Ismail took Zubi into the living room and settled her onto the thick carpet. She was still learning to crawl, but managed to pull and creep her way toward a collection of her toys stacked in a cardboard box. Ismail sat on the floor with her, looking at the rag doll she held close to her face, trying to see what she was seeing. He laid down on his back beside her, cupping his hands behind his head. From this vantage point, the room was imposing, the spackled ceiling faraway. Zubi and he, so tiny by comparison, seemed lost in the room. The sensation was unsettling to Ismail, but when he looked over at Zubi, she didn’t seem bothered in the least.
He opened his eyes and looked up at the living-room ceiling, which was now smooth, its spackles scraped away the previous year. He reached for the carpeting that had been there just a moment ago and instead felt hard laminate beneath his head. Zubi, and the almost twenty years between them, had disappeared.
He stumbled back to the kitchen, and finished the last of the beer. Then, he groped his way up the darkened staircase and fell into bed.
After the divorce, Rehana cleared out most of the kitchen crockery, but she left behind the fruit bowl for Ismail. He never knew why. Perhaps the bowl held memories that she didn’t want to keep. Or, perhaps, it held nothing at all.
— 18 —
Streetcar
Ismail saw Celia again the next Saturday, this time through the streaky window of the Dundas streetcar. He was on his way to the Eaton Centre to buy reduced-price winter boots during the end of February sales. He looked up from his Toronto Star and saw her standing at the corner of Dundas and Ossington, waiting at the streetcar stop. He thought: She’s getting on! His belly lurched and, mistaking this unfamiliar sensation for indigestion, he fumbled in his pocket for an antacid.
Ismail craned his neck to get a better view of her. She stepped around a slushy puddle and waited for the driver to open the doors wide. She wore her scarf loosely tied, like an ambivalent hijabi, and so he could still see much of her new red hair. He sat up tall in his seat to watch her climb the steps, which were a little too high for her small frame. While she dug into her leather handbag to extract a token, the driver leaned down from his high-seated perch. Did she smile shyly at him just then? The driver said something to her, which made her laugh long enough for Ismail to notice her slight overbite and bright-red lipsticked mouth. Before Ismail could look away, he realized that she was gazing back at him with a look of friendly acknowledgement.
Self-conscious, he sucked in his gut, and straightened his slumped posture. She approached slowly, cautiously holding onto the handrails as she made her way toward him. Her smile and nod made Ismail’s armpits bristle awake. With no vacant seats nearby, she headed to the back of the bus, leaving him alone, an island, in the centre of the crowded streetcar. Ismail silently cursed the passengers around him, especially the lady in the seat next to his, whose shopping bags were bumping against his knee.
Ismail turned around, perhaps a little too desperately, to follow Celia’s small figure as she stopped at a window seat about fifteen feet away. No longer seeming to notice his gawking, she pulled a newspaper from her purse, one of those free dailies found in boxes near bus stops. Ismail faced forward again, and patted his damp forehead with his handkerchief. He attempted to slow his racing pulse, chastising himself for behaving like a hormonal teenager. Still, he wished the woman next to him would get off the streetcar, and leave the seat beside his vacant, imagining this would be an invitation to Celia to come to him. He unbuttoned his jacket, slid open the window a centimetre and inhaled cool air. The lady with the shopping bags stood up at Bay Street, just one stop before his and Ismail opened the window wider.
When Ismail gathered up his things and stood to leave, Celia looked his way. He nodded to her and she casually returned the gesture. He stood stock-still at the bustling corner of Yonge and Dundas, his jacket open to the wind, his eyes fixed on her while she thumbed through her newspaper. The light changed, the streetcar jolted forward and he started to walk away. But then her gaze tapped him on his shoulder, forced him to turn around. Their eyes met and Ismail grinned long after the streetcar crossed the intersection and continued its eastbound journey.
