Summer of My Amazing Luck

one

Lish had been a lifer even before the trouble started with Serenity Place. She had four daughters, two of them with the same guy and the other two, twins, with a carefree street performer who had fallen in love with Lish’s hands. Perfect for balls, he’d said, juggling them that is. Now jugglers never make cracks about balls, Lish informed me, they just don’t. Lish knew a lot about the theatre, about working a room, drawing a crowd, about blocking and leading, about the superstitions of theatre people. She had always loved the stage. Or the street, or wherever it is that people perform. She had met the juggler in the hospitality suite of the hotel at which all the performers were staying. Volunteering, for Lish, was a good way to meet theatre people without violating welfare rules, and it was a nice break from the kids. This street performer, absent father of the twins, said he loved Lish and suggested that she join him on the road. He could teach her to eat fire, juggle knives, walk on stilts. He showed her a newspaper clipping of himself from The Miami Herald and the headline was “Magic, Music and Tomfoolery,” and then there was a photo of him breaking a chain with his chest.

Just like Zampano in “La Strada,” he’d said. Lish was giddy with the proposition and the free booze of the hospitality suite, and so she agreed to join him on the road, on the condition that she could bring her daughters, numbering two at the time. “Not a problem, not a problem,” he said, “they’ll bring in more cash,” and then he made a red handkerchief disappear up Lish’s nose. And, of course, reappear. Something he himself had failed to do after impregnating Lish in his hotel room that night, while her long beautiful hands caressed his oily back and the hot summer night got hotter. Lish found him irresistible with his sad eyes and his world-weary bearing and silly jokes that in and of themselves weren’t funny at all, but when he said them seemed, at least to Lish, to define comedy. And Lish loved to laugh. What was funniest though to Lish was his utter seriousness about sex.

He didn’t say a word or crack a smile throughout, and Lish had to pretend that a snort of laughter she let escape while he focussed in on the homestretch was really an uncontrollable gasp of pleasure. She had hoped he’d think it was her unusual way of expressing herself while in the throes of passion. Snorting. But she wasn’t sure. In any case, it didn’t matter. The next morning while Lish slept sated and pregnant with not one but two of the busker’s babies, he made himself, along with Lish’s cotton purse, disappear for good. Lish said he had left a note that said “Catcha on the flip side.” Can you believe it? Lish said his juggling was much better than his writing.

For a while Lish wondered if her snorting had made him leave, but really she knew that it hadn’t been her, it had been the road, and there was nothing she or anyone else could do about it. Some people were just like that. All the road had to do was look up at them and they were gone. Poof. And so it was with the father of her twins. She wished she had found out what his name was, but hey . . . Lish was the kind of person who enjoyed telling this tale to people. It was romantic, reckless. And if the twins asked about their dad, she could build him up for them, make him a hero, a rogue, a poet, a jester. Once I pointed out to Lish that the twins might like more details, some fleshing out of the story, maybe an address or a present on their birthday, a postcard. Lish said, “Maybe. Maybe not.”

I know that Lish still kept a big silver spoon room service had brought up to the hotel room the night she and the busker got together, and the twins, when they were old enough, took turns using it to scoop the natural chunky peanut butter Lish bought at a health food co-op. They’d say, “It’s my turn to use Dad’s spoon.” And Lish would smile and hand it over. Who knew what she was thinking. The older girls had a dad they saw fairly regularly and for a while were willing to let the twins use him as theirs, too. But the twins didn’t want him. They were happy enough with their own.

I should tell you right now how I got to where I am: single mother on the dole, public housing, all that. It wasn’t a goal of mine, certainly. As a child I never once dreamed, “I will be a poor mother.” I had fully intended to be a forest ranger. Now I realize there just isn’t enough human contact in that field for me. But then, look where human contact got me. They said I hadn’t grieved properly over my mother’s death. That was the reason I became promiscuous, they said. They said I snuck out of my bedroom window every night because I needed to forget. I needed to forget, they said, because I couldn’t bear the sadness of remembering. That’s what they meant by grieving properly: remembering. Remembering everything and reacting to it and releasing it. There was more to it, but I can’t remember what it was, ha ha. So I’m not proud of it or anything, but it happened. And it’s how I got to where I am. Half-a-Life Housing. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, city with the most hours of sunshine per year (that’s another thing they say).

