The Beggar's Garden (11 page)

He took her to a Portuguese place on Commercial Drive, where he swatted everyone on the back and belted every tongue-rolling syllable of every tune the discordant band managed. He stained his teeth lilac with a vast quantity of red wine then took her in his taxi on a tour of the city, relating stories mostly about different buildings, pointing with crooked fingers as he drove.

“You know more about this city than I do, and I grew up here,” she said, watching a man furiously wave his briefcase at them as they pulled away from a stoplight.

“I must,” he said, patting the dash like a stallion's flank. “It's this job to.”

She loved the way he attributed personalities to neighbourhoods: this one was cruel, that one depressed, this one tipped
better, that one was vain. Even her own—across the inlet, where her father's house stood, the same house she'd slept in each night of her life so far—he called “ungrateful,” and at this she smirked. The very next thing he said was he wanted sons or daughters, it didn't matter which, and though she loathed her large gums, she showed them. Sitting at her delaminating kitchen table, Bernice hated to think what word he'd use to describe her neighbourhood if they were to drive through it in his taxi today.

“Goddamnit!” barked a voice outside and Bernice jumped, banging her knee on the table, rattling her spoons. She went to the window to see a soiled orange velour chesterfield balanced atop a shopping cart pushed by a wiry, emaciated man, grinding down the alley. The scene reminded her of ants she'd once seen on a nature program. She turned to find the awfully vigorous teenaged faces of her nieces and grandnieces magnetized to her fridge. To them, Bernice was famous for the Christmas presents she mailed each year, though the girls didn't know their gifts were always second-hand. Could she really move to this coach house? Leave her shop and her apartment behind like the donors did the boxes of their unwanted things? She had no friends to speak of. Most of the shopgirls she knew from Woodward's were either long dead or had cashed in on skyrocketing house prices and moved to more affordable cities like Kelowna to spend their money on their grandchildren and strict regimens of all-inclusive cruises.

Why
have
you stayed so long? she thought while commencing to dust her collection, more for something to do than anything. She began to suspect that a great part of her life had been expended waiting for something to happen, though she couldn't say what that something was. She'd given up fantasies of Gus's
return years ago, thinking of him only when hanging clothes he would have worn, or happening upon his initials embroidered in the cuffs of a donated Oxford shirt. Neither did she have illusions of how much actual good her thrift shop did for the neighbourhood. Sure, it had achieved some modest benefits. A few people, with her help, had got on their feet and left, leaving being the only way to survive a slum, because there were no jobs, and to be offered drugs every ten paces or beaten near dead for your groceries was no existence for anyone. Duster in hand, she arrived at the spoon rack and saw only two empty slots remained.

Later, as she got ready for bed, she half-heartedly imagined melting all her spoons down and buying a plane ticket to Portugal, or maybe just Winnipeg, not to find Gus, but a man like him, a better one. Tucking herself in, she wondered if they had slums in Portugal and decided to keep her eye out for donated books on the subject, and also on the price of silver.

Karla, a dedicated thrift-store volunteer, had died a week ago and today was the funeral. It was held outside the city, so Bernice took the bus. After three transfers she stepped from the vehicle's hissing doors and asked a boy in a pristine white tracksuit lazing on a bicycle with gold-plated rims where the church was. He flicked his chin grimly at what looked to Bernice like a mall at the centre of a monstrous parking lot, so vast it reminded her of the sweeping landscape paintings often donated to the store, the ones that never sold because, she figured, they amplified people's loneliness. “That's a church?” she said.

“No doubt,” he said. She now saw how the gold was just paint and had bled from the rims to the tire. He also had a skid of grease on his calf where it had met the chain.

Bernice thanked him and set out across the lot.

