Summer of My Amazing Luck, page 6
The woman who moved into her apartment was very friendly. Her name was Tanya. She had two children, a boy and a girl. They had different fathers. On the weekend her son went to his dad’s place in the country. His dad had a girlfriend who had a daughter. His dad and the girlfriend had a son together. So Tanya’s son had a half-sister and a mother with whom he lived during the week, but on the weekend he had a step-sister and a half-brother and a step-mom. The girl went to her dad’s place in the suburbs on the weekend. Her dad had a girlfriend who had a son. Her dad and the girlfriend had a daughter together. So Tanya’s daughter had a half-brother and a mother with whom she lived during the week, but on the weekend she had a step-brother and a half-sister and a step-mom.
Tanya had the weekends to herself. On the weekends she brewed beer in huge vats and bootlegged it to people in the block. Once, somebody from Serenity Place called the cops on her. One of the cops turned out to be the full brother of Tanya’s daughter’s weekend step-mom. Tanya and this woman got along all right. The cop knew that his sister wouldn’t invite him over for Sunday dinners anymore if he arrested Tanya and, like most cops, he was lonely. So he gave Tanya a warning, tongue in cheek, enjoyed a mug of home brew with his partner, and left. You see, it pays to be well-connected and Tanya certainly was. She made a fine beer with a higher than usual alcohol content. She let us buy it on credit and half the time she’d forget about it. She really enjoyed brewing beer. When her kids came home she put all the tubes and funnels and bags of sugar away and she and Sing Dylan and Sarah carried the bubbling vats of beer downstairs to Sing Dylan’s apartment. Sing Dylan didn’t drink it, of course, but he didn’t mind storing it for her. I don’t think her kids ever knew their mother was the Beer Queen of Half-a-Life.
There was one other woman in Half-a-Life I sort of got to know. Her name was Mercy. Lish told me that her real name was Mercedes. Her mother had given her that name when she was still in the womb because it was the last thing she saw of Mercy’s father after she told him she was pregnant: a big black Mercedes pulling out of the driveway of her parents’ home. He was the son of a banker or a judge. Mercy’s mom raised her alone on the top floor of her parents’ elegant home in River Heights. Lish said Mercy and her mom were invited downstairs to join the grandparents for dinner every Thursday night. Other than Thursday nights they never saw each other. When Mercy turned eighteen she turned wild. She set fires around town until she was caught. She did every type of drug available. She screwed anything that moved, male or female. Eventually her grandparents turfed her. Heartbroken, her mother committed suicide on a Friday afternoon and they didn’t find her body until the next Thursday evening when she didn’t show up for dinner. Or so the story goes around Half-a-Life.
Anyway, Mercy belonged to our group only because we loved to gossip about her. Actually she would have been very funny if she hadn’t been so uptight about everything. After a while her uptightness became the joke. She confused me. She had one daughter. The father of this girl was a Trinidadian Rastafarian. But he lived with a different white woman and they had a whole whack of children together. From time to time he’d stay overnight with Mercy. Seems his wife knew about Mercy, and Mercy certainly knew about his wife and that was the situation. I knew he had hit her a couple of times. I found it interesting how a person like Mercy could be attracted to a violent married man. She and her daughter went to bed every night at 7:30. She saved money on everything she bought. She always rode her bike everywhere with her daughter bobbing around behind her in a kid’s bicycle seat. Her apartment was spotless. They seemed to bathe incessantly. When her daughter had been a baby, she had changed her diaper every time she urinated, even the smallest amount, to prevent diaper rash. She rarely got a sitter. She only read books by female feminist authors, mostly black ones, and she didn’t own a TV. She was in control of everything—everything except her peculiar and violent love life. This guy walked all over her, showing up drunk late at night, banging on her door, agreeing to take the girl out to the park, then not showing up, asking her to marry him and the next day telling her she was a whore and hitting her. She put up with his shit. I guess he was the only unpredictable thing she could handle. She probably didn’t want to end up alone like her mom had, so she didn’t complain. She compensated for his randomness with her own precision.
One Saturday morning she asked Dill and me over for tea. Her daughter was surprisingly free and charming. Every time Dill dragged some book or toy out of place Mercy quickly put it back. When he spilled his juice, she spent about fifteen minutes wiping it off the floor, not complaining about it, just very focussed on it. Mercy showed me photographs of her trips to Trinidad. She travelled there with her daughter every year. She saved money on food and clothes and stuff so she could do this. She said she wanted her daughter to know where she was from. But these pictures were very odd. A lot of black people crowded into the photo, smiling and barefoot, holding chickens, wearing ripped t-shirts, dancing. Then there in the middle of the shot was Mercy. She was always wearing bright white knee socks and long khaki shorts. She had on hiking boots and long-sleeved men’s white shirts. She wore a big-brimmed straw hat, tied around her little head with a yellow ribbon. Her face was obliterated almost entirely by huge black sunglasses. Her expression was always grim. Her daughter was usually off in the background dancing with her cousins. When she had finished showing me these pictures she carefully put them back into their plastic-backed envelope and then into another one and then another. Then she put them into a file folder entitled Trip Photos and put that file up high on a shelf in a cardboard box made especially for folders.
