Alice promptly lost interest in papermaking.
Daddy commenced pilfering stock from Quills to bring home to her as encouragement. He drew up plans to expand the shop, build the small gallery where Alice could show her work; I would curate. We could bring in other local artists too. He called a family meeting to hammer out the details, but Alice couldn’t make it.
She had gotten a job waiting tables in a Spanish restaurant over on South Cambie and had started dating Joaquin, a young Latin guitar player. A part-time waiter, Joaquin also played accompaniment for his sister, Emilia, who danced flamenco Tuesday and Thursday nights for the dinner crowd.
Alice bought a guitar and took lessons from Joaquin. She saw flamenco as her new true calling.
One night after dinner, she sat on the hearth and played us a piece. She was good, as usual.
Sitting in the living room by the fireplace, my father watched her slap a palm on the guitar’s body between rhythmic strummings, the muscles around his eyes bunching. He seemed to be concentrating to the point of pain.
After the guitar had received Alice’s last flamenco whack, there was silence in the room.
The fire snapped. Daddy cleared his throat.
“Well, that was something, sweetheart. You’ve been putting your heart into this. And it shows. You sure are terrific.”
Alice’s face looked cheerfully frail.
I slumped back into the armchair.
“What?” she said guardedly.
Had my sigh been audible?
“Well.” He hunted in his hands for a way to begin. “Alice. I—We invested a significant amount of money and energy into a family business almost four months ago now and I don’t think you’ve set foot in there since. You haven’t been paying any attention to your artwork … and you’ve stopped making your beautiful paper. I thought this could be a real enterprise for you. A focal point.”
“Why should I focus on one point?” She set the guitar down beside her.
“Why?” he repeated, his tone still gentle but equally baffled.
I had never heard my father raise his voice. There were articles written about people like him, about how they all seemed to end up with cancer or ALS. “ … to be a success,” Daddy was saying, “a person’s got to discipline her mind and choose what she wants.”
“Why do I have to give up what I love to make other people happy?” Without warning, tears rolled down her cheeks and she wrapped her arms around her ribs.
Daddy reached out a hand toward her.
“No.” She flinched from his touch. Then she got up and walked out of the room, head down, as if trekking through a blizzard.
My father drooped with helplessness, his expression the one he wore when no amount of corralling could contain the women in his life. Then he smiled sheepishly. “I guess it’s hard for a couple fellas like us to know how creative types like Alice and your mother feel.”
I smacked my palms against the chair arms and stood. “Guess I’ll go see what gives.”
Alice’s reaction seemed extreme until I discovered that only hours before, her guitar-playing waiter had discovered that his lover was also seeing his sister. Alice’s fireside concert, it turned out, had been a swan song. Sometime during my father’s inquisition, it had hit home for Alice that Joaquin had walked out of her life for good and taken his sister with him.
At two the next morning, deep in sleep, my sister wandered into the hallway and began to wail, “Don’t burn, no, Momma, please, I don’t want to …”
She dreamed that our mother had come to life, climbed from the depths of a canyon, only to slip backward over the edge. Clutching the rocks and vines, she begged for Alice to come with her, crying that she was afraid to go down alone.
Alice went into such an awful funk after losing both Joaquin and Emilia at once that she was essentially bed-ridden through the Christmas season. Daddy and I bundled her down to the couch each morning as though she were a terminal patient and babied her as best we could, but she was pretty non-responsive until I started up with my old trick of drawing fairies—these ones adorned with Santa hats and sleigh bells. They rode the backs of antlered, red-nosed mice under toadstools that had been draped in coloured lights. The details were not readily apparent to my family until I explained them, but, bit by bit, my feeble renditions got a laugh. It was something of a heart-suck, though, to hear those lost old words from Alice: “It was love that made it come.”
Soon Alice took the sketchbook back in her capable hands. Slowly her fairies grew plump again, like the voluptuous creatures from the past, only now they appeared to be more in the realm of heavenly angels, sweet cherubs watching over God’s children.
