Summer of My Amazing Luck

five

Even Terrapin had stopped marvelling at the rain. The mid-western United States was starting to flood. Rivers were running over farmers’ fields and into their homes. Entire towns were being threatened by swollen rivers. Major highways and bridges were being wiped out. It was only a matter of time before the Red and the Assiniboine, Winnipeg’s rivers, would feel the pressure and begin to rise. With the rain came the mosquitoes. Every puddle, large or small, became fertile breeding grounds. Our children were covered in bites. Some were too young to spray with repellent because the chemicals in the spray seeped through the skin into their blood. Others had mothers who didn’t believe in it. They tried to ward off the mosquitoes with home remedies, Avon’s Skin So Soft and citronella, but nothing worked. Soon some kids, especially the ones that were too young to slap mosquitoes off, had started a second layer of bites. Dill had three mosquito bites one on top of the other above his right eye. One morning he woke up and his eye was swollen shut.

We couldn’t even open our windows, because the buggers managed to get through the miniscule holes in the screens, those that had them. At night you could hear the collective scratching of all of Half-a-Life’s bite victims. We scratched until we bled. It was common for the kids to walk around with the dark bodies of mosquitoes squished onto their skin. They couldn’t be bothered to flick them off anymore after they had slapped them. If the mosquito was slapped with a belly full of fresh blood, skin and clothing were stained. The walls in our apartments had ugly smears of dead mosquitoes. Large chunks of our days were devoted to tracking mosquitoes, creeping from room to room, standing on chairs and furniture, cornering them, and adding to their death toll. We were told by the experts on the six o’clock news to wear white long sleeves and pants. But it didn’t matter what we wore. They still got through. Even the animals were suffering. Farmers couldn’t sell their meat for as much as they were used to. Big pork hams had ugly bites all over the skin and nobody wanted to buy them.

Terrapin advised us all to take an organic pill containing kelp and hyssop and tree bark. She said it would make our broken skin heal faster. People didn’t want to go out for any reason, not even for beer. Tanya bought herself a beat-up old van and put one of Sing Dylan’s old fridges inside. A friend of hers gave her a cell phone and she was in business. She was bootlegging her homemade beer at twenty-five bucks for a twelve, fifteen for a six. She didn’t even have to work the normal bootleg hours of two to five in the morning. People were willing to pay any time as long as they didn’t have to leave their houses.

On top of the rain and the mosquitoes there was the heat. With our windows shut to keep the bugs out and the heat and the humidity building up inside, it felt like we were living in Vietnam or someplace. We were all getting nasty yeast infections and Terrapin’s yogurt remedy wasn’t working for any of us. Lish said to her one day after many yogurt applications, “Hey Hairpin, got any peach? Sean’s allergic to avocado.” Terrapin advised Lish that if she wanted to cure the yeast infection she should stay away from men for a while. Lish laughed.

Lish’s hair became thick and wavy. She complained daily about it being out of control. I thought it was beautiful. She had cut off the bottom of her gauzy skirts to make them into minis. She tied the bottom of her black t-shirts up under her breasts. A white roll of flab hung over her waistband and occasionally she would grab it and insist that we look at it, saying, “Isn’t it disgusting?” It wasn’t really, and I don’t think she actually cared. Her legs were long and thin and her calves were seriously hairy. They were hairier than any man’s I had seen. She ditched the Birkenstocks and traipsed around in her big bare feet. Only on the very hottest days did she take off her hat with the spider on it. Without it she looked younger and paler. Her older daughters wore Lish’s t-shirts as dresses. Most of the time the young twins didn’t wear anything at all. Some days they jumped in and out of a baking soda bath that Lish had prepared for them to take the edge off their itchy bites.

