Mistakes to Run With

by Yasuko Thanh

  On days when people flung pennies into my guitar case, or asked me to make change, I came home dejected. I’d been trying to publish my work, and ever since moving in with Phillip I’d been sending off stories about my travels in Oaxaca. Some days I couldn’t even afford the postage for submissions to literary magazines.

  I never paid for items I could get for free. I picked a sweater out of the garbage in the bathroom of a nearby drop-in centre where I took my hot showers. I knew what time of day to find the biggest cigarette butts outside the Sinclair Centre office tower, fresh, half-smoked specimens. On a special day I bought cheap Drum tobacco, but I had to be careful with it because people on the street (like me) liked to bum smokes and would take my pouch and roll a cigarette thicker than my thumb if I let them. Once a week I’d buy a single tailor-made cigarette from a convenience store on Hastings Street, the same one that sold individual tea bags for a nickel.

  I met the scrap-metal collectors with their shopping carts, the guy who sold stolen cheese from Safeway, the guy who offered me a sip of his Aqua Velva. I met a man who found people parking spots for a couple of bucks. If that didn’t pan out he invented poems, on the spot, for any amount of spare change. His name was Sean and he liked that I was a writer. He was the son of a diplomat, had been raised in Latin America, and could sell drugs in Spanish. He was the kind of guy who worked every angle, even when he was drunk or high. Sean hustled, he sold stolen rollerblades, and—unlike the alcoholics and the dumpster divers, the people who walked to the twenty-four-hour convenience store to buy a weevil-ridden package of instant noodles in their pyjamas, who stepped like zombies into the street without looking right or left, impervious to ambulance sirens—he wasn’t down here because life had happened to him. Neither was I. We watched a man eating ice cream with his fingers out of a pail he’d salvaged from a dumpster and a woman hawking, for thirty-five cents, a tailor-made smoke with lipstick on the filter. No, we weren’t like them.

  I was proud of myself one day after having earned sixty dollars, twenty of them American, given to me by a rich guy from Miami for singing a song in Spanish. I’d been bragging about it, improving the story with each telling. Saying how the Downtown Eastside had taken me on as a sort of apprentice.

  I’d been up to the library already, stolen the toilet paper we needed. When it began to rain tourists scrambled into shops and locals found dry spaces in which to shelter. I stared at the falling drops. Sean, his cigarette burning in his hand, watched them too. Even the clerk from the tourist store behind us left the register to stand in the doorway and look out. It was as if the cloth sheets draping the world had slipped to crash around our feet, collecting and pooling. The drops played and tumbled and splashed on my boots where they shone; the world was, for now, clean and simple. Soon the streets were flowing. The rain landed on my fingers, calloused from playing songs I didn’t know all the words to.

  * * *

  —

  Phillip was working on a portrait. A commission. In exchange for an oil painting of his daughter, the landlord would knock off our back rent. He was a good landlord who appreciated that we weren’t junkies or running an after-hours, and who fancied himself a patron of the arts. Phillip had started blocking in her image, a young woman posing before a fireplace, but had then painted over the entire canvas. I lost count of how many times he did this before turning the painting to the wall, where it had had been facing for days.

  * * *

  —

  I wrote as if in competition with Phillip. I finished what I was calling a novel; then, inexplicably, I took it and cut it into pieces, spreading them out from one corner of our vast warehouse studio to the other. As if I could repair my fractures, I taped them back together again in another order. Then another. Nothing satisfied me. I threw sections away. Penned new sections. Forced Phillip to live encircled by slices of paper that lifted from the floor and floated in mid-air every time the heavy door to the studio opened or closed. I thought I was trying to prove that I was as good an artist as Phillip. Yet the more I worked on this “novel,” the more I found myself thinking about the past.

  I wrote: “The Yellow Cab rolled past the house with a pavement square for a front yard and stopped in front of the one with the bug-eaten morning glory vines, the one where a Rottweiler was pushing his nose through the living room blinds.” The new material was old material filtered through the person I was trying to become.

