Penny Candy

 Helen grumbled when dispatch sent her on a fifteen-mile drive to pick up a couple in the suburbs. It was a half-hour before the end of her shift, November and already winter cold in Montreal. She wanted to soak in a bath, watch tv. But City Cab made it clear. You took calls or you looked for another job. After fifteen years, she still hated being told what to do. Just once, she’d like to tell dispatch to shove it.

By 5:30, Helen had picked up the couple and was on Cardinal, the road leading to the airport. With a little luck, she’d be back in the city by 7:00. When Helen was a child, this area was handful of one-block side streets, followed by miles and miles of fields and trees north and west of Cardinal. Since the war, an airport, a highway, and a railroad connected the area with the city. Bungalows and split levels mushroomed. Every couple wanted a home in the newly minted suburb of Cedar Grove. When City Cab drivers joked about the town’s two gas stations and one restaurant that closed at 7:00, Helen nodded but said nothing. She knew first-hand about the opulent homes on the other side of the highway that bordered the lake. The owners had people like Helen’s mother who cooked and cleaned for them and drivers who worried about gas station hours, staff as interchangeable as lightbulbs.

Men poured onto the platform from a train arriving at the Cedar Grove station. Helen stopped to let two of them cut across Cardinal. Easy pick-ups, she thought to herself, fanning a smoldering ember of leaving City Cab and going independent.

Helen’s eyes caught a “for rent” sign in the window of a little yellow house opposite the train station. It was an older place, with a gabled roof and wooden siding that gave it a cottage look. The rest of the drive to the airport, the rental in Cedar Grove was in her thoughts. And those men streaming from the train. After depositing the couple at their gate, Helen nosed the cab back along Cardinal. Doesn’t cost to look, she told herself, knocking on a green wooden door.

“Entrez, entrez,” a voice responded, “the door’s open.”

“Is this a house or a room for rent?” Helen asked.

“The whole house. We tried to sell, but the young couples want a new place with three bedrooms. So, we’re going to rent for now.”

“I’m Ginette Paquette. And you are?”

“Helen. Helen Martin.”

“So, Helen how about a look around?”

Stepping inside, Helen’s eyes locked on chocolate mounds, jellybeans, and sugar-speckled triangles, glistening like jewels inside a glass case. Catching Helen’s look of surprise, the woman explained, “My brother works for one of the candy factories in the city. He gave me the idea for the store. Kids come in with a penny or a nickel and they’re in heaven when they leave. I never make a mint, but it keeps me busy while my husband delivers milk.”

Mrs. Paquette led Helen into a living room that adjoined a compact kitchen and up a flight of stairs that ended in two bedrooms, each of which had windows that faced a tidy backyard. Helen remembered a game she and her mother used to play. They’d walk around the fancy houses on Lakeshore Vista and imagine the ones they wanted for their own.  Helen’s mother always picked one of the fancy homes. Helen always picked the modest stucco guest house several feet from an imposing brick and stone edifice. At nine, she knew what was possible and what wasn’t. At thirty-nine, she’d become resigned to living in a studio in the city. Places in the suburbs were for people who could afford down payments. This rental changed things. Her own address, a home, not two miles from where she grew up. She wished her mother had lived to see it.

When Helen followed Mrs. Paquette downstairs, her mind was made up. She wanted this place in Cedar Grove. Her mind turned practical. She could live upstairs and operate a taxi dispatch from the living room on the ground floor. She’d have the local territory to herself. Helen’s Taxi. She liked the sound of it.

“I can give you the first month now, and last in a couple of weeks. Will you keep it for me?”

“Whoever signs the contract and pays first and last gets the place. We’d like to be out by December. My son has a truck. He can get us moved in a day.”

Helen didn’t tell anyone at City about her plan. She did extra shifts for drivers who wanted a night off. The yellow house was always on her mind. Not two rooms at the back of the Donaldson’s fancy place on Lakeshore Vista Drive that were never really yours. An address of your own. Stairs you could thump on any time you pleased, a door you could lock. She wished her mother had lived to see it.

Two weeks later, Helen got a call from Mrs. Paquette. A couple was interested in the house.

“Keep it through Friday. Three days. I’ll have the money.”

How was she going to get the cash? She was seventy short and her next pay was a week off. Helen looked around her room for things she could sell. There was nothing. In all these years of working for the cab company, all she had was the secondhand Chevy, a few bits of furniture, a used tv, and some clothes. She could donate blood. She’d overheard drivers at work doing it to make ends meet.