— * —
Earlier that day, Celia stood in front of 68 Shannon Street, the house that had been hers for more than a quarter century. She’d raised her two children there, planted gardens (flowers out front and vegetables in the back), made countless meals in the kitchen, and scrubbed every corner. They’d moved into the small three-bedroom semi-detached a young family; a husband and wife in their twenties, Lydia in kindergarten and Filipe in grade two. When her son moved out, she left his things there, but moved in a rarely used Singer machine and an even more rarely used exercise bike. It only made sense to her that her daughter’s room would become her mother’s after her father died. The three of them, José, Celia, and her mother, made agreeable housemates for almost ten years.
Sixty-eight Shannon was the house where Celia was widowed and orphaned within the same month. It was a house that grew silent, all at once.
José had been a good provider. She didn’t have to work two jobs like some of her friends. She had it easy; she babysat children while her own were growing up, which paid for their groceries. The rest she left to José and he seemed to manage well: he’d paid off the house, and even saved a little to help the children with college.
Once a month or so, he came home with a roll of bills and told her it was a “bonus” he’d earned for staying late or getting a contracting job done early. She never questioned him, using the extra money for small luxuries like new outfits or furniture. They were a respectable family.
Celia sighed and inspected the front window of 68 Shannon. In her mind’s eye, she expected to see the old lace curtains fluttering in the front window, the ones she’d stitched herself and later packed away in a cardboard box. She looked for the hand-painted sign above the mailbox, the one that said Família Sousa, even though she knew it had cracked into three pieces when Lydia unscrewed it from the aluminum siding. Lydia tried to convince her that a little glue could save the sign, but Celia wasn’t interested in a keepsake of her husband’s handiwork. It was just another example of the how the world in which she lived had turned out to be only a facade with a rotted-out foundation. She threw José’s broken sign into the trash.
Anger left an acrid taste in her mouth that was like hours-old coffee on the tongue. She spat it on the street. A cold wind blew and she pulled her black scarf around her hair. But it wasn’t only the cold she was protecting herself from; she hoped to keep herself hidden from the neighbours’ glances. She was in no mood to be greeted by their pity today; most had heard that she had been forced to leave her home because of her husband’s shameful debts.
Yes, José had been keeping many secrets from her — that he was out of work, playing too much poker, had taken out loans. He’d even re-mortgaged the house — her house — to pay for his debts. Celia hadn’t known about all that, didn’t pay much attention to the finances; she had her own household responsibilities and José had his. In her mind, it was such an old, familiar story. And she hated that, was angry to have become the stereotype she had never imagined herself to be. A woman first dependent on her parents, then her husband, and later, her children.
She wiped a tear with the edge of her scarf and then wound it more snugly around her head, making sure to tuck in stray locks of her new red hair. She glanced quickly down Shannon Street, glad that it was deserted at this hour. What would her old friends and neighbours think if they could see it? A widow with crimson hair! She felt a little silly for the impulsive choice she’d made a few days earlier. Of course, the enthusiastic young Vietnamese hair dresser had spurred her on, tut-tutting at her dull, grey-brown hair and presenting her with a stiff cardboard display of dyed hair samples. Celia was about to choose a dark mahogany when the hairdresser pointed out the “Cinnamon” fringe.
“Look, this is a nice one. It will look good against your complexion. It’s good for older women to brighten up their look.” Celia bristled at the word “older” yet knew the label fit. Widowhood had catapulted her to a more mature age, drew lines around her eyes and sprouted white hair that hadn’t been there a year ago.
“Well,” she demurred, fingering the silky crimson fringe between her fingers, “I don’t know if this colour would be appropriate for a widow. Maybe too flashy?”
“Really? I don’t think so … are you not allowed to have nice hair if you’re a widow?”
“Well there’s no rule, really. It’s just that you’re supposed to downplay the colour, come out of mourning slowly, gradually. And some widows never wear colour again after their husbands die,” Celia said. “I guess it is a personal choice, but still, there are conventions.”
