The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland Page A

built of reams of bond paper dreamed of one day bearing sonnets and the solutions to string theory, yet in their hearts-if reams of paper can be said to possess hearts-they knew they would, at best, merely tout a daily seafood special or be the unread, unloved third page of an in-house corporate document on earthquake preparedness-and even fates such as these were probably too much to expect. Instead, they would end up as a discarded second draft of a homework assignment on manganese or pollination, badly formatted and crumpled up, tossed into a wastepaper basket alongside lumps of chewed gum, pubic hair trimmings, Kotex wrappers and the lids of cran apple juice bottles.
    Norm stood by the gum racks and the numerous impulse point-of-purchase displays near the front tills. He idly fondled a chocolate stain embedded in his crimson shirt, unwashed from the day before. He cocked an ear, trying to identify the PA system's first musical gem of the day ("Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic," by the Police), heard the clatter of a pile of CD and DVD jewel cases falling onto the white tile floors at the store's farthest end, heard the rumble of shopping carts being corralled into their marshalling stalls. He turned around, his midriff jiggling like a Jell-O mould, and tried to decide which brand of gum he was going to steal that morning.

Dee Dee

    I don't think you're a monster, Roger, and I am not a monster either. I am, in fact, one of those mothers who clips inspiring articles from newspapers, hoards them, and then pounces on her offspring with a stack of twenty-usually when they're in a hurry and their heads are in the completely wrong space to appreciate them. There's that old Kids in the Hall skit where the overprotective mother goes through a new copy of TV Guide to highlight with a yellow marker all of the shows she thinks her son will like. That's me. Or rather, that's me these days. I wasn't always such a good mother.
    Bethany told me about something you wrote, about how animals are the voices of the dead come to speak to us. I don't know if they're here to console us or to warn us and scare the crap out of us. I like animals. They're better than people. Even when they're mean they're pure, whereas people, when they're mean, are simply lost.
    Did you know that Bethany's stepbrother hanged himself? Oh, that was awful. Devon. He was a lost soul. Bethany found his body. He did it with the twenty-five-foot orange extension cord from the leaf blower, strung on the chandelier in the front hallway. She looked at him for a half-hour before she phoned anybody.
    Chandelier: that sounds so swanky, but it wasn't. That was when I was married to Kenny and we were living in this Brady Bunch house in an okay suburb. I woke up every morning with my stomach clenching. Why? Because I felt like a useless member of society and I could feel the ghosts of the people who built the Brady Bunch suburb surrounding me. I knew they were better people than I'd ever be: industrious, optimistic and dutiful-and I could feel them judging me. I could never live up to the expectations of people who built such cheerful, well-Laid-out 3BDRs with dormer windows, rhododendrons and garages lined with pegboard where the tools could be alphabetically arranged, and where orange extension cords always had a special cord-only spot above the pesticide cupboard. I couldn't enter the garage because of that goddam pegboard wall, and because I was spooked I'd meet the ghost of the guy who installed it. The ghost would see me, and he'd know that Kenny beat me with full plastic bottles of fabric softener, that Kenny hectored and teased his son, who hanged himself because of it, and that Kenny treated Bethany as if she didn't exist-literally, like that game you play with kids where you pretend you're unable to see them, except that Kenny did this all the time. I think this is why Bethany wears all that Goth makeup and pretends not to care-it's a testament to my lack of care