Larry’s Party. Carol Shields

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 had forgotten about his recent haircut. Instead of the movement of soft hair flying outward and then landing with a bounce on his neck, that comforting silky familiar flick against his cheek, he sensed only the abruptness of his cold, clean face, how exposed it was beneath the tiny cabin light and how stupidly rigid.

      An hour ago he had felt the tug of drowsiness, but now he pledged himself to stay awake. Grief was involved in this decision, and possibly a crude form of gallantry. Staying awake seemed a portion of what was expected of him, part of the new role he had undertaken a mere thirty-six hours earlier, standing in front of a marriage commissioner at the Law Courts with his family and Dorrie’s family looking on. “Marriage is not to be entered into lightly, but with certainty, mutual respect, and a sense of reverence.” These words had been part of the civil ceremony, printed on a little souvenir card he and Dorrie had been given.

      He was a husband now, and his chattering, fretful Dorrie, no longer a girlfriend but a wife, was slipping down sideways against his arm, her face damp, pared-down, and sealed shut with sleep. He felt her shoulder lift on every third or fourth breath, lift and then fall in a catching, irregular way, as though her dreams had brought her up against a new, puzzling form of exhaustion, something she would soon be getting used to.

      For her sake he would stay alert. He would keep guard over her, drawing himself as straight as possible in his seat without disturbing her sleeping body. He’d clamp his jaw firmly shut in a husbandlike way, patient, forbearing, and keep his eyes steady in the dark. He would do this in order to keep panic at a distance. All that was required of him was to outstare the image in the floating black glass of the window, that shorn, bewildered, fresh-faced stranger whose profile, for all its raw boyishness, reminded him, alarmingly, of – of who?

      His father, that’s who.

      “The very image of his mother,” people used to say about Larry Weller. Same blue eyes. The freckled skin. Dot’s gestures. That mouth.

      Larry could not recall any mention of a resemblance to his father. He was his mother’s boy. Heir to her body, her intensity, and to her frantic private pleasures and glooms.

      But now, twenty-seven and a half years into his life, he found that his father had moved in beneath his bones. That nameless part of his face, the hinged area where the jaw approaches the lower ear – he could see now what his flowing hair had hidden: that his father’s genes were alive in his body. Even his earlobes, their fleshiness and color. What was that color? A hint of strawberry that spread from the ears up the veins to the cheeks, his father’s cheeks, curving and surprisingly soft in a man’s hard face.

      His father’s solid, ruddy presence. It arrived, sudden and shocking, and stayed with him throughout the two weeks of his and

      Dorrie’s honeymoon. He met it each morning in the shaving mirror of the various modest hotels where they stayed. What kind of trick was this? He’d turn his eyes slowly toward the mirror, creeping up on his face, and there the old guy would be, larger and more substantial than a simple genetic flicker. His father’s flexible loose skin pressed up against the glass, a fully formed image, yawning, hoisting up his sleepy lids, dressed in his work clothes with the bus factory’s insignia on the pocket, Air-Rider, his broad shoulders and back bunching forward under Larry’s pajamas, and his large red hands reaching out, every finger scarred in one way or another from the upholstery work he did at the plant. And Larry could hear the voice too, his father’s high, querulous voice, with the Lancashire notes still in place after twenty-seven years in Canada.

      Stu Weller. Master upholsterer. Husband of Dot, father of Midge and Larry.

      It was Stu, with Dot’s blessing, who had the idea of giving the young couple a package tour of England. A wedding present, gruffly, unceremoniously offered. “We did the same for your sister when she got herself married.”

      Never mind that Midge and her husband got divorced after two years. That Paul turned out to like men more than women.

      Dorrie would have preferred a honeymoon in Los Angeles or maybe Mexico, somewhere hot, a nice hotel on the beach, but how can a person say no to free tickets, everything paid for, the plane fare, plus a twelve-day bus trip, Sunbrite Tours, breakfast and dinner, all the way up to the Pennines, then down to Land’s End, the very south-west tip of England, then back to London for the final three days. Stu and Dot had taken a similar package tour a few years back, a twenty-fifth anniversary present to themselves, a “journey back to our roots,” as Dot put it, though the real roots for both of them were in the industrial northern town of Bolton, not the green sprawling English countryside.

      And when Larry and Dorrie got there it was green, unimaginably green – a bright variegated green that made Larry think of Brussels sprouts. Everyone back home had said: What? – you’re going to England in March? Are you crazy?

      But here they were, carried over England’s green hills, ferried down into narrow green valleys, pulling up in the parking lots of green medieval villages where thick-towered castles threw greenish shadows across their squat Sunbrite coach (they had got over their terror of riding along on the left side of the highway with the traffic thundering straight at them).

      The tour began in London and headed north-east. Rain, and then episodes of brilliant slanting sunshine accompanied them as they set off, then rain again, pelting the bare trees and hedges, bringing violent, pressing changes of light, as though the day itself was about to offer up an immense idea. They stopped at the picture-postcard town of Saffron Walden, where they were led on a quick march through the old twisted streets and served lunch in a tearoom called the Silken Cat. Dorrie was staunchly brave about the steak and kidney pie, leaving only a few polite scraps on her plate.

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