“We don’t do that in my culture. We mourn for a little while, get it over with. At least that’s how it is in Canada. How long have you been a widow?”
“Since last fall. Over a year now.”
“Over a year! And really, you’re not that old. What are you — late fifties? Early sixties?”
Celia told her she was fifty.
“Oh! Well! You know fifty is the new thirty!” the hairdresser said, stumbling out of her faux pas. Celia thought about that. The new thirty. She inspected the samples again, holding each up against her skin and studying herself in the mirror. The hairdresser raised an eyebrow at Celia’s reflection, and said, “Well it’s up to you. You tell me. You want to be Mahogany or Cinnamon?”
Celia pointed to the one on the right.
That same evening, when Lydia saw her new hair, she forgave her mother for walking out on her in the morning.
“Mãe! It’s great! A little bright maybe, but it’ll fade. This is just the right thing for picking up your mood.”
Celia muttered to herself and strode to her bedroom-den, pushing the door shut behind her. She didn’t want a hairdo to fix her mood.
She continued to stand on the sidewalk and stare at her old house, troubling over its appearance. Nothing looked the same. When the buyers arrived for the final inspection with measuring tapes and a digital camera, she’d overheard them using words like “gut,” “tear down,” and “strip.” And that’s what they’d done to her home — they’d renovated, upgraded, changed everything, as though the home she’d made over the last twenty-five years was rubbish to be thrown away.
She guessed the ground floor no longer had any dividing walls and all her carpet was ripped away. Where once there was aluminum siding now was coral stucco. Who likes coral stucco? But she had to admit that she liked the brand-new porch and freshly painted green door. The front window, from where she had supervised her children playing on the lawn, had been made into a larger, grander, bay window. José had once promised to install a window seat for her, but never got around to that project.
A car approached, and drove into what used to be her driveway. She avoided the driver’s curious eyes, and turned away, trudging through the slush, south on Dovercourt to Dundas Street. Snow soaked right through her boots, into her socks, making her pinky toe go numb. Still, she continued east, only pausing to look into the steamed-up windows of Nova Era. She appraised the trays of pastéis de nata, fruit tarts, and cookies. Her eyes dwelled on the chocolate éclairs lined up on a cooling rack. The taste of chocolate icing, mixed with her bile, burned upwards through her esophagus and into her mouth; reflux from another time.
Now, she walked on without a destination. Ahead of her sat the white bearded man who kept vigil on a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk, just outside St. Christopher House. The old panhandler reminded her of a picture she once saw of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, and she found it fitting that he would take up his station right there, as though he were the community centre’s ambassador. She dug into her coat pocket and handed him two quarters, their mittened hands touching. She didn’t feel so different from him, understood that she was just a bedroom-den luckier than he. He nodded to her, as though agreeing with her unspoken thoughts.
She stood at the corner, intending to cross Ossington and catch the westbound Dundas streetcar home. But when the light changed to green, she stayed put. The other pedestrians stepped around her, her body a minor inconvenience. The light turned red again. She turned and crossed Dundas, changing direction, changing her mind. The eastbound streetcar pulled up just as she reached the curb, an answer to a question she didn’t know she had. As she climbed the steps, she gave the driver a knowing look, as though he was a co-conspirator in her spontaneous journey.
“Looks like I came at just the right time,” the driver said, grinning down at Celia. His words weren’t all that funny, but they made her giggle and pinked her face.
When she made her way through the half-empty streetcar, she glimpsed her neighbour Ismail sitting by the window, looking in her direction. Expectant. She averted her eyes in shyness. When she got closer, she noticed a woman sitting beside him — was that his friend? His girlfriend? She quickly found an empty seat near the back and pulled out a newspaper from her bag to distract herself. She peered in his direction from time to time and then the woman next to Ismail vacated the seat. Good, she was a stranger. The streetcar lumbered up to Yonge Street and Ismail stood, along with most of the riders, to get off. He descended the steps, crossed to the sidewalk and tromped toward the mall. The he turned, met her gaze, and she waved at him. The streetcar continued eastbound, and she settled herself back into her seat, looking out at the sky-high billboards and television screens of Yonge-Dundas Square. She passed Victoria and then Church, not caring where the streetcar took her.
