Miriam Toews - Summer of My Amazing Luck

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 Halfa-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 Halfa-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.