Retraining

The coal-fired power plant is closing, ready to turn off the lights forever in its industrial complex, and Petra shudders before the winds of change. She gamely attends the half-day retraining sessions, preparing to “deploy her skills in other sectors of the economy.” Late at night she seethes with the question Why me? but in daylight she obeys the poster plastered everywhere: Stay Calm and Carry On.

She slows down as she rounds the curve of the highway, mindful of the bald tires that need replacing. An intermittent chirp reminds her that the brakes, too, need servicing. She cranks up the volume on the audiobook, What Color is Your Jet-Pack: A Guide for Designing the Career You’ll LOVE. “Count your blessings,” the narrator commands at the end of the chapter and Petra begins doing just that as she turns onto her street. “I am blessed to have a family to come home to. I am blessed to play a role in the global move to reduce carbon emissions—something for future generations.” Not that Delia, her grown daughter still living at home, was impressed.

When she catches sight of her front lawn, Petra shrieks and, from reflex, stomps on the well-worn brakes.

All the contents. Out on the lawn. What the…?

She has to maneuver her rusty Honda Civic curbside because her own driveway is completely full. Like a dollhouse that’s been overturned and its contents shaken out and scooped into random piles: this was the scene spread before her. Forced eviction. She recognized it immediately from reality TV shows–like World's Worst Tenants and Can't Pay? We'll Take It Away. And yes, Hoarders. Everything, except fixtures and big appliances, was out there for inspection by the world. Including their frightfully stained double mattresses, the sofa with stuffing erupting from one end, and piles and piles of dreary clothing. Even Delia’s outgrown giant teddy bear, a joke prize won at the county fair.

Someone, somewhere, has made a terrible mistake, and, Petra vows, will pay for it very soon. Blood pounds in her ears. She gets out of the car and slams the door, tooting a stress-fart from the very exertion.

Delia, phone clamped to one ear, finger plugging the other, frowns into her conversation. “Can you? … They close at 5 PM… Oh-oh. Gotta go.” Dressed in crop top and stained jogging pants, she blinks into the light, a vapid smile on her face. Playing with a hair tendril, she clarifies she stayed over at Mindy’s last night and came home to this. “At first I thought they were burglars,” she says. “Four guys in a white panel van. But they’re from the buy-back company.”

Petra stutters and huffs, trying to join two or more consonants into intelligible words. Two concepts could not be combined: eviction and her house. They are impossible to link. Dammit, she is paying that mortgage month over month—she sees the hole gouged in her bank account on the fifteenth of every month, when the bank takes its automatic withdrawal, reducing her account to chickenfeed for the last half of the month. She knows that she has paid off over half the mortgage by now … and that the house is technically half hers. A quick call to her bank manager, Mr. Duvernay, confirms that yes, those payments are going through like clockwork, “however, not the payments to the HELOC.”

“Heel-lock?” she says. It sounds like an ankle bracelet—the type that criminals under house arrest have to wear. Long story short, the Home Equity Line of Credit, a type of loan taken out against the fifty percent of the house she owns, has not been paid—for the past year.

“This is the first I’ve heard of it!”

She waits, steaming with exasperation, while Mr. Duvernay reviews the file and she listens to muzak, Best of Meatloaf, while on hold.

The mystery is solved. “It turns out notices and reminders were getting sent to your email,” Petra reports to Delia afterward.

“Yeah, I didn’t want you to be bothered by all those emails.” Delia smiles winningly, a spaniel puppy ready to roll over.

“And they were calling your cell phone—didn’t you get messages?” Petra’s stomach clenches as she drags the story out from Delia, clump by clump, like unplugging a drain with a toothpick.

“I’ve blocked every caller,” Delia says. “The spam these days, you just wouldn’t believe!”

“Did you ever think to switch the contact info back to me?”

“Just chill, Mom. I’ve figured it out. Richard will—”

“Don’t! I don’t want to hear the name!”

“Okay, well, ‘someone’ will bail us out and the repo man will unlock the door and we can get back inside…”

Petra feels the gall rise in her throat. To be rescued by her snobbish brother-in-law was bad enough. He will add it to the litany of Petra’s shortcomings that he trots out in after-dinner conversations with the extended family. How pathetic, for him to come and see them like this. Moreover—she squints at the sky—rain is forecast for the evening.

Another stress-fart escapes, and this time Delia’s nose wrinkles. “Oh, Moooom.”

“I can’t help it—they served us burritos at the retraining luncheon today… you know my innards are becoming irritable…”

“We just have to chill, Mom. Relaaaax,” Delia says. “I’ll make some chamomile tea.” She busies herself at a TV tray with mugs and spoons and electric kettle.

