Miriam Toews - Summer of My Amazing Luck

Mario gave Roberto two black eyes for telling Teresa about the front and told him never to hit Teresa again. But he didn’t have a chance to because shortly afterward Mario set him up in Toronto with a cappuccino bar and a nice Italian girl who’d keep her mouth shut.

Men played cards in the back of the grocery and watched soccer. Sometimes one of their wives, one of the old ones, dressed in black and kind of beakish and hairy, would haul her husband home for supper or bed. The others would laugh and ridicule him and then later get hauled home by their wives. We ate a lot of Mario’s noodles. And oatmeal. Porridge is very cheap, very easy, very filling, and very healthy. What more do you want? Well sure, there’s taste. But Mario’s noodles have that. Hardly any of us, except Naomi and Angela and Tanya, prepared a lot of meat. Kids hardly ever eat it, and it seems odd tucking into a big pork chop all by yourself, kind of depraved.

Anyway, one day Lish and I and Teresa were sitting around in Lish’s kitchen eating noodles in different-coloured plastic bowls and reading the paper. Teresa had got the three for the price of one deal from the box on the corner so we all had our own copy. I wished Teresa hadn’t shown up because her kid was rough with Dill and it made me uptight. Also, I had really wanted to talk about the busker with Lish. It was exciting, titillating to talk about him. He was perfect because he wasn’t around. Lish wasn’t shy about telling me the details of how they had sex, and what he told her, all that stuff. But she wouldn’t say anything with Teresa around. Lish knew better than to tell Teresa anything even if Roberto hadn’t. Teresa read and talked at the same time. She told us she was taking some kind of flagging course at the community college. She had quit French Immersion because her French teacher had come on to her, she said, and besides the grammar didn’t make any sense. I thought that must have been the real reason. She thought if she could get this flagging course under her belt she’d have a chance in the movie industry. Apparently flagging is an essential part of any shoot. The flagger must stand around waving a flag which indicates to the truck drivers and dolly operators and whatever where they are to go.

Lish snorted. “You have to go to school to learn how to wave a flag, Teresa?”

“Yeah, it’s a one-year course. It’s not as easy as you think.”

“My god, you’re going to study flagging for a whole year? What’s there to study? The psychology of flagging? Ha ha. The Origins of Flagging, or how about Flagging: Art or Science? The Post-Modern Implications of Flagging … Ha ha ha …”

“Excuse me,” said Teresa, “are you finished?”

“The Great Flaggers of Our Time: A Retrospective,” said Lish. “Women in Flagging … HA HA HA!”

“Ha ha fucking ha,” said Teresa, “just you wait. I’m gonna extinguish myself.”

“What?” said Lish. “What did you say? HA HA HA. Are you on fire, Teresa? Oh god. HA HA HA. Go stand in the rain! Dis , Teresa, the word is distinguish. D-I-S-T—”

Teresa was pissed off. I gave her a look that was supposed to be sympathetic, but I don’t think she noticed. She had stood up to Lish before and she could do it again.

“Yeah well, Lish,” she said, “what the hell are you doing? Watching tomato plants grow on your window sill, hovering over your kids, laughing at everyone. At least I’m doing something. ”

“Oh relax, Teresa, I’m just kidding around. Some of my best friends are flaggers. Why, just the other night Kevin started flagging only five minutes into the greatest fu—”

“Fucking bitch!!!” Teresa slammed down her coffee cup, spilling a bit.

“What, what, what’s your fucking problem?” Lish was mad now too. “I was joking. Jesus, can’t you—”

“No, no, not you,” said Teresa. “Her. What a fucking cunt. Sorry. Look, Bunnie Hutchison has decided to take away our fucking child tax credit money.”

“What?!” Lish grabbed Teresa’s newspaper.

Teresa was shaking her head. “I can’t fucking believe it.” I didn’t know who Bunnie Hutchison was or what the child tax credit money was, but by Lish and Teresa’s reactions I knew it was serious.

“More coffee?” I asked.

