One Hundred Days of Rain (3 page)

11.

The first apartment she's shown in the red-brick building is on the sixth floor. It's a sunny day and the park spreads out below her from two windows. The current tenant has sensibly restricted (himself? herself?) to a single piece of furniture: a giant futon cantilevered into a couch, with wheels set to stay and a robust corduroy cover. She falls in love at once.

That one's gone, says the harried building manager when he calls her later with good news. She has been accepted & approved. He's tall and Slavic, this manager, with an indeterminate accent, probably from a vanished country. He has an erect brush of brown hair and is one of those men whose tone comes entirely from their circumstances. He could be kind, he could be cruel, all with the same lack of thought, no flicker to animate those small dark eyes. There is one on the first floor available, he continues.

It's evening when she goes back. Her son alone in their temporary apartment a block away. It may not be true anymore that they don't rent to people with children but she can't be sure. She can't take anything for granted.

The first-floor apartment is supposed to be a clone of the one on the sixth floor but to her eyes they are entirely different. Boxes and belongings clutter the dim dingy room. The pullout bed a cavern. Outside a swishing and sighing, faint. It is too close, there in the room, to tell if she is listening to the rain, brushing against the windows, or the cars that rush ceaselessly on the road outside.

The next day she calls back with renter's remorse. It's too dark, she says over and over. The Slavic manager deals more kindly with her than she might have expected, talks her into it in fact. She tells herself they can always move.

12.

On the day she is to pick up her belongings she rents a van, the smallest one she can get, and still backs into another car in the drugstore parking lot. A stranger has to talk her off the other car's bumper, which he does, sensibly and without fuss.

She drives to the café near her and M's house. Calls the police who must accompany her given her apparently terrible ways. The police are busy. She waits and calls back, waits and calls back. Finally the police call her. M has refused, they say. She will have to come another day. But the van, the empty apartment. Her son. In vain she argues.

She has to call her son's father. It's the second time they've spoken in years, after the night with the police at the other café. He arrives in an hour. Foam mattress, bucket, soap, cups & dishes. Sheets & towels. Drives her to the store for a clock and dishpan. Returns the van for her, drives them both back downtown. Large & silent in the driver's seat. Her son asks nothing. Why are we moving. Why don't we have our things. What will happen to us.

13.

Their new apartment is too cold, the weather has turned and suddenly she's wearing wool which seems a little excessive. The rain streaks the angled glass roof across from her windows. Each day these panes are her barometer. Today the drops form an indeterminate scree, silvery streaks veining the steep pitch. Someone upstairs is walking restless as her, her slow dragging steps echoed there, in counterpoint.

She forces herself to go outside. In this mood only force works. People on the sidewalk are breathing like smokers, each wet puff overloading the already supersaturated atmosphere. She should care, believe, something, whatever. Add her mite. Anything but this dull grey cloud over everything, suffocating her.

14.

The child's father has her son for the week. Alone she wakes to rain, seeping into crevices all around. She imagines she can hear it on the roof, five storeys above. Each storey a layer of people, like a cake studded with fruit. The rain coming through them all, through her. There must have been a time when the sun shone however watery. When the clouds parted and that single weak ray made its unerring way to ground. The point of God's finger. But the wet world has wrapped her too long, she no longer remembers anything else. Rain has worked its way into a permanent condition.

She locks up the dim room where she lives. Outside the sky an undifferentiated lowering mass. There is no dark or light, just this pressing pale grey like an iron held up against the city. Blunt & inarguable against the constructed world. Steaming. Pedestrians cross the street without looking up.

Rain continues. It's there every time she glances out her window at work, the one window permitted in their jail cell of a barred interior. Rain when she steps to the alley door to take a breather. Rain when she mounts her cycle. Well, bye then, she says to her coworkers, and rings her bell. Her bell unanswered in the alley. No need to hurry, with no child to pick up. She pedals down the wet road. Vehicle headlights flash as they turn before her in the pre-dusk gloom. More and more she takes her hands off the bars, more and more she's able to balance unaided. Folly, this sense of effortless motion on the rain-slick street.

