Pregnant, that was it. Maybe Lish was pregnant and that’s why she was crying. No, Lish loved being pregnant. She’d be celebrating if she was. Not with tequila though. She kept crying. I stood there. I tiptoed over to the kitchen table, thinking I’d just sit there quietly and wait for Lish to be through.
That’s where I saw the program. It was a festival program from years ago. 1989. It was open to the page with the buskers’ descriptions and one of them was circled, about a hundred times, as if someone had spent a whole day with a pen going round and round it. The picture was small and blurry and black and white. It was a close-up of a dark-haired guy eating fire. It was the busker, the twins’ dad. She was crying her eyes out over this guy. The twins were four years old. How long had she been crying in her hair over him? Four years, my god. I would have had to have started crying at fourteen and not stopped to have been crying for four years. Lish was so funny. Why was she crying after all this time? Obviously she was really hooked on this guy. I was envious. She had a real reason to get worked up. To throw herself down on her bed and sob, bawl her eyes out thinking of lost love, of happier times. I thought then that would be easier than looking forward to them like I was. At least she knew what life was like, at least what it could be like. She could see it. I was still trying to picture it.
Alimony please … Dill wasn’t catching on quickly to Alba and Letitia’s teachings. I stared at the picture of the performer. I read his blurb. Fire-eater, magician, not afraid to risk his life for your cheap thrills … Lish kept on with her muffled crying. I guess she thought she was keeping it a secret from the kids. That bastard, I thought. Why did this always happen? I had built Halfa-Life and the women in it into a kind of shrine I worshipped. I had to, it was all I had. I really wanted it to be a good thing. I wanted the women in it to laugh all the time. I wanted them to be tough. I wanted them to roll their eyes at trouble and crack a joke. I enjoyed the stupid arguments but I didn’t want them to become complicated. In my mind these women had escaped from horrible lives and had come to seek solace in Half-a-Life. And Lish? I needed her to laugh at her life, not cry. Then my life would be funny, too. And Dill would be a lucky boy.
I looked at the wicker basket full of letters. Each one had been opened very carefully, and they were stacked neatly, according to size, smallest to largest. I ran my finger around the rim of the basket. Lish was still crying and the kids were having a good time. I looked out the window and it was then that I had my brilliant idea. I felt like I was Pierre Elliott Trudeau and I had just gone for a walk in the snow. I looked up, big wet snowflakes like chunks of cake falling on my face, and there it was, the answer: QUIT POLITICS. Or it could have been, probably, QUITEZ LES POLITIC. I’d have to ask Teresa. Anyway, in my case, of course, it wasn’t QUIT POLITICS or anything, it was WRITE LETTERS. And I wasn’t really walking in the snow, I was staring out the window at the rain — but still. It came to me.
And I would sign them, “Love, Gotcha.”
When I was a kid my cousin Delia and I played a trick on her brother. He had told his mom that there was a girl he liked. Delia and I overheard him talking about her. He said her name was Sandy and she had hair like Farrah Fawcett and was really cute. He had doubled her on his bike all the way to the Mac Store. “I hope she likes me,” he’d told his mom. Delia and I made a plan. We wrote her brother a letter from Sandy. She must have been three or four years older than us so we wrote the letter in big swooping letters instead of printing it in our own square hand. We dabbed my aunt’s perfume on it. Dear David, I like you a lot. Please meet me at the Mohawk after school if you like me too. And if you don’t already have a girlfriend. Love Sandy. Then we dropped this letter in the mailbox and waited. We were bursting to find out what happened. We couldn’t even look at each other without laughing our heads off. We were so brilliant. After school we ran home and threw ourselves on the couch, pretending to watch TV like any other day. We waited and waited and waited. Finally the front door opened. Slowly David walked into the house. He dropped his jacket and his books on the floor in front of the door and started walking down the hall to his bedroom. He had on his stiff new Lee jeans. When he saw us in the living room, he said in a really nice soft voice, “Hi.” He kept on walking slowly toward his bedroom. I was worried and I could tell Delia was, too. We were frozen, staring at the TV. “What if he shoots himself?” I whispered to Delia. “As if. He doesn’t even have a gun,” she whispered back. I wanted to cry.
We had always played jokes on David and he’d get mad and tell my aunt and she’d tell us to leave him alone. But this was different. We’d broken his heart. What if he became a serial killer of women because of us? The next day his mom found out what happened and she took both of us into her sewing room. She told us we had done a very cruel thing and had made David very sad. We would have to apologize and promise never to do anything like it again. I had hoped David would beat us up like he usually did when we bugged him, but instead he just sat there. After we apologized he said, “Kay.” Then we said we were sorry. We told him we had been assholes. Neither one of us had ever said that word out loud before. We hoped this would really convince him we were sorry. He just said “OK” again. After that we stopped bugging him and he never beat us up again. I think we were all sad about that for a long time. Anyway, now he’s married to a nurse and almost bald and helps disturbed teenagers by canoeing with them and teaching them to camp. I don’t know what became of Sandy.
But that whole thing with my cousin Delia had been a bad joke. I was much older now, and serious about keeping Lish happy. I think even Pierre Trudeau would have approved.
five
Even Terrapin had stopped marvelling at the rain. The mid-western United States was starting to flood. Rivers were running over farmers’ fields and into their homes. Entire towns were being threatened by swollen rivers. Major highways and bridges were being wiped out. It was only a matter of time before the Red and the Assiniboine, Winnipeg’s rivers, would feel the pressure and begin to rise. With the rain came the mosquitoes. Every puddle, large or small, became fertile breeding grounds. Our children were covered in bites. Some were too young to spray with repellent because the chemicals in the spray seeped through the skin into their blood. Others had mothers who didn’t believe in it. They tried to ward off the mosquitoes with home remedies, Avon’s Skin So Soft and citronella, but nothing worked. Soon some kids, especially the ones that were too young to slap mosquitoes off, had started a second layer of bites. Dill had three mosquito bites one on top of the other above his right eye. One morning he woke up and his eye was swollen shut.
We couldn’t even open our windows, because the buggers managed to get through the miniscule holes in the screens, those that had them. At night you could hear the collective scratching of all of Half-a-Life’s bite victims. We scratched until we bled. It was common for the kids to walk around with the dark bodies of mosquitoes squished onto their skin. They couldn’t be bothered to flick them off anymore after they had slapped them. If the mosquito was slapped with a belly full of fresh blood, skin and clothing were stained. The walls in our apartments had ugly smears of dead mosquitoes. Large chunks of our days were devoted to tracking mosquitoes, creeping from room to room, standing on chairs and furniture, cornering them, and adding to their death toll. We were told by the experts on the six o’clock news to wear white long sleeves and pants. But it didn’t matter what we wore. They still got through. Even the animals were suffering. Farmers couldn’t sell their meat for as much as they were used to. Big pork hams had ugly bites all over the skin and nobody wanted to buy them.