Once More with Feeling

by Méira Cook

  Who are we and what are our dreams?

  The rabbi glared, shook his fist at Shapiro. The wind parted his beard in the middle, the two halves blowing over his shoulders like a break in the weather, like a frothing stream diverted from its course, like the veil of longing that hangs between the world’s riches and man’s hapless desire for them. In a flash that was like resemblance glancing off a mirror, Shapiro recognized him for the third time. He was neither Rabbi Zalman nor his pal, the kidnapper. Instead he stood there roaring, an Old Testament patriarch, a reluctant messiah, thumping his fists against indignity in this fifty-cents-a-call world.

  Scalded, Shapiro cried out. A single word. The word sounded like a measure of distance but it was simply a measure of relationship. Father — the distance between an only son and his responsibility.

  Half sobbing, Shapiro covered his face with his hands and began to rock back and forth, chanting his prayers for the dead.

  Spring

  Three

  The Mission

  Down at the Mission folks were idling on the sidewalk, smoking and waiting for the metal shutters at the kitchen counter to clatter up so that lunch could finally be served. Folks was what Miss Leonard called the men spinning on their worn-down rubber heels in the weak iodine sunlight of early spring. Miss Leonard volunteered all her free time to the Mission and consequently had a proprietary attitude. She called everyone folks: the old-timers sipping coffee and playing checkers in the dining room, the born-agains who came for breakfast and stayed for Christ, the teenage boys with their wire-hanger shoulder blades angling through their “Born to Rock” T-shirts.

  Sometimes a woman would sidle or shuffle or strut into the Mission, her gait keeping pace with her disposition, her mood the coin tosses of bravado or despondency that saw her through her days. Singly, or in spindly little groups, the women would wait in line at the lunch counter, their hunger for food or companionship rendering them bold. And they were folks, too.

  Five or six men were idling outside the Mission when Annunciata arrived, a thin brown girl clutching at the balloon-string of her occasional buoyancy. The snow had finally rotted away, winter rushing through the gutters and gurgling down the drains. A couple of the men were smoking, coaxing a last puff from their burnt-down cigarettes, holding each breath until their eyes bulged. The Mission opened its doors to the city’s jobless, the street people, the panhandlers, the squeegee kids, the homeless ones, although once, when she’d wondered aloud at these poor doorstep ghosts, Senior Admin had corrected her.

  “We don’t say homeless here, Anna. We say persons experiencing homelessness.” Senior Admin was a stocky girl with a permanent furrow above her brow. A little asterisk in the arid homelessness of her face, although what it bore witness to, Annunciata couldn’t exactly say.

  Experiencing homelessness was meant to convey the temporariness of the condition, the vagrant hope that poverty was merely a refugee camp on the way to permanent citizenship. A waystation.

  “They’re just folks who’ve fallen between the cracks,” Miss Leonard would say.

  “Or gotten hooked on crack,” Lolleen Magary would add, always the thorn in Miss Leonard’s corseted side.

  “Morning, Isaac, Donny, Bodo,” Annunciata called, stepping through the men who obligingly allowed her passage, sucking back their smoke and paddling at the air in front of them. “Morning, Nachos and Mr. Wilson.” Weary of being told what not to call the Mission people, Annunciata had decided to learn as many names as she could and use them accordingly.

  “Mornin’, Mr.… Um.” His name wasn’t really Um but the old fellow had been uncooperative when asked, and Mr. Um was the best she could do. Annunciata thought that perhaps he was secretive about his name because it was the only thing he owned. On the other hand, maybe he’d just forgotten it — drink did that to a fellow, and crack, and the dog-eyed loneliness that eats its own paws. Rain or shine he always wore an oversize duffle coat. His eyes were yellowish and his few remaining teeth were grey. He never smiled and seldom spoke, but when he was hungry he rapped out “a shave and a shoeshine” on the metal shutters of the kitchen window, and when he was feeling sprightly he did a soft shoe shuffle in the dust.

  Annunciata stopped to watch and applaud. “Bravo!” Mr. Um made jazz hands and blew her a kiss. He had a heavy, stumbling gait but a perfect pitch for imaginary music. “Nice weather we’re having,” she replied.

