As they enter the Okanagan, Matt complains to Kayla that when he was a kid his parents always drove right by Teeny Town.
“You’re almost thirty,” Kayla says. “I can’t believe that still bugs you.”
“The sign made me think of it. And besides, it wasn’t just Teeny Town,” Matt says. “Even though I begged, my parents wouldn’t stop at the fruit stand with the petting zoo, or the place with the bumper boats, or even the go-kart track.”
“Poor thing. Pull into Teeny Town if you want,” Kayla offers.
“Really? Now?”
“Sure. I don’t want you complaining about roadside attractions after we’re married.”
“Oh babe—you won’t regret this.”
Matt and Kayla met in Banff at the hotel where Matt was the handyman, and where Kayla worked as a summer front desk clerk. At the end of four months—hiking every day off, sleeping in the same bed every night—they got engaged, quit their jobs, and are now on what Kayla calls their Meet the Fockers tour. Matt says they can overnight in Penticton where his parents have the largest cabin on the lake. “My dad is a big show-off,” Matt has told Kayla. “He wants the celebrity-size cabin, the fastest boat, and the most successful son.”
After Penticton, the plan is to stop briefly in Vancouver to make sure Kayla is set up at the University of British Columbia for the upcoming term at grad school, and then carry on for a weekend on Vancouver Island, where Kayla’s mom lives in a double-wide trailer with two tabby cats and a hedgehog. “My mom and your dad probably shouldn’t sit too close at the wedding,” Kayla said. “My mom doesn’t do show-offs.”
More than seating at the wedding (no date has been finalized but Kayla is hoping for sometime next spring), Kayla has a few other concerns regarding her mother. For instance, she hasn’t told her mother about the age difference—that she is eight years younger than Matt. That’s something her mother, perpetually negative about men and relationships and life in general, could find upsetting. But Kayla is sure that once her mother meets Matt, and Matt applies his charm, everything will run smoothly. Then Kayla will mention the age difference.
Matt brakes, steers the car between the brick posts, each topped by a stone rabbit mid-prance on its hind legs, that signal the entrance to Teeny Town. There’s only one other car—a minivan—in the parking lot, and the building appears to be more of a 1960s urban bungalow than a roadside attraction.
“Doesn’t look like much,” Kayla says. “And those rabbits aren’t teeny. They’re bigger than real rabbits.”
“Trust me,” Matt says.
The front door is propped open with a worn moccasin-style slipper. Straight ahead, a thin elderly woman stands behind a long empty desk. Her grey hair is done in stiff roller-shaped curls, and she wears a frilled blouse tucked into high-waisted jeans. Behind her, in the kitchen, an old man sits at the table, a newspaper spread out before him. He has one thumb looped through his suspender, and he licks the other thumb each time he uses it to turn the page of the newspaper. Kayla flips through the pamphlet on the desk so she doesn’t have to watch the licking.
“Busy day?” Matt asks the woman as he pulls his wallet from his back pocket.
“Twenty dollars each,” she says. “There’s a mom and her kid already touring the exhibit.”
“This brochure says ten dollars per person,” Kayla says.
“No big deal,” Matt whispers into Kayla’s hair. “We’re here for miniatures, not a bargain. And it looks like these folks could use the money.”
He puts forty dollars on the desk, slips his hand under Kayla’s arm. Then he gently pulls her through the living room, down a short flight of stairs, and toward the “start” poster, which is above the back door of the house.
Matt pushes open the door and they step into a gravelled compound of small wood huts, like sheds, arranged in a semicircle. The huts are identical, except one has a ladder and a lookout fort attached to it. Matt heads for the first hut on the right.
“Wait—don’t I get a vote for which one we see first?” Kayla asks, hustling to keep up with Matt.
“There’s an order to these places,” Matt says.
“I thought you’d never been to any.”
“I haven’t,” Matt says. “Bear with my childhood fantasy.”
“Okay—but it’s not like there are numbers, or even signs.”
“Listen to your inner GPS for roadside attractions,” Matt says, closing his eyes, crossing his hands over his chest.
Kayla laughs, says, “I must not have been outfitted with an inner GPS.”
A model train set, laid out on top of a relief map of Canada takes up most of the first hut. Trains loaded with fish circle around the Maritimes. Trains loaded with wheat circle the prairies. And a train loaded with skiers, some of whom have fallen stiffly on their plastic sides, rattles its way through the Rocky Mountains. There’s a giant mountain on the west coast.
“That’s not a Canadian mountain,” Kayla says. “That’s the Matterhorn.”
“And your point is?” Matt asks.
“Misrepresentation.”
“There you go. Thanks to Teeny Town you’ve got a topic for your paper when you go back to university.”
“It’s not a paper—it’s a thesis.”
“Who knew? I’m just a handyman.”
Kayla is glad that, as much as she loves Matt, they won’t be living together for at least the first part of the school year. She will have time to get her thesis started while he goes north to work as a welder. A welder! A bus driver, a car mechanic, a heavy equipment operator… even a chef at an Italian restaurant in Jasper—all past jobs he has told her about. She is enamoured by the amount of experience he has packed into his extra eight years of living.