Somewhere along the line I became pregnant. With Dill, my son who is now nine months old. His full name is Dillinger. I don’t know who his father is. Like Lish says, if you eat a whole can of beans, how do you know which one made you fart? I don’t think it’s the caretaker at my dad’s church, because Dill’s hands are very big. Those huge hands were the first thing I noticed about Dill. The caretaker, on the other hand, had very small hands. I remember, because after we’d had sex leaning up against the pulpit, he wandered over to the organ and started playing “Midnight Special.” I lay on top of the organ, naked as a cherub, and I remember peering down at the caretaker’s hands as he played. They were small and cupped and soft like a baby’s. So I’m quite sure he’s not Dill’s father. And, to tell you the truth, there were eight or nine other guys I was with at the time Dill was conceived, and most of them have faded from my memory. If I ever did know their names, I’ve just about forgotten them. At least I’ve tried to. And all this because I didn’t grieve properly.

The first time I saw Lish, I thought she was insane. In fact, I thought she was a baby snatcher. I had left Dill sitting on the grass in front of Half-a-Life just for a second while I paid the cab. It wasn’t really called Half-a-Life, it was called Have-a-Life Housing, like Have a chocolate, or a pretzel, but nobody called it that. Lish told me later that the Public Housing Authority people had considered all sorts of names before deciding on Have-a-Life. They tried Seek-a-Life, but it sounded too Buddhist or something, and Take-a-Life, but it sounded like a home for murderers. They couldn’t call it Get-a-Life, ’cause it sounded rude, or Dial-a-Life, ’cause it was already taken. So they settled for Have-a-Life, which became Half-a-Life, and sometimes Have-a-Light? or Have-a-Laugh or Half-a-Loaf Housing. Anyway, it was the day Dill and I moved in and everything we owned could more or less fit into the trunk and the back seat of the cab. When I turned around I saw Lish picking Dill up and smiling at him and talking to him. I screamed at her to put him down and ran over to where they were. She was wearing a black t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, a purple gauzy skirt, Birkenstocks with socks, and a black beret with a big silver spider brooch stuck on the front of it. She said she was sorry and tried to explain, but I just grabbed Dill and walked away: I’d heard about crazy women who couldn’t have babies of their own so they kidnapped somebody else’s. Or they’d walk up and down sidewalks with empty strollers, cooing to imaginary babies and buying big packages of diapers for nobody. Back then I was extremely protective of Dill. Kind of paranoid, I guess. He was all I had. Or then again my constant worrying might have been a result of my improper grieving. Who knows. I found out that Lish actually lived in Half-a-Life, too, and had four kids of her own and wasn’t interested in having mine.

The next day I was sitting on the floor in my apartment, playing with Dill and taking stock of my material possessions: one single mattress with no wooden frame, one cassette player held together with gaffer tape, one crib, one toaster, one stroller with a wheel that kept falling off, two wooden crates which could be used as table, chair, storage, whatever they were needed for at the moment, various posters, which struck me as childish and out of place in my new home, a few dishes and utensils, one pot, and some toys and clothes, mine and Dill’s. I sat on the linoleum floor and decided that I could use area tugs, some plants, and a real table and chairs. And Dill’s room could use some bright colours. Maybe paint. The door bell rang. I answered it and guess who? Lish. Wearing the same black hat and spider, the same socks and sandals, and gauzy skirt. She was wearing a t-shirt that had a picture of a giant mosquito and underneath, it read “Blood Lust.” She had the twins with her. They looked like they were about four years old.

“Hi.”

I was not prepared for this conversation.

“Look, I’m sorry about yesterday. I . . .”

“Don’t worry about it. I know what you were thinking. You shouldn’t apologize for wanting to protect your kid. Our mostnoble gestures as mothers are the ones most ridiculed. My name is Lish and these are my daughters, two of them that is, Alba and Letitia.”

“My name is Lucy.”

“Hi.”