  An early thaw had cruelly widened the distance between the end of the snows and the beginning of the rains, and the city was a horrifying dust bowl of migraine-inducing winds, mould-fed allergies, grass as mangy as a sick dog, and the return of all the repressed objects that always floated to the surface after the snow had melted. Fat sausage links of dog shit, predominantly. Water-heavy mittens and filthy socks rummaged from the bottom of winter’s grab-bag of a closet. Styrofoam takeout containers, plastic beer can rings, and Big Gulp cups drooling the thawing sludge of last year’s neon-coloured Slurpees into the earth. Cigarette butts and broken glass and bank statements peering through the windows of their red-stickered envelopes. Hello, sunshine! Good morning, spring!

  Whenever she lied — even social lies, even weather lies — Annunciata felt terrible. Now she stood with her head bowed, dabbling her toe in the dust. She was nothing, less than nothing. She was gum on the shoe of the world’s smallest flea. But Mr. Um was unfazed.

  “Pizza, chicken,” he confided. Something like that. At least she thought he said “pizza,” and then some other kind of food. Possibly chicken. It was going on ten and she had to hustle to report for kitchen duty. So did.

  “Heavens, child, I’m glad we’re not waiting for you to make any big announcements,” cried Miss Leonard when Annunciata came into the kitchen, tying an apron around her waist and tucking her hair beneath a hairnet. She meant the miracle of the Lord’s birth which, if she was an angel, Annunciata would have been in charge of. Sometimes Miss Leonard said, “Hallelujah, young lady!” and sometimes just, “Hurry, you!” but it was always to do with Annunciata being half a minute behindhand and two thousand years too late.

  It was a pity, this inclination to tardiness, because Annunciata had so much to do on any given day and knew from experience that the first five minutes of being late could never be retrieved. In fact those five minutes seemed to replicate, adding themselves to every errand, every chore, every drudgery so that by the end of the day she was likely a whole week behindhand.

  “Any faster and you’ll catch up to yesterday,” her papa would remark when she got home.

  What she had to do today after her shift at the Mission was take the bus to her mama’s cleaning job because Imee had woken up too dreary to get out of bed.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Mrs. Binder had said over the phone. “In fact, since I’m home these days, you can tell Imee to rest up for the next month.” Mrs. Binder was only being kind, Annunciata knew, or thought she was. But they couldn’t afford to lose her mama’s cleaning job money. Imee had worked for the Binder family since the boys were babies and her name was Imelda, she liked to say. It was the oldest boy who’d begun calling her mother Imee. Although Imee would never admit it, Annunciata thought that her mother had loved those two baby boys. Well, why not? Just because you love two little boys, not your own, doesn’t mean you don’t have room in your heart for the two little girls you started with. There was room in Imee’s heart for all the children in those days: boys, girls, sons, daughters, her own and another woman’s.

  The boys grew up but Imee still went round to clean for Mrs. Binder, who loved Imee and didn’t want to lose her. Perhaps she felt sorry for her or perhaps it was only that she, Mrs. B, as Imee called her, was a slovenly housekeeper. Imee had a terrible time trying to keep the house in the Heights clean, but Mrs. Binder was a good employer. She was both generous and careless, occasionally paying Imee for the same day twice. Imee called these windfalls her two-timing money but, t
o her shame, Annunciata always deposited the cheques in her mother’s savings account even though she knew it was wrong and that she was taking advantage of a grieving woman and would likely end up in hell.

  “Needs must,” Miss Leonard would often say, adding water to the lunch soup. Annunciata tried to think of the family income as a pot of this soup, so thin and watery to begin with that the addition of a couple of extra ladles of whatever was going would hardly make a difference.

  The kitchen was at a rolling boil by now, the regulars at their stations, and Chef Charlie sweating through his bandanna as he listened to Christian rock on the radio he always kept beside him on the counter. Why Chef Charlie listened to Christian rock was a story in itself but one that could be boiled down to his claim that it inspired him not to sin because the music of the saved was so goddamn awful. Long story short, Chef Charlie could still count the years of his sobriety on one hand and, as he told Annunciata, he didn’t want to take any chances by letting his other hand, together with the rest of his body (his words), settle into the hard-luck rhythms he truly loved. If Christian rock was a poor substitute for the blues, well the Mission folk knew all about poor substitutes, having made their peace with margarine and powdered milk and instant mash.

