The Beggar's Garden

by Michael Christie

  He turned. “Yeah, pretty, ain’t it? Real good leather, smells like a ball glove.” He rose and took a long whiff of the coat and put it on.

  “It suits you,” she said, admiring how well it embraced his shoulders and how it hit his wrists perfectly, right where he’d wear a watch, if he had one.

  “Ten bucks,” he said.

  “You should keep it for yourself. It looks … handsome,” she said.

  He smiled and his teeth resembled the wall of a castle. “Got plenty of coats. Ten bucks,” he said. He removed it and hung it with finality.

  “Well, it suits you, Harold, that’s what’s important. I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true,” she said, then feigned interest in a few coverless mystery pocketbooks before slipping away when he was distracted by someone else.

  A message from Wanda was waiting on her machine. No mention of the coach house, just one of her sunny updates indexing the things she and her husband had been up to: catered lunches with eminent doctors, notable art purchases, the mounting achievements of grandchildren. Her sister seemed most herself when leaving a phone message, and Bernice suspected she timed her calls for when she was out.

  “I’m not going anywhere, Wanda,” she said when she called back.

  “What, Bernice? Not going where?”

  “Into the coach house.”

  Her sister groaned as if she were reaching high up in a cupboard. “Oh, right, sure that’s fine, Bernice. It was Brian’s idea really, he mentioned you probably hadn’t managed to put much away for retirement and could use a hand, and the girls are all gone now, so—but that’s fine, you’re happy where you are, to be honest I didn’t think you’d go for it.”

  “Thing is, I’m just not sure what I’d do there.”

  “But there’s so much here,” her sister said. “How about golf? Low impact. Easy on the soft tissue.”

  What she knew of golf was limited to the clubs, nylon pullovers and spiked shoes donated to the thrift store. The clubs and shoes never made it to the shelves because they held too much potential as weapons, and the pullovers were neither waterproof nor warm. Bernice said she wasn’t interested in golf.

  “It isn’t the only game in town. There are plenty of churches out here you know, good ones, modern architecture, nice and big and brand-new. You could get involved. And besides, we’d be abroad most of the time and you’d have the whole place to yourself.”

  She saw an image of herself alone, riding a bus to a mall to spend her modest Woodward’s pension on little bits of plastic from the dollar store. She could at least bring some of her collection, couldn’t she?

  “How about storage space,” she said. “In your home? I’d have to bring at least some of my more essential things, I just can’t be rid of them.”

  “Oh sure, there’s plenty of room, we could conceal a midsized army in our closets, but you know, Brian and I have discussed this, and we figured you could get new things, Bernice, here. You could decorate … or redecorate, rid yourself of clutter, you know? Simplify.”

  To her, sitting alone in a room of foreign things was anything but simple.

  “I can’t.”

  “You know you’re as stubborn as Dad ever was,” her sister said, attempting to sound like that was something she found endearing.

  Their father had been an insurance adjustor and part-time inventor who often began his frequent dinner-table lessons with “We now know …,” as if speaking on behalf of humanity’s collective knowledge. The girls competed for his attention, and in pop quizzes or races he pitted sister against sister. Bernice, the eldest, usually won, sending her sister into pillow-screaming rages in her room. “Sore loser,” her father would whisper, nudging Bernice’s ribs as they cuddled up in front of the TV for a delicious hour past her bedtime. As teenagers, she and Wanda had established an unspoken truce, a pact of mutual aloofness, choosing vastly dissimilar hobbies and pursuits to ensure no comparisons were possible. He’d died in 1993, the same year Woodward’s shut its doors, after spending two days with his pelvis snapped in half from a fall on the concrete at the foot of the basement stairs of their childhood home. This just a month after refusing to move into the care facility Wanda had arranged. Her mentioning him now pained Bernice. She’d pushed for him to stay at home, flush with that old feeling of father-daughter collusion.