Each time she went to Trinidad she brought the family of her daughter’s father gifts. For the children she brought thick-soled leather hi-top runners and puzzles and books. For the women she brought perfume and tampons and for the men she brought white dress shirts like the ones she wore. Mercy told me that in Trinidad she and her daughter slept in a dirty one-room shack with about six other people. There was no running water and no electricity. Almost everyone went barefoot. They joyously welcomed Mercy and her daughter, their granddaughter and cousin, into their home and hated to see them go.
She was also the only one of us who worked—outside of the home, that is. Once I asked Terrapin if she worked. She said, “Yes, I work very hard raising Sunshine and Rain. If you mean do I work outside the home for wages, no, I do not. It’s more important for me to be at home with my children.” I was going to ask her why her kids always looked so grim, but instead I said, “Oh. Cool.” I had decided not to talk to Terrapin about anything concerning me or Dill, anything that was meaningful, anything about life or kids, nothing but Hello, nice day for her. God, she bugged me. One time Lish and I were moving a dresser from Lish’s apartment to mine and Terrapin happened to show up on the stairs. She was wearing a shirt that read “Have a Special Delivery.” She asked us how we were managing. Lish said, “Oh terrible, this is so heavy I’m going to have a miscarriage and I’m not even pregnant.” I laughed and Terrapin said, “That might not be funny for all of us?”
Lish sighed, “Yeah, that’s very true, Paraffin. What, am I supposed to be like court jester here or what?”
Actually, that is exactly what we expected Lish to be. She was funny. She was meant to be funny. Even if she wasn’t making you laugh outright, she was uplifting, good for the soul. She had an attitude towards life that I wish I had. She did her own thing and she never noticed when people stared at her stupid spider hat or her long square-toed shoes. She loved to hang out with her kids, but if they wanted to do foolish things like attend school or join Girl Scouts, that was okay with her. She let them do their own thing because she knew how much she needed to be able to do hers. She had successfully separated her identity from her kids’ identities and so she could really enjoy them. She wasn’t afraid to be alone, as I suspected a lot of us at Half-a-Life were.
The next morning, it was raining as usual. I cleaned up Dill’s breakfast mess, and took him over to Lish’s place. I couldn’t call to tell her I was coming because her phone had been disconnected. But she knew just about everybody in the block and could use one of theirs anytime, provided they hadn’t been disconnected, too. I brought my own coffee because Lish had stopped buying it. “Too expensive for something that makes me all jittery,” she’d said. I knocked but nobody answered. So I walked right in to the living room. Hope and Maya were in school. Alba and Letitia were in there playing and singing the alphabet song as best they could. “A B C D E F G H I J K alimony please.” I was about to say “Hi” to them when I heard moaning from the other room. At first I thought it was Lish and whoever having sex in her bedroom.
“Good morning Lucy Goosie and Dilly Willy,” said Letitia in her most agreeable teacher’s voice. They were playing school. Then I heard it again. It wasn’t sex at all, Lish was crying. She must have been muffling it in her pillow or in all her hair, because it sounded far away. Nothing sounds far away in a Half-a-Life apartment. I didn’t know what to do. Lish crying. It was too weird. She never cried.
Alba said, “Lish is crying because she has a tummy ache. And she can’t come to school right now.”
“But she’ll come in the afternoon.”
“Yeah.”
I figured I’d just slip out and come back later, but by then Dill had been made a pupil and was being taught the alphabet. Alimony please. He’d scream if I tried to take him home now and then Lish would come into the room and be embarrassed. So I stood there smiling at the kids, wondering what the hell I should do. I flipped through a wicker basket full of letters she had saved. Love letters? I was tempted to read some but I was afraid the twins would tell her I’d been snooping through her stuff while she wept in the other room. I looked around at her photographs. Her parents looked normal. John was even smiling. Her mom had a happy expression and was holding John’s hand. A picture of her brother from the ’70s when he had an Afro. Someone had stuck two straws into his hair to look like antennae. A picture of Lish and Hope and her dad. Lish was enormously pregnant, with Maya, I guess, and wearing a bikini. They were on the beach. A picture beside it showed Rodger digging a hole in the sand and Lish standing beside him laughing. Hope was playing in the background. Then another picture beside that one. Lish was lying on her stomach with her huge belly nestled comfortably in the hole Rodger had dug for it and reading a book. Maya was sitting on her back and Rodger was drinking a beer. You couldn’t even tell Lish was pregnant.
Pregnant, that was it. Maybe Lish was pregnant and that’s why she was crying. No, Lish loved being pregnant. She’d be celebrating if she was. Not with tequila though. She kept crying. I stood there. I tiptoed over to the kitchen table, thinking I’d just sit there quietly and wait for Lish to be through.
