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.
It was in Cactus Flats that everything was supposed to happen. According to the plan Teresa and I had made, Lish and I would call Teresa to find out what was happening and she’d tell me that Lish had received a postcard from one of Gotcha’s friends, saying that Gotcha was dead, killed outside a movie theatre, shot randomly by some drug dealer or buyer or whatever. An American thing. She’d say that in the postcard the guy, Gotcha’s friend, had written that Gotcha had never forgotten Lish and up to the day he died remembered her the most fondly of all the women he’d known on the road. As the most fun. And he’d never forget all that wild black hair. And that he always regretted stealing her wallet. It would say that his parents had already retrieved the body and buried it in their local cemetery in—the guy couldn’t remember where Gotcha was from—but he’d never forget him. And, oh yeah, he loved kids and had always wanted one (or two) of his own. It would say that Gotcha had said that he was happy that Lish had that big silver spoon, at least, as a reminder of their love.
I had written the postcard before we left so Lish would be able to get her hands on it just as soon as we got back. It was written badly, like all the others, but I thought it important that I was consistent.
It was strange: tricking Lish this way I was filled with a sense of well-being and an overwhelming sense of dread at the same time. Every five miles or so my mood would shift from one to the other, but I tried to ride it up the middle and focus on my project and convince myself it was for the best. I looked at the twins and tried to tell myself that Gotcha would never ever have shown up anyway, not after five years of no communication at all, and so for their father to be dead was best. Hell, even if he did show up some time, it would be a great story for the twins to tell their friends. Our dad died and came back to life so he could see us. Oh god, the next five-mile section of dread was coming up. What was I doing?
When I was eight, my parents bought a cabin at Falcon Lake, and every Sunday we went to church and Sunday School at an outdoor tent set up a few miles down the road. I had short hair and red jeans and a Jimmy Walker shirt that said “dyn-o-mite” on it and everyone thought I was a boy. I wanted to be a boy. So I said, “Yeah, my name’s uh . . . Jimmy,” and I got to go in the boys’ Sunday School for weeks and play with the boys until one Sunday the minister guy came up to my mom and dad and me in the car and said, “So how’s Jimmy liking Sunday School?” And they said, “Who?” And the minister smiled and smiled, looking back at me and them, and I buried my face in my mom’s lap and cried all the way home, while my mom and dad tried not to laugh. After that I refused to go back to the outdoor church and so we all quit.
I think it was a big relief for everyone. Except for a while there I was hung up on the Rapture story that I had heard in Sunday School. If I came home from school and nobody was home, my dad gone, even my mom and her clients nowhere to be seen, no murmuring coming from her office, I’d think the Rapture had happened and I’d been left behind to fend for myself on earth while everybody else had managed to get taken to heaven. For those split seconds I’d be afraid and pissed off, too. I thought Geez, even my mom’s clients who were so messed up managed to get to heaven and I, an innocent child, was left behind. Go figure. What had I done? What had I done? For a while there I couldn’t go to sleep until I had gotten down on my knees and thanked God for everything in my life and asked to be forgiven for just about everything I had said and thought that day. I had scraps of paper with terrible things I had thought and said during the day so I wouldn’t forget come forgiveness time. For some reason I never worried about dying during the day at school or something without being forgiven. It was only at home at night in my bed that I feared the morning would never come.
I also made myself read two pages of tiny print in the King James version of the Bible, which is almost entirely incomprehensible. If I didn’t do that I’d fear for my life and worry about eternal damnation. It got to be a problem, a real problem, though, because I’d lie in bed almost asleep and think an evil thought just because I knew I wasn’t supposed to and then poof I’d be on my knees again praying for forgiveness. I had to be kneeling to be forgiven, this I knew. Eventually I told myself to fall asleep kneeling against my bed in a repentant pose so I wouldn’t miss being forgiven for every single bad thing I thought before I fell asleep. During the day I was dragging myself around, totally exhausted and hurting from a terrible crick in my neck. My mom started to worry and took me to three doctors before she finally caught me kneeling at my bed, head in my hands, fast asleep at three in the morning. She had come in to close my window. She told me evil thoughts are normal and beneficial: they are God’s way of preventing us from actually carrying out evil deeds. And when we have good thoughts, you know, kind and gentle ones, we’ll be so pleasantly surprised that we’ll want to have more. She told me there are two things I should not do. They were lie and throw stones.
She told me more things that night, but I didn’t hear them, because I was sound asleep, beside her in my little twin bed. What I heard was Don’t lie, Don’t throw stones. That was good. I could do that. I could breathe easy. Since then I’ve lied a bit, okay a lot, and even thrown stones. But it’s definitely a good base to work from. I’m still alive, anyway, and I’m not so tired. And if the Rapture’s happened, nobody I know got picked to go up to heaven.