  When they hung up, Bernice lifted her head from her hands and took notice of the spoon rack, the way it already seemed drab, siphoned of newness. She had to go up close to single out the Manitoba spoon, and saw it looked just as sad as any other. The next day was welfare day and all her customers were off tearing themselves up and throwing themselves in the garbage. As early as tomorrow they’d start trickling in, half-naked and deranged, with blackened fingertips and lacerated faces, their eyes swirling tempests of remorse and paranoia, back for more of what she’d already given them.

  Bernice took advantage of the lull to accomplish tasks she’d been putting off. She priced an entire box of kitchen items, arranged them neatly and sensibly on shelves she’d already wiped down, then went on to organize the sprawling women’s tops section by colour—all of this before lunch. She couldn’t sort clothes by size anymore because labels couldn’t be trusted. Today’s mediums fit like the extra larges of yesterday. Were people getting bigger? If so, how big would they get? It had to be all the healthy food they ate now, these people who’d never known war, hardship or famine. Worse, their giant garments just weren’t made with the care they once were. The seams gave way, the shapes pinched, bagged out and went misshapen. And the materials were of such poor quality, thick and cardboardy, quickly pilled or faded after a handful of washes. She liked old clothes best, they were made to last. Woodward’s even had their own clothing line, most of it pretty good quality, for the price, and sometimes these too were donated. Today she found a burnt-orange acrylic cardigan she swore she’d once owned. These discoveries usually brought a good dose of nostalgia, but today it left her feeling old, left behind.

  “Bernice?” A woman with short electrified hair carrying a cardboard box was looking at her as if peering through fogged glass. “It’s Carol.” She set the box down, touching her generously exposed, liverspotted chest as if to prove also to herself she was real. “We sold shoes together.”

  Bernice smoothed her skirt and took the hand of her old friend, thankful her work that morning had left the store looking its very best.

  “I can’t believe it!” Carol said, cupping her forehead with her hand, her ring a dazzle of tiny diamonds.

  Carol asked what she’d been up to all this time, and Bernice offered a condensed history of her thrift store.

  “It must feel so good to give something back,” Carol said, and Bernice was tickled by a modest pride.

  “Kids?” she said, as Bernice knew she would.

  Bernice shook her head. “No time. This place keeps me so busy, anyhow. Just keeping it going takes all the energy I’ve got. Shame it’s in such poor shape today, though, not like the old shoe department, that’s for sure.”

  “Well, I think it looks fantastic.” Carol said. “You still with, what’s his name, Gustavo?”

  She couldn’t bear the idea of seeing pity register in her old friend’s face, so she shook her head again and smiled in what she felt was a cheerful way, tossing her hand in the air as if she didn’t need it either. “Oh, we split years ago!”

  Carol hung for a moment speechless, then rescued her. “Got rid of him, did you? Atta girl!”

  Bernice found herself in a featureless territory somewhere between laughter and tears and turned to pluck from the floor a dress that had slipped its hanger.

  “Well, Pete and I are still together, just barely. No I’m kidding. He’s in the car. We’re in town because my dad passed and I couldn’t bear to just throw his things away, you know, so I thought what better than if people could put them to good use.” “Oh dear, I’m sorry.”

  Carol said it was okay. Then came a honk from outside. “That’s
him,” she said, embarrassed but still smiling. “I’d better get moving.”

  Bernice didn’t feel up to speaking with Pete, given the possibility of more questions, so she sent Tuan out to help bring the rest of the things inside. They returned with boxes obscuring their vision and Bernice held the door for them. “More where this came from,” Carol said. “A real packrat he was.”

  When the work was done, Carol said, “Well, I’d better run, we’ve got to get to the crematorium before they burn the wrong old guy. We live in Kelowna now,” she added, as if as an afterthought. “Look me up if you’re ever out that way.” She handed Bernice a square of sharp cardboard.