On her late shift that evening, dispatch sent her to pick up a businessman with a 2 a.m. flight. “The guy’s drunk. Put a bucket in the back seat. You don’t want him upchucking in your cab,” the operator said.

Helen pulled the cab onto the deserted city streets and made her way to the hotel, catching sight of her customer through the hotel’s heavy glass doors. Folded in a chair, his head rolled forward onto a double-breasted coat. Even without seeing the label, Helen recognized the soft nap of cashmere. She’d seen plenty of these coats at Donaldsons. She’d stand there in the plaid skirt and white blouse Mrs. Donaldson insisted she wear for these grand occasions, hang up coats and retrieve them when company left. One guest, a retired judge, had groped her breast when she handed him his coat, and laughed it off as a big joke. That rough hand. That soft coat. Mrs. Donaldson in the foyer, seeing it and not seeing it. Not a word to Helen or her mother. The next day, a thank-you gift for the Donaldsons arrived from the judge, an elegant glass vase. Helen wanted to smash it.

Helen heaved his leather suitcase into the trunk, her hands stinging in the brutal night air. Without a glance or a word, he settled himself in the back seat. He was one of those customers who expected silence, and Helen was happy to oblige. At the airport, Helen popped the trunk and read out the meter charge, “$18.40.”  While the man fumbled through his wallet. Helen saw his fingers miss a twenty and land on a hundred-dollar bill. As Helen fished in her cash satchel for four twenties, her fare lumbered out of the cab, impatiently gesturing to a uniformed airport attendant to take charge of his bag from the opened trunk. Helen’s first impulse was to yell out to him, her usual practice when a customer left something in the cab. Watching this guy stride ahead, oblivious to his mistake and to the attendant struggling with his heavy case, Helen swallowed her words.

Helen called Mrs. Paquette the next morning and signed the lease the same day. Saturday, she drove to City Cab and turned in her cap and identity card. Her boss shrugged. Driver turnover was common. Here, too, Helen was just another lightbulb. That afternoon, she loaded the Chevy with her mother’s rocking chair, a jumble of boxes, and made her way to the yellow house in Cedar Grove. The first thing she noticed was the candy glistening behind the glass counter. A note from Mrs. Paquette wished her well in her new home and invited her to enjoy the rest of the candy. Beside the handwritten note were sheets of paper with the prices for each type of candy and the names and contact information of the candy distributors.

Unpacking the boxes, Helen heard the front doorbell jingle. Making her way downstairs, she saw a child peering into the glass case. She was ready to send her away, tell her Mrs. Paquette was no longer in business when she saw the nickel on the counter, the eyes of the girl glued to the candy behind the glass case. “Two honeymoons,” she said, one licorice whip, and one, no two cents worth of jellybeans.”  Helen remembered the ache for sweets behind a glass counter or in a glossy catalog, the bliss of a candy-filled mouth. Slipping the candies in the brown paper bag and the nickel into the cash register, Helen laughed to herself. Me, a candy store operator.

Helen had a phone connected and put an ad in the local paper announcing her cab service. There were calls for early morning and early evening runs to and from the train station, but not the rush Helen had anticipated. Many of the husbands, she learned, drove to work, or walked home from the train station. After school and every Saturday, the candy store was packed with kids spending their allowances. The candy store paid for the bologna and beans in those first weeks.

A woman called one Friday in mid- December for a cab to the Civic Center. “Can you be here in ten minutes? I’m at 129 Ferguson Drive. My meeting starts at 11:00.”

“Yes, I can get you there. What’s the name?”

“Marcie, Marcie Wilkie.”

As the cab pulled in front of the house on Ferguson, a woman in a fur hat and chic black coat stared at her watch, then at Helen.

Helen knew what the woman saw. A wool cap pulled over short black hair. An oversized checkered shirt that extended beneath her heavy winter jacket. Bulky pants that ended in a pair of lace-up leather boots. These sturdy clothes felt like her, felt safe. When she started at City Cab, customers rarely gave the drivers a second look. She looked like the other drivers. Would it be the same out here?

“You’re late.”

The lady’s tone reminded Helen of Eleanor Donaldson’s. Your girl, she icily referred to Helen, as if Helen were a piece of property.

“Sorry, there’s road work on Cardinal. But I can get you there by 11:00.”

