by Howard Akler
Can’t beat the scene at Grossman’s. Not just because the first round is on the house, but because the congratulatory vibe continues long after the rally has ended. Democra-shee, goes the toast.
Lily, half in the bag, weaves around the revellers with a pitcher of beer. She refills Gus Bosetti’s glass, then ones for Phoebe and Sachs.
So, she says, they hassled you?
Sì, says Gus. Like criminals they treat us. Not even three words I can say to my paisan before bang-o, the polizia is tapping me on the shoulder. English, they say, it is the law you speak English.
What’d you say?
To them I say vaffanculo, pigs! Well, they get rough. That is how I get this – he points to a pale scar above his lip – and this – to a paler twin on his wispy pate.
Shit, Gus. That smarts.
Sì. Smarts like a fox. Because that night I see she is moved by my wounds. She is older than me, a woman of the world. She see – how you say – the big picture. She say to me, Agostino, there is no revolution. Only one moment of a long, hard evolution.
She who? says Sachs.
Emma Goldman, says Phoebe.
Lily smiles a tipsy smile. They called her the most dangerous woman in the world.
Sì. Because she speak with fire. To get out the word, everything she does is with fire. Passionate.
Gus! Are you blushing?
Gus looks at the floor. Looks up. With a hand that has shaved thousands unnicked, he shakily taps a spot on his neck.
She kiss me here. Hard.
Hard?
Sì.
Are you trying to tell us that Emma Goldman gave you a hickey?
Gus drains the rest of his beer in one gulp. I say too much already.
Come on, says Lily. How far’d you get? First base? Second base?
◊
Min does the books. On the last Sunday of every month, she sits in her brother’s kitchen and taps out small agonies on the adding machine. She checks her numbers, sighs, rechecks them.
Sachs at the counter chops an egg. Sales are always down in the winter, he says. You know that.
They were down in the fall, too.
Taxi receipts, plumbers’. One from a pizza parlour. So many expenses for such a small operation. There is a handwritten bill for general labour she needs to read twice.
This is made out to you and not the business.
Uh-huh.
Plus, your name is spelled wrong. You need to be accurate with all this. How am I supposed to make any sense of it all?
Sachs struggles with a jar of mayonnaise. He runs the lid under hot water, whacks it with a wooden spoon. Comes to the table with a plate of sandwiches. His sister sorts more paper and sharpens her pencil: double-entry accounting can be a singular pain.
This is what I mean, she says. Look at this.
He leans over her shoulder. Min sees him squint at the ledger.
When’s the last time you had your eyes checked? she asks.
◊
Minutes to go before first period. Commotion in the halls, kissing. A girl in owl rims gives her boyfriend a pat on the ass. A trig book bonks the floor and two twelfth-graders guffaw. Somewhere, the reverb of a basketball.
Hey! Miz K!
Lily turns to see Pammy DaSilva. Long, long hair and a leather trench with a Stop Spadina! button in the lapel. She taps it twice and and gives the thumbs up.
Lily watches her go.
The bell rings. Lockers creak and slam and then there’s Principal Libov, looking steamed.
She’s suspended without pay. Grabs her coat from the staff room, where drama and gym teacher offer only downturned eyes. The hallway is so, so long. The janitor gives his usual grunt. She goes outside and does not look back. Not at the arched entranceway nor at the students who grab a quick smoke. Lily on the sidewalk has a spasm in the diaphragm, tear ducts on the verge.
She walks. Angry breath behind her, visible and twisted. Her cheeks flush with rage and cold. She stomps down Manning to College. Mannink, Ida would say with Yiddish inflection, Cullig. Back when she could speak. Lily shivers: her grandmother forced into a permanent silence. Not the same fate for the granddaughter, no way. She continues east, the businesses on this stretch all Italian – a record shop with Tito Schipa albums on sale, the Riviera Bakery. Red light at Bathurst. A fogged-up Plymouth makes a wide left. She cuts down Lippincott. Families from the Azores live here, recent arrivals who moved into staid Victorians and repainted them aquamarine, coral. The Mediterranean hues a visual respite from deep winter. Water crystalizes in Lily’s lashes. She avoids the hustle of Kensington Market, the hawkers and hagglers, and instead follows a more solitary route, the soft eastward curve along Dundas.