Thank god for tactless kids. Lish and I would still be standing at my door grinning at each other if it weren’t for the twins marching right in and saying hello to Dill, who was slithering around on the floor, pushing himself backwards toward the sound of our voices in the hall. For the next hour or so the twins passed Dill back and forth and played peekaboo with him, and Lish and I drank coffee and shot the breeze. I was not entirely comfortable with the twins using Dill as a plaything, thinking of his soft spot, but Lish didn’t seem worried and I had the feeling they had done this before. Talking with Lish, I kind of got the feeling we, at Half-a-Life, were one big rollicking, happy, impoverished family. I felt ill at ease and remember thinking Lish was probably the freak of the block and she was thinking I was too new to know it and I’d let her in the door. I also had a strange feeling that I had seen her before, years ago on a city bus, wearing cat eye glasses, a faux leopard fur coat, ripped tights and a head that was half shaved. I remember thinking, as I walked past her on the bus, that she was weird and probably a punk from the suburbs with really strict parents. Now here she was sitting in my empty kitchen with twin girls and Birkenstocks and a full head of hair. God, she had hair. Thick, black, long hair clinging to her back like an oil slick. I could tell her twins were going to have it too one day, and I hated to think of their bathtub drain.

It was during the course of this conversation in my empty kitchen that I found out that the father of the twins was some kind of performer. He ate fire and made things disappear. I told her I didn’t know who Dill’s father was and she smiled and said, “Just as well.” The problem was knowing, she said, because as soon as you knew, you cared, soon as you cared, you lost. As for Dill, she said, now he could create his own dad in his mind and never be let down. Well, that was Lish, I wouldn’t call her a man-hater or anything, she was simply speaking from her own experience. In fact, many weeks later, sometime in June, during the flood, she told me that she would give anything to see the twins’ dad again and laugh in bed and wrap her hairy legs around his hot back and that the twins had a right to meet their father in the flesh and spit in his face. She was full of contradictions. And I believed each one. I wondered if she felt more love for this busker guy because he was gone than she would if he actually did show up. But what did it matter? He was gone. Their only encounter had been in a hotel and he didn’t even know where she actually lived or that he was the father of two playful girls with thick black hair. And that they were the half-sisters of two older girls, more serious but just as hairy. And that they all lived in a public housing co-op in Winnipeg’s inner city. Smack dab in the centre of Winnipeg, which was smack dab in the centre of Canada, which, as a point of interest, was smack dab in the centre of the earth.

Lish and I were single welfare mothers. I was proud to be something finally, to belong to a group of people that had a name and a purpose. It turns out that Lish was considered by most of the people at Half-a-Life to be a freak, but a kind freak and a funny freak as freaks go and, therefore, a good freak. As Joe put it, “Lish is off her nut, but she’s not dangerous or anything.”

I told you she liked the theatre. Joe had probably never heard of the word “eccentric.” Not that she was really. Eccentric. She wasn’t self-absorbed enough to be called eccentric. I’d have to say she was just miscast. Again, it all boiled down to money. Lish could have been a performer herself. Not only on the street but in theatres anywhere, had her lust not interfered with her passion. In the world of theatre she would have been considered normal: flamboyant, zany. In Half-a-Life she was just weird. And four kids, are you kidding? And on her own? A life on stage was not practical for Lish.

Well, Lish might not have been practical, but she knew something of life’s limitations. Besides, if she couldn’t perform for money, she could perform for us at Half-a-Life, and if anybody could use a laugh, it was us. As my mom used to say before she died, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”

Lish’s imitations were the funniest. She imitated her social worker from the dole and bank tellers and her father and just about everybody in a position of authority, however remote. She’d imitate bus drivers and waiters. She didn’t do it with spite, well, not much spite, just dead-on accuracy. Her father, John, for instance: she’d drop her chin to her chest and lower her voice to a booming bass, to say, “Alicia, your mother and I have some concerns about the kids. We think they need a father figure in their lives and uh . . . more . . . uh . . . structure. We feel uh . . . that they are given too many uh . . . freedoms.” Lish informed us that words like freedom, peace, happiness and love all made John nervous, genuinely confused. How he raised a daughter like Lish, I’ll never know.

