Summer of My Amazing Luck

three

Every day it rained. The day I had to go to the welfare office for my regular lecture, it was raining like mad. My appointment was for 2:15. That really didn’t mean a thing because when you got to the office everyone just threw their name and case number into a pail and then sat down for about two or three hours. The names were picked at random as far as I could tell.

The very first time I had been to the dole, I had waited with Dill for about two-and-a-half hours. Right next to the dole headquarters was the Sals. I had jokingly suggested to my worker when I finally got in to see her that there should be some kind of intercom system installed between the dole building and the Sals and that way we could all sit in the Sals drinking coffee and eating cheese nips until we were called in to confess our sins of poverty and joblessness. She looked at me as if I had just told her she had an enormous butt.

Before I turned eighteen, my dad had to support me or I would have been made a ward of Child and Family Services and they’d in theory have to take care of Dill’s and my needs. My dad preferred to give me money than to have me go public, so to speak, because the idea of me as a ward of Children’s Aid horrified him. But I know he was somewhat consoled by the fact that I was only a single mother and not a drug addict or a prostitute. I don’t think it occurred to him that a person could be all three. So from the day Dill was born until the day I turned eighteen, which was one month before I moved into Half-a-Life, my father gave me four hundred and fifty bucks a month. I didn’t see him, I just received his cheques in the mail. At that time I was living in a different dive, but it was a dive for all kinds of people, not only women and kids.

When I turned eighteen he gave me a book for my birthday. It was a thick historical romance epic novel with a picture of a man and woman on the front, the wind blowing their hair back and the man towering over the woman who had her head tilted backwards and her mouth open and eyes closed, like an eighteenth century Cosmo cover girl, and the man looked as if he was strangling her. On the inside cover he had written, “Best wishes on your eighteenth birthday Lucy; from your dad.” I kept the book just for that.

When I was a kid I scratched my name into the wet concrete that was put in down the street. That was long before they had guards to watch over it as it dried. As a matter of fact, Teresa had that job once for a while. She got it through welfare: they figured it was something she was qualified to do. Anyway, I scratched my name, Lucy Van Alstyne, into the sidewalk that my dad walked up and down four times a day for thirty years. To the university, back for lunch, back to the U and home again. At first I was nervous, wondering what he’d say. Then I forgot about it. He didn’t mention it once, not once. He still walks that way and back and there and back, and I wonder what he thinks when he sees my childish scrawl in the cement. Does he wonder what happened to that kid? Is he ashamed? Does he smile to himself? Guess I’ll never know.

Anyway, I was on my way to my second dole appointment. I had to wake Dill up in the middle of his nap to make it on time. He was not happy about that. I was supposed to bring proof of all sorts of things, photocopies of this and that, and my appointment slip. I stuffed all of it into a plastic Safeway bag. (In Half-a-Life just about everyone carries their stuff in plastic grocery bags: you can put half-eaten chocolate bars and wet diapers and washcloths in them.) I got Dill into his little pink rain jacket, passed on to me from Lish, and carried him and the stroller and the bag down the stairs to the front entrance. It was pouring. You can’t miss a welfare appointment. If you do you will not get any money and your future’s at stake. If you can call a future on welfare at stake. And you have to wait until they have another opening. Some of the workers will insist on knowing the reason why you can’t make it, and ask for written proof to back it up and make sure it was a damn good reason. When Sarah’s sister died, she had to bring a photocopy of the death certificate to the dole because the funeral fell on the same day as her appointment. After a few months on City welfare single mothers get bumped over to Provincial welfare, which means that they think you’re a lifer and good for nothing else. Then you get visits only about twice a year and your cheque in the mail every month. It’s like a graduation. In fact Lish was telling me about Provincial parties some of the women in Half-a-Life had. They’d celebrate, usually with tequila, because once you were in the hole (called that because they just about forget about you), life was much easier. For some reason everyone in this block drinks tequila whenever they’re on a tear. I hate it myself and I worry about it seeping into my breast milk and getting Dill drunk. But I was still on City.

To get to the dole office, I had to walk for about twenty minutes. Half-a-Life wasn’t too far away. Both were in the Core, the centre of the city. Dill’s umbrella stroller was falling apart. One of the wheels kept coming off and every ten yards or so I’d have to stop and kick it back on. Or I’d have to tip the stroller a bit so it was only riding on three wheels, but that got tiring fast. The rain was pissing down on us. Dill was crying and then made himself puke by sticking the string of his hood too far down his throat. Cars whizzed past two feet away and splashed us all the way to the front doors of the dole. A guy on a mountain bike wearing some Gore-Tex jacket and cut-offs over long johns rode on the sidewalk beside me for a while with a big ecstatic grin on his face as though he had just spent a year in the Sahara.

