The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [49]
She shivered and looked at her feet, where there lay a Halloween residue of blown-up pumpkin chunks, dead fireworks and candy wrappers. She thought about her new makeup and the way she looked tonight. She thought of how rare it is that we catch glimpses of ourselves in mirrors—usually in public spaces—and see ourselves first as strangers see us. Then, upon recognizing ourselves, we’re back to being stuck inside our bodies again, and back to having just a fuzzy sense of our being.
She carried on tracking the footprints until she lost them in a thicket of weeds.
Which way should I go?
Damn—it’s that interior voice again, never shutting up.
She strained to hear Steve and Gloria, but all she heard was an electrical humming sound. She looked up and saw transformers atop the utility poles. She had never noticed transformers before, but now she saw that they were as pervasive in the urban world as street lights, parked cars and trees. Why are they everywhere? Aside from simply being called transformers, what do they actually do? What do they transform? How do they do it?
She stopped and huffed out a breath, and it hung there in the cold as though in a museum’s showcase. She was cold.
And then she heard what sounded like small drums beating a few backyards over. In spite of the chill, she went to investigate. Peering over the fence in a neighbour’s yard, she saw Steve and Gloria under the moonlight, stealing armloads of plastic children’s toys—a Fisher-Price plastic scooter, a hula hoop, a red plastic pony-shaped rocking toy and other coloured vinyl forms she couldn’t make out. They were so loaded down with stolen swag that in silhouette they resembled deformed Christmas trees.
Brittany ducked behind a shed as the couple began heading back to their own house. The plastic toys, bouncing against each other, sounded like bamboo wind chimes. It was a pretty sound, blameless and kind.
Brittany followed. At the back door, Steve removed a key, and he and Gloria took the load of stolen toys into the basement. This was her chance to get back into the house unnoticed. She darted back to sit beside Kyle.
Steve and Gloria ever so casually came into the dining room. “The soy sauce was a little bit hard to find,” said Gloria, “But voilà!” With the air of someone producing difficult-to-obtain food—fugu livers, say, or absinthe—she dropped a six-ounce bottle of La Choy soy sauce on the table, a sauce so old that it had turned solid inside the bottle.
“Soy sauce. I hope the food hasn’t gone cold.”
Glove Pond
Steve and Gloria had hastily grabbed a series of sweaters and overcoats from the alcove beside the rear kitchen door and were trying to don gardening gloves caked with brittle summer dirt.
“Bloody guests—they’re never anything but trouble. First they arrive, and then they sit there and eat your food.”
“ You invited them. And it’s been so many years now without guests.”
“Well, I had to invite them. You know how interdepartmental politics are. Everything was going just fine until that young maverick, Fraser, from Humanities brought in his ergonomically correct Balans chair to meetings. I’ve been out of kilter ever since. And then I turn around, blink, and suddenly I’m railroaded into having this Falconcrest idiot here for dinner.”
“Balans chairs? Those are those chairs with no backs and all the pressure is on your knee—”
“Yes, yes.”
“I saw a PBS documentary on them. They’ll soon be replacing every chair on earth.”
“Wretched things. God, I hate the present.”
They stepped out into their backyard, the frost-covered lawn altering the night air in a way that made Steve feel as if all sounds were moving away from his ears.
Gloria asked, “What are we going to do now?”
“Same thing as last time.”
“Last time we did this it was summer. I’m cold.”
“So