Alice told me one night after our father had gone to bed that she’d been thinking maybe this wasn’t right, this business of having multiple lovers. Forty, fifty? How many lovers would she have by the time she was done? She’d be so far into the triple digits, she’d need an abacus to keep track.
Peering into my eyes she added, “There’s no joy in frivolous sex, Angie. I’m lonesome.”
Suddenly self-conscious, I wondered if my envy was always this apparent.
“Maybe I never should have gone with girls at all,” she said. “The Universe is about miracles, and creativity and life. Two girls can’t create life. Two girls … must make no sense to God.”
Days before Alice’s eighteenth New Year’s Eve, she made the resolution that she was going to become more spiritual. By which she apparently meant Christian. She started to read the Bible—off-putting for my father and me, but aside from the theological navel-gazing she seemed in much better spirits. I even managed to persuade her it was time to join the human race again, commune with God’s other creatures and have a glass of Jesus-juice.
We went to a house party brimming with some artsy types I figured my sister would enjoy. There was enough male pulchritude to keep me and twenty Alices happy, but my sister was on a whole new kick and all night long she kept talking up the Father, the Son and the whole damn thing.
As we rang in the new year, one of the guys hollered, “Here’s to getting laid!”
To which Alice responded: “The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.” From Proverbs, she informed me.
I moved to the other side of the room, slammed a shot of tequila and began necking with a stranger.
As the night wore on Alice became the object of relentless teasing.
“Alice, if you go for a walk with the Lord, can you pick me up some smokes on your way back?”
“Alice, did you know Jesus couldn’t play hockey for shit—he always got nailed to the boards.”
Letting them go at her that way, unchecked, bothered me some, but a larger part of me enjoyed it. My guilt was assuaged by the fact that the more they ribbed, the more beatific she looked.
The Sunday after, she headed down to a neighbourhood church, Good News Community, which had a parish of about two hundred youthful congregants. Afterward she easily found their new youth pastor. Or, more likely, he found her. The two of them had a chat in the foyer, which extended downstairs into the parish hall for after-service coffee and cookies.
Alice came home elated. “You can feel the love. You can see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices when they sing. They’ve really got the Joy joy joy,” she sang, “down in their hearts.”
Soon Alice joined the choir, and over the next few weeks became the youth pastor’s right-hand man. There was talk of her teaching Sunday school eventually, once she really got her bearings, once she’d been baptized.
After Alice started at the church office as a part-time secretary, Daddy gave up trying to entice her back into the family business. She worked mostly for Pastor Clint, her partner-in-Christ, and apparently her assistance was invaluable.
My mother and father had had some Sunday school in their childhoods but neither had seemed interested in their own kids attending. While growing up, Alice and I were both fairly ign
orant of the Bible’s contents. Now, Alice crashed headlong into the scriptures. Once she finished with Proverbs she took to reading and rereading the Book of Matthew, The Sermon on the Mount in particular, gobbling verse after verse, regurgitating bits here and there whenever she considered it warranted.
Hearing the words made me feel as if I had bugs in my clothes.
I was past the age of dressing to my father’s specifications, but he was entitled to hope, I suppose. Sitting in his La-Z-Boy staring over his newspaper one night, he gave me the once-over as I walked into the living room. I had on a new dress, one that I considered an appetizing yet chic choice for the evening.
“Is that absolutely necessary?” he asked.
I looked down at myself and threw up my hands in mock exasperation.
Alice sat curled on the sofa, poring over some Clint work she’d brought home. She glanced up. “What do you want her to do, Daddy? Hide her light under a bushel?”
“I don’t want her casting her pearls before swine, dear, that’s all.” He turned the page of his paper with exaggerated calm and tilted his head back as he perused the headlines.
Alice snickered.
A car honked out front.
“’Kay, gotta go.” I took a couple of steps toward the door.