  The next day it dawned on me. To be whole, I needed to integrate whoever I’d been, even Michelle, into who I was now.

  Maybe the answer lay with Avery.

  In reality, I was rationalising the draw my old life still had, the good a part of the bad, impossible to separate.

  I began to see him a few times a week. He was running another grow op now and suggested I trim his crop for twenty-five dollars an hour.

  * * *

  —

  “Honk your horn,” I told the cab driver when we arrived. He eyed me in the rear-view mirror. Two blasts. Wah-wah, like an injured goose.

  Avery cracked the door open and peered outside. Even from this distance I could see that his face was bathed in sweat. I motioned to him. He shoved the door closed and a few seconds later pulled it back open, kneeing the dog in the chest to keep her down. He had on a tie-dyed undershirt and red nylon shorts, a plastic shower cap, opaque from grease, hiding his long hair.

  Avery came to the driver’s-side window in his bare feet. His jaw was tight and he was grinding his teeth. “How much?” he said, having trouble speaking. This always happened when he got high.

  “Twenty-two fifty.”

  Avery lowered his head to read the meter. I opened the door of the cab and stepped into garish sunshine, waiting while Avery handed the driver the fifty-dollar bill folded up in his hand. He collected the change in his open palm, even the coins. I wondered about that—whether he was broke, and how broke that might be—but didn’t say anything. I followed him up the stairs as the cab drove away.

  “Be a heat score, then, will you?” Avery said, opening the door. “What did you do that for?”

  He meant the horn. “Sorry,” I said. “Take a pill. I won’t do it again.”

  He stared at me, weighing whether to curse me out, as if I’d gotten his neighbours’ attention to do whatever his paranoid mind had conjured up.

  I ignored him and closed the door behind us as his new dog, a white pit bull not yet two years old, rushed about our feet. I reached for his pack of Du Mauriers on the kitchen counter and rummaged under restaurant flyers for a book of matches.

  “Get!” Avery said to the dog. He pointed with his finger. “Go lie down.” She slicked her ears back, tucked her tail between her legs, and, never taking her eyes off Avery, slunk through the doorway to the living room, where she lay down next to the couch.

  I began opening drawers. “Aren’t there any matches around here?”

  “Basement.” He headed for the door leading to the unfinished space where the plants grew. “You coming?”

  The stairs were steep, uncarpeted plywood. They creaked with each footstep.

  “I might be driving,” Avery said, palming the wall as though it was holding him up.

  “What’s that?”

  “Next week. A load to Edmonton. Five G’s.”

  “Cool…That’d be good, eh?”

  A bare bulb illuminated three kitchen chairs placed in a triangle around a pile of untrimmed bud on newspaper, the edges of the room in shadow. The smell of pot, from the pile on the floor and from the plants that grew on the other side of the flimsy divider, was overpowering.

  I picked up a branch and a pair of scissors. “So, you broke? You got money to pay me?”

  More pot was laid out to dry on large window screens raised up on bricks.

  “I’ll have your money soon,” he said.

  I picked up another willowy branch with smaller branches that shot off in all directions. I waved it, examining buds no bigger than my thumb. It was a shit cr
op.

  Avery held small silver scissors from a store in Chinatown up to the light. He put them down. “I’m going to have a hit.” He bent over a candle I hadn’t noticed, hidden by the pile of bud closest to him. Above the divider he’d scrawled Pimp Daddy in black magic marker on an exposed two-by-four. Avery had hidden his crack pipe, a glass straight shooter, in the wall frame where Avery + Darcy was written. His new girlfriend. Holding his straight shooter in one hand, he ripped two matches from the cardboard pack with the other, then leaned over the tea light and held their sulphur heads over the flame until they flared. My palms began to sweat at the sound, the sizzle, the sweet smell.

  He took a hit and passed me the pipe, still smoking; I pursed my lips and sucked while he lit new matches for me. Like an old married couple, we predicted and then completed each other’s movements. He raised the matches to reheat the remaining shard of crack as I lifted my head to the pipe and began inhaling, nectar swirling into my lungs.

  “Slower, slower,” he said.