Every day Mercy went to work on her bike with her daughter sitting on the seat behind her. She’d drop her off at the daycare on the way. Both of them wore regulation fibreglass bike helmets and cheesecloth underneath covering their faces and necks. They looked like bee farmers. God, it was hot. And muggy. Muggy was a favorite word of my mom’s. Every evening I’d give Dill a bath, but before I did, I had to stretch him out on the bed and peel away the dirt and lint that had stuck deep in the rolls of his fat. His neck had a thin ring of dirt all the way around it. I made cleaning him a game and he laughed his loud big-mouthed laugh the whole time. He chuckled and drooled. Even laughing made us sweat. Even Sing Dylan who came from India said it was “Bloody hot.”

It was June. Terrapin was organizing a solstice party. I had no idea what that was and I was too embarrassed to ask her or even Lish, who groaned when Terrapin told her she was having one. I asked Terrapin when she was having it and she just kind of cocked her head at me like a dog and said, “What do you mean When?” She was wearing a t-shirt that read “Food” on the back, and on the front it had a picture of a ukulele or something and read “Winnipeg Folk Festival.”

Her kids had made some playdough out of salt and flour and carrot juice for colour and wanted to give it to Dill to play with. I guess it was the kind he could eat when he was finished playing with it. From Terrapin’s tone when she said when, I assumed I was supposed to take my cues from her aura or her vibe or maybe check my I Ching to get the answer. What was I thinking being so direct about something so vague and wispy as the solstice? I was determined not to appear ignorant around Hairpin. Besides, I had already given the impression that I knew what the solstice was and I had a pretty good idea that if I knew what it was I was supposed to know when it was. Kind of like a Grey Cup party.

Thank goodness the library was only a couple of blocks away from Half-a-Life. The mosquitoes were bad, so I had to run as fast as I could, pushing Dill in the stroller. At least the sidewalk was smooth the whole way so I wouldn’t run the risk of smashing into shifting concrete and watching Dill get flung out of his stroller. He loved the speed anyway, and the mosquitoes would have to work too hard to get us. They were getting slower and bigger from all the blood they were drinking. They looked more like prehistoric miniature flying dinosaurs now, but they were sluggish and sated. Drinking blood for them had become more sport than survival. Now that they had the city to themselves they were living it up, sitting around in outdoor cafés ordering Bloody Marys and slapping each other on the back. Dill and I managed to get to the library with two bites apiece. Not bad. A greater difficulty faced me: getting to the front doors, gasping for air, removing Dill from his stroller, plopping him on the grass, folding the stroller up, making sure Dill didn’t crawl into the wet dirt of the flower bed beside the grass, and then carrying him and the stroller inside. This process resulted in another half a dozen bites for each of us. Each time I performed this operation I counted the seconds it took to complete: one thousand, two thousand, three thousand.

I had, in the past, removed Dill from his stroller, folded it up, and got in the library with both of them in eight seconds. In a rodeo this is the amount of time you have to tear out of the chute on your horse, rope the little calf, yank it off its feet, leap down from your horse, flip the calf onto its back, and tie its feet together. Then you jump up and back from the calf with your arms in the air. If your cowboy hat is still on your head you can take it off and wave it around and then wipe your brow with your sleeve. I guess after that someone comes around and unties the calf and drags it back to its mother.

So anyway, I could do this in eight seconds, too, not every time, but often enough. If someone I knew came over to talk to me, someone from Half-a-Life or the dole or wherever, I had to forfeit. It would be disconcerting for them if I was moving around like greased lightning muttering thousands, or Mississippis under my breath and then hurtling myself and Dill and the stroller into the library and slamming the door in their face, peering out at them with a victorious expression on my face and my arms in the air. But with the mosquitoes and the rain I wasn’t meeting many people outside.