“You will not.” My father set his paper down.
“What!” I said, closer to expressing genuine irritation.
“Angela.” He switched to a cajoling tone. “Where’s your self-respect? Your mother—”
“Oh Jesus.” I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t planning to marry the guy, for god’s sake.
“Oh!” Alice looked from her paperwork again. “Before you go, I’ve been meaning to ask you …” She tapped her pen on the pages. “I’m working on something for Clint—”
“Clint,” I repeated. “Nobody’s really named Clint.”
Alice grinned.
Another honk from out front. I dashed for the hall and grabbed my coat.
I heard my father thrash the newspaper against his legs. “Angela,” he pleaded. “Please let this fool inquire at the door like a gentleman.”
“He’s just a friend, Dad.” I poked my face back into the living room. “Later!”
“Ange, wait,” my sister called. “Clint is starting up a sandwich project for homeless people. Could you volunteer for our first day? Either to make sandwiches or to give them out. And then you could meet Clint too!”
“Angela!” A distant bellow from outside.
My date. I suddenly felt a bit old to have a juvenile delinquent waiting out front in a souped-up car, with my father staring daggers through the walls. I came back into the room and flopped onto the couch beside Alice.
Daddy marched for the front door.
“Dad, just let it—”
He went out and the door closed carefully behind him.
“I gotta get my own place,” I said.
“We start this Friday.” Alice prattled on as though I hadn’t said a word. “From 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. But if you can’t make it—I don’t know why that would be because the store doesn’t open until eleven—but maybe you could make sandwiches the night before? Clint said in L.A. they liked meat loaf the best.”
Clint had gone to Bible-thumping school in California. Whether he had been transferred by the Good News people or had relocated of his own volition wasn’t clear, but he had headed north and immediately commenced a multimedia overhaul at the Vancouver location.
I turned my head to look at Alice—her corkscrew curls were sickeningly angelic and bouncy right now—then twisted around for another look at the door. “You ever hear any more from that Roni-chick?” I asked, irritated that she’d managed to have an affair with a complete thug without our father being any the wiser.
Her eyes dimmed, then brightened. “No. She was a good person … but misguided.”
Christ, she was loving her enemies now. It was a relief that she was out of her fragile phase, but this patience-of-Job routine made me want to pound her with her own Gideon.
My father appeared in the door with a hand on the shoulder of my date. “Alice,” he said, “I’d like you to meet Vincent. Vincent’s going to join us for dinner tonight.”
“Hey,” said my date, previously known as Vince, as in convince. He slunk nervously into the glare of the front hall light, his legs suddenly scrawny, shoulders stooped, dwindling before my eyes, never to regain stature again.
At 7:45 a.m., Friday morning, Alice and I hauled the sandwiches we’d made over to Clint’s apartment. She had neglected to mention the set-up entailed in this production and I was feeling chilled and resentful. This morning was the city’s first fall frost, as far as I knew. I hadn’t been awake this early in some time.
When he opened the door, even in my groggy state I could see what she saw in him. He looked like a Clint. Handsome but not pretty, with an unsettled coyote quality about him despite his earnest veneer.
“Look at you girls,” he said with a lost-in-the-sheets hoarseness. “Up to the armpits in alms! You must be Angela.” He extended his hand to me. “Wonderful to meet you.”
We shook.
His face, like tanned-soft leather, was close shaven and his blue shirt ironed smooth. Something in him looked refurbished to me. Maybe it was the low rasp of his voice, as if he and Jack Daniel’s had once sharked their way through pool halls and back alleys, hustling and lusting, bosom buddies—until he met Jesus.
His gaze held mine for a couple of moments. It’s striking how rare that is. Most eyes flit and avoid extended contact at all costs. A steady gaze is almost suspect.
I dropped mine and felt as though I’d lost a game of chicken.
“I’m almost ready,” he said, and we followed him to his kitchen where a box of sandwiches sat on the counter. “I’m just finishing up a cigarette on the balcony.”
