The Checkout Girl Read Free

over: little nose, little hands, little feet.”
    â€œSure he won’t mind?” Kathy asked.
    And Penny said, “Abso-fucking-lutely not.”
    A blush rises up Barry’s neck and turns his cold cheeks redder when Kathy says the word sex. She wishes she hadn’t said it, because it’s the last thing she wants: to have sex with Barry. It’s why she dragged him out skating tonight. Because when Freddy hit the glass she didn’t want a Barry rescue.
    Freddy the snake is a boa constrictor, seven feet long and as thick as Kathy’s arm. He lives in Kathy’s room in a Plexiglas cage that takes up most of one wall. He’s pretty quiet most of the time, lies at the back of his cage in a mottled, muscled coil. But every once in a while, for no particular reason Kathy can figure, he shoots straight out from where he’s resting and slams his nose, BAM, into the Plexiglas. The first time, Kathy screamed. Now she tries not to scream because when she does, Barry comes running into her room.
    â€œTa-da,” he sang when he came in tonight. “Barry Bender to the rescue.”
    During the week, Barry works as an electrician up on the Bruce, at the Douglas Point Nuclear Plant. Shutdowns began almost as soon as the plant opened, and Barry’s one in a large pool of workers hired to fix the problems and keep the plant running. He makes big bucks, which is good because he just bought a shiny new Corvette Stingray, and because he’s saving to marry The Virgin Goddess, the beautiful, platinum blonde, Westmount-born-and-bred Rachel Anderson.
    When he’s home on weekends, Barry takes Rachel to expensive restaurants, where they talk about The Wedding. Rachel lets Barry make out with her on Barry’s basement bachelor bed, but she won’t let him Go All The Way. (That’s the way Rachel talks, raising her eyebrows and opening her eyes wide for words with especial meaning.) For that, Barry waits for Freddy to make Kathy scream. Then he can run into her room and rescue her.
    Kathy sleeps in the buff. Barry used to pretend he did, but Kathy now knows he wears old-man pyjamas, and not just because Rachel told her one Friday night when they were sitting together at the Lehmans’ kitchen table drinking instant coffee while Rachel waited for Barry to arrive home from the Bruce. Rachel said she doesn’t want to see Barry naked until after their marriage, so she buys him those cute flannelette pyjamas with button flies, white or beige with little blue anchors, or brown and red pheasants all over them. She gets them at Ahrens Department Store.
    Once she bought him a pair with Disney characters, novelty pyjamas, Rachel said, that she got when she went with her family to Disneyland. She was disappointed, she said, because Barry wouldn’t wear them. Barry’s allowed to take his clothes off when they make out, but he has to wear pyjamas, Rachel told Kathy. You know how men are, Rachel said. They dribble here and there when their “thing gets big.” She didn’t want to get any of that stuff on her. Rachel kept her bra and panties on at all times, and she wore a long-line panty girdle for extra protection.
    So Kathy believed Barry when he told her his sex life woes. His blue balls, as he called them, and how Rachel wouldn’t touch him and didn’t want to see him naked before they get married. Kathy thought that if Rachel ever saw Barry’s penis, she’d find another man to marry, invest in a potentially larger growth fund.
    Barry’s little penis works, as Kathy found out the first time Freddy hit the Plexiglas. Kathy screamed and Barry stood in front of her so quickly it was as if he’d spent every night waiting for this moment, had been practising this particular rescue all his life. Kathy stopped screaming. As she sat naked at the side of her bed, she watched Barry’s penis stiffen inside his flannel Disney pyjamas.
    (She’d have to