Lucy's Launderette. Betsy Burke
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phalluses erected, then ordering me out to slip and slide through the slush to the bakery to get her daily ration of a couple dozen pastries; then the dark nights of insomnia, the Viking and her conquests sloshing and moaning in the waterbed next door, and me, with the pillow over my head trying not to listen.
And then one morning, I looked out my window, and the sun was shining. Not that brittle, illusive midwinter sun, but the sun you can feel when you’ve turned the corner into spring, the warming hardworking sun. I made myself a cappuccino and sat down to enjoy it at the kitchen table, thinking, good, now the snow is melting, the ground is showing through, the winter is finally over. And then the phone rang.
“Lucy.” It was my father.
“Hi, Dad. How’re things?”
“It’s Jeremy.” Jeremy was my father’s father. My favorite grandfather.
“What about Jeremy?”
“He’s dead.” My father’s tone was odd, like Jeremy deserved what he got.
I couldn’t speak and when enough silence had gone by, my father said, “They tell me he was doing at least a hundred on his Harley. He went into a ravine up the coast. The funeral’s the day after tomorrow.”
“Will you be there?” I asked.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Your prince could show up anytime, anywhere.” In which case it was going to be a beautiful day for a funeral. Going on the principle that our mothers can be right from time to time, I decided that if my prince was going to be there, I was going to make sure he didn’t miss me. I look good in black, and thanks to my old university friend, Sky Robertson, I had the clothes.
Sky manages the Retro Metro Boutique for the owner, Max Kinghorn. Max lives in Seattle and is hardly ever there, so Sky has a free hand.
She and I share the same tastes in a lot of things, especially clothing. We have other worlds in our heads. One of them is black-and-white, with sleek women in well-tailored suits or dresses cut on the bias, men in tuxedos looking as though they were born in them and not jerking and straining as if they were dressed in straitjackets. In our fantasy world, everyone gets to smoke, sip martinis and live in gleamingly smooth Art Deco high-rise apartments with views of bustling but not yet ruined cities glittering below. In our dreams.
Sky really pushes the Metro chic, the tough but sexy businesswoman. I think she pushes it too far. She doesn’t want to be like her mother. Sky’s mother went to Woodstock and spent the rest of her life paying for it. Both Sky and her name are souvenirs from those three days of music and muck.
Sky saves nice pieces that she knows will fit me, like the clothes I wore that day to the funeral. It was a little fifties number, maybe worn once by its original owner, a black wool crepe suit, jacket with three-quarter sleeves and velvet collar and cuffs, tightish skirt with a little kick pleat at the back. Jeremy would have approved of the black fishnet stockings and stiletto heels.
The day of the funeral, I got dressed, then went into the bathroom to work on my hair. Every day is a bad hair day for me because my hair is red, and curly, and if I’m not careful with it, it ends up looking like a bush. I keep it pruned to shoulder length and with enough gel and mousse and whatnot, I can make it cooperate.
Anyway, the bathroom door was open and the Viking strode in and out, amused by me, a sneering little smile creeping into one corner of her mouth. There are women who undress to make a good impression and women who cover up every inch of themselves to make a good impression. I considered myself to be in the second category, believing that if I were five foot eleven with mile-long gleaming sinewy bronze limbs I, too, would stride around the house naked, planning my next bone-crunching assault on the male population.
Anna depressed me. She reminded me of how much dieting, depilation and general suffering I had to go through to make myself desirable. I consoled myself with the fact that she still couldn’t put together a proper English sentence, although she’d been in Canada for over two years. She had something to do with sports development in the physical education department at the university, but she’d never specified which sport, or how it was being developed. I had a few ideas though.
When I was ready, I called a cab. It was an extravagance, and I knew it, but I was going to remember Jeremy in style. I was going to take a little break from my miserable, penny-pinching daily life. When I got there, I paid the cabby, stood up straight, saying to myself, I am beautiful, I am beautiful, and walked through the cemetery gates. I must have looked quite chic until I hit the patch of snowy grass and my stiletto heels sank deep into the wet earth. I had to creep on tiptoes the rest of the way. By then, Jeremy’s death had become a reality and any attempt at being beautiful and finding the prince my mother was always yattering about, was going to be marred by the mascara streaming down my face. I missed the old scoundrel and couldn’t stop blubbering like a baby when the moment of truth came.
At the graveside, there were quite a few people to see him off on his last big ride, so to speak. A number of women, all different types and ages, old girlfriends. A few older men in very natty suits standing at a distance. His real pals clustered close around the hole to watch the glittering heap of wrecked metal be lowered into the ground.
His friends had names tattooed on their fat, hairy, leather-bound arms, names like Spike, Snake, Muncher and Brewbelly. Instead of tossing flowers, they guzzled beer from tins, crushed and tossed the empties onto the corpse of the Harley, and belched with a lot of commitment and respect. A biker’s ten-gun salute.
Jeremy’s remains, on the other hand, had already been cremated. As far as I knew, there was no will, but his buddies knew how he wanted it all to be done. They were paying for the funeral.
My parents were there, too, my father being his only child, or at least the only legally recognized child. But they had no intention of coming nearer or joining the boozy group. They lurked behind some poplar trees, pretending to be part of someone else’s interment a few yards away. From time to time, they sneaked distressed peeks in the direction of our group of geriatric rabble-rousers, then looked away before anyone could catch them at it.
My father is terminally conservative. He’s the principal of Cedar Narrows Senior Secondary School, wears sock suspenders, and has spent most of his life in a state of mortification and denial over his biker dad. If he’d been born later, he would have been one of those kids that tries to get a divorce from their parents. I gather his mother, my grandmother, was a biker babe. She abandoned them, found a bigger, badder man with a bigger, badder machine and ran off, leaving Jeremy to look after a newborn baby.
Jeremy was pretty amazing. He managed to raise my father and make a life for himself. He had a little income from his Laundromat business and so could devote himself exclusively to his son, and the gang on weekends and summer holidays.
And my father actually did okay until he hit thirteen and decided he didn’t want to be who he was anymore. He started hanging out with the leaky-pen crowd at school, got religion, one of the noisier ones that involves near-drowning in a baptismal font the size of an Olympic pool, and became mortally tedious.
He met my mother at a church social. The joke was on him though. My mother, a resourceful woman at heart, was there under false pretenses, just trying things out, trolling different waters looking for a man. Over the years, she’s been able to mess my father up a bit, making him a little less respectable. But she never really took to Jeremy, who kept making passes and lewd propositions.
My parents live in the ’burbs. My mother’s idea of an orgasm is making Rice Krispie squares, vacuuming the beige wall-to-wall carpet and securing the plastic covers on the living room furniture. My father’s is finding all his pens and pencils lying exactly the way he left them. He’s a control freak. He goes to Mars if anybody moves his pens and pencils.
It wasn’t that my father hated Jeremy. He just didn’t know what to do with him. I adored Jeremy because he had taught me how life could be exciting in unexpected ways. He was always ready to see the funny side of things and never too interested in control. And when I started going to university, before I had an