Summer of My Amazing Luck

six

Of course, I didn’t have to read the letter Lish received to know what it was all about: the busker missed her and wanted to see her again. Lish was acting like a little kid. Her face shone and she bounced around her apartment. She still killed mosquitoes but she called them dear and honey before she squished the life out of them. She took her girls and me and Dill out for curry in a cab. She paid for it all with her laundry quarters. Forty-eight dollars and seventy-five cents’ worth. Hope and Maya were concerned. They needed clean clothes for school.

“Darlings, there are more important things in life than clean clothes.”

“Curry?” replied Maya.

“Oh, Maya, lighten up, have some fun. I’ll wash your precious school clothes by hand if I have to.”

“Well, you will.”

We did have fun. Lish was being extravagant all because of this stupid letter. I offered to pay for my and Dill’s share, but she refused. Lish and I drank red wine and I listened to her retell the story of the blissful week she and the busker spent together almost five years ago. The kids started to run around the restaurant. Dill was crawling up to other people’s tables and pulling himself up and grinning at them. A few found him amusing.

Alba and Letitia were performing a drama for some others. From what I remember the plot revolved around two women getting drunk. The dialogue was very repetitive. The girls teetered around the restaurant, pretending that their apple juice was beer. They tried to get Dill to join them, but he was busy playing peekaboo with a young couple at another table. Maya read her book and Hope listened to our conversation and drew on her napkin. Some people stared at Lish. She was wearing her black hat with the spider on it and a gauzy skirt with ripped tights underneath. She had taken off her sandals and was resting her big bare feet on one of the twins’ empty chairs. A couple of times she burped. Once she imitated the waiter’s expression and both of us laughed too loud. I noticed a few words being exchanged between the waiter and a guy who looked like the manager. The manager came over to us and very politely said that some of the other patrons might be bothered by the children and the noise they were making. Whoops. This guy didn’t know Lish. First, she recrossed her feet on the chair and then she pushed back her black hat a bit and stared up at him. She had another sip of wine and asked, “This is a public restaurant, isn’t it?”

“Well yes, of course—”

“My kids are people, right, at least for the most part?” She smiled at me. I didn’t smile back. I was getting embarrassed.

“Yes, but I—”

“Right. If they’re people, then they’re part of the public. This isn’t an adults’ restaurant. This is a public restaurant. Like a public washroom or a public library?”

“All I’m saying—”

All you’re saying is that your establishment discriminates against the young. You’d rather put them on a spit and sprinkle them with curry, wouldn’t you?”

Oh god, I thought and put my hand over my eyes

“No I really wouldn’t—”

“It’s a joke, Chuckles.” She crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. Now everyone was staring at us. Alba and Letitia were still getting drunk and Dill had wandered away and was sitting on some woman’s lap. Maya sighed and kept reading and Letitia made faces at the manager. Lish was getting worked up.

“Lish,” I whispered, “don’t worry about it. He’s right, you know, the kids should sit down.”

But Lish just kept on going. “You know, you people remind me of those other people who put up signs in their store windows that say ‘No Strollers.’ Basically they’re saying No women and children. Especially no poor women who have to cart their kids and everything else around in strollers. I’d like to see a sign in a window that said ‘No Suits’ or ‘No Toupees’ or ‘No Body Odour’ for a change, you know? Eh, Luce?” she said, “wouldn’t you?”

I smiled at the manager, and shrugged my shoulders. “Don’t worry,” I said to him, “she’s not violent.” And then I muttered into my glass, “I think she’s having an allergic reaction to the wine, or something, I don’t know …”

The manager nodded. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave,” he said.

“You know what really makes me mad, Luce?” Lish said.

“C’mon Lish, let’s go,” I said and smiled at the manager, who was staring at Lish incredulously.

“It’s okay,” I whispered to him, “we’re going.”

“The people that make curbs at a ninety-degree angle so you have to break your back to lift the stroller over them or wreck your stroller or wake up your kid getting up them. There are no smooth curbs anywhere in this WHOLE GADDAMN CITY.”

Lish was standing up now. Her black hair was all over the place, a strand of it was caught in her mouth, and her hat was crooked. The spider was almost covering her right eye. She was gathering up the leftover food in napkins and ramming it into her plastic Safeway bag. I got Dill away from the couple. He screamed. He was having a good time. The twins came over to where we were and said, “We’re so drunk. Ooh oooh, let’s drink more beer.” Maya and Hope were giggling with each other now. A middle-aged man next to us was smiling at Lish with what looked like admiration. His wife glared at him and when he noticed her scowling at him he went back to his goat dish. I tried to get Dill into his pink rain jacket, but I gave up and stuffed it into my Safeway bag and tried to hold him the way he was.

