Lish reminded me of my mother. When I was young she’d pull me out of school, actually out of my bed, and announce that we were taking the train to Vancouver to visit her sister. Or that we must hurry to the airport to catch a plane to Grenada or wherever. I only realized later that these spontaneous trips always followed confrontations with my dad, where he sat in furious helpless rage and my mother tried to get him to talk to her. My mother was indifferent to school and never forced me to go or questioned my grades or really showed any interest in it whatsoever. The only course she insisted I take was typing. She said it would serve me well.
If I got into trouble at school, which I did frequently, I’d regale her with the whole story and she’d laugh in collusion, slapping her thigh in appreciation of my rebellious spirit. My dad, a geology professor, would sit silently and occasionally twitch his mouth as he sipped his black coffee from a tiny cup. My mother drank from a big ceramic mug, at least fifteen cups a day.
Throughout my life I have tried to make my dad laugh or shout, to get a rise out of him, as my mom said. Once, on one of his up days when I was about twelve, he invited me into his classroom and asked me what colour he had just painted the supply counter. I thought hard for a moment and then said, “Rose.” That made him so excited he actually jumped up off the floor, all two hundred and fifty pounds of him, which is one eighth of a ton, and whooped like Dill does when he’s in his Jolly Jumper. He grabbed my hand and shook it and then pulled a fiver out of his wallet and pressed it into my other hand. I guess he hadn’t wanted me to say plain ordinary pink. Maybe he was concerned about his masculinity or maybe as a child he had had an argument about the colour with an adult who had laughed at him and walked away, and now, finally, was his chance to be vindicated. But then again, what did I know from pink? Since that episode I have given him books with rose covers, sport shirts with rose buttons, and offered to paint his picnic table rose, wink wink, but he either doesn’t remember or doesn’t want to be reminded of that day he got excited and shook my hand.
Sometimes I get this image in my head of thousands of fathers rubbing small peepholes on frosty windows and standing in snow and looking into warm houses, watching their families inside. Well, in our cases, mine and Lish’s, there weren’t any fathers looking in, more like us, at least her, looking out wondering where in the hell they could be. Or who they could be. Or where that one, that dark-eyed, sinewy, rogue magician, had disappeared to.
Hope and Maya’s dad was a long-haired musician who wore round glasses and worked in a book store part time. He’d frequently stop in and visit his daughters, and occasionally take them over to his mom’s place where they’d play Clue and eat Fudgee-Os, a rare treat. He and Lish had no hard feelings toward one another except that Lish wished he’d live in a building instead of his VW van, the location of Maya and Hope’s conception, so that Maya and Hope could stay with him when they needed a change from Half-a-Life.
Not all the women in Half-a-Life had friendly relationships with their exes. No sirree. When I heard their stories I was glad I didn’t know who Dill’s dad was. I was amazed that love could turn so rotten. Lish’s second cousin, Naomi, for instance, was involved in an endless battle with the father of her second child. The father of her first choked on his own vomit and died one snowy evening when Naomi was out working. He had been a really nice guy, but a notorious drunk. When Naomi returned home, she found Tina, the child, sitting on top of Rob’s cold body watching TV and drinking apple juice from the box. In shock, Naomi married the first man to come along, a firefighter with a soothing voice and a sympathetic ear and a genuine interest in Tina. Not until it was too late did Naomi discover his interest in Tina was sexual and his hatred for Naomi boundless. He turned out to be one of those creeps who prey on single mothers as a means of getting to their kids. Lish warned me never to get involved with a man who was immediately crazy about Dill. She said it takes a normal man a bit of time to warm to somebody else’s kid, that is, if it ever happens at all. All this after Naomi had fallen in love with him and given birth to their son, a child he found irritating and time-consuming. Believe it or not, it was months before Naomi could act upon her discovery. One night while the guy slept, Naomi silently stuffed her kids into their snowsuits, packed a bag of diapers and crackers and toys and slipped away. She carried both children and the bag and walked, bare-headed and without gloves, for a mile before stopping to rest in a snow bank. There she considered falling asleep with the children, peacefully slipping away into another place and joining Rob, a man she had always taken for granted, not knowing any others.
But just then Tina woke up and complained of hunger and the boy opened his eyes and grinned at the snow around them and Naomi decided to get focussed, as Lish put it. They had a snack of crackers in the snow and then Naomi told Tina she would have to walk and carry the toys. She threw the rest of the bag’s contents in the snow, heaved the boy over her shoulder, and together the family trekked across town from their comfortable suburb where split-level homes with Christmas lights lit the night sky, to the shabby front door of Half-a-Life and up four floors to Lish’s open arms. Hell, said Lish, she had let enough men live with her expense-free, why not Naomi? They lived with Lish and her two daughters (this was before the twins arrived) for three weeks until housing authorities found out and forbade that many people in a two-bedroom apartment and commissioned Sing Dylan to spray for roaches in number thirty-four and help Naomi move in. Lish had pulled a few strings to get them their own spot in Half-a-Life. One of her skinny tubercular lovers was the son of the chairman of the board of Manitoba Housing.
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.
I asked Lish if Angela could blackmail him and get more money out of him, maybe take a cruise with the kids, and Lish replied that writers don’t have any money but do have lots of imagination to dream up excuses and lies about their lives and that a blackmail job didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. When Robert De Niro or Mick Jagger are dumped with paternity suits by desperate women, does anybody care? Nope, Angela would have to take her knocks like the rest of us and write her own stories about unhappy love.
