Carol Shields - Larry’s Party

Forty-five minutes, Arthur had given them. But Larry Weller had lingered inside the green walls for a full hour.

“We were worried,” Dorrie said. Scolding.

He followed her into the coach for the ride back to London. “How could you get yourself so lost?” she kept asking. The next day they boarded a plane that carried them across a wide ocean, then over the immense empty stretches of Labrador and the sunlit cities and villages of Ontario, an endless afternoon of flight. Frozen lakes and woodlands spread beneath them, thinning finally, flattening out to a corridor of snow-covered fields and then the dark knowable labyrinth of tangled roadways and rooftops and clouds of cold air rising up to greet them.

A sweet soprano bell dinged for attention. Seat belts buckled, tables up, the landing gear grinding down, a small suite of engineering miracles carefully sequenced. Dorrie gave Larry’s hand an excited, distracted squeeze that said: almost home. They were about to be matter-of-factly claimed by familiar streets and houses and the life they’d chosen or which had chosen them.

Departures and arrivals: he didn’t know it then, but these two forces would form the twin bolts of his existence – as would the brief moments of clarity that rose up in between, offering stillness. A suspension of breath. His life held in his own hands.

Shortly before Larry’s thirtieth birthday he managed to get enough money together for a down payment on a small house over on Lipton Street, a handyman special, just five rooms and a glassed-in front porch, and now he spends most evenings and weekends working on it. He and his wife, Dorrie, moved in two months ago, and ever since then she’s been after him to lay new tiles in the kitchen, and after that there’s the bathroom fixtures to replace, and maybe some ceiling insulation before winter comes along. A list as long as your arm. But this summer Larry’s been using every spare minute to work on the yard, sometimes with the help of his friend Bill Herschel, but more often alone. Might as well do it while the weather’s still good, Larry says. And he wants the whole yard closed in so Ryan can play out there next spring, unsupervised.

He’d be working at it today, only his folks have invited him and Dorrie and the baby over for the birthday festivities. Sunday dinner, opening his presents from the family, blowing out the candles, the usual. It’s 1980; he’s about to enter the decade of decadence, only he doesn’t know that yet, no one does; he only knows he feels the good hum of almost continuous anticipation in his chest, even though Dorrie griped all the way over to his folks’ place about how they were probably going to have a hot dinner, gravy and everything, when here it was, the bitch end of a sizzling day. Her own idea of hot weather fare is a big bowl of ice-cream and a glass of iced tea.

A brutal bored silence had fallen between them these last weeks.

A mere three years ago he was a young buck walking down a Winnipeg street in his shirt-sleeves. He remembers how that felt, no wife, no kid, no house, no yard. Now the whole picture’s changed, but that’s okay, especially his kid, Ryan. Another thing: he’s supposed to be sunk in gloom at the thought of turning thirty, but he isn’t. He’s unique and mortal, he knows that, and he’s got this sweet little babe of a house, and a yard that’s slowly taking shape, all its corners filling up with transplanted shrubs from the wholesaler down in Carmen. There’re some flowers too, and a few sweet peppers, but it’s mainly the shrubs he loves. Dorrie keeps calling them bushes, and he keeps having to correct her. “You’ve got shrub mania,” she says, but her lips smile when she’s saying it. “You want to be the shrub king of the universe.”

Maybe it’s true. Maybe he wants to make his yard a real shrub showplace. Somewhere Larry’s heard that almost everyone in the world is allowed one minute of fame in their lives, or maybe that’s one hour.

Stu Weller, Larry’s dad, got written up once in the weekend section of the Winnipeg Tribune on the subject of his corkscrew and bottle-opener collection, which included 600 items at the time of the interview, and has almost doubled since. Larry’s older sister, Midge, won a thousand dollars last year in the art gallery raffle – enough for a trip to Hawaii with a girlfriend – and she actually appeared on Channel 13 talking about how surprised she was, and how she didn’t usually waste money on raffle tickets unless it was for a good cause like expanding the gallery’s exhibition space or something.

Larry’s own moment of fame is still some years in the future, and that’s fine with him. He’s got enough on his mind these days, his young family – Dorrie, little Ryan – and his job at Flowerfolks, and his current preoccupation with transforming his yard. As for his mother, Dot, she’s had enough celebrity for a lifetime. Don’t even talk to her about being famous, especially not the kind of fame that comes boiling out of ignorance, and haunts you for the rest of your life. Dumb Dot. Careless Dot. Dot the murderer. Of course, that was a long time ago.

When Larry was a little kid his mother warned him about the dangers of public drinking fountains. “No one ever, ever puts their mouth right on the spout,” she said, “because they can pick up other people’s germs, and who knows what kind of disease you’ll get.”

This was bad news for Larry. At that age he liked to stand on tiptoe and press his lips directly on the cool silvery water spout, rather than trying to catch the spray in his mouth as it looped unpredictably upward. Besides, his mother’s caution didn’t make sense, since if no one ever touched the spout, how could there be any germs? He recalls – he must have been six or seven at the time – that he presented this piece of logic to his mother, but she only shook her headful of squashed curls and said sadly, wisely, “There will always be people in this world who don’t know any better.”

He pictured these people – the people who didn’t know any better – as a race of clumsy unfortunates, and according to his mother there were plenty of them living right here on Ella Street in Winnipeg’s West End: those people who mowed their lawns but failed to rake up the clippings, for instance. People who didn’t know any better stored cake flour and other staples in their original paper bags so that their cupboards swarmed with ants and beetles. They never got around to replacing the crumbling rubber-backed placemats from the Lake of the Woods with “The Story of Wood Pulp” stamped in the middle. That was the problem with people who didn’t know any better: they never threw things away, not even their stained tea-towels, not even their oven mitts with holes burnt right through the fingers.

People who didn’t know any better actually ate the coleslaw that came with their hamburgers, poking it out of those miniature pleated paper cups with their stabbing forks. Someone, their well-meaning mothers probably, told them they should eat any and all green vegetables that were put in front of them, not that there’s anything very green about coleslaw, especially when it’s been sitting in a puddle of wet salad dressing and improperly refrigerated for heaven only knows how many days. These people have never heard of the word salmonella, or if they have, they probably can’t pronounce it.

Whereas Dot (Dorothy) Woolsey Weller, wife of Stu Weller, mother of Larry and Midge, grandmother of Ryan, knows about food poisoning intimately, tragically. She was, early in her life, an ignorant and careless person, one of those very people who didn’t know any better and who will never be allowed, now, to forget her lack of knowledge. She’s obliged to remember every day, either for a fleeting moment – her good days – or for long suffering afternoons of gloom. “Your mother’s got a nip of the blues today,” Stu Weller used to tell his kids while they were growing up in the Ella Street house, and they knew what that meant. There sat their mother at the kitchen table, again, still in her chenille robe, again, when they got home from school, her hands rubbing back and forth across her face, and her eyes blank and glassy, reliving her single terrifying act of infamy.