“Call us a cab, we are leaving!” Lish barked at nobody in particular. Part of her was just play-acting, having a tantrum. Like I said, Lish could have been an actress. It’s too bad she had to create her own scenes. Had the cops shown up and the manager broken into song or something, she would have been thrilled. As it was, everyone just thought she was crazy. The manager muttered something logical about wanting to be paid for the food. Lish heard him and said, “Oh sure, you want to get paid for ruining our evening. Well, fine.” She took out a little bread bag from her Safeway bag. She had a big grin on her face. Her hat was back in place. She dumped all the quarters, forty-eight dollars and seventy-five cents’ worth, onto the red carpet. The next morning, when she was sober, she told me it had been an accident, but I didn’t believe her. It was actually quite a beautiful thing to see. All that silver mixed with the red. Dill convulsed with excitement and I almost dropped him. A bunch of the quarters rolled under the table of the old couple with the goat dishes.

“Shall we, ladies … and gentleman?”

With that, Lish polished off the rest of the wine from her glass and mine. She grabbed the wine bottle, and, holding it over her head like a beacon of hope, led us out of the restaurant and into the dark street. I guess nobody had called us a cab, but it was probably a good thing. Lish threw up twice on the way home. She dumped the leftover curry in a puddle and accidentally dropped the wine bottle, too. It smashed on the sidewalk and an old guy looked out of his window and shook his fist. Lish tried to moon him, but it was too much work. She wasn’t much of a drinker.

We walked the whole way in the rain singing dumb songs like “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” I taught Lish a couple of the songs my mom sang to me as lullabies when I was a little kid. “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right out of My Hair” was one. She used to sing that song with quite a lot of conviction. “Take Me out to the Ball Game” was another one. When she came to the line I don’t care if I never come back my mom’s voice would get loud and brazen and her top lip would roll up to her nose. Before she got to the one two three strikes you’re out part, she’d shift me around on her lap so she could do her umpire routine. At “You’re out” she’d say it like a real umpire, You’re really fast and high and out low and dragged out. Then, if I was in the right position on her lap, she’d slice her arm across and out in front of her with her index finger pointing to the closet door. There was just enough space between the bed and the closet for her to do this, but still, every time she did her umpire act, I worried that she’d thwack her hand on the closet door. Afterwards, she’d lie down with me and close her eyes, her chest heaving from all that singing. I’d watch my skinny arm going up and down on her chest until I fell asleep.

Walking home from the curry place Dill fell asleep in my arms and the twins walked backwards all the way to Half-a-Life. When we got there Sing Dylan was at the wall, scrubbing the graffiti in the dark. He stopped and looked closely at all of us. He said, “Good evening. How are you?” I was about to say fine when Lish lurched over to him and said, “The answer to that, my good friend Sing Dylan, is blowin’ in the wind.” And then, of course, she started to sing. Sing Dylan shook his head and went back to his scrubbing. I could see how the busker would have missed Lish.

The next morning the sun was shining. At about 6:30 Lish pounded on my door, yelling at me to get up and come outside, the sun was shining, the sun was shining. The twins had their pails and shovels, and the older kids had their beat-up old bicycles. Lish had planned a walk to the park on the corner of Broadway and Young. She said, “Even the mosquitoes are too stunned by the sunshine to bite.” She was wearing a hot pink dress. Her black hair shone. She stood right in the middle of a sunray that had pierced through the window into my kitchen. Little bits of dust flew up around her. She was eating a bagel with cream cheese. She told me I had a crusty line of red wine on my lower lip. By the time I had thrown on a pair of cut-offs and a t-shirt and changed Dill’s diaper and gotten him dressed and given him some cereal, the sun was starting to disappear.

We hurried outside and caught the tail end of the sunshine. It had shone for twenty-four minutes. The rest of the time we played in the rain. A couple of guys at the park were sleeping in the grass next to the sandbox. They were covered with a big orange shag carpet. They woke up when the kids started hollering and they said, “Good morning.” We played in the thunder and the lightning. Maya told me that the chances of us getting hit by lightning were slimmer than the chances of us being killed by terrorists. Lish and I lay on the wet ground. We tried to ignore the mosquitoes. Once you start slapping, that’s it, you’ll never quit, and you have to admit defeat and go inside. So we lay there quietly and agreed with each other that life was grand and we were made for just this sort of activity: lying on the grass, talking, looking after the kids. For Lish it was especially grand. She was the one who got the letter. We had to admit, however, that it would have been grander still without the rain and the mosquitoes. Eventually we had to leave the park because Maya and Hope had to go to school.