She'd always wondered if Karla was a prostitute. There was a hardness to her, a kind of cheerful vacancy, but she'd never taken for herself any of the more tartish clothes that Bernice made sure to throw away rather than give to the prostitutes who came in flocks and bought anything scanty and headlight-catching. Karla began as an occasional weekend volunteer until Bernice had offered her a regular position after she'd been impressed with her hard work. In fact, Bernice had to order her to take smoke breaks or she'd work right through them, get antsy and start dropping breakables. But what Karla did set aside for herself were children's toys, anything that was handmade or unique. The room she lived in must have been brimming with toys. Karla had said once that she'd had a son taken from her by family services. He lived in foster care in a town called Merritt, and when Bernice asked if she'd ever thought of visiting, Karla shook her head and went for a smoke in the alley. She'd died of ovarian cancer and Bernice couldn't help but picture the disease, in a kind of science filmstrip, X-ray view, as the accumulate of all those nasty men taking root in her, setting up shop, and Bernice shuddered as she traversed the empty spaces of the lot.

There were a handful of new cars huddled around the church. Conifers wrapped in burlap for winter stood around its brown, rectangular lawn.

“Karla made some bad decisions,” her father began in his eulogy. “We all have choices in our lives, free will and the like, but I can feel she's happier now, at peace.”

To say someone was more content in death made Bernice's scalp prickle. She drove her knees together until they shook. She doubted Karla was sprawled on a chaise-lounge-shaped cloud having a chuckle at how things had shaken out for her, prostitute or no.

In their tearful speeches mostly about themselves, the family mentioned little of her life but their own respective roles in her courageous battle with addiction, as if she'd sprung from her mother's womb already decided on the perfect way to wreck her life.

“Karla was in my employ,” she said after the ceremony to the mother, whose nose hooked in the same not unattractive way Karla's had.

“She had a job?”

“A volunteer job.”

“Umhmm.”

Bernice raked her mind for something more to tell her, this parent who should already know everything, but in truth they'd discussed their lives as much as she and Tuan had.

Bernice watched her hug the other mourners—lightly, so as not to disturb each other's hairdo, her black shawl gently shimmering—and pictured this mother feeding baby Karla, rocking her. She marvelled at the money spent on things like piano lessons and figure skates, the time teachers spent after class unpaid to detangle in her mind the multiplication of fractions. And with all that went into the girl, that this sad display would stand as the summation of her time here crushed Bernice's heart like a baby bird.

Bernice went to the pencil-lead-coloured coffin and pulled from her purse a wooden caterpillar that wobbled when pulled by
its string. She set the toy beside her in the white satin interior. Karla had a ponytail—a style she'd never worn—and her face was puffy and spatulaed with makeup.

On her way out, Bernice turned and saw her father pick the caterpillar from her coffin and place it on a table. Then he and one of the funeral staff electric-screwdrivered the box shut, the tiny motor mewling painfully.

She couldn't find the bus stop, and she wondered if it might have been relocated during the funeral. The sun crinkled her eyes as she walked to another parking lot—this time, she gathered from the nearly full lot, that of a real mall. She went inside to seek directions.

She entered through a store where everything was supposed to cost a dollar. Walking the cluttered aisles with not a salesperson in evidence, she recalled the scoldings Carol would dole out if a customer went thirty seconds in the shoe department without a warm greeting. The dollar store was organized with no apparent logic and the items were all tawdry bits of plastic, a fact the sign-age and overall design of the store seemed to celebrate. Woodward's had had dollar-forty-nine days each Tuesday. They drew lineups down the block, but people still got good value for their money, and the products were made to last. She stopped in an aisle of towering stacks of plastic containers.

She wondered if Gus shopped in stores like these now. He and the owner of the green dress, or the owner of some other dress. She decided he probably did. The smell of plastic was making her
light-headed. Finally, she was approached by an employee, who Bernice asked to escort her into the mall itself, where she sat on a bench. After a short rest, she located a pay phone in a dingy hallway that led to the janitorial area. She had to ask a custodian where she was before phoning for a taxi that would cost more than the thrift store made in a week.

The next morning, a pumpkin-faced man wandered in the door, pants soaked with urine—his own, Bernice hoped.

