Summer of My Amazing Luck, page 9
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.
seven
On TV we saw that thousands of families in the States were being evacuated from flooded towns and cities and farms. Water pipes had been turned off. Sandbagging was the activity of the day. After work, after school, everybody bagged. School gymnasiums and machinery warehouses were filling up with homeless families and even their pets. We read stories of stubborn old women who refused to leave their homes, moving up from the main floor to the second floor, to the attic, and then onto the roofs of their homes. From there they were rescued by helicopters and taken to refugee centres or next of kin. Lish told me about some guy in Iowa who had lost five cans of beer in the flood. He was devastated. The sixth can of the six pack had been the last beer his brother had drunk before he collapsed of a heart attack and died. The remaining five cans had been placed on the mantle in homage to the dead brother. Nobody was allowed to touch them. They were washed right off the mantle, out the front door, and then sank to the bottom of the swirling brown cesspool outside. Maclean’s magazine showed a picture of this guy on his knees crying for his beer cans and his brother. More highways were wiped out and closed. Bridges crumbled and livestock drowned. The U.S. was registering more deaths from electrocution than ever before. Rock bands were getting together to plan a benefit for the flood victims. Bill Clinton surveyed the area in hipwaders, and placed one sandbag on a pile outside Des Moines for the photographers. In case there was some doubt in people’s minds, he officially declared the mess a disaster area.
In Winnipeg, the flooding had damaged much of the antiquated sewer system. Filthy ground water was pouring in through the cracks, the weeping tiles, and the windows in people’s basements. Toilets were backing up all over the city. When people plugged their toilets with bricks and boards and rocks, the shit came up through their sinks. Pieces of human waste, tampons and used condoms were bumping up against rec room pool tables and entertainment units. Washers and dryers, freezers and bathroom cabinets were floating around in three or four feet of water. The hospitals were dealing with more heart attack and stroke victims than ever. Usually old men. While they were being admitted, their wives were on the phone making arrangements with insurance companies, sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, trying to take care of the details.
A makeshift disaster relief agency had been set up by the provincial government to assist those without flood insurance. The lineup to the office stretched for blocks, fights broke out, crafty entrepreneurs walked up and down the lineups selling mosquito spray, umbrellas and fold-up lawn chairs for exorbitant prices. Those people who were renting homes and woke up to raw sewage threw up their hands, packed their bags and moved. Those who owned homes, though, stayed and fought the flood and panicked. The resale value of flooded homes plummeted. It’s impossible to remove the foul stench of raw sewage without spending thousands of dollars on cleaning, repair and renovation. The stink gets behind the walls into the insulation: it seeps under the carpet, under the tiles and into the floor boards. The mould and mildew from the water keep growing and permeate the house and get into the lungs of small children and frail adults. Flood victims moved in with extended family or with neighbours: eight kids to a bedroom, four adults on the living room floor. The heat, the bugs, the despair, the loss, the constant smell of wet dog. Cops were busy around the clock with domestic assaults; abandoned flooded homes were being broken into by gangs of kids, sometimes neighbours. Grown men cried and cursed the skies, shook their fists at the clouds and screamed for the rain to stop. Mothers told their kids to think of it as a great adventure and cried in corners. University psychologists were called in to assess the children. Panels of experts informed us that we were under a lot of stress and our tempers would be short, but that disasters like this would bring us together. International disaster analysts told us that we in Canada and the U.S. were living under a false sense of security. We had no reason to be shocked at the magnitude of the flood. What made us think that we could shut out the forces of nature with our well-built houses, expensive building materials and sophisticated engineering? People living in underdeveloped countries handled disasters better than we did because they prepared for them mentally. They expected them.
