On TV we saw that thousands of families in the States were being evacuated from flooded towns and cities and farms. Water pipes had been turned off. Sandbagging was the activity of the day. After work, after school, everybody bagged. School gymnasiums and machinery warehouses were filling up with homeless families and even their pets. We read stories of stubborn old women who refused to leave their homes, moving up from the main floor to the second floor, to the attic, and then onto the roofs of their homes. From there they were rescued by helicopters and taken to refugee centres or next of kin. Lish told me about some guy in Iowa who had lost five cans of beer in the flood. He was devastated. The sixth can of the six pack had been the last beer his brother had drunk before he collapsed of a heart attack and died. The remaining five cans had been placed on the mantle in homage to the dead brother. Nobody was allowed to touch them. They were washed right off the mantle, out the front door, and then sank to the bottom of the swirling brown cesspool outside. Maclean’s magazine showed a picture of this guy on his knees crying for his beer cans and his brother. More highways were wiped out and closed. Bridges crumbled and livestock drowned. The U.S. was registering more deaths from electrocution than ever before. Rock bands were getting together to plan a benefit for the flood victims. Bill Clinton surveyed the area in hipwaders, and placed one sandbag on a pile outside Des Moines for the photographers. In case there was some doubt in people’s minds, he officially declared the mess a disaster area.
In Winnipeg, the flooding had damaged much of the antiquated sewer system. Filthy ground water was pouring in through the cracks, the weeping tiles, and the windows in people’s basements. Toilets were backing up all over the city. When people plugged their toilets with bricks and boards and rocks, the shit came up through their sinks. Pieces of human waste, tampons and used condoms were bumping up against rec room pool tables and entertainment units. Washers and dryers, freezers and bathroom cabinets were floating around in three or four feet of water. The hospitals were dealing with more heart attack and stroke victims than ever. Usually old men. While they were being admitted, their wives were on the phone making arrangements with insurance companies, sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, trying to take care of the details.
A makeshift disaster relief agency had been set up by the provincial government to assist those without flood insurance. The lineup to the office stretched for blocks, fights broke out, crafty entrepreneurs walked up and down the lineups selling mosquito spray, umbrellas and fold-up lawn chairs for exorbitant prices. Those people who were renting homes and woke up to raw sewage threw up their hands, packed their bags and moved. Those who owned homes, though, stayed and fought the flood and panicked. The resale value of flooded homes plummeted. It’s impossible to remove the foul stench of raw sewage without spending thousands of dollars on cleaning, repair and renovation. The stink gets behind the walls into the insulation: it seeps under the carpet, under the tiles and into the floor boards. The mould and mildew from the water keep growing and permeate the house and get into the lungs of small children and frail adults. Flood victims moved in with extended family or with neighbours: eight kids to a bedroom, four adults on the living room floor. The heat, the bugs, the despair, the loss, the constant smell of wet dog. Cops were busy around the clock with domestic assaults; abandoned flooded homes were being broken into by gangs of kids, sometimes neighbours. Grown men cried and cursed the skies, shook their fists at the clouds and screamed for the rain to stop. Mothers told their kids to think of it as a great adventure and cried in corners. University psychologists were called in to assess the children. Panels of experts informed us that we were under a lot of stress and our tempers would be short, but that disasters like this would bring us together. International disaster analysts told us that we in Canada and the U.S. were living under a false sense of security. We had no reason to be shocked at the magnitude of the flood. What made us think that we could shut out the forces of nature with our well-built houses, expensive building materials and sophisticated engineering? People living in underdeveloped countries handled disasters better than we did because they prepared for them mentally. They expected them.