  I’d heard of escaped convicts sucking air through bamboo straws to remain hidden beneath the black, stinking, brackish water of swamps. I sucked more slowly, the way they must have, drawing enough air to live, not enough to be noticed.

  “That’s it. Keep going.” When the matches burned out he threw them to the floor; I nodded and he lit two more. My shoulders lifted with the effort of sucking. Even in my seat I felt like I was standing on my tiptoes. When my lungs were full I pulled the pipe from my mouth, dead, no smoke, crack gone. Good hit. Nothing left in the pipe. I held my breath for as long as I could, and when my lungs verged on exploding I curled my finger toward him, a smile spreading on my lips. He lowered his head and placed his lips on mine. In a large rush, dizzy, I exhaled the smoke into his mouth. Then I sat back in my chair, my ears ringing, dazed. When Avery exhaled fifteen seconds later the smoke streaming from his mouth was strong enough to reach across the room.

  “That was a good one,” he said.

  “Yeah, holy, that was a good one.”

  For the next hour and a half we alternated between the basement and the living room, going upstairs to listen to music, going downstairs when we needed another hit, match flame honeying down the crack on a bed of ash, scorched spoons on the coffee table, thin columns of smoke.

  Mountain of Knives

  The inventory of my life so far included one poem in a Belgian literary magazine, a handful of newspaper articles, no toaster, no winter coat, no money. I’d written a travel piece about Belize, an op-ed piece about discrimination against interracial couples, and a personal essay about losing my Christian faith. The Vancouver Sun newspaper had an arts editor who liked my work. For every four articles painstakingly typed on Phillip’s manual machine, he took one. And paid me.

  I was high but coming down, which may have accounted for why I was marching in exasperation across the intersection toward home, wanting to get to the studio and shut the door behind me as fast as I could. Everyone looked crazy. I wondered if those pushing shopping carts teetering with Franciscan Sisters blankets and sick dogs and recyclable bottles and slabs of greasy cardboard had lost part of their mind on purpose, to justify the search, or in all their muttering insanity their minds had snapped. I wasn’t one of them. I tried to walk with a sense of pride, keeping my things-on-the-go self-image, past the emaciated hookers who worked outside our front door, dealers dealing, junkies shooting up with puddle water, ambulances reviving overdoses. From the outside I looked like anyone with a habit. But I was a writer, living with an artist. What did people know about that?

  * * *

  —

  I’d had a few pregnancy scares in Zipolite, when my period came late or not at all. On my return to Canada, not having had a period in three months, I felt sure Kyle’s baby was growing inside me. Before I got the chance to take a test my period came fast and hard, making me wonder: Was this a miscarriage?

  I visited my parents on the heels of this “loss.” My German grandmother as well as an aunt and uncle had chosen to visit my mother during their vacation that year. Prompted by their arrival, I caught a ferry boat over. Out in the sunshine on my parents’ deck, surrounded by potted flowers buzzing with bees, I said to my mother, “Well, I’m twenty-six years old. That means I have a couple good years left to get pregnant, right? I want kids. Within the next year or two, I’ll find someone.” I envisioned meeting my life partner. “After that, my chances of having a Down’s baby go way up, don’t they?”

  Afraid of hurting my feelings, my mother refrained from pointing out my astounding naïveté, the impulsivity of my plan.

  Within what I thought of as my perfect time frame, I became pregnant in the fall of that year.

  My doctor confirmed the results. Then he hesitated, looking down at his clipboard. “Is this a happy occasion?”

  I said yes.

  “Well, in that case, mazel tov.”

  In the studio, cross-legged on the futon and surrounded by the detritus of our creative endeavours, I gave Phillip the news. Then I said that not keeping it would be tantamount to asking myself in the years to come, “Which one of our babies did we kill?”

  I used the words “our” and “we” when I meant “mine” and “I.”

  I wanted to be a mother. Phillip’s lack of any memorable response seemed agreement enough.

  My driving motivation could be distilled thusly: “The writer must learn to neither evade nor waste any personal experience.”

