Annabel - Kathleen Winter [90]
Now Gracie sat and circled the order number on a Panasonic sandwich griddle on sale for $16.99 in the Canadian Tire catalogue. “It says here it corrugates the bread and increases its surface area so a sandwich grills in half the normal time.”
“I don’t want,” Wayne said, “to be like Archie Broomfield and Carol Rich.” He had been looking at the undersides of moths that had alighted on the window outside, armoured and malevolent. The wings looked delicate but the mechanism that nourished and propelled the wings was ugly.
Wayne had dovetailed the edges of Gracie’s hope chest and made its floor of cedar to keep moths away from her pillowcases and a tablecloth her mother had edged in satin stitch. The hope chest was small, and the things in it were small, but he feared they held some sort of power he needed to guard against. He knew Gracie was buying silverware, one place setting at a time, from the Eaton’s catalogue, and that the name of the design was Sambonet.
There were times Gracie made him feel desire, like the time she had melted him and made him feel protective of her with one touch of her hand at the prom. The latest pills Dr. Lioukras had given him were cumulative: over time they had increased his muscle mass and succeeded in making him look like any other son of Croydon Harbour. His voice sounded like a young man’s voice, and he was stronger than a girl. He and Gracie looked, from the outside, like a couple.
Because Gracie wanted a home more than anything else, she came to his house when he was not working. She took him out for walks and she kissed him in the bushes. She had kissed many boys before, and she believed Wayne’s kisses were the kisses of a normal young man. There was nothing to tell her otherwise, but she had no choice but to sense that he was holding back.
“Don’t you want to make love to me?”
“Yes.” He did. When Gracie got close to him and he smelled her Evening in Paris perfume and felt how soft the skin was inside her wrists, and when she touched him with the hungry way she had, yes. It was when he was alone in his room, thinking about his life and where he wanted it to go, that he knew he did not love Gracie. She did not ignite him, though his physical body responded to the fact that she wanted him. This was not the same as being ignited through your electric and imaginative bodies, but a long time can go by in which two people remain together because of the fierce longing of one of them. A lifetime can go by, and he worried about this.
“I don’t want to be like Carol Rich and Archie Broomfield either,” Gracie said. “I don’t want to get pregnant, for one thing. And I’m going to make my own money. I’m going to take the paramedic course in Goose Bay. I’m going to do something useful. I’m going to drive a hundred miles an hour in an ambulance and carry people on stretchers and give emergency blood transfusions. I’m going to have my own job, my own paycheque, my own bank account.”
Was she telling him this so he would not be afraid of having to make enough money for both of them? While his classmates had chosen normal career paths, Wayne had continued to sell cod tongues, some fillets, and packages of Roland Shiwack’s shrimp. He sold these, gave tours, and cut wood for women whose husbands were on the trapline and whose sons had gone away to work. He knew this was a haphazard way to make a living. He did not know what else to do. How had his classmates been so certain about what they wanted to do after high school? To him the world seemed big and small at the same time. There was Croydon Harbour, with everything he knew, then there was the world outside Croydon Harbour, about which he knew nothing.