The Beggar's Garden

by Michael Christie

  The decline had only deepened the need for her services, and Bernice had to find volunteers like Tuan just to keep clothes on the racks. Busy as it was, the store only narrowly broke even. “As long as you need it,” Bernice would say to her pitiful customers, punching No Sale, a button more worn than any other on the register.

  That afternoon she and Tuan were organizing the shoe racks, combing them for singles—what she called shoes without a mate.

  “I’m leaving the store. For good,” she said, trying the words out, listening to how they sounded amidst the shelves of used cookbooks and the mannequins in the display window.

  “Thank you,” he said, relacing a pair of brittle, yellowed boat shoes. Tuan was volunteering at the store while the pastor and his wife helped him with his immigration application. Bernice never tried to correct his English because she didn’t want to offend him. The pastor once said Tuan had a master’s degree in philosophy, so she figured he’d pick it up soon enough. Anyway, she liked small talk kept to a minimum.

  “This ones is stink,” Tuan said, pinching his nose, dangling a pair of steel-toed boots like roadkill before venturing out back to toss them in the dumpster.

  Alone, she surveyed the store. There was, as always, much to do: organizing, pricing, sorting, displaying. This was no junk shop. When second-hand things were presented well, with care—techniques for which she’d learned at Woodward’s—clothes folded or carefully hung, books categorized and alphabetized, knick-knacks arranged attractively, they became items folks could picture in their homes, welcome into their lives.

  “Donation!” she heard Tuan yelp from out back.

  Lately, more donations were arriving than she knew what to do with, the two storerooms nearly to the roof with them. The rear doors of the church opened to a squalid alley where they pulled up in all sorts of vehicles to pop their trunks, lift their hatchbacks, say this can go, and this, and this, handing Tuan and Bernice their garbage bags and boxes. The donors were always pleasant but seemed uneasy, uttering few words. Perhaps they were ashamed of their surplus, Bernice had often thought, the sheer weight of it.

  Today it was a tall, stately woman, definitely a women’s ten in shoes, with sunglasses nested in her hair and cheekbones that rose neatly on her porcelain face. From her silver vehicle climbed down an unsteady, moon-faced girl in a princess dress. Flakes of sun leapt from her plastic tiara.

  “Give the bag to the nice lady like we talked about,” the woman said to the girl, who took careful steps toward Bernice as though approaching a windy cliff. Bernice had been witness to these lessons in charity before, parents sandbagging Christian values nice and early in hopes they wouldn’t be washed out in the tsunami of adolescence. In the girl’s eyes, Bernice knew, she probably seemed something closer to witch than saint.

  “These are my clothes,” the princess said.

  “They don’t fit you anymore, Cricket,” her mother said.

  “What if I shrink?” the girl bleated, pressing the bag to her bulbous, sequined belly.

  “Now that’s enough of this,” her mother said, checking a thin gold watch riding the underside of her wrist. “Let’s get moving.” She reached into the back seat and set the last of their unwanted stuff at Tuan’s feet. “Now,” she ordered, and Bernice caught a whiff of the woman’s minty gum.

  “Will you promise to take care of my clothes?” the princess asked Bernice.

  “Oh, certainly,” Bernice said, keeping to herself the fact that other kids would likely soon be wearing her clothes, possibly muck-seeking children who might not take care of them at all. The girl knotted her glassy lips and handed over the bag.

  As she watched them drive off, Bernice envied the rush of benevolence and general lightness these donors must feel returning to their homes, suddenly unburdened, free from what they no longer wanted or needed. She and Tuan dragged the donations into the storage room, where they could be gone through, appraised. Few of Bernice’s customers had kids, so the princess’s clothes would go to a shelter for battered women and their children a few blocks over.

  Opening the boxes and bags was always thrilling, like the unsealing of mummies’ tombs or the vaults of gangsters. As a girl, she’d dreamed of becoming an archaeologist until she discovered how many years of schooling were required and turned her ambitions toward more modest, attainable goals.

  The most startling treasures she unearthed were the brand new or the valuable: clothing still tagged or wrapped in tissue paper; unopened specialty appliances like rice cookers or fruit dehydrators; futuristic basketball shoes, their jumping springs never tested; designer labels she vaguely recognized from billboards. Once there were sixteen mason jars full of change, mostly silver, that she’d dumped into the church collection bucket upstairs; and always plenty of new dishes and kitchenware still stickered with prices of magnitudes that never failed to astonish her. Could they all be unwanted gifts? If not, how could someone pay so much for things they didn’t need? And if they had once needed them, what had happened in between?

