The Beggar's Garden (12 page)

In the way one does in dreams, she knew instantly he'd come to drive all the poor, wretched people to another place: a safe, fertile and hospitable land where they could prosper. She saw his tan robe protruding from the vehicle where he'd slammed it in the door.

“It's not so bad,” she said, just as hundreds of impoverished souls suddenly emerged from the alleys, teeming from the crack hotels and doorways, running or limping as fast as their rotting bodies could carry them. She watched them open the limo's countless doors and pile into the vehicle like a clown car in the circus.

Charlton flexed his beautiful face beneath his beard as he electrically raised the window.

“Don't,” Bernice said as the limo pulled away, people perched dangerously on the bumper and dog piled on the roof. She kicked off her pumps and chased them for a few blocks, pleading for Charlton to stop. It was no good, she would have told him if he'd slowed; these were no Israelites—they packed their masters with them, their horrid childhoods, their illnesses and deformities, their plagues, their bedbugs and lice, their rats, roaches
and unforgivable sins. And the drugs and drink wouldn't be far behind. Someone would bring those too. Or they'd make new drugs. She watched the car sail through a red light and woke to her cat kneading painfully on her chest.

“Who can make straight what he has made crooked?” the pastor said. Everyone stood to sing a hymn, and Bernice, finding dampness had painted her blouse to her back, sidestepped her way down the pew, past a group of women who each year knit hundreds of mittens for the poor. The same mittens that sat untouched in a box in her shop until finally she had Tuan toss them in the dumpster each April. Who the hell needs mittens anymore? Bernice thought, passing the women, blasted by their high, impassioned voices.

The sky cleared, a white midday light landed everywhere and for the first time in she couldn't say how long, Bernice decided to take a walk. She left a “Will Return” sign in the thrift-shop window and passed a few empty storefronts, their signs repainted hundreds of times, now just a soup of faint letters and graphics, the ghosts of failed enterprises emerging from beneath. She passed a window of exhausted pizza slices under a heat lamp; beyond them just a few packages of discount cigarettes were displayed behind a counter. The sign above the store read “Saveway” in red and white, a pathetic imitation of the grocery giant. Surely this would fool no one, she thought, then watched a soiled, twitching teenager disappear inside. She passed a place called Prime Time Chicken with a sandwich board out front that said,

“Leg: 53 cents,” and “Wing: 68 cents,” the numbers crossed out and written over at least twenty times. Bernice shuddered to think what might cause this price fluctuation.

She found herself approaching the corner of Hastings and Abbott streets, where the Woodward's building stood. She had read in the paper it was to be torn down, finally, to build some new type of apartments for young people. Just as well, she thought; it was of no use to anyone anymore, a whole city block standing empty, an eight-storey palace for pigeons and rats. And maybe that was all the neighbourhood ever really needed, she thought, more young people.

Now the sidewalk was thick with those situated somewhere on the spectrum of ruin. A snarling, agitated woman passed inches from her, pushing an empty wheelchair that Bernice hoped someone wasn't missing. A man with a navel-length beard rode by hunched on a tiny pink child's bicycle. He had a grey propane tank slung over one shoulder, and for a moment Bernice feared he would lose his grip and incinerate them both.

Most of the people on the street knew her and they rarely bothered her for change. Some even said hello. But Bernice was uncomfortable talking to them outside her store, with its known rules of conduct. She had always felt uneasy when speaking not of something tangible, like the fit of a pair of shoes, or the fabric of a garment.

She saw the windows that once housed the famous Woodward's displays, little theatres of possible lives to imagine yourself into, now all stitched up with plywood that was plastered with advertisements as incomprehensible to her as the graffiti painted over them. She strained to see the building as it once was. Most
of the streetcars and trolley buses had led right to this corner, where the streets had been alive with restaurants, nightclubs and cinemas. Woodward's itself offered every kind of thing you could imagine and many you couldn't. “Hats direct from Paris, by air,” her mother once told her, adding the second part as if it were a punchline. As a child, from her bedroom window, Bernice had studied the great red W glowing across the inlet, perched atop a small replica of the Eiffel Tower built on the roof of the store, staking claim to the city's then modest skyline. She once took a photo of the sign with her father's camera and painted “ANDA” on it, offering it to her sister for her birthday. Wanda, with a mouthful of blue coconut cake, regarded the gift like a dead pet.

It was a friend of her mother's who had arranged the job for Bernice after she graduated high school. That first morning, Bernice had arrived an hour early and walked around and around the block until the store opened. “There are two ways to sell shoes,” Carol, her new supervisor, said in the stockroom, a svelte cigarette bucking in her mouth. “Tell ‘em the shoes look good, or tell ‘em they'll never wear out. Me, myself, I prefer the flattery—it's easier to lie about.” Bernice adored her immediately. She was old, which to Bernice meant over thirty, with a residue of tragedy and a fondness for big dark sunglasses and miniskirts that stretched over a high flat butt that seemed to have drifted up on her lower back.

