Nine

If I’d known I’d be putting in so much busybody time, I would have cleared my schedule. As it was, I went back to the Last Ditch to start chipping away at the hang-ups and melt-downs of another day’s worth of affluent navel-gazers with the library trip waiting as a treat at the end, like a biscuit placed just beyond the nose of a dog while you brush it. I had no idea how groomers played it with cats. Flynn and Florian were far from feral and weren’t yet fully grown, but they’d just smack the brush away with their claws out, snaffle the treat, and then climb the curtains to get away.

“Your eleven, your noon, and your three are booked in with me afterwards,” Todd said, as we drove home. “Kathi’s out at your eleven o’clock now, decluttering.”

I said nothing. For nearly thirty seconds I managed to say nothing at all, then the words shot out around my clenched teeth anyway. “Booked in for what?”

“Huh,” said Todd. “You’ve never sounded like Sean Connery before, Lexy. But you sounded way like him then. Say some more.”

This time I said nothing and stuck to it.

Todd sighed, then started counting off on his fingers and talking in a sing-song voice: “Basic wardrobe advice for Marcie at noon. A bit of bitch training for Helen at one, and a massage for Ron at four.”

“You’re massaging that Ron guy with the—” I said, before I remembered that my clients’ difficulties were confidential.

“I know!” said Todd, wiggling his eyebrows. “Who’da thunk it?”

“Also,” I said. “Bitch training?”

“Oh yeah,” said Todd. “All that woman needs is a few put-downs to get Mommy Dearest off her back and she’ll be sailing into the sunset on her honeymoon.”

Helen was a twenty-five-year-old medical receptionist who had cancelled her wedding twice already and was beginning to check the refund dates on flowers and chair skirts for her third one. All to the same guy, let me say. I had met her twice and covered commitment versus contingency, contentment versus happiness, and the end of the patriarchy. She hadn’t mentioned her mum.

“Right,” I said as we parked at the Last Ditch. “Well, I think I’ll nip up to the Skweek and finish sewing that zip in. I’ve got twenty minutes.”

“We’re like a 1970s Coke ad,” said Todd, heading towards his room. “Go us.”

Finding Noleen behind the counter of the launderette seemed like more evidence of the general love-in. But one look at her face told me she thought the same as I did regarding the Last Ditch turning commune.

“There’s a sign on the door of my office sending check-ins up here,” she said. “No way to stop them moving on to La Quinta instead, though, if they don’t want to climb the stairs. And all so Kathi can go stick Q-tips in a stranger’s keyholes and pretend it’s for them. It’s for her. She’s getting worse, Lexy.”

“I’m no happier about it than you are,” I said. “And I’m sorry to hear Kathi’s having a dip.”

“I do my best with her,” Noleen said. “Keep her spirits up. Keep her outlook sunny.”

I knew my expression was growing fixed, but thankfully Noleen was staring at the floor while she shook her head in sorrow like a basset hound. She loved Kathi. I’m sure she did, but she was no cheerleader. This very day, she was wearing a t-shirt bearing the legend We’re all going to die across the chest. It wasn’t a set-up for a cute punchline; there was nothing written on the back. That was the whole message and it was one of Noleen’s favourites. She had it in four colours.

I sat down and pulled the cover off the sewing machine. “Maybe,” I said, checking the tension and wrangling the pinned edge of the zip under the foot, “just maybe, this could be the way in. If I was to give in on the Trinity thing.”

“You spat when you said that,” Noleen said. “Don’t spit on the alterations.”

I unclenched my teeth and tried again. “If I give in on the Trinity thing and start agreeing that a bit of a tidy round and a new scarf are essential components in therapy … ” At least that made Noleen smile. She did love to hear some sneering. “ … Kathi won’t have a leg to stand on if I ask her to submit to my bit of the three-way.”

“Don’t say three-way,” said Noleen. “But you’re right, Lexy. If you embrace them—Todd too, not just Kathi—they’ll have to embrace you back or look like wankers.”

“Don’t say wanker,” I told her, but I spoke without any real conviction. I was looking deep down inside myself, proctology-deep (only down, not up), and wondering if I could really bring myself to embrace Trinity Solutions. But then, if my plan worked, I wouldn’t be embracing it for long. If I cured Todd’s cleptoparasitosis, he would go back to being an anaesthetist, and if I cured Kathi’s germaphobia, she’d no longer want to go around pulling out other people’s drain hair. At which point it would be goodbye Trinity and hello sanity.