If Lish found out I had rigged this whole thing, I wouldn’t be able to leave Half-a-Life as easily as I had that outdoor church. Public housing isn’t exactly popping up all over the city. And I don’t think anybody would be laughing. And I certainly wouldn’t be able to cry in my mom’s lap. But things might just work out. The next five-mile stretch of well-being was coming up and Lish was singing and the kids were quiet, listening. The van was still running, the children were happy and it was not raining.
Cactus Flats. Where history was made, thanks to me and my big mouth and my need to shape other people’s lives. Was I like my mother? Would I die holding onto the secrets of other women’s lives? I was acting more like a dictator than a mirror. If my mother reflected women’s lives, I twisted them around like nutty putty. “I think we should call Teresa and see how things are going,” I said to Lish that day in Cactus Flats. “You know, the mail.” Could I be more obvious. Denver was only a day’s drive away and I had to make sure we didn’t get there. “Fine,” she said. Just like that. We bought a carton of Camel cigarettes for Teresa and bourbon for Lish and then we found a pay phone. I do not remember any details about the town of Cactus Flats, other than that it was very quiet. In the phone booth Lish kept flipping her hair back so she could dial: every time it hit the side wall of the booth. She was wearing a black t-shirt with the sleeves and neckline cut off and it read, “She Who Must Be Obeyed.” I was nervous, really nervous about the call. I was worried about how Lish would react. What would I tell her? Why hadn’t I rehearsed that? And how would the kids, especially the twins, feel? Lish spoke to Teresa. I only heard what Lish said.
What?
No.
No.
No way.
No.
No fucking way.
No. Fucking. Way.
Yeah, read it to me.
Jesus.
No.
Did you say silver spoon? How do you like them apples.
How the fuck do you like them apples.
Yeah.
Yes.
What? Yeah, it’s still running. Kay.
Bye.
I don’t know why Teresa had to ask if the van was still running. It was rather inappropriate timing. I guess she just didn’t feel the drama of the moment. At least she didn’t ask if we’d got her cheap American smokes yet. Or maybe she had. How would I know? While Lish was talking I had the feeling I was drifting away, lifting off and floating up into the sky, away from Lish and Dill and the girls and out of this crazy lie I had concocted. Then the Badlands came to life and I came back to earth and the dusty quiet town of Cactus Flats, South Dakota, woke up briefly as Lish hollered at the top of her lungs, “GODDAMN FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING ASSHOLE!!!” The girls stared and I stared. Nobody mentioned the swear jar and Dill, in that marvellous way babies have, began to chuckle.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” That was about all I kept saying to Lish on the drive back to Winnipeg. She kept saying, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.” She had these crying jags and I told her she looked great afterwards. She laughed. When she cried I drove so we wouldn’t go off the road. She told the girls point blank that the friend they were looking for had been killed in a terrible stupid accident and we were going home. Alba said we could still have a holiday and Hope glared at her and Alba stuck out her tongue. In the washroom of a gas station, Lish told me she would have to figure out how to tell the twins their mysterious father was now dead. It was anti-climactic. This was the big finish I was hoping for. Better a dead father than an absent one and all that. No more waiting, hoping, wondering. On with life! The twins could create the new Gotcha in their minds, in their hearts, in their stories at school, and in their conversations in the playground, and he would never let them down. Never. And they would believe he had died trying to find them.
But I didn’t feel jubilant. After all, the twins had never really worried about their father. Lish had explained to them who he was, and that they’d likely never see him. They were content with that. They had been told the truth. And maybe when they were older they’d borrow somebody’s van and hit the road looking for him themselves. Or maybe they wouldn’t and he would become something they’d think about a couple of times a year, maybe the month of their conception, which would have been July, or whenever they saw a dark-haired handsome man performing magic on an outdoor stage. Who can tell? Why did I think that just because I could re-create my mother after her stupid death, they could or would want to re-create their dad’s after his? After his fake one, that is.
And Lish. Obviously she had managed to survive all those years before I moved into Half-a-Life. I found her crying one day, assumed it was over lost love, and then concocted some stupid plan to return that love to her to make her happy, to keep her happy, so I could be happy. To think I could be a mother and so fucked up at the same time. If I wanted to fix somebody’s life so badly, why didn’t I start with my own?
Anyway, I kept apologizing to Lish, saying it was my fault, it was my fault, I shouldn’t have encouraged her to take this trip. It was doomed from the beginning, etc. etc. I came as close as I could to telling her I had rigged the whole thing—until she finally told me to shut up and stop blaming myself. She said women always blame themselves when it rains at a picnic. She drove with one hairy leg heaved up onto the seat and her elbow resting on the window sill holding up her head. She had on the same t-shirt as on the day before. As we headed north toward Winnipeg a miracle began, slowly, to unfold: the sun came out. The prairie sun was finally doing what it was famous for. It was shining, hot and shining. “Well,” said Lish, “there is a God. That big red swollen orb up there has finally found its groove and it’s about darn tootin’ time I’d say, wouldn’t you, girls? Dill?”
