Bursting Bubbles (12 page)

He opens the door, turns off the alarm and steps inside, suddenly aware of how truly tired he is. The centre may be a falling-down hole-in-the-wall, but it’s a busy one. You’d think that people would drive right by it, assuming that any help it offered would be counter-productive, but they flock to it. Not just the ones getting free food, either. Besides the new mothers’ club, it has a youth club, a senior citizens’ club and a story hour for under-fives. It offers classes in English as a second language, and tutoring in reading and maths. It gives advice on your rights as both a citizen and a tenant, advice to women in abusive relationships, advice to parents with problem children, and help in filling out forms, applying for jobs, writing résumés and dealing with debt. According to Mrs Dunbar, they have to do so much because the government is doing next to nothing and cutting the funding it gives to the organizations that do try to do something. Also according to Mrs Dunbar, every week more people lose their jobs, their homes or both, while homeless and women’s shelters, libraries and programmes to help the desperate are forced to close.

“Doesn’t the Bible say that God helps those who help themselves?” asked Asher.

Mrs Dunbar said no. “The Bible doesn’t say anything like that.”

That isn’t what Asher’s been told.

“It was the Greeks. Check it yourself if you don’t believe me,” said Mrs Dunbar. “God doesn’t concern himself with the material world. It’s the government who helps those who help themselves. The bankers get bailed out and the unfortunate get thrown out. Jesus said you should love your neighbour as you love yourself, and, if you ask me, that doesn’t mean foreclosing on his house and making him and his family homeless.”

There isn’t a Saturday that Asher isn’t as busy as a doctor in a war. Because everyone who works at the centre is a volunteer, most of them are over sixty-five, and there are limits to how much they can heave, haul or carry, and to how high they can climb and how low bend. Which makes Asher very much in demand. They all keep telling him how nice it is to have an able-bodied young man on the team. Though if he keeps this up, he won’t be able-bodied for long. Every time he finishes doing one thing, Mrs Dunbar – who always knows the second he stands still – pops up like some manic genie to give him another task. But even by the centre’s high standards of chaos, today was special. Today was a Saturday that was handmade in Hell. Handmade and gift-wrapped with a big bow on top.

Someone threw a small stuffed pig into the toilet, causing it to back up and flood the bathroom. Today’s workshop was housing advice, and at one point there were three people in the waiting room crying. The woman who runs the story hour couldn’t get her car started. There was one epileptic fit, a violent drunk and a small child who fell down the basement stairs and had to be taken to the hospital. Mrs Dunbar dealt with the crying, the fit and the drunks, but the bathroom, story hour and the child were left to Asher. He’s never dealt with waste matter, read to small children or been in Emergency before – which doesn’t mean that any of them were experiences likely to make him a better person. On top of all that, they ran out of food boxes, which caused even more tears to fall.

He goes upstairs to shower and change. Besides sewage, he smells like a combination of sweat and the musty, never-really-clean odour of the centre itself, and has a funny taste in his mouth from an unwise cup of coffee he took from the urn. Asher is still getting dressed when Will arrives. “I’ll be five minutes!” he calls, and tosses the keys to him from his bedroom window.

The Grossmans’ family room features an enormous flat-screen TV, a top-end pool table (unlike the one at the centre that last saw better days in the nineteen-fifties), a ping-pong table, two oversized sofas and four matching armchairs. Looking at it, you would think that the family who uses it is a large one, not just two people – one of whom is rarely home. Will is on the sofa in front of the set, and leans back with a satisfied sigh as Asher comes in, carrying a tray of snacks and drinks.

“Man, this is the life,” says Will. “You don’t know how lucky you are not to have sisters. The house to ourselves and football. Heaven couldn’t be any better than this.”

“Yeah, it’s cool.” Cool but sometimes a little lonely. Will’s sisters are pretty high-maintenance, but there are times when Asher would prefer any company to none. Asher’s father is away so much that Asher has the house to himself more often than not; when Albert is home he’s usually busy. And Mrs Swedger wasn’t hired as a mother substitute, not even when Asher was younger; she was hired to keep the house running smoothly. She works a set number of hours a day, has her evenings off as well as weekends and has her own apartment over the garage. But Asher doesn’t say anything about being lonely to himself, never mind to Will. What he says is, “Don’t start pulling out the tears and violins, Lundquist. You don’t have it that bad. Your sisters do have friends. And some of them are pretty all right.”

