Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (12 page)

“Are you okay?” asked Dave, who was walking out as she was walking in.

Morley kept the Tamagotchi in her T-shirt drawer at night. It was night three when it chirped from the bureau. Dave, who was reading a magazine in bed, looked up, puzzled.

Morley said, “It’s a stopwatch I brought from work.”

She hopped over to the dresser, scooped her Tamagotchi and took it into the bathroom, carefully closing the door behind her. She looked at the chicken with exasperation.

“You can’t be serious,” she said. “I just fed you.”

Dave was too busy with his own thoughts to wonder what Morley was up to. The picture of Harrison Ford on the cover of
People
had rattled him. He had brought the magazine home from work so he could study it. It was hidden under a pile of books on his side of the bed. The more Dave stared at the picture—the more he compared himself to Harrison Ford—the more he was forced to face the fact that he had let himself go soft.

Before he climbed into bed Dave had stood in front of the full-length bedroom mirror, wearing only his underwear. Turning sideways, he gazed at his belly in despair. Where had it come from? He didn’t remember it sticking out like that. When he stared at his face in the bathroom mirror it seemed even softer. He put his fingers on his cheeks and pushed his skin up toward his ears. It made him look startlingly younger. He needed a facelift! He
was
getting old and soft.

Harrison Ford didn’t look old and soft. Harrison Ford seemed to have defied the ravages of age. Harrison Ford seemed to have stopped time. To get even half as fit as Harrison Ford, Dave figured he would have to change his diet, hire a personal trainer and spend hours a day under a bank of sun lamps. Fat chance.

Far easier to wallow in a pool of self-loathing.

He was standing in the bathroom the next morning, brushing his teeth, staring down at his ugly feet and loathing them, when he realized there
was
something he could do. He pulled his belly in and hauled his shoulders back. If he couldn’t have Harrison Ford’s body, at least he could have his toes. He looked down at his feet again and wiggled them. Just as Betty Friedan had cleared the way for many women to walk proudly out of their kitchens and into the workplace, Harrison Ford had made it possible for Dave to have a pedicure. All he had to do was make sure it wasn’t at some neighborhood place where he might be recognized.

It was an impulse born as much from curiosity as insecurity. Dave knew Morley wasn’t going to leave him because some movie star had prettier feet. It had just never occurred to Dave that a man could have his nails done. It seemed like a waste of money to pay someone to cut your nails—
If God had wanted me to have pedicures,
thought Dave,
why would he have given me teeth?

When Dave got to work he hauled out the yellow pages. The woman at the first place said, “I don’t know if we do men. No one has ever asked.” There was no confusion at the second salon. “We do men’s hands but not their feet,” said the receptionist. And then she added mysteriously, “We don’t wax men either.”

It had taken Dave all morning to gather the courage to make these calls. But once he had started, nothing was going to stop him. He stared at the ads. “German pedicures,” said the one at the top of the page.

“When do you want to come?” asked the woman. Dave did not ask what a German pedicure involved. He didn’t want to look stupid.

He didn’t ask about anything until it was way too late—until he was sitting in a chair so space-age and contoured that it might have been pried out of the shuttle. His feet were soaking in water, his eyes were glued to the woman who had introduced herself as Ulla. He watched Ulla’s every move as she laid out an assortment of implements—tools that looked as if they belonged in a surgery. She plugged in what appeared to be a router, and plucked Dave’s right foot out of the water.

“We begin,” she said, “by grinding the calluses.”

Morley had always said that having her feet done was “the best.” Once when she said that, Dave had asked, “Better than a massage?” And Morley had said, “Way better. Better than anything.”

Because he didn’t tell Morley that he had gone for a pedicure, Dave was not able to ask her how allowing someone to work on the soles of her feet with power tools could possibly be thought of in the same context as a massage. The very idea that his wife could enjoy this cast her in a new and worrying light.
If this,
thought Dave,
what else?

But he didn’t tell her about the pedicure. Couldn’t tell her. Not because his feet looked bad. Because they looked so darn good. They were the best-looking part of him. Dave didn’t know that Ulla would put nail polish on his toes. His toes looked as though they had been Varathaned. They looked so much better than any other part of his body that they only intensified his shame.

And so he wore socks to bed. And when he wanted to check his feet—which he did frequently, because they looked so good—he’d go into the bathroom and lock the door and take his socks off. Once he took the
People
magazine with him and compared his feet to Harrison Ford’s. He thought he didn’t come out so bad. Maybe not Hollywood, but not Hamilton either.

All the time he was doing this—sneaking in and out of the bathroom with a nail file to do maintenance, or to have a quick peek—Morley was sneaking in and out of the same room to feed the Tamagotchi.

This went on for a week, both of them so self-absorbed they were totally unaware of the other’s preoccupation.

Only Stephanie, who needed the bathroom more than either of them, seemed bothered.

“WHAT IS GOING ON?” she said one night, while Morley scooted in as Dave slipped out.

The first time Morley answered that question it was to a woman she had never met. It was a Friday night. She was grocery shopping. She was feeding the Tamagotchi as she moved down the cereal aisle, so she had her head down and wasn’t paying attention when she knocked into the woman who was coming the other way. They smiled at each other and Morley ruefully held up the Tamagotchi and said, “My son’s. Alien chicken.”

“Let’s see,” said the women.

As Morley held the toy out, the chicken started to chirp.