But you see, even if her kids or any of ours at Half-a-Life had their dads around, would it make any difference? They’d grow up to be themselves eventually like the rest of us. But that didn’t stop us from dreaming of fathers coming home from work with treats and offers to do housework, to take the kids to the park, or read them a story. It didn’t stop us from dreaming of falling asleep with a man and waking up with him, going through the motions of an easy, comfortable routine, Mom, Dad and the kids all playing on the same team. Naturally some of the women in Half-a-Life had spent years with the same guy and it hadn’t worked out, causing a nasty separation and the usual poverty for one thing, but still . . . a smoker dying of lung cancer always dreams of one more perfect cigarette. So, during the days we congratulated each other on our independence, busied ourselves with the kids and odd jobs and other people’s kids and the headaches and general ups and downs of everyday life on the dole. During the days it was easy to forget about men. There were always distractions.

At night, though, we had more time to scrutinize our bodies, which, I might point out, were still fairly young and able to withstand violent contortions and the tough eager enthusiasm men of our age had for sex, or lovemaking, as Lish calls it. I’d never have called it that except that Lish told me it was a good word and I should use it. I would have said boinking or boning, two words Lish hated.

But every once in a while one of us, I should say them, because I was just not interested, did somehow manage to meet a man. Or a woman. After all, there were a couple of lesbians in the block who had managed to get custody of their kids—one, Gail, was given custody because the judge had to decide what was worse, a lesbian or an alcoholic, and because he had had a father who drank and beat him, decided that Gail, as long as she kept her perversions to herself, would be more suitable, god help those kids anyhow. Anyway, these flings and one-night stands helped to take the edge off their desire and remind them of their potential. They’d always laugh about it in the morning and roll their eyes while describing the very personal details of the night before like it had been a Jets game or an encounter at the 7-Eleven. I think I knew more about their boyfriends’ genitals than I did about my own. They felt that they had come too far to go back to the silly pretense of romance. We all talked as though we were too tough to get duped again by some smooth-talking man. All of us, that is, except Lish, who could fall hook, line and sinker for skinny, artistic guys who looked like they had TB, and long hair and goatees. That was her type. Usually they were quiet and not very funny, but I guess she provided the laughs during the brief courtships they’d have. I don’t know, because Lish didn’t talk about her nights of passion as eagerly as the rest of them. She actually respected the privacy of the men she’d had sex with, and besides, it was difficult to talk about those things at Half-a-Life with our kids around all the time.

Inevitably these men Lish fell in love with said they couldn’t handle the pressure of being with four children all the time, and she believed them (didn’t we all) and had no hard feelings for them, nor they for her. They’d usually remain good friends, and sit around burning incense and drinking tea and talking all night while her children lay sleeping in little heaps around her. Lish didn’t believe in cordoned off bedrooms where each child, or maybe two, lay alone, separated from the rest of the family. They did everything else together, why not sleep? She didn’t call it the family bed, like some other women in the block, she just let the kids fall asleep where they felt like and let the experts go to hell. She’d point out the absurdity of situations by saying in a nasal kind of ditzy voice, “Okay, now you go into this tiny dark room and sleep and You, you get this walled-off area here to sleep in and I’ll go way over here and sleep in this little room. Good night dears, have no fears.” If Lish wanted to fall asleep with her arms around two of her daughters and the other two near by, she would. Of course, on the occasions when she had one of her tubercular lovers over, she’d lead him to the kitchen or the bathroom or some room without children sleeping in it and there remove her spider hat and her gauzy skirt and let all her hair, and his, cushion them from the cold, cheap tile of public housing.

Lish didn’t have a problem picking up men. Usually they were guys who hung out at the local natural food collective or worked in the artists’ co-op next door to it. I think these guys found Lish’s long black hair irresistible and Lish herself a lot easier to handle than women with careers and ambitions and problems with sex and an inability to nurture. These are the types of things unemployed guys sometimes say about employed women. The type of women these guys thought wanted to take over the world. But Lish didn’t care. It felt good to be with a man and touch his hair and it made her feel powerful. The thing is none of these guys, not one single one of them, made her feel the way her busker did, the father of her twins, the love of her life, the one that got away. She longed to see him again, I knew this, even though she laughed it off and joked about a spoon being a pathetic reminder of the man you love.