Sing Dylan said this was a load of crap: it doesn’t matter how often shit falls on your head, it still smells bad. Sing Dylan had been hit by the flood three times. After the second time he didn’t even bother getting his carpet cleaned and putting it back in. He made sure all of his stuff was in plastic pails or high up on boards or in closets. Every time he went out he unplugged everything. Sarah helped him keep back the rain water as best she could. He couldn’t apply to the disaster relief agency for money to cover his losses or to cover cleaning costs and repairs because he was an illegal immigrant and he worried they’d find him out. The public housing agency in charge of Half-a-Life knew he was here illegally and so they knew he wouldn’t complain to anyone if they didn’t immediately clean up his apartment and replace the damaged stuff. About all Sing Dylan could do was curse the skies like everyone else. In the meantime Sarah let him store some stuff, pictures of his family in India, letters, and rare books he had brought over to Canada, in Emmanuel’s empty bedroom. Sing Dylan would say, “Only until the boy returns home. Thank you. Thank you kindly.” Sing Dylan always said that. Thank you. Thank you kindly. Never just Thank you or Thanks or just Thank you kindly but always Thank you. Thank you kindly.
Sing Dylan came from The Punjab, Lish said. I had never heard of The Punjab. It was the place in India where a lot of Sikhs come from, Lish said. She told me the Sikhs want their own country. They’re not thrilled with the Indian government and they want to change the name of The Punjab to Khalistan. So naturally there was some fighting going on and Lish figured maybe Sing Dylan was involved in it. Lish thought that maybe Sing Dylan came to Canada because his life was in danger. But we didn’t want to ask. I thought Khalistan sounded a lot more sophisticated than The Punjab. So anyway, it made sense that Sing Dylan always said to Sarah, “Only until the boy returns home.” Sing Dylan was the kind of guy who could really believe that one day Emmanuel would come home. He had to. Just like he believed that one day he could go back to his home, his Khalistan. Emmanuel and Sing Dylan were two homeless guys.
Lish told me about Sing Dylan first coming to Half-a-Life. She told me that every morning when he first arrived he put a pot of coffee on his stove. He would have one cup and keep the rest for company. But company never came. Everyone in Half-a-Life was freaked by having a wild Sikh freedom fighter as their caretaker. At 11:30 every morning Sing Dylan turned off the element under the coffee and poured the coffee down the drain in his kitchen sink. Lish found out about it because one morning she went down to Sing Dylan’s place for a mop and he invited her in. He said, “I’m sorry, my coffee is gone.” He explained to Lish his morning ritual. Lish just said, “Oh yeah? Well, thanks anyway,” and took the mop and left. Then she started to ask people in the block if they had ever gone down to Sing Dylan’s for a cup of coffee and everybody said no, no, no, no way, are you kidding, why, what, no, no. No. On and on until she had asked everyone in the block.
Eventually Sarah went down. Mute Sarah. They had a cup of coffee together. Both sitting there, quietly, Sing Dylan wanting his Khalistan and Sarah wanting her Emmanuel. Lish said not a lot of people visited Sarah either, not because she was that weird really, but because she didn’t talk. And so conversations, well, you know. Lish said that if Sing Dylan took off his turban and if Sarah talked, life would be different for them.
Lately Sarah had been talking a bit more. Her droopy eyes were opening up a bit and she was even playing music in her apartment. Lish told me that Family Services was considering extending Sarah’s visiting rights with Emmanuel. The boy had told his social worker that he didn’t care who his father or his grandfather was and whether or not they were the same person. He missed his mom. At the same time, Sarah told her social worker that she promised to talk normally and to send Emmanuel to school. She told her social worker that she was over the trauma that had paralyzed her and she really wanted to get on with her life together with Emmanuel. These visits with the social worker exhausted her. We coached her on what to say, not that we really knew. We told her to stay calm and focussed and always agreeable no matter what the social worker said. We told her to tell the social worker that she did not consider welfare a career option and that she would like to get into a helping profession because from her experience they were all doing such a good job. She understood what had happened, why it had happened and her role in it, and that the future was not bright or easy but that she would do her best to create a positive home environment for Emmanuel. We told her to tell her social worker, when she was leaving, that she appreciated everything she was doing for Emmanuel and for herself, to smile graciously and to say “Bye bye for now,” instead of “Kay” when the social worker said, “We’ll see you in two months’ time.”