  Equally baffling were the odd and used-up things the donors somehow imagined the poor could actually use: cracked helmets, expired urine-smelling vitamins, tiny musical instruments, perfumed negligees, mute synthesizers, their keys greyed with skin cells, couches shot through with black mould, long-expired canned goods, sacks of wormy flour, bloodstained sheets, broken crutches, ten-year-old phonebooks. She’d once got a silk parachutist’s jumpsuit decorated with fluorescent polygons, and Bernice and Tuan roared at the thought of one of her customers sporting it to collect bottles then falling asleep in a park like an off-duty superhero. But it disturbed her, the way people failed to distinguish what was useful from what wasn’t. The ability to do so seemed to her an inseparable part of getting by in this world.

  She tore into the princess’s mother’s boxes, and under some musty, purple fitted sheets, inside a faux-rosewood case, she found a velvet pouch of collector’s souvenir spoons. Shuffling them, she picked out the only one she didn’t already have, its handle grazed upon by a gilded buffalo. She fogged it with a breath, polished it on her slacks, then held it up.

  “Manitoba,” she read, feeling how the word made her mouth go as hollow as a birdhouse, then set the spoon aside. Later, she dropped it into the pocket of her camel pea coat before turning off the lights, locking up and walking for the bus.

  Her apartment was half dwelling, half museum. She’d assembled her collection over the years, piece by piece, each object assigned its own special place within the whole. Something rested on every available surface—wide-eyed dolls, ceramic candy dishes, commemorative platters, a wooden Indian, plants both real and fake, three Bakelite radios, a stuffed squirrel, bottles and containers from products long discontinued. There were exactly ten decorative lamps in her bedroom alone, and every square inch of the apartment’s floor not obscured by furniture was layered with a thick icing of ornamental rugs. On her walls, paintings and hangings shouldered for space—velvet landscapes, nets of macramé, portraits of winsome children. This collection was not random; there were some themes: near the living room window lived a sanctuary of owl-related items—owl ashtrays, tiny china owl figurines, a hooting clock—and in the bathroom a nautical motif—a tugboat soap dish, anchor-embroidered towels, a miniature ship’s wheel for the toilet flusher.

  It wasn’t that these things were valuable. Most were just plain strange—tacky memorabilia and dead concepts of beauty to which Bernice had taken an unexplainable liking. Perhaps it was their very oddity she found so reassuring. Here in her apartment, she gave room to the rescued, the unlikely. They were evidence that not everything was used up and wasted, pitched away and ruined, a reminder that people made things and those things could be, if properly cared for, kept, possibly forever. She was, however, running out of space.

  She clicked on some lamps in the living room and laid her coat over the arm of a chair. Then she set about hanging the Manitoba spoon above her kitchen table in the decorative display rack.
Donated years ago, perhaps her favourite artifact of all, the display rack was solid wood, probably maple, shaped like a shield, housing nearly one hundred spoons in total, all dangling from their hilts in fine array. She had spoons from countries the world over, others commemorating great events like the Queen’s visits to Canada or Expo ‘86. At first she’d felt selfish bringing the spoons home from the thrift store, or any of the other donations she fancied, as if she were stealing from or somehow depriving the poor. But little good some sterling spoons or knick-knacks would do them; most of those poor folks didn’t have homes, and certainly not spoon racks. It was the sad truth that the nice things would simply be wasted on them, and besides, there would always be more donations.

  She sat at the table with a mug of tea and admired how the new spoon greatly altered the overall appearance of the rack, how the whole room sung with newness. She’d never been to Manitoba, but Gus had ended up in Winnipeg for a few years when he first immigrated from Lisbon, before the extreme weather and dearth of good work drove him west. She’d noticed him at Woodward’s in the food floor’s noisy cafeteria: a short, rigid man with a fanning black moustache that put Bernice in mind of a cartoon walrus or a Russian spy. The makeup girls said he drove one of the taxis that queued for blocks out front of the store. Each day, over the sandwich her mother insisted on tucking into her coat pocket, Bernice watched him devour a whole fish—one he brought each morning and somehow convinced the guys at the lunch counter to cook for him specially—with a green cloth napkin sprouting from his collar. In him she’d glimpsed the same stormy assemblage of charm, absurdity and selfishness she’d loved in her father. Their few instances of eye contact eventually drew Gus up the escalator, into the women’s shoe department. He came every day for a month.

  “One time, you don’t even have to say nothing,” he said, fists over his chest like he was staunching a fatal wound.

  “You are much too short,” she said with the playful abrasion she’d picked up from Carol, her supervisor, not intended to discourage.

  “Okay, okay, I’m going …,” he said.

  Left to herself, Bernice despaired she’d pushed too far, and continued to arrange a display of powder-blue baby shoes that were already quite orderly.

  Ten minutes later he was back. “I’m ready now for you, yes?” he said, clip-clopping in a pair of size-thirteen Italian pumps that nearly brought him to her eye level.

  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.