Happiness of Fish by Fred Armstrong Page A

back down the hall in herlong housecoat and red-top grey work socks. Through the rest of the day she avoided meeting his eyes. Gerry had no idea grey Stanfield Y-fronts were so sinfully disturbing, but, out of respect for her sensibilities, he wore old sweatpants and a T-shirt to make the coffee for the rest of the holidays.
    In any event, Gretchen and Duane and the kids have been herded onto one plane, and a couple of days later Tanya left on another. When she went she took a down-filled peaked cap with knitted earflaps that had somehow followed Gerry since he had worked in Labrador.
    â€œYou never wear it,” she said.
    â€œWho would?” Gerry asked. The hat had been a joke, presented to him at a Christmas party where everyone exchanged gifts under ten dollars. There was a knitted “willy warmer” with it. He’d modelled that for Patricia. They were in one of their patches of getting along at the time. It was a lot too big.
    â€œIt’s nice to know you didn’t have a personal fitting,” she said as they climbed into bed. “Maybe you’ll grow into it.”
    â€œI believe I am right now,” Gerry said. “See what you think.”
    â€œHmmm...”
    However, later on, she vetoed the hat. “It lowers your IQ by thirty points,” she said when he proposed to wear it to go snowmobiling. “You look like the Mackenzie Brothers,
Great White North
.”
    Gerry drives the Christmas tree to the park and tosses it on the pile. It lands with a dead rustle. Around the main pile of trees, some people have dumped theirs at a distance. He wonders if they feel they’re unworthy of the main heap, or if they’re shy. Some of the set-apart trees are wrapped in those giant, plastic tree condoms that are supposed to contain the shed needles. Maybe their fastidious owners expect special treatment for their trees, designer chipping.
    Gerry gets back in the Honda and heads for the mall.
    A little later that morning, Gerry sits in the mall food court, drinking Tim Hortons coffee and eating an apple fritter. The sugar sticks to his fingers like candy leper scales. The too-hot paper cup melts it into a thin suburban varnish, a tacky morning shine he’s not displeased with.
    The tall, accordion-stalked cherry picker that the mall staff uses to reach the ceiling putters around. It purrs electrically through the pinball-machine décor of the food court. The maintenance people are taking down the last of the big hanging Christmas decorations. The mall is getting busier. Eventually the machine whirrs off to hide, kneeling in an alcove, a depressed, agoraphobic, electric giraffe.
    Gerry eats his fritter and looks around at people packing away the doughnuts and oily wafers of hash browns. They treat their arteries to three-egg breakfasts. In a morning mall you can pretend to be grownup enough to eat anything with impunity.
    In the food court
, Gerry writes in his Chinese notebook,
the pleasures are all guilty
.
    Gerry is drowning some guilt of his own in apple fritter sweetness. Walking to the food court through the mall, he has dodged an old drinking buddy. He spotted the man, and the woman who looks after him, and angled behind a pillar, keeping a mall-width between them. The man’s name is Paul. He wears pastel, elastic-waisted jogging suits and sneakers with Velcro fasteners because other people dress him now. There is an egg-sized dent, edged with shiny white scar, in the side of his head. It shows through the prison haircut that Paul has grown back since they whipped him into hospital to make the dent and scar, to remove the tumour and pull down the shades in his eyes.
    The woman with Paul is his daughter. Her name is March, and Gerry supposes she must be in her late forties now. She leads Paul around the mall with a competent hand on his elbow. Gerry recalls that March is a potter. She has practical hands. On this sunny Saturday, under the skylights, she moulds their