Larry’s Party. Carol Shields
almost a wink but not quite. Larry took a lick too, lightly. What he found was, eucalyptus tastes like horse medicine. And orchids don’t taste at all.
The sun was dipping low, and Larry was at the corner now, only half a block from Shoes Express. There was a great big rubbish receptacle standing there with a sign on it: Help Keep Our City Clean.
Larry unbuttoned the Harris tweed jacket, slipped it off fast and rolled it up in a sweet little ball. He stuffed it into the rubbish bin. He had to cram it in. He didn’t know if he was making a mistake or not, getting rid of that jacket, and he didn’t care. The jacket had to go.
And that’s when he really knew how cold the wind had got. It puffed his shirt-sleeves up like a couple of balloons, so that all of a sudden he had these huge brand-new muscles. Superman. Then it shifted around quick, and there he was with his shirt pressed flat against his arms and chest, puny and shrunk-up. The next minute he was inflated again. Then it all got sucked out. In and out, in and out. The windiest city in the country, in North America. It really was.
There were plenty of eyes on him, he could feel them boring through to his skin. In about two minutes some guy was going to pull that Harris tweed jacket out of the garbage and put it on. But by that time Larry would be around the corner, walking straight toward the next thing that was going to happen to him.
On a Wednesday in winter Larry walked over to a barber shop on Sargent Avenue and asked for a cut. “Just a regular cut,” he told the barber in an unsmiling, muttering tone of voice that was altogether unlike his usual manner. This was after a decade of having shoulder-length hair. He came out of the barber shop half an hour later with hair that was short around the ears and cropped close at the neck. Even the color seemed different – darker, denser, and without shadows, a color hard to put a name to.
He was shivery with cold for hours after his haircut, lonely for his hair, shrunken in his upper body, but he also felt stronger, braver. The new look made him want to bunch his fists like a prizefighter or cross his arms over his chest. He stood in front of the bathroom mirror working on new expressions, moving his mouth and eyebrows around, and trying to settle on something friendly.
Vivian and Marcie who work with Larry at Flowerfolks were both bursting with compliments. Vivian, the store manager, said the new cut made him look “younger and healthier,” and that started Larry wondering about how he’d been looking lately. He was only twenty-seven, which was not really old enough to show up on his face and body – or was it? His own opinion was that he was in pretty fair shape what with all the walking he did to and from work, plus the weekend hikes out at Birds Hill with his friend Bill Herschel. Marcie chimed in then about how the new hairstyle made him look more “with-it” “It’s 1978,” she said. “The sixties are over.”
What would she know, Larry thought – she was only a kid, seventeen, eighteen.
Larry, at twenty-seven, still lived with his parents, Dot and Stu, in their bungalow on Ella Street, but this was his last week; he was set to move out on Friday, at long last. Both Dot and Stu approved of their son’s haircut. Not that they jumped up and down and waved their arms. It was more a case of pretend nonchalance. “About bloody time,” Larry’s father said, and started in about the number of times he’d had to open the bathtub drain and clean out all the hair and muck. “Why, you’re handsome as can be,” Dot said, reaching out and testing the flat of her hand against the new springiness of Larry’s hair. It had been some time since she’d touched the top of her son’s head, years in fact, and now it was like she couldn’t stop herself. “If this is Dorrie’s influence,” she said, “then I say more power to her.”
On Friday afternoon – blizzards, high winds – Larry and his folks, and his girlfriend, Dorrie, and her family, went downtown to the Law Courts and got married. Dorrie (Dora) Marie Shaw and Laurence John Weller became the Wellers, husband and wife. And on Saturday morning the bridal couple boarded an Air Canada jet for London, England.
Most of the passengers on the plane were wearing jeans and sweaters, but Dorrie had chosen for her travel outfit a new rose-colored polyester blend suit. Now she regretted it, she told Larry. The suit’s straight skirt was restrictive so that she couldn’t relax and enjoy the trip, and she worried about the hard wrinkles that had formed across her lap. She should have invested in one of those folding travel irons she’d seen on sale. And she’d been a dope not to bring along some spot-lifter for the stain on her jacket lapel. By the time they got to England it would be permanently set. They put dye in airplane food, coloring the gravy dark brown so it looked richer and more appetizing. One of the salesmen at Manitoba Motors, where she works, told her about it. He also told her not to drink carbonated drinks on the flight because of gas. People pass a lot of gas on planes, he’d informed her. It had to do with air pressure. Also, one alcoholic drink on land equals three in the air. This is important information.
If only someone had filled her in about what to wear for a trip like this. She’d never been on a plane before – neither had Larry for that matter – but somehow she’d got the idea that air travel was dressy, especially if you were headed for an international destination, such as London, England. She was all for being casual, as she told Larry, she loved comfortable clothes, he knew that, but wouldn’t you think people would make an effort to look nice when they went somewhere important?
“Not everyone’s on their honeymoon,” he reminded her.
And that was the moment they heard a special announcement over the P.A. system, the pilot’s chuckly, good-sport voice coming at them from the cockpit. “Ladies and gents, we thought you’d like to know we’ve got a brand-new married couple aboard our flight today. How about a round of applause, everyone, for Mr. and Mrs. Larry Weller of Winnipeg, Manitoba.”
A stewardess was suddenly standing next to the bride and groom with a bottle of champagne and two glasses and also a corsage to pin on Dorrie’s shoulder, compliments of Air Canada.
“Ohh!’ Dorrie gave a little shriek. She glowed bright pink. She squirmed in her seat with pleasure. “This is fabulous. How did you know? Baby roses, I love baby roses, and, look, they match my outfit. It’s perfect.”
“I almost died of embarrassment,” Dorrie would tell Larry’s mother two weeks later, back home in Winnipeg. “I bet you anything I was blushing from head to foot. Everyone was just staring at the two of us, and then they started cheering and clapping and peering around their seats at us or standing up so they could see who we were and what we looked like. Was I ever glad I had my new pink outfit on. And Larry with his hair restyled. The newly-weds!”
The champagne sent Dorrie straight to sleep, her feet tucked up under her on the seat, and her head flopped over on Larry’s shoulder. The sweet perfume of the roses, which were already darkening, got stirred in with the drone of voices and the dimmed cabin lights and the steady, sleepy vibrations of the plane as it nosed through the night sky.
A little drunk, stranded between the old day and the new, between one continent and another, Larry felt the proprietorial pleasure of having a hushed and satisfied companion by his side. He and Dorrie had boarded the plane under a weight of anticlimax, worn out after the wedding and the wedding lunch at the Delta and from moving his things over to Dorrie’s apartment. And they were hollowed out too – that’s how it felt – after a long, ecstatic night of sex, then the alarm clock going off at five-thirty, the last-minute packing to do, and Larry’s folks arriving, too early, to drive them out to the airport. It was a lot to absorb. But now this unexpected tribute had come to them, to himself and to his wife, Dorrie. A wife, a wife. He breathed the word into the rubbery patterned upholstery of the seat ahead of him – wife.
A daze of contentment fell over him, numbing and fateful, and he shook his head violently to clear his senses – but in the excitement of the last few hours he