Good grief, I thought, if that was the case my mom may as well have said FUCK! YOU! to me every time I went out instead of GOOD! LUCK! But what about the letter? Hadn’t the letter from the busker made Lish happy? She had been full of energy since she got it: laughing and singing and buzzing around her apartment organizing things, throwing stuff out, putting up different pictures and posters, washing her cupboards. She had taken a book out of the library called Clutter’s Last Stand, determined that it would help her to get rid of her junk. Her unnecessary junk. If any one of us in Half-a-Life got rid of all our junk our apartments would be bare. Was she expecting him to appear at her door? The letter said simply, “I’m thinking of you. I miss you. I haven’t met anyone else that could make me laugh like you. Do you still have your spider hat? Oh Right. I’m sorry about taking your wallet, I was going through a bit of a hard time when I met you. I’m sorry. But hey, how would I have had your address if I hadn’t stolen your wallet? I’m on the road now, a different city or town almost every day so there’s no point in writing me. I’m going to try to make it to Winnipeg sometime this summer. I hear it’s very wet. Right now I’m in Cleveland. Take care of yourself Lish, say Hi to your daughters from me.” It was signed, “The guy in rm. 204.”
Lish had read it to me. She assumed that he assumed that she knew his name. He had never actually told her his real name. All she knew him as was “Gotcha,” his show name. I guess if people were always calling you that, you would want to run away. And that’s all that he was called in that old program she’d found. I thought about the letter and it made sense that Lish was ambivalent about it. Excited, yes, to have heard from him, the love of her life and the father of the twins. But on the other hand, it hadn’t been too specific. Would he visit or wouldn’t he? And if he had been thinking about her all these months — years — why didn’t he sound more passionate in his letter? Maybe she would think he wrote letters like this to all his one-night stands. Maybe she would think he was just drunk and lonely and feeling bad about stealing her wallet. And so what if he was the twins’ father? They didn’t know him. How could they miss him? They were happy enough the way they were. It would have to be a lot more convincing for her to think he really cared.
Anyway, Lish seemed to think this letter was a sign a sign that he would, when he could, show up at Half-a-Life. In her heart she was thinking they could put the past behind them, start anew, make love desperately at first and then in a more knowing, confident way. The twins could hate him at first for leaving and then come to love him as a father should be loved. They could all tour in the summertime and maybe even become an entire performing family. They’d be good at it. And even if something bad happened at least the twins would know that he had made the effort. And that was the most important thing, wasn’t it: that he had tried to find them? But so far Lish hadn’t told the twins or anybody except me about the letter. In Half-a-Life it had happened often enough that one of the women would get her hopes up over some guy and then have them dashed soon afterwards. There was no point in even talking about it until it was real, until the guy had maybe moved a few clothes in or offered to take care of the kids for a while. Besides, the others in Half-a-Life thought Lish was fooling herself thinking life was more simple than it really was. I didn’t think that she thought that life itself was simple at alclass="underline" it was just her take on it that she had smoothed over and over, whittled and refined, until it became simple. Do what makes you happy because there is no sure thing. Just because you can pick out four-leafed clovers doesn’t mean you’ll get lucky.
Another reason why the women in Half-a-Life didn’t publicize every encounter with a man was because it could lead to trouble with welfare. Most of us were friends or had at least a grudging tolerance for each other. Even Naomi and Terrapin were seen laughing over something in the hallway. Public housing isn’t called public housing for nothing. If you’ve got some dirt on your neighbour, chances are she’s got some on you. So, in an unspoken form of a truce, we stick together. Most of the time. Our problem was more Serenity Place. And theirs was us. We were two opposing teams in the game of welfare.
The game revolves around men. There are a thousand strange rules regarding women on welfare and their men. And they have only to do with men. The Mensa minds down at Social Assistance headquarters haven’t twigged to the fact that some mothers have decided to make love to other women and sometimes have live-in relationships with them. Often one of the women will work outside the home and the other stay at home with the children. In instances like this welfare officials only consider the working woman to be a roommate, not a lover, so a portion of the stay-at-home mother’s welfare rent supplement would be docked, because technically the roommate would be paying half the rent. And that would be the only financial penalty. The “roommate” could be making seventy-five thousand dollars a year and welfare wouldn’t care, believing, presumably, that two women would not have sex, especially because one of them, the mother, had already demonstrated her gender preferences. So living with another woman presents no problems. But men, they were trouble.
At least having sex with them was trouble. Life became very messy. More messy than usual, that is, under those circumstances. Actually, it was okay to have quick sex during certain hours. But if a man stays overnight you’re off the dole. Welfare equates men with financial support. This always made us laugh. Lish said they obviously didn’t know the same men we knew. I guess they figured we’d had our chances at love and screwed up and now we could just think about that for awhile, at least while we were dependent on the generosity of the state and its tax payers. So, naturally, we were breaking the law all the time. Us and the women in Serenity Place. Men were crawling in and our of our beds, eating bits of our food that had been paid for by the dole, showering with water that was paid for by the dole, and, of course, pleasuring themselves with us, women who were kept by the dole. That cost. The woman anyway. We were prostitutes for the state.
Okay, I’m repeating everything Lish told me. I actually had never thought of myself as a prostitute for the state. Anyway, no man had been in my bed since I had been on the dole. Never, actually, since I had never had sex in a bed. I lived with my father until I became pregnant. I had a pink frilly room with a single bed and a matching dresser. I had sex in fields, in cars, in stairwells, in basement cellars, in dark cemeteries, in the darkroom of my high school, in half-built houses, in between buildings, up against buildings, and in abandoned buildings. Groping, painful, wordless sex. The cigarettes afterwards were about as fulfilling. I was a kid. Anyway, the point is you have to be careful when you’re on the dole. The women at Serenity Place tried to catch us with men during daylight hours and we tried to catch them. If the same guy visited more than two or three times, rumours started to fly. Elaborate traps were set. Usually we didn’t even carry our plans out. It was just something to talk about and to solidify our own alliance. We could inform on someone in Serenity Place, but never on our own. The only reason why we even cared to rat on somebody in Serenity Place was because of the whole Sarah/Emmanuel incident. But still, Lish was playing it safe by not telling anyone, except me, about the letter and the possibility of the busker coming for a visit. Maybe even to stay. This was a good thing. I hoped she wouldn’t tell the twins. At least not for some time.