Chamomile tea is the latest potion Petra is using to calm her GI tract, which has a peculiar sensitivity to bad vibes, whether remote (war in Ukraine) or very local (Delia losing her second job in three weeks). Petra scans the junk pile for her favorite mug, can’t find it, and feels angry all over again. She picks up one end of the orange extension cord, and says drily, “It won’t boil if you don’t plug it in, Einstein. Sheesh.”

Delia runs forward, grabs the cord-end, starts looking for a outlet.

“Einstein” is a low blow, Petra thinks, but when oh when is that girl going to wise up? She recalls the day two years ago she signed for the HELOC to fund rehab for Delia. In the glacially air-conditioned steel-and-glass bank tower, Mr. Duvernay had refused her an ordinary loan but “as a favor” set up the HELOC at double the rate.

“They’ll give vacation loans,” Delia said, lounging in the waiting room, reading the bank’s promo brochures. “Why doesn’t my rehab count as a vacation?” She meant it to be funny but Petra was in no laughing mood.

And now, this.

Just then a car with four bobbing heads slows down and toots, causing Petra to toot as well, in a more biological way. They wave and point at the giant teddy bear that the repo crew has whimsically wedged into the Stairmaster, also in her driveway. “Hey lady, looks like Mr. Bear has a few pounds to lose.”

“Ha ha,” Petra says and the foursome speeds off.

She separates the clothes from the kitchenware. She tries to put order in the chaos. Somehow, it seemed so easy when God did it, she thinks. She turns to share the chuckle with Delia, then remembers she’s mad at her.

“Richard says he’ll call on the way,” Delia says, “but my phone’s dying. I’ll charge it at Mindy’s.”

“Let me come with you.” Petra knows Mindy’s place has a washroom right off the front hall.

“But our stuff, Mom… Guard Byron’s bear, okay? … I’ll be back real soon.”

So Petra drags a tarp from the garage pile to protect what she can from the coming rain. She finds a kitchen stool and perches on it. Her belly roils. She needs to use Mindy’s washroom—soon. She scrutinizes the neighbor’s places on either side. Dr. Karatsakos, the periodontist, works long hours stitching gums (he told her early on, she supposed, to forestall medical questions) and the other folks have irregular hours. She simmers at the very thought: reduced to begging neighbors to use their toilet! But she did drop off a bottle of Tia Maria every Christmas; surely that counts as insurance against shame?

She returns to her Sisyphean task, organizing the pile. Byron’s bear? She wonders what’s on Delia’s mind.

A van marked YOUR LOCAL NEWS pulls to a stop. A wiry man in T-shirt and black Levi’s gets out and approaches her, followed by a young woman with a tripod. “Hel-lo,” he says, slowly pulling off his sunglasses and pausing dramatically.

By reflex she answers “Hello” and continues separating coffee filters from paint rollers.

“Basil Redfox, Channel 43 news. We’ve been looking to put a face to the economic plight of the region.”

She’s a sucker for his strong British accent, but it makes the humiliation seem international, as if the BBC has come calling. “This is not what you think it is,” she says. “It’s just an ordinary, garden-variety, run-of-the-mill fuck-up in paperwork.” She adds helpfully, “Oh, and no curbside parking”

“But there’s already a vehicle curbside.”

“Yeah, it’s mine. My driveway’s occupied, you might have noticed.” There, she did him in with some sarcasm. Brits always respect you if you outdo them in sarcasm. Too bad Delia wasn’t there to hear that.

She thinks sitting on that blasted stool makes her look like a carney barker or a dunce in the corner. Someone separate from the crowd. “Seriously, they will tow,” she says and moves away from Basil to dig out an ordinary chair. She sees her retraining manual lying there. She places her chair to one side of the jumble-heap and begins to read as the sun beats down.

She watches the van drive off. Media vultures.

“Here ya go,” Delia says, waltzing back with a plate, wrapped in plastic, of mini-muffins. “From Mindy.” She moves Byron’s bear under the tarp.

“No thank you.” Petra feels a pang in her intestines just looking at the plate. Maybe it’s a gluten allergy. She resolves not to touch a single deadly muffin. Although… they were sprinkled with toasted brown-sugar crumbles, Mindy’s signature topping.

Delia’s sunny aura looks dented. “Oh come on, Mom. No sense being ‘hangry.’” She gives a small giggle—“hangry” was their favorite diagnosis of the many small tiffs over the years. True, the majority of their quarrels occur in the hour before dinner.

“This is not a simple case of grumpy mummy. Have you any idea how humiliating this is for me?” Petra feels her eyes sting. Of course the girl didn’t. (“Girl,” although she was 24.) She practically lives her life online, the mess of her room in full view, sometimes standing in the bathroom tweezing her eyebrows while Facetiming friends. A cloud slides over the intense sun, like a flashlight show, causing them both to look up, and Petra to remember the weather forecast. “Not to mention—we’re going to get rained on.”

“Rain?”