  It was a quote I’d read and misunderstood as one should selfishly pursue all life had to offer—and now, specifically, that I should have a child. I’d be able to write from a richer self, from the perspective of a mother. The only way to do that properly was to give birth. Only the real thing could satisfy true writerly curiosity.

  I gave no thought to whether my life would change, my decision on par with buying a new pair of shoes that I could tuck away in the closet at will.

  In other words, having a child was simply adding to my life.

  When I told the welfare office they increased my stipend so that I could afford the necessary vitamins and supplements. I quit drinking, continued smoking, and I kept on busking, wondering often what the tiny baby in my gut thought of my music. Was it comforting? Or did it tumble and toss them in their amniotic bath?

  I was improving my art. No way would I become like so many other women who’d tell their children, “I used to be a writer.” Painter, dancer, photographer, brain surgeon. “Then you came along and I had to give it all up.”

  Patti, my writer friend, had suffered at the hands of such a mother.

  Instead I’d become the kind of mother my Australian co-worker had had. She’d been raised on the road in third-world countries, following a mother who bought trinkets to flip for a profit, until the endless shifting of towns became home, movement as home.

  I visited the doctor regularly.

  I wasn’t gaining much weight, but I was five foot two, half Vietnamese. Of course my baby would be small.

  One evening a friend named Junko and her husband asked Phillip and me when we were going to have a baby.

  “Well, actually,” Phillip said, “in August.”

  “August?”

  Their joy and excitement embarrassed me.

  “Are you ready?” they asked. Ready for the imminent, lasting turn in my life. And yet I still believed parenthood meant that only the writing would change.

  My foolishness staggers me. Had I learned nothing about responsibility back when I volunteered at the hospital for handicapped children? If I had an inkling of what parenthood entailed, I’d blocked it out.

  All that mattered now was that I was the smartest writer, the smartest artist on earth, for recognizing and capitalizing on such a rich muse. If someone had asked whether I’d like to be in the middle of the ocean surrounded by sharks I’d have said yes, to have the experience to draw on. Cultivate the most unusual experiences you can because what surrounds you shapes you, and what sha
pes you shapes your words. How else to deepen your voice, your scope?

  On the other hand, had I not been so naive, I wouldn’t have the two children I have today. Fast-forward five years to my second pregnancy. By now I knew that motherhood was work, but was still naive enough to believe Phillip when he said this second baby was all about him. “One child to replace each of us,” he said, talking about posterity. “All you have to do is give birth. Then hand the baby over, I’ll do everything.”

  * * *

  —

  Rewind. Phillip’s mother, Christine, ran a three-room B&B on Mayne Island, one of the Gulf Islands situated between Vancouver Island to the west and mainland British Columbia to the east. Mayne Island was a verdant paradise populated by wealthy weekenders, aging hippies, loggers, crab fishermen, and young families. During the week Phillip’s father worked on the mainland, living in a small apartment with his mother in White Rock.

  When we arrived on the island at Christmastime, the swelling around Christine’s eyes, her belly stretching her waistband, worried me. She didn’t look as though she was dying, but her eyes and mouth and nose had rearranged themselves in a way that couldn’t be attributed to weariness or frustration. She stuffed the Christmas turkey and stirred the gravy, her eyes bulging, her hands as puffy as balloons.

  I wasn’t yet used to this family, their silences, their ability to ignore impending doom with a stiff upper lip and another pint, so I wasn’t about to shriek “Why haven’t you seen a doctor?” I did ask Christine if she was in pain. She said it didn’t hurt, that “I just look like I’m pregnant.” She forced a laugh.

  We hadn’t told her I was pregnant. Not yet. I’d only known for a few days myself. At the doctor’s office he’d paused before asking me to fill out a questionnaire that asked how much I smoked, how often I drank, how many alcoholic beverages before I felt drunk? Once he’d reviewed my answers he added me to the high-risk mothers list, meaning I’d have the pleasure of delivering in British Columbia’s best facility, the Women’s Hospital. At the time, I thought I owed the privilege to being short-statured.