“And what good does that do me?” demands Will. “You don’t seriously think I could go out with one of my sisters’ friends, do you? Trust me, dude, they’ve all seen that picture of me pissing on the side of the car when I was three. None of them thinks that highly of me. And even if I did date one of them, you can bet my sisters would tell her stuff about me even I don’t know. Every time I belched or farted they’d be on the phone telling her how loud or how much it stank.”

“Oh, man…” Asher laughs. “They’d take pictures of you sleeping, with your mouth open and drooling. And pictures of your room with your dirty boxers piled up on the floor and all those plates under the bed.”

“Exactly. That’s why I keep my door locked at all times.” He pats Dunkin, sleeping loudly beside him. “And why I’m glad I have my guard dog here.”

Asher sets the tray down on the coffee table and drops onto the sofa next to Will. “You’re quite a team. He’s hardly ever awake and you never stop eating.”

“We’ll ignore that unkind jibe, won’t we, Dunk? Because we know you don’t really mean it.”

Asher winks. “You believe what you want.”

Will reaches for a handful of chips and stuffs them into his mouth, sprinkling crumbs all over himself and the sofa. “So how was it today at the salt mines of Queen’s Park? Drain any lakes? Feed the multitude with a couple of packages of hot dogs and a bag of rolls? Have anybody puke all over you?”

“Hahaha,” says Asher.

Will thinks it’s hilarious that Asher Grossman, the boy who was born wearing a suit and shoes with a spit shine, is doing menial tasks and manual labour. He has said – repeatedly – that he’d give a hundred bucks for a picture of Asher with a mop.

“I know this’ll be a big disappointment, but there weren’t any major floods or barfing babies like on my first day.”

“You see?” Will punches him in the arm. “What’d I tell you? It’s getting better, isn’t it?”

“It depends what you call better. I did have to spend half a lifetime sitting in Emergency with a kid with a broken arm. And unblock the toilet and clean up the crap.”

“Eww…” Will wrinkles his face in distaste. “You don’t mean that literally, do you?”

“Oh yes, I do,” says Asher. “We don’t deal with metaphors at the centre.” They just deal with hopelessness and despair.

“So it’s not getting better?”

“It’s never going to get better. The most you can hope for is different.” Every day a new crisis; every week a fresh disaster. “I know you think I’m exaggerating. Because I’m me.” Someone who thinks civilization is collapsing if a fuse blows or his flight is delayed. “But I’m not. That place is total chaos. And if you think that there’s any order in chaos, I can tell you straight up that there isn’t. Not a subatomic particle of the stuff.” Asher also takes some chips, but, unlike Will, he sets his down on a napkin. He’s a neat eater. “There are always at least four things going on at the same time, and everybody running around like they’re in a disaster movie.” Which, if he’s honest, they technically are. The disaster movie of life. “When anybody bothers to show up.” Asher’s father is right. No matter what Mrs Dunbar or the Bible says about loving your neighbour (he did check it out, she was right about God not helping the ambitious), without the profit motive, very little gets done. Either people don’t come at all, or they come and achieve less than the paint on the walls – which, at the centre, at least is peeling. “And every five minutes something goes wrong. The power’s always going out. There’s always a partition collapsing.” Though his theory is that Mrs Dunbar knocks down the partitions. Graceful as a bulldozer. “Today, besides the sewer taking over the bathroom, we had an angry ex-husband stinking of beer looking for his wife and threatening to set us on fire. I’m not even going to get into the rest of it.”

“At least it’s not boring. Unlike, for example, raking leaves.”

Asher pours his soda into a glass. “No, it’s not boring.” It’s a lot more like a psychiatric crisis unit than a community centre. “It’s stressful. It’s messy. And it’s exhausting. But, no, you’re right, Will, I honestly can’t say that it’s boring.”

Will grins. “And I have to say that as awesome as I thought it was that this woman got you to stand in dirty water in your bare feet and mop up the cellar, I think it’s a hundred times more awesome that she had you unblock the toilet. I assume you wore your surgical gloves.” He tosses some more chips into his mouth. “Asher I-get-manicures Grossman! I really would pay to see that.”