The last time Sarah had a meeting with her social worker, she walked home in the rain. A few of us watched out the window as she got off the bus in front of Half-a-Life. She had a Safeway bag with a few groceries in it. She walked through a puddle in the parking lot instead of around it. Lish said that was a good sign; I said it was a bad sign.
It turned out to be a good sign, though, because that evening Sarah and Sing Dylan were back at the wall trying to wash the FUCK THE RICH THAN EAT THEM graffiti, and Sarah sprayed Sing Dylan with the hose. They looked like a beer commercial, spraying each other: a non-drinking sikh and a welfare mom whose child had been apprehended. It could be called Real Beer. Still—they were having fun. Scrubbing the paint off the wall was very difficult and time-consuming, but Sing Dylan’s plan was to wash off the first letter of each word at least so the message would be more obscure, less obscene. So far he had UCK HE ICH HAN EAT THEM. Lish and I agreed this was much classier than before. Lish said she was going to write “Confucius” under it, but she didn’t want to piss off Sing Dylan.
That evening I sneaked Dill’s dirty disposable diapers past Terrapin’s place. I knew she was disappointed that I was still using them instead of cloth ones or tree moss or whatever it was her kids peed on. She told me wildlife had been found with bits of disposable diapers lodged in their throats. I said, “Oh my goodness, they must have misread the instructions on the package. Ha ha.” Anyway, I was sneaking the diapers down, in the dark, to the BFI container. There was Sing Dylan at the wall, alone and still scrubbing.
“Hi, Sing Dylan.”
“Hello, Lucy.”
“Still scrubbing, eh?”
“Here today. Here tomorrow,” he said. He was smiling.
Sing Dylan hardly spoke any English, but I thought that was a pretty good joke. “Well. Good! Luck! . . . with the wall, I mean.”
“Thank you. Thank you kindly.”
You would not believe the amount of noodles we consumed in Half-a-Life. Noodles were the national dish of Half-a-Life. We all had different ways of preparing them, but still the humble noodle was the starting point of most of our meals, Lish prepared rotini noodles, sometimes herbal ones, with a lot of garlic which she shaved with a razor, and extra virgin olive oil. Sometimes she added mushrooms or a green or red pepper for a dash of colour and zippy taste. I poured tomato sauce on mine and grated Parmesan cheese. Teresa heaped butter and ketchup onto hers. But our kids ate the noodles plain, sometimes with a bit of butter or cheese, but never any sauce—and god forbid garlic or peppers. Simplicity was the key with noodles. Don’t overboil them or they’re mushy and lifeless. Don’t add too many spices or too many vegetables or the noodles get upstaged and their taste is lost and they just end up as filling, fattening dead weight in the pit of your stomach. Savour the taste and the texture of the noodles. Especially the homemade Italian ones that we got for cheap from Mario’s because Tanya gave him a cut rate on her beer and because Teresa had slept with one of his younger brothers and found out that his grocery was really just a front for the local Mafia. A laundromat really. Roberto had hit Teresa for some reason and she said, “if you ever do that again I will blow this illegal laundering joint right out of the water and you’ll be picking olives back in Sicily so fast you won’t know what hit you!” Roberto told Mario and Mario told him to tell Teresa that she and all the whores in Half-a-Life could have special rates on pasta as long as they kept their mouths shut.
Mario gave Roberto two black eyes for telling Teresa about the front and told him never to hit Teresa again. But he didn’t have a chance to because shortly afterward Mario set him up in Toronto with a cappuccino bar and a nice Italian girl who’d keep her mouth shut.
Men played cards in the back of the grocery and watched soccer. Sometimes one of their wives, one of the old ones, dressed in black and kind of beakish and hairy, would haul her husband home for supper or bed. The others would laugh and ridicule him and then later get hauled home by their wives. We ate a lot of Mario’s noodles. And oatmeal. Porridge is very cheap, very easy, very filling, and very healthy. What more do you want? Well sure, there’s taste. But Mario’s noodles have that. Hardly any of us, except Naomi and Angela and Tanya, prepared a lot of meat. Kids hardly ever eat it, and it seems odd tucking into a big pork chop all by yourself, kind of depraved.
