With the encouragement of HGTV, he worked steadily, devoting himself to his projects each evening, weekend, and statutory holiday. He even used a few sick days for the really time-consuming and tricky jobs. As he destroyed places within the house that reminded him of the old days, he hoped to make homeless the memories that lingered long in that old row house.
Bad memories are like relatives who visit and overstay their welcome. Soon your irritation builds when night after night, you return home to find them lounging on your couch, or raiding the refrigerator. And bad memories can be a noisy lot, keeping you up late at night with their endless chatter. Sometimes, you rouse at night to find one of them standing next to your bed, pillow in hand, about to smother you to death.
Evicting them is futile, for memories are slippery and sly, able to find new hiding places and cubbyholes in which to live. They grudgingly vacated for a night or two, fooling him into thinking they were gone, only to make their appearance once again. When he repositioned his bedroom furniture to improve the feng shui, he found a pair of Rehana’s socks trapped behind the dresser, coated in pinkish-grayish dust. He brushed them off, and, unsure of what to do with them, meekly folded them into a tight ball and tossed them to the back of the closet.
One day while digging a hole for a new Rose of Sharon bush, he spied something buried a foot down in the soil. He poked it with his trowel, yanked it free from the earth, and held it in his gloved hand. It was a bright yellow car, encrusted in grime, just the right size for a toddler’s grip. Tiny cartoon faces peered out from its dirty windows: a father at the steering wheel, a mother in the passenger seat, and two children in the back. A gush of high-pitched babbling filled the air. Ismail looked around for children in neighbouring yards, but there weren’t any. He closed his eyes and listened until the sounds stopped.
Sometimes, on rainy days, he’d enter Zubi’s nursery, an abandoned, closed-up area of the house. He considered redoing the room, perhaps turning it into a mini-gym. He planned to donate the dusty pine crib, dresser, and change table to charity, but never managed the task. At least the closet was mostly empty; Rehana had packed up Zubi’s clothing, photo albums, and toys long ago. She left behind three framed photographs of Zubi on the dresser. He hadn’t moved them from where they’d been placed, and could hardly bear to look at them.
Over the years, the room turned musty and the wallpaper shabby, its edges peeling and curling up into itself. Rehana and Ismail had hung the wallpaper together, one of their first home decorating efforts. They had an argument about whether to go with a balloon or teddy bear motif, and as usual her choice prevailed. Rehana steadied a ladder for Ismail, and her seven-month tummy got in the way, rubbing up against the paste. After he’d hung the paper, Ismail painted the ceiling sky blue, with puffy white clouds, so that their baby would have something soothing to look at when she woke.
His renovations stopped there, at the threshold of Zubi’s room. In the rest of the house, the lovely walls, new finishes, and garden left him feeling lonelier than ever. He returned to the Merry Pint for solace, and within days, was drinking to get drunk again.
For a spell he had cheerless sexual encounters with the not-so-merry, half-sauced women he met there. They seemed to efficiently manage their dance cards through some kind of unspoken agreement with one another, switching partners on alternate nights. Ismail was among the dozen or so men who frequently vied for their attentions, buying them drinks, going home with them on a weekday evening. The luckiest, the ones most in the women’s favour on a particular week, got a Friday or Saturday night of inebriated tangoing.
They filled the vacant space in Ismail’s cold bed, their panting or snoring distracting him a little from the ghosts who lurked at night. But like the rest of his survival tactics, the results were temporary. It took him a few months of drunken sex to stumble into the realization that middle-aged white women with smoke in their hair can’t erase memories. He gave them up, and instead, found Daphne.
— 5 —
Affairs
It was shortly after Ismail’s return to the Merry Pint that Daphne became his favourite drinking buddy. Almost every day, she’d arrive just after her shift at a nearby women’s drop-in centre. She told Ismail once that she had a different personality during her workday, optimistic and helpful while she completed housing applications and distributed TTC tickets. By the time 5:00 p.m. rolled around, most of her cheer had run out.
Ismail found it surprising that Daphne had these two personas, on and off the job. But then, his work was in maintaining structures, not people. His almost singular focus was Toronto’s bridges and tunnels; the city’s great connectors. Ismail tested them for their soundness, inspected them to ensure they wouldn’t fall down on people, applying himself to his job in the same tedious and consistent manner in which he approached the rest of his life.
It was obvious that Daphne was worn down by her work. She arrived at the bar in baggy sweatshirts and jeans, only in the most sombre of colours. Her attire cloaked her slender figure, hiding ribs and hipbones that jutted out against her skin. Her face rarely saw the sunshine and her fair complexion was the kind that blushed tomato red when she was livid or embarrassed. By the end of the night, her long hair, usually pulled back in a messy braid, would be in further disarray. Later, Ismail would learn that it always carried a faint, but heady scent of lavender.
She was caustically cynical, and could find a way to flood anyone at the bar, not already depressed, with her hopelessness and despair. Ismail thought she was just his type. Besides her ability to bring people down, Daphne held great powers of suggestion. Mostly, she was a bad influence on Ismail, peer-pressuring him into drinking one, two, five too many shots of whiskey with her. When she was beyond drunk, her mood lifted and she could entertain Ismail with jokes and tales he found hilarious in the moment, but could never recall the following morning. She introduced him to several drinking games involving cards, dice, and whatever TV show was playing on the bar’s ceiling-mounted television. This held Ismail’s attention, amusing him for almost three years.
Two weeks after The Simpsons game that left Ismail questioning the wisdom of his ways, Daphne shocked him by joining Alcoholics Anonymous. They were in their usual spot at the bar, but she seemed more alert than usual, while he was already feeling a buzz.
“Wait. Really? You always called them a cult.”
“I was wrong,” she said with a shrug. “But there are some weirdos there. But most of them, they’re nice people.” Although she’d been to the Merry Pint since joining up, Ismail could tell AA was helping her. That night, he saw her order a ginger ale between beers, a sobering soda pop intermission. Her previous negativity about the program even seemed to be replaced with some hopefulness and a tentative loyalty to its teachings. Without a hint of sarcasm in her voice, she told him about the previous night’s meeting, using phrases like “one day at a time” and “higher power.”
“Well, isn’t it a contradiction to be here while joining AA?” he challenged.
“I’m going to go back tomorrow. I’m taking things slow. I’ve never been able to dive into things all at once.” Then she smiled, “Plus, if they really are a cult, it’s a good idea to do this gradually, right?”
“I guess it’s better to go sometimes than not at all,” he conceded.
“Come with me tomorrow, Ismail. It’ll be fun.” He raised a skeptical eyebrow, but she continued, her tone growing serious, “I don’t know a lot of people there yet. It would be good to have a friend with me.”
Ismail didn’t answer just then, and she changed the subject. But while she talked about a new policy at work that was annoying her, he considered her invitation. The pains in his side had returned,
