Miriam Toews - Summer of My Amazing Luck

By the time we got to Half-a-Life, I had gained a more positive perspective on the whole thing. In fact, I couldn’t stop laughing. Hart looked nervous about me laughing. He tried to chuckle in the spirit of things, but he sounded nervous. He said, “You’re crazy, aren’t you?” in a voice mixed with disbelief and appreciation and a tinge of hostility. He sounded like an actor doing a first reading. I realized he wanted me to be crazy, nutty; making up for poverty with joie de vivre and skid row toughness. And tenderness, you know the type. Wise beyond my years. Street-smart, but still yearning for love in all the wrong places. Hollywood. We managed to sneak past Teresa’s place. I couldn’t exactly be crazy and tough and tender and generally fucked up and not caring, just enjoying the desperate edge of poverty, and not needing anyone — or so I tried to tell myself — with a ten-month-old baby on my hip. Besides, Dill was probably fast asleep on Teresa’s living room floor anyway and why wake him up? This was going to be the first time I’d had sex in a bed. Then I started laughing all over again.

Hart took off his shoes at the door and promptly stepped on a hard block and then another. Then he stepped on another and said, “What the heck?” What I wanted to do right then was sit down at the kitchen table with Lish and have a good laugh. At that point Hart might have welcomed it as well. But Lish was still stranded at the party, she’d have to make her own way home, and somehow I knew she’d do it with a lot more class. Hart and I stood smiling at each other. Then he walked down the hall to the bathroom and I ran to my bedroom and chucked the diapers, clothes, toys and books off my bed and onto my floor.

I heard the toilet running. I yelled, “Jiggle the handle!” but I don’t think he heard me. If it kept running it would eventually run all over the floor and Sing Dylan would have to fix it. I went into the hall to yell it again and I saw him in the light of the bathroom for a brief moment before he switched it off and headed my way in the half-darkness of the hallway. He wore a gleaming white t-shirt and black socks pulled up mid-calf. He had removed his glasses and put water in his hair to slick it back. My heart sank. He’d looked better at the party. Then again, I probably had too. He grinned and rubbed his hands together and said, “Ready or not.” Then for a brief second I envied his wife sitting at home on the couch alone, or lying down with the baby. She’d be relieved he was getting his rocks off with me, and not with her, and the joke was on me! I smiled sweetly at Hart, overcome with sadness really, and led him by his little hand to my messy bedroom. Then I lay there stating at the ceiling and thinking about Dill.

And my toilet, which was still running. Hart rubbed his black sock against my bare foot and then ran his big toe up my shin to about my knee. Unfortunately he spoke. “You hot little tomato you.” I smiled sweetly again. I closed my eyes and thought about my non-existent nineteen-year-old boyfriend with the muscular arms and the jeans and the picture in his wallet poking out of a hole in the back pocket of his jeans. Hart started rubbing my belly like I was a kid with a stomachache (which come to think of it I was, getting there, anyway) and then moved his hand down to my pubic hair, hesitated for one brief dramatic moment and plunged one of his skinny white fingers into my vagina. Sigh. That area taken care of for the time being, he proceeded to move up to my breasts. Like switching on a car. Ignition, wipers, radio, okay we’re ready to go!

I could see him with a long pointer pointing to a pie on the blackboard. Attend to bottom half of woman, then, moving the marker, from there proceed to top half, maintaining pressure on bottom, until all lights on dash are on. Contact! Proceed to drive. He started to kiss his way up from my belly-button to my right breast, stopping briefly to lick the hard flat area in between my breasts. I wondered if Dill had had trouble going to sleep over at Teresa’s. Hart pulled my hand and steered it in the general direction of his dick and then demonstrated how he wanted me to move my hand. Standard. See chart. Back to the breast. His tongue wrapped itself around my nipple and one of his hands moved up to squeeze the wide base of my breast.

“HOLY SHIT!!!!! WHAT THE HEEEELLL!!!” Suddenly Hart was hollering.

By the dim light of the street lamp shining into my bedroom window I saw Hart’s face, lifted up off my breast, white, dripping, covered in milk. Dill’s milk. He looked like a kitten stopping for a breath while drinking from a big bowl of cream. Warm milk dribbled out of the corner of his mouth. A little geyser shot out from my nipple for a few seconds and then petered out to a few drops. They sat poised, shimmering and white, pure, on the very tip of my pink nipple, with no place to go. Hart’s hot tomato had sprung a leak.

“For Christ’s sake,” Hart spluttered. He got up and stumbled to the bathroom. I rolled over and buried my face in my pillow and laughed and laughed and shook, trying to muffle my laughter. From the bathroom Hart yelled, “Jesus, thanks a lot, I can’t believe you’re laughing!”

“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine!” I yelled back and then laughed really hard. After a minute or two I got up and got dressed. I noticed the sun coming up. The sun! I could hear Hart struggling with the toilet handle. I asked, “Doncha have to get back home, Hart?” I assumed our night of passion was over and our lives would resume their opposite courses. Hart came out of the bathroom, fully dressed and looking pale and frightened without his glasses and without the blurriness that he once had, when the booze had had a firmer grip. He looked about fourteen. He forced a smile and looked at me as if I was his captor and he needed to pee.

He asked, “What was that? Was it milk?”

“Yeah. What did you think?” I couldn’t believe it. He was still under the impression that I had spontaneously shot out some mysterious white fluid from my breasts.

“Do you have a baby!!!”

“Yeah. I have a baby. I breast-feed him. I told you I had a baby, at the party.”

“Oh, my god.”

“It’s a pretty normal thing to do, Hart.”

“Really? I mean still?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh geez. You must think I’m an idiot.”

“Look, Hart, don’t you have to get back?”

“No. My mom’s in Florida.”

“Excuse me?”

“She won’t know when I get in.”

“You live with your mother?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” I said. “What about the baby seat in the mini-van?” “What? Oh right. Oh geez, it’s my brother’s mini-van.” Hart looked like he was going to cry. Every single person who entered my life in any way seemed to be on the verge of tears. That can make a person feel insecure.

“Look,” he said, “would you like to see me?”

“I can see you, Hart. You’re standing right in front of me.”

“No. Like, another time. Or whatever.”

Then I realized that Hart might be interested in seeing me again, in dating, in becoming my boyfriend, in becoming Dill’s step-father, maybe adopting him, after marriage of course, building a home for us in Linden Woods, having more kids together, a cottage at Victoria Beach, and matching shorts, side by side burial plots, oh my god. Not that I didn’t want some of that. I just didn’t know if I wanted it with Hart.

“No,” I said. “Well, maybe …”

“Oh.”

I could hear the building coming to life. Out of my kitchen window I saw Mercy leaving for work on her bike with Zara in the seat behind her. Off to deal with the flood disasters. Sing Dylan was at the wall with his hose and soap, scrubbing at the letters. I realized I had to get Dill. Teresa would probably be pissed off at me for leaving him with her all night.