“Isn’t it great?” he puffed.

“What?” I said, removing the string from Dill’s mouth.

“The rain, it’s amazing. It’s like a great equalizer, you know?” It’s funny how some people just start talking to you when they see you have a kid.

“Oh yeah, for sure,”

I hated Gore-Tex Guy.

“Well, take her easy,” he said as he wheeled away, probably on his way to some philosophy or film studies course. Even with the plastic Safeway bag, all my proofs and papers and Dill’s extra diapers were soaking wet. Dill had kicked off one of his yellow boots and I hadn’t noticed. It took me about fifteen minutes just to get in through the bloody doors of the dole office. There were about five guys standing around in the lobby all staring at me and nobody did anything to help. At one point I had pushed the front of the stroller in and the door came swinging back shoving one of the curvy handles of the stroller into my stomach. Eventually I got Dill and the stroller and myself into the building. Water was dripping off the end of my nose. The rain had made the vomit on Dill’s jacket runny and it was sliding down the shiny plastic onto his lap. He was very intrigued with it and moved one chubby index finger around in circles through the puke.

I asked the secretary, “Can I leave my stroller in the lobby?”

“No, you can’t.”

“Where can I put it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Most people don’t bring ’em.”

“Well, I did.”

“I’m just saying most people don’t.”

Getting past the receptionist into the holding tank/waiting area was never pleasant. I shook the water out of the stroller in front of her. I didn’t care because she was only the secretary. She wasn’t the one giving me the money

Some guy with a black eye and fresh blood on his cheek said he could watch the stroller for me. Like I was born yesterday. To get into the bigger waiting area I had to follow one of three lines painted on the floor. Yellow, Red, or Blue. Which line you followed all depended on how long you had been on the dole. Following a colour is easier than following signs, for people who can’t read. The receptionist glanced at my wet appointment slip.

“Red line.”

“Thank you ever so much.”

I started off down the red line. The wheel on Dill’s stroller fell off. I stuffed it into my Safeway bag full of sidewalk muck and sand. I reminded myself, the main thing to remember when you walk into the waiting room is not to look at anybody. That’s only an invitation for boring conversations and hard-luck stories that can go on for two or three hours. The thing to do is just find a seat and sit and look tough. And also remember that these people aren’t necessarily as pathetic as they look. Or they’re far more pathetic than they look. Either way, don’t talk to anybody. I sat down holding Dill on my lap and shaking things in front of his face like keys and the stroller wheel. And I thought of Gore-Tex Guy beaming with delight in his cultural anthropology class at the wonder of it all. The old guy next to me appeared to be having some kind of asthma attack, he kept smacking his shiny lips together after every gasp and hack. A woman said “Hi baby” to Dill. She offered him a nickel.

I was trying hard to look tough. I didn’t stare at anybody or offer the old man assistance or coo at Dill or smile sympathetically at the crazy woman or take her dirty nickel. I sat and looked at the walls and ceiling and waited for my name to be called. Then I saw Terrapin. Oh great. She saw me and dragged her two little sullen girls over to me and Dill.

“Lucy! Why didn’t you tell me you were coming here? We could have walked together. Isn’t the rain beautiful? This is your first time isn’t it?” Blah, blah, blah. She was wearing a t-shirt that read, “Extinct is Forever.”

I had wanted to give the impression that I had been on the dole all my life, that I had seen the world from every angle, that I didn’t need anybody, that I had been to hell and back and survived.

“Hi.”

“Hey Lucy, would you like to share our snack? I brought some veggies and raisins, and Sunshine” (her other daughter’s name was Rain) “brought a board game she made by herself out of odds and ends. We may as well enjoy ourselves while we wait.”

My cover was shot to hell. The other hard-cores had no respect for me. They were staring at Terrapin and me and I felt trapped. I don’t know why I wanted the respect of long-term dole recipients. Wherever I went I tried to fit in and the dole was no different. There was something terrible about being at the dole for the second time. I didn’t want them to pity me and I didn’t want to pity them. I just wanted to be anonymous. But I think they felt about me the same way I felt about Gore-Tex Guy.