Anyway, one day Lish and I and Teresa were sitting around in Lish’s kitchen eating noodles in different-coloured plastic bowls and reading the paper. Teresa had got the three for the price of one deal from the box on the corner so we all had our own copy. I wished Teresa hadn’t shown up because her kid was rough with Dill and it made me uptight. Also, I had really wanted to talk about the busker with Lish. It was exciting, titillating to talk about him. He was perfect because he wasn’t around. Lish wasn’t shy about telling me the details of how they had sex, and what he told her, all that stuff. But she wouldn’t say anything with Teresa around. Lish knew better than to tell Teresa anything even if Roberto hadn’t. Teresa read and talked at the same time. She told us she was taking some kind of flagging course at the community college. She had quit French Immersion because her French teacher had come on to her, she said, and besides the grammar didn’t make any sense. I thought that must have been the real reason. She thought if she could get this flagging course under her belt she’d have a chance in the movie industry. Apparently flagging is an essential part of any shoot. The flagger must stand around waving a flag which indicates to the truck drivers and dolly operators and whatever where they are to go.
Lish snorted. “You have to go to school to learn how to wave a flag, Teresa?”
“Yeah, it’s a one-year course. It’s not as easy as you think.”
“My god, you’re going to study flagging for a whole year? What’s there to study? The psychology of flagging? Ha ha. The Origins of Flagging, or how about Flagging: Art or Science? The Post-Modern Implications of Flagging . . . Ha ha ha . . .”
“Excuse me,” said Teresa, “are you finished?”
“The Great Flaggers of Our Time: A Retrospective,” said Lish. “Women in Flagging . . . HA HA HA!”
“Ha ha fucking ha,” said Teresa, “just you wait. I’m gonna extinguish myself.”
“What?” said Lish. “What did you say? HA HA HA. Are you on fire, Teresa? Oh god. HA HA HA. Go stand in the rain! Dis, Teresa, the word is distinguish. D- I- S-T—”
Teresa was pissed off. I gave her a look that was supposed to be sympathetic, but I don’t think she noticed. She had stood up to Lish before and she could do it again.
“Yeah well, Lish,” she said, “what the hell are you doing? Watching tomato plants grow on your window sill, hovering over your kids, laughing at everyone. At least I’m doing something.”
“Oh relax, Teresa, I’m just kidding around. Some of my best friends are flaggers. Why, just the other night Kevin started flagging only five minutes into the greatest fu—”
“Fucking bitch!!!” Teresa slammed down her coffee cup, spilling a bit.
“What, what, what’s your fucking problem?” Lish was mad now too. “I was joking. Jesus, can’t you—”
“No, no, not you,” said Teresa. “Her. What a fucking cunt. Sorry. Look, Bunnie Hutchison has decided to take away our fucking child tax credit money.”
“What?!” Lish grabbed Teresa’s newspaper.
Teresa was shaking her head. “I can’t fucking believe it.” I didn’t know who Bunnie Hutchison was or what the child tax credit money was, but by Lish and Teresa’s reactions I knew it was serious.
“More coffee?” I asked.
“What?!” Both Teresa and Lish stared at me as if I had just handed them a plate of snot.
“Don’t you know anything? God, Lucy, this is major. It affects you too, you know, you’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy . . . fuck . . .”
I just shut up then. Who the hell did they think they were? How was I supposed to know about political things just because I was a mother on welfare? I didn’t know that Bunnie Hutch (as she was called by the Lifers because she had them trapped) was the minister in charge of welfare mothers and I didn’t know that the child tax credit was fifteen hundred dollars. Fifteen hundred dollars is a lot of money when your annual income is only nine thousand six hundred. Well, that was mine because I only had one kid. Lish had four so she got eleven hundred dollars a month instead of eight hundred. Everybody with kids got the child tax credit money. Now, Bunnie Hutchison wanted to take it away. That is, away from mothers on welfare. Everybody else would still get it.
