Miriam Toews - Summer of My Amazing Luck

Once, she broiled frozen bagels for us in Lish’s oven. She took them out gingerly and said “ouch” because they were hot. I noticed that the oven hadn’t even been on. But she smeared cream cheese over them anyway and handed them out to us. Frozen bagels with cream cheese. Then she went running upstairs and brought down the dress she was going to wear to get married in. It was really stunning. It was beige silk, simple and very elegant. I thought she had good taste for a nutcase. She asked us about ten times if we thought she had a soft laugh because Andre, the murderer she planned to marry, told her over the phone that she did and he liked it.

Lish told her that she didn’t think it was a good idea to plan to marry this con without visiting him first. “The guy’s a murderer for Christ’s sake,” Lish said. Betty said, “Yeah, but it could just have been a backhand that happened to kill this woman.” “Or he might have chopped her into little bits,” Lish said. “The two are very different.” “If he chopped her into little bits,” Betty had said, “I’d reconsider.” But basically, she thought he was a very sweet guy. He was completing a university degree in psychology. She also pointed out that he was black, male, poor and eighteen when he killed this woman, and might be taking the rap for someone. People like him are thrown into prison in the States all the time, Betty claimed. Anyway, she was excited about hitchhiking out to Baltimore to see him and was preparing herself for the trip.

“I want to get really long fingernails so I look like one of those Jewish broads who’ve never worked a day in their lives,” she told us. I looked at Lish. She had longish nails. I thought she might say something to set Betty straight, but she just laughed. A couple of days later Betty told us that Andre had called her and said he wanted to be honest with her. He had killed his grandmother, doused her with gasoline and lit her on fire. But he had been young and she had always nagged him. Betty decided she didn’t care whom he had killed or how. She wanted to wear that silk dress more than anything and be Andre’s wife. Though she had wondered out loud whether or not they would actually be married if they didn’t have sex. Apparently that prison didn’t have a conjugal trailer or room or whatever.

After that first visit we’d had, I’d say Hi to Betty when I saw her in the hallway. She’d purse her lips at me and wouldn’t say a thing. Once I saw her with big black stitches on her chin and she told me she had fallen off her bike. Lish told me that Betty had shown her the photograph of Andre and had told Lish it was her brother Dean. Toward the end of the summer she moved out and none of us saw her again.

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 longsleeved 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.