Miriam Toews - Summer of My Amazing Luck

Naomi lived next door to Terrapin, and the two of them were constantly arguing. Naomi found Terrapin’s organic crusade stupid and phony and Terrapin found Naomi crude and dirty. Both were right about the other, I thought. Terrapin was a royal pain in the ass with her earnest preaching about better living and Naomi had, since walking across town with her kids and no tuque, given up on surface things for awhile. She said what she felt like saying about anything, including Terrapin.

One afternoon I heard Terrapin reminding Naomi that she shouldn’t leave her leftover Hamburger Helper garbage in the hallway because it made her nauseous, and Naomi, in a voice similar to Lish’s, said, “If you’d rather be a cow than eat one, get fucked.” One time Terrapin had asked Naomi if she was a natural blonde and Naomi had said, “Are you a natural asshole?” Naomi, after that rush of adrenaline she had used to rescue her children and herself from the firefighter, had needed some time to lie around and re-charge, plan her next move. Her mind was working overtime trying to keep herself sane, and her heart was heavy with guilt and shock and the unbearable sorrow she felt thinking of her daughter. So Lish helped her get Tina to school and looked after the boy, Keith, quite a lot. This whole time Naomi was trying to get sole custody of the boy and figure out how to get the firefighter to court on assault charges. Tina wouldn’t talk about it and there was no physical proof that it happened. Naomi was close to having a nervous breakdown and eventually Lish told Terrapin to quit harping about her tinctures and homebirths and leave Naomi the hell alone.

A couple of the other women in Half-a-Life I got to know were more like me, not possessing any well-defined goals or on the run from nightmarish pasts. We were just there because we were poor and had kids. Most of us were unlucky when it came to men. Lish said poor self-esteem made us incapable of maintaining relationships, but I firmly believed that it took a lot of self-esteem to get out of them.

Teresa lived next door to me. I thought she was beautiful, and it took a while before I gave up trying to be like her. Her grammar wasn’t great and her nails were chewed down to almost nothing, but her skin was incredibly smooth and thin and her lips were always very red, naturally. She gave me a lot of food tips for Dill and would, from time to time, give me a Safeway bag of her son’s old clothing for Dill. As I removed these articles I sniffed them, trying to smell Teresa. Don’t get the wrong idea, but everything about Half-a-Life was so new to me and I wanted to become familiar with everything about it. I was, after all, trying to fit in and maybe even find a family for Dill and me. Teresa had an eight-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. The father of the eight-year-old lived in New York City and worked as a book editor. I wondered if Teresa’s lack of grammar skills had ever bothered him, but I’m smart enough to know that ruby red lips can take the sting off dangling participles and I admired Teresa’s nonchalant power. Anyway, the editor was long gone, wouldn’t be back for many a day, and Teresa had “taken up,” as my mom would have said, with another.

This guy, turns out, ended up impregnating Teresa’s neighbour and Teresa almost simultaneously. I guess he felt more in tune with the neighbour or maybe more afraid of Teresa, but he let the neighbour in on his predicament, and not Teresa. Then, for one whole year, he bounced back and forth between the two apartments like a madman, never, not even for a second, piquing Teresa’s curiosity with his impulsive exits and nightly fatigue. Not even when he grabbed his coat and scarf and left behind his shoes on his way, supposedly to pick up a litre of milk in the middle of November, did Teresa suspect. Anyway, after one whole year of this, when his sons were three months old and he had, miraculously, managed to attend the births of each, born within twelve hours of each other, and both with confused expressions, he spilled the beans.

