Carol Shields - Larry’s Party

Dorrie kept wanting him to buy a khaki trenchcoat, but he doesn’t need one, not with his Harris tweed. You don’t want bulk when you’re walking along. He walks a lot. It’s when he does his thinking. He hums his thoughts out on the air like music; they’ve got a disco beat: My name is Larry Weller. I’m a floral designer, twenty-six years old, and I’m walking down Notre Dame Avenue, in the city of Winnipeg, in the country of Canada, in the month of April, in the year 1977, and I’m thinking hard. About being hungry, about being late, about having sex later on tonight. About how great I feel in this other guy’s Harris tweed jacket.

Cars were zipping along, horns honking, trucks going by every couple of seconds, people yelling at each other. Not a quiet neighborhood. But even with all the noise blaring out, Larry kept hearing this tiny slidey little underneath noise. He’d been hearing it for the last couple of minutes. Whoosh, wash, whoosh, wash. It was coming out of the body of Larry J. Weller. It wasn’t that he found it objectionable. He liked it, as a matter of fact, but he just wanted to know what it was.

He whooshed past the Triple Value Store, past the Portuguese Funeral Home, past Big Mike’s where they had their windows full of ski equipment on sale. The store was packed with people wearing spring clothes, denim jackets, super-flare pants, and so on, but they were already thinking ahead to next winter. They had snow in their heads instead of a nice hot beach. That’s one thing Larry appreciates about Dorrie. She lives in the moment. When it’s snowing she thinks about snow. When it’s spring, like right now, she’s thinking about getting some new sandals. That’s what she’s doing this very minute: buying sandals at Shoes Express, their two-for-one sale. Larry knows she’s probably made up her mind already, but she told him she’d wait till he got to the store before buying. She wants to make sure Larry likes what she decides on, even though sandals are just sandals to him. Just a bunch of straps.

Dorrie knows how to stretch money. She saves the fifty-cents-off coupons from Ponderosa – which’ll give you a rib eye steak, baked potato and salad, all for $1.69. Or she’ll hear a rumor that next week shoe prices are going to get slashed double. So she’ll say to the guy at Shoes Express, “Look, can you hold these for me till next Wednesday or Thursday or whatever, so I can get in on the sale price?”

It comes to Larry, what the noise is. It’s the lining of his jacket moving back and forth across his shoulders as he strolls along, also the lining material sliding up and down against his shirt-sleeves. He can make it softer if he slows down. Or louder if he lifts his arm and waves at that guy across the street that he doesn’t even know. The guy’s waving back, he’s trying to figure out who Larry is – hey, who’s that man striding along over there, that man in the very top-line Harris tweed jacket?

Actually no one wears Harris tweed much anymore. In fact, they never did, no one Larry ever knew. It’s vintage almost, like a costume. What happened was, Larry was about to graduate from Red River College (Floral Arts Diploma), just two guys and twenty-four girls. The ceremony was in the cafeteria instead of the general-purpose room, and dress was supposed to be informal. So what’s informal? Suits or what? The girls ended up wearing just regular dresses, and the two guys opted for jackets and dress pants.

Larry and his mother went to Hector’s, which she swears by, and that’s where they found the Harris tweed, this nubby-dubby wool cloth, smooth and rough at the same time, heavy but also light, with the look of money and the feel of a grain sack, and everywhere these soft little hairs riding on top of the weave. The salesman said: “Hey, you could wear that jacket to a do at the Prime Minister’s.” Larry had never heard of Harris tweed, but the salesman said it was a classic. That it would never go out of style. That it would wear like iron. Then his mother chimed in about how it wouldn’t show the dirt, and the salesman said he’d try real hard to get them twenty percent off, and that clinched it.

Larry wears the Harris tweed to Flowerfolks almost every day over a pair of jeans, and it’s hardly worn out at all. It never looks wrinkled or dirty. Or at least it didn’t until today when Larry put on this other jacket by mistake. So! There’s Harris tweed and Harris tweed, uh -huh.

It was an accident how Larry got into floral design. A fluke. He’d been out of school for a few weeks, just goofing off, and finally his mother phoned Red River College one day and asked them to mail out their brochure on the Furnace Repair course. She figured everyone’s got a furnace, so even with the economy up and down, furnaces were a good thing to get into. Well, someone must have been sleeping at the switch, because along came a pamphlet from Floral Arts, flowers instead of furnaces. Larry’s mother, Dot, sat right down in the breakfast nook and read it straight through, tapping her foot as she turned the pages, and nodding her head at the ivy wallpaper as if she was saying, yes, yes, floral design really is the future.

Larry’s father, though, wasn’t too overwhelmed. Larry could tell he was thinking that flowers were for girls, not boys. Like maybe his only son was a homo and it was just starting to show. In the end, he did come to Larry’s graduation in the cafeteria but he didn’t know where to look. Even when Mrs. Starr presented Larry with the Rose Wreath for having the top point average, Larry’s father just sat there with his chin scraping the floor.

Larry was offered a job right off at Flowerfolks, and he’s been there ever since. Last October he got to do the centerpieces for the mayor’s banquet. It was even on television, Channel 13. You saw the mayor standing up to give his speech and there were these sprays of wheat, eucalyptus branches, and baby orchids right there on the table. Orchids! So much for your average taxpayer. But Flowerfolks has a policy of delivering their flowers to hospital wards if their clients don’t want them afterwards, so it’s really not a waste. They’re a chain with a social conscience, and also an emphasis on professionalism. They like the employees to look good. Shoulder-length hair’s okay for male staff, but not a quarter inch longer. A tie’s optional, but jackets are required. That’s where the Harris tweed comes in.

Larry can’t help thinking how this new, new jacket will knock their eyebrows off down at work.

Or maybe not, maybe they won’t even notice. He hadn’t noticed himself when he picked it up, so why should they? What happened was he went up to the counter to order his cappuccino. Not that he had to order it. He takes the same thing every day, a double cappuccino. He used to go to a bar for a few beers after work, but Dorrie got worried about all the booze he was soaking up. She was convinced his brain cells were getting killed off. One by one they were going out, like Christmas lights on a string, only there weren’t any replacements available.

“Why don’t you switch to coffee?” she said, and that’s when Larry started dropping into Cafe Capri, which is just around the corner from Flowerfolks. A nothing place, but they’ve brought cappuccino to this town. Nobody knew what it was at first, and some people, like Larry’s folks, still don’t. Larry’s tried it, and now he’s on a streak with double cappuccinos. They start making it when they see him come through the door at five-thirty.

He likes to put on his own cinnamon. He likes it spread out thin across the entire foam area, not just sitting in a wet clump in the middle. You take the shaker, hold it sideways about two inches to the right of the cup and tap it twice, lightly. A soft little cinnamon cloud forms in the air – you can almost see it hanging there – and then the little grains drift down evenly into the cup. Total coverage. Like the dust storm in Winnipeg last summer, how it coated every ledge and leaf and petunia petal with this beautiful, evenly distributed layer of powdery dust.