Thirteen Crucifixions 3

I was going to blog about my building, especially this annoying tenant with a personality disorder who tends to upset other tenants but I've already written about my building so here is some more novel.  I really seem to have run out of original material for now.  Thanks for reading!

                                                       2001

“Sheila?”  She knew that voice at once, with its burnt edge like the odour of frying potatoes.  They hadn’t spoken in almost a year.

            “Well, hello Bill. I wasn’t expecting to run into you here.”

            “May I join you?”

            Sheila was going to say no, but the word “yes” came out of her mouth. She wasn’t ready to see her ex-husband.  Not today.  He still looked terrible.

            “So, how’s it going?”  He’d brought his coffee with him, which he held in cigarette- browned fingers that shook visibly.  During their brief marriage, he smoked, yet his fingers had remained clean, pink like cocktail sausages.

            “It’s going quite well today.”  She hadn’t seen him come in.  She must have been in the kitchen getting that soup order ready.  In the fourth month of their marriage, after he’d tried to stab her, Bill was diagnosed with a mental illness.  Theirs was a seamless divorce.  “What brings you to the neighbourhood?”

“ I wanted to see you.”          

            “You might have phoned first.”

            “Sorry.  Sheila, I’m awful sorry.  I forgot. It’s the medication.”  He still looked… pathetic.  Broken.  Crushed. Not at all the man she married.  Almost within days of their wedding, four years ago, he had begun to deteriorate.  To this day, she was certain he’d had no previous history of mental illness.   Sheila was almost sixty-one. Bill was eighteen years her junior.  Which made him forty-three.

            “You’ve done well with my little restaurant.  Really well.”

            “Thanks.  It’s a bit of work.”

            “Don’t I know it.” The West Wind was Bill’s restaurant in the beginning when he first began to court Sheila.  An establishment best described as “unpretentious.”  The sheer ordinariness of the place had made it a neighbourhood magnet, drawing as the West Wind’s most faithful patrons such persons as represented the full social diversity of the neighbourhood.  Only one thing had changed, since Sheila had taken it over from Bill:  she allowed local artists to hang their paintings here.

            “So,” Sheila said, “What brings you here?”  She caught the hostile tone in her own voice before it was too late.  Inwardly she flinched as she watched Bill receive it as though she were slapping him.          
            “I don’t get out to this area much.  I guess I was feeling a bit nostalgic.”  He was looking around, with the bewildered, blank look of a small child who has suddenly realized that he is lost.  When did you start putting art on the wall?”

            “Last year.  Do you like our feature artist?”

            “These paintings are very intense. I’m not sure if I can look at them too much. They might set me off.”

            “I find them rather beautiful.”         

            “They are extremely beautiful.  They’re almost too beautiful.”  He couldn’t seem to stop staring at the art.  “Who did them?”

            “A local artist.”

            “What do you call this style of art--abstract?”

            “Yes.  I like how they brighten the place..”

            “They jump out at you--they leap on you like jaguars, then they pull you back into their cave and eat you.  These colours, I can feel them breathing on my neck.”

            “So, how are you enjoying your apartment?”

            “I like it so far.  It’s very nice.  I have a view.  Would you like to see it?”

            “Sometime, I guess.”

            “Yes.  Today.”           

            “Can we do it next week, Bill.  I’m tired.”   He was still a handsome man. If he wasn’t ill, if he was looking after himself better, he would still be stunning. For twelve years, long before she knew him, Bill had been a gigolo.

            “You know, Sheila, I haven’t sat here in the West Wind in years, not since it was mine.  Have you changed the menu at all?”

            “Not much, except, every week I do an ethnic special. That’s Mondays.  Yesterday it was perogies.  It’s too bad you didn’t come yesterday, since I know you love perogies.”

            “Just my luck.  Just my luck.”

            “We still do everything the way you did, Bill.  All from scratch, only the freshest ingredients.  And no french fries.  Remember your famous potato salad?”

            “With dill pickle slices and a black olive garnish?  Lots of paprika?”

            “Yes, would you like some?  Yes?   Here, allow me.  I think I’ll have some, too, since I haven’t had time to eat yet.  Breakfast ran right into lunch today, then either no one wanted to leave, or they just didn’t know when to stop coming in.”

            “It’s wonderful!” he said, savouring the potato salad.   Just the way I always made it.  My dear, you have been so good to my little restaurant.”

            “Take some home with you, why don’t you.”  He was looking better.  His handsomeness again was starting to show itself. Beneath the slovenly clothes, the unwashed hair and the haggard, medicated face still lived the gorgeous man she once loved.