The word got around fast and the women in Half-a-Life were mad. Lish and Angela and Teresa decided to get a petition going and bring it down to Bunnie’s office. Terrapin said she’d chain herself to the big buffalo in the foyer of the legislative building.
“It’s a bison, Nellie McClung,” said Lish. “And please don’t. You’d be ignored all day and then when it was time for everybody to go home, some dopey caretaker would come and cut the chain and tell you to go home, they’re closing.”
“Can’t you call me by my name, Lish, just once?”
“I would if I knew it. What is your real name, anyway? Your mother can’t have named you after a turtle. What’s your real name? Karen? Barb? Look, I don’t even care. Go chain yourself to the buffalo if you like. Chain your kids to it, too. Nothing’s gonna change. Why don’t we just get drunk tonight and kvetch amongst ourselves until morning. Oh fuck, now it’s pouring again.”
I had never thought of Terrapin as having a mother. She was trying so hard to be everybody else’s. Trying very hard, and not succeeding. We were all trying very hard to be good mothers. But were we succeeding? If we weren’t good mothers, then what were we? Losers. What if all our kids hated us for not letting them have fathers, for being poor and for living in a dump like Half-a-Life? What would we do when we couldn’t have babies anymore, when they had all left us? Then what? What could we do to make our kids proud of us? To make us proud of us? Chain ourselves to buffaloes? Become flaggers? Maybe I shouldn’t have had a baby. Dill was doomed and it was my fault. I wanted my life to be funny, and I wanted Dill to be a lucky boy, as lucky as his namesake, John Dillinger. Some people believe he’s still alive. I do. His girlfriend only pretended to be setting him up. But the guy who was shot by J. Edgar Hoover’s men outside the theatre in Chicago was somebody else. Dillinger had a notoriously long dick, twelve inches, and the guy who was shot coming out of the theatre had a dick that was only nine inches. Even so it was pickled and now sits in a jar on some shelf at the Smithsonian Institute. I think the lady in red, Dillinger’s girlfriend, collected the cash from the FBI for helping them get their guy, and together she and Dillinger disappeared, never to be heard from again. John Dillinger never killed anybody; he just said, “Lie down and nobody gets hurt.” He was a lucky man.
I never got to see my mother’s dead body on account of its being all beat up. I never actually saw her go into the ground. It could all have been an elaborate plot on her part to get away from my dad. All those trips to Vancouver had been part of the experiment. But who would she have convinced to take the fall for her? Maybe a suicidal client who wanted to die anyway, or maybe she conned some cop into identifying some dead drifter as her. The guy at the morgue could have put one of my mom’s sweaters onto the stiff, shown an edge of it to my dad, who would have been too distraught to look at the face. He would have positively identified her, the briefcase, the car, all that, and asked for a closed casket funeral. After ten or twenty years my mom could have created a whole new life for herself, maybe somewhere in South America. Maybe Southern California. She liked warm climates. Someday she might come marching through the doors of Half-a-Life with tickets for me and Dill and we’ll go back with her to her sunny hacienda. Oh god, she’d love Dill. She loved babies, loved to hold them and smell their heads and she always called them precious, precious things. Lish could meet her. They’d really get along. Lish could use the cheering up, too. We all could, really.
The first letter from the busker had worked. It had cheered Lish up. If Lish’s life had been a Brazilian soap opera, I’m sure the audience would have voted in favor of Lish receiving another letter from the busker. Well anyway, I had to be sure at that point. The second letter was scheduled to arrive. Sure enough, bam bam bam. There was Lish at my door with the twins and one of Angela’s daughters. All the girls were wearing bathing suits and Lish had her black hair pulled back into a pony tail. She and Alba had blue face paint all over their faces. Another one of Alba’s make-up experiments. Lish had a very strange expression on her face, under the blue, like she’d just been pinched in the bum by a stranger. She told the girls to find Dill and build a fort with him or something. Normally Lish remembered that Dill couldn’t even walk, let alone construct forts, but like I said, she was looking weird.