It’s hard to talk about this kind of stuff, because the independence that we strutted around throughout the days is what people knew us as. All that longing and female desire and pent-up lust and yearning to have a man as not only a lover but a friend and father to our kids, too. Well, that wasn’t what the public got or how they thought of us. Out in the city, in the welfare office, at the grocery store, at the school, we carried ourselves like gangsters, warriors, we were just fine, didn’t need anybody, we had a job to do and we’d do it without anybody’s help if we had to. We were Single Mothers. Only Lish was brave enough to give herself up to the possibility of love, to follow the whims and wants of her four daughters during the day, and to enjoy herself during the night, and throughout all those days and nights to flirt with the wild possibility of the twins’ father finding his way to Half-a-Life and into Lish’s happy dream.

A lot of the women in Half-a-Life thought Lish was fooling herself. She didn’t even know the guy’s real name, and he didn’t know where she lived, as they had met and parted in a hotel, never knowing he’d sired not one but two adorable girls, and besides, just because he was connected with theatre, had gorgeous hair, made her laugh and caused a stir in the sack, didn’t mean he wouldn’t turn out to be like the rest of them. We all thought Lish had just been another easy lay for him on the road. Probably he had a wife and kids somewhere else, and he had completely forgotten about the crazy chick with the spider on her hat from the centre of the universe. I felt guilty about not sharing Lish’s optimism. And not believing, like Lish, that maybe someday she’d see him again, made me feel like one of those old, cheated people who don’t believe in anything.

Lish was the one who showed me the ropes at Half-a-Life. First of all she explained to me the problem with the women in Serenity Place. Well, it wasn’t a problem with all of them, just one in particular. But you know how that works. Serenity Place was the name of the public housing block directly across the street from Half-a-Life. It was a low-slung building with fake street lanterns outside it and actual flowers out front. It looked better than Half-a-Life. Serenity Place and Half-a-Life. Sounds like Heaven and Hell. But actually it was all the same: cheap housing, tons of women and kids. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, where there’s cheap housing, there’s women and kids. Anyway, this one woman in Serenity Place was giving Sarah, who lives in Half-a-Life, a lot of problems. Sarah had a son, and they lived on the second floor of Half-a-Life. She was also the caretaker along with Sing Dylan, whose real name was Bhupinder Singh Dhillon, but was called Sing Dylan because he liked to play sad folk songs on his guitar late at night in his little suite next to the furnace room in the basement of Half-a-Life. We all knew they weren’t having sex because Sikhs don’t have sex before they’re married, but we didn’t know anything else because Sarah was mute, or rather, she had chosen to stop talking after the traumatic circumstances of her pregnancy.

Either her brother or her father had raped her and then denied the whole thing. According to Lish, Sarah had tried to talk to people, to get them to believe her, but nobody cared to hear the unsavoury details and dismissed her as crazy. Sarah then just said, fuck it, from this day on I will never say another word. She didn’t, either, but she did write furiously on little stick-it note pads, to her son, to us, to herself, to Sing Dylan, who didn’t read English, but somehow related to Sarah. Little messages, like “Right now I’m thinking about something so hilarious if I said it you wouldn’t stop laughing for a week.” Or, to her son who was nine, “Good thing you’re such a blabbermouth sweetie, blab on.” Strange messages, but never information about herself, what happened to her, what she saw happen to other people. All her messages were cheerful and odd and not conversation starters at all, just detached snippets from the reel going round inside her head. When Emmanuel was five and starting school, Sarah fell in love with his teacher, a gentle, handsome man with startling blue eyes. As they say. She also made friends with the mother of one of Emmanuel’s classmates.

