Anyway, the less stuff I had cluttering up my apartment, the easier it was for Sing Dylan to spray for roaches. Lish would have babysat gladly, but I was nervous about her girls lugging Dill around and maybe dropping him. Besides, when I went out Lish and the twins usually came along. If I didn’t want them to I’d have to sneak out the back door past Sing Dylan’s apartment and traipse across the gravel parking lot. Dill’s umbrella stroller was falling apart as it was and the gravel made it worse. With the puddles and the muck, crossing it was almost impossible. So I usually just went out the front door and took my chances.
three
Every day it rained. The day I had to go to the welfare office for my regular lecture, it was raining like mad. My appointment was for 2:15. That really didn’t mean a thing because when you got to the office everyone just threw their name and case number into a pail and then sat down for about two or three hours. The names were picked at random as far as I could tell.
The very first time I had been to the dole, I had waited with Dill for about two-and-a-half hours. Right next to the dole headquarters was the Sals. I had jokingly suggested to my worker when I finally got in to see her that there should be some kind of intercom system installed between the dole building and the Sals and that way we could all sit in the Sals drinking coffee and eating cheese nips until we were called in to confess our sins of poverty and joblessness. She looked at me as if I had just told her she had an enormous butt.
Before I turned eighteen, my dad had to support me or I would have been made a ward of Child and Family Services and they’d in theory have to take care of Dill’s and my needs. My dad preferred to give me money than to have me go public, so to speak, because the idea of me as a ward of Children’s Aid horrified him. But I know he was somewhat consoled by the fact that I was only a single mother and not a drug addict or a prostitute. I don’t think it occurred to him that a person could be all three. So from the day Dill was born until the day I turned eighteen, which was one month before I moved into Half-a-Life, my father gave me four hundred and fifty bucks a month. I didn’t see him, I just received his cheques in the mail. At that time I was living in a different dive, but it was a dive for all kinds of people, not only women and kids.
When I turned eighteen he gave me a book for my birthday. It was a thick historical romance epic novel with a picture of a man and woman on the front, the wind blowing their hair back and the man towering over the woman who had her head tilted backwards and her mouth open and eyes closed, like an eighteenth century Cosmo cover girl, and the man looked as if he was strangling her. On the inside cover he had written, “Best wishes on your eighteenth birthday Lucy; from your dad.” I kept the book just for that.
When I was a kid I scratched my name into the wet concrete that was put in down the street. That was long before they had guards to watch over it as it dried. As a matter of fact, Teresa had that job once for a while. She got it through welfare: they figured it was something she was qualified to do. Anyway, I scratched my name, Lucy Van Alstyne, into the sidewalk that my dad walked up and down four times a day for thirty years. To the university, back for lunch, back to the U and home again. At first I was nervous, wondering what he’d say. Then I forgot about it. He didn’t mention it once, not once. He still walks that way and back and there and back, and I wonder what he thinks when he sees my childish scrawl in the cement. Does he wonder what happened to that kid? Is he ashamed? Does he smile to himself? Guess I’ll never know.
Anyway, I was on my way to my second dole appointment. I had to wake Dill up in the middle of his nap to make it on time. He was not happy about that. I was supposed to bring proof of all sorts of things, photocopies of this and that, and my appointment slip. I stuffed all of it into a plastic Safeway bag. (In Half-a-Life just about everyone carries their stuff in plastic grocery bags: you can put half-eaten chocolate bars and wet diapers and washcloths in them.) I got Dill into his little pink rain jacket, passed on to me from Lish, and carried him and the stroller and the bag down the stairs to the front entrance. It was pouring. You can’t miss a welfare appointment. If you do you will not get any money and your future’s at stake. If you can call a future on welfare at stake. And you have to wait until they have another opening. Some of the workers will insist on knowing the reason why you can’t make it, and ask for written proof to back it up and make sure it was a damn good reason. When Sarah’s sister died, she had to bring a photocopy of the death certificate to the dole because the funeral fell on the same day as her appointment. After a few months on City welfare single mothers get bumped over to Provincial welfare, which means that they think you’re a lifer and good for nothing else. Then you get visits only about twice a year and your cheque in the mail every month. It’s like a graduation. In fact Lish was telling me about Provincial parties some of the women in Half-a-Life had. They’d celebrate, usually with tequila, because once you were in the hole (called that because they just about forget about you), life was much easier. For some reason everyone in this block drinks tequila whenever they’re on a tear. I hate it myself and I worry about it seeping into my breast milk and getting Dill drunk. But I was still on City.
To get to the dole office, I had to walk for about twenty minutes. Half-a-Life wasn’t too far away. Both were in the Core, the centre of the city. Dill’s umbrella stroller was falling apart. One of the wheels kept coming off and every ten yards or so I’d have to stop and kick it back on. Or I’d have to tip the stroller a bit so it was only riding on three wheels, but that got tiring fast. The rain was pissing down on us. Dill was crying and then made himself puke by sticking the string of his hood too far down his throat. Cars whizzed past two feet away and splashed us all the way to the front doors of the dole. A guy on a mountain bike wearing some Gore-Tex jacket and cut-offs over long johns rode on the sidewalk beside me for a while with a big ecstatic grin on his face as though he had just spent a year in the Sahara.
“Isn’t it great?” he puffed.
“What?” I said, removing the string from Dill’s mouth.
“The rain, it’s amazing. It’s like a great equalizer, you know?” It’s funny how some people just start talking to you when they see you have a kid.
“Oh yeah, for sure,”
I hated Gore-Tex Guy.
“Well, take her easy,” he said as he wheeled away, probably on his way to some philosophy or film studies course. Even with the plastic Safeway bag, all my proofs and papers and Dill’s extra diapers were soaking wet. Dill had kicked off one of his yellow boots and I hadn’t noticed. It took me about fifteen minutes just to get in through the bloody doors of the dole office. There were about five guys standing around in the lobby all staring at me and nobody did anything to help. At one point I had pushed the front of the stroller in and the door came swinging back shoving one of the curvy handles of the stroller into my stomach. Eventually I got Dill and the stroller and myself into the building. Water was dripping off the end of my nose. The rain had made the vomit on Dill’s jacket runny and it was sliding down the shiny plastic onto his lap. He was very intrigued with it and moved one chubby index finger around in circles through the puke.