She wanted a cigarette, then remembered that she had quit last year. The air was cool and she kept her sweater on, her favourite cardigan that hung on her like a loose turquoise curtain. In this diner forty years ago, when Alice was fresh out of high school and newly arrived in the big city she ate a huge plate of ham, eggs and greasy fried potatoes washed down with turbo-charged coffee. She then rented a room in the hotel across the street, which once stood where the park is.
“Excuse me,” she said abruptly to the waiter.
“Excuse me”, she repeated, when he seemed to not hear her. He looked up, lazily directing on her his languid dark gaze.
“Could I have the ham and eggs, please?” She tried to soften her tone, afraid that she might scare him away, or that he might not serve her. She had been sitting here nearly an hour already, just drinking coffee. She had been asked, or told, to leave many establishments in the past for overstaying her welcome.
“How do you like your eggs?” he asked, leaning over her.
“Fried. Over medium.”
“White, brown toast or multi-grain? Or would you prefer a bagel? We have plain, sesame, poppy-seed and multi-grain.”
“White toast, please.”
“More coffee?”
“Yes please.”
The coffee was different from forty years ago. Now they served espresso, which meant fancy drinks she could scarcely pronounce, along with a choice of light, medium, strong or decaffeinated. She still wasn't sure if she liked it. Recently the handsome waiter explained to her that all the coffee is now organic fair trade, meaning that the farmers and the pickers in Colombia or Guatemala get a better deal for their labours and the birds are also happy because none of their trees get cut down. Their prices had gone up as well. Her first plate of ham and eggs had cost eighty cents. Now it was eight dollars.
Her mental health worker had been hectoring her lately about structuring her time. “I get up at six every morning, unlike a lot of people who don’t roll out of bed till one or two in the afternoon,” she had argued back. “What more do you want from me?” The worker stared, startled and a bit frightened at this unaccustomed display of defiance, then read off to Alice as though she wasn't even in the room a litany of possible volunteer positions she might want to fill as well as a couple of part-time jobs. Alice was already doing volunteer work sorting clothes for the free box twice a week at the Living Room Drop-In Centre. Most of her favourite clothes, including the turquoise cardigan, had come from the free box as well as her bright saffron skirt and crimson blouse she was wearing, and also the bangles that clanged musically on her wrist. She had recently come to favour bright, strong and bold colours.
She was keeping herself clean again following many years of intentional self-neglect. Her hair, though it hung limp and leaden-grey over her shoulders, had a clean healthy sheen, despite the little care that she gave it. She had no illusions about ever having been beautiful. Forty years ago she was perhaps passably pretty. She still had left over acne then, and a slight underbite and oversize breasts that even then wanted to sag a bit. Even though nearly sixty she still had a figure, though she had put on a little weight over the years. Had she taken better care of herself, had it not been for her illness and the pills that she had to take every day now she might even be, if not exactly beautiful then…maybe…striking?
They were playing her favourite song: “Just call me angel of the morning (Angel), Just touch my cheek before you leave me (Baby), Just call me angel of the morning (Angel)…Then slowly turn away.” She had heard it in its earlier version here, in this same coffee shop while seated at the same table by the window forty years ago, breakfasting on her first plate of eggs and ham and home-fried potatoes, just after getting off the Greyhound bus. She preferred the new version, which was stronger, louder and for her more present and it thrilled through her along with the cool fragrant breeze blowing in from the park through the open door. The young waiter brought her her breakfast and Alice stared at the two eggs that stared back at her like two yellow eyes struggling to see through cataracts next to the pink circle of pig flesh. When she was a young child she once asked her mother where ham came from. “From pigs” she replied. How do they get it from the pig? she asked. “It’s from the pig’s thigh”, she replied evasively. But what happens to the pig? Does the pig just let us have the ham? “Yes, I suppose so, dear,” her mother replied listlessly while wiping down the cupboard doors. Alice nearly asked her to somehow assure her that nothing happened to the pig, that it wasn't hurt or killed, but before she could open her mouth again her mother sent her outside to play. Alice still had not worked up the courage to become a vegetarian. Trying not to think of the living creature that it once was she dug in her fork, knowing that tasting the tender pink meat would be tantamount again to forgetting.