            “Sheila, I was wanting to tell you something.”

            “Yes, Bill?”

            “It’s my psychiatrist.  He says I’m getting better.”

            “I see an improvement.”

            “And since I’m getting better—well—I’m beginning to feel ordinary again.  Normal”

            “Uh-huh.”

            “Like, one day soon, I might be ready again to have someone in my life.”

            Sheila looked up at the clock.  In twenty minutes it would be time to close.

            “I don’t think that I want to be married again.”

            Already Sheila could feel her chest loosen with relief.         

“There’s an attractive girl in my building, but I think she’s even sicker than I am.  But Sheila.”  She beheld again his teeth, still white and gleaming and movie star perfect.  “Maybe I should just wait till I’m better.”

            “Maybe you should, Bill.”

            “And how are things going with you?”

            “Well, running this place takes a lot of my time.  I still paint, I work in the garden, and that house I live in also requires a lot of work.  Michael is moving back with me this week.  I expect he’ll be a great help.”

            “Michael?”

            “My son.”  Even though she had another son, Jason, and a daughter, Suzanne, Michael alone, Sheila would speak of as “My son.”  He was her eldest.

            “Bill, I really should start getting ready to close.  Here, let me pack you some more potato salad to take with you.  And would you like a couple of Kaiser rolls, too?  We still get them from Andy’s bakery.  Oh, they’re the best in town, I think.”

            “Sheila?  You know, I would really like to come back and work here at the West Wind.  Not right away, but maybe after the summer.  What do you think of that?’

            “We could discuss it in September?”

            “Well, you need to close and get home, and I want to get back to my little place to see the news.  It’s sure been good seeing you again.”

            “Yes, Bill, it’s been quite a nice surprise seeing you.  You’re looking well.”

            He gave her a damp, self-effacing smile, and then, retreating into the squalor of his illness, he shuffled out onto the sidewalk.

            Cheryl the new waitress was leaving the restaurant, and Sheila locked the door behind her, ostensibly to do the cash, which she’d already done while the floor was being mopped.  What she really planned to do was sit all alone inside the café.   She had known her for just over a year, Cheryl, when she became a regular in the West Wind.  It was only a matter of time before Sheila would ask her if she wanted to work here.  As she’d done with Guy, the cook, and so with all the staff she’d acquired since she took over the establishment. She only hired her regular customers, and only those whom she thought were particularly “right” for the place.  She used no external grid for making such decisions.  She was always willing to train new staff, and Sheila, by anyone’s reckoning, was a gifted teacher.  Never, not once, had she asked for or accepted a resume.  With her unfailing intuition Sheila seemed always able to determine, and most accurately, all of her hiring choices for the West Wind.  She had never yet had to dismiss anyone, nor had anyone else yet to leave on bad terms.  None of her staff appeared to have anything in common, outside of an enjoyment of other human beings, a robust sense of humour, and an ability to work well with others.  Now Cheryl, she was already past fifty, and still wore her teased and shellacked bronze-coloured hair and excessive mascara much as she probably wore them as a teenager in the mid-sixties.  Think, Petula Clarke, or Lulu singing “To Sir With Love”, or an early rendition of “Just Call Me Angel Of The Morning.”  Whatever it was about Cheryl’s unselfconsciously retro schoolgirl days, including the slightly too tight not-quite miniskirt and black nylons with kitten heels, it made her a perfect fit.  She had only to be chewing and cracking gum while taking orders.

            It was nice for Sheila to sit alone, quiet in the empty darkened restaurant.  Not often did she need to do this.  It must have been Bill’s visit.  And now she was, as it were, reasserting her claim, her property rights?  Turf.  That he was mentally-ill, or her ex-husband, or the former owner of this place, or the fact that he’d once charged at her with a butcher knife—any one of these things on their own would have been sufficient to throw Sheila off balance.  But getting all these things simultaneously from the same person—it made her want alcohol.  But Sheila was not much of a drinker, except for the bottle of scotch she brought out at home for special occasions.  She actually wanted to retire.

            She was getting old, certainly too old for the restaurant business.  She wanted a quiet life.  She could afford it now.  She might even travel a little.  She would miss everyone at the West Wind, certainly.  Often her only social outlet since her life, especially in that big empty house, had become very quiet.  She had braced herself for a solitary old age, only to realize that this was what she wanted, what she’d been made for.  Being married or otherwise settled down with anyone would only be preposterous.  And not simply because of her age.  Her four-month marriage to Bill had taught her everything she needed to know.  She didn’t realize that he was becoming ill—not when his moods began to swing and teeter, not when he became silent and withdrawn, and not even that time when he came running at her with a knife.  Thank heavens she got away.  But when, just afterward, he tried to gas himself in his car… and by then she knew she could not stand by her man, though after the quick divorce proceedings were over she did try to give him support and friendship, particularly while he was hospitalized.   He was the only man who’d ever made Sheila feel really desirable.

