Chapter 13
Thirteen
Crampton receives new stock at the grocery store every Thursday, which Clemence finds surprising, because it didn’t seem like the store received new stock ever, but she knows now that if she goes in on Thursday after her shift at the bookstore, she has a good chance of finding bread and milk whose best-before dates are still on the horizon.
She also thinks it might please Crampton to have a customer, but Crampton doesn’t seem bothered either way.
Apparently she makes enough selling cigarettes to subsidize the loss from the rest. She sees no problem with this approach, and that she keeps her store at all, she explains, is community service.
Not everybody has the energy to make the trek up to the superstore, or can afford the luxury of having groceries delivered.
“Once,” she tells Clemence, “the store was the centre of the neighbourhood. When my mother ran this place, she knew everyone. We used to do sandwiches up here at the counter.” But the neighbourhood is changing.
Crampton says, “It’s always been changing.
” Someone has started sleeping in a tent popped up in front of the organic dog food store, and it won’t be long before there’ll be no sign that either the tent or the business had ever been there.
“Not all change is bad, though,” Crampton adds.
And change, at least, is how you know that a neighbourhood is alive.
Clemence wants to talk to her about updating the window displays, but Crampton dismisses her suggestions. “I’ve been running this business since before you were born.”
But the problem is that’s exactly what it looks like. There are cans of SPAM that have been on the shelf ever since then.
Crampton says, “Don’t start. It didn’t work the last time.”
“The last time?”
“Don’t you people have anything better to do than walk up and down the street criticizing the way I run my businesses?”
“‘You people’?” Who people? “I’ve come to buy cheese,” says Clemence. Not the fancy cheese, those ones that are soft and come in a wheel, but just a brick of cheddar, perfect for a tuna melt. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And so Crampton tells her about the time the tyrannical woman who runs the artisan market got involved with the Business Improvement Association and tried to get bylaw enforcement officers to issue tickets because her windows were so filthy.
“There aren’t even bylaws about that. So you can leave my windows alone. ”
“Oh,” says Clemence. She wouldn’t have mentioned anything if she’d realized this was a sore spot.
She was mostly here in pursuit of the tuna melt.
“Hey listen, I need a grater, too.” The one that came with her apartment is rusty.
Crampton’s shop has a tangle of dusty housewares down the far aisle, from which Clemence had already bought a Pyrex measuring cup.
It was the first vintage item she’d purchased that wasn’t second-hand.
She unearths the grater and Crampton rings it all up. “So, I hear you’ve been going to church,” she notes, feigning nonchalance but doing it poorly.
“I only went once,” says Clemence. “How did you know?”
“I’ve got spies.” Crampton doesn’t even smile as she says this. “I didn’t take you for the churchgoing type, what with the rabid feminism.”
“I went to church once. It’s not rabid.” Clemence can’t keep up with the onslaught of accusations. “I’m helping with the sale, the jumble.”
“You mean junk,” Crampton says as she packs Clemence’s shopping in the plastic bag with the smiley face that she insists on every time.
After her satisfying lunch, Clemence walks up the street to the bookshop, goes inside and right up to the desk where she rings the bell obnoxiously.
“You’re back,” Toby says. He doesn’t even put his book down. He’s not reading a play today, instead the collected poetry of John Dryden.
“Are you tired of drama?” Clemence asks him, and now he lowers the book, looking confused. “The book, I mean,” she continues. “You’re reading poetry. I didn’t know you did that.”
“Why are you here?” Toby asks. “This is the part of the day where I don’t have to talk to you or anyone.”
“Some job you’ve got.”
“You should talk,” says Toby.
And Clemence sings, “I do!” Toby’s apparent lack of a personality seems to give Clemence permission to behave in ways that magnify her own to a most absurd degree.
She says, “Toby, I’m kind of bored. We didn’t even talk that much this morning.
Do you get a break? Do you want to go get a coffee? I could buy you a muffin?”
Toby shakes his head. “I’m gluten-free.”
“You eat every meal at Burger King!”
“Burger King gluten isn’t the kind that gives me trouble.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” says Clemence. “And you know, there are entire cafés now that don’t bother with gluten at all.”
Toby says, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“To you?”
“Don’t you have any friends or something?”