Asher jabs him with his elbow. “Lay off, will you? It was only the one time.” His father took him to a VIP party and insisted on the manicure. “And anyway, you’re not going to see it. Not in this lifetime.”

Will pops the top on his soda with a flourish of spray. Asher never bothers offering him a glass. He’s seen Dunkin drink out of a glass more often than Will.

“So, the multitudes still coming for the handouts?”

“Are you kidding?” Freeloaders, his father would call them. Wanting something for nothing. “You’d need barbed wire and dogs to keep them away. We actually ran out today.” It surprised him that no one shouted or complained. Most of them just turned around and walked off with blank faces.

“So why did you even bother going?” Will takes a slug of his drink. “You must’ve done most of your twenty hours already. Just stop. If you have a couple more hours to do, do them in April or May.”

But here’s the weird thing. It doesn’t seem that Asher can just quit. Not even for one weekend.

“I tried to.” He really did. At least he thinks so. “But, I don’t know, somehow it didn’t work.”

“Somehow it didn’t work?”
Will almost chokes with laughter. “What’d you do, fall through the rabbit hole or something? You’re the slick-as-oil future lawyer. You could talk a moose into shooting itself.”

“Yeah, I’m great with moose.” Asher takes a few more chips. He chews them singly and well. “But Mrs Dunbar isn’t a moose.”

Will grins, waggling his eyebrows. “What is she? Some hot babe? Is that why you can’t say no to her? Why as soon as she looks at you, you grab your plunger and wade into the muck? Because she makes you melt with her big blue eyes?”

Mrs Dunbar is a
femme fatale
only in the sense that she might knock him over and trample him to death. What she is, as far as Asher can figure, is a force of nature. Like a tornado. Something you can’t really say no to. Not with any success.

“Man, are you on the wrong page, you doof. Mrs Dunbar’s in her fifties, built like a black bear and married to the minister over at the Methodist church. She’s just got this way about her.”

“What way? She carry a gun?”

“She doesn’t need a gun.” Weak people may need to be armed, but not people like Mrs Dunbar. She would have made a great dictator. “And it’s not like she’s really bossy or anything like that. She just makes you think she’s agreeing with you and then the next thing you know you’re doing what she wants.”

This is the literal truth. Last week, Asher kept saying he was finished for the day and was going home, and Mrs Dunbar kept saying how hard he’d worked and what a good job he’d done as if she was thanking him and telling him to go in peace, and the next thing he knew he was carrying someone’s groceries to her car. Then he tried to tell Mrs Dunbar that he wouldn’t be in this week, and she asked him why, and he heard himself saying, “Yeah, OK, I guess I can make it.” The same thing happened this week. The woman doesn’t seem to hear “no”.

Will frowns. “Shoot, man. Does that mean you’re not going to have any free Saturdays for the rest of the year? What about the games? And our climbing? We have to get one more climb in before the snow.”

“There’s no way I won’t be free for that stuff, dude. We’re going to do everything we always do. This time I really mean it. That woman’s not going to see me again till the spring.”

Famous last words. Again.

“What
is all this, honey?”

Marigold stops in the middle of the staircase, and automatically smiles. She left her mother alone for a few minutes to get something in her room, and here she is in the hall, peering into Marigold’s opened backpack. Why isn’t she still at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and watching TV?

“Oh, nothing.” Smile solid as cement, Marigold continues her descent. “Just a couple of old picture books I’m taking to the library.”

Her mother looks at her. “Books? You’re taking books to the library?” She’s wearing a smile, too. The happy Liottas. But she sounds as if Marigold has pulled a gun on her. “Isn’t that like taking chocolate to Nestlé?”

“It’s just books I don’t need any more, Mom. I thought the library could use them.”

“You mean you’re
giving
them to the library? You’re giving your childhood books away?”

Marigold chooses to misunderstand. “The library won’t think it’s weird, Mom. They’re in really good condition.” There has never been any scribbling or bending down corners in this house.

“Well, that goes without saying, honey. Of course they’re practically like new. That wasn’t what I meant. These were your books when you were a little girl. They have sentimental value.” Mrs Liotta pulls out a hardback with a blue cover. “Look! This was your favourite book. You must have read it a thousand times. Remember? Remember how you loved it?”