Her name was Sindy (Lish told me to spell it with an S) and she happened to live in Serenity Place with her kids. Everybody in Half-a-Life felt very protective of Sarah and so when Sindy made her move they all saw red. Sarah wrote a special note to Sindy and it said something like, “I’m finding myself interested in Mr. Myron.” Well, that was it, if this pathetic dumpy mute could entertain thoughts of boinking Myron, then, thought Sindy, so could she. So Sindy schemed and connived and eventually got ol’ Myron over to her place under the pretense of discussing her own son’s lack of social skills in the classroom, and Myron, not being professional enough to resist her advances, took Sindy right there on her velour sectional and then did it again the next night and the next. She didn’t mention any of this to Sarah, but when she saw Myron giving Sarah the once-over in the coat room as she bent to tie Emmanuel’s boots, she used her trump card. That night she told Myron that Sarah’s kid was a freak, an unnatural product of an unnatural coupling. Pssst . . . Sarah’s own father was the kid’s father. And, if that didn’t take the cake, Sarah was hunting for a father for the kid, intending to pass him off as someone else’s.

Mr. Myron was appalled at Sindy’s vicious telling of this tale, but also put off by the notion of having anything to do with Sarah or her kid. Emmanuel was transferred to a different classroom, one for slow learners, or whatever they’re called now, and Sarah was told, essentially, that Emmanuel must be told of his origins or he’d be angry later on and possibly run the risk of a lifetime in jail, maybe even take his rage our on his mother or himself. Anyway, he’d be a burden to society on some level. Appointments were set up, Emmanuel was told the terrible secret, and his mother was evaluated by a clinical psychologist who said she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and should try to begin talking in order to begin healing. If she didn’t, Child and Family Services would have to be notified and Emmanuel might have to be placed in a normal home where people spoke to one another and didn’t scribble on stick-it pads all day.

Because she’d do anything not to lose Emmanuel, Sarah began to talk in a scratchy voice that was raw from not being used. Emmanuel, once bubbly and carefree, stopped talking and laughing and refused to go to school, so that the school principal was forced to call Child and Family Services and they sent out a social worker to investigate. Sarah had been trying to help Emmanuel and had been making progress. The two of them, over something funny on TV, would turn to each other and smile now, and Emmanuel could be heard through the walls of his bedroom experimenting with swear words, like fuck and shit and bloody hell, which Sing Dylan used a lot. But when the social worker visited Sarah and Emmanuel and tried to get some sort of promise that Emmanuel would be sent to school, Sarah began to cry and Emmanuel ran to his room and slammed the door. This was enough for the social worker to recommend a foster home for Emmanuel on the basis of his and her lack of cooperation regarding school attendance. So two days later Emmanuel was packed into the back of the social worker’s car, staring straight ahead at nothing, and Sarah collapsed in the arms of Sing Dylan.

Sindy and Mr. Myron ended up living together, and all of Serenity Place heard the story, at least Sindy’s version of it, and all of them agreed that poor Emmanuel was much better off in a foster home and hadn’t Sarah handled the situation badly. After that Sarah helped Sing Dylan clean Half-a-Life, and prepared herself and her apartment for Emmanuel’s ninety-minute visits every other Sunday afternoon as if preparing to meet the love of her life, which she was.

After hearing this story I understood the feelings the Lifers had for Serenity Place and its tenants. Most of us shunned the women who lived there, even the new ones moving in, innocent women who knew nothing of its terrible reputation. And the women in Serenity Place hated us Lifers as well. Our children and theirs did not play together. I guess it was stupid. Elaine, the Irish girl, said we were just like Northern Ireland without the bombs.

Lish also introduced Dill and me to a trio of women who practised witchcraft and treated each other’s various infections and rashes with rare herbs and potions and went to bed and woke with the sun. Lish herself was part of a group that met on every full moon out back behind the parking lot in the grassy area, making circles and doing mysterious things, and she packed her share of Tiger Balm on the heaving chests of her children and treated ear infections with half an onion strapped to the ear with one of her Indian scarves.

Once, just before the rains, when the atmosphere was preparing for the upheaval and the ground was bracing itself, the vibrations of these forces tunnelled themselves right into Dill’s inner ear, according to Terrapin, the enormous dark beauty of the trio. I noticed that whenever she spoke her voice went up at the end of the sentence as though it were a question, which it usually wasn’t. Like, “I can’t believe the amount of junk my kids got on Hallowe’en?”