Which was bit rich coming from him, Clemence thinks. “They’re all at work.”
“But I’m at work.”
“I think your work,” Clemence says, “is a bit more flexible?”
And it is. Apparently Toby is free to take breaks when he chooses, flipping the sign in the window (or not—he says it doesn’t matter) and off they go to the coffee shop up by the fromagerie where they have gluten-free cupcakes.
But then it turns out he’s also allergic to cocoa, so he’s out of luck.
He doesn’t drink coffee, either. The place has a gluten-free madeleine, though, so he contents himself with that.
“Like Proust,” says Clemence.
“You’ve read Proust?” asks Toby, mildly animated at this.
And Clemence is forced to confess that no, she hasn’t. “But I don’t imagine you have either,” she says, “seeing as he never wrote a single Restoration play.” And Toby laughs! Well, kind of.
The lighting in the coffee shop is dim, but interesting, strands of naked bulbs undulating from the ceiling, and Toby looks healthier here, the shadows underneath his eyes not as pronounced.
He is also less solipsistic than Clemence had given him credit for, asking her, “Why don’t you get a job?
A better one? More than three hours a week, if you’re bored, I mean. ”
Clemence thinks about his question. She tells him, “Right now, I’m taking a break from all that, from routine and striving.
I’m having a reset. Even just being bored is a novel experience—I don’t think I’ve been bored for more than five minutes since I was eleven.
” Clemence has spent years with her days and her life booked up so that she’d never been able to take a moment to think about where she was going or what any of it meant.
“Which is how I got here, I guess. And what I need is a recalibration.” She wants him to know, though: “But I actually do have friends.”
“Sure,” says Toby. But he doesn’t sound sure.
Though Toby doesn’t have much truck with friends anyway.
He doesn’t see the point, he says, and Clemence wonders if she and Toby have more in common than she thinks, if her current recalibration is putting her on the road to becoming a weird recluse.
Toby is lonely, Clemence suspects, and evidently Crampton thinks so too, because she’s paying Clemence a wage to engage him in conversation, but Toby doesn’t appear to think that his loneliness is a problem, or at least one that needs addressing with the presence of actual people.
Clemence says, “I envy you, actually. You seem okay on your own. The point of all this, for me, is to become accustomed to my own company, but I’m terrified the end result might end up being that I don’t even like it.
My company, I mean.” She tenses. She can’t believe she said that.
She hardly even knew she felt that way, but she does, and the thing about Toby responding to everything Clemence says and does as though she’s strange and unfathomable is that it permits her to be as strange and unfathomable as she’d like, and maybe more, because he’d never notice the difference.
Toby says, “No.”
“No?”
“You’re good company,” Toby clarifies.
“Really?”
“You bought me a snack.” He shrugs. She’s also bought him a small carton of milk, and she’s surprised to find that his digestive system can tolerate lactose, the rest of him seeming so fragile.
Toby contains multitudes, she thinks, but maybe she’s giving him too much credit.
He’s just tipped the carton back to get to the dregs, milk running all over his shirt.
Clemence says, “Want to walk me home?”
“Why?”
“I bought you a snack, remember? It’s only polite.”
And so he goes through the motions, awkwardly holding the door for her as they exit, but stumbling over his feet in the process and hitting his head on the frame.
“Well, now you really have to walk me home,” says Clemence, after ducking back inside to grab a pile of napkins.
“Why?”
“Because I’ve got a first aid kit, and you’re bleeding.”
Toby panics. “Is it serious?” Clemence is pressing some of the napkins against his head. “Do you think I’m going to have to get stitches?” He touches the wound, getting blood on his hands. Clemence foists the rest of the napkins upon him.
“You don’t need stitches,” she says, hoping she sounds more certain than she is.
Because there does seem to be a lot of blood for a cut that’s mainly superficial.
The napkins Toby has pressed against his head right now are soaked through already.
Thankfully, her house is close, even though Toby winces as she leads him up to the porch, and she isn’t sure he’ll be able to make it all the way to her room at the top, but somehow he manages, stopping only three times to catch his breath.
When they arrive at her door, the napkins are disintegrated, and there’s blood all over his hand and face, and Toby looks like he’s been in an explosion.