When we got back to Half-a-Life, Sing Dylan was outside trying to get the water to run somewhere other than into his apartment. He had given up trying to get the graffiti off the wall for the time being. When he was done digging and draining and piling and drilling, Sing Dylan asked us if we could help Sarah drag out his soaked carpet. It must have weighed two thousand pounds. Each of us, even the twins, grabbed a handful of wet carpet and pushed and pulled it up the stairs and out the back door. By this time we were surrounded by swarms of mosquitoes.

I thought about my friends from high school. What would they be doing now? When Dill was born, they were all really enthusiastic. They brought me and Dill presents and they asked to hold him and offered to babysit. They loved to hear me talk about his birth. “Didn’t it hurt?” Then one by one they stopped calling. Once in a while I’d meet one of them somewhere and they were always really friendly, promising to call to get together. But that never happened. I had heard that Sheila had moved to Toronto to study law. She was living out there with a lawyer in a place called Forest Hill next to a castle. I thought of Lish. I thought of the two of them together. Sheila had been really poor as a kid; her dad had tried to kill her mom and was eventually committed to some kind of looney bin. Her mom sometimes put make-up on one eye and forgot to do the other one.

Lish, on the other hand, had grown up in a wealthy home. Her dad had invested in the future, made sure they were all secure. Her mom stayed at home and sewed them Hallowe’en costumes and cooked their favourite meals. In the evenings they played board games together. They had a summer home in France and a French au pair to help their mom look after them there and teach them the right kind of French. Her dad flew in for a few days at a time. Now Lish lived in Half-a-Life, trying to raise four kids on welfare. So much for security. As my mom would have said, “Tricky life, this.”

We got the wet rug out onto the grass. Sing Dylan gave each of the kids a loonie for their help, even Dill, who had made Sarah trip on the last step. Dill tried to put the loonie in his mouth and Letitia grabbed it away from him and gave it to me. She had a very solemn expression on her face. Sing Dylan patted the kids on their heads and then he slapped Sarah’s cheek. She smiled and said thanks. A big glob of blood stained her cheek and Sing Dylan flicked the remains of the mosquito off his hand. Somehow his safari suit managed to stay white even with all that blood and rain and dirt.

That afternoon Lish came over to my place with the twins. Dill was having his afternoon nap, so the twins played quietly and Lish and I watched Y & R: our lives were nice and dull compared to those in the soap. Some people watched them to escape from their normal lives. We watched them to appreciate ours. I had heard of a soap opera in Brazil where the audience was allowed to vote on what would happen next: should Officer João Carlos go to the chair for killing those street kids or should he be promoted? Should Branca tell her chubby husband that he repulses her or should she just go ahead and have an affair with the handsome doctor? “Well, that’s an easy one,” Lish said. If it had been up to me I would have brought all the couples together. They would stop trying to kill each other and fool around behind each others’ backs and steal the kids. They would be funny, I told Lish, and instead of all that skulking around they would shout out their problems and cry and laugh freely and love one another and leave the kids alone. “Oh, pa-lease Lucy,” said Lish. “People don’t want to see that. They want blood and revenge and sorrow. That’s what makes them feel better.”

Good grief, I thought, if that was the case my mom may as well have said FUCK! YOU! to me every time I went out instead of GOOD! LUCK! But what about the letter? Hadn’t the letter from the busker made Lish happy? She had been full of energy since she got it: laughing and singing and buzzing around her apartment organizing things, throwing stuff out, putting up different pictures and posters, washing her cupboards. She had taken a book out of the library called Clutter’s Last Stand, determined that it would help her to get rid of her junk. Her unnecessary junk. If any one of us in Half-a-Life got rid of all our junk our apartments would be bare. Was she expecting him to appear at her door? The letter said simply, “I’m thinking of you. I miss you. I haven’t met anyone else that could make me laugh like you. Do you still have your spider hat? Oh Right. I’m sorry about taking your wallet, I was going through a bit of a hard time when I met you. I’m sorry. But hey, how would I have had your address if I hadn’t stolen your wallet? I’m on the road now, a different city or town almost every day so there’s no point in writing me. I’m going to try to make it to Winnipeg sometime this summer. I hear it’s very wet. Right now I’m in Cleveland. Take care of yourself Lish, say Hi to your daughters from me.” It was signed, “The guy in rm. 204.”

Lish had read it to me. She assumed that he assumed that she knew his name. He had never actually told her his real name. All she knew him as was “Gotcha,” his show name. I guess if people were always calling you that, you would want to run away. And that’s all that he was called in that old program she’d found. I thought about the letter and it made sense that Lish was ambivalent about it. Excited, yes, to have heard from him, the love of her life and the father of the twins. But on the other hand, it hadn’t been too specific. Would he visit or wouldn’t he? And if he had been thinking about her all these months — years — why didn’t he sound more passionate in his letter? Maybe she would think he wrote letters like this to all his one-night stands. Maybe she would think he was just drunk and lonely and feeling bad about stealing her wallet. And so what if he was the twins’ father? They didn’t know him. How could they miss him? They were happy enough the way they were. It would have to be a lot more convincing for her to think he really cared.