“Oh, Charlie,” she said, pulling her lips taut, guiding him to the washroom beside the overflowing storeroom. “Nothing I haven't seen before,” she said, as she peeled away his shirt, its tails soaked and sour, and saw the man's pink blotchy flesh hung in pouches as if melting from him. Yanking off his pants, she discovered on his shins numerous weeping sores that someone had bandaged long ago, possibly months. She tutted at the red streaks that leapt toward his groin.

“You see these?” she said, tracing one with her fingernail.

Charlie looked down at his lower half incredulously as though for the first time in a year.

“You want to lose your legs, you old goat?”

Charlie shrugged and placed his hand on her back. A pleasant sensation unrolled from where his hand pressed, akin to tickling, but warmer. She let it mix into her blood a moment, recalling how comfortably Gus fit beneath her chin when they hugged—a disparity she'd first found embarrassing but grew to adore—how they'd waited to be together until their honeymoon in Tofino,
where he rented from a fishmonger he knew a smelly cedar cabin smack dab in the middle of all that water and air, and how they sat on the gravelly beach drinking wine. “Here,” he said, sweeping his arm, exhaling as if at the end of a journey, “this sea faces the right way.”

Bernice stood abruptly and Charlie's hand swung limp to his lap. She snipped some gauze, re-dressed his shins and found him a new shirt and pair of pants, better brands and materials than she should have.

“Now you go straight to the hospital and get those legs looked at,” she said and Charlie grinned lavishly, opening his arms wide, teetering like a chopped-at tree. “Off you go,” she said and ushered him out.

His rancid pants and shirt she flung into the dumpster. She took the squat brown bottle of rice wine he'd forgotten and poured it down the drain, calling it payment for the new clothes. Her opinion, one she would never have spoken aloud, was that these people behaved mostly like little children—careless, impulsive, selfish. Perhaps no one had ever taught them to care for themselves, she had no idea. It was just that possessions didn't seem to matter to people anymore, not how they once did. She gave them nice warm coats, good-quality jeans and blouses and skirts, she gave them toasters and dishes, sometimes even furniture—all of which they lost, or ruined, or sold, or even just threw away. And they treated themselves no better than the things she gave them.

She'd always liked to think if she found something perfect enough for them they'd have to keep it, care for it and in doing so acquire a taste for caring for themselves. But when dealing with people like Charlie she feared there was something missing,
something essential they lacked, something that her thrift store could never provide.

On the rumbling bus home from the store that evening, Bernice tried to imagine the coach house, glittery lakeside sun dancing on the floor of her little room. She tried to select just one item in her collection she could part with, just one that wasn't necessary, but this left her feeling cruel. She remembered as a girl the horror of finding even one of her stuffed animals on the floor when she woke and the subsequent guilt at imagining it there the whole night, shivering, crying out, imploring in its silent stuffed-animal language how she, their only caretaker, could be so heartless. No, there was no part of her collection she could be rid of, no part that was less worthy. She decided to put the whole coach house question to rest.

She sat on the varnished pew in the teal Orlon skirt she used to wear to sell shoes. “When did you get so dowdy?” she'd said to herself in the mirror that morning before digging deeper into the recesses of her bedroom closet than she had in years.

Never much of a believer, she came to church partly for the singing and mostly for when the pastor referred them to a passage in the Bible. She loved to lick her fingertips, peel the thin pages, discover the numbered verse there waiting for her, right where it should be, charging her with a joy comparable to when she opened the store each morning.

“Blessed is he that considereth the poor: the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble,” the pastor began, his voice chalky
with feeling. “Fat chance of that,” Bernice muttered to herself, and dropped the burgundy King James back into the slot in the pew ahead. It'd been two weeks since her sister's phone call, and Bernice found herself unexpectedly bothered by the lapse. A few nights ago she dreamt that Charlton Heston as Moses from
The Ten Commandments
had pulled up out front of her shop in one of those new truck-style limousines she'd seen lately on the street, the ones the size of a school bus.

“This place is cursed,” he'd said, speaking as if he hated his teeth.