Below Dundas, below Queen, below Wellington. She ditches imperial nomenclature, Bolshevik countenance, stray thoughts. The Balfour building, the Darling: nothing but concrete figments. She slows, briefly, in front of Clarence Square – site of many May Day rallies – before continuing over the railyards toward the water. Lily stands at the municipal edge. Fists in her pockets. The mercury drops, her heart sinks. What now?
What now? says Sachs.
Lily blows on her hands. Her diaphragm continues to jump, every sentence sliced by a hiccup.
Beats – me.
Do you think it’s personal?
With Libov? Un-uh. He’s just – y’know – a func – tionary.
Maybe you can appeal then. To the school board or the trustee or whoever makes the decision.
No fucking – way! I took a stand and – I’ll take – the conse – sequen – ces.
Don’t go all Simone Weil on me.
She smiles. I won’t starve.
Sachs grabs a bottle off the kitchen counter, pours two stiff ones, and returns to the table. Formica-topped, shortlegged, it wobbles enough to leave tiny splashes of Old Grand-Dad here and there.
Take a swig, he says. But don’t swallow. Hold it in your mouth till I count to ten.
They clink.
One Mississauga, two Mississauga, three Mississauga.
Lily’s cheekbones dot pink. Her eyes widen.
Four Mississauga, five Mississauga.
Her brow furrows, a tickle in the nose.
Six Mississauga, seven Mississ –
Gah! says Lily. She holds out her glass.
Hit me – again.
They down half the bottle. Badinage off the tongues turns thick. They take off their clothes, hop in the shower, and it is there, drunken, sudsy, impulsive, that he asks her to move in with him.
◊
One month! They date for one month and she moves in? What kind of woman does that?
You put a pencil dot on the living room wall of your mother’s new condo. You were almost forty, attuned for the moment to the word date that lolled in your ear. The verb had become quaint, its delicacy resistant to the next burst of sororal ferocity.
Who did she think she was? your mother said.
You responded with hammer whams. One, two.
You picked up a framed photo of your father. Thick black glasses, receding hairline. He was very tanned. On his face some mid-career mix of satisfaction and resignation. He’d been buried not five months before the old house was sold and you came uptown to help your mother move in. She set her jaw tight. Shelving paper needed to be laid, lampshades dusted, pictures hung.
And did she ever go back to teach school? Nosiree. Too proud. But not too proud to sponge off him the whole time.
She assessed your job. She furrowed her brow. Too high, she said.
◊
The first thing Lily does is find space for the litter box. She shoves the shower curtain aside and fills the pan. Calls. Alice sniffs in and out of corners, detects nothing feline in the many foreign scents of this new apartment. Slowly, sedulously, she covers the vast terrain of the living room.
Kitten? says Lily. Where are you?
Nothing to do but wait. She has little else to do, few things to claim. Her typewriter sits
in its case beside a bureau, duffle bag still packed on the bed. Lily on her haunches. She calls again and the cat trots in. Sniffs and purrs. Alice shits in her box and then paws her business. Lily opens the window a crack and cold winter air enters the room.
The second thing she does is stand in the middle of the sitting room. Sun-up. Daylight alternates pink and grey against the window, an unfastened wall sconce on the sill. Baseboard dust. Small piles of books run the floor, titles he brings upstairs to read and takes back down to sell: Kenko and a Cohen and someone named Ethel Wilson. There’s a cover-torn copy of The Hustler and, slipped between a pair of fat pocketbooks, one slender hardcover. She reaches for it. Of Being Numerous, only sixty-four pages – Perfect! she whispers out loud. She strides into the kitchen, where she kneels and slides the book under the uneven table leg. She gives a small shake, but nothing, nada, not a wobble.