“What?!” Both Teresa and Lish stared at me as if I had just handed them a plate of snot.

“Don’t you know anything? God, Lucy, this is major. It affects you too, you know, you’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy … fuck …”

I just shut up then. Who the hell did they think they were? How was I supposed to know about political things just because I was a mother on welfare? I didn’t know that Bunnie Hutch (as she was called by the Lifers because she had them trapped) was the minister in charge of welfare mothers and I didn’t know that the child tax credit was fifteen hundred dollars. Fifteen hundred dollars is a lot of money when your annual income is only nine thousand six hundred. Well, that was mine because I only had one kid. Lish had four so she got eleven hundred dollars a month instead of eight hundred. Everybody with kids got the child tax credit money. Now, Bunnie Hutchison wanted to take it away. That is, away from mothers on welfare. Everybody else would still get it.

The word got around fast and the women in Half-a-Life were mad. Lish and Angela and Teresa decided to get a petition going and bring it down to Bunnie’s office. Terrapin said she’d chain herself to the big buffalo in the foyer of the legislative building.

“It’s a bison, Nellie McClung,” said Lish. “And please don’t. You’d be ignored all day and then when it was time for everybody to go home, some dopey caretaker would come and cut the chain and tell you to go home, they’re closing.”

“Can’t you call me by my name, Lish, just once?”

“I would if I knew it. What is your real name, anyway? Your mother can’t have named you after a turtle. What’s your real name? Karen? Barb? Look, I don’t even care. Go chain yourself to the buffalo if you like. Chain your kids to it, too. Nothing’s gonna change. Why don’t we just get drunk tonight and kvetch amongst ourselves until morning. Oh fuck, now it’s pouring again.”

I had never thought of Terrapin as having a mother. She was trying so hard to be everybody else’s. Trying very hard, and not succeeding. We were all trying very hard to be good mothers. But were we succeeding? If we weren’t good mothers, then what were we? Losers. What if all our kids hated us for not letting them have fathers, for being poor and for living in a dump like Half-a-Life? What would we do when we couldn’t have babies anymore, when they had all left us? Then what? What could we do to make our kids proud of us? To make us proud of us? Chain ourselves to buffaloes? Become flaggers? Maybe I shouldn’t have had a baby. Dill was doomed and it was my fault. I wanted my life to be funny, and I wanted Dill to be a lucky boy, as lucky as his namesake, John Dillinger. Some people believe he’s still alive. I do. His girlfriend only pretended to be setting him up. But the guy who was shot by J. Edgar Hoover’s men outside the theatre in Chicago was somebody else. Dillinger had a notoriously long dick, twelve inches, and the guy who was shot coming out of the theatre had a dick that was only nine inches. Even so it was pickled and now sits in a jar on some shelf at the Smithsonian Institute. I think the lady in red, Dillinger’s girlfriend, collected the cash from the FBI for helping them get their guy, and together she and Dillinger disappeared, never to be heard from again. John Dillinger never killed anybody; he just said, “Lie down and nobody gets hurt.” He was a lucky man.

I never got to see my mother’s dead body on account of its being all beat up. I never actually saw her go into the ground. It could all have been an elaborate plot on her part to get away from my dad. All those trips to Vancouver had been part of the experiment. But who would she have convinced to take the fall for her? Maybe a suicidal client who wanted to die anyway, or maybe she conned some cop into identifying some dead drifter as her. The guy at the morgue could have put one of my mom’s sweaters onto the stiff, shown an edge of it to my dad, who would have been too distraught to look at the face. He would have positively identified her, the briefcase, the car, all that, and asked for a closed casket funeral. After ten or twenty years my mom could have created a whole new life for herself, maybe somewhere in South America. Maybe Southern California. She liked warm climates. Someday she might come marching through the doors of Half-a-Life with tickets for me and Dill and we’ll go back with her to her sunny hacienda. Oh god, she’d love Dill. She loved babies, loved to hold them and smell their heads and she always called them precious, precious things. Lish could meet her. They’d really get along. Lish could use the cheering up, too. We all could, really.