She wanted a cigarette, then remembered that she had quit last year, the last of her bad habits to break. The air was still cool in the morning and she kept her sweater on, her favourite cardigan that hung like a loose turquoise curtain over her sumptuous body. This café had been here even longer than the park. Forty years ago, when Alice was a young woman fresh out of high school and newly arrived in the big city this café was the first place where she ate a huge plate of ham, eggs and greasy fried potatoes washed down with cup after free refill of turbo-charged coffee. She went afterward to rent a room in the hotel across the street, which stood right where the park now blazed with the green fire of High Spring. She suddenly felt hungry, which was unusual, given that she usually didn’t have breakfast these days, and felt a strange whim of wanting to talk to the waiter, who was really doing nothing to earn his money this morning.
“Excuse me,” she said abruptly, almost appalled at how rude she must sound.
“Excuse me”, she repeated, when he seemed to not hear her. He looked up, lazily pointing his dark eyes at her. A gentle smile emerged from his young, fresh-shaven face.
“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 even serve her. She had been sitting here nearly an hour already, just drinking coffee.
“How do you like your eggs?”
“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, and the coffee tasted so good now. Recently the handsome waiter explained 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. Of course their prices had gone up as well. Her first plate of ham and eggs had cost eighty cents. Now it was six dollars.
She thought of the day that lay ahead of her. Her worker had been hectoring her lately to 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?” The worker read off a litany of possible volunteer positions she might want to fill as well as a couple of part-time jobs. Alice was already sorting clothes for the free box twice a week at the Living Room Drop-In Centre, which had become for her her parlour and her salon. Most of her favourite clothes, including her turquoise cardigan had come from the free box. Even her bright saffron skirt and crimson blouse she was wearing, along with the bangles that clanged musically on her wrist. She had always favoured bright, strong and bold colours, and now that she was feeling better again this is how she was going to dress. She was keeping herself clean again having recently emerged out of many years of intentional self-neglect. Even 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 being beautiful. Even on her first visit to this café forty years ago she was perhaps just passably pretty. 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 damn illness and those pills that she had to take every day now she might even be, if not exactly beautiful then…maybe…striking?
Her favourite song came on the radio: “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 that song in it’s earlier version played here, in this same coffee shop while seated at this very same table by the window forty years ago while breakfasting on her first plate of eggs and ham and home-fried potatoes, just after disembarking from the Greyhound bus. She rather preferred the new version of the song, and it thrilled through her along with the cool fragrant spring breeze blowing in from the park through the open door, the same park where once stood the hotel she was staying in. 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 poor pig, that it didn’t get hurt or killed or anything, 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
“Nineteen.”
“You could be my grandson.”
“Do you have grandchildren?” he asked.
“I don’t even have children.” How could she even begin to explain that for her, for someone like her, having children, being a mother, through much of her life, would have been a near impossibility. Instead 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 and sat again at the barstool. He was looking at her, as though trying to think of something to say in order to revive their conversation.
“Are you from around her?” 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.” He kept looking at her, hoping to hear more. His gaze was 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.”
“Do you live in the area?”
“Yes.” Why did he want to know where she was living? She really didn’t want to hear any more questions. She was beginning to feel tired, tired and irritable.
“You know, Alice, I’ve always liked that park across the street.”
“There used to be a hotel there.”
“No kidding?” Oh, why did she have to say it? Why did she have to go and mention it? He would, with his relentless curiosity, want to know all about the hotel, it’s name, the fact that she stayed there, and the fire that took the building and every human life inside it 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, personally 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 in order to be her friend. This was their way of getting information. This was their way of controlling her.
She certainly wasn’t going to flatter herself with any such nonsense that this boy, this child with body hair, might actually like her as a woman. 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. It was 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.” What especially had made her flesh creep was that 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, and they were blowing bubbles! How Alice had hated that movie.
While Alice struggled over the crossword and Todd read the newspaper at the barstool she had a fleeting curiosity of what his body was like. Not from elderly lasciviousness, but a sort of clinical, esthetic curiosity. Where were his blemishes? Even a young Adonis must carry his flaws. Then she remembered, last week, seeing him come into the café dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, to talk to his mother about something. She noted his legs. They were not perfectly formed, perhaps just a little bit spindly with an abundance of dark hair that sheathed them from thighs to ankles. Funny looking goat legs. The very idea of going to bed with something like that? 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, a virgin, 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. Alarmingly still. 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 like the corpse next to her 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 absorbed with 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 the sudden smile of gratitude that seemed to brighten his face. She had been sitting in here for almost two hours and surely she had better things to do than baby-sit a beguiling young faun. She touched the amber beads that hung around her neck, and the dark sandalwood beads, and the blue and white rosary. She never took them off, except for while bathing, or asleep. She waited for Sammy, who owed her money, to 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. 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 flowerbeds vibrated with the luminous colour of the season. She sat on top of the granite memorial plaque in the cenre that commemorated the hotel that had burned there to the ground. She could almost see the child in the white nightshirt waiting for 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 where one night forty years ago her love had died and now here she was rising out of the ashes.
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, 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 against her breasts his owner, a young woman, came over.
“He’s not always so friendly with people,” she said to Alice.
Alice smiled without speaking, gently gathered up the beagle and handed him over to the 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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