Miriam Toews - Summer of My Amazing Luck

Here we were, going to Colorado to find some guy because it occurred to Lish that we could. I mean, people travel, they go places, they try to find people. Why not us? But that didn’t mean we’d find him. That didn’t mean we wouldn’t go back home to Half-a-Life and the rain and Serenity Place and sad Sarah and Sing Dylan and Podborczintski and all the other people and start doing the same things all over again. All it meant was that we had decided to do something adventurous and then we had done it. If it didn’t work out the way we had hoped it to, fine. Who cares how it all ends? We had taken the steps toward something. Anything. Some people wouldn’t understand how important that is for a woman on the dole. It’s like that song, “The Tennessee Waltz.” My mom used to play it on the piano. It starts off beautifully about dancing with my darling to the Tennessee Waltz, but then an old friend cuts in and while they are dancing, the friend steals the sweetheart. But then we get the cold hard cruel facts of the song and it’s just way too sad. If we could just block out the second part of the song from our minds and sing the first part. But we can’t. The first part of the song is so beautiful because the second part is so sad. We can’t have one without the other. It doesn’t turn out like we thought. But still it’s a beautiful song.

I was lost in a reverie about this when I heard Lish’s voice: “Lucy!”

Dill had slipped down in his car seat and looked like he was choking to death. His head was where his waist should have been, squeezed between the back of the chair and the bar in front, and his legs were dangling close to the floor of the van. Lish slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road and I scrambled over to Dill to rescue him. I managed to get him out of the seat with all the girls hovering around saying, “Is he alright, is Dilly alright,” and Lish sitting behind the wheel muttering, oh my god oh my god oh my god. Dill was absolutely fine. In fact, he loved the attention and started giggling as the girls stroked his head and arms and back and stomach, and Lish and I stared at each other and at him and back at each other. I knew Lish was going to have another fit like the one about the curbs and the strollers she had had in the curry restaurant.

“You see,” she began, “you see, Lucy? Just because we’re poor we have inferior fucking car seats, borrowed secondhand pieces of shit that sooner strangle a kid than protect him. We’re driving in a piece of shit with bald tires held together with rope and wire, and why? Because we’re poor! We can’t even travel to a stupid place in the States without risking our lives. No wonder people like us are always dying before everyone else. We have to live with all these stupid risks, even in our apartments. Bad wiring, leaking freon from our inferior fridges, mice in our walls, roach spray making our hair fall out, wet mouldy rotten drywall and insulation that makes our kids cough all night, windows with broken screens so kids can fall out of them, burnt out lights in the hallway, elevators that don’t work, neighbours that are psychopaths, obscene graffiti on the walls, cops circling round all the time but never when you need them—”

“Lish, the car seat thing could have happened to a rich kid, too. He’s fine, don’t worry. I probably did the strap thing wrong. It’s not because we’re poor, we’re stupid.” I laughed.

“Yeah, but we’re poor because we’re stupid. And being poor makes us more stupid.”

“No, it doesn’t. It makes other people think we’re stupid. You know there are so many pissed-off people who are considered much more successful than me, but I think I’m happy, I feel happy. I don’t know why. I have Dill. I’m young. We’re on the road. Stuff’s happening. I wish it was enough to be happy. It should be, you know. That should be the mark of success, you know, just a general feeling of happiness. I mean considering everything, I think I’m fucking amazing for being happy. Happy, happy, happy , isn’t it a funny word? You know some guy could come along and say you still happy? Gosh darn , he’d say and shake his head and say, Well, okay, here’s your cheque for five million dollars, keep up the good work.”

“Jesus, how much caffeine have you had today, Lucy?”

“Oh, about ten cups, but it’s not that. Just moving, you know, this moving ahead thing makes me feel awake and—”

“Happy, yeah yeah yeah. But you worry a lot.”

“Yeah, that’s true, but maybe worrying makes me happy. It motivates me. I think worrying must relax me. I’m very optimistic about my future.”

“You are?”

“Yeah, I am. And so are you, or we wouldn’t even be in this stupid van travelling down the highway. You wouldn’t get up every morning and put on music and cook your garlic dishes and have real fun with your kids who actually like you, and go to the library and wear your goofy pink dress and play in that little sunlight on your wall. What do you want anyway?”

“I do not play in the little sunlight on my wall.”

“Yes, you do. When you think no one’s looking, you stop and make these little shapes and stuff and you—”

“Lucy. I do not play in the little sunlight on my wall, as you put it. I perform complex shadow puppet theatre.”

“Ah.” We were both laughing. In fact we were really laughing hard. And driving slow. And people passing us were staring at us, as if two women laughing hard in a beater van with five kids in the back of it was the strangest thing in the world.

“Oh Lucy, why can’t we get paid for the things we’re good at?”

“Well, in a way we do. You know, by the dole. We’re like government employees, you know, freelance ones. Those people who just passed us wouldn’t have had anything to stare at if they weren’t paying taxes to keep people like us alive.”

“Hmmmmmm. It’s a good thing I didn’t introduce you to my dad at that convention. He’d hate you.”

“Really?” I said.

“Guaranteed,” said Lish.

I was shocked. It had never occurred to me that somebody might hate me for being on the dole. I hadn’t meant to be on the dole. I wasn’t planning to be on it for a long time, not forever, anyway. I didn’t want anybody to hate me. What would happen if I started hating everybody before they could hate me? I’d have an awful life! I’d be a terrible mother! I’d become an alcoholic! Fuck him, I thought, why would he hate me? He didn’t even know me!

We had been on the road for fifty minutes and not one out of the five — well, out of four, really; Dill had a diaper on — children had asked to stop to pee. There had not been one argument, not one shriek, not one bad word, not one painful accident (besides the car seat incident, but that was only painful for everyone watching it happen to Dill and not for Dill himself), not one spilled box of apple juice, not one object thrown from the window, and not one automotive breakdown. Uneventful , a gossip columnist would have written of our trip at that point. We passed flooded fields, abandoned homes and barns, machinery, and even whole deserted towns. The highway was clear of water, other than the shallow puddles this morning’s rain had formed. The ditches, though, were full of dark, dirty water. Every now and then we saw a piece of some kid’s abandoned raft.

In Morris we saw a big billboard that read, “Give money to the chamber of commerce. Help pay for the flood victims’ hotel bills,” Lish had read that they were all covered by the government, so she snorted when she read the billboard. We wondered if Mercy’s blackmail plan would work with Bunnie Hutchison. We saw a billboard that read, “Jesus is the way, the truth and the light.” We saw another one reading, “An unborn baby’s heart starts beating at four weeks.”