Good one, Sing. Naturally, it was raining when we left. It was a good thing, too, because without the rain we wouldn’t have noticed that the left windshield wiper didn’t work, and we weren’t going far without it. We stopped at the first garage and had to spend fifteen dollars on a new wiper. Lish was fuming. She couldn’t believe Rodger was so dense that he hadn’t noticed the wiper was broken. Where had he been living? The Sahara? So that was our first major expense. I told Lish that it was better than getting caught in a downpour somewhere in the middle of nowhere and finding out, but she said she’d rather have made it outside city limits before something went wrong. She had a point. At least the sliding door was still on.
I want to tell you right now I was feeling okay about the way things were going. There was something I needed to know though. That was how optimistic was Lish feeling about finding the busker and what exactly he meant to her. Part of me knew that he was more like a sweet memory, a dream, but not a flesh and blood thing really, a person. ’Course the twins were proof of his existence, but Lish never knew the busker in a big way, never actually, you know, loved him, really. I mean, how could you after a week? Wouldn’t it be better if she never found him?
It would be, wouldn’t it? That way he could just remain a sweet memory. And living in Half-a-Life, it helps to have these memories.
As for how optimistic she felt about finding him, well, that was another story. She seemed to waver between being absolutely positive to thinking she was a total fool for even trying to find this guy, let alone giving a damn about him. After all, he had stolen from her, ditched her, been busted for drugs, lived in a tent, and as far as she knew wrote terrible letters. Sometimes she talked about how great it would be to spend just one passionate night with him, just to feel young and crazy and alive again. Sometimes she talked about marching up to him after a show with the twins and grabbing the hat he threw down for money and saying, “We’ll take that, thank you very much. By the way, these are your children, you low-life prick!” And then marching off. She never talked about bringing him back to Half-a-Life. You have to be strong to live in Half-a-Life, and frankly I don’t think Gotcha would have lasted a week. It’s a nutty life when you try to combine romance and taking care of little kids. Now this is what we had in the van. And actually, it was quite amazing that we had the van at all.
Up until the evening before we left, Rodger was going to change his mind about letting us use it because welfare had scooped him up for some kind of job demolishing the old meatpacking plant and he was going to have to use it to get to work. Fortunately, Safety Canada or some such thing stepped in and said it was utterly criminal to send inexperienced men on welfare in to work with explosives and dangerous chemicals and heavy machinery. Only skilled workers could do that. What the hell, Bunnie Hutchison was going to try to get around it. She probably wouldn’t have shed a tear to see a few single welfare recipients go up in smoke or die slowly from asbestos poisoning. Rodger said welfare was getting too dangerous and he decided to just be done with it and live once and for all off his mother and write short stories in her basement until something better came along. So we got the van after all, complete with a bumper sticker that read, “I Brake for Hallucinations,” a back bumper that we had to hang onto the van with wire and pry off when we needed to put oil in the engine (which was in the back behind the bumper), and an ignition that could be started with a screwdriver. This is what we filled it with:
one tiny ripped pup tent (some of us would sleep in the van)
one Coleman stove
one cooler full of fruit and vegetables and crackers and juice and some beer from Tanya and alfalfa sprout and cucumber sandwiches on rice cakes from Terrapin (who seemed to be getting skinnier and skinnier)
one ghetto blaster and assorted tapes
candles for emergencies and ambience
paper
markers
Barbies
toys
books
diapers
sunscreen
Dill’s ultra-deluxe two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar stolen stroller. (It had become a bit beat up after the women in Half-a-Life started borrowing it for bringing home the groceries.)
bag of clothes for each of Lish’s kids, one bag for Lish, and one bag for Dill and me
maps
spare tire
tire jack
jumper cables
motor oil
pillows and blankets
two inflatable air mattresses
two women
five children
Teresa had promised to get our mail and cover for us if any dole patrols showed up, but that probably wouldn’t happen. She told us, “Youse all have a great trip and don’t turn around halfway and come back neither. And get me some cheap American smokes.” She would also make sure our toilets didn’t overflow and the rain didn’t come through our windows. (Even when they were closed, rain would gather on the window ledge and sometimes seep under the caulking and run down the wall.) Nobody in Half-a-Life had their beds against the walls, and kids were constantly falling out of bed. In public housing it sounds like an explosion. Mercy, who is so tense all the time, bangs on the door of whoever she thinks fell out of bed so she can tell us not to move the kid too quickly, not before checking all the bones. Apparently she heard of a kid who had fallen out of bed the wrong way, broke her neck, and was paralyzed from the waist down forevermore.
It’s funny that Mercy is working for the Disaster Board because we think her life is a bit of a disaster — that is, the way it’s set up so disaster can never happen, so pinched and safe and boarded up from every danger. And yet she’s the one who tells us we’re fooling ourselves thinking we’re secure. You’d think, with that philosophy, she’d be the one to let loose, flirt with danger, live on the edge, take risks. Her motto is: “Disaster can strike anytime, anywhere.” According to her, Dill could choke on a piece of Lego, Hope and Maya might go to school one day and never return. These things we women of Half-a-Life knew. But I think Mercy was still hung up on that disappearing Mercedes, the car she was named after because it was the last memory her mother had of her father. Mercy was just trying to keep things from going away or getting lost. Her photographs were all wrapped up in plastic and binding. All her toys and books put away in the same place each time, her bike helmets and mosquito netting, too. Her fluorescent clothing, her never-changing routine, her obsessiveness with the safety of her daughter, her nervousness. It occurred to me that she and I were the same, sort of. Both our mothers were dead and our fathers were just, well, they were just out there. And so was Dill’s and so was the twins’. And so was Lish’s. All these missing fathers, not even dead and buried. That would be easy. No, they were just out there somewhere, like space junk orbiting planets populated with wives and girlfriends and sons and daughters.
Speaking of fathers, the day we left was a Friday. Deadbeat Dad’s day. Sherree’s ex was back for Jasmine. Sherree, who was a born-again Christian, and Jasmine lived in the basement with eight or nine cats. Tanya’s kids were going off in separate directions and the librarian was there to pick up Teresa’s and Marjorie’s boys, both his. Also a couple of others I had seen but didn’t really know. The mothers who were saying goodbye to their kids had their lists of things to do and things not to do, for the fathers: brush their teeth, don’t lose their clothes, and so on. I don’t know whether it was harder to keep them for the weekend or to say goodbye.