The library was one of my favourite places. The building was old and had a lot of dark wood in it. The book stacks were on the main floor. The library had dim yellow lighting and no windows. The floors creaked and the books were sort of greasy. All winter long the rads hissed and banged. A whole shelf of rare books the library had somehow managed to score had been soaked when one of the rads exploded overnight. The librarians took turns blowing hot air on them with a hair dryer. Downstairs was a room for story time and crafts. Lish and some of the others brought their kids to story time every week. It was free and close and a good break. The parents had to stay in the library but they could go upstairs and talk quietly or read, uninterrupted, for one whole hour. The woman in charge of story time was kind and energetic. Her face had a permanent grin on it and she didn’t mind spilled glue and paint as long as the kids were enjoying themselves. Often she’d be a minute or two late. Then she’d come running into the room grinning and panting. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Here I am. I misplaced my glasses, so if I can’t read the words we’ll have to make them up ha ha ha.” The kids would cheer and clap and gaze up at her from their spots on the ratty carpet. When she read, the kids listened. There was also a chess club downstairs. Clusters of old men smoking and playing chess and speaking in different languages.

The only problem with this library was the old librarian upstairs. She seemed to work irregularly, so I never knew when she’d be there. For some reason she hated me. Or at least I thought she did. It might have been because I let Dill crawl around on the floor while I looked for books. Sometimes he’d pull out a bunch of books from the lower shelves and she’d clear her throat and try to catch my eye. After a while I stopped looking at her after she had cleared her throat. I’d just go over to where Dill was and clean up the books like it was no big deal. Silently I encouraged him to keep doing it. Sometimes I met other moms from Half-a-Life and we’d talk and laugh and our kids would run around making too much noise. Usually there wasn’t anybody else in the library so I didn’t see what the big deal was. We’d take out piles of books for our kids, even Dill.

Anyway, this librarian, Mrs. Hobbs, was always on my case. I’d check out books and she’d look at me over the tops of her half-glasses. She’d pull up my file on the computer and then get close to it and squint at it for at least half a minute with her chin resting in her hand. She’d drum her skinny fingers against her slack cheek while she stared at the computer. She’d sigh and look at me again with a very stern expression.

Anyway, I’d found a book that had something in it on the solstice and I wanted to take it out. “You owe twelve dollars and fifty-nine cents in overdue fines,” said Mrs. Hobbs.

“Really?”

“Do you wish to pay for that with a cheque or cash?”

“Uh, could I work it off?” I smiled.

“Cheque or cash?”

In the meantime I had put Dill on the floor and he was heading over to the table with the rare wet books.

“You can’t take any books out until you pay your fine,” said Mrs. Hobbs.

Just then Emily the smiling story time woman came over to the desk,

“No, no, Sadie, don’t you remember? The fine has to be brought down to ten dollars. As long as it’s only ten dollars she can take out the books.”

“Oh. Okay,” I said, “I’ll pay two dollars and fifty-nine cents now and then I can take out the books.”

With Emily the Good at my side I felt more confident

“Hey,” I added, laughing, “I could go on bringing my fine down to ten dollars forever. I don’t ever have to pay the ten dollars. When I die my estate would have to take care of it,”

Emily laughed. Just then there was a huge crash. Dill had managed to pull few of the thick hardcovers off the drying table and was standing there chuckling. Then he knocked the hair dryer off the table and a piece of plastic broke off it and flew up in the air. Now Emily was really laughing. Sadie stood frozen to the spot, her half-glasses suspended like icicles on the bridge of her nose. She must have thought they were slipping down because she started flaring her nostrils, I guess in an attempt to widen her nose and create a broader base for her glasses to rest on. The flaring must have upset the delicate equilibrium and the glasses fell. For a second they caught on her lower lip and then clunked onto her chest. They clacked against a peacock brooch she was wearing and then they were still.

I didn’t really need a book on the solstice. I could just have asked Lish. Or I could have looked up the meaning of solstice and then left without checking out the book from the library. Or I could have paid the full amount of twelve dollars and fifty-nine cents. Well, actually I couldn’t have, not then, but I could have been nicer to Mrs. Hobbs. And in the future I was. We had established an unspoken truce. She smiled at me. I smiled back. I brought my fine down to ten bucks every time and she checked out my books. Dill pulled books off the shelves. I put them back. Mrs. Hobbs did not clear her throat as much.

