Crossings by Betty Lambert Page B

are in the beer parlor.
To go across the bridge
means to go straight, become respectable, get a job. He was just sitting there, boozing it up with the buddies, and it came over him, how he had to go across the bridge. When he got out of the Pen he was still gimpy, but Welfare fixed his back and then he did the odd bit of benny snatching and so on to augment his Welfare cheques. A bit of B & E now and then. Most times he crashed with one of the buddies in the Helen’s. His buddies laughed at him, but he just up and did it. First he and Taffy got a suitcase from one of the rooms and stuffed it with old newspapers from the lounge of the Helen’s.
    â€˜You can tell if someone’s carrying an MT,’ Mik said to me later. ‘A guy forgets and hoists it,’ he illustrated, ‘so you got to stuff it.’ All he owned in the world was the clothes he arrived in: a khaki shirt, khaki trousers, sandals, not the fashionable kind. Sandals with holes in them and buckled-down straps. Like children wear. That was all he had. Ben would have loved to have been so free.
    In one of the newspapers was our ad, Jocelyn’s and mine. We’d switched from the Female Only classified section to Men/Women. It was already two weeks old.
    He borrowed a buck from Taffy. Then he humped the suitcase across the bridge. On the other side, he got a taxi to our house, with the buck.
    â€˜Your dumb sister!’ he says to me. ‘She never even saw me drive up.’
    Jocelyn is a tall thin pre-Raphealite girl who moves through life in a Mr Magoo way, miraculously avoiding all pitfalls and mud puddles. It is a family joke. One day she inadvertently became engaged to an Arab exchange student. ‘But we were talking about agrarian reform,’ she said wonderingly, after he had made a scene in Acadia camp. ‘He was telling me about his father’s farms, and all I said was I would like to see them.’
    â€˜I come up in a cab and does she see me?’ Mik said. ‘Boy! Your dumb sister.’
    He knocked at the door and Jocelyn answered it. Yes, she said vaguely, we still had the room, nobody wanted it. You had to share the bathroom, she supposed that was why. It was just a sleeping room.
    â€˜