Miriam Toews - Summer of My Amazing Luck

“Lish?”

“Yeah?”

“Good night.”

“Yeah, okay, good night. The kids were pretty good, weren’t they?”

“Yeah Lish, they were. They were very good.”

“Sweet dreams, Lucy.”

“You too.”

Frankly, I was tired of dreaming. And I was feeling wide awake. More awake than I had felt in months. I needed to convince myself of only one more thing. That what I was doing was right. That my life was funny, and Dill was a lucky boy, father or no father. I would go through with this whole Gotcha business and hope that later on sometime I could tell Lish the truth and we could laugh. If I never told her the truth, I hoped that we could laugh, too. At the age of eighteen I told myself I would be happy. And if I could do that, I could finally embrace the sadness and the truth of my mother’s death and remember her for who she was.

That night it rained. When it rains so much it feels like cotton in your ears, like big woollen socks brushing up against the nerve endings in your brain, rubbing and rubbing. A constant background noise. That night it rained like every other night so far that spring. Our fleabag motel was only about twenty feet from the highway and every car and truck that whizzed past on the wet road sounded like fabric ripping. Not only that, but Lish was snoring like some kind of wild animal. Her kids were used to it and Dill was so tired he slept through it. But geez, it was loud. I called her name loud and then louder. “Lish you’re snoring.” “Thank you,” she’d say extremely cheerfully. Then she’d stop for a few minutes. Then she’d start up again even louder. With the ripping fabric sound of the cars on the wet road right outside our window and her snoring, it was like being in the middle of some ferocious jungle kill. I told myself to remember to mention it to her. She definitely had some kind of nasal problem. But soon I was screaming, “LISH YOU ARE SNORING!!!”

Nothing.

“LISH ROLL OVER YOU ARE SNORING LIKE A WILD PIG AND I CAN’T SLEEP!!!”

Grunt. Snort. “Again? Look at that. Gotta turn on to my side. Gotta turn onto my side. Thank you … zzzz.” More grunting.

Lish’s snoring didn’t bother her kids, but my yelling did, and Alba woke up and said, “Mommy? Lucy’s mad at you. She’s screaming.”

“No, Alba, I am not mad at your mother. I’m trying to get her to stop snoring because I can’t sleep.”

“Ha ha ha. My mom doesn’t snore. Ha ha ha.”

“Yeah, Alba, she snores like a wildebeest. You’re just used to it.”

Then Letitia woke up. “Used to what? What’s Alba used to?”

“Nothing.”

“What’s Alba used to? Tell me what Alba’s used to?

Hope said, “Shut up.”

Maya said, “You shut up.”

Then Dill woke up and started to cry and I had to get up to nurse him and I stepped on Hope and she started to cry and said she wanted to go home.

“So go,” said Maya. “Hitchhike.”

“Shut up,” said Hope.

“How many seconds do you think I can hold my breath for, Lucy?”

“I don’t know, I don’t care. Go to sleep.”

“I could hold my breath and pass out.”

“Kay.”

“I’m telling my mom you said that.”

“Good. Tell her to roll over, too.”

“Why?”

“Look. Everybody just shut the fuck up and go to sleep.”

“That’s twenty-five cents in the swear jar.”

“Hope, we don’t even have one of those any more. Not since the twins. After they were born Mom said we could all just start swearing a lot as long as we didn’t hit anybody,” said Maya.

“Oh right,” said Hope.

“Well, that’s no fair that you had a swear jar and we didn’t, is it Letish,” said Alba.

“Kay, so just get one. You don’t even know what a swear word is. Sucks,” said Hope.

“Fucks,” said Alba. “Ha ha. Did you hear what I said, Letitia? I said—”

“SHUT UP!”

Then Lish said, “Okay, thank you. Gotta turn onto my side. Gotta turn onto my side.”

In the morning we were getting along a lot better. Somehow we had managed to fall back asleep and wake up in time to get free coffee and doughnuts before they were taken away for the day. Our battery was dead in the van because we had forgotten to switch the lights off and the teenager who had been working behind the front desk the night before now had a chance to do something real. He looked happy when we told him we needed a boost. His neck was covered in huge hickeys that he must have got after we took the room. He pulled his car up to our van and blasted music out of speakers in his trunk. He had those silver sticky letters on the back of his car and they spelled “Dream Weaver.” His back tires were jacked up and the interior of his car was black. He had a garter belt hanging from his rearview mirror. He said to us, “I’ll jump youse no problem. Hey, cool bumper sticker, hallucinations, yup, I’ve had a few of those too. Hello trouble. But what the hell, you gotta live from time to time. Whadya got under the hood? Holy shit this thing’s ancient. Yeah I wanted to get ‘Red Phantom’ put on my car it’s more you know of a guy thing? But my girlfriend said Dream Weaver was hot and actually she paid for it so … it’s kind of gay but fuck can this baby move when she has to I’m telling you. Ohhhhh yeah.”

It occurred to me that he was probably only a couple of years younger than me. Or maybe even my age. He didn’t seem to wonder why two women with five kids were travelling around in an old van. I wondered what his girlfriend was like. She obviously liked to give hickeys and drive around in hot cars. He was probably crazy about her. I wanted to be her. I wanted to touch his arms. I really wanted to touch his arms. I wanted to forget about Dill just for a while and feel those hard brown arms. I wanted to ride in the Dream Weaver with him and see those dirty hands of his holding onto the wheel. Driving fast. I wanted my life to go back about ten years so I could do it over and figure things out before I went ahead living it. And everybody else’s life, too. I wanted him to be Dill’s father. I wanted my mother. I wanted my father. I just wanted.

When he bent over to hook up the cables from his car to our van, his jeans slid down slightly and the girls could see the crack in his smooth, hairless ass. They talked about that for at least an hour while Lish and I had some peace in the front. Or as much peace as you can feel when you think you’re searching for a man you don’t know if you hate or love, and as much peace as you can feel when you’re headlong into the biggest lie you’ve ever told and wonder if you’ve done the right thing or ruined somebody’s life forever.

We were headed for the Badlands, for Murdo and Wall Drug. I kept meaning to bring up Lish’s snoring problem, but I thought really it was just a problem for me and I didn’t normally sleep with her, so why bother. Really we didn’t talk much at all during that stretch to the Badlands. It had stopped raining. The fields were turning into grassy sandy plains. The earth was getting dryer and the air was getting warmer and as we approached the entrance to the Badlands I could see that not much lived around there. Nothing we could see, anyway. It was sort of a relief to see all that eroded rock and sand and hot air. There was less life than Lish and I and all the kids were used to, living in Half-a-Life public housing during one of the rainiest, most mosquito infested summers in the history of Winnipeg, city of extremes, city of thunder, centre of the universe. And the absence of all that life, all that noisy relentless non-stop life, was quite a relief. In the Badlands you kind of see the miracle of your own living body in the midst of all this crumbly clay. It’s standing out for a change, as a unique living thing instead of more of the same. Then there’s the movement of your limbs and the way your eyes dart over a landscape and the urge to pee and the dryness in your mouth and the ability to recall a childhood memory just by feeling the texture of the dry sand as it slips through your fingers.