Miriam Toews - Summer of My Amazing Luck

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.

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.