            Bill was her second husband.  Sheila was a widow when she married him.  For thirty years she had been married to Frank, who eventually perished from AIDS.  On their wedding night she had given him her virginity, and so she had remained faithful, and for the last two decades of marriage virtually celibate, until she began seeing Bill.   He at first had her convinced that it was from tainted blood he’d received following his near-fatal car-crash.  In his final days he confessed that it had more likely been from a young male prostitute.  That was the first Sheila had learned of her first husband’s secret life.  Michael their son was gay. Sheila met Bill at Frank’s funeral, who at the time had been dating a cousin of his, but only after two years did they begin seeing each other.

            Frank and Sheila had been high school sweethearts.  When they got married, Sheila, like many young wives in 1961 or so, discontinued her university studies and left pending her degree in social work until the children were able to fend for themselves.  She had always assumed that they were meant to be together, Frank and her, though she had always remained obtuse as to the nature of their bond.  She simply had assumed without questioning that passion was not a necessary component to married love, that fidelity and steadfastness should be of infinite value.  His work—he was a sales-rep for an international chemical company—took him on lengthy business trips all over the world, leaving Sheila alone with the children for interminable months.  She grew used to this, came to enjoy it, and eventually, to prefer it.  When Jason the youngest was in high school she asked Frank for a divorce.  He refused.  Jason was in college when she asked him again.  He still wouldn’t.  Then, when Suzanne was newly married, he had full-blown AIDS.  Fortunately, for Sheila, their marriage had suffered bed death long before her husband had begun philandering with rent boys.

            Far easier it was on her when Michael her son came out to her.  He was seventeen.  Not that he had given her cause to suspect, since he was very masculine, tough, even pugnacious and scrappy.  So, one evening when Sheila sat alone at the kitchen table with the newspaper, reading about the horrors of Rhodesia undergoing its bloody and violent rebirth into the nation Zimbabwe, Michael her son descended on her with blazing blue eyes and set, determined jaw.  He took the chair opposite, slipped the newspaper out from under her nose, and before Sheila could say “Hey!” he announced, “Ma!  I’m gay.”  She looked back at him and said, “Well, if you are, you are.”  “You don’t mind?”  “What’s there to mind?”  “Are you  sure you don’t mind?”  “Michael,” she lied, “I already knew.”

            What she wasn’t prepared for was Matthew, who was eighteen years her son’s senior.  A fey antique dealer, within months of her son’s confession he took him under his wing and into his penthouse apartment to come live with him and be his love.  Sheila was horrified.   The whole family, apart from Frank, was horrified.  She couldn’t quite fathom her husband’s nonchalance about the affair.   Any other father would have gone after the bastard with a baseball bat.  He seemed almost to approve of them, and it was on Frank’s insistence that Michael and Matthew should be welcomed home every Christmas and Easter, as well as Thanksgiving—not as Michael and his “friend”, but Michael and Matthew, May-December homosexual partners.  He was almost as old as Sheila!  “You haven’t lost a son, Sheila,” Frank had joked tastelessly, “You’ve gained a sister.”  Neither did it thrill her that Frank and Matthew should particularly seem to get on well together. Even so, Frank’s deathbed revelation of his trysts with rent boys hit Sheila like a truncheon.  There was no way that she could have been ready for this.  To this day, she didn’t know whether or not Michael her son had already known this about his father.

            “Are you a nice lady?” said the shaven-head youth to Sheila.  With his green-haired girlfriend he sat in the neighbouring doorway, begging for money.

            “That all depends on who’s asking me.”

            “What have you got in that big bag?” asked the girl.  Her head, with its lime-coloured buzzcut looked rather like a fluorescent tennis ball.  A metal ring clung, like crystallized snot to her pretty little nose.

            “Sandwiches.  They’re left over from the café.  Would you like them?”

            “How many ya got?” said the boy.

            “Maybe ten.  I don’t need them, and I really don’t know what to do with them, and they are rather heavy for me to carry.”

            “Do they have meat in them?” said the girl.  “I’m a vegetarian.”

            “Three are devilled egg, and I think two or three are Swiss and avocado.  The others are ham or chicken.”