“How old are you?” she asked the waiter as he came to retrieve her empty plate.
“Nineteen.”
“You could be my grandson.”
“Do you have grandchildren?” he asked.
“I don’t even have children.” Then she said, “Are you a student?”
“Yes. Classes are out for the summer.”
“You’ve only worked here for the last couple of weeks?”
“My mom’s the owner.”
“Oh, you’re Nora’s boy?”
“Indeed I am.”
“So your mom has given you a job to help tide you over?”
“Actually I have another waitering job downtown.”
“Do you live at home?”
“Yeah,” he said, slowly backing away with her dirty plate and utensils, “I live with my mom.”
“Do you pay rent?”
“She wouldn’t hear of it.” He nimbly retreated to the kitchen where he remained hidden for some time. Alice opened the paper again and hunted for the crossword. While trying to think of a five-letter word for “Voodoo” the waiter returned to the barstool.
“Are you from around here?” he asked.
“Not originally, no.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since I got out of high school.”
“How do you like living here?”
She didn’t want to hear any more questions, but did not know how to shut him off. She stared at the crossword without answering. She looked up and said, “Can you think of a five letter word for ‘Voodoo’?”
“How about ‘Magic’?
“Thanks.” She found his gaze not quite penetrating, nor really invasive, but curious and perhaps even friendly. Still, Alice did not like being looked at.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Todd.”
“That’s a nice name.”
Now she was trying to think of a nine-letter word for “children”.
“What’s your name?”
“Alice.” They were talking like two five year olds making their acquaintance on the playground.
“Do you live in the area?”
“Yes.” She really didn’t want to hear any more questions. She was feeling tired and irritable.
He said, "I’ve always liked that park across the street.”
“There used to be a hotel there.” Why did she have to say it? He would want to know about the hotel, it’s name, that she stayed there, that the fire took the building and every human life inside but her own. She knew his kind only too well. The good psychiatrist, the good case manager, the good occupational therapist, the benevolent social worker. Each had had for Alice that same bland, kind, impersonal happy face that so many of them wore and turned on for her. It wasn’t because they actually liked her and certainly in most cases she did not like them, and not because they really wanted to know her or be her friends. They wanted information. They wanted to control her.
She still cringed whenever she thought about that ridiculous movie they had shown on a movie night from the distant past in a boarding home where she once lived about a love affair between an eccentric elderly woman and a boy the same age as this wildly handsome twit whose name rhymed with “God.” She still felt her flesh creep remembering the scene with the boy and the crone waking up in bed together, presumably naked but for the mercy of strategically arranged bed-sheets. They were blowing bubbles. Their faces were radiant with the delight of satiated lovers. She still hated that movie.
She was curious about his body. Not from elderly lasciviousness, but a sort of clinical, esthetic curiosity. Where were his blemishes? Even a young Adonis must carry his flaws. She had seen him recently wearing shorts and a T-shirt. She noted his legs. They were not perfectly formed, rather spindly with an abundance of dark hair that sheathed them like goat legs. Without referring to herself as a lesbian Alice had long come to prefer the company of other women. During her frequent stays in hospital, in transition houses, shelters, in boarding homes, if she had a romance on the stove it was always with one of the many other unfortunate women with whom she was stranded. Nothing had ever come of these chaste little trysts, though there was a lot of sympathetic hand-holding and cuddling and weeping forlornly and desperately on one another’s shoulders.
Only once had she ever been to bed with a man. They had met in the bar downstairs. Alice was lonely, and broke, having exhausted her meagre savings. She had just found a job as a store clerk, but she wasn’t going to get paid for a couple of weeks. He was older, perhaps in his forties, a salesman with a family in Toronto. He saw her at the bar and bought her a drink. It was he who opened negotiations. Alice had never done anything like this before, and now she was being offered money. But she was hungry and already she had begun hearing voices. It wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be, and once they had gotten through the clumsy maneuvres of sex between strangers, she did feel rather a maternal warmth towards this man who lay very still beside her. She listened carefully for breathing and heard nothing. She put her fingers on his neck, then laid her hand on his chest. The skin felt cool. There was no heartbeat. She called to him and there was no response. His body lay there like a large naked wax figure. His eyes were wide open. Alice didn’t move. She lay in the dark next to this dead man who had just paid her for sex, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling.