Helen pulled the cab into the delivery alley that ran behind the businesses on Cardinal, praying that no truck was coming in the opposite direction.

When the cab pulled up in front of the Civic Center, the customer fumbled in her purse, before announcing, “Opps. Jim forgot to stick a twenty in here like I asked him. Pay you tomorrow, okay?”

If she were driving for City, no way Helen would let a fare go without paying, even if it meant taking a check or driving to a bank. Dispatch held the driver accountable for all fares on the meter. In all her years at City, she had been stiffed twice. Helen swallowed the urge to shoot back a smart remark. People who pay you don’t like any lip, her mother had reminded her more than once.

“Ok,” Helen replied, telling herself she knew where Marcie lived. She’d bang on her door if she had to.

Marcie stopped by the store on Saturday and handed Helen the fare, and a nice tip.

“Thanks, Mrs. Wilkie.”

“Macie, please. Mrs. Wilkie sound like my mother.”

“Sure thing, Marcie.”

“Men. You have to remind them about everything. I wonder how Jim would feel if I forgot to cook dinner?”

Helen nodded. This passive nodding that looked like agreeing she had learned when at the Donaldsons. She herself would never leave the house without knowing how much money she had in her wallet. Every dollar, every nickel had its place in the endless calculations that preoccupied her thinking, especially at the end of the month.

“I’ve always loved those licorice sticks,” Marcie said, “put five in a bag for me, would you.”

Marcie and her friends called regularly to get to meetings or slip over to a local shopping center. Marcie was full of advice she shared with Helen or any of her friends who were in the cab. She read those magazines that told you six different ways to make meatloaf and how to turn a tablecloth into a smashing summer shift. Marcie often had a bee in her bonnet when in the cab with one or two of her friends. Today, it was workers at one of the local supermarkets.

“Ruth, I’m not shopping at Dolmans Grocery and more. The last time I was there the workers had filthy aprons. When I asked to see the manager, he came out with a big stain on his apron.”

“Slobs,” Ruth agreed. “Everyone can wash clothes.”

“Helen, Marcie called, “take us over to that ShopRite. It’s only two miles further along Cardinal. It’s brand new and I’ll bet there looking for customers.”

On another trip, one of the ladies reported her son had seen one of the workers at the Halloween Haunted House changing behind one of the trailers. Marcie bent her neck towards the back seat, her eyes narrowing. “It’s best for them to set up in another town next year. Heck, I bet we could do our own scary house at one the schools.”  The two women in the back seat nodded in agreement.

Marcie, Helen figured, was not so different from Mrs. Donaldson in that fancy house on Lakeshore Vista Drive where her mother had worked as a housekeeper. When Helen was ten, a farmer from the far end of the island drove a horse and cart to sell fresh blueberries and strawberries. When his horse relieved himself on the street, Mrs. Donaldson told Helen’s mother to get it cleaned up.

Mrs. Donaldson got on the phone to her friends up and down the street. That farmer did not make a single sale. From their rooms at the back of the house, Helen overhead Mrs. Donaldson telling her husband that evening, “He’ll learn. Why these people come into a residential area with a horse is beyond me. We’re going to put a stop to it. Mary Macdonald’s husband is going to get the town regulation changed.”

Marcie and her women friends in Cedar Grove were not rich like the Donaldsons. But they ran things in this town. Helen knew she had to keep on their good side. She kept the cab washed and vacuumed. When two women raved about Elaine’s amazing dinner party, Helen never shared that she’d driven Elaine to a restaurant in the city to pick up the lasagna. She learned from her mother to keep her mouth shut.

A schedule fell into place. Helen ferried the women to their morning and early afternoon appointments and shopping trips and opened the candy store 3:00-5:30. On Saturdays, the husbands drove their wives to the shopping plaza, the kids to the pool or baseball practice, and themselves to the barber shop. Helen kept the candy store open all day. She’d put a “closed” sign on the door if a call came for a cab. The kids knew that Helen would be back soon enough, and they could get their candy.

Arms resting on the glass top of the candy counter after the last of the afternoon runs, Helen sucked on a caramel, savoring its simple sweetness. Looking over the sugary delights within easy reach of her hands, she remembered the box of fancy candies, the annual Christmas gift from the Donaldsons to Helen’s mother. That candy tasted like poverty and shame. They ate it anyway.

