Atwood Margaret - The Heart Goes Last

By name and by nature, thinks Charmaine: a layer of permanent grime coats everything. The air smells of rancid fat from the chicken wings place next door; customers bring them in here in paper bags, pass them around. Those wings are moderately disgusting, but Charmaine never says no to them when they’re on offer.

The place wouldn’t stay open, except that it’s now the hub for what she supposes – knows, really – is the local clutch of drug dealers. It’s where they meet their suppliers and customers; they don’t need to worry about getting caught, not here, not any more. They have a few hangers-on, plus the two hookers, just high-spirited girls, no more than nineteen. They’re both very pretty; one is a blonde, the other has long dark hair. Sandi and Veronica, decked out in T-shirts with sequins and really short shorts. They were in college before everyone around here lost their money is what they say.

They won’t last is Charmaine’s opinion. Either someone will beat them up and they’ll quit, or they’ll give up and start taking those drugs, which is another way of quitting. Or a pimp will move in on them; or one day they’ll just drop through a hole in space and no one will want to mention them, because they’ll be dead. It’s a wonder none of those things have happened yet. Charmaine wants to tell them to get out of here, but where would they go, and anyway it’s none of her business.

When they aren’t busying themselves in the Fuck Tank, they sit at the counter and drink diet sodas and chat with Charmaine. Sandi told her they only do the hooking because they’re waiting to get real work, and Veronica said, “I work my ass off,” and then they both laughed. Sandi would like to be a personal trainer, Veronica would choose nursing. They talk as if these things might really happen one day. Charmaine doesn’t contradict them, because Grandma Win always said miracles really can happen, such as Charmaine coming to stay with her – that was a miracle! So who knows? They’ve been there a couple of the times that Stan has picked her up for work, and she couldn’t help but introduce them. Out in the car he said, “You shouldn’t get so cozy with those hookers,” and Charmaine said she wasn’t that cozy with them, but they were quite sweet really, and he said, Sweet my ass, which wasn’t very kind in her opinion. But she didn’t say so.

Once in a while outsiders blunder in, young guys usually, tourists from other, more prosperous countries or cities, going slumming, looking for cheap thrills; then she needs to be alert. She’s come to know a lot of the regulars, so they leave her alone – they know she’s not like Sandi and Veronica, she has a husband – and only someone new would think of trying to hit on her.

She has the afternoon shift, when it’s pretty quiet. The evening would be better for tips, but Stan says he doesn’t want her to do that because there are too many drunken lechers, though he may have to give in on that if she’s offered the slot, because their cash stash is getting really small. In the afternoons it’s only her and Deirdre, who’s left over from the cushier days of PixelDust – she was once a coder, she has a tattoo of a Moebius strip on her arm and still wears her hair in two little-girl brunette pigtails, that Harriet-the-Spy girl-geek look. And there’s also Brad, who does the scowling at the rowdy customers when necessary.

She can watch TV on the flatscreens, old Elvis Presley movies from the sixties, so consoling; or daytime sitcoms, though they aren’t that funny and anyway comedy is so cold and heartless, it makes fun of people’s sadness. She prefers the more dramatic shows where everyone’s getting kidnapped or raped or shut up in a dark hole, and you aren’t supposed to laugh at it. You’re supposed to be upset, the way you’d be if it was happening to you. Being upset is a warmer, close-up feeling, not a chilly distant feeling like laughing at people.

She used to watch a show that wasn’t a sitcom. It was a reality show called The Home Front, with Lucinda Quant. Lucinda used to be a bigtime anchor but then she got older, so The Home Front was only on local cable. Lucinda went around and interviewed people who were being evicted from their homes, and you got to see all their stuff being piled on the lawn, such as their sofa and their bed and their TV, which was really sad but also interesting, all the things they’d bought, and Lucinda asked them what happened to their life, and they told about how hard-working they’d been, but then the plant closed, or the head office relocated, or whatever. Then viewers were supposed to send in money to help those folks out, and sometimes they did, and that showed the good in people.

Charmaine found The Home Fro nt encouraging, because what happened to her and Stan could happen to anyone. But then Lucinda Quant got cancer and went bald and started streaming video of herself being sick, right from her hospital room, and Charmaine found that depressing, so she didn’t watch Lucinda any more. Though she wished her well, and hoped she would get better.

Sometimes she chats with Dierdre. They tell their life stories, and Dierdre’s is worse than Charmaine’s, with fewer kindly adults like Grandma Win, and more molesting, and it has an abortion in it; which isn’t a thing Charmaine could ever bring herself to do. She’s on the pill for now, she gets them cheap from Deirdre, but she’s always wanted a baby, though how she’ll cope if she gets pregnant by mistake with Stan and her living in their car she has no idea. Other women – women in the past, tougher women – have dealt with babies in confined spaces, such as ocean ships and covered wagons. But maybe not cars. It’s hard to get smells out of car upholstery, so you’d have to be extra careful about the spitting up and so forth.

Around eleven she and Stan have another doughnut. Then they make a hopeful stop at a dumpster out behind a soup joint, but no luck, the stuff has already been picked over. Before noon Stan takes her to the laundromat in one of the malls – they’ve used that one before, two of the machines are still working – and he watches the car while she does a load and then pays for it on their phone. She got rid of their white things a while ago – even her cotton nighties – traded them for darker colours. It’s too hard to keep white things clean, she hates that dingy look. Then they eat some cheese slices and a leftover bagel for lunch, with some more instant coffee. They’ll have better food tonight, because Charmaine gets paid.

Then Stan drops her off at Dust and says he’ll come back at seven to pick her up.

Brad says Deirdre is off, she’s called in sick, but it’s okay because there’s nothing much happening. Just a few guys sitting at the bar drinking a brew or two. They’ve got fancy mixed drinks written up on the chalkboard, but nobody ever buys them.

She settles into the familiar boredom of the afternoon. She’s only had this job for a few weeks, but it feels like longer. Waiting, waiting, waiting, for other people to decide things, for something to happen. It reminds her a lot of the Ruby Slipper Home and Clinic – their motto was “There’s no place like home,” which was kind of sick if you thought about it, because the people were in there because they couldn’t manage in their real homes. Mostly you served the old folks food and drink at intervals, just like at Dust, and were nice to them, just like at Dust, and smiled a lot, just like at Dust. Once in a while she would get in some entertainment, a therapy clown or a therapy dog, or a magician, or a music group donating their time to charity. But mostly nothing much happened, as in those animal-cam websites with baby eagles, until all of a sudden there would be the flurry and crisis of a messy, squawky death. Just like at Dust. Though they didn’t beat up anyone inside the building if they could help it.