Miriam Toews - Summer of My Amazing Luck

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.

Even Terrapin had stopped marvelling at the rain. The mid-western 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.

Terrapin advised us all to take an organic pill containing kelp and hyssop and tree bark. She said it would make our broken skin heal faster. People didn’t want to go out for any reason, not even for beer. Tanya bought herself a beat-up old van and put one of Sing Dylan’s old fridges inside. A friend of hers gave her a cell phone and she was in business. She was bootlegging her homemade beer at twenty-five bucks for a twelve, fifteen for a six. She didn’t even have to work the normal bootleg hours of two to five in the morning. People were willing to pay any time as long as they didn’t have to leave their houses.

On top of the rain and the mosquitoes there was the heat. With our windows shut to keep the bugs out and the heat and the humidity building up inside, it felt like we were living in Vietnam or someplace. We were all getting nasty yeast infections and Terrapin’s yogurt remedy wasn’t working for any of us. Lish said to her one day after many yogurt applications, “Hey Hairpin, got any peach? Sean’s allergic to avocado.” Terrapin advised Lish that if she wanted to cure the yeast infection she should stay away from men for a while. Lish laughed.

Lish’s hair became thick and wavy. She complained daily about it being out of control. I thought it was beautiful. She had cut off the bottom of her gauzy skirts to make them into minis. She tied the bottom of her black t-shirts up under her breasts. A white roll of flab hung over her waistband and occasionally she would grab it and insist that we look at it, saying, “Isn’t it disgusting?” It wasn’t really, and I don’t think she actually cared. Her legs were long and thin and her calves were seriously hairy. They were hairier than any man’s I had seen. She ditched the Birkenstocks and traipsed around in her big bare feet. Only on the very hottest days did she take off her hat with the spider on it. Without it she looked younger and paler. Her older daughters wore Lish’s t-shirts as dresses. Most of the time the young twins didn’t wear anything at all. Some days they jumped in and out of a baking soda bath that Lish had prepared for them to take the edge off their itchy bites.

Every day Mercy went to work on her bike with her daughter sitting on the seat behind her. She’d drop her off at the daycare on the way. Both of them wore regulation fibreglass bike helmets and cheesecloth underneath covering their faces and necks. They looked like bee farmers. God, it was hot. And muggy. Muggy was a favorite word of my mom’s. Every evening I’d give Dill a bath, but before I did, I had to stretch him out on the bed and peel away the dirt and lint that had stuck deep in the rolls of his fat. His neck had a thin ring of dirt all the way around it. I made cleaning him a game and he laughed his loud big-mouthed laugh the whole time. He chuckled and drooled. Even laughing made us sweat. Even Sing Dylan who came from India said it was “Bloody hot.”