Free Larry's Party by Carol Shields Page B

from apples and lichen, like it’s from seaweed too. And bread, these great gigantic loaves just passed around and torn apart and eaten like that out of the hand, no butter or anything, just pure grainy bread and the breeze coming off the lake and all those stones buried under the water, out of sight, out of mind, gone forever, and women dancing on the sand with their arms around each other, singing too, or maybe just sitting quietly while the sun bobbed up, the stillness, the light on the water. And then the fucking traffic coming home - it was a nightmare, you can just imagine, and in this everlasting heat!
    Dot takes Ryan on her lap - her little Rye-Krisp, her little Ribena, her Mister Man, her Noodle-Doodle - and settles him against her peaceful chest.
    “So what were all these chicks so angry about?” Dorrie asks Midge. She can’t stand her sister-in-law, and the feeling is mutual.
    “Oh, God,” Midge shakes her head, and reaches for a pickled onion. “Don’t get me started.”
    And no one does. They talk about the heat instead, and the ragweed count, and whether or not Quebec should separate. They’re trying to keep on being a family, after all. Nothing real will ever get said out loud in this house, though Midge will bleat and blast, and Larry will prod and suggest. It doesn’t matter; Larry understood this years ago. Today his dad tells a joke he heard at the plant, a long story about a Newfie visiting Quebec and trying to buy some cod liver oil from a Frenchie. Dot Weller hums Ryan to sleep, and Dorrie Weller tells everyone how she’s found this place in the North End where you can purchase cleaning products at twenty percent off.
    Larry listens. This is how he’s learning about the world, exactly as everyone else does - from sideways comments over a lemon meringue pie, sudden bursts of comprehension or weird parallels that come curling out of the radio, out of a movie, off the pages of a newspaper, out of a joke - and his baffled self stands back and says: so this is how it works.
    You would have thought Larry’s folks would have turned themselves into a grief-hardened set of statuettes, but no. They’re moving, they’re breathing, they’re practicing rituals of their own tentative invention, and Larry’s sucking it up. His mother’s gorgeous bloom of guilt, his father’s stoic heart, his sister’s brilliant jets of anger, even the alternate sharpness and slack of his wife’s domestic habits - these burn around him, a ring of fluorescence, though the zone between such vividness and the plain familiar faces around the table seems too narrow to enter. He’s thirty years old, for Chrissake, old enough to know that he can’t know everything. All he wants is what he’s owed, what he’s lucky enough to find along the way. All he wants is to go on living and living until he’s a hundred years old and then he’ll lie down and die.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Larry’s Work 1981

    Most of Larry’s friends have had half a dozen jobs in their lives, and quite a few of the guys have suffered spells of unemployment in between. But Larry’s been lucky. He’s worked at Flowerfolks for twelve years now, ever since he completed his Floral Arts Diploma back in ’69
    Flowerfolks is a small chain with a reputation for friendly service and a quality product. Usually you can spot a Flowerfolks arrangement by its natural appearance. For instance, they don’t go in for bending stems into far-out shapes and positions, or for those Holly Hobby wreaths, et cetera, or weird combinations like, say, tulips and birds-of-paradise sticking out of the same arrangement. Even their Welcome-New-Baby floral offerings have a fresh earthy look to them. Larry says it makes him shudder just thinking about those styrofoam lamb shapes with pink and blue flowers poking out of their backs. Simplicity and integrity at a reasonable price - that’s what Flowerfolks has always stood for.
    Well, that’s changed overnight.
    All twelve Flowerfolks