A couple of women from Serenity Place came in, and Terrapin whispered in my ear that one of them was making over five thousand bucks a month as a prostitute as well as collecting the dole. I wondered if it would work for me. The women from Serenity Place sat way off in a corner next to a group of Indians who hadn’t said one word to each other the whole time.

I’m not sure, but I think someone who worked at the dole must have told my case worker to see me as soon as possible, because Dill kept crawling off into the blue and yellow line rooms, where we were not supposed to go, and I’d chase him, he’d laugh, I’d sigh, and the dole workers would clear their throats or look away. With the puke now on his pants and one boot missing he looked horrible, and I think seeing him depressed the dole staff. Anyway, they got me in and out of there pretty quickly. My worker asked me if I knew yet who Dill’s father was. As if since the last visit an angel had appeared in my kitchen and said “Psst, it was Tiffany’s brother, whatsisname.” Was I supposed to line up all the guys I’d had sex with over that period and check out their features and insist that they all go for blood tests and report back to me so I could then get the sheriff after them to give me child support and get off the dole? Actually it might have been a good thing I didn’t know.

A lot of women in Half-a-Life did know who the fathers were, and as soon as their dole workers knew they knew, they were expected to get money from them, which would be docked from the mothers’ welfare cheques. If the guy didn’t pay, too bad, you were still out the money. You could put them on maintenance enforcement if they were still in the province. Sometimes this worked. But sometimes, if the guy was an asshole, he could blackmail the woman and get her welfare cancelled. Like if a woman babysat or sewed stuff or did any little amount of work in her apartment for pay, it was supposed to be reported to the dole, so they could dock that amount from the cheque. Also, if you left your kids sleeping while you went downstairs to do the laundry or ran over to a friend’s for an egg, the guy could sue for custody, claiming you were an unfit mother. Some mothers simply didn’t want to anger their children’s fathers. They would rather tell the dole they were receiving a hundred bucks or fifty bucks a month from the father even when they weren’t and lose it from their cheque than risk the dole and the courts getting involved and going after the man. Most of them are far more afraid of these men than they are of poverty. For those with a lot of pride, it’s rough. When your case worker sits there punching information into a computer, and says, “Father’s name and address,” you can say, “I don’t know,” which for me is true and hard to admit, but even when it’s not true, a lot of women say it to save themselves the grief of trying to extract cash from fathers long gone.

It’s not hard to ask for money for new winter snowsuits, or a crib, even though it’s kind of degrading, but there’s something about saying you don’t know who the father of your child is when you do. And when that child was conceived you really loved the guy and he loved you, maybe, and the child was perfect, and you almost believed that you’d be together, a family, forever. That you had actually made a decision to have a relationship with a certain man and to become pregnant and give birth and become a mother and be responsible. Then to just toss that out the window and say you don’t know — for some of these women, that was the hardest thing. They hung on to their memories of perfect love, of perfect union, these were the beginnings of their children. Yeah, they were alone now, the guy had split. But their intentions had been grand and they’d be damned if anybody was going to take that away. These are the women who say Yes of course they know who the father is, and No they have no idea where he is and no way of finding out. That really surprises the workers. Their hands are tied. They have to issue the full amount on the cheque and they can’t go after the guy for maintenance. They hate it.

Anyway, I wasn’t one of those. I had to answer the question. I sighed and said, “No, I still don’t know who the father is. I should tell you right now, I probably never will.”

“Well, if it happens again,” the dole officer said, “we might not be so helpful.”

That pissed me off. Helpful? This was his job. It was policy. It was all politically motivated. People like him needed people like me. I had read this in an editorial in the newspaper, and besides, I could have a dozen children and not know the father of any one of them and they’d still have to give me money. I knew that. “Oh,” I said.

“Yes, oh. If you find yourself in a similar position in the future, I’d advise you to a) utilize some type of proven contraceptive device, or b) obtain the identity of the male, be that through direct communication, that is, by asking him his name, or if need be, that is, if he is not forthcoming and refuses to cooperate, by taking down his license plate number, providing he owns a vehicle, and from thereon in his identity can be traced by the police, that is, if the need arises.”

I concentrated on breathing. I noticed the sign on his door. It said F. Podborczintski. His eyes were small and blue and his nose was large and red. He had managed to comb a few strips of hair over his shiny scalp. His shirt tugged around his armpits and was the colour of dust. He looked sad and tired. I wondered if he was married and had kids of his own. I wondered if he always talked this way about sex.