The rain continues. February, month of love, drugstore hearts and gas-station flowers. Her son's birthday, past now, her (deceased) grandmother's birthday, her lover S's birthday. People to think about. No point putting cards in the mail, buying presents. Not this year.

The weekend comes. The child hers again.
S
back in town,
S
who comes to visit regularly and faithfully, nine years now. They are watching the game in the restaurant, she and
S
and the child. Okay
S
is watching. Plates & pints. What normal people do. She clings to it. On TV the rain is invisible. The football teams catch & fumble, drops spatter the lens. The camera pulls away and the rain is suddenly central to it all, visible, Biblical, coming down like fury on the people in the stadium. Helpless. The ball goes up again, arcing in that particular irregular parabola, the football players' sinewy delicate hands reaching and failing to grasp.

15.

Rain overwhelms her as she plods from foot to foot. The kind of rain that can't be ignored. It envelops her, it makes even walking to the corner a misery. Each drop weighs in, another small burden, and the splashes coming up from under make it impossible to stay dry. There hasn't been a kind of covering invented that works. People with umbrellas duck under the overhang, everyone threading their way from shelter to shelter on the dark street. There was a dawn, hours ago, and hours from now there will be a sunset, so she's told or remembers from long ago. Meanwhile this obliterating rain obscures everything. The luckiest maddest ones are swathed in coats, hoods pulled up over their faces, pants of rainproof drip-dry material. They move through the world as through an alien landscape, astronauts, swaddled & untouchable.

Rainproof. Like quick and easy weight loss, a demonstrable lie.

S
is visiting again.
S
wants to know if she possesses an umbrella. As if. Her son dressed in fire-licked rubber boots with little eyes. They are all miserable as they trudge from place to place. Should we take the bus. Yes, yes, pipes the little one, sodden. The adults grudging the cost.

All the time now she makes mistakes. The next morning she forgets her wallet. Let me off, she says to the driver. Last week they were on their way to school in the rain, she and her child, when the driver stopped the bus with a jerk. The child somersaulted head over heels down the aisle. She came stomping up to the front to complain, her son in her arms wailing. Would you stop driving that way, she hissed.

I didn't do anything. The wail impossible to ignore, he capitulated grudgingly. Okay, okay, I'm sorry.

So she doesn't expect mercy today. But he says it's fine, waves a hand. Settle up with me later. She sits back down, indignation leaking from her pricked. Unfamiliar, this curdling mix of outrage and gratitude. Outside the windows, what else, rain.

16.

From inside the windows of the bus the passengers watch rain. Condensation wraps them in a frosted blanket of glass. She smears herself a hole to look out. Outside is the same view as always, the wet darkened streets, the unlucky. They totter from place to place trailing blankets. They shamble heedless across the avenue. The bus she's on slows and picks up speed and stops regretfully a safe block from Chinatown's main intersection. The Chinese crowd on. There is a lot of excited conversation over who's to sit where. Maybe something else. The bus begins to move again, the hesitant lurch and rush of the bus. Everyone falls silent, clutching plastic bags.

They are going to work to school. They are going going beyond the reach of rain. They won't be caught. They won't be left out. Rain is a vengeful thing, it has but one goal. To saturate them. Rain would like to fill her up until she can't hold it in any more. She sees herself broken and flooding, a vessel. She knows they should feel grateful to rain that fills up the city's reservoirs for summer. That waters the bushes & grass so that they spring up later. They're impatient though. It's difficult to grasp, to think ahead. Theoretical. What matters is the here & now. Rain is the citizenry's inheritance, their boondoggle, their folly, their insurance policy. Rain creates. Rain is cause and effect. Rain makes them.

17.

Vancouver, on the edge of the rain forest, the mountains a craggy wall. They are friendly and they stop the weather cold so that rain stays. The sea too does its part. Buffeted here between wet expanse and high back. Nothing else suits her, not the high or wide plain, not the anonymous inland tuck of cities in the smack centre of big islands. Without mountains at her back and sea at her feet she feels unmoored, drifting. Take me and keep me. Never let me go.