Joe Sharpe fishes for change. He dials. Behind the pay phone, three generations of jobbers close up shop. A dewlapped convoy, they trudge carton after carton out of their old storefront and into a rented van. The foot traffic idles. Pedestrians and familiars congregate with the merchant family. A beat cop jaws with the middle son. Joe looks over his shoulder and says into the receiver, Yup. Uh-huh. Almost.
Street-corner divestment. Durwood-Grubb purchased this five-store complex in late fall and four commerical tenants packed it in before snowfall. Big City Jobbers is the last to go.
The crowd disperses. The last box is loaded. Joe rubs his temple and walks over to the door and tapes a No Trespassing sign inside it.
Sachs takes the morning to doll up his display window. Lustig covers only, the New Directions titles that always sell well. He grabs off the shelf a copy of Confessions of Zeno, with its reticulated portrait of a face aflame. Picks a Boyle. Black-blue-and-grey lithograph of a poison bottle and uncertain spiral printed on off-white wove paper. He whistles while he works. Three Lives, Paterson, A Season in Hell. He needs as much time to ogle the books as he does to arrange them.
Third, she unzips her duffle. Spreads her duds on the mattress. Tights with a run, an ill-folded blouse. Lily presses on a crease and the box spring squeaks, déjà vu moment for a woman whose history includes numerous strange beds. She straightens up, effort in each vertebra, and lets loose a long sigh.
Dull headache up and down the stairs. Eighteen steps each flight, two flights per building, six buildings on this block and four more across the street. Joe has never bothered to add them up; he saves his rudimentary arithmetic for the calculations of rent. Most of these tenants owe money yet they are always the ones who put him on the spot. Broken windows, leaky pipes, electrical shorts. They all have their problems, so he nods, listens, does nothing because it’s rent day and his job is not to give but take. He takes money from the indignant artist, the indigent trucker, the inebriated tanner. He does not give a receipt, doesn’t give out his phone number, gives not a single assurance of repair – there is no incentive to fix anything in a building soon to be demolished. He is simply the middleman. His bosses count bills in one hand and blasting caps in the other.
Ka-ching!
Ka-boom!
Happy hour in the Cabana Room, second floor of the Spadina Hotel. The bartender has a Zapata moustache, the waitress bunions. She sits on a stool and massages her foot when Joe Sharpe shows up.
Wish you’d let me treat you to some Dr. Scholl’s, Gretch.
The waitress shows her dimples. Pineapple earrings dangle. Big spender, she says. Shot and a beer?
Please.
Joe unrolls the newspaper from the pocket of his overcoat and lingers but a moment over city hall coverage before he opens the sports. He knocks back his whisky and releases a soft hiss.
Bum a smoke?
She proffers him one. He lights up, the flickering orange of promises made and broken. He’s quit three times before. He watches Gretchen stand and straighten out her silk dress. Foliage printed on the bodice. She’s short and bosomy, a figure he’d figured out long ago.
What time do you get off? he says.
Lastly, that night in bed. Sachs has his back to her, asleep, and Lily becomes a student of nape and scapula and spine.
◊
This morning, not quite eight. Kitchen light a worry on the retinas. Everything in sight – blister pack of Celexa, fruit bowl – pouched your eyes. You leaned against the counter and peeled a banana. Es rolled out of bed and, with resonant thal-umphs, made her way. She eased herself into a chair.
No sleep? she said.
Some.
You started to scalp a half-dozen strawberries. Pulled out yogourt from the fridge. Do you want oatmeal with this? Or avocado toast?
Both. Can you get me a glass of water, too? I’m really thirsty.
You’re not getting dehydrated, are you?
Es gave her belly a consolatory pat. Your papa’s a worrier, she said.
She’ll find that out soon enough.
She?
You shrugged. The kettle whistled. Although her designs were on breakfast, Es opted, with impressive effort, to raise herself out of the chair and come kiss your unshaven cheek. Why don’t you get out of the apartment for a while? she said. Go for a bike ride. Go for a coffee.
