The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [37]
“You poor thing,” said Gloria. “Have a seat.”
Gloria pulled up a guest tuffet beside her chair, a chunky silk bonbon. “Let’s put some makeup on you right now, young lady. Makeup is the answer to your problems.”
“Makeup? I never wear makeup.”
“Well, from now on you will. Your unmodified eyes remind me of newly born pink mice, and, my dear, I think you have approximately one-third of a pimple near the corner of your nose.”
“That’s Helen.”
“You name your pimples?”
“This one I do. Helen is this pimple that migrates around my face but never quite leaves.”
“My dear, Helen must die.”
“I don’t understand makeup, Gloria—why wear it at all? Isn’t it dishonest?”
“My dear, the reason we wear makeup is to prevent the world from seeing what we’re like underneath.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong with that?” Gloria was in the midst of swishing about a small sand dune of face powder in a cerise lacquered box. “My dear, if you allow your feelings to be exposed, people will hurt you with them.They will use your feelings against you. Something once private and sacred to you will be transformed into a weapon. Something precious will be damaged. You will experience pain.”
Brittany looked sombre.
“Now, may I put some powder on your forehead?” Gloria asked.
“Yes.”
Roger
Not the best day.
This morning I had one of those from-hell wake-ups where all you can think of is fear and loss and the people you’ve hurt and all the damage you’ve done. You put your hand out from under the sheets and the air is cold. It’s like not wanting to be born. And then, finally, your head can’t stand lying there thinking any more, so you jump up and run to the bathroom and put your head under the shower’s jet, hoping it will fuzz out the feelings, but instead there’s only a tiny amount of diversion.
I get older. I grow old. Somebody starts to tell me about their dreams, and I get so bored I have to escape. I flee to the craft superstore down the street from the hardware superstore, down the parkway from the office superstore. I wander its aisles, looking for the seed of an idea to help me escape from myself—I walk past artificial lilies and unpainted birdhouses and crewel kits that allow me to make images of koi swimming in Tokyo ponds. And then, in the scrapbooking aisle, I see 790 sticker packs with little rainbows and unicorns that say DREAMS CAN COME TRUE! and it makes me want to cry the way we feed nonsense crap like this to kids, who are going to inherit a century of ugly wars started by people who died long ago, but who were sick and damaged enough to transmit their hatred down through the centuries. Dreams don’t come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised. Dreams end up dealing meth in a booth at the back of the Olive Garden. Dreams choke to death on bay leaves. Dreams get spleen cancer.
So there you have it—that’s been my day until now. The Dell shipment got stuck at customs and won’t be arriving until tomorrow, so I’m going to have a vodka snack and pretend to help customers in the office furniture department. Then I’ll probably go through the aisles and look at all the plastic crap we sell and wonder about the chemicals in it, and what leftovers were flushed into the water system during manufacturing. I sometimes get the feeling that we’re having full-time one-on-one unprotected sex with the twenty-first century, exchanging fluids with the era: antibiotics, swimming pool chlorine, long-chain molecules, gas fumes, new car smell—all of it one great big condom-free involuntary love-in.
Roger
A half-hour later: Pete is away this afternoon, so we’re all slacking off like crazy. We drew straws to see who works the till, and Kyle lost. I went down the road and bought a bottle of rotgut vodka and am going to work on Glove Pond in the loading bay. It’s warm as long as you’re not in the wind.
R.
Glove Pond: Kyle
Steve and Gloria were psychic abortions. Steve’s hour-long exegesis of his five grotesque, directionless and archaic