into you but you don’t notice because you’re in a trancelike state. He forgot, suddenly, how Dorrie had this too-little face with too much hair around it and how he always used to get turned on by girls with bigger faces and just average hair size.
He looked at his watch, worried. He knew she’d still be standing there, though, next to the cash with her arms full of shoes and she’d be pissed off for about two seconds and then she’d get an eyeful of Larry’s jacket and before you knew it she’d be rubbing her hands up and down the cloth and fingering the buttons.
The problem, though, was tomorrow. Larry and his new jacket weren’t going to make it tomorrow. He could go to work in this jacket, but no way could he go back to the Capri at five o’clock. They’d grab him the minute he walked in. Hey, buddy, there’s a call out for that jacket. That jacket’s been reported.
Wait a minute, it’s all a mistake.
A mistake that led to another mistake that led to another. People make mistakes all the time, so many mistakes that they aren’t mistakes anymore, they’re just positive and negative charges shooting back and forth and moving you along. Like good luck and bad luck. Like a tunnel you’re walking through, with all your pores wide open. When it turns, you turn too.
Larry remembers seeing a patient in the Winnipeg Chronic Care Unit when he delivered the flowers after the mayor’s banquet. This guy didn’t have any arms or legs, just little buds growing out of his body. He was one bad mistake, like a human salt shaker perched there on the edge of a bed. Larry, set the flowers down on the table next to him, and the guy leaned over a couple of inches and brushed them with his forehead, then he smelled them, then he stuck his tongue out and licked the leaves and petals, all the while giving Larry a look, 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