Helen enjoyed seeing the kids come in with a nickel or a dime, pondering the choices in front of them, anticipating the rapture of dissolving sugar. She ordered gum packets with hockey cards, and in a month had a flood of boys rifling quickly through the cards in hopes of finding a Levasseur or a Gagne. Every boy in Cedar Grove dreamed of being a hockey player even when their parents made clear their futures included a full set of teeth and a spot at a university. For the girls, Helen ordered candy necklaces that could be sucked for hours, turning lips into garish shades of pink, green and yellow and staining the collars of white school blouses.

Henry and Sam, seven-year-old twins, were two of Helen’s favorites. They arrived one Saturday to spend their allowances.

“I gave you a quarter,” Henry said, clutching a ten-cent bag of candy, his face pleading for justice.

Helen said nothing, but shifted her gaze to his brother, asking, “Which ones?”

Sam pointed to his usual, a pack of gum with those coveted hockey cards, three red hots and a licorice pipe. “Ten cents, same as last week,” Helen said, raising an arched eye at Henry, whose head dropped. She didn’t blame Henry for trying. She knew what it was like to want more. More than pictures of candy she’d pasted into a scrapbook. More than two rooms at the back of someone else’s house.

Business was good, so good that by April, Helen had to tell callers, even regulars, she had one more pick-up before she could get to them. Men started calling for a cab to pick them up from the train. One wanted a drive into the city every morning for a week after while his car was being repaired. The calls were all bunched in the morning and early evening. Helen’s regulars, Marcie, and her friends, told her she’d missed their calls.

Helen slumped over the glass counter after she had driven the last of the wives to their homes that sparkled in the spring sunshine. The pieces of the problem tumbled in her brain like wooden bingo numbers. She could close the candy store. But those weren’t the busy hours. A second driver to cover the overflow during those peak mornings and late afternoons would help. Another driver meant another salary. Could she pay a second driver and sock away money for inevitable car repairs?

Helen pored over the jobs wanted section of the Sentinel as she had done every morning for the past month, popping candies into her mouth as she read. Her eyes stuck on one entry. Driver. Ten years’ experience. Wants part-time position in Lakeside-Duval area. Call 842-4649. Helen called and set up an interview.

Three days later, a heavy-set figure in a brown nylon jacket that spilled over a pair of wrinkled khakis filled the doorway of the yellow house.

“You Helen?” he asked. “Fred. Fred Boynton,” he said, extending his hand.

Helen put the “closed” sign on the door and led the applicant through an open doorway to the living room where she had first sat with Mrs. Paquette. Now Helen’s dispatch room, it consisted of a wooden table rescued from the trash, a couple of wooden chairs, and a telephone.

“So, what’s your experience as a driver?’’ Helen asked.

“Been driving for Dominion Flour. Montreal to Toronto.”

“Why’d you leave the trucking job?”

“Diabetes. Company insurance insisted I go on disability.”

Helen wondered if an accident was lurking in the background but all she asked was, “What’s the status of your license?”

“All good.”

“Do you have a car?”

“Yup. It’s old. But I know a guy at the DMV. It’ll pass inspection. Wouldn’t take it on long highway hauls, but it’s fine for out here,” he said, glancing in the direction of the near-empty Cardinal Street.

“I need someone for 10:00-2:00, 5:30-7:00 Part-time. $100.00 a week. More if you do extra hours.”
“I live with my brother a couple of miles from here so split shift is ok. Can you pay me in cash? I need to keep my full disability check.”

Helen nodded her approval. She knew that City Cab paid cash to a couple of retired drivers. It didn’t hurt anyone, her boss claimed, and helped the old guys with expenses.

“Let’s try it for a few weeks and see what happens.”

Both drove heavy shifts in the morning and early evening. Helen kept the candy store open its usual hours, making use of the “closed” sign whenever an afternoon pick-up was needed. Fred was always willing to pinch-hit if it got busy.

Fred got to know all the regulars. Unlike Helen who mostly nodded and kept quiet, Fred joined in the conversations. In the quiet times between runs, he filled Helen in on all the local gossip. A couple had moved into the empty house on Windermere Road with two kids and a loud dog. A housewife the next town over was charged with driving under the influence.

It was Fred who got wind of another cab company moving into the area.

“It’s an offshoot of Maple Leaf Cabs. Two brothers, young, with new cars. They’re running their cabs from the parking lot of that shopping center two miles west of here.”

“How do they get their calls?”

“Marshall’s HomeGoods gave them a desk at the back of their store and lets them use the store phone. The Manager thinks it will be good for his business. You know, wives out shopping wanting a cab to get home with their packages.”