All this she had told the police, the firemen, the doctors, the psychiatrists, the case managers, everyone who had a legal entitlement to know. What she had told no one, and held still as her secret was the appearance of the child in the room. He was small, perhaps five or six years of age, with curly blond hair and wearing what appeared to be a white nightshirt. Smiling, he held towards her a beckoning hand. Alice climbed out of bed and got dressed and followed the child out of the room. There was already smoke in the corridor. The child led her down a flight of stairs she had never known about. As she stepped out in the alley with him, the building was suddenly engulfed in flames. The last thing she heard was the terrified screaming of people burning to death. When Alice woke up she was for the first time in her life in the psychiatric wing of a hospital.
“What are you studying in university?” she asked the young waiter.
“Psychology.”
Alice said nothing. Her suspicions were confirmed.
“Hey, Alice, I was wanting to ask you something.”
She was summoning forth the six-letter equivalent for “Magus.”
“The Livingroom drop-in and resource centre. You work there, right?”
“Twice a week.”
“Are they looking for volunteers?”
“Might be. You want to talk to Moira.”
“I’m off at two after lunch. Could I go in with you?”
“Just come over. I’ll be there.”
She was unsettled by his sudden smile of gratitude. She touched the amber beads that hung around her neck, her mother's final gift to her, and the dark sandalwood beads, which she had found last week in the free box and the blue and white rosary. She almost never took them off. She watched Sammy, who owed her money, push his overflowing shopping buggy past the café. They had been friends in the Psychiatric Assessment Unit in one of the hospitals, as well as in a small psychiatric facility in a midtown neighbourhood. He had been on the street for the last three or four years and had deteriorated badly. She could see that he was muttering to himself. One day she would muster the courage to tell him that she had forgiven him his debt. It was only ten dollars. It was Sammy who had given her the rosary.
The small park across the street was still ablaze with the fiery green of the May morning as lawn and trees and luminous flowerbeds vibrated with the colours of the season. She sat on top of the granite memorial plaque in the centre that commemorated the hotel that had burned there to the ground. She could almost see the child in the white nightshirt standing before her. A luminous joy, like a flaming fire serpent, swept suddenly through Alice and she leapt off the memorial plaque and began dancing around in circles, whirling in the soft brilliant spring sunshine. Music she had never heard in her life pulsed inside her head as she danced and spun and leapt and laughed, like a dervish, like Salome, like an ancient temple dancer, a splendour of turquoise, crimson and saffron here in the same spot where one night forty years ago her love had died in sacrificial offering and now here she was rising out of the ashes spreading before the sun the multicoloured wings that would one day carry her home.
She soon felt tired and sat down in the still slightly damp grass. A small dog, a beagle, ran towards Alice and leapt into her waiting arms. While the dog licked her face and squirmed with delight in her lap, Alice, feeling the soft warmth of the sun all over her body like the eager hands of a youthful lover, began to weep, and vowed that she would go on weeping until every tear had washed away from her mind every bad memory of all the years of her life and bring her the joy she had always been deprived of. While the dog settled and cuddled serenely like a freshly nursed infant against her breasts his owner, a tall young woman in tight jeans, came over.
“He’s not always so friendly with people,” she said to Alice who smiled up at her without speaking, gently gathered up the beagle and handed him over to the beautiful young woman.
“Have a nice day,” the girl said with a hint of a smile as she attached a leash to the beagle’s collar. As though she had never spoken to her she walked away from Alice with her dog and she remained on the grass watching them slowly grow smaller till they disappeared around the corner forever from her sight. She got up. Todd was standing in the doorway looking at her. Her bum felt a little bit damp from the wet grass. She waved to him feebly and he waved back. She smiled and walked away, leaving the park and the vanished hotel and its burning dead and walked the short distance home to her little subsidized apartment. When she opened the door she went straight to the kitchen sink, ignoring the clutter of papers, books and scattered clothing on the floor. She sneezed twice from the dust then stood waiting for the running water to get cold. Just before she reached for a clean glass, she gently caressed the body of Jesus on the white plastic crucifix of her rosary and was scarcely aware of the soft little smile that was only beginning to form on her face.
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