“Yes, ‘rain,’” she mimics Delia’s little-girl voice. “Rain over my entire collection of James Patterson… but what the hell, I’ll never get a chance to read these anyway.” In a surge of anger, she picks up a battered paperback and rips it down the spine. With difficulty. Delia grabs a second book and joins in. A second wave of disgust envelopes Petra and she picks up the cast iron skillet and swings it at a wicker fruit basket, causing a satisfying crunch. Delia’s eyes widen.

“And forget the Stairmaster—it’s not like we ever use it!” Petra swings the skillet at the device.

“No need to be nasty!” Delia gasps.

Petra swings the skillet again and again at the Stairmaster, causing a great clanking but no real structural damage. She is dimly aware she’s making an ass of herself therefore should stop. A drop of rain lands on her nose. She’s aware she should be more trying to stuff things in the Civic or put up a tent (the camping stuff would be in the garage junk pile).

“The one thing I ask you,” she wheezes as the Stairmaster shudders under her blows. “The one thing… to keep me informed…” The Stairmaster crouches in abeyance while she keeps swinging. She feels dizzy… light-headed… and soon has an out-of-body experience, looking down on this ridiculous primate battering the steel body of the saurian Stairmaster. She must stop herself before saying what could never be unsaid.

“Stop, Mommy—we can resell on eBay. Or Kijiji.” When this has no effect, “I could—I will—I am planning to use this Stairmaster.”

Petra drags her sleeve across her sweating face. “You have no initiative, … you will never amount to anything.”

Delia’s face crumples.

The swinging causes Petra to pull a muscle in her chest. Or is it some heart problem rearing its terrible head? A couple years ago, Petra did a stress test under doctor’s supervision in the cardiac unit. The doctor concluded it was “merely” an anxiety attack brought on by Petra’s worry over her daughter’s fondness for partying with the wrong kind of friends, guys like Byron. “Children, they’ll be the death of us,” the doctor cheerily dismissed her concerns.

Today Petra stops mid-swing.

Weeping, Delia comes over and grabs Petra in a body hold. Or maybe it’s a hug. She nuzzles a warm snotty face in her hair. “Oh Mom, how can you say that? I messed up. I’ve been so busy lately. Drawing my book of poetry. Look.” She pulls away and selects a sketch pad from a teetering pile, causing it to collapse. She flips through the pages, showing lots of doodles, some horses and hedgehogs, but also some writing. It is dedicated to Byron, in memoriam.

Petra lets the skillet fall with a clank onto the asphalt. Her eyes are unable to focus, so she presses her palms into them.

Delia thrusts the sketch pad at her.

Petra takes it appreciatively, the same way she’s accepted kindergarten crafts and high school projects on leatherback turtles over the years. The inked cover says in balloon letters “Mama Done Tole Me.” She turns the sketch pad over and on the back is a schedule showing days of the week and My Studio Time.

“This is what you need, Delia,” Petra says. “Some way to get organized. Block off Monday Wednesday Friday when you’re working at the sub shop. All the rest of the time is yours. That’s how to—”

Delia looks at her, head to one side like a dog whose owner says “blah-blah-blah-walkies!-blah-blah.”

A Porsche Cayenne Turbo Coupe zips around the crescent and halts. Richard rolls down the window, grinning, showing off whitened teeth. “Look at you. Sky is about to fall, and you gals stand there yakking.” He nods at Delia, who bounces over to him. Gals, thinks Petra, annoyed at feeling flattered.

“I’ve been such a bad girl to Mommy,” Delia says in a mock pout.

He dangles the keys and Petra grits her teeth. He’s taking this rich uncle schtick a little too far; she’ll have to have a word with her sister. Delia takes the keys, gives a glancing kiss to his wrinkled cheek, and goes to unlock the house and garage.

Petra follows her. “It’s not a bad girl / good girl thing,” she lectures her daughter. “It’s a case of being grown up, taking care of finances and housing.”

Richard places the HOUSE CALL sign on his dashboard so he can park curbside. They start dragging stuff into the garage.

Petra buttonholes Richard and earnestly explains she is entirely caught up on her mortgage payments; it’s just that … somehow… the wires got crossed on payments for a home equity… blah-blah-blah-our hero-blah-blah. Petra is still a bundle of tension and her abdominal muscles let it rip. She feels her face burning.

Delia laughs and says, “Hark, I hear ducks quacking,” in a light, insouciant manner. Petra feels grateful.

The TV van careens into a nearby driveway and Basil and his camerawoman leap out. “At the coal-fired power plant, one after another of its soot-stained generators is being shut down, throwing dozens of people out of work, including this woman… Hel-lo…”

“Sorry, too busy to talk,” Petra says. “We have to get this stuff inside before it rains.” She reaches for Byron’s bear. As if on cue, the thunder cracks and lightning flickers in the sky.

THE END