Atwood Margaret - The Heart Goes Last

Charmaine’s commiseration makes it worse. She tries so hard. “You are not a failure,” she says. “Just because we lost the house and we’re sleeping in the car, and you got …” She doesn’t want to say fired. “And you haven’t given up, at least you’re looking for a job. Those things like losing the house, and, and … those things have happened to a lot of people. To most people.”

“But not to everyone,” Stan would say. “Not to fucking everyone.”

Not to rich people.

They’d started out so well. They both had jobs then. Charmaine was in the Ruby Slippers Retirement Homes and Clinics chain, doing entertainment and events – she had a special touch with the elderly, said the supervisors, and she was working her way up. He was doing well too: junior quality control at Dimple Robotics, testing the Empathy Module in the automated Customer Fulfillment models. People didn’t just want their groceries bagged, he used to explain to Charmaine: they wanted a total shopping experience, and that included a smile. Smiles were hard; they could turn into grimaces or leers, but if you got a smile right, they’d spend extra for it. Amazing to remember, now, what people would once spend extra for.

They’d had a small wedding – just friends, since there wasn’t much family left on either side, their parents being dead one way or another. Charmaine said she wouldn’t have invited hers anyway, though she didn’t elaborate because she didn’t like to talk about them, but she wished her Grandma Win could have been there. Who knew where Conor was? Stan didn’t look for him, because if he turned up he would probably have tried to grope Charmaine or do some other attention-grabbing stunt.

Then they had a beach honeymoon in Georgia. That was a high point. There are the two of them in the photos, golden and smiling, sunlight all over them like mist, raising their glasses of – what had that been, some tropical cocktail heavy on the lime cordial – raising their glasses to their new life. Charmaine in a retro flower-patterned halter top with a sarong skirt and a hibiscus blossom tucked behind her ear, her blond hair shining, ruffled by the breeze, him in a green shirt with penguins on it that Charmaine had picked out for him, and a panama; well, not a real panama, but that idea. They look so young, so untouched. So eager for the future.

Stan sent one of those photos to Conor to show that there was, finally, a girl of Stan’s that Con couldn’t poach; also as an example of the success Con himself might expect to have if he’d settle down, go straight, stop doing minor time, quit fooling around on the fringes. It’s not that Con wasn’t smart: he was too smart. Always playing the angles.

Con sent a message back: Nice T&A, big brother. Can she cook? Dumb penguins though. Typical: Con had to leer, he had to disparage. That was before he’d cut the lines, dumped his email, refused to share his address.

Back up north, they’d made a down payment on a house, a starter two-bedroom in need of a little love but with room for the growing family, said the agent with wink. It seemed affordable, but in retrospect the decision to buy was a mistake – there were the renovations and repairs, and that meant extra debt on top of the mortgage. They told themselves they could handle it: they weren’t big spenders, they worked hard. That’s the killer: the hard work. He’d busted his ass. He might as well not have bothered, in view of the fuck-all he’s been left with. It makes him cross-eyed to remember how hard he’d worked.

Then everything went to ratshit. Overnight, it felt like. Not just in his own personal life: the whole card castle, the whole system fell to pieces, trillions of dollars wiped off the balance sheets like fog off a window. There were hordes of two-bit experts on TV pretending to explain why it had happened – demographics, loss of confidence, gigantic Ponzi schemes – but that was all guesswork bullshit. Someone had lied, someone had cheated, someone had shorted the market, someone had inflated the currency. Not enough jobs, too many people. Or not enough jobs for middle-of-the-road people like Stan and Charmaine. The northeast, where they were, was the hardest hit.

The Ruby Slippers location where Charmaine worked ran into trouble: it was upscale, a lot of families could no longer afford to park their old folks in there. Rooms emptied, overheads were cut. Charmaine applied for a transfer – the chain was still doing well on the West Coast – but that didn’t happen, and she was made redundant. Then Dimple Robotics packed up and moved west, and Stan was out without a parachute.

They sat in their newly bought home on their newly bought sofa with the flowered throw pillows that Charmaine had taken such trouble to match, and hugged each other, and said they loved each other, and Charmaine cried, and Stan patted her and felt useless.

Charmaine got a temporary job waiting tables; when that place went belly up, she got another one. Then another, in a bar. Not high-end places; those were drying up, because anyone who could afford to eat fancy food was gobbling it up farther west, or else in exotic countries where the concept of minimum wage had never existed.

No such luck for Stan, with the odd jobs: overqualified was what they told him at the employment office. He said he wasn’t picky – he’d clean floors, he’d mow lawns – and they smirked (what floors? what lawns?), and said they’d keep him on file. But then the employment office itself closed down, because why keep it open if there was no employment?

They held on in their little house, living on fast food and the money from selling the furniture, skimping on energy use and sitting in the dark, hoping things would take an upturn. Finally they put the house on the market, but by then there were no buyers; the houses on either side of theirs were already empty, and the looters had been through them, ripping out anything that could be sold. One day they had no mortgage money left, and their credit cards were frozen. They walked out before they were thrown out, and drove away before the creditors could grab their car.

Luckily Charmaine had saved up a little stash of cash. That, and her tiny pay packet at the bar, plus tips – those have kept them in gas, and a post-office box so they can pretend to have an address if anything does come up for Stan, and the odd trip to the laundromat when they can’t stand the griminess of their clothes.

Stan has sold his blood twice, though he didn’t get much for it. “You wouldn’t believe it,” the woman said to him as she handed him a paper cup of fake juice after his second blood drain, “but some people have asked us if we want to buy their babies’ blood, can you imagine?”

“No shit,” says Stan. “Why? Babies don’t have that much blood.”

More valuable was her answer. She said there was a news item that claimed a total blood renewal, young blood for old, staves off dementia and rolls your physical clock back twenty, thirty years. “It’s only been tried with mice,” she said. “Mice aren’t people! But some folks will clutch at anything. We’ve turned away at least a dozen baby-blood offers. We tell them we can’t accept it.”

Someone’s accepting it, Stan thought. You can bet they are. If there’s money in it.

If only the two of them could find some place where the prospects are better. There’s said to be a boom in Oregon – fuelled by a rare earth discovery, China’s buying a lot of that – but how can they get out there? They’d no longer have Charmaine’s trickle of money coming in, they’d run out of gas. They could ditch the car, try hitching, but Charmaine is terrified by the thought. Their car is the only barrier between them and gang rape, and not just for her, she says, considering what’s out there roaming around in the night with no pants on. She has a point.