If I had made a movie about me and Mrs. Hobbs, it would have had a lot of dream sequences of me blindfolded and sitting on a cement floor in the basement of the library. And Mrs. Hobbs would be lighting a cigarette for me and putting it in my mouth. You know that hostage phenomenon where you grow fond of your captor? That’s what would happen.

“I hate asking you to pay your fines, Lucy,” she’d say. “But until you do, I can’t release you.”

“I know, Mrs. Hobbs, I know. You’re just doing your job,” I’d say. “You’re as much of a prisoner as I am. Here, have a drag of my cigarette.”

“Thank you, Lucy. I’m glad we’ve had these seven hundred and thirty-one days to get to know each other.”

“Me too, Mrs. Hobbs, me too.”

Credits roll, orchestra starts up. I told Lish about my movie idea and she said, “God Lucy, give her a break, she’s a fucking librarian! What do you know about her life anyway?”

And I said, “Me? You’re the one who’s always freaking out whenever someone tells you what to do! I was simply trying to illustrate the nature of our relationship!”

“I would not pay to see that movie, Lucy,” she said.

Lish and I went on like that for a while. It was our first stupid fight.

Day after day of rain and bugs kept us virtually imprisoned within the walls of Half-a-Life. Lish wasn’t cracking as many jokes. Terrapin had lost some of her glow. Sarah was looking sad again and not doing as much talking anymore. Emmanuel’s visits had been cut back to once a month. Sing Dylan was still trying to scrub the graffiti from the wall. Naomi was fighting more than ever with the fireman for sole custody of their son. She hit him once when he came over and he charged her with assault. She was worried about the charge affecting her custody case. Every day was more or less the same: trying to get by, keep the kids amused, and not lose our minds. We could hole up inside our apartments or we could wander around the halls, talk in the laundry room or in someone’s kitchen. It was difficult for those of us with hobbies and jobs to concentrate on them because of the heat and the constant interruptions from restless kids and restless moms looking for someone to talk with. Joe and Pillar were fighting an awful lot even though neither one of them was working. Lish told me that Pillar had told her that one of the reasons why she had married Joe was because he had reminded her of her old best friend, back when she was a kid in a town called Sarto. Especially his profile and the way he smelled. Pillar told Lish that when Joe was drunk and sleeping she tilted his head just so he looks more like her old friend, Peggy, and then she would lie there looking at him looking like her and smelling him smelling like her and remembering her childhood. And Pillar thinks Sing Dylan is weird for not drinking. Life is strange. But life in Half-a-Life is even stranger.

During that June I looked forward to the time of the day Mercy and her daughter came home just for something to watch outside other than the rain. Watching Mercy and her girl get off the bike, drag it over to the lockers and then get into Half-a-Life was like watching a choreographed performance: every move was precise and it never changed. Getting the mail was another high point of the day, even though most of our mail consisted of library fines or disconnection notices or advertising for places and things none of us could afford. Samples of shampoo were nice.

One afternoon Lish trekked downstairs with Alba and Letitia to get the mail. The twins were singing. “It’s raining. It’s boring. The old man is scoring.” Lish looked tired. Her skin was breaking out around her chin and her black hair was greasy. It was bread day for her. Every Tuesday she had to pick up the bread at Prairie Song and deliver it to the co-op. In return she got member prices on the stuff at the co-op. But it meant putting the twins in the wagon, walking four blocks to the Wheat’s End Bakery, loading the bread in and around the girls in the wagon, and in a big hockey bag that she draped over her shoulder, and then walking another four blocks to the co-op to deliver the bread. It also meant either getting soaked or eaten alive when the mosquitoes were bad. I don’t know why she didn’t ask one of her boyfriends to help her. One of them must have had a car they could lend or give her a ride in. But she said, “Men are a nighttime indoors thing.” Going outside with them during the day with kids and bread and problems to solve would ruin it for her. Nope. She’d rather do it on her own. Teresa and I were standing around the mailboxes in the lobby talking about Marjorie. Teresa had a gut feeling Marjorie had started seeing that guy again, the father of her son and of Teresa’s, and not telling Teresa, who didn’t want to care, and who didn’t want to appear suspicious, either.