People came from all corners of the world, strolling the store like an amusement park or a museum. There was often music and singing on the first floor, and Bernice couldn't imagine a food that the food floor didn't stock. To her, it was a small version of a city, only a better one: inside, cleaner, more orderly. It seemed to be bursting with goods, an intoxicating promise of endless possibility.
It never failed to amaze her what wonders they could make, what unheard-of new things could come.

At first she was timid with customers. She'd never spoken much in school and spent most of her leisure time with her family, rarely with friends. Those nights, she replayed in her head the mistakes and inefficiencies of the day and chastised herself for them. She practised the smooth, pauseless speech of salesmanship on her stuffed animals and memorized the shoe styles by lugging catalogues into the bath. Carol was impressed by her commitment and knowledge of the products, and Bernice found Carol's growing confidence in her to be contagious.

Soon Bernice was scheduled weekends, holidays. She navigated the department as if hovering, helping three or four sets of customers at a time, bursting into the stockroom with styles and sizes balanced precariously in her mind. For the first time Bernice had her own money, all of which, because of her discount, she spent in the store. She met Gus each day at the lunch counter and bought expensive gifts for Wanda and her parents.

Her sister, mouth agape, visited her at Woodward's, and they'd catch a show when Bernice got off. When she neared graduation herself, Wanda begged Bernice to recommend her to the ladies' wear department. Though Bernice knew her sister's presence in the store would lead to comparisons being drawn between them and could threaten the fragile independence she'd established there, she agreed. It was then Carol informed her of the store policy that once one member of a family worked at Woodward's, that person's brother, sister, mother or father couldn't also work there. Management's reasoning was that salespeople doubled as advocates for the store, a kind of advertising network,
and by limiting the number of employees who knew each other, the customer base was broadened considerably at no cost to them.

When Wanda learned of this she was mutely devastated. Bernice sensed she somehow blamed her for the store's policy, or thought she'd made it up entirely. Wanda found employment in the concession at a bowling alley on Granville and would no longer eat with the family, even on Sundays. She left home shortly thereafter to begin a series of relationships with men whom Bernice found similar only in their fancy clothes and fondness for finishing Wanda's sentences. Bernice had only seen photos of Brian, the surgeon, the most striking of which was of him skiing in a T-shirt, his hirsute arms planting two neon poles like flags on an arctic moon, with Wanda beside him, flushed beneath her pink headband. Though she'd never met him—Wanda had neglected to invite her to their wedding in Whistler, later saying it wasn't her “kind of thing”—she suspected he was like the others. For the first time Bernice wondered if there was some way she should have assisted her sister, some advice she could have given. But what did she know, anyway? She'd latched herself to Gus with the same recklessness, then spent her whole adult life sorting through the wreckage, with no answers to come of it. A sharp desire to call her sister rose in Bernice.

“Something you want, lady?” rasped a voice from her knees.

“Oh … sorry.”

She was standing over a man who sat cross-legged on the ground, a small, sad collection of things for sale lying before him on a blanket. She backed up and saw power adapters, thick booklets of compact discs, a cracked computer monitor, a flute missing valves.

Recognition lifted his scowl. “You from the thrift shop?”

“Yes,” she said, unsure what to add to inflect the word with more friendliness. He looked familiar.

“I suppose you don't need anything then? Got everything you need, do you?” he said. Though the sun was now muted by cloud, he squinted as if in pain. He had heavy brows, like a cartoon Neanderthal.

“Well, I'm Harold, and you let me know if you got any questions about the items.” He stood, allowing Bernice to read his T-shirt—“i still miss my ex, but my aim's improving”—and she smiled.

“Harold, can I ask where you get these things you're selling?” she said.

He blew air loosely through his mouth. “Guys bring ‘em to me, they find ‘em in alleys, dumpsters, bushes, that kind of thing,” he said, twirling his hands as if to imply anything could be found anywhere, even perhaps the air. Bernice then noticed the chapped nub where his thumb once was. She wondered what awful moment had taken it, whether it accidental or intentional, and where this part of him was now, a jar? a lake? a box? Behind him, hanging on a nail in the plywood, she saw a leather jacket she'd once had in her store. It was cherry red, mid-thigh-length, a popular style when she and Gus were dating. It had been in her shop for a few weeks last month and she'd put it on once or twice, wondering if Gus would've liked it, until she'd noticed it missing and asked Tuan, who said he hadn't sold it.

“Is that coat for sale?” she said.

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.