I appreciated her natural wisdom. I had never witnessed anything like it in my life. Almost an entire floor of hippies, but I couldn’t repress my cravings for hot dogs and Kraft Dinner and Tylenol and coffee for killer hangovers. I hid my 7-Eleven bags in Dill’s diaper bag. I had to sneak Dill’s antibiotics past her in the elevator. I was sure she’d disapprove. I was not able to keep plants alive and incense made me choke. Lish said it was all bogus anyway, and if the trio sometimes went overboard it was only because they had nothing else to do. As their kids got older, she said, they’d probably give it up for something else. They didn’t seem any calmer than the rest of us anyway. Still, Lish continued her full moon ritual and munched on organic fruit all day long and didn’t lose her sense of humour. Though she seemed bitter some days and pitied herself stuck in a dive like Half-a-Life while the men who had once whispered proclamations of undying love in her ear now travelled the world with no cares. At times she was tempted to chuck the silver spoon.

When Terrapin asked Lish if she had eaten the twins’ placentas, Lish gagged on her fruit leather and said in her mock enthusiastic voice, sort of high and puckered, “Oh yeah, it was incredible and when they turn six I plan to sacrifice them both to the goddess. Won’t you come? I think it’ll be a potluck.” I laughed at that and Terrapin said, “Oh Lish, you’re never serious.” Which wasn’t exactly true, but the trio brought enough New Age brooding into our lives and Lish and I enjoyed tormenting them with our demented humour. Well, I should say Lish’s, because I was more an enthusiastic fan than an actual accomplice, a role I didn’t mind and Lish seemed to need.

During the days Lish and I would sit and talk and drink chamomile tea or cider, sometimes cheap champagne for the hell of it, getting up only to sort out problems between the children or to rummage around in boxes looking for artifacts to support the stories we told to each other of our lives. And loves, in Lish’s case.

Her four-year-old twins were born on a full moon under the sign of Pisces which, according to Lish, made them very emotional and eager to please. They adored Dill, dressing him up in ridiculous costumes and bathing him and letting him crawl all over them while they giggled and screamed. Their paintings covered all of the walls, which Lish had painted dark colours of burnt red and midnight blue. Alba took diving lessons at the Pan Am pool and Letitia was saving up for a video camera so she could make movies about bugs and show them to children. Both girls cried easily if Lish raised her voice, and whenever she did, which wasn’t often, she’d scoop them both up and beg their forgiveness. Then she would berate herself for being inconsistent. Alba and Letitia were identical twins, and during their nightly performances of dance and spontaneous poetry they were enchanting. Lish lit candles and operated the tapes, and the older girls prepared treats which were passed around before and after the performances. They also gave stage directions to the twins and operated the curtain which was made from a wool blanket given to Lish by a macrobiotic shoemaker and always made her break out in itchy hives. It was a royal bank blue with a big yellow star in the middle.

The older girls, Maya and Hope, I didn’t know as well because they were in school all day and had many friends in the block with whom they were always hatching plans that would terrify and infuriate Sing Dylan. “Bloody hell,” he’d say in a clipped way, “Bloody hell.” They were nine and ten. Lish hadn’t wanted them to go to school. She didn’t trust schools and knew that she could do a much better job of teaching her kids herself. This she would do by filling the apartment with books, art supplies, fresh vegetables and soul-stirring music, by visits from local artisans and writers, by naps after lunch, by evening walks and bike rides. At night the girls could release all the energy of the day and dream and rest next to Lish and the twins.

But Maya and Hope were just like their mother. They needed an audience and loved to talk and laugh with other girls their age. And the boys at school held a special appeal their own household lacked. Nothing Lish could say could keep them from going to school, and as each year passed their love for its comforting routine grew. Every morning Lish shook her head and looked desolate as Maya and Hope scrambled around the apartment gathering their books and lunches, not even trying to conceal their excitement. And every morning Lish would mutter as she covered them with kisses and hair, “Don’t take any shit, my sweet petunias. Remember you can quit any time and return to the land of the living.” And off they’d run, laughing and screeching.

I tried to console poor Lish. Maybe Alba and Letitia would stick around and let Lish teach them at home, but the way they followed Maya and Hope with their eyes down the street and beyond the giant BFI containers until they were out of sight, it wasn’t likely.