That’s where I saw the program. It was a festival program from years ago. 1989. It was open to the page with the buskers’ descriptions and one of them was circled, about a hundred times, as if someone had spent a whole day with a pen going round and round it. The picture was small and blurry and black and white. It was a close-up of a dark-haired guy eating fire. It was the busker, the twins’ dad. She was crying her eyes out over this guy. The twins were four years old. How long had she been crying in her hair over him? Four years, my god. I would have had to have started crying at fourteen and not stopped to have been crying for four years. Lish was so funny. Why was she crying after all this time? Obviously she was really hooked on this guy. I was envious. She had a real reason to get worked up. To throw herself down on her bed and sob, bawl her eyes out thinking of lost love, of happier times. I thought then that would be easier than looking forward to them like I was. At least she knew what life was like, at least what it could be like. She could see it. I was still trying to picture it.
Alimony please . . . Dill wasn’t catching on quickly to Alba and Letitia’s teachings. I stared at the picture of the performer. I read his blurb. Fire-eater, magician, not afraid to risk his life for your cheap thrills . . . Lish kept on with her muffled crying. I guess she thought she was keeping it a secret from the kids. That bastard, I thought. Why did this always happen? I had built Half-a-Life and the women in it into a kind of shrine I worshipped. I had to, it was all I had. I really wanted it to be a good thing. I wanted the women in it to laugh all the time. I wanted them to be tough. I wanted them to roll their eyes at trouble and crack a joke. I enjoyed the stupid arguments but I didn’t want them to become complicated. In my mind these women had escaped from horrible lives and had come to seek solace in Half-a-Life. And Lish? I needed her to laugh at her life, not cry. Then my life would be funny, too. And Dill would be a lucky boy.
I looked at the wicker basket full of letters. Each one had been opened very carefully, and they were stacked neatly, according to size, smallest to largest. I ran my finger around the rim of the basket. Lish was still crying and the kids were having a good time. I looked out the window and it was then that I had my brilliant idea. I felt like I was Pierre Elliott Trudeau and I had just gone for a walk in the snow. I looked up, big wet snowflakes like chunks of cake falling on my face, and there it was, the answer: QUIT POLITICS. Or it could have been, probably, QUITEZ LES POLITIC. I’d have to ask Teresa. Anyway, in my case, of course, it wasn’t QUIT POLITICS or anything, it was WRITE LETTERS. And I wasn’t really walking in the snow, I was staring out the window at the rain—but still. It came to me.
And I would sign them, “Love, Gotcha.”
When I was a kid my cousin Delia and I played a trick on her brother. He had told his mom that there was a girl he liked. Delia and I overheard him talking about her. He said her name was Sandy and she had hair like Farrah Fawcett and was really cute. He had doubled her on his bike all the way to the Mac Store. “I hope she likes me,” he’d told his mom. Delia and I made a plan. We wrote her brother a letter from Sandy. She must have been three or four years older than us so we wrote the letter in big swooping letters instead of printing it in our own square hand. We dabbed my aunt’s perfume on it. Dear David, I like you a lot. Please meet me at the Mohawk after school if you like me too. And if you don’t already have a girlfriend. Love Sandy. Then we dropped this letter in the mailbox and waited. We were bursting to find out what happened. We couldn’t even look at each other without laughing our heads off. We were so brilliant. After school we ran home and threw ourselves on the couch, pretending to watch TV like any other day. We waited and waited and waited. Finally the front door opened. Slowly David walked into the house. He dropped his jacket and his books on the floor in front of the door and started walking down the hall to his bedroom. He had on his stiff new Lee jeans. When he saw us in the living room, he said in a really nice soft voice, “Hi.” He kept on walking slowly toward his bedroom. I was worried and I could tell Delia was, too. We were frozen, staring at the TV. “What if he shoots himself?” I whispered to Delia. “As if. He doesn’t even have a gun,” she whispered back. I wanted to cry.
We had always played jokes on David and he’d get mad and tell my aunt and she’d tell us to leave him alone. But this was different. We’d broken his heart. What if he became a serial killer of women because of us? The next day his mom found out what happened and she took both of us into her sewing room. She told us we had done a very cruel thing and had made David very sad. We would have to apologize and promise never to do anything like it again. I had hoped David would beat us up like he usually did when we bugged him, but instead he just sat there. After we apologized he said, “Kay.” Then we said we were sorry. We told him we had been assholes. Neither one of us had ever said that word out loud before. We hoped this would really convince him we were sorry. He just said “OK” again. After that we stopped bugging him and he never beat us up again. I think we were all sad about that for a long time. Anyway, now he’s married to a nurse and almost bald and helps disturbed teenagers by canoeing with them and teaching them to camp. I don’t know what became of Sandy.
But that whole thing with my cousin Delia had been a bad joke. I was much older now, and serious about keeping Lish happy. I think even Pierre Trudeau would have approved.
five
Even Terrapin had stopped marvelling at the rain. The midwestern 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.
