The Footstop Café
The Footstop Café
Poulette Crosse
Copyright © Janine Cross, 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Editor: Michael Carroll
Designer: Erin Mallory
Printer: Webcom
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Crosse, Paulette
The footstop café / by Paulette Crosse.
ISBN 978-1-55002-716-7
I. Title.
PS8605.R68F66 2007 C813’.6 C2007-902050-X
1 2 3 4 5 11 10 09 08 07
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada
Printed on recycled paper
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To my children, again and always
Acknowledgements
Apparently, the English word crisis is translated by the Chinese with two little characters; one means “danger,” the other “opportunity.”
Many thanks to my editor, Michael Carroll, for seeing The Footstop Café through interesting times and persevering. Thanks also to Laurel Hickey for great support and friendship way back when. And thanks, too, to the book club at the North Vancouver District Public Library in Lynn Valley, and Olivia, who ran the club when I first started this novel, for enlightening me on how non-writers read books. As someone once said: “The universe is made of stories. Not atoms.” So I add: “God must therefore be a librarian.”
I don’t ever recall any accidents. We practically lived at the canyon. We just loved it down there, especially the Thirty Foot Pool. We respected that canyon and we knew exactly what we could do with it. Whenever there was any accidents down there, it was always the children from out of town or Vancouver.
— Peggy Hunt, daughter of one of the original pioneers of Lynn Valley
Chapter One
Karen Morton keeps her microwave in the bathroom. She does this because she’s afraid to get zapped by its radiation. The way she reasons it, she’s never in the bathroom while cooking and is therefore out of harm’s way. Before she hit upon this solution, whenever she used the microwave she could feel her ovaries writhing and shrinking somewhere in the vicinity of her kidneys, behind the bony flare of her pelvis, either side of the small of her back.
Her nine-year-old son Andy has inherited this terror of microwave radiation.
One evening while his mother is zapping a butternut squash for dinner, Andy has to defecate. It is the kind that can’t wait, the bloated-stomach kind that comes after eating porridge all day in an attempt to put muscle on a skinny frame.
A butternut squash takes approximately fifteen minutes to cook in the microwave; Andy can’t wait that long. He is desperate, but not desperate enough to risk cancer of the prostate by straining into the toilet alongside the microwave. (The microwave sits on a small, olive-coloured table that Karen purchased from the Salvation Army explicitly for this purpose.) Nor does he dare go into the bathroom to turn the microwave off — just standing before the activated device those scant few seconds, with his gonads right at radiation level, is a prospect that makes his wee hairless testicles shrivel.
Yet Andy has to go badly. He looks outside his bedroom window and scans the gloomy yard, then decides he also doesn’t want to risk Mrs. Baroudi seeing him crouch behind one of the rhododendrons that separates her yard from his. He needs a room, a room with a lock on it. The hall closet.
The hall closet has a lock because of Candice, who showers two to four times a day, depending whether it is a weekday or a weekend. With each shower, she uses a dozen or so towels to dry her budding body. Karen has installed a lock on the closet door in an attempt to reduce the massive laundry loads this shower fetish produces. Everyone in the house has a key to the door save Candice, a fact she resents as vocally as possible.
Andy needs something to poop in, a container of sorts. Preferably one with a lid, so he can whip the makeshift toilet outside and into the battered metal garbage can without someone smelling him out. He needs something like a margarine tub. Such a tub sits on his bookcase, where used batteries collect dust until his mother disposes of them.
A contraction grips his lower bowel. With a strangled gasp, he dumps the batteries out of the margarine tub and runs from his room. He slides to a stop outside the hall closet and pauses: Candice is in her room, listening to the radio and talking on her phone. Satisfied, Andy unlocks the closet, shuts himself in, and yanks down his pants.
There is something deeply gratifying — a monk-like contentedness — about producing a large, solid stool. Like everybody who’s ever spawned such a specimen, Andy feels the bigger his stool is, the more he has achieved.
In much the same way Dairy Queen employees fill cones with ice cream, he gently swirls the tub beneath him so the stool can fit completely inside. Through the tub’s yellow plastic he can feel the stool’s warmth. The stench is strong and worrisome — until now he he had no idea how much the water in a toilet bowl dampens such odours. Moving carefully in his crowded, dark quarters, he snaps the lid over the tub. Done. Relief.
Except ...
He forgot toilet paper! Panic descends upon him, the cold, clammy panic he feels during gym class as he waits, as if on a firing squad, to be chosen last again