“Don’t worry,” said the woman. “It requires less attention as it grows.”

It was a true moment of motherhood.

It was the very next evening that Stephanie came downstairs wearing Dave’s blue sweater.

Morley stared at her. “Where did you get that?” she demanded.

“It was in my drawer,” said Stephanie defensively. “Why?”

That night as they lay in bed Morley reached out for Dave and said, “Do you remember last Christmas when I couldn’t find the present your mother sent Sam?”

She got out of bed and opened her T-shirt drawer and picked out the Tamagotchi and handed it to Dave.

She showed him how she fed it and how she cleaned it and how she played with it.

As they sat there in their bed the toy started to beep.

“What else does it do?” asked Dave, handing it back.

“It beeps,” said Morley, pushing the buttons expertly. “Then it dies.”

She fiddled with the buttons for a few moments and carried it back to the bureau.

She came back to bed and snuggled up to Dave.

Ten minutes later the Tamagotchi began beeping again.

Morley started to get out of bed.

Dave grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her back.

“I have to,” she said, trying to pull free. “I won’t be able to sleep if I think that thing is going to die tonight.”

“I’ll get it,” said Dave. “I always did the night feedings.”

The polish on Dave’s toes began to chip two weeks after his pedicure. The morning he noticed the first missing flake he thought of touching them up himself. He sneaked into Stephanie’s room looking for clear polish. All he could find was blue glitter and black.

He considered buying his own bottle of polish, but decided against it. It didn’t feel at all right. The polish, after all, hadn’t been his fault—Ulla had applied it without asking. To go out and buy a bottle would make him entirely complicit. True, he had been enjoying the secret of his perfect toes—his feet had given him a ridiculous sense of sophistication and he wasn’t in a hurry to let the feeling go—but he wasn’t prepared to visit Ulla every two weeks and he wasn’t about to start buying bottles of nail polish either. If this was how Harrison Ford spent his time, so be it. It was just a step too far from
The Temple of Doom
for Dave. Anyway, he couldn’t wear socks to bed for the rest of his life—surely Morley would eventually notice. Dave didn’t want to be there for that. What was the point?

He did go to the drugstore, however. He walked in one afternoon and quietly examined the bottles of polish. But he didn’t buy any. Another day, on his way home from work, he passed a cigar store that had a little leather-cased manicure set in the window. He walked in and asked how much and the clerk told him, “Two hundred and fifty dollars, sir.”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars!” said Dave.

“It’s made in Germany, sir,” said the clerk, who had made a move to fetch the case from the window but was now turning back to other things. More important things.

Dave wandered over and looked at the case again. It was such a perfect-looking thing. So perfect he was sure it would inoculate elegance through his entire being—if he owned this one thing, more than his nails would be better, his entire life would change. He, too, could be as elegant as Harrison Ford.

Dave desperately wanted to buy it. For a moment he tottered on the brink, thinking of the small but not insignificant pleasure it would give him to summon the smarmy little clerk and wave offhandedly at the window, as if he bought these sorts of things all the time. As if money was no object.

He bought a four-dollar cigar instead, and a little box of wooden matches, which made him feel swank enough, walking home in the evening sun, smoking his cigar—until it started to make him feel ill.

The very next morning, he dropped a milk case of records on his foot. The nail on his big toe turned black. There seemed no point in worrying about nail polish or imported manicure sets after that.

It was that same week that the Tamagotchi died. Morley was not sure why or exactly when. She was at work and something made her check, and it was gone. Just like that. No warning. She couldn’t believe it. As she stared at the empty screen she felt like crying.

When she got home she began supper immediately. Once it was under control, she went into the backyard and dug a little hole in the corner of the garden where they had buried the guinea pig. She took the Tamagotchi out of her pocket. It was wrapped in a piece of Kleenex. She put it in the hole and covered it with dirt.

There was a time, and it wasn’t so long ago, when mothers had to accept that they would have to do this for at least one of their children. Influenza. Scarlet fever. Tuberculosis. Morley put her hand on the earth and shook her head.
That
was why she felt like crying. She stood up and looked around the garden, at the light of the autumn sun playing on the last leaves of the pear tree.

“Jesus,” she said.

She wasn’t sure if it was a prayer or an oath.

She was remembering a tiny tombstone she had touched in a graveyard beside a stone church in a Newfoundland outport. She was thinking of all the mothers who had carried on. She was thinking of Sam and Stephanie.

“Jesus,” she said again as she turned to go inside, folding her arms around her chest against the chill of the afternoon.

It was a prayer.

Dorothy

The phone started ringing in the middle of the night. Ten past four by the clock radio. Dave jerked up before the first ring ended, his eyes closed, his heart pounding, struggling for the bedside table, overshooting and knocking his reading lamp onto the floor. The lamp landed on the dog, who was curled up on the floor, dreaming of food. In Arthur’s dream someone, a pair of legs—Arthur couldn’t see the rest of the body—was opening a never-ending stack of cans and, out of each can, pulling a leg of beef of improbable size. The bones were being dropped, one after the other, onto the sofa in the living room—the sofa that Arthur was, under normal circumstances, not allowed to go near. When the lamp bounced off Arthur’s rib cage he whooshed onto his feet, snarling, his head swivelling in all directions at once, determined to protect his mountain of bones from this thing that had dropped from the sky.