Terrapin advised us all to take an organic pill containing kelp and hyssop and tree bark. She said it would make our broken skin heal faster. People didn’t want to go out for any reason, not even for beer. Tanya bought herself a beat-up old van and put one of Sing Dylan’s old fridges inside. A friend of hers gave her a cell phone and she was in business. She was bootlegging her homemade beer at twenty-five bucks for a twelve, fifteen for a six. She didn’t even have to work the normal bootleg hours of two to five in the morning. People were willing to pay any time as long as they didn’t have to leave their houses.
On top of the rain and the mosquitoes there was the heat. With our windows shut to keep the bugs out and the heat and the humidity building up inside, it felt like we were living in Vietnam or someplace. We were all getting nasty yeast infections and Terrapin’s yogurt remedy wasn’t working for any of us. Lish said to her one day after many yogurt applications, “Hey Hairpin, got any peach? Sean’s allergic to avocado.” Terrapin advised Lish that if she wanted to cure the yeast infection she should stay away from men for a while. Lish laughed.
Lish’s hair became thick and wavy. She complained daily about it being out of control. I thought it was beautiful. She had cut off the bottom of her gauzy skirts to make them into minis. She tied the bottom of her black t-shirts up under her breasts. A white roll of flab hung over her waistband and occasionally she would grab it and insist that we look at it, saying, “Isn’t it disgusting?” It wasn’t really, and I don’t think she actually cared. Her legs were long and thin and her calves were seriously hairy. They were hairier than any man’s I had seen. She ditched the Birkenstocks and traipsed around in her big bare feet. Only on the very hottest days did she take off her hat with the spider on it. Without it she looked younger and paler. Her older daughters wore Lish’s t-shirts as dresses. Most of the time the young twins didn’t wear anything at all. Some days they jumped in and out of a baking soda bath that Lish had prepared for them to take the edge off their itchy bites.
Every day Mercy went to work on her bike with her daughter sitting on the seat behind her. She’d drop her off at the daycare on the way. Both of them wore regulation fibreglass bike helmets and cheesecloth underneath covering their faces and necks. They looked like bee farmers. God, it was hot. And muggy. Muggy was a favorite word of my mom’s. Every evening I’d give Dill a bath, but before I did, I had to stretch him out on the bed and peel away the dirt and lint that had stuck deep in the rolls of his fat. His neck had a thin ring of dirt all the way around it. I made cleaning him a game and he laughed his loud big-mouthed laugh the whole time. He chuckled and drooled. Even laughing made us sweat. Even Sing Dylan who came from India said it was “Bloody hot.”
It was June. Terrapin was organizing a solstice party. I had no idea what that was and I was too embarrassed to ask her or even Lish, who groaned when Terrapin told her she was having one. I asked Terrapin when she was having it and she just kind of cocked her head at me like a dog and said, “What do you mean When?” She was wearing a t-shirt that read “Food” on the back, and on the front it had a picture of a ukulele or something and read “Winnipeg Folk Festival.”
Her kids had made some playdough out of salt and flour and carrot juice for colour and wanted to give it to Dill to play with. I guess it was the kind he could eat when he was finished playing with it. From Terrapin’s tone when she said when, I assumed I was supposed to take my cues from her aura or her vibe or maybe check my I Ching to get the answer. What was I thinking being so direct about something so vague and wispy as the solstice? I was determined not to appear ignorant around Hairpin. Besides, I had already given the impression that I knew what the solstice was and I had a pretty good idea that if I knew what it was I was supposed to know when it was. Kind of like a Grey Cup party.
Thank goodness the library was only a couple of blocks away from Half-a-Life. The mosquitoes were bad, so I had to run as fast as I could, pushing Dill in the stroller. At least the sidewalk was smooth the whole way so I wouldn’t run the risk of smashing into shifting concrete and watching Dill get flung out of his stroller. He loved the speed anyway, and the mosquitoes would have to work too hard to get us. They were getting slower and bigger from all the blood they were drinking. They looked more like prehistoric miniature flying dinosaurs now, but they were sluggish and sated. Drinking blood for them had become more sport than survival. Now that they had the city to themselves they were living it up, sitting around in outdoor cafés ordering Bloody Marys and slapping each other on the back. Dill and I managed to get to the library with two bites apiece. Not bad. A greater difficulty faced me: getting to the front doors, gasping for air, removing Dill from his stroller, plopping him on the grass, folding the stroller up, making sure Dill didn’t crawl into the wet dirt of the flower bed beside the grass, and then carrying him and the stroller inside. This process resulted in another half a dozen bites for each of us. Each time I performed this operation I counted the seconds it took to complete: one thousand, two thousand, three thousand.
I had, in the past, removed Dill from his stroller, folded it up, and got in the library with both of them in eight seconds. In a rodeo this is the amount of time you have to tear out of the chute on your horse, rope the little calf, yank it off its feet, leap down from your horse, flip the calf onto its back, and tie its feet together. Then you jump up and back from the calf with your arms in the air. If your cowboy hat is still on your head you can take it off and wave it around and then wipe your brow with your sleeve. I guess after that someone comes around and unties the calf and drags it back to its mother.
So anyway, I could do this in eight seconds, too, not every time, but often enough. If someone I knew came over to talk to me, someone from Half-a-Life or the dole or wherever, I had to forfeit. It would be disconcerting for them if I was moving around like greased lightning muttering thousands, or Mississippis under my breath and then hurtling myself and Dill and the stroller into the library and slamming the door in their face, peering out at them with a victorious expression on my face and my arms in the air. But with the mosquitoes and the rain I wasn’t meeting many people outside.
The library was one of my favourite places. The building was old and had a lot of dark wood in it. The book stacks were on the main floor. The library had dim yellow lighting and no windows. The floors creaked and the books were sort of greasy. All winter long the rads hissed and banged. A whole shelf of rare books the library had somehow managed to score had been soaked when one of the rads exploded overnight. The librarians took turns blowing hot air on them with a hair dryer. Downstairs was a room for story time and crafts. Lish and some of the others brought their kids to story time every week. It was free and close and a good break. The parents had to stay in the library but they could go upstairs and talk quietly or read, uninterrupted, for one whole hour. The woman in charge of story time was kind and energetic. Her face had a permanent grin on it and she didn’t mind spilled glue and paint as long as the kids were enjoying themselves. Often she’d be a minute or two late. Then she’d come running into the room grinning and panting. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Here I am. I misplaced my glasses, so if I can’t read the words we’ll have to make them up ha ha ha.” The kids would cheer and clap and gaze up at her from their spots on the ratty carpet. When she read, the kids listened. There was also a chess club downstairs. Clusters of old men smoking and playing chess and speaking in different languages.