The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [9]
“Goddam hot water spout!” shouted Gloria.
Steve woke up from his reverie. “What about it?”
“It’s not powerful enough to blast your blood from the nooks and cracks in the cheese. And now the cheese is starting to get squishy.”
Steve turned the faucet to cold. “Rinse it quickly, then let’s put it in the freezer for a few minutes. When it comes out, we can scrape away the squishy outer layer of cheese, and the bloody bits with it.” Steve flared his nostrils. “I think the Triscuits are done. We have barely enough cheese to cover them.”
Gloria felt a harp’s gentle glissando of love for her husband. It swelled from nowhere; it was unexpected. She decided not to battle for the next five minutes. “I think I’ll change gears from Scotch to gin,” she said.
“You do that, baby. Hey, check it out—we’ve got pickles in the fridge door shelf—two of them. There’s our vegetable. I think we’ve nailed all four food groups.”
Bethany
I love Glove Pond.
Steve and Gloria’s lives are so small. I can’t believe how small life can become. I sit on the bus and the world becomes as small as the dot at the end of this sentence. And then I wake up, as if from a spell, and look out the windows and see that while I’ve been obsessing about how my mother threw out my old cosmetics, the rest of the human race has been out there designing microchips and collecting money for orphans in faraway lands.
I think I need to see more of the world. I’ve only ever been to Seattle twice, and Banff once. Last year I went to see this lame death-metal band over in Victoria, but Victoria doesn’t count. Europe’s been on my mind lately. I go online and concoct dream tours of London and Paris, which is a total escapist girly thing to do, and it’s kind of embarrassing—but I want to go somewhere some day!
God, it’s reached the point where I look at my shadow, and it feels like a ball and chain anchoring me to this stupid store in this stupid suburb in this stupid new century. My question of the day is, “What if my shadow became unattached from my body? What if one day I went one way and it went the other?” Wouldn’t that be strange— if my shadow moved off to some other place and began leading a separate life—if it got its own apartment and a job? Maybe it’d shack up with those hitchhiking souls who’ve left their owners’ bodies. Maybe they’d have a way better time than they ever did being stuck to us. We’d try to instigate legal proceedings to make them come back to us, but no way, José.
Today’s big news is that I swiped a pack of Wrigley’s Orbit White chewing gum from the rack up front and then spent the morning chewing every piece, one by one, placing the resulting gum wads underneath the Bic Soft-Grip display racks. Talk about life on the edge. And let’s be brutally honest here: can gum actually whiten your teeth? Kyle’s teeth used to be yellow. That was before you started working at Shtooples. And then one week we all noticed his teeth were bleached paper white, and instead of everybody razzing him, they all went out and got white teeth too.
Sheepy-weepies.
Does anybody have off-white teeth these days?
Oh, and before lunch these two gay guys came in to buy price stickers for their garage sale, and they went for the expensive ones with little strings and grommetted string holes. I got their address because if they take that much care, they probably have some pretty good stuff.
Back to you.
Who’s Joan? And even if you’ve had fifty jobs, you seem like you could do better than working here. And you mentioned a car crash way back. Who was in it? What happened? Funny how I can ask you these questions on paper but not to your face. BTW, it’s fun pretending I don’t know all this stuff about you. Are you getting off on it as well? Let’s keep it this way. It keeps life interesting.
Five minutes later: Kayla came in and asked me the strangest question.