            “Sure!”

            “Thanks, Granny!” said the boy.

            “You may call me Sheila,” she answered icily.

            “Thank you, Sheila.  My name’s Melissa.  And this is Stefan.”

            “Very pleased to meet you.”

            “Hey,” said Stefan, “Does your coffee shop need its windows washed?’

            “What—there aren’t enough windshields out there for you to squeegie?” said Sheila, still stinging from the “Granny” remark.

            “Don’t be mean!” Stefan said, “Don’t be the Granny from Hell.”

            “I’ll be nice to you as long as you’re nice to me.”

            “Thank you.”

            “Now as for my windows—why don’t you come in tomorrow, say around closing time and we’ll see what we can arrange.  How much do you charge?”

            “I was going to do it in exchange for the sandwiches.”

            “No, seriously.  You don’t owe me.  I want to pay you.  Is twenty good?”

            “Deal.”

            “Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”

            “”Bye Sheila!” said Melissa.

             Sheila left the punks behind, priding herself for not having much noticed Stefan’s shaven head, nor Melissa’s fluorescent green buzz-cut and nose ring.   She felt relieved thinking that none of her own offspring had tattoos, nor piercings away from their ears, and that she had always, seen them with normal hair.  She rather missed the hippies, having never been one herself, since she had been too old, having turned thirty during the summer of love, and having lived then as a sensible young matron with three small children to raise and an indifferent and usually absent husband.  She did look forward to the return of Michael her son, whose ever-faithful Matthew had unceremoniously dumped him to go live with an eccentric religious community somewhere on Vancouver Island.  This had come out of the blue, and Sheila still didn’t know what would be the most appropriate reaction to this sudden change of events.  Being, herself, if not conventionally religious, or Christian, she was still deeply spiritual.  She rose every morning at five, to sit in contemplative silence, unable to name the presence that overshadowed her during these sessions.  Every morning, ever since Frank’s diagnosis of AIDS became known, she had done this, instinctively, and now by habit.  She had no doubt that this communing with the Unknown Presence had only strengthened her and enabled her to cope and to cope well with the challenges of each new day.  Who then was she to fault Matthew, whom in recent years she had actually grown to rather like, for choosing to surrender his life to the Absolute, if that had been indeed his intention?  She expected that her son’s heart would be broken.  But Michael, who was already thirty-seven, had never really been on his own.  And now he was returning to live with mother.

            After all the time she’d spent on her feet today, Sheila couldn’t understand why she should walk home.  She had a car, which she never used.  By principle?  She was concerned about the environment, and did what she could to cut on energy and waste, especially where fossil fuels were concerned.  And she might have taken the bus, but this bus was almost always too crowded this time of day, and besides, the service was inconsistent.  Like many other transit users she had been scandalized a few years earlier when the Vancouver transit system had been voted the best in North America.  By who?  Michael her son had muttered snarkily, “By fat, ugly corporate scum in suits who’ve never had to ride a bus in all their pampered lives.”  Michael was a journalist, who had an almost frightening hatred of rich people.  Still, she had to agree with him, and not simply because he was her brilliant offspring. Her ex-husband Bill, before he became ill, used to argue senselessly with Michael, whose sexual orientation he couldn’t seem to stomach.  And Michael was no more affectionately disposed towards his stepfather, whom he was usually careful to avoid, judging him as an opportunistic ass-kisser who only wanted to exploit his mother’s maternal good nature.  Perhaps there was jealousy there?  But neither had her other children liked Bill.  They had all collectively warned Sheila about the risk she was running in making this match.  She was still living down their silent I-Told-You-So’s.  There is no Greek chorus like grown offspring.  They will judge you and sentence you like none other.  So Madge, Sheila’s best friend since childhood often reminded her.

            Unlike Madge, Sheila had opted to remain in this neighbourhood.  Commercial Drive.  Or, to the wannabe hipsters migrating from Toronto, “The Drive.”  She had no time for them, these eastern interlopers, manufacturers and perpetrators of the Lotus Land Myth.  As far as Sheila could see, almost every funky new café, boutique, hair salon and vintage clothing store on—“The Drive”—was owned and operated by some white Anglo scion of Upper Canada Loyalist Toronto or Ottawa, dreadlocks sprouting magically from their heads and hackey-sacks appearing like forbidden fruit in their hands as though by fiat of their having just arrived in the city of Vancouver.  They only appeared “laid-back”.  Sheila had met her share in the West Wind, leering and THC-addled as they were.  To her they were really opportunistic sharks behind their goatees, every last one of them.  One often had his eye on the café.  He was opting to buy her out.  He had big plans he had told Sheila, for the West Wind.  If she would allow him an equal share in the place, what he could do to enhance, to give it ambience, a new fusion menu, with new tables and chairs, an espresso bar, dim lighting, late hours, and last but not least, a liquor license.  Live music?  Or at least a resident D.J.