“Right,” I said. “I’ve finished the zip. Will I press it or should we dry clean it? Did I really spit?”

“Press it and bring me up to speed with the case,” Noleen said. “What happened at the stables?”

I told her about the stables, the Thrift, and the upcoming library visit, and she regaled me with the perfect 100 percent negative response to Tam’s picture at the two smaller senior centers when Roger had flashed it around.

“And you know they’d do anything for him,” she finished up. “They love him more than the kids love him. And the kids love him nearly as much as the mommies love him.”

“How could anyone not love him?” I said.

“I don’t love him,” said Noleen, rearing back as if I’d waved smelling salts under her nose. “He’s been tying up one of my rooms, make that two of my rooms, for a year and a half and he comes with a built-in Todd.”

She was doing her best. She was shaking her head like a basset hound again, but her eyes were sparkling. She loved him. Hell, she loved both of them.

So I was overflowing with love as I began my professional day. And talking Trinity up was much easier than pretending it wasn’t happening.

“She is a terminator of filth,” said Marcie. “She can find dirt I never even imagined. Have you any idea how much dirt collects in the overflow of a kitchen sink? It was like an eel! I took a photograph of it. Look, Lexy.”

“Wow,” I said. It was the first overflow eel I had ever seen so I didn’t know if it was a whopper or a tiddler, but wow summed up the sight overall.

“And she’s so organized! She explained her household systems analysis to me so clearly I’ll never forget. It’s all so straightforward.”

I had never asked Kathi about the internal workings of her mammoth cleanliness obsession, I was ashamed to say. I didn’t want to give it oxygen. But Marcie, with the zeal of the convert, was waxing unstoppably.

“There’s shelter,” she said. “And clothing and sustenance. Every bit of housekeeping falls into one of those three areas. Then there’s management, which is different.”

“Mkay,” I said.

“Shelter!” Marci said. “You have to clean your house: mop, scrub, wipe, sweep, dust, vacuum, and declutter. Clothing! You need to sort, mend, wash, dry, fold, and stow your clothes. And sustenance! You need to buy, store, cook, and clean up after your meals. And that is how a household runs. Like a machine.”

“And management?” I said, intrigued in spite of myself.

“Running the calendar, running the white board, birthdays, bills, invitations, and thank yous.”

“And separating these systems lets you … ?” I said.

“Lets me see how much I do without anyone asking me and lets me see how little he does unless it’s all set out for him. I’ve told him I’ll take over the barbecuing next year if he does carpooling and bathrooms.”

“How did that go down?” I said, taking a wild guess.

“He couldn’t argue,” she told me. “I showed him the spreadsheet of weekly and monthly totals that Kathi and I worked up together. He takes out the trash—forty minutes per calendar month; I fold the laundry—forty minutes every two days. Every two days!”

I nodded. I wanted to ask about fitted sheets but I stopped myself.

“Interesting,” I said. “So if you think about your life—over time—the way you think about a snapshot of your house in the course of a week, what would that spreadsheet look like?”

Marcie frowned at me.

“Like you said, your husband reckons putting the bins out and grilling a few burgers is a significant contribution. What looms largest in your mind when you think about your life?”

“My first marriage,” she said, every cell of the spreadsheet falling away, taking Marcie’s smile with it.

“And how long did it last?”

“Eighteen months.”

“And you’re how old?”

“Forty-four.”

“So that’s forty-four times twelve … which is eighty-eight times six … that’s five hundred and twenty-eight months. Other than that marriage, there’s five hundred and ten months of adult life we need to account for. What else you got?”

“Is that how it works?” Marcie said.

What could I tell her?

“Yip,” I said. “Unless you’ve got PTSD from those eighteen months, that is exactly how it works. The childhood years are extra … Well, we could say the first five years counts triple, the next five double, one and a half up to fifteen, and then the cake—that’s you—is baked.”

“Is that true?”

What would I say now?

“Yip. So tell me about your first five years. What do you remember? Let’s fill in this spreadsheet, eh?”

