The Beggar's Garden

by Michael Christie

  “She had a job?”

  “A volunteer job.”

  “Umhmm.”

  Bernice raked her mind for something more to tell her, this parent who should already know everything, but in truth they’d discussed their lives as much as she and Tuan had.

  Bernice watched her hug the other mourners—lightly, so as not to disturb each other’s hairdo, her black shawl gently shimmering—and pictured this mother feeding baby Karla, rocking her. She marvelled at the money spent on things like piano lessons and figure skates, the time teachers spent after class unpaid to detangle in her mind the multiplication of fractions. And with all that went into the girl, that this sad display would stand as the summation of her time here crushed Bernice’s heart like a baby bird.

  Bernice went to the pencil-lead-coloured coffin and pulled from her purse a wooden caterpillar that wobbled when pulled by its string. She set the toy beside her in the white satin interior. Karla had a ponytail—a style she’d never worn—and her face was puffy and spatulaed with makeup.

  On her way out, Bernice turned and saw her father pick the caterpillar from her coffin and place it on a table. Then he and one of the funeral staff electric-screwdrivered the box shut, the tiny motor mewling painfully.

  She couldn’t find the bus stop, and she wondered if it might have been relocated during the funeral. The sun crinkled her eyes as she walked to another parking lot—this time, she gathered from the nearly full lot, that of a real mall. She went inside to seek directions.

  She entered through a store where everything was supposed to cost a dollar. Walking the cluttered aisles with not a salesperson in evidence, she recalled the scoldings Carol would dole out if a customer went thirty seconds in the shoe department without a warm greeting. The dollar store was organized with no apparent logic and the items were all tawdry bits of plastic, a fact the sign-age and overall design of the store seemed to celebrate. Woodward’s had had dollar-forty-nine days each Tuesday. They drew lineups down the block, but people still got good value for their money, and the products were made to last. She stopped in an aisle of towering stacks of plastic containers.

  She wondered if Gus shopped in stores like these now. He and the owner of the green dress, or the owner of some other dress. She decided he probably did. The smell of plastic was making her light-headed. Finally, she was approached by an employee, who Bernice asked to escort her into the mall itself, where she sat on a bench. After a short rest, she located a pay phone in a dingy hallway that led to the janitorial area. She had to ask a custodian where she was before phoning for a taxi that would cost more than the thrift store made in a week.

  The next morning, a pumpkin-faced man wandered in the door, pants soaked with urine—his own, Bernice hoped.

  “Oh, Charlie,” she said, pulling her lips taut, guiding him to the washroom beside the overflowing storeroom. “Nothing I haven’t seen before,” she said, as she peeled away his shirt, its tails soaked and sour, and saw the man’s pink blotchy flesh hung in pouches as if melting from him. Yanking off his pants, she discovered on his shins numerous weeping sores that someone had bandaged long ago, possibly months. She tutted at the red streaks that leapt toward his groin.

  “You see these?” she said, tracing one with her fingernail.

  Charlie looked down at his lower half incredulously as though for the first time in a year.

  “You want to lose your legs, you old goat?”

  Charlie shrugged and placed his hand on her back. A pleasant sensation unrolled from where his hand pressed, akin to tickling, but warmer. She let it mix into her blood a moment, recalling how comfortably Gus fit beneath her chin when they hugged—a disparity she’d first found embarrassing but grew to adore—how they’d waited to be together until their honeymoon in Tofino, where he rented from a fishmonger he knew a smelly cedar cabin smack dab in the middle of all that water and air, and how they sat on the gravelly beach drinking wine. “Here,” he said, sweeping his arm, exhaling as if at the end of a journey, “this sea faces the right way.”

  Bernice stood abruptly and Charlie’s hand swung limp to his lap. She snipped some gauze, re-dressed his shins and found him a new shirt and pair of pants, better brands and materials than she should have.

  “Now you go straight to the hospital and get those legs looked at,” she said and Charlie grinned lavishly, opening his arms wide, teetering like a chopped-at tree. “Off you go,” she said and ushered him out.

  His rancid pants and shirt she flung into the dumpster. She took the squat brown bottle of rice wine he’d forgotten and poured it down the drain, calling it payment for the new clothes. Her opinion, one she would never have spoken aloud, was that these people behaved mostly like little children—careless, impulsive, selfish. Perhaps no one had ever taught them to care for themselves, she had no idea. It was just that possessions didn’t seem to matter to people anymore, not how they once did. She gave them nice warm coats, good-quality jeans and blouses and skirts, she gave them toasters and dishes, sometimes even furniture—all of which they lost, or ruined, or sold, or even just threw away. And they treated themselves no better than the things she gave them.

  She’d always liked to think if she found something perfect enough for them they’d have to keep it, care for it and in doing so acquire a taste for caring for themselves. But when dealing with people like Charlie she feared there was something missing, something essential they lacked, something that her thrift store could never provide.

  On the rumbling bus home from the store that evening, Bernice tried to imagine the coach house, glittery lakeside sun dancing on the floor of her little room. She tried to select just one item in her collection she could part with, just one that wasn’t necessary, but this left her feeling cruel. She remembered as a girl the horror of finding even one of her stuffed animals on the floor when she woke and the subsequent guilt at imagining it there the whole night, shivering, crying out, imploring in its silent stuffed-animal language how she, their only caretaker, could be so heartless. No, there was no part of her collection she could be rid of, no part that was less worthy. She decided to put the whole coach house question to rest.

  She sat on the varnished pew in the teal Orlon skirt she used to wear to sell shoes. “When did you get so dowdy?” she’d said to herself in the mirror that morning before digging deeper into the recesses of her bedroom closet than she had in years.

  Never much of a believer, she came to church partly for the singing and mostly for when the pastor referred them to a passage in the Bible. She loved to lick her fingertips, peel the thin pages, discover the numbered verse there waiting for her, right where it should be, charging her with a joy comparable to when she opened the store each morning.

  “Blessed is he that considereth the poor: the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble,” the pastor began, his voice chalky with feeling. “Fat chance of that,” Bernice muttered to herself, and dropped the burgundy King James back into the slot in the pew ahead. It’d been two weeks since her sister’s phone call, and Bernice found herself unexpectedly bothered by the lapse. A few nights ago she dreamt that Charlton Heston as Moses from The Ten Commandments had pulled up out front of her shop in one of those new truck-style limousines she’d seen lately on the street, the ones the size of a school bus.

  “This place is cursed,” he’d said, speaking as if he hated his teeth.

  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 bene
ath 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 sa
me 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.