At night, though, we had more time to scrutinize our bodies, which, I might point out, were still fairly young and able to withstand violent contortions and the tough eager enthusiasm men of our age had for sex, or lovemaking, as Lish calls it. I’d never have called it that except that Lish told me it was a good word and I should use it. I would have said boinking or boning, two words Lish hated.
But every once in a while one of us, I should say them, because I was just not interested, did somehow manage to meet a man. Or a woman. After all, there were a couple of lesbians in the block who had managed to get custody of their kids — one, Gail, was given custody because the judge had to decide what was worse, a lesbian or an alcoholic, and because he had had a father who drank and beat him, decided that Gail, as long as she kept her perversions to herself, would be more suitable, god help those kids anyhow. Anyway, these flings and one-night stands helped to take the edge off their desire and remind them of their potential. They’d always laugh about it in the morning and roll their eyes while describing the very personal details of the night before like it had been a Jets game or an encounter at the 7-Eleven. I think I knew more about their boyfriends’ genitals than I did about my own. They felt that they had come too far to go back to the silly pretense of romance. We all talked as though we were too tough to get duped again by some smooth-talking man. All of us, that is, except Lish, who could fall hook, line and sinker for skinny, artistic guys who looked like they had TB, and long hair and goatees. That was her type. Usually they were quiet and not very funny, but I guess she provided the laughs during the brief courtships they’d have. I don’t know, because Lish didn’t talk about her nights of passion as eagerly as the rest of them. She actually respected the privacy of the men she’d had sex with, and besides, it was difficult to talk about those things at Half-a-Life with our kids around all the time.
Inevitably these men Lish fell in love with said they couldn’t handle the pressure of being with four children all the time, and she believed them (didn’t we all) and had no hard feelings for them, nor they for her. They’d usually remain good friends, and sit around burning incense and drinking tea and talking all night while her children lay sleeping in little heaps around her. Lish didn’t believe in cordoned off bedrooms where each child, or maybe two, lay alone, separated from the rest of the family. They did everything else together, why not sleep? She didn’t call it the family bed, like some other women in the block, she just let the kids fall asleep where they felt like and let the experts go to hell. She’d point out the absurdity of situations by saying in a nasal kind of ditzy voice, “Okay, now you go into this tiny dark room and sleep and You, you get this walled-off area here to sleep in and I’ll go way over here and sleep in this little room. Good night dears, have no fears.” If Lish wanted to fall asleep with her arms around two of her daughters and the other two near by, she would. Of course, on the occasions when she had one of her tubercular lovers over, she’d lead him to the kitchen or the bathroom or some room without children sleeping in it and there remove her spider hat and her gauzy skirt and let all her hair, and his, cushion them from the cold, cheap tile of public housing.
Lish didn’t have a problem picking up men. Usually they were guys who hung out at the local natural food collective or worked in the artists’ co-op next door to it. I think these guys found Lish’s long black hair irresistible and Lish herself a lot easier to handle than women with careers and ambitions and problems with sex and an inability to nurture. These are the types of things unemployed guys sometimes say about employed women. The type of women these guys thought wanted to take over the world. But Lish didn’t care. It felt good to be with a man and touch his hair and it made her feel powerful. The thing is none of these guys, not one single one of them, made her feel the way her busker did, the father of her twins, the love of her life, the one that got away. She longed to see him again, I knew this, even though she laughed it off and joked about a spoon being a pathetic reminder of the man you love.
It’s hard to talk about this kind of stuff, because the independence that we strutted around throughout the days is what people knew us as. All that longing and female desire and pent-up lust and yearning to have a man as not only a lover but a friend and father to our kids, too. Well, that wasn’t what the public got or how they thought of us. Out in the city, in the welfare office, at the grocery store, at the school, we carried ourselves like gangsters, warriors, we were just fine, didn’t need anybody, we had a job to do and we’d do it without anybody’s help if we had to. We were Single Mothers. Only Lish was brave enough to give herself up to the possibility of love, to follow the whims and wants of her four daughters during the day, and to enjoy herself during the night, and throughout all those days and nights to flirt with the wild possibility of the twins’ father finding his way to Half-a-Life and into Lish’s happy dream.
A lot of the women in Half-a-Life thought Lish was fooling herself. She didn’t even know the guy’s real name, and he didn’t know where she lived, as they had met and parted in a hotel, never knowing he’d sired not one but two adorable girls, and besides, just because he was connected with theatre, had gorgeous hair, made her laugh and caused a stir in the sack, didn’t mean he wouldn’t turn out to be like the rest of them. We all thought Lish had just been another easy lay for him on the road. Probably he had a wife and kids somewhere else, and he had completely forgotten about the crazy chick with the spider on her hat from the centre of the universe. I felt guilty about not sharing Lish’s optimism. And not believing, like Lish, that maybe someday she’d see him again, made me feel like one of those old, cheated people who don’t believe in anything.
Lish was the one who showed me the ropes at Half-a-Life. First of all she explained to me the problem with the women in Serenity Place. Well, it wasn’t a problem with all of them, just one in particular. But you know how that works. Serenity Place was the name of the public housing block directly across the street from Half-a-Life. It was a low-slung building with fake street lanterns outside it and actual flowers out front. It looked better than Half-a-Life. Serenity Place and Half-a-Life. Sounds like Heaven and Hell. But actually it was all the same: cheap housing, tons of women and kids. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, where there’s cheap housing, there’s women and kids. Anyway, this one woman in Serenity Place was giving Sarah, who lives in Half-a-Life, a lot of problems. Sarah had a son, and they lived on the second floor of Half-a-Life. She was also the caretaker along with Sing Dylan, whose real name was Bhupinder Singh Dhillon, but was called Sing Dylan because he liked to play sad folk songs on his guitar late at night in his little suite next to the furnace room in the basement of Half-a-Life. We all knew they weren’t having sex because Sikhs don’t have sex before they’re married, but we didn’t know anything else because Sarah was mute, or rather, she had chosen to stop talking after the traumatic circumstances of her pregnancy.
Either her brother or her father had raped her and then denied the whole thing. According to Lish, Sarah had tried to talk to people, to get them to believe her, but nobody cared to hear the unsavoury details and dismissed her as crazy. Sarah then just said, fuck it, from this day on I will never say another word. She didn’t, either, but she did write furiously on little stick-it note pads, to her son, to us, to herself, to Sing Dylan, who didn’t read English, but somehow related to Sarah. Little messages, like “Right now I’m thinking about something so hilarious if I said it you wouldn’t stop laughing for a week.” Or, to her son who was nine, “Good thing you’re such a blabbermouth sweetie, blab on.” Strange messages, but never information about herself, what happened to her, what she saw happen to other people. All her messages were cheerful and odd and not conversation starters at all, just detached snippets from the reel going round inside her head. When Emmanuel was five and starting school, Sarah fell in love with his teacher, a gentle, handsome man with startling blue eyes. As they say. She also made friends with the mother of one of Emmanuel’s classmates.