Miriam Toews - Summer of My Amazing Luck

My apartment seemed too big for Dill and me: we had an extra room and some of the other women used theirs for craft things, easels, sewing machines, drum kits. But I didn’t have a hobby. I hated crafts. Angela was forever making piñatas for the kids in the block. Terrapin and her organic friends, Gypsy and Deb, made jewellery and wove friendship bracelets and tried to sell the stuff on the street and through a women’s co-op. There was a woman in the block who was sculpting sex toys out of clay: rocking chairs with big multi-coloured phalluses sticking out of the seats. She had a teenage son, and his girlfriend lived there, too. The woman was very shy. I don’t even know her name but I suspect her son and his girlfriend forced her to be their slave.

My apartment, like most, had a long hall as its central feature. On one end was the bathroom, on the other the kitchen. In between were the bedrooms and living room, which were more or less the same size. The rooms had big windows that opened out. Off the living room was a door to the outside balcony. Lish had woven a fishnet around the bars of hers and put a plastic wading pool out there that was continuously filling up with rainwater. The kids loved it. The couple below weren’t thrilled about the water splashing over the sides down onto their balcony, but their kids played in it too, so they couldn’t really complain.

Joe and Pillar had been at Half-a-Life almost as long as Lish had. Theirs had been one of those perfect storybook marriages. Until about one week after the wedding. That’s when their first kid was born. Apparently they both fell so in love with the kid that neither one wanted to leave the house and work. Joe had always been kind of unemployable and Pillar had once been a computer programmer. But after Duncan, they hung around at home, had more kids, fell in love with them, went on the dole when their money ran out, and eventually joined the ranks of the nouveau poor. Give a big warm welcome to Joe and Pillar!

Like I said, they lived right under Lish, and whenever she had one of her skinny boyfriends over and her moaning and groaning got too loud, Joe would stand in his apartment, in his kitchen, right under her kitchen, where she always did it with her boyfriends, and imitate her moaning. Then Pillar would call him a jerk and they’d fight and all along Lish didn’t even hear it or care because she was too wrapped up in her own fun.

I didn’t have enough stuff to fill my apartment. I marvelled at Lish’s apartment. It was full of junk mostly, secondhand furniture that she painted or the kids had painted, art from a lot of her boyfriends, kids’ art, plants, old books, records (she didn’t have a stereo to play them on), jars of organic food stuff, boxes of leather bits and material the kids could use to make things with, lamps with big fringy shades and two or three old-fashioned typewriters, photographs of her kids and her family, her great-grandparents, her friends. She almost always had music playing in the background and incense burning and big vats of soup or vegetables boiling on the stove. Mint and dill were her favourite smells, and she put huge amounts of garlic into everything she cooked. She had transformed her standard issue public housing suite into a marvellous home. I loved going over there. In comparison, my apartment was cold and depressing.

Over the summer it got better. Lish took me to all the secondhand furniture shops and gave me some blue and yellow cloth to hang over my windows. I bought an old Persian carpet from an estate sale and my dad gave me the bedside lamp from Mom’s side of the bed. Rodger, Hope and Maya’s dad, let us use his van to pick up the stuff. When I picked up the lamp my dad wasn’t home, but he had left a note telling me where the lamp was, as if I had forgotten where my mom had slept. We picked old wooden chairs out of back lanes and sanded them down and painted them green and mustard, fuchsia and black, I draped a lacy tablecloth over my old couch and bought a few plants from Safeway. Lish suggested I take the cupboard doors off my kitchen cupboards. That way the dishes and food would be visible and make the room look more lived in and colourful. I wasn’t so sure boxes of Kraft Dinner and Melmac plates were so hot to look at, but off came the cupboard doors anyway. Angela gave me a big clay pot and I hid my crappy food behind it. Lish told me I needed a cast iron frying pan and wooden mixing spoons. These I got from my dad’s place, too. Again he wasn’t home when I picked them up. I guess there’s a lot to do when you’re a geology professor. My mom had never used these things because they were lodged too far back in the cupboard and she didn’t really care whether she was cooking on iron or Teflon.

My dad never cooked for himself. He ate all his meals at The Waffle Shop or at the Pizza Hut. When I was a kid he’d take me to The Waffle Shop. We would walk there holding hands. Well, it was more like me flying behind him like a kite because he was a huge man and covered the ground with enormous quick strides. My dad had this weird talent. He could pick out four-leafed clovers in the grass. One four-leafed clover surrounded by thousands of regular three-leafed ones and grass and stuff and he’d see it. Every once in a while that would happen on our way to The Waffle Shop and he’d stop and home in on the thing and then point it out to me, but that was it. He never picked them and I never asked him how he did it and he never told me. It was very strange. I remember telling my grade two class that my dad could do this weird thing with four-leaf clovers and they were not impressed. A boy got up and said his dad could crow like a rooster and they were impressed. Then I told them, well, my dad was the only baby ever in the world to be born wearing a little grey suit. I had overheard my mother tell this to one of her friends on the phone. They were not impressed and my teacher asked me to please sit down.

I don’t think my dad could even feel my hand in his big one. I think often he forgot I was with him until we actually got to The Waffle Shop. That’s when I landed back on the ground beside him, huffing and puffing. Every time we were at The Waffle Shop he’d say the same thing to the waitress: “An egg salad sandwich for my bombshell blonde.” My dad was human when he was outside of our house. He talked a bit and smiled. He tousled my hair. Inside the house he was dead, terrifying. He sat in his chair and silently shook his head at me when I made a lot of noise or ran around too much. On weekends when he wasn’t working, he stayed in bed all day. We’d forget about him.

There was a woman in the block who was really truly crazy. Betty took seventeen pills a day to try and keep herself “between the ditches” as she said. She hadn’t always been nuts. At one point she had been studying for her Master’s degree in English Literature. She was married to an engineer and they had a son. When her son turned five, things started to unravel for her. She lost it. Her husband left and took the kid with him. He couldn’t handle her madness. Somehow she got to Half-a-Life, probably because her son was allowed to spend one week of every year with her. I don’t know. I never asked her because I didn’t want to upset her. She scared me. Once she dropped in on Lish and me, at Lish’s place, and started talking to us like we were old friends. Before that she had never spoken to us.

The kids used her as their ultimate insult. “You love Betty.” “No, you.” She was pleasant around them, always saying, “Hi, how’re you doing?” But all that medication made her twitch and shudder a lot. It scared the kids just like it did me. She showed us a picture of a guy she had been writing to and was hoping to visit. She got his name from a prison pen pal catalogue at the library. He was in jail in Baltimore for murdering a woman. That’s all he had told her. She told us she was going to hitchhike out there and they were going to get married. She was worried about telling him she was nuts. Lish pointed out to her that he had a few quirks himself. This made her laugh.