Late One Night

I got to thinking about things, and the way they are, and the way they used to be, and the way I wish they were, and the way I used to wish they would be. One part of me was arguing that I should just go to bed and then this other part of me wanted a snack, like maybe a piece of toast with butter and jam. I could hear the cars passing by my window and I wondered where all of these people were going, or more like where they were coming from, because at this hour I figured most of them were just going home. That's where I was: home. Then I thought about the concept of "home", and how it took me so long to understand it. Then I thought: Popcorn. I'm in the mood for popcorn. But, of course, I didn't have any popcorn. I even considered walking over to the 24-hour grocery store to buy some, but then I talked myself out of it and went to bed.

The Lake

A Clean Woman

In the summers, on the rare occasions when my dad would find work, I would spend my days with Mrs. Shaw, our downstairs neighbour and landlady.

In the mornings, she would give me some Rice Krispies and turn a blind eye while I poured sugar on them. After breakfast, there was always this long stretch of time before The Price is Right. Immediately after that, we would eat lunch, which was followed by an even longer stretch of time. Some afternoons, we would run errands and I would carry her bags, which always seemed unreasonably heavy for my little arms. Mostly, I spent a lot of time feeling sweaty and hinting about going to the public pool, which we never did.

Sometime in the later part of the afternoon, we would always have a snack, usually apple quarters served in a plastic bowl. We would take our snacks and sit on the front porch and do as the cats and dogs and just watch the cars and people go by.

Mrs. Shaw knew a lot of people, and sometimes a couple of them would stop walking and chat it up for a few minutes. They were all old, though, and uninteresting.

On the patio, there were two chairs, the rocking chair and the normal chair. The rocking chair was for Mrs. Shaw and the normal chair was for me, and I knew that very well, but sometimes I hoped that she would let me sit in it and rock for, like, 10 minutes. I think that would have been fair. But she never did offer.

Mrs. Shaw wasn’t mean, but she was, I guess, cold, and a bit scary. But you knew you would be fine so long as you didn’t disobey her. It wasn’t a problem for me because I was generally a good kid, mostly because I feared any kind of reprimand, or situations when grownups would raise their voices in my direction.

Mrs. Shaw really liked her gambling, mostly in the form of instant lottery tickets. She would spend a good part of the day just scratching away and sometimes she would give me one to scratch too, and let me keep my earnings. One time, I won 10$ and proceeded to invest in an impressive amount of jujubes.

She was also cool in the way that she would let me watch my soap operas in the afternoon, while she napped. And this, regardless of the fact that my dad had specifically said “no tv”. Truth be told, most of my time there was spent watching tv.

I also spent a fair amount of time playing with the toys that were kept in a bucket under the kitchen counter. They were mostly a bunch of old Happy Meal toys that many other children had played with before, and also carpet samples. I quite enjoyed the carpet samples.

I don’t know why my dad didn’t let me bring my own toys. Maybe he didn’t want me scattering them all over the old woman’s apartment where she might trip on them and break a hip or something. I only had my coloring books, my library books, my coloured pencils and my pencil sharpener. Sometimes I drew naked people just to amuse myself. However, I feared that Mrs. Shaw would catch me and straight up have a heart attack.

I also had a little game I liked to play where I would take a stack of old Sears catalogues and make believe that I had just won a contest which granted me the right to choose one item from every page. I took this exercise very seriously. Food processor, yes please. Deep fryer…let’s see…no, it’ll just collect dust. And those things can be dangerous! I knew stuff like that. I don’t know where I got it, but I was well aware of what kind of appliances one really needed.

Apart from being a devoted gambler, Mrs. Shaw was also an Avon saleslady. I liked to assist her in dividing up little make-up and perfume samples, organising them by colour or name, and putting them into small bags. Everything in her home smelled like Skin‑So‑Soft lotion. She used it to remove sticky labels and to keep bugs away. She swore it was a miraculous product, and that there was nothing it couldn’t do.

Once in awhile, we would have a guest in the house, and this was always very exciting since most of my days were spent alone with her and Bob Barker. Some sketchy women would come by to pick up their orders, or sometimes because they owed her money from previous purchases. These were the kind of women who, after forty years of trying, still hadn’t succeeded in applying make-up in any kind of remotely flattering way. Mrs. Shaw didn’t wear any make-up herself, so she was of little help to her clients. She just told them they looked good, and “healthy”. After they left, the ashtray would be filled to the brim with cigarette butts that were stained with every color of the rainbow. Well, the lipstick rainbow. (That goes from light peach to deep burgundy, for your information.)

Of all my moments spent with Mrs. Shaw, what I remember most of all is the one time when she farted in the parking lot in front of the Canadian Tire, where we were headed to purchase a new garden hose. Yes, she farted. Just like that! Quite audibly. And shamelessly. Upon seeing my paralysed expression of outrage and despair she said, very matter‑of‑factly: “You know, a clean woman doesn’t keep that inside her!”

So it was settled. Then she yanked my arm, as she often did, directing me towards the store. Later that evening, when I told my father about it, he only seemed amused, and showed no apparent revulsion.

But worst of all was that we lived right next to an ice cream parlour. I mean exactly next door, no joke. So I would regularly be forced to watch other children enjoying their milkshakes and fudge sundaes on their way home from day camp while I nibbled on my yellowing apple slices.

But it’s not as bad as it sounds. Some days I got ice cream, too. I was a reasonable kid. I knew you weren’t supposed to eat ice cream every day. So, on the days when I got to eat some, I would just plain shake with excitement. And when she was handing me an ice cream cone (or a fudgesicle, or a slurpie), Mrs. Shaw would make this face that was almost like a smile. I think some part of her enjoyed seeing me get so keyed up. Then, after I would become all hyperactive from eating sugar, I would try to impress her with my mediocre handstands and cartwheels on the front lawn.

Most days, though, there was no ice cream, and I would just sit there on my non-rocking chair and look impatiently for my father’s silhouette in the distance.

What the Russian Girls Know

We used to call them “the Russian girls” but I think only one of them was actually Russian and then the other ones were Ukrainian or Polish or something. They all had long, straight hair and they got good grades and they dressed funny. Their clothes seemed outdated, but the tailoring was always impeccable, like they were wearing clothes from the fifties made from fabrics that were in fashion five years ago. They didn’t blend in, and you could tell that they weren’t impressed. But, if ever you had to work on a team project with one of them, she would act quite professional and almost kind and she would talk a bit about her kittens and about her grandmother, mastering the art of small talk before we were even aware that “small talk” was a well-known, commonly accepted and, dare I say, necessary form of communication.

The Russian girls were all skinny except for the chubby one, and you could barely call her “chubby”. No, you would probably call her “voluptuous” or “womanly”, and you would probably call the skinny ones “thin”, but you didn’t know them. You didn’t really know them. Neither did we, but we thought we did. We thought that because we observed them for five years and saw what they ate for lunch every day that we knew them.

Needless to say, we hated them.