Twenty years ago I worked as a waitress in a mediocre Italian restaurant in downtown Toronto. The restaurant was at the corner of Queen and Bathurst, which at the time was in the throes of an identity crisis—trying to trade in its back-alley image for a hipper, trendier look.
Between shifts at the restaurant I often killed time at Galaxy Donuts—a coffee shop that was home to the neighbourhood’s castaways. The people I met in Galaxy Donuts were vulnerable, defensive, and streetwise. They were everything that I—a trusting twenty-year-old from small-town British Columbia— was not.
One morning as I sat with a coffee in front of me—more for the company than the caffeine—I heard a raspy voice behind me.
“Hey you!”
I squirmed in my chair.
“You!” the voice said again.
I turned and found myself looking into the hollow eyes of a woman whose life was the street. It was hard to guess her age. She might have been fifty; she could have been seventy. Her hair was shoulder-length, grey, and matted to her head. The contents of her life, rolled up in two canvas duffle bags, lay like faithful dogs at her feet.
“You got any red-haired girls?” the woman asked, staring at my own head of red hair.
“No,” I replied.
The woman had opened one of her sacks and was rummaging for something.
“No,” I repeated, “I don’t have any kids.”
But it didn’t matter now—she hadn’t heard me, it seemed. She was intent on digging something out of her bag. Relieved, I turned back to my coffee.
“Here,” she said, handing me a small plastic doll. The doll was about six inches tall. Her cheeks were freckled and her hair was an outrageous shade of orange. Her name, according to the words printed on her speckled dress, was Orange Juice. The expression on her face gave her a perky, impish look.
“When you get a daughter, give ’er that,” the woman said.
“Thanks,” I said. “I will.” I offered a smile to show that I was sincere, but by then the woman had turned away.
The little doll named Orange Juice followed me through the next decade of my life, to different cities, other provinces, even a new continent. Each time I packed up my possessions to set forth on another chapter of my life, I would take Orange Juice down from whichever shelf or tabletop had served as her perch and pack her in my bag. The cheery-faced, orange-haired doll that had once been a part of that woman’s life was now a part of mine. There was something special in that.
A few years ago when my daughter became interested in dolls, she asked about the doll standing among her mother’s perfume bottles and jewellery boxes. The time had come to fulfill the old woman’s request. I removed the doll from my dresser top and placed it in the hands of my little red-haired girl.
The doll named Orange Juice has become a part of my daughter’s life now, and the woman who had no home and no name, whose life seemed so detached from any other, has made one more small connection.
Nelson, British Columbia