It was really none of her business anyway. Out of her control. I agreed. She didn’t love this guy anymore and certainly didn’t want him hanging around her place. But I knew Teresa was wondering if maybe Marjorie was getting more cash for her son than she was getting for hers. If Marjorie was sleeping with this guy again, it would stand to reason she was also reaping fringe benefits like take-out food, new clothes, occasional movies, a new toy for her son. Their son. At least while the bloom was still on the rose. If he was spending money on Marjorie, he was, in Teresa’s mind, spending more money on Marjorie’s son too, even in a roundabout way. That would make his son with Marjorie better off than his son with Teresa simply because he was having sex with Marjorie instead of Teresa. That is, if his actual presence could be considered an advantage to Marjorie’s boy. Both boys knew he was their father but neither one had really known him and so couldn’t really miss him. It was complicated. Teresa was trying to put a price on time and affection. If in her opinion, Marjorie’s son reaped some extra benefit, then Teresa’s son should too. Just because Marjorie and this guy were having sex didn’t mean that Teresa’s son should have less money than Marjorie’s son, did it? That was what we were talking about. Or rather what Teresa was talking about. While she was talking I was running up and down the stairs. Dill went up. I brought him down. He went up. I brought him down. It was a good form of exercise, and when I was up, it gave Teresa time to formulate her next thought on the whole mess with her ex and Marjorie.

“What are you guys talking about?” asked Lish, coming down the stairs.

“Men and sex and money,” answered Teresa, her red lips pursed.

“Jesus Christ, is that all we ever talk about? Bitch bitch bitch let’s change the subject.” She rammed her key into her mailbox and flung it open.

“To what?” Teresa slapped a mosquito that had landed on her arm and her own blood smeared her skin. Alba and Letitia picked Dill up and started fighting over him. “Men and Sex and Money. Men and Sex and Money,” they chanted while they tugged at Dill from opposite sides. I noticed we were all barefoot.

That’s when Lish grabbed my arm hard. “Oh my god. Oh my god. I can’t believe this. Oh my god. This is too weird,” That was the day she got her first letter from the busker. He had stolen her wallet from the hotel room, he had written, and had carried her address around with him since.

My mother was killed in a botched robbery attempt. My dad and I told her over and over again she was crazy to pick up hitchhikers. Didn’t she read the papers? But she’d say, “Why would anyone want to kill a little old lady like me?” So it was her policy to pick up any hitchhiker with a bag or a suitcase. If they had a bag they were serious. Sometimes she scared the hitchhikers: why would a single lone female be so eager to pick them up? Didn’t she read the newspapers? She’d slow down and stop beside them, a big grin on her face. They’d back away and wave her off and shake their heads. She’d laugh. Suit yourself. Sorry for you if you’re afraid of a little old lady. And she’d spin out in her big old Ford with her window wide open, her elbow sticking out and her hand tapping on the roof of the car, always in a hurry to get where she was going. I guess she liked the company and the potential risk of picking up strangers. When you think about it, we had both been affected for life by picking up strangers. She had lost her life and I got Dill.