“Are they getting any calls?”

“Marty Smithers over on Raven says his wife was at HomeGoods and called you from the store. No one answered so she walked over to a cab in the parking lot. The driver made a joke about helmet head, that guy who runs the other taxi company in town.”

Helen cringed at the reference to herself. Helmet head. That guy. Marty’s wife was sure to pass it along to the other women in Cedar Grove. She knew her oversized pants and checkered shirts did not jibe with the full skirts and matching cinch belts that Marcie and her friends favored that summer. She swallowed hard. She might be on a first-name basis with the women in Cedar Grave, but they would joke about helmet head and that guy during their coffee klatches.

“Do you know anything about them?”

“Called a buddy at Maple Leaf Cabs.  One had a fight with the boss about a complaint from some lady customer. Young guy. Hot-headed. He quit. His brother quit with him. Said the boss was taking the lady’s side.”

“The regulars. They’ll stick with me.” Even as Helen mouthed the words, she started to worry. She knew the women’s fondness for anything new. The shiny cars would be reason enough to call another cab company.

“They won’t keep calling if we can’t deliver. We need one, two cabs on the road. Someone full-time on dispatch so we don’t miss calls.”

The next day after the rush, Fred slowly grated the edges of a spoon inside a heavy ceramic mug and looked at Helen.

“You could make real money out front.”

“How so?”

“It’s zoned commercial out here, right. “Women will stop by for a quart of milk and pick up a magazine. Men will come off the trains and grab a pack of cigarettes. You could easily clear seventy, eighty a week on cigarettes and magazines. A store could bring in real money, not dimes and nickels from kid candy.”

Helen nodded and stirred her coffee.

Fred took this as an opening and continued, “You could be full-time getting calls, dispatching pick-ups, and running the store. Dress like a boss, like Mrs. Olsen at The Place for Steak. I might go off disability, work full-time. We could get a part-time driver to cover the busy shifts. You’ll get a cut from every meter run, and everything from the store.”

Slumped over the counter that afternoon, her eyes drifted over the jellybeans, the sugar babies, the coconut delights. Fred was right. Switching from penny candy to cigarettes and magazines meant dollar bills, not nickels and dimes. But a dress? A store manager? She’d never seen herself that way. And when did it become ‘we’? The taxi, the little yellow house, the candy store, all of this was hers.

The phone interrupted her thinking. “Helen, Marcie here, can you get me over to Dr. Wood’s office? My little one’s throat is burning up. I’m sure it’s strep.”

“Be there in ten,” Helen replied, scooping a handful of caramels into a small bag, and dropping a few in her own pocket.

“On the house,” she said to the little girl in the back seat of the cab, handing her the bag of candy.

As Helen drove, she took note of the businesses up and down Cardinal, the fields north and west of the train tracks exploding with snazzy housing developments, strip malls, and a movie theatre. In time, there’d be room for two taxi services out here. She might just ride things out.

A voice from the back seat brought back Helen from her thoughts.

“Edna Smalley said she saw one of the drivers from that new cab company sitting with a girl from high school. Said there was no mistaking that burgundy blazer. Both were smoking in the front seat. She couldn’t see the girl’s face, or she’d have let her parents know.”

Helen thought for a moment about nodding and saying nothing, her usual response to talk from a customer. Instead, she drew in a breath and the words left her mouth.

“Between you and me, stories are circulating.”

Marcie’s eyes snapped from the side window and angled towards Helen.

“Stories”?

“Fred heard something from his contacts in the city. Something about a woman in the cab late at night. The driver left the company in a hurry, if you know what I mean. They’re brothers so they’re going to stick together. Fred says higher-ups, maybe even the police, are checking into one of those drivers. Can’t be too careful with girls.”

It was a lie. At best, a half-truth. But Helen was done being a lightbulb.

Through the rearview mirror, Helen caught the steely glare in Marcie’s eyes. The telephones in Cedar Grove would hum tonight. Helen flexed her arms inside the floppy flannel shirt and popped a caramel into her mouth. Helen’s taxi, her little yellow house were going to be just fine.

*****

Barbara O’Byrne is a Literacy Education professor living in Charleston, WV where she directs a site of the National Writing Project. Her fiction has appeared in Literally Stories, Flash Fiction, and The Citron Review. When not writing, she can be bicycling in the hills of West Virginia.