“Okay,” I said.

Type, type, type. He put more information into my file and then he gave me a slip which meant I should follow the red line out of there and then switch onto the green line towards the tellers who would dole out my money. There were about seven of them and they sat behind bulletproof windows that had little slits at the bottom close to the counter where we slipped them our papers and they slipped us our cash. We didn’t have to say anything to each other. Before I left his office, Mr. Podborczintski tweaked Dill’s cheek and this made him cry. Podborczintski looked so uncomfortable. It would have been nice if Dill had smiled at him.

I had to stand in a teller’s line for about fifteen minutes, while Dill tried to lift my shirt and get his mouth on my breast. After that tweak, he needed some soothing. Lish had told me that feeding your child was nothing to be ashamed of and if people didn’t like it they shouldn’t look, so I stood there while Dill slurped away to his heart’s content. I knew the receptionist was staring, and sure enough, after a few minutes, she clomped over to me and said she was sorry, but breast-feeding wasn’t allowed in the building. There had been complaints. I felt like ripping off my shirt and shaking my milky tits in her face. Just then Terrapin came around the corner and waved. I motioned to her to come over and then asked her to chase Dill around because if he couldn’t eat, he sure wasn’t going to stand there in the line-up with me and I didn’t want to lose my spot. I had heard a woman behind me say, “That’s disgusting,” after the wet thwop sound that happened every time I took my nipple out of Dill’s mouth before he was ready to let go.

On the way home, the stroller was working remarkably well, so I decided to take a chance and go to the mall to pay my phone bill. One more day and I was going to be disconnected. As soon as Dill and I hit the mall, the stroller started acting up. Every ten yards, kick kick. Dill had fallen asleep by then and I was trying to ram the thing back on gently so he wouldn’t wake up. I deposited my dole cheque into the instant teller and then expected to get cash back. But because I had no funds in my account to cover it I was told there would be a two-day hold. Have a nice day the instant teller told me and then the window slid shut over the screen. I looked in my pocket and counted two dollars and twenty-seven cents. CRASH! I had put my heavy leather jacket on the stroller handles and the weight of it pulled the stroller over backwards onto the floor. Dill woke up screaming and staring up at the ceiling. I picked up the stroller and Dill from the floor and took off for the phone place to tell them that they’d just have to wait. I’d explain and pay in full as soon as I got my money. Every ten yards the wheel came off and I’d kick it back on, but then it started coming off every five yards. I was kicking it harder and harder. Dill was really screaming now. People were staring. I thought I saw Gore-Tex Guy going into the Gap store. My head was starting to pound and my jaw was clenched like a psychopath’s.

Suddenly I stopped.

“I CAN’T FUCKING STAND THIS FUCKING FUCKING PIECE OF FUCKING SHIT NO FUCKING MORE!” I screamed. I thought to myself that I sounded like Teresa. I scooped Dill from the stroller and then starting kicking the stroller for all I was worth. I kicked it and kicked it. I kicked it at least fifty yards down the mall. Everybody was staring at me. Dill was crying. Then I picked it up and carried it over to the fountain in the centre and heaved it right in. Over the heads of a few old people that were sitting around it killing time.

I remembered my mother getting pissed off at an umbrella that wouldn’t close. She was standing in the doorway, she had just come back from the neighbours’, and she couldn’t get the umbrella to close nor could she get it through the door into the house. The wind was howling. The rain was coming down so hard it hurt. I was sitting on a chair at the kitchen table watching her fight with the umbrella. Then the door shut. I looked out the window and there was the umbrella tumbling through the sky lifting higher and higher. It was beautiful. My mom had thrown it away, let it go. I was impressed. I clapped. My mom put a pot of coffee on and sat down with the crossword puzzle.

I shifted Dill over to my other hip, stuffed the Safeway bag and our jackets under my arm and marched all the way to the other end of the mall and into the Sears store. Dill had stopped crying and I felt quite good. I walked over to the baby appliance section and put Dill into the first floor model stroller I saw, heaped my jacket and the bag on top of him, and walked right out of the store. I walked out of the mall into the rain and I didn’t have to stop until I got to the front doors of good ol’ Half-a-Life.

Dill loved his new stolen stroller. He’d sit in it for hours and Alba and Letitia would push him up and down the hall. I stayed away from the mall for a while.