Groove? I thought to myself. Groove?
We decided to bypass the fleabag motel in Grand Forks and camp instead. I was glad about that. The boy with the hickeys and the brown arms confused me. And I think any more confusion at that point would have made me certifiably insane. And anyway, Lish could afford to look awful from a night of camping. And we could tell Terrapin that yes, we had camped, because she was sure to ask. Lish tried to start a fire using the bourbon as lighter fluid, but it didn’t work. She said, “Fuck it, who needs a fire,” and started chugging the bourbon straight from the bottle. After a lot of swearing and sweating and second thoughts we got the tent up and then all seven of us went skinny dipping in the lake until a park ranger or warden came to tell us it was unlawful to swim naked in the lake. Lish rose from the water slowly and walked over to this guy on the beach, starkers. Her wet black hair hung around her body like a pelt. The girls shrieked with delight.
“Did you say ‘unlawful’?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “It means you’re not supposed to do it.”
“To swim naked?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said again. The ranger and Lish were smiling at each other and he began to rub his hands on his thighs and clear his throat. Then he played with a little button on his two-way radio. He didn’t look much older than me. I was trying desperately to keep my breasts under the water and still hold Dill without drowning him. I must have looked like some kind of deformed stroke victim. Lish, however, stood on that beach like Joan of Arc, big, naked, looking the ranger in the eye, grinning, shaking drops of water out of her hair, squinting at the setting sun like a self-contained fugitive. I wanted this scene to end promptly. Lish wanted it to go on forever.
They stood smiling at each other. Lish moved her hair around a bit and a few drops of water fell on the ranger’s pant leg. She made a big deal of wiping him off and he laughed and looked up at the sky as if to say Thank you God for this naked woman standing in front of me and rubbing my thigh. He took out two cigarettes and offered one to Lish. She shook her head and shifted her weight to one leg. The ranger was having a problem lighting his cigarette and Lish moved around slightly to block the wind from blowing out his match. They were talking and laughing. He was a cute ranger. It occurred to me to look at his pants to see if he was getting an erection, but I couldn’t really tell. I quickly looked away.
I tried to engage Dill and the girls in some kind of feeble splashing game but Dill started fussing about the water in his eyes and the girls began chucking wet sand at each other. I looked at the happy couple on the beach and wondered whether Lish would drag this guy off to the bushes any second and screw him while she was at it, but they seemed satisfied enough standing around and talking to each other.
What the hell was I supposed to do? There was no way I was getting out of the water naked, and I was starting to feel like a real idiot, hunched over like a clam and moving around trying to stay warm in the water and keep Dill from crying. I couldn’t exactly nurse him underwater—he’d drown if he took a breath. I guess I should have known it wasn’t my breasts anybody was interested in, except Dill, and it wouldn’t make any difference if I exposed myself or not. It could have been Normandy Beach on D-Day and Lish and the ranger wouldn’t have noticed.
Lish walked over a few feet and pulled her bottle of bourbon out from a log, and handed it to him. He had a drink and passed it back to Lish. Well fine, I thought, if that’s the only fluid they pass back and forth. I swatted a horsefly off Dill’s head.
Finally Lish turned around and looked at us and waved. I held up my hand for a second like a traffic cop, thinking okay if you’ve had your fun with buddy boy you might want to get back to looking after your kids, who were kind of drifting off down the beach by now.
The ranger started pointing in one direction and then moving his finger around his palm and then pointing again. He was giving her directions to some place. His, I imagined. I sighed. No way, I thought. I am not looking after your kids while you go off to some look-out tower with a total stranger.
Lish nodded politely while he spoke and looked off in the direction in which he had pointed. Then he smiled and said, “So?” with an animated shrug. Lish laughed. She said, “You never know.” He dropped his head in a comic gesture of defeat and then looked up at the sky again, supposedly for guidance. He was really a very cute ranger. Then they shook hands and while they were doing that he briefly placed his other hand on Lish’s bare hip. She smiled.
Then he just walked away into the bush. And Lish did the old brushing off her hands gesture that meant well, that’s over, and walked back into the lake with so much energy that she left a little wake behind her.
“You just never stop making waves, do you, Lish.”
“Oh, pa-lease, leave the comedy to me.”
“You’re not gonna go off with that guy later, are you?” I asked.
“Nah,” she said. She cupped some water in her hands and splashed it on her face. “He’s a nice guy, though,” she said. “He’s funny.”
“He’s pretty cute,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Lish, and we both stared off at the place in the bushes where he’d disappeared.
It’s amazing how refreshing a little bit of water can be. Mixed with bourbon.