  Later, while rummaging through Carol’s boxes—mostly large new Y-fronts and neatly folded men’s perma-press slacks—Bernice recalled the shoe-fitting fluoroscope they’d used in the shoe department. It was a contraption the size of a deep freeze, into which the customers, usually children because they liked it best, would stick their feet, snug inside the shoe they were trying on. Protruding upwards from the machine were three viewing stations like the periscopes Bernice had seen in submarine movies, so that the mother, along with Bernice, could “scientifically verify” the fit of her child’s shoe. Don’t buy your shoes blindly! warned a sign hung from the ceiling over the contraption. The kids squealed at their ghostly toes wiggling, the incredible complexity of their own feet something they’d never suspected.

  Bernice could guess any shoe size without consulting the machine, but it sold shoes and that was a fact. It wasn’t until after Carol had married Pete and quit her job that some men had come and taken it away. Later she heard it had used X-rays, and she shuddered now to think of it. Those nasty rays, or beams or whatever they were, zapping her and all those mothers and little children. How she had survived this long she could never say.

  While microwaving her vegetable beef soup at lunchtime, she wished she’d stuck a few people’s heads inside the fluoroscope to see what was what. She could’ve saved herself some trouble and put Gus’s head in there to check for missing parts, like the bit that made a person appreciate what they had. She drew Carol’s business card from her pocket and studied it as she had the shoe styles in the Woodward’s catalogue.

  “I’m out of sorts,” she said to Tuan, who lifted his eyes from a thick book split in half on the glass counter. “I’m going home early.”

  The pastor had met her decision with less surprise than she’d expected. Bernice feared one of the old mitten ladies would be taking over her store, but the pastor had suggested his niece Tabitha, who’d recently had some sort of difficulty with her family up north in Prince George and was looking to make a new beginning in the city. She’d be fine, Bernice had thought; the store was nothing a young woman with a bit of tenacity couldn’t handle. There really wasn’t much to the job, mostly moving things here and there, when you thought about it. That she’d considered herself the only person capable of doing it seemed to her now an incredible vanity.

  First she took apart her bed and dragged the pieces to the door. Then she began filling boxes with things and stacking them against the wall over the rectangle of darker wood where her bed had sat for nearly thirty years. She fought the urge to keep her collection organized, tossing it willy-nilly into the boxes, mixing even the owls and nautical items together. Next she moved into the living room, where she teetered on a chair to lift her pictures from the walls. The dishes she wrapped in the weekly fliers that had piled for years in the hall closet. In the end, she’d decided to keep only the spoon rack and her very best items of clothing—many of them Woodward’s brand—and these she packed in just two suitcases and set them near the door of her empty apartment. The rest she marked for donation. It astonished her that it had taken only two days to pack her entire apartment.

  Tuan and another young fellow with blue hair and metal bits hung in his face came and loaded the boxes and furniture into the van. The few odds and ends that didn’t fit, including an old oak desk that Gus used to write his poetry on, she was forced to leave in the alley for the men with shopping carts.

  Bernice rode between them to the thrift store, where she was meeting Wanda and Brian later that night for them to take her to Kelowna. As they drove, the blue-haired fellow sang along to the stereo and Bernice swore she heard the word Jesus. Amidst the noisy jangle of the rock and roll it sounded like a swear.

  Tuan curved the van into an alley and they approached the rear entrance of the church. Then she watched Tuan carry her boxes inside, struck by the awareness that others would be taking items from her collection home and soon using them as their own. The mitten ladies had organized a going-away party and it would be starting in a few minutes, but Bernice already wanted to leave.

  Later that afternoon, Bernice stepped from the chattering heat of the party for some air and was drawn by the low roar of human voices from a few blocks over. As she approached Abbott Street, she thought it was a protest march, but then she saw that no part of the crowd was moving. Hotdog trucks and trucks with satellite dishes strapped to their roofs stood by. The sidewalks around the old department store were barricaded off by high fences and large metal containers that looked like train cars lacking wheels. The surrounding streets were crammed with people who all seemed to be searching the red brickwork of the old department store for clues to a mystery.