  “Am I right, Anna Banana?”

  “Darn tootin’, Chef Charlie.”

  He was the only one who could make her joke around, coax her small face to shine.

  “Which way, which way, which way is home?” he was singing now, sounding distracted as he rifled through the cutlery drawer.

  Annunciata began organizing the volunteers into an efficient serving line. Most were old hands, coming in early to chop vegetables for soup, toast bread cubes for croutons, and mix up batches of red sauce for poor man’s lasagna or lazy halloumi. The adjectives were misleading, though. In Annunciata’s opinion the lasagna was fit for a king and the halloumi was a time-consuming endeavour requiring nimble fingers and a tightrope disposition. Cabbage was a demanding mistress, the blanching and cooling and rolling of it. But there it was again: “poor man” and “lazy.” Angel for cake and devil for eggs, as her mama said. All the lying words made Annunciata feel hot and uneasy as if she were, once again, zipped into that ill-fitting parka, that immigrant coat of lapsed languages.

  “English, she is a bitch,” her papa always said. It was one of the few phrases he’d learned in twenty years of reluctant citizenship, and the others didn’t bear repeating.

  Beyond the step-and-fetch-it of her shopping, cleaning, cooking life, Annunciata’s mama hadn’t even bothered to make the bitch’s acquaintance, although she was charmed by the bizzaro jauntiness of idioms, every last one of which, she maintained, meant the opposite of what it set out to prove. “Because pie isn’t easy, eh, and mice aren’t quiet and babies — ho, babies never sleep.”

  Her mama knew all about babies, that was for damn sure. Because babies were what Annunciata and her sister, Maria, had been when they arrived in this country. They had been “babes in arms.” Their parents had carried them off the plane in a winter blizzard, the whole flapping prairie as blank as the fluttering pages of this new country. Her parents still spoke to one another in Tagalog, their looted mother tongue. It had become a language of curses and lullabies, of blessings and terrible haphazard losses. And although Annunciata and her sister had once bobbed about in the amniotic fluid of this language, they had made it a matter of some urgency to claim ignorance and, by elementary school, had achieved it.

  Annunciata was still messing about with the volunteers because, along with the regulars who knew the score, there were the usual shiny do-gooders who had to be ushered into place, reminded to wear hairnets and to wash, wash, wash their hands. Herding cats!

  “Our friends in Christ,” was what Chef Charlie called the Mission people who gathered behind the metal shutters that divided the kitchen from the dining hall. Men and women were already lining up at the food window, two and three deep, crowding into the Mission or hurrying down the street, bandy-legged in their haste.

  “No hair in the soup for our friends in Christ,” Chef Charlie yelled, slamming an enormous jar of sweet pickle and garlic onto the counter. Most of the friends in Christ loved sweet pickle to distraction. They stirred it into their hambone pea soup, they spread it thickly onto their Co-op buns, and, God help them, they arranged clumps of sweet pickle like a corsage upon the pastel frosting of the slab cake that Miss Leonard was, even now, apportioning. The cake, along with a platter of butter tarts and a plate of iced fancies, had been donated by Glory Funeral Home. When a family overestimated the number of their mourners or the appetites of their guests, the Mission was the happy beneficiary and Reverend Tremblay, bless his heart, was diligent about delivering the funeral baked meats.

  Miss Leonard was humming like a generator as she cut the cake into precise squares. Geometry was her sanctuary when it came to the Levitican abomination of different foods piled on the same plate: colours and odours and courses all jumbled together and devil take the hindermost. Annunciata herself hated the way that the bowl of soup inevitably slopped over, soaking dinner rolls and turning dessert squares into vegetable glop. But what could they do? Every weekend the Mission welcomed hundreds of customers but there were only so many dinner plates to go around.