Sing Dylan said this was a load of crap: it doesn’t matter how often shit falls on your head, it still smells bad. Sing Dylan had been hit by the flood three times. After the second time he didn’t even bother getting his carpet cleaned and putting it back in. He made sure all of his stuff was in plastic pails or high up on boards or in closets. Every time he went out he unplugged everything. Sarah helped him keep back the rain water as best she could. He couldn’t apply to the disaster relief agency for money to cover his losses or to cover cleaning costs and repairs because he was an illegal immigrant and he worried they’d find him out. The public housing agency in charge of Half-a-Life knew he was here illegally and so they knew he wouldn’t complain to anyone if they didn’t immediately clean up his apartment and replace the damaged stuff. About all Sing Dylan could do was curse the skies like everyone else. In the meantime Sarah let him store some stuff, pictures of his family in India, letters, and rare books he had brought over to Canada, in Emmanuel’s empty bedroom. Sing Dylan would say, “Only until the boy returns home. Thank you. Thank you kindly.” Sing Dylan always said that. Thank you. Thank you kindly. Never just Thank you or Thanks or just Thank you kindly but always Thank you. Thank you kindly.
Sing Dylan came from The Punjab, Lish said. I had never heard of The Punjab. It was the place in India where a lot of Sikhs come from, Lish said. She told me the Sikhs want their own country. They’re not thrilled with the Indian government and they want to change the name of The Punjab to Khalistan. So naturally there was some fighting going on and Lish figured maybe Sing Dylan was involved in it. Lish thought that maybe Sing Dylan came to Canada because his life was in danger. But we didn’t want to ask. I thought Khalistan sounded a lot more sophisticated than The Punjab. So anyway, it made sense that Sing Dylan always said to Sarah, “Only until the boy returns home.” Sing Dylan was the kind of guy who could really believe that one day Emmanuel would come home. He had to. Just like he believed that one day he could go back to his home, his Khalistan. Emmanuel and Sing Dylan were two homeless guys.
Lish told me about Sing Dylan first coming to Half-a-Life. She told me that every morning when he first arrived he put a pot of coffee on his stove. He would have one cup and keep the rest for company. But company never came. Everyone in Half-a-Life was freaked by having a wild Sikh freedom fighter as their caretaker. At 11:30 every morning Sing Dylan turned off the element under the coffee and poured the coffee down the drain in his kitchen sink. Lish found out about it because one morning she went down to Sing Dylan’s place for a mop and he invited her in. He said, “I’m sorry, my coffee is gone.” He explained to Lish his morning ritual. Lish just said, “Oh yeah? Well, thanks anyway,” and took the mop and left. Then she started to ask people in the block if they had ever gone down to Sing Dylan’s for a cup of coffee and everybody said no, no, no, no way, are you kidding, why, what, no, no. No. On and on until she had asked everyone in the block.
Eventually Sarah went down. Mute Sarah. They had a cup of coffee together. Both sitting there, quietly, Sing Dylan wanting his Khalistan and Sarah wanting her Emmanuel. Lish said not a lot of people visited Sarah either, not because she was that weird really, but because she didn’t talk. And so conversations, well, you know. Lish said that if Sing Dylan took off his turban and if Sarah talked, life would be different for them.
Lately Sarah had been talking a bit more. Her droopy eyes were opening up a bit and she was even playing music in her apartment. Lish told me that Family Services was considering extending Sarah’s visiting rights with Emmanuel. The boy had told his social worker that he didn’t care who his father or his grandfather was and whether or not they were the same person. He missed his mom. At the same time, Sarah told her social worker that she promised to talk normally and to send Emmanuel to school. She told her social worker that she was over the trauma that had paralyzed her and she really wanted to get on with her life together with Emmanuel. These visits with the social worker exhausted her. We coached her on what to say, not that we really knew. We told her to stay calm and focussed and always agreeable no matter what the social worker said. We told her to tell the social worker that she did not consider welfare a career option and that she would like to get into a helping profession because from her experience they were all doing such a good job. She understood what had happened, why it had happened and her role in it, and that the future was not bright or easy but that she would do her best to create a positive home environment for Emmanuel. We told her to tell her social worker, when she was leaving, that she appreciated everything she was doing for Emmanuel and for herself, to smile graciously and to say “Bye bye for now,” instead of “Kay” when the social worker said, “We’ll see you in two months’ time.”
