds of times. While I had been pottering around, waiting for the right moment to introduce myself to the world, they had been attempting sombre business—trying to drink in moderation, paying motorway tolls.

  Of course, we had an abrupt, jittery conversation about money. My main problem was I had none and I was uneasy about it. In the city, getting cash was no problem. Anytime I opened my purse, ugly dollars just leapt out, excited to see me. I never stole anything. I was civilised in that way. I made a living. It was a confidence trick, it was leaning in at exactly the right moment, it was lying on your back very flat, very still. Poverty was only for women who didn’t know how to make slight social improvements.

  My friends said I should keep busy. They were all familiar with my patterns – my fondness for just fucking things away. They had a dull list of activities for me to do. At one point or another, it was put forward, it was implied that being a good-looking person was not a full-time occupation.

  ‘You should try it,’ I said. ‘Try it for a week and get back to me.’

  If there was a lull in the conversation, if there was a place I could edge in, I liked to talk about the city women on the trains, the women who never removed their sunglasses. They were incredible, these ladies! They sat deathly still, their eyes shielded from the dark, metal sun and tears moving down their cheeks, as if by chance, as if it had nothing to do with them.

  I exhibited much wisdom and maturity at these moments. I didn’t know where it came from. I was really very drunk.

  *

  Back at the garage, I was in charge of the interior. It contained three tin cans of indiscernible origin, one for each shelf; a feeling of forever melancholy; a postcard of a skyscraper; and a ghostly fridge floating in the middle of the floor. We talked about painting the walls. Painting, stock, customers – Kevin had the schemes and the mindset of a helpless idealist.

  As regards love and friendship, I sometimes got the sense it was a bit of a one-way street with Kevin. He was embarrassed by my cluelessness, and this brought out a red, rough rash on his cheeks and an unattractive side. I slowed him down, he said. I held him back from advancement in his field, he said. Blah-blah. He had a habit of pointing out my less-than-quick wits in the mornings. He pushed out his hands, rolled back his eyes and staggered in my direction. I was his zombie wife, his zombie sister. He added, in a polite and helpful way, that there are ways of mixing drinks so you don’t get formidable hangovers.

  ‘Don’t you want this place to be nice?’ he shouted at me.

  ‘I do.’ I certainly did.

  ‘They could have given us more than three cans of godforsaken soup.’

  ‘We don’t know if they are soup.’

  ‘What I mean is that they are not even putting in a bit of effort. In the training offices in town they have two working computers. What do we have?’

  I double-tapped the postcard.

  *

  There was possible room for promotion at the garage and that possibility nearly drove Kevin demented. I was done with trying. There was nothing to do and I didn’t feel like doing it. Just stay alive – that was my job. But Kevin was starving. Management knew just how to send him sky-high with outrageous promises and complete lack of follow-through. I said it was tacky to want to succeed at an imaginary job. I liked to be honest when I felt it was needed.

  Kevin said he wished I paid the same level of care and attention to everything in the garage as I paid to the plant, which I watered daily. The plant had been introduced in the summer as a new level of responsibility. It was the sole living thing in our stockless gloom. It was green, as plants usually are, but it had a touch of the exotic about it. It was in my interest to keep it out of the sun and away from the greedy birds.

  ‘Stop cuddling the plant,�
� Kevin often suggested.

  ‘I’m just holding it,’ I lied. I liked to have it in my hands, my fingers wrapped delicately around its black plastic casing. If pushed, I probably would have admitted to feeling some kind of kinship with the plant: there were hundreds of things we didn’t understand about the world and there wasn’t a person alive interested in telling us. Poor short and squat fellow.

  Kevin blamed my passivity for our slow days. I was a human scarecrow: a strange woman, wild-haired, with end-of-the-world eyes. What town could not turn away from that? Despite his calm exterior, he was capable of great crabbiness. He screamed questions at the blameless sky. He shook the petrol pumps as if he alone could outwit their emptiness. ‘We must be profitable,’ he said to nobody in particular.

  ‘Why do you move like that?’ he asked once.

  ‘It’s a walk I’m trying. It’s only recent. Do you like it?’

  ‘It honestly looks like there is something wrong with you.’

  ‘There is something wrong with me,’ I said. ‘When I was a child I grew at an advanced rate. My mother took me to the doctor to measure my arms and legs and they are actually two inches longer than they should be.’

  I had ways of silencing Kevin, ways of forcing him to stare rigidly into the distance as if being near me required great strength. He was a young person given to habitual fits of insanity and nervy implosions. I passed several weeks simply following his erratic, slippery shadow through the glass as he stalked the garage floor. He needed to get over his moods, sharpish. But I worried about Kevin. I did. I worried about people, desperately. It took up a huge amount of my daily hours. I didn’t ask to be that kind of woman but that’s just the way it worked out. The reason I ended up in the garage was clear: I was being punished in a sluggish, work-shy way by the universe and, honestly, it just made me laugh.

  ‘Why are you here, Kevin?’ I asked.

  ‘My dad said even a clown could do it.’

  *

  Occasionally, when people from out of town arrived in, rumpled and made frantic by too much time with their families, I became shy. There were probably interesting things to talk about, and ways to make the garage understood, but these people possessed an energy that was beyond me. I was skittish, I sweated unnatural amounts, I went unusual hues. The people moved at a ferocious speed. They had their grand intentions – conversation, sucky sweets, inexpensive petrol. I felt like a child trapped in a dumb plastic playhouse before these adults. Forever dutiful, I stuttered through my spiel: ‘Thank you for visiting us today. I’m sorry I can’t help you in any way as this establishment is a participant in the practice scheme designed to improve my skills and eventually lead to long-term employment. I know what you are thinking. But you would be wrong. Please take a complimentary mint.’