  “It all ends up in the same place anyways,” Lolleen Magary said. Lolleen had several bones to pick with Miss Leonard: there were the ones in her hambone soup, and then there was the soup itself, which Miss Leonard had boasted was a family recipe. An heirloom, no less. But Lolleen insisted that she’d seen just such a recipe reproduced in the cookery column of a local paper — Aunt Betsy’s Country Recipes — had Miss Leonard heard of it? This was a sneaky, underhanded jab since surely Lolleen Magary knew that Miss Leonard worked at the Riverview News and had for nigh on thirty years. Thirty years was longer than most folks’ marriages, Miss Leonard often said, Lolleen’s bitterly acrimonious divorce after thirty-two years notwithstanding.

  Notwithstanding what? Lolleen snapped. And by the way had Miss Leonard heard of that cookery column she was talking about? No, Miss Leonard replied serenely, she had not.

  Truth be known, Lolleen Magary had more than a couple of bones to pick with her supervisor. A whole turkey carcass of bones, more likely, an articulated dinosaur skeleton of bones. But she contented herself with returning to her initial point: “It all ends up in the same place anyways,” she said. “And it looks even worse when it gets there.” This was true if a little vulgar, but Lolleen wasn’t allowed to say “Beggars can’t be choosers” anymore.

  “Customers” was what Lolleen now called the men and women on the other side of the metal shutter.

  “Customers, eh?” Miss Leonard scoffed. “So they have the right to complain and demand better service and threaten to take their business elsewhere, do they?”

  “Couldn’t have said it better myself,” said Lolleen, who clearly believed she could have said it better than Miss Leonard, could indeed say anything better than Miss Leonard, who had seniority and was her sworn enemy and also a dried-up old prune that no amount of soaking could plump up. The truth was that everyone complained, everyone demanded better service. Giving stuff away — food, clothing, the proverbial fish — was the shortest route to whatever the opposite of gratitude was, which in Lolleen’s book included a whole chapter on complaints. Teach a man to fish and he’ll only develop a hankering for rump steak, she was fond of observing.

  In this cynical observation, Lolleen was not far wrong. It was the Saturday before Easter Sunday and the kitchen had been barraged all week with anxious questions regarding Sunday’s lunch menu. Chicken or ham? What kind of soup? More than a single helping of dessert for once? The building across the street, vacant for some time after Sturgeon Investments folded, had recently been bought by the Salvation Army, which had moved in and set up shop. The rumour was that they were going to serve turkey on Easter Sunday. Turkey and
all the trimmings! It was an unseasonal offering but undoubtedly a competitive one.

  “Whoa, girls!” said Chef Charlie, as always a day late and a dollar short.

  “Girls, are we?” said Lolleen. “Well, I guess everyone’s got to be called something. They’re customers and we’re girls and you’re a no-good line cook.” She knew she shouldn’t bait Chef Charlie but Lolleen was snappish and sour at being called a girl by a man with no sense of flirtation.

  “Heh, I’m a proud indigenous warrior,” Chef Charlie said. He brandished his chopping knife to demonstrate his fierceness and winked at Annunciata. Chin up, Anna Banana! Someone on the other side banged at the rolled metal shutters and a trip line of laughter caught and rippled through the dining hall.

  “Our friends in Christ are hungry,” Annunciata said as loudly as she could. The odd little phrase was a gift to Chef Charlie, whose feelings, she feared, had been hurt.

  “Whoops! Let’s not keep our friends in Christ waiting, people,” said Chef Charlie, turning off his radio and looking Annunciata in the eye, although this time he neither smiled nor winked. Oh, did he think that she, too, was baiting him? What was the matter with everybody? But even as her armpits prickled with mortification, she knew that nothing had changed. Every Saturday it was the same — Miss Leonard and Lolleen Magary scrapping daintily, Chef Charlie throwing his sharp-edged words this way and that, although he always managed to sheath them in the butcher’s block of his sturdy good humour.

  As for the volunteers, they remained oblivious to everything but the satisfying slow burn of their charitable fellowship. There was a tongue-in-groove neatness to the way their selflessness meshed with their self-regard. They had come to do good and were consequently obliged by their own goodness.