Anyway, Lish seemed to think this letter was a sign a sign that he would, when he could, show up at Half-a-Life. In her heart she was thinking they could put the past behind them, start anew, make love desperately at first and then in a more knowing, confident way. The twins could hate him at first for leaving and then come to love him as a father should be loved. They could all tour in the summertime and maybe even become an entire performing family. They’d be good at it. And even if something bad happened at least the twins would know that he had made the effort. And that was the most important thing, wasn’t it: that he had tried to find them? But so far Lish hadn’t told the twins or anybody except me about the letter. In Half-a-Life it had happened often enough that one of the women would get her hopes up over some guy and then have them dashed soon afterwards. There was no point in even talking about it until it was real, until the guy had maybe moved a few clothes in or offered to take care of the kids for a while. Besides, the others in Half-a-Life thought Lish was fooling herself thinking life was more simple than it really was. I didn’t think that she thought that life itself was simple at all: it was just her take on it that she had smoothed over and over, whittled and refined, until it became simple. Do what makes you happy because there is no sure thing. Just because you can pick out four-leafed clovers doesn’t mean you’ll get lucky.

Another reason why the women in Half-a-Life didn’t publicize every encounter with a man was because it could lead to trouble with welfare. Most of us were friends or had at least a grudging tolerance for each other. Even Naomi and Terrapin were seen laughing over something in the hallway. Public housing isn’t called public housing for nothing. If you’ve got some dirt on your neighbour, chances are she’s got some on you. So, in an unspoken form of a truce, we stick together. Most of the time. Our problem was more Serenity Place. And theirs was us. We were two opposing teams in the game of welfare.

The game revolves around men. There are a thousand strange rules regarding women on welfare and their men. And they have only to do with men. The Mensa minds down at Social Assistance headquarters haven’t twigged to the fact that some mothers have decided to make love to other women and sometimes have live-in relationships with them. Often one of the women will work outside the home and the other stay at home with the children. In instances like this welfare officials only consider the working woman to be a roommate, not a lover, so a portion of the stay-at-home mother’s welfare rent supplement would be docked, because technically the roommate would be paying half the rent. And that would be the only financial penalty. The “roommate” could be making seventy-five thousand dollars a year and welfare wouldn’t care, believing, presumably, that two women would not have sex, especially because one of them, the mother, had already demonstrated her gender preferences. So living with another woman presents no problems. But men, they were trouble.

At least having sex with them was trouble. Life became very messy. More messy than usual, that is, under those circumstances. Actually, it was okay to have quick sex during certain hours. But if a man stays overnight you’re off the dole. Welfare equates men with financial support. This always made us laugh. Lish said they obviously didn’t know the same men we knew. I guess they figured we’d had our chances at love and screwed up and now we could just think about that for awhile, at least while we were dependent on the generosity of the state and its tax payers. So, naturally, we were breaking the law all the time. Us and the women in Serenity Place. Men were crawling in and our of our beds, eating bits of our food that had been paid for by the dole, showering with water that was paid for by the dole, and, of course, pleasuring themselves with us, women who were kept by the dole. That cost. The woman anyway. We were prostitutes for the state.

Okay, I’m repeating everything Lish told me. I actually had never thought of myself as a prostitute for the state. Anyway, no man had been in my bed since I had been on the dole. Never, actually, since I had never had sex in a bed. I lived with my father until I became pregnant. I had a pink frilly room with a single bed and a matching dresser. I had sex in fields, in cars, in stairwells, in basement cellars, in dark cemeteries, in the darkroom of my high school, in half-built houses, in between buildings, up against buildings, and in abandoned buildings. Groping, painful, wordless sex. The cigarettes afterwards were about as fulfilling. I was a kid. Anyway, the point is you have to be careful when you’re on the dole. The women at Serenity Place tried to catch us with men during daylight hours and we tried to catch them. If the same guy visited more than two or three times, rumours started to fly. Elaborate traps were set. Usually we didn’t even carry our plans out. It was just something to talk about and to solidify our own alliance. We could inform on someone in Serenity Place, but never on our own. The only reason why we even cared to rat on somebody in Serenity Place was because of the whole Sarah/Emmanuel incident. But still, Lish was playing it safe by not telling anyone, except me, about the letter and the possibility of the busker coming for a visit. Maybe even to stay. This was a good thing. I hoped she wouldn’t tell the twins. At least not for some time.