“He’s hanging in the hallway,” I said, referring to Dill.
“Can we take him down?”
“Sure, just hang the Jolly Jumper over the doorknob so you don’t bash into it every time.”
“Okay Lucy; this is it.” Lish was making coffee and bubbling over with talk. “He’s written again. It’s gotta mean something. I’m going to find him. He can’t come here right now ’cause of some drug charge, he can’t cross the border and he’s broke ’cause the festival in Detroit got rained out. He’s on his way to Denver, Colorado. Oh Lucy, I’m gonna go there. I don’t care. I’ve got nothing to lose. I have to do something—if it doesn’t work out at least we’ll have gotten the hell out of Half-a-Laugh for a while anyway.”
“What do you mean we? Are you taking the girls? You didn’t tell them, did you?”
“That their dad’s written, or that were going to find him?”
“Either. Oh, god.”
“No, no, no, nope. Not yet. But I think I will. They have a right to know.”
“Yeah, but you’ve said what difference does it make, they don’t even know him, and if you don’t find him, it’ll just be a major letdown for them”
“Either way it’s a letdown. They’re old enough to know they had a father. They think he’s abandoned them, even though I told them he didn’t even know they existed. It might not break their hearts, but still . . . If there’s a chance of finding him, great, if not, no loss. Back to square one.”
“Oh god, Lish, why don’t—”
“What, I thought you’d be excited! This is great news! He’s not that far away. Let me read you the letter.”
The twins came into the room wanting a drink, and Lish poured them some apple juice and shooed them off into the other room. She was so excited she put the juice into the cupboard instead of into the fridge. Lish opened the letter and then lowered her voice a bit and tried not to smile.
“Hey Baby,” she read, “The more I think about you the more I regret ever leaving you. I’ll be in the middle of my show and a picture of you will come into my head and I’ll forget my next bit. I’ve been doing the same shtick for years and I’ll forget. I know we didn’t have much time together but what we had was amazing. I love the way you laugh and the way your black hair fell all over the pillow when we made love. I love the little blue veins behind your knees and your long fingers. I want to see you more than anything else in this world. But I can’t cross the border because six months ago I was charged with obsession (of you) ha ha no possession (of drugs) and now I can’t get into Canada. The festival in Detroit was rained out so I didn’t make any money. I’m going to hitchhike to Denver. I hear they’ve got a great street scene. And it’s nice there in the fall. Course it’s not the fall but soon it will be. If you care about me or even remember me you could send a letter to Denver, Poste Restante, I might get it. I might not. Anyway I’ve got to keep moving. I’ll try to sneak across the border somewhere, somehow and get into Canada to see you. Otherwise I’ll keep writing. All my love to you Lish, (it says here on your drivers license that your real name is Alicia. That’s the most beautiful name I’ve ever heard. I sleep with your wallet.) Love, Gotcha.”
Lish opened her mouth and laughed. “Okay, he’s a lousy writer, but hey, he’s got other qualities.” All I could do was sit there and stare at my cup. I thought how odd it was to be sitting drinking coffee while my child played in the other room with the children of my friend, another mother, and I didn’t know a damn thing about love. It didn’t make sense. I noticed a chip on the cup. My mother would have thrown the cup into the garbage right there and then. Lish was right, it was a terrible letter. But still, Lish was buzzing. It had done the job. She was laughing. She was happy. She was a fool, but at least she was happy. Suddenly Lish began singing: “Wise men say only fools rush in but I can’t help falling in love with you.” She had rolled the letter into a microphone and she was singing into it. Her face was painted blue. What a kook. Très bizarre, as Teresa would have said before she quit French Immersions.