The only light in the train hut is a hooded fluorescent—directly over the train set, so it takes a few seconds for Kayla to notice the little girl and her mom standing in front of the display. They are both fair-skinned—the girl is so fair that she almost glows in the light of the hut. The mom is heavy-set—not fat, but plain heavy from the top of her perspiring brow to her swelling ankles.
“Look, press this button,” she says.
The girl pushes the button and the train whistle sounds.
“My turn,” Matt says, sliding his arm in front of the girl and pushing the red whistle-button.
“You’re too old,” the girl says.
Matt gives her an exaggerated look of shock, says, “I’m only ten years old.”
The girl swats him on the arm. “Liar!”
“You’re a smart one,” Matt says.
Matt and the girl take turns pushing the train whistle. Kayla hopes the rest of the huts aren’t as irritating.
Once they are all outside the train hut, the little girl steps in front of Matt, stops, stares at him. She tucks her shoulder-length red hair behind her ear in a thoughtful way. It makes her seem older than she is.
“You’ve got another admirer, Matt,” Kayla says, taking his hand.
It seems that Matt picks up admirers everywhere. The other staff at the hotel, tourists, teenagers hanging out beside the river, seniors in coffee shops. He makes people feel good. When Kayla arrived in Banff, Matt was the first person to help her find her room at the staff residence, to show her where to put a few groceries, to ask about her life. Kayla had surprised herself by telling him, at that very first meeting, about how she had been dumped by her boyfriend on the last day of exams, how her marks hadn’t been quite high enough to get the provincial scholarship for the upcoming year at grad school, how she had lied and told her mother that she did get the scholarship. Matt had made her feel like things would work out. So far, he was right—things were working out. After all, she is engaged to be married. And Matt, her unbelievably sweet fiancé, has promised to help her with money for school.
“Are you someone’s dad?” the girl asks Matt.
“Of course,” Matt says earnestly. “I have over a hundred children.”
“You’re lying again,” the girl says.
“He’s just kidding,” Kayla says.
“Kidding is lying,” the girl says.
“That’s enough, Chelsea,” the mother reprimands. “Sorry,” she says to Matt. “She’s at that bossy age.”
“No problem,” Matt says. “We’re friends. Aren’t we, Chelsea?”
“No,” Chelsea says.
“Nothing gets by Chelsea,” Matt says. “Must be good parenting.”
Chelsea’s mother blushes. She says, “I’m just divorced. This is our first summer vacation as a twosome.” Then she looks around, says, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
“You probably need to talk about it,” Matt says.
Kayla recognizes this as one of Matt’s favourite lines. He is prepared to listen. He brings people out, but she hopes they won’t have to sit down beside a hut and hear this sweaty woman’s life story. She seems a bit boring.
The mother doesn’t offer any more information, and Matt says, “I mean it. I think Chelsea is smart. Maybe smarter than beautiful Kayla here, and Kayla is the smartest person I know.” Matt places his hand on the woman’s shoulder for a moment and then strolls on to the next hut. He stoops through the doorway, with Kayla, Chelsea, and Chelsea’s mother following him. When her eyes adjust to the lack of light, Kayla sees dolls. Rows and shadowy rows of big, baby-size dolls, floor to ceiling. All behind glass.
“Check it out,” Matt says. “Now that’s a collection.”
“All Caucasian,” Kayla says. “Typical.”
“You’re Caucasian,” Matt says.
“I don’t claim to represent everyone,” Kayla says.
“Neither does Teeny Town,” Matt says.
Chelsea pushes the interactive button. An eerie soundtrack of children laughing begins.
Chelsea grabs her mother’s arm and starts to cry. The mother says, “I know. These dolls aren’t teeny at all. That’s what makes them creepy.”
“The whole place is creepy,” Chelsea sobs.
After the doll hut, the mother and Chelsea apply sunscreen. The sun is directly overhead and there is no shade outside the huts. Chelsea’s mother says that they are heading back to the bungalow to see if the old couple will give them a drink of water. Kayla feels the sun pounding off the gravel, feels the sweat soaking through her tank top.
“Ready for the next hut?” Matt asks her.
“Ready to leave,” she says.
Matt clutches his hands to his chest. “Where’s the love?”
“Overshadowed by my sense of cultural awareness and good taste.”
Matt kisses her on the cheek, says, “It’s just for fun.”
The next hut has a frontier theme. A disproportionately large chuckwagon is parked in the middle of a herd of buffalo.
“Check out the Indians,” Matt says, pointing to a hilltop where a number of war-painted figures are propped. “Can I say ‘Indians’?”
Kayla surveys the crouching Indians, the straight-backed cowboy dolls—all the usual ahistorical portrayals she’s learned about in school—lined up in one disproportional diorama. And then she spots, in one of the hills, a dinosaur. A plastic stegosaurus, small—even smaller than the toy buffalo, and tucked into the hillside, presumably as a visual perk for the studious observer.