“Oh my gosh.” My sister beamed, and peered inside the box. “You must’ve been up all night making those.”
Clint smiled and winked at her, then headed for his smoke on the other side of the sliding glass doors. I followed a few steps into the front room. The sparse furniture was mostly pine. The walls were regulation rental-white. Framed on one was a poster from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Clint’s Special Collector’s Edition displayed a white-bearded Charlton Heston lifting his golden tablet. A bolt of lightning cut through Technicolor clouds and struck the commandments in ferocious Heston’s mitts.
The poster next to Moses featured a throng of men running across a sandy seashore: They will sacrifice anything to achieve their goals … Except their honor. Chariots of Fire.
I watched Clint as he stepped out onto his balcony. He looked toward the North Shore mountains bathed pink in the early morning light. He took a deep drag off his cigarette and folded his arms, his leather coat pulled tight across his shoulders.
I stepped closer but remained on the inside of the glass doors. I hadn’t thought Born Againers smoked.
As though reading my mind, he glanced back and shrugged. “My last bad habit.”
Alice braced herself against the metal balcony door frame and leaned into the cool air. “Man, it’s so beautiful—like a spirit came and painted the sky with all its finest.”
“One did,” he said, grinning at her, his voice low and warm. He reached his empty hand to her cheek and gave it an adoring-but-paternal brush with the topside of his fingers. He ran his cigarette hand through his own tousled hair as he took in a last eyeful of the city and turned back, just in time to catch me staring.
I looked away.
“You a Christian, Angela?”
My head jerked as though I’d been caught stealing. “Excuse me?”
“Do you love Jesus?” Clint and his honey-and-sand voice.
“Just as a friend.” I forced a smile and backed toward Moses.
On the Downtown Eastside, Pastor Clint had set up a coordinated effort with an outreach centre on Powell Street. Once the rollicking centre of town, the area was no
w one of the bleakest in all of Canada. Rundown Chinese produce stores nestled behind the barred windows of defunct businesses. Pawnshops and dilapidated beer parlours lined the streets while drug-jonesing hookers and boozehounds staggered down the sidewalks.
I stared out the window of Clint’s van at the grizzled homeless, layered in filthy old clothes, some pushing carts, some sharing a bottle in the tiny park nearby. Most squinted as if a smash in the face were looming, their knuckles and scabby noses proof that one usually was. The morning didn’t look so beautiful any more and I cursed Alice for it.
We unloaded the van at the outreach centre and a couple of staff came out to greet Clint and help us set up our tent next to the sidewalk. Clint laid out church leaflets on the fold-up table. The outreach workers thanked us again and went back inside.
I stood back as Clint and Alice stapled posters along the edges of the table. When they were done, Taste and see the goodness of the Lord and Good News is Good Food hung down like an evangelical hula skirt.
Alice attempted to plaster more along the sides of the tent, juggling paper and tape, dropping posters and catching sticky ribbons of plastic in her hair.
I grudgingly moved in to help, only to lose the end of the tape against the roll. I cursed under my breath and then snuck a look to see whether Clint had heard. His eyes met mine as if they’d been waiting, and I swung my gaze away as fast as I could.
A few neighbourhood men hung back, watching and asking questions.
“Is this real food or is this just Bible shit?”
“Gonna try and holy-roll our asses?”
Clint assured them in a booming voice that there would be real sustenance to fill their bellies. Jesus fed the multitudes and so would we.
“Jesus was a stand-up guy,” someone muttered pensively.
“Fuckin’ cocksucker,” a female voice shrieked. “Jesus was a fuckin’ cocksucker!”
My eyes searched to find the woman behind the voice. Gaunt and coltish, she wore her coat hanging open, exposing an orange-spandex—covered belly that popped like a blue-ribbon pumpkin. I couldn’t take my eyes off that belly as she argued with the man now scolding her.
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