There are other places, true. Places she stayed and about which she can testify upon returning that it never rained there, not once. Kingston. The cold knife-like, that sharp it was. Summers muggy & clear. Quebec City, her lashes freezing together, the warm sweep of her uncovered shoulder above the woolen sweater when she took off her coat. All the students wore giant overcoats from the thrift store, boiled wool, heavy as God the Father.

It never rained in New York City either. How she begged for rain as that summer stretched out. To wash the pee away. So many men peed in the streets, there was nothing else you could do if you didn't have a toilet. She wanted rain to overlay the smells, smells that climbed and intertwined as day after day the heat continued to lengthen and rise. She walked through not grimacing, shuddering inside.

18.

Places she lived where it did rain. A different kind of rain though. In Salt Lake City the storms came sudden out of the west. One minute cloudless ordinary sky. The unthreatening sky of the desert. The next rain had passed over in violence. There was a hard insistent quality to the way it dropped on them, for twenty minutes or so. The colour of the rain was yellow. It threw up the dust as it hit. She could watch the rain from under overhangs where everybody dashed. In a few minutes it was gone again and the mountains, mauve in the distance, resumed their indifferent overlooking. The rain was like a murky dream that came and passed. She had imagined it perhaps. Given another hour the pavements resumed their colouring of bone, the moisture bleached clean from them.

19.

In Birmingham it rained just like home except nobody mentioned it, nobody seemed to think it worthy of notice. The rain went on and on and on, dreary, dripping, like a man with a head cold and not enough energy to wipe his nose. It was too pervasive to be discussed. It lasted too long. It took the heart and spirit out of them. The locals found themselves in pubs drinking beer. Lager. Mild. Bitter. Something to quench the spark the rain had almost, but not quite, succeeded in putting out.

Later everybody got on the bus damp and drunk and it didn't matter any more.

20.

She cycles in the wet, in the thick of it. Her pants dampen, then go slack, pulling away from the lean flesh of her legs: sand clings to their bottoms. Why sand? It's what lies on the street, arcs under her wheels. Her bicycle is dirty – so dirty she should clean it, instead of letting it sully the interiors of kind strangers' cars. She will cycle again today. Again today it is raining. Cycling in the rain: proof of her stoicism, what sort of person she is. What she's earned and deserves. How good she is.

Yesterday she saw a film about cyclists in Vancouver. They were cycling over the Lion's Gate Bridge, which goes straight up. Swarming against the dark pavement like crawling insects on a hill. How ugly they looked swathed in their outdoor jackets, their helmet covers like puffy mushrooms. How grey the world was. How brave they were, braving rain. There is something perverse about them all, or must be, to choose this. To resist what is comfortable. To exercise their rights. To be wet, and ultimately to be wrong.

21.

Weekly her son visits M. The child returns the next day bearing twists of cookies in a small stack, chocolate-covered raisins. Darkening pears. M phones in a flutter: I had no idea his teeth were so bad. This after the second set of cavities. The child isn't allowed any of the sugary snacks and his mother will touch none of the fruit, not if it's the last piece in the bowl.

A few days ago the drinks cupboard was bare and she persuaded herself to a can of soda the child had toted all the way from M's place. It's sealed, she told herself, it's not as if it could possibly hurt me. She drank it down and the acid rose in her throat in a terrible boil.

Yesterday she was in a courtroom with M, M's lawyer, a judge. A friendly meeting, supposedly. A chance to work things out although she would testify M has no such intention. The judge makes the customary speech about the harm done children by warring spouses. M nods, puts on her sincere expression. Later M screams that her son is confused: he doesn't understand why his mother is returning all the gifts M ever gave her. With some pleasure she is able to inquire mildly as to how her child comes to know of such things. M falls silent.

Today rain is a faint stippling on the glass across the way, sun illuminating each drop so that it stands out in glorious relief. Today the rain invites ignoring, persuading her almost, as she glances out her window, that it's not really there. Don't bother with a coat, a hat, an all-encompassing rainsuit: it's February after all. Nearly spring.

Outside, rain is a trace, the sky rising brilliant above. The wet streets on which she walks seem almost impossible, the drops scattered on every surface illusory. Surely there has been no rain, not on such a fine day as this. Surely everyone's very eyes and nostrils are mistaken.