I was going to have to buy Kathi a bunch of flowers to say thank you, because Marcie took a leisurely stroll down memory lane and recalled her mother making penny soup, her father teaching her to trim his cigars, and her baby sister grabbing her finger and laughing. When she looked at her watch, told me Todd was waiting, and went off practically skipping, I emailed the florist—Name of the Day: Assussena, a money-saving option disguised as diversity; sneaky—and ordered a pot of chrysanthemums and eucalyptus, remembering just in time that Kathi doesn’t like flowers that are too pretty.

Balance, I found myself thinking as I pedalled up to the north end of town at the end of the day. The library was open for another two hours and I needed this. Even a great day of clients like today left me fogged with their worries and knotted with their stresses. Cycling in the crisp air of a November evening, with my hair flying back and my muscles pumping, would blow the whole day away. As the wind ruffled my do up into a nest, I thought of Tam on his trusty mare, racing away across the bridge with the devil chasing him, and I thought of Kimberly on Agnetha, stopped dead on the overpass with the shears snipping. As my clothes flew back like flags, I thought of the dancing witch in her cutty sark and that white shift resting on the stinkweed at the old Armour place. And, as I slowed at the library bike stand, losing momentum and starting to wobble, I thought of the first Tam, lucky Tam, away home to Kate and his hangover; and our Tam, our poor unfortunate Tam, dead as a doornail and his corpse made into a bad joke.

Inside the sliding doors, the librarian on duty just about managed not to cry or punch me when I asked for the 1968 yearbook. No doubt it was far, far from the front desk, deep, deep in some dusty warren and she was counting down the minutes till she could get out of here.

“1968?” she said. “Senior high school yearbook?” As if I might smack myself in the head and say Silly me, I meant the new David Sedaris on disc.

I grimaced my apologies at her and, with a sigh, she went plodding off, picking over a monster bunch of keys.

The book she plunked down on the desk in front of me five minutes later was not at all what I was expecting. It wasn’t some stapled-together kids’ project, full of Tippex and typos. It was a serious hardback tome, big as an Ikea catalogue but hardback bound, its nubbly cover lavishly embossed in gold and its upward of two hundred glossy pages telling me I hadn’t had time to cycle up here after all.

I found the seniors easily and felt proud of myself for knowing that seniors was what you called the graduating year, then I settled down to find Tam.

Wow, they looked old. That was the first thing that struck me. All the Pattis and Suzies and Sandys and Bettys, with their beehives and horn-rims and their little black dresses. Did they really all have identical black dresses? Or did the photographer just put the same bolt of black cloth on all of them. And where were their bra straps?

But I didn’t need to be looking at the girls. I turned my eye instead to the Glenns, Johnnys, Howies, and Steves in their black jackets, starched shirts, and skinny ties. My God, they were white. Clean-cut, short-haired, clear-eyed, and stubble-free, they started to freak me out after a page or two. Where were the bad boys? I’d seen Grease. Where was Kenickie? Some of this lot looked the same age as Kenickie—in other words, about thirty-eight—but there was nary a snarl and certainly not a leather jacket to be seen.

But that was all to the good. Every single one of these Midwich cuckoos was grinning like a maniac, so finding Tam’s gap-toothed gob would be a skoosh.

Except I scrutinised every single one from Larry Abbott to Bobby Zane and he wasn’t there. There was one boy with a space in his teeth, but his name was Luis Estrada and there was no way his crisp black curls and big brown eyes could have faded to what I had hauled up out the slough. There was one boy with a set of braces so sturdy they obscured his teeth, but then they’d have been torqueing the gap together, wouldn’t they?

Maybe he bought the ring secondhand, because he liked it. I considered the possibility for roughly three seconds. For one thing, the ring was too ugly. That wasn’t my opinion. It was a statement of objective fact. The BCSHS class ring was ugly like Cuento was flat. No one would wear one if they didn’t have to. And also everyone else in Cuento except me would know it was a class ring. And Cuento-ites of … I did a quick calculation … fifty years’ standing, would see it and ask him about it and know he had no right to it.

I was leafing desultorily through the rest of the yearbook as my mind wandered over the possibilities. Cheerleaders, Junior Red Cross, Varsity Band, Sophomore Metro League Champs. It was like reading the fifth book in a fantasy series that had no helpful website explaining anything. The pictures were clear though. Page after page of beehives and skinny ties ranged on benches, some smiling, some sombre. Some very sombre. The Future Homemakers of America looked properly like their soufflés had sunk. I turned the page to the smiling faces of the Future Farmers of America, much cheerier, then my hand stopped leafing, my eyes stopped seeing, and my lungs, briefly but completely, stopped breathing.

I let the page fall back and looked at the Homemakers again.

He was there.

Tam—our Tam—was there in the back row, between a girl in a fur-trimmed overcoat and a girl in a jacket with a big embroidered C on one breast. He had both his arms back as if he was giving the two of them a friendly hug and he was the only one in the whole three rows who was grinning. The gap in his teeth was there as clear as day and, as I looked back and forth between my printout of Roger’s Photo­shopped corpse-shot and the little face in the back row, all my doubts fell away.

I set to studying the names under the photo, aware that my pulse was racing. I was going to ID a murder victim.

But his name wasn’t there. There were nine girls as well as Tam on the back row and the names underneath were Patti, Linda, Maggie, Vera, Wanda, Mickie, Sallie, Gudrun, and Clarice. He wasn’t listed.

I turned a page, casting my eyes over the fun-loving scamps in the Latin Club—beaming smiles all round—and then the Future Nurses of America—faces like skelped arses and Tam in the back row again, arms around his neighbours to either side, face split with a grin like a pumpkin lantern and no name in the legend. Future Business Leaders and the Acapella Band were two bunches of girls and boys who had been caught mid-orgy if their pictures were to be believed, and there was no sign of Tam anywhere. But I caught one last glimpse of him among the girls who were destined to be librarians, mouths so pursed they could have been practising a collective “Ssssshhhhh!”

So. I sat back and gazed into the middle distance, wondering. Tam was a member of the class of 1968 and a Future Homemaker, Nurse, or possibly Librarian of America. How weird was that? For 1968? And what about Tam being in the class but having his picture missed out? How weird was that?

A nasty wriggling feeling was beginning to steal over me, starting at the back of my neck. Were Fur Collar and Big C and the rest of them in the Homemakers’ Club not smiling because Tam was there? Were they annoyed that they hadn’t managed to freeze him out? Were they just a big back-combed bunch of ’phobes? It would explain their expressions.

Or was I being unfair to girls born in 1950?

So what if I was? What kind of people were running the school who had let this happen? I flicked forward to where the faculty photos were laid out. Dale Dwight Johnson, the headmaster, straight from Mad Men, was flanked by a Dean of Girls and a Dean of Boys. I stuck my tongue out at both of them and turned to the so-called counsellors who, in my view, sucked at their jobs. And the school nurse had obviously just climbed out of the cuckoo’s nest for the photo op. Business, fine arts and foreign language, maths and music. They all gazed out at me so pleased with themselves, with such unwarranted smugness and pride, while a kid in their pastoral care was ostracised. Physical education … I stopped.

All the female teachers had been Mrs. Something up till now: Mrs. Salter, Mrs. Moon, Mrs. Grady. But here were the gym teachers: Miss Brand, Miss Jensen, Miss McNamara, and Miss Reinhardt (not pictured). I gazed at them. Did they know, this phalanx of strapping lesbians, that a poor lonely gay kid was kept out and cold-shouldered, when all he wanted to do was fit in and be accepted? I was glad Miss Reinhardt was too ashamed to be seen.

Although, as I flicked through the sciences and got to the librarians, bus drivers, and cafeteria staff, the number of unpictured individuals rose. There were only a few custodians in the group shot and half a dozen jannies lost forever, like they weren’t worth the effort. Like this was just a popularity contest and not an official record after all.

Then another thought occurred to me. Because this was an official record, wasn’t it? Oh not the Future Homemakers and the touchdown action shots. But a bit of this was a facebook. The origin story of actual Facebook was right here between these covers.

I flicked back to the end of the senior portraits again. And there it was. There was the name of the only student who did not have his picture included but had to have his name recorded officially just this once. Not Pictured it said in tiny writing. Thomas Oscar Shatner.

Bastards.

I clicked a few photos with my phone, slammed the book shut, and pedaled home.