  She pushed deeper into the swarm. Bodies pressed against her. She could see the plywood had been removed from the windows and that there was nothing left inside, the store entirely gutted. Children were riding their parents’ shoulders like lumbering elephants; people carried roughly scrawled signs she couldn’t make out without her glasses, and still others aimed tiny movie cameras, lifting them over their heads as if in choreographed salute. It cheered her to see so many people back on this block again, especially people who took care of themselves, people with jobs and children and cameras.

  She found a bit of space out front of a soup kitchen, stepping up on the curb for a better view—of what she wasn’t yet sure. Beside her stood a young woman, patches crudely pinned and sewn on her clothing as if to suggest a lack of concern for her own appearance, or perhaps appearances in general. The woman turned to her and shrugged as if she too were confused by the spectacle. Her easy, dejected way of holding herself reminded Bernice of her sister at her age. The girl’s feet were a size seven and a half.

  Then came seven loud blasts from an air horn, silencing the crowd. A distorted voice began counting down from ten. The young woman stuck her fingers in her ears. When the count ended, the voice said “Go,” and there were fourteen explosions—she counted—that seemed to chase each other around the structure. She saw flocks of birds, mostly pigeons and crows, launch from the empty windows of the upper levels and she felt great pity for them, knowing there’d be nests and lame birds left behind in the store. Her heart dropped as if her chest were a carnival dunk tank. She felt her hand cover her mouth, and when the explosions ended there came a short pause in which Bernice turned to the young woman, who she saw, also stunned, was timidly pulling her fingers from her ears. For a moment Bernice wondered if there had been some kind of miscalculation, right before a series of greater explosions erupted, triple the power of the ones that still hung webs in her ears, and the structure became liquid and began to fold in on itself, slumping like a set of clothes without a body to keep them standing. In a dense oatmeal cloud, dust and bits of the building rose into the air and enveloped the now cheering and whooping crowd. She brought her silk scarf to her mouth and breathed through it, the dusty odour reminding her of her closet now all emptied out and awaiting the clothes of another. She felt a hand she knew to be the young woman’s grip her own, and found herself hoping she was one of the young people who would live in the new apartments they would be building here, and they stood like this, immobile, blinded by dust, in the cacophony of car alarms that seemed to be setting each other off, spreading across the city, block by block.

  The Extra

  Me and Rick,
we rent a basement suite at the bottom of Baldev’s house. Actually, we only call it that to Welfare so they’ll give us the most amount of money for rent, but really it’s just a basement, no suite part. The walls are two-by-fours with cotton candy in between and there’s no toilet or sink and it smells bad like your wrist when you leave your watch on too long. We sleep on hunks of foam beside the furnace between an orange lawnmower and used cans of paint that Baldev keeps down there. We take dumps at the gas station down the street and pee in plastic jugs we pour down a drain in the alley. Then at the tap on the side of the house, we rinse them and fill them for drinking and washing our pits and crotches. We used to have different jugs but then we got tired of remembering which was which.

  When I say we rent, I really mean I do because my disability worker, Linda, sends a cheque for five hundred dollars a month to Baldev because she can’t trust me with my money for the reason of my brain being disabled. But me and Rick and Baldev have this deal where Baldev gives us two hundred of the rent back in cash as long as we don’t complain about the basement and how it’s just a basement.

  Rick needs my help. He can’t get welfare because years ago he got kicked off for not telling them he had a job while he was still getting cheques. But Rick says we’re lucky because I have a disabled brain and we get more money than the regular welfare pays anyway, so it works out, and we split the disabled money right down the middle. Without Rick I’d be starving with flies buzzing on my face or back in a group home. He says what we’re going to do with our money because I’m bad at numbers, and also he cooks me dinners and lunches on his hot plate. He sometimes cooks spaghetti or mostly different stews he gets out of a can. He always makes me wait until the stew is hot before we eat because I eat things cold because I’m bad at waiting. It’s just more proper, he says. Then he says it lasts longer in your belly if it’s hot. When I ask why, he says because then your belly has to wait for it to get cool before it can soak it up.