Miriam Toews - Summer of My Amazing Luck

It took me about five minutes to decide not to wear Teresa’s red fake silk dress and to wear instead my super tight jeans and black t-shirt. Hopefully Teresa wouldn’t see me leave. I’d have to crumple the dress up a bit and blow cigarette smoke on it and put some of my blonde hairs and maybe a smudge of lipstick on it. Watching Lish, on the other hand, prepare for this party, was another story. She did take an hour to get ready. First of all, she had to find her black lipstick and that took fifteen minutes. It took her about half an hour to comb through her hair, a concession she only makes when going to parties. Then she changed her mind about a dozen times about what she wanted to wear. First, it was her ripped up underwear look, pantyhose, nightgown, with leopard skin fake fur vest and knee-high red rubber rain boots. Then she thought that was too flip and people like Graham Greene would think she was insane. So she changed into a floor-length shimmery black skin-tight velvet dress with buttons down the front, and added black gloves up to her elbow and put on her square-toed black shoes. This was much more elegant and mysterious-looking, but she looked like an eel or a skindiver or something. Plus, the rolls around her middle stuck out. Finally she settled on a pair of black tights and a huge green loosely-knit sweater and her red rubber boots, because we’d probably have to walk back after the buses had stopped running. She slapped her spider hat on, of course, and splashed patchouli and rose water all over her neck. I have a feeling she put some on her crotch when she went to the can, but who knows. I would have if I had been her, but I wasn’t her and I didn’t think any guy would even notice me, let alone get close enough to my crotch to smell it. I had the impression this Graham Greene guy was more refined. She also managed to find all fifteen bracelets for her arms. Even though she could have been one bright green and red smelly, jangly mess with crows’ feet and belly flab, she wasn’t. She was beautiful. Then, she started to cry out of the blue, and I thought, Oh god, why is she crying now? But before I could say anything, Lish said, “Luce, don’t worry, I just like the way I look right after I cry and I usually feel more in control, funnier and more, you know, reckless. Crying releases some kind of bravado inside me. Plus my lips go puffy and my eyes sort of shine.”

“Oh. Kay, cry your head off then. But we should go soon.”

“Yeah, yeah, I have to cry for at least a good ten minutes for the right effect. And it has to be serious open-mouthed pathetic crying. So, okay, here goes.”

While Lish cried I stared at myself in the mirror. I looked like a wide-eyed kid going to her first mixed-sex party. I was hanging around with some kooky older mother who had to cry before we could leave. I had left my child, my child , with a woman whose last name I didn’t even know. Some hot shot actor guy was going to be at the party but I knew he would not talk to me or notice me. Tight jeans looked bad on me. Loose fit would have been better. That’s it. I looked like a reject from the ’seventies.

“’Kay, Luce, I’m done. Are you ready?” Lish definitely looked puffier and her eyes shone. For a moment I imagined her and Graham Greene as my parents: giving me a big pile of crackers and then dashing upstairs for the nearest bedroom, the house pet rubbing against my leg and whining for my crackers. I’d kick him.

“Yeah. I’m ready.”

I drank way too much at the party. Lish shone like a star, charming everyone, being smart and funny. She knew how to talk to men so that they talked back. The guys at this party were not like Joe or Sing Dylan or Rodger or any of the guys she brought back to her apartment. They wore sweaters that were pastel-coloured and drank beer from glasses. They felt good laughing and talking with a wacky single welfare mother. I didn’t think any of them would ever marry women like us, or even date us, but a little drunken flirtation — maybe even sex — away from their real lives was okay. For them, stretch marks were like jock straps or Jack Daniels or facial hair, or ejaculation: a little benchmark on their way to becoming real men. “Oh yeah,” they’d say, “I’ve had sex with a woman who’s had kids. I’ve fucked a mother!” I wondered what they thought might happen; that their penis might get lost inside like a surgeon’s rubber glove accidentally left behind in the patient’s body?

Pillar told me that Joe woke up one morning and his penis had swollen up like a turnip — like an S-shaped turnip with bubbles. He freaked. He screamed at her, “What did you do to me? This is my dick!!!! This is my life, my future, this is grotesque!!!” Pillar made the mistake of laughing all day about it. Even before they found out it was only a wasp bite, actually three of them, and not some terrible disease. Apparently he’d been drinking red wine all night before going to bed and getting stung and that’s why he hadn’t woken up. Before he got to the doctor he had said, repeatedly, I am very concerned about this, you know, very concerned about this. And that would set Pillar off all over again. She told us she actually wet her pants laughing, but she felt it was worth it.

Like I said, I drank way too much. I remember hearing Lish telling some guy we were hitting the road in search of a man she once knew, and who was the father of her twins. I remember him saying, “My goodness,” and asking her to excuse him, he needed another beer. I had the feeling we were becoming cartoon characters in that place: Lish was trying to make her life seem funny and reckless, charming and dangerous. Sexy. Maybe it was, I don’t know. Graham Greene didn’t talk to us at all. But a lawyer did. Well, he talked to me. I think Lish terrifed him.

“But you look too young to have a kid,” he said to me in some kind of backhanded compliment.

“I am.”

“Oh, ha ha, you are, good one. I’m sure you’re capable of raising a child, but …”

I had the feeling his only idea of a mother was his own and the mother of his own children, a woman who was probably right now administering Tempra or something, chasing out monsters, maybe getting sloshed in front of the tube wondering why her husband had to work so much and thinking of her lost youth. I didn’t know if he had a wife or kids, but I was sure he’d had a mother. Mothers you can be sure of, fathers, well … they’re the kind of people whose heads always get chopped off in pictures.

I found out that this man’s name was Hartley Weinstein of Weinstein, Weinstein and Vrsnick. I wish that he could have come right out and said, “I want to fuck you,” because that is obviously what he did want. He didn’t talk to the other people there his age, other professionals, film people, people he knew from work, people who knew him, people who wouldn’t fuck him.

At first I felt sorry for his wife, I just knew he had to have one, and then I felt mean. I thought, well, she could be all those women who stare at me and Lish in the rain, with our Safeway bags and our secondhand clothes and our many children and our inferior strollers and our lack of men and cars. I stopped feeling sorry for her and decided to fuck her husband just for revenge. Then I felt sad with a really big feeling of wanting a boyfriend, some guy my age in jeans and runners, all wiry and muscular, with his arm around me, giving other guys the evil eye, carrying a picture of me, and Dill, I guess, in his wallet, and throwing me over his shoulder, throwing me onto a bed and making love to me in a bed. Making Love to me in a Bed and then sleeping with his muscular arm lying across my stomach, and his hair in my face.

This was my thought as I got into Hart’s Ford Aerostar. He chucked the kid’s car seat in the back, thinking I was too drunk to notice, I guess. Stupidly he held my hand as he drove and then all I could think about was my dad holding my hand on the way to The Waffle Shop. My dad had big brown hairy hands with chewed nails. Hart had narrow white bony hands that didn’t seem much bigger than mine. His nails looked crisp and even. He had tassel shoes and the heel of one kind of slipped off his foot when he had it on the gas pedal. He mentioned something about the farmers getting enough rain this summer. The thing was this guy Weinstein wasn’t really that much older than me. Really, he told me, he was only twenty-four, which made him only six years older than me. He told me that he didn’t think he approved of welfare. I had no idea where we were going. He seemed interested in coming to my place. More slumming I guess. Too cheap to get a room. Wife at home. Why not. Fuck the Rich Than Eat them.