Lish told me all about it. She had been at Teresa’s watching Y & R when it happened. He couldn’t handle the stress any longer and he kneeled at Teresa’s feet and wept and asked for forgiveness and understanding. Teresa ate one entire carrot in silence, except for the crunching, while the baby sucked at her breast, and then snapped, “Cry me a river lover boy, get the hell out of here and don’t never come back.” When this guy moaned and begged to be able to see his son, Teresa said with all the melodrama she could muster, “The kid ain’t yours, you two-timing prick, he’s mine.” Since then Teresa and her neighbour, Marjorie, have become great friends. Marjorie gave him the boot, too, hearing that he had gone all soft for Teresa in the end, when she had been the one who had maintained the secret and kept him even knowing she was one of two of his true loves.

And I thought this was very wise of her. Usually the woman keeps the man and shits on the other woman when all the problems originated with the man’s stupidity. Now the two of them organize Scrabble tournaments for the block and their sons, both five and both with that kind of confused, peeved expression, are unseparable , as Teresa says. Teresa is taking French immersions— she calls it that, she’s actually just taking some classes in French — which I don’t think is wise. Why not master one language first, but I don’t know her well enough to tell her, and besides, with her beautiful skin and red red lips, who the hell cares?

There was another woman in the block. Shirley was pregnant and almost due to have the baby. She waddled up and down the halls for exercise and had eaten so many carrots for Vitamin A that her face and hands were orange. Whenever anyone asked how she was she’d say, “Never better.” Every time. So it seemed like she was just getting better and better all the time. Or maybe she meant her face. It was getting more and more orange all the time, so maybe that was a goal of hers. I had no idea how that sort of thing would end. She didn’t know who the father was either, but she, at least, had narrowed it down to two men. One was a big six-foot-five fireman. (It seems firemen pop up in the women’s lives all the time. Lish told me the first time this one went out to a fire he fell off the back of the truck. So now he takes cabs to fires and he’s joined a men’s group because of the unfair teasing he gets just because he isn’t “man enough” to hold onto the back of a fire truck.) The other was a five-foot six-inch stripper with a great, but small, body, according to Teresa. Shirley obviously doesn’t have a type.

Both men know they could be the child’s father, so both of them are vying for it. They buy bigger and bigger gifts and are offering more and more amounts of child support, to beat out the other one. They are bringing her food and giving her tickets to the theatre and stopping their smoking and rug-doctoring her carpets and freezing food for after the baby arrives and decking out the baby’s room with toys and new paint and expensive cribs and change tables. Maybe that’s what she means when she says, “Never better.” I realize it is very unusual for two men to be clamouring to be the Father, and peacefully at that. When one’s there the other waits outside in the hall or in his car until the first is gone before he does his bidding. Shirley says she’ll get a blood test eventually (the men, naturally, have agreed to split the four-hundred-dollar cost of that), but in the meantime she’s never been better.

Just before the rain started a woman and her kids moved into a suite across from Lish’s. Apparently they came from the Northwest Territories. Lish said they couldn’t handle the cold winters there, which I later realized was a joke of hers. You see, Winnipeg is one of the two coldest points in the world, the other being somewhere in Outer Mongolia. Her name was Angela, and we’d chat about superficial things. She told me she thought Dill had an old soul because of his rather stoic expression. Lish told me that Angela’s oldest daughter and her youngest daughter had the same father, but the middle girl had a different one. The father of the oldest and the youngest was an Irish rock musician she had picked up in a bar. He had returned a second time to play in the same bar and had just about the same amount of time to kill before hitting the road. The oldest and the youngest looked exactly alike, round-faced, red-haired, pale. The middle child was small and dark and furtive and always wore sweaters that were much too big for her. She was always shooting her arms straight up into the air, to allow her tiny hands to free themselves from the sleeves. She looked like a scruffy midget cheerleader, but she seemed happy enough being the oddball around both her chubby red-haired sisters. Her father was a well-known writer from the Northwest Territories and at the time of her conception was also being hailed as family man of the north, an honour some women’s group got together to bestow upon some unsuspecting local father. They didn’t know about Angela, of course, and neither did the writer’s wife and teenage sons. Lish figures he gave her some money to go away and Half-a-Life is where she ended up.