            Three times he didn’t appear to hear her when Sheila insisted that those were just the changes that would cost her her most cherished patrons.  This twenty-something entrepreneur, stroking his goatee like it was a magic lamp, good- naturedly shrilled that such changes would be just what it would take to bring in more customers from the neighbourhood.  .Sheila had might as well have been speaking to him in Swahili when she replied that all of her patrons lived in the area, that these people WERE the neighbourhood.  He had no ears to hear her admonition that the majority of the local residents simply couldn’t be expected to meet his standard of “cool.”  Then she politely asked him to please from now on stay away from the West Wind.  She had never barred anyone before. 

            As much as Commercial Drive had changed since her childhood it still remained essentially the same.  Even when she was growing up the buildings had a certain tawdriness, a failed attempt at elegance which now shone with a serene, funky grace through peeling paint or new layers and colours.   The two produce markets, once Italian, but now Chinese-owned, still seemed to smile beneath their awnings, appearing to mock the garish shopping mall plus a McDonald’s that had gone up across the street in the eighties.  There had been a big neighbourhood protest which Sheila herself had participated in against this McDonald’s being allowed to defile her precious Commercial Drive.  Then Starbuck’s appeared.  Still, the street, in spite of the steady succession of new immigrants, new businesses, new colours of whatever hue or garishness, maintained its essential integrity.  The Italian and Portuguese coffee bars and pool halls that were already an established feature when Sheila’s children were in school, still held their ground.  Even a couple of new ones had appeared, apparently indifferent to the springing up of natural food stores, trendy restaurants and fashion boutiques.  Even with creeping gentrification—inevitable in Madge’s opinion—the whole spirit of the street remained solidly working class, proletarian, and revolutionary.  Sheila’s father, who was a steelworker and a solid union man had helped establish this essence, long after the elegant mansions in the area had been turned into rooming houses, and the wealthy barons had packed their bags and moved to the greener estates opening up on the West Side.  Sheila often wondered, had they lived long enough, what her parents would have to say now about the neighbourhood.  But her father had been blown to bits when Sheila was still fourteen, during the Korean War, and her mother, never robust in health, perished two years later from a heart ailment, leaving teenage Sheila, with help from an aunt, in sole charge of her younger sister.

            Perhaps this was why she chose to walk?  Her way of steadily, faithfully documenting the small changes, progressions and mutations of her neighbourhood?  She had never lived anywhere else.  While the Italian and Portuguese immigrants settled in after the war, most of the Anglo-Saxon habitues had already moved to the suburbs.  Which, before the Korean War, Sheila’s father and mother had already resolved to do once the war was over.  He was killed in action, and this triggered in her mother an unstoppable decline.  When Sheila was twenty, Gail, her sister was almost nineteen, and already married to a soldier boy who took her with him to New Brunswick.  Sheila married Frank.  Commercial Drive remained steadfastly political, left wing, socialist, communist.  Sheila, during her husband’s lengthy absences, attended community meetings and rallies, joined support groups for American draft-resisters, campaigned for fair treatment of Aboriginals and ethnics.  She was soon taking in refugees—in the sixties American boys who didn’t want to kill for their country, then in the seventies, Chilean exiles from Pinochet’s brutal regime.  There was plenty of room, the house had eight bedrooms, plus a full basement.  She went back to school and completed her degree, then, with Madge, Sheila opened a drop-in centre on Commercial Drive for street people and ex-mental patients.  It ran until the mid-eighties when the increasing shift to the right on all levels of government dried up the funding for such ventures.

            For nearly a year Sheila had virtually nothing to do, but then Frank had his accident.  His car was rear-ended by a drunk driver one night.  The offender died instantly, and Frank spent a year and a half in rehab, which gave Sheila something to do.  Her husband, now critically injured, and learning how to walk again, needed her care. They had never been this long, or this much together.  Rather than bringing them closer, it simply confirmed to Sheila that she was married to a complete stranger whom she really wanted to be done with.  His lengthy business trips had accustomed her completely to a life of solitude.  And now, he repulsed her.  When Frank was better she again brought up the subject of divorce.  And then the bomb fell, and in less than three years Sheila Watson was an AIDS widow.