— * —
That day Ismail bought two pairs of boots; one he needed and one he liked.
That evening he scrawled in his writing-class notebook, “I was not aware that Portuguese widows were allowed to wear red lipstick.” After so many brief encounters, Ismail knew that it was time for him to find a way to have a real visit with his grieving lady neighbour.
He slept well that night, dreaming he was riding on the back of a black raven, flying over the neighbourhood, surveying the small houses and shops of Little Portugal. He took in the frozen, waiting rose gardens and the large, stately churches whose bells called out each Sunday. He watched men, shivering and smoking outside sports bars, slapping each other on the back in tipsy camaraderie. He looked over at grandmothers pushing toddlers in strollers as they lugged their groceries home. He glimpsed the young non-Portuguese couples moving into starter homes, making broken-English conversation with elderly neighbours who, thirty years ago, were the new kids on the block. He noticed his neighbourhood’s quaint beauty from way up high, a beauty, that despite his twenty-five years living there, he’d never before allowed himself to see.
— 19 —
Six Metres of Pavement
The furnace was malfunctioning that day, and the classroom overheating. Joseph, a tall, young nursing student, had managed to climb up on a desk and pull open windows, offering some relief to the stifling air. Ismail removed his jacket and tie and was still too warm, but perhaps that was due to Fatima’s pestering.
“Oh come on, Ismail, you just have to pick something that interests you. There’s gotta be something,” Fatima insisted, her long, silver-ringed fingers stroking the air, punctuating her words. She had pulled off her wool sweater and wore only a thin T-shirt with the confusing slogan “what part of no don’t you understand?” Even though she was small-chested, he could tell she wasn’t wearing a bra and this knowledge unsettled him. He was regretting the decision to reclaim the chair he’d chosen at the very first class, the one next to hers.
“I don’t know. Maybe that’s the problem. Nothing much of interest comes to mind.”
“But you said you wanted to write about your daughter. What about that? Tell me about her.”
Ismail looked away, his pulse quickening. He checked the clock, hoping that the “in-class exercise” time was almost over. Unfortunately, James Busbridge had only left the room a few minutes ago, giving his class a full half-hour to discuss story ideas with a classmate.
“I’ve decided against that topic,” Ismail said quietly. “I can’t write about her after all.” He sniffed, rifled through the pages of his notebook and looked away. Fatima stared at him pensively, her lips pursed, unspoken words forming on their edges. He filled the brief silence before she could. “It’s for personal reasons. And since I can’t find a new topic, I might as well quit this class,” he said resolutely, unbuttoning his shirt down to the middle of his chest and fanning himself with his papers. He had an undershirt on underneath, but its neckline plunged low and he felt self-conscious exposing himself. “My goodness it’s warm … perhaps I should just leave now. James was clear that we each had to write something and I clearly cannot do that.”
“Hey! Hold up! You can’t quit. Of course you can write. Everyone can write. Come on,” she said, lowering her voice to a near-whisper, “we’re the only people of colour in this class. I need you here,” she said, her thick eyebrows raised as high as she could push them. Ismail looked around the room, scanning the faces of the other students, registering their skin colour for the first time. He nodded to her, acknowledged the class demographics, but was noncommittal about her need for him to stay.
“Hey,” she said, before Ismail could question her sentiments, “here’s an idea. Start with something you know, like James said. Or create a character based on someone you know or have been curious about,” she said earnestly, stroking her chin. Ismail studied the column of piercings that traced their way up her left ear. She frowned, and he tried to refocus.
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