Like I said, with Angela’s arrival in early June came the rain. The clouds broke like a million amniotic sacs and didn’t stop dumping rain on us until one month later.
Lish and Angela got along quite well. They’d sit around and talk while their girls played together. Angela taught Lish how to bake bread. Neither one of them faked a big interest in the other’s kids, and if they wanted to yell from time to time, they did. I wasn’t crazy about Angela and in a way I was jealous of the attention Lish gave to her. I told myself it was because they both had daughters of the same age. Anyway, Angela and I were the newcomers and Lish, as de facto mother hen of the block, had decided to take us both under her wing.
Once on a Friday evening when all the fathers lined up their cars and half-tons outside the block, Deadbeat Dad’s Row we called it, Lish thought she had seen the dark head of the fire-eater in one of the cars. She said to me, “Watch my kids,” and took off out the door of her apartment like her hair was on fire. I had never seen Lish move that fast. Her long black hair shot out behind her and her bracelets jangled as she sprinted. A few minutes later she came back and looked at us all as if we were vaguely familiar and sat down at her kitchen table. She played with her hair for a few seconds and then burst our laughing. We all laughed then, relieved.
That evening I bathed Dill in the big tub for the first time and wondered if I had ruined his life by not knowing who his father was. And is, I guess. Somewhere out there in the suburbs, probably, some guy is living with his parents, fixing his car, studying for exams, drinking at socials with guys, trying to pick up girls, Dill’s father. Doesn’t even know it. He’ll probably marry someone pretty and competent and have a family and be proud of them, put up pictures in his office and tumble around with them before bed, never knowing that on the other side of town some girl he boinked when he was too pissed to remember is living on the dole and raising his son.
If only Dill’s dad were dead, that would be so much easier. I have imagined the scene in my mind. And I’ve imagined Dill as a seven-year-old or maybe even younger saying, “By the way Mom, who’s my dad?” And what would I say? “Well, Dill, I really don’t know.” Or would I launch into some inane parable to try and derail his thinking? What would other kids say? Hey Dill, I hear your old lady’s a slut. Doesn’t even know who your old man is. This was my thinking late at night. During the day Lish and some of the others and I would laugh at the bleak humour of our situations. We’d roll our eyes at the thought of trying to parent with some fumbling man and pity women who had to. This was another way in which we separated ourselves from the women in Serenity Place who, we told each other, resented being single mothers and would marry the first man who asked them. Lish would say, “If I had a dollar for every time a man asked me to marry him, I’d be a wealthy woman.” And then she’d pause, and say, “But I’ve got four kids already, I can’t handle another one.” We’d usually join in with the last part of that sentence and then snort through our noses with our mouths shut, like we were some kind of a chorus line. But really it was just an act for me. I’d say it, but I’d cross my fingers under the table, or my toes in my shoe—so I wouldn’t jinx my entire life. I always thought I would have a husband. If I had a dollar for every time I imagined who he might be, I’d be a wealthy woman. Well, I’d be able to buy some furniture anyway.
The first week of rain was bearable. The mosquitoes hadn’t arrived and the rain had provided us all at Half-a-Life with a few interesting challenges. None of us had cars or money for cabs. Even the bus was an extravagance. One bus fare can get you a box of Kraft Dinner or a litre of milk. So with kids and babies and strollers and bags of groceries, and tricycles the little ones would start out on and then abandon, wanting instead to be carried, and the rain coming down on top of everything else, we at Half-a-Life were accustomed to getting wet. Not only that, but the road in front of Half-a-Life had sunk and dipped, so crossing it meant wading through one foot of water. Lish had called the city works department about it, but they had said if they started with our road they’d have to fix everyone’s. We didn’t see the problem with this. Anyway, we couldn’t stay in all day. At least I couldn’t. Lish could because her apartment was a real home and being in it so much of the time didn’t make her crazy like it did me. In fact I had known her to spend entire days curled up in her big brown chair. She’d get up to prepare food for the kids or find a lost toy, but that was about it. She wasn’t despondent or anything, just content. People would come and go and she would hold court from her brown chair.
My apartment was kind of empty and white. Or eggshell really. Stuff sat around in boxes. Terrapin said maybe I was depressed and couldn’t motivate myself to unpack. But I was after all only eighteen years old and had never set up a home of my own before. She offered me something called echinacea she had purchased from Vita Health, promising it would pick me up. I told her I didn’t need picking up, I needed a break from Dill to think and organize and maybe go out and pick up some things from the Goodwill. Maybe even from my dad’s house. Her head tilted to one side and moved up and down like a big oil drill and she made herself look empathetic. She could have offered to babysit Dill so I could set up my place properly. But no. Terrapin smiled wanly, tilting her oil drill head, and then hugged me. I was horrified. And then immediately relieved that she hadn’t offered to babysit Dill because the thought of her holding Dill against her scratchy Guatemalan vest and anointing him with god knows what kind of oils and tinctures gave me the creeps.
Anyway, the less stuff I had cluttering up my apartment, the easier it was for Sing Dylan to spray for roaches. Lish would have babysat gladly, but I was nervous about her girls lugging Dill around and maybe dropping him. Besides, when I went out Lish and the twins usually came along. If I didn’t want them to I’d have to sneak out the back door past Sing Dylan’s apartment and traipse across the gravel parking lot. Dill’s umbrella stroller was falling apart as it was and the gravel made it worse. With the puddles and the muck, crossing it was almost impossible. So I usually just went out the front door and took my chances.