The day she was killed she was on her way to a farm just outside the city. She was a family therapist. Her office used to be my playroom. There was a lot of talking and yelling and crying going on in that room. It bothered my dad that my mom had all these unstable people streaming in and out of our house, so whenever he was at home and she had clients he would mow the lawn — or shovel the driveway in the winter. He’d mow the lawn tight outside the window to the playroom/office, bumping up against the house and going over the same patch of grass many times. Our lawn had never looked trimmer. Actually it was bald in patches. I think this was his way of telling my mom’s clients to get a life, get busy like him and leave his wife alone. Or he’d start crashing around in the kitchen, washing dishes and slamming cupboards. The only time he washed the dishes was when my mom was trying to work. My friends said, “Oh wow, your dad washes dishes. That’s nice.” But I knew it wasn’t. My mom did her best to ignore him, When it got to be too much she’d wake me in the middle of the night and off we’d go on the train to my cousins in Vancouver for a week or two. If that was impossible she’d run to the piano and play songs like “Moon River” and “Alfie” and “Five Foot Two” as loud as she could over and over until my dad left the house. Then she’d walk away from the piano, beaming, red in the face, swish over to the counter and make herself a pot of coffee. Once she spit into every pot and dish and cup he had washed and then threw them out the back door into the yard for all to see. My dad stood by saying, “What are you doing? What are you doing?”

The day she was killed she was driving off to some little town to counsel abused farm women. I think she was trying to tell them, “Get the hell off that farm. Take your kids and leave. Move to the city and go on welfare if need be. Start a new life. Just get away.” Like Naomi at Half-a-Life. But she had to get the women to come to that conclusion themselves by repeating a lot of what they said. My mom said she acted as a kind of mirror. That was her job, as far as I could tell.

So on her way she had picked up a hitchhiker, a drifter with a bag. Only the bag had knives and guns in it. Right beside a billboard advertising fresh honey on the number 75 highway, he asked her to stop and get out of the car. She said, fine, she would, but not without her briefcase, which contained all sorts of confidential files and tapes of women and my mom talking. The guy was nervous and said No. So she said something like, “Look, you can have the car, you can have my money, just give me my bag.” Then she reached over into the back seat to get it and he freaked.

He didn’t shoot her, he just smashed her over the head with his gun. This is how he told the story after he was caught a couple of days later. She wasn’t dead then. He dragged her out to the ditch, threw her briefcase on top of her and took off. A while later she died in the ditch. My mom had always done what she had wanted to do, more or less. She’d done it quickly, too. Even at home, cleaning up or whatever, she’d almost run to get it over with. Swish, swish across the linoleum, in her red down-filled slippers. Sometimes she’d have power naps. She could hold a spoon in her hand, she said, and fall asleep. At the moment it dropped she would have had enough rest to feel completely refreshed. Then boom, she’d be up. Swish, swish. She could make herself a tuna salad sandwich in three minutes and a pot of coffee in one. “If that was lunch, I’ve had it,” she’d say and then coerce me into playing a quick game of Dutch Blitz before she had to go back to work. She always lost because her fingers were shorter and fatter than mine and she’d have to take sips of her coffee.

At her funeral I was thinking that would be a good thing to put on her tombstone: “If that was lunch, I’ve had it.” But things like that had already been worked out and it would never have happened. I couldn’t imagine my dad and me standing there weeping in front of a tombstone with those words written on it. At her funeral my dad, all two hundred and fifty pounds of him, leaned against me in the front row and cried. I wondered, what was he going to do without her? What was I going to do with him? I looked down at his hand holding mine. A very strange hand. He was shaking against my shoulder. He shook and he shook and then he let out a moan that terrified me. There were so many people in the church. Loudspeakers were set up outside in the parking lot so those who couldn’t get in could hear what was going on. Lots of half-tons with women in them crying and kids running around the parking lot laughing while the minister’s voice boomed out at them. “Let us celebrate, let us celebrate,” he kept saying. “Let us celebrate the life.” A kid outside must have been playing with a car horn and it got stuck. The horn blasted through the open windows of the church and the minister had to cut his speech short. Everybody else was looking around wondering what to do. My dad didn’t care about the speech or the horn. He sat there. He didn’t look up. He leaned against me and cried.