The next day I was sitting on the floor in my apartment, playing with Dill and taking stock of my material possessions: one single mattress with no wooden frame, one cassette player held together with gaffer tape, one crib, one toaster, one stroller with a wheel that kept falling off, two wooden crates which could be used as table, chair, storage, whatever they were needed for at the moment, various posters, which struck me as childish and out of place in my new home, a few dishes and utensils, one pot, and some toys and clothes, mine and Dill’s. I sat on the linoleum floor and decided that I could use area tugs, some plants, and a real table and chairs. And Dill’s room could use some bright colours. Maybe paint. The door bell rang. I answered it and guess who? Lish. Wearing the same black hat and spider, the same socks and sandals, and gauzy skirt. She was wearing a t-shirt that had a picture of a giant mosquito and underneath, it read “Blood Lust.” She had the twins with her. They looked like they were about four years old.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
I was not prepared for this conversation.
“Look, I’m sorry about yesterday. I …”
“Don’t worry about it. I know what you were thinking. You shouldn’t apologize for wanting to protect your kid. Our most-noble gestures as mothers are the ones most ridiculed. My name is Lish and these are my daughters, two of them that is, Alba and Letitia.”
“My name is Lucy.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Thank god for tactless kids. Lish and I would still be standing at my door grinning at each other if it weren’t for the twins marching right in and saying hello to Dill, who was slithering around on the floor, pushing himself backwards toward the sound of our voices in the hall. For the next hour or so the twins passed Dill back and forth and played peekaboo with him, and Lish and I drank coffee and shot the breeze. I was not entirely comfortable with the twins using Dill as a plaything, thinking of his soft spot, but Lish didn’t seem worried and I had the feeling they had done this before. Talking with Lish, I kind of got the feeling we, at Half-a-Life, were one big rollicking, happy, impoverished family. I felt ill at ease and remember thinking Lish was probably the freak of the block and she was thinking I was too new to know it and I’d let her in the door. I also had a strange feeling that I had seen her before, years ago on a city bus, wearing cat eye glasses, a faux leopard fur coat, ripped tights and a head that was half shaved. I remember thinking, as I walked past her on the bus, that she was weird and probably a punk from the suburbs with really strict parents. Now here she was sitting in my empty kitchen with twin girls and Birkenstocks and a full head of hair. God, she had hair. Thick, black, long hair clinging to her back like an oil slick. I could tell her twins were going to have it too one day, and I hated to think of their bathtub drain.
It was during the course of this conversation in my empty kitchen that I found out that the father of the twins was some kind of performer. He ate fire and made things disappear. I told her I didn’t know who Dill’s father was and she smiled and said, “Just as well.” The problem was knowing, she said, because as soon as you knew, you cared, soon as you cared, you lost. As for Dill, she said, now he could create his own dad in his mind and never be let down. Well, that was Lish, I wouldn’t call her a man-hater or anything, she was simply speaking from her own experience. In fact, many weeks later, sometime in June, during the flood, she told me that she would give anything to see the twins’ dad again and laugh in bed and wrap her hairy legs around his hot back and that the twins had a right to meet their father in the flesh and spit in his face. She was full of contradictions. And I believed each one. I wondered if she felt more love for this busker guy because he was gone than she would if he actually did show up. But what did it matter? He was gone. Their only encounter had been in a hotel and he didn’t even know where she actually lived or that he was the father of two playful girls with thick black hair. And that they were the half-sisters of two older girls, more serious but just as hairy. And that they all lived in a public housing co-op in Winnipeg’s inner city. Smack dab in the centre of Winnipeg, which was smack dab in the centre of Canada, which, as a point of interest, was smack dab in the centre of the earth.
Lish and I were single welfare mothers. I was proud to be something finally, to belong to a group of people that had a name and a purpose. It turns out that Lish was considered by most of the people at Half-a-Life to be a freak, but a kind freak and a funny freak as freaks go and, therefore, a good freak. As Joe put it, “Lish is off her nut, but she’s not dangerous or anything.”
I told you she liked the theatre. Joe had probably never heard of the word “eccentric.” Not that she was really. Eccentric. She wasn’t self-absorbed enough to be called eccentric. I’d have to say she was just miscast. Again, it all boiled down to money. Lish could have been a performer herself. Not only on the street but in theatres anywhere, had her lust not interfered with her passion. In the world of theatre she would have been considered normaclass="underline" flamboyant, zany. In Half-a-Life she was just weird. And four kids, are you kidding? And on her own? A life on stage was not practical for Lish.
Well, Lish might not have been practical, but she knew something of life’s limitations. Besides, if she couldn’t perform for money, she could perform for us at Half-a-Life, and if anybody could use a laugh, it was us. As my mom used to say before she died, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”
Lish’s imitations were the funniest. She imitated her social worker from the dole and bank tellers and her father and just about everybody in a position of authority, however remote. She’d imitate bus drivers and waiters. She didn’t do it with spite, well, not much spite, just dead-on accuracy. Her father, John, for instance: she’d drop her chin to her chest and lower her voice to a booming bass, to say, “Alicia, your mother and I have some concerns about the kids. We think they need a father figure in their lives and uh … more … uh … structure. We feel uh … that they are given too many uh … freedoms.” Lish informed us that words like freedom, peace, happiness and love all made John nervous, genuinely confused. How he raised a daughter like Lish, I’ll never know.
But you see, even if her kids or any of ours at Half-a-Life had their dads around, would it make any difference? They’d grow up to be themselves eventually like the rest of us. But that didn’t stop us from dreaming of fathers coming home from work with treats and offers to do housework, to take the kids to the park, or read them a story. It didn’t stop us from dreaming of falling asleep with a man and waking up with him, going through the motions of an easy, comfortable routine, Mom, Dad and the kids all playing on the same team. Naturally some of the women in Half-a-Life had spent years with the same guy and it hadn’t worked out, causing a nasty separation and the usual poverty for one thing, but still … a smoker dying of lung cancer always dreams of one more perfect cigarette. So, during the days we congratulated each other on our independence, busied ourselves with the kids and odd jobs and other people’s kids and the headaches and general ups and downs of everyday life on the dole. During the days it was easy to forget about men. There were always distractions.