Grandpa and Baby Go to the Mall

Earl Fowler

Scene 1

It was a hot day in the city, the kind that makes you feel like you’re melting into the sidewalk, but you’re too tired to care. The kind where, to quote the great Raymond Chandler, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

And was about to.

My name is Marlowe. But that was in another life, flickering somewhere in the heartland like the streetlamps of the tract housing out here by the mall. Now they call me Grandpa. Gramps. Papa. Zeyde. Dada. Nonno. It’s all the same to me.

I’d been called out on a mall babysitting assignment while my wife and daughter shopped their brains out. The little guy was asleep. Me, I was wondering what it’d be like to be somewhere else. Then she walked in.

Pointed two 38s at me. She also had a gun.

Spotted the pram. Came straight for me, headlights blazing. Somewhere in the distance, a siren.

She was the kind of dame who made you want to forget your name, forget your life, maybe even forget your morals — if you had any left after years in the grandpa business. She wore a tight dress, the kind that left no room for secrets, but plenty of room for trouble. Her legs were as long as a summer night and her eyes — those eyes — looked like they’d seen things. Things she thought maybe staring at a baby could fix.

Her name was Phyllis. I’d seen her around before. Her husband, a fish of a man named Dietrichson, was one of those guys carved out of a block of wood and left to rot in a musty warehouse. But Phyllis? Phyllis was all angles and curves, like she’d been designed by Frank Lloyd Guccione.

“That’s a honey of an anklet you’re wearing, Mrs. Dietrichson.”

She sat down next to me, close enough that I could smell the faint hint of vanilla on her skin, mixed with something more dangerous — like gasoline and bad decisions. If I had to guess, I’d say Fleur de Rocaille tempered with a hint of L’Air du Temps behind the lobes.

Her breasts were too large, visible through tight black mesh beneath an out-of-season chinchilla jacket, the belt of which she was using to buff her fingernails. Her waist was impossibly narrow. Silvered lenses covered half her face. She held an absurdly elaborate weapon of some kind, a pistol shape nearly lost beneath a flanged overlay of scope sights, silencers, flash hiders. Her legs were spread, pelvis canted forward, her mouth fixed in a leer of idiotic ecstasy. Or was that cruelty?

Been retired for years now but I still trip up on the odd occupational hazard. Turned out not to be a pistol at all but a sleek clutch purse, one of those shiny, palladium-toned Hermes Kelly Cut Niloticus Crocodile jobs with a top handle and a cross-over flap. The matte black leather interior with its convenient patch pocket left nothing to the imagination.

“I need a favour, Walter,” she purred, her voice smooth, like someone was pouring honey over a razor blade. “I want you to pull back the blanket on that carriage you’re pushing so I can see the baby’s face.”

I raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything. For one thing, my name isn’t Walter. But I was in the mood for a little trouble. It wasn’t like I was going anywhere, and trouble always had a way of finding me. So I rolled back the blanket so she could see the little guy’s angelic countenance as he slept.

As I all-too-willingly complied, I could feel the cue ball being pocketed in the dim billiard room of my last shred of integrity.

She cooed. She oohed. She awwwwed like the women always do around strollers and prams, even when the guy pushing them has a face with more miles on it than a space probe. And that guy was me as Phyllis leaned in closer, the scent of her perfume an exhilarating ripple of relief here by the food court donair stand.

I could imagine her glimmering in the sun, undressing every stone. No flower in the fold could stay the madness beneath her feet; rage upon the sands of the universe. She bends and whispers to the ground, and the world doth diminish …

She leaned back, giving me that look — the kind that made a man forget what he was supposed to be doing and start thinking about what he wanted to do. But there was more to it than that. I could see the desperation underneath the comeliness, like a rust stain on a diamond. And that wasn’t good for anyone.

She seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that I could not understand why no one was as disturbed as I by the clicking of her heels on the artificial paving stones.

Maybe it was the cheap blonde wig. Or maybe the way she laughed: like a snake slithering across a floorboard — low, but it had bite.

Or maybe it was the monochromatic flatness of the food court with its thick whitewashed walls, dark shutters and drab linoleum — the universal suburban food court nexus of bad food and bad smells and chintzy tips.

I closed my eyes and her wet dress shaped for the dead eyes of three blind men whose mammalian ludicrous ties are the horizons and the valleys of the earth. And the places on her body had no names. And she was what’s immense about the night. And our clothes on the floor were arranged for forgetfulness. Remembered her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.

Opened my eyes and she was gone, as mysteriously as she had appeared, into the white dead dawn of the universal panel lighting. I wasn’t worried. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. And there are always plenty more where she came from when you’re an old-fart grandpa on his own with a baby in tow.

By some kind of atavistic rite beyond the ken of science, lonely old grubbers with infants are as attractive to women as the Big Rock Candy Mountain once was to Depression-era hobos. Ash blondes with green eyes and beaded lashes. Widows in muumuus and simulated pearls. Joyful debutantes and dolorous analysands. All powerless before the irresistible, unfathomable allure of codger and neonate, geezer and bairn.

The migrainous Edith Wharton type I’d noticed earlier marketing hair straighteners at a kiosk by the lotto centre was making a bee line straight for us when my reverie began to buckle, corroded by the sea air, peeling off in scales of pale green and ochre as a familiar voice cut through the tule fog like a container ship with Panamanian or Liberian flags, the Filipino crew standing in the hot twilight and staring sullenly at the grotesque and claustrophobic laminate and recycled aluminum of the table and the chair where I had stayed too long at the Fair.

“Dad?” said my daughter, laden with $2 bags from stores I’d never heard of and whose names I couldn’t pronounce. “Time to go. Mum’s waiting for us in the car.”

Scene 2

A week later, my daughter and I are in the food court with the little guy in a stroller. Every woman in the place, particularly those who share my ragtag demographic, immediately assumes I’m the father and impales me — obviously a lecherous, dissolute, wanton, salacious, prurient, debauched, over-tanned ham hock of cradle robber — with withering stink eyes. Rock of Ages, cleft for me.

The donair lady is disagreeable. I slip her a quarter to “buy yourself a treat.” The little guy laughs and coos.

Accompanied by your daughter and her baby, the food court is no country for old men.

As I make my way to the washroom, I am inconsequential as a translucent fish in the Mariana Trench. I come upon the table where Phyllis is eating alone. It dawns on me that her anklet is actually calamari.

She doesn’t look up.