◊
Sachs turns on the tube. Reception comes and goes. He unrolls the foil from his TV dinner and faces an explosion of steam. He pushes his peas around. Go Spadina! Go! The voice-over mentions OMB appeal and Cabinet approval, terms that limp out despite the announcer’s deep melisma. Sachs fiddles with the rabbit ears until the picture becomes clear: unemployed construction workers are protesting outside city hall. Go Spadina! Go! Hal shifts, a lump of Salisbury steak in his throat.
Lily and Phoebe go door-to-door. Humewood has a strong ratepayers’ association, homeowners scared of appropriation. But it’s dinnertime, so they get several polite Nos. A slam or two. They stand under a great bare maple. Hint of sleet in the air.
Maybe we should cut out early.
Lily checks her clipboard. Let’s finish this block, she says.
Phoebe tucks her chin into her scarf. All day she’d banged out affadavits – a bathhouse roust, piddly possession charges – with Blatnyck over her shoulder. He’s all moony over me, y’know.
I know.
Took him three times to clear his throat before he asked me out.
Lily snorts. What’d you say?
I said: Go home to your wife, Karl.
Geez.
I think I’m going to quit.
Lily nudges her along. They wind up a slippery drive, Phoebe steadies herself against the front of a wood-panelled station wagon. Three small icicles hang off the licence plate.
How’re you going to make the rent? I still feel lousy cutting out on you.
Phoebe squeezes Lily at the elbow. Don’t worry about it. Irving’s parents finally kicked him out. He and Claude are going to take the second bedroom.
Cozy.
Up the wide stone steps to a big brass knocker. They both reach for it at the same time. What about you? says Phoebe. How do you like living in holy bedlock?
Sachs pops the cork. He bloops wine into their glasses. Lily wraps fingers around hers, palm warmth moves up to wrist and forearm.
What’d Phoebe say?
She says you’re a fast mover.
Heh. This is a first for me, y’know.
Shacking up?
He nods. Conjugating, he says.
Like the verb? says Lily. I screw, you screw, we screw.
Sachs smacks his knee. Alice the cat slinks around his legs. Claws the sofa, a tactic only ignored.
What’s the present preterite? he says.
Um. We screwed.
The infinitive?
Screw!
Very good. Past participle?
Having screwed.
The cat mewls for attention. Hops onto Lily’s lap and looks up with indignation, expectation.
Past perfect?
We had screwed.
&nbs
p; Future perfect?
We will screw.
Nope. We will have screwed.
Are you sure?
Alice leaps from Lily’s lap to his.
Trust me, Sachs says.
◊
The adjudicators at the Ontario Municipal Board had heard all the evidence, new and old. They listened to opinions on adjusted costs, lost productivity. For the hundreth time in his career, Roads Commissioner Cass explained that the success of Spadina would pave the way for the next innercity expressway, from Highway 401 down toward Christie Pits. An ecology professor exaggerated carbon dioxide levels. An eleven-year-old girl lamented the destruction of her favourite playground. Lawyers on both sides promulgated data. They billed extravagantly. The decision would come any day. The whole goddamned city held its breath.
◊
Middle of the month before the bad weather finally relents. Sun and a slow thaw bring hourly topographical changes to Spadina. Snowbanks become large seeping puddles, dangerous passages of icy sidewalk vanish into safer, slushier ground. The big melt transudes even brick: blackish trickles wend the lone exterior wall of Cecil Street Books, soaking three shelves of fiction on the other side.
Sachs hunches over a limp dust jacket. He pats it dry with a sponge, then stands the hardcover upright in the shop’s big sunlit window. Lily mops up. There’s a silent rhythm to their work, a syntax interrupted when Joe drops in. His tongue unwavering as usual, but it wavers when he tries to place this woman’s familiar face.
Sachs does the introduction.
Lily toes her bucket across the floor. Seen you around, she says. You’re Grubb’s bagman.
Joe’s smile is thinner than a vein. I manage some properties around here, he says and then turns to Sachs: I thought you ran a solo operation.
Lily flops her mop. He’s not my boss.
Triangled glances and the moment runs lonely and wayward, like a trickle of sweat.
I stand corrected, says Joe. He rolls up his sleeves. Give you a hand?