“This is horrifying,” Kayla says.
“I’m going to say ‘Indians,’” Matt says.
“How does this get by anyone?” Kayla asks.
“Not everyone is looking for the same things as you, professor.”
A ladder outside the frontier hut leads up the exterior wall of the hut and into the air for several feet before reaching a small fort. Kayla follows Matt, his long legs skipping every second rung. At the top, there’s a waist-high wood wall around the edges, and graffiti—racist scrawl, swears, and rudimentary sketches of genitals.
“Guess the owners can’t make it up the ladder to clean this,” Matt says.
“The owners should be arrested for socio-cultural-geological misrepresentation,” Kayla says.
“They’re just trying to make a living.”
The fort overlooks the parking lot. Kayla watches Chelsea and her mom cross the lot to their minivan. The mom grabs two bottled waters from the back of the van, leading Kayla to assume that the old people didn’t give them any water. The mother settles Chelsea in the back seat, then gets into the driver’s seat. Gravel crunches as the minivan moves out of the lot and picks up speed to join the highway.
“Looks like we have the frontier all to ourselves,” Matt says, putting his arm around Kayla. He cups his hand over her breast. Kisses her.
“You have got to be kidding,” Kayla says.
“Nope,” Matt says. He slides against her cut-offs, says, “Missy, there ain’t nothing Teeny Town about what’s in my pants right now.”
“No way,” Kayla says, pushing him away. “That’s not remotely funny.”
“Babe,” Matt says. “Carpe diem. That’s Latin for seize the day… but I’m sure you know that.”
“Stop with the ‘babe’ stuff,” Kayla says, backing away from him. “It has always bugged me. It’s demeaning.”
“Done. No more ‘babe.’ You could have told me that, like, three months ago.”
Matt closes his eyes, spreads his arms wide for a hug.
“Thank you,” Kayla says, as she starts down the ladder.
After a silent visit to the hut with northern Canadians building Lego inukshuks and sugar cube igloos, and to the hut with the rotating green felt platform topped with the aluminum Royal Canadian Mounted Police on their musical ride, Kayla and Matt head for the parking lot. They have to exit through the bungalow, where the old couple are sitting across the table from each other, having tea.
“Enjoy your tea,” Matt says.
“We’ve got postcards,” the woman calls out. “Two dollars apiece. You can send a note to your friends.”
“I’ve already got one from a previous visit,” Matt says.
Kayla looks at his calm expression. No hint of a lie. She marvels at his ability to tell a story when the need arises. Matt glances at Kayla; Kayla mouths, “What previous visit?” and gives him a conspiratorial wink.
“I thought you looked familiar,” the woman says. “Maybe last summer? About the same time of year?”
Kayla almost laughs out loud because there’s Matt—caught in one of his white lies. Matt stands perfectly still for a moment, his head slightly tilted as though he’s confused, then turns to the woman, says, “Now that I think about it, I was at another place along this stretch. So, in fact, I could use a postcard.” He puts two dollars on the counter and takes a postcard off the rack. Kayla leans over for a glance at the fuzzy image of a giant stone rabbit prancing.
The man in suspenders says, “I did the words, she took the photo.”
Kayla reads “World’s Greatest Exhibition” at the bottom of the card.
“Well, when you two tire of running this place you could start a postcard business,” Matt says.
The woman beams, “You think so?”
Matt says, “I know so.”
At the car, Matt opens the hatchback, tosses the postcard onto the mat, and pulls the cooler towards him. He tugs off the lid and takes out a can of beer. “Want one?” he asks.
Kayla shakes her head no.
Matt pops the tab on his beer, takes a swig.
“Whooee,” he says, holding the can in the air. “Here’s to Teeny Town.”
Kayla watches as he chugs the rest of the beer. Finally, he takes the empty can away from his mouth. She puts her hands on her hips, says, “Did we really just stop here for sex? Was that your plan? I feel like you had a plan.”
“Nothing gets by you university types,” Matt says. He squeezes the beer can and tosses it in the cooler, closes the lid with a jerk. “Kayla, no, I did not want to come here for sex in a lousy fake fort. I wanted to see Teeny Town. Okay? I didn’t know you were going to bring your piss-ass political correctness through it all.”
Matt slams the hatch, gets in the driver’s seat. Kayla watches a few cars roar by on the highway. She has never seen Matt this irritated before; the whole summer he has rarely even shown a ripple in his personality, but he is right—she has been pissy. She needs to lighten up. Let stuff go. What kind of road trip, let alone marriage, are they going to have if she picks on every single misrepresentation?
“Hop in, babe,” Matt calls. “We’ll talk it out.”
He seems happy again. Yes, talking it out is exactly what they should do. Kayla gets in the car, closes the door. Matt turns over the engine. Kayla buckles her seat belt. Matt pats her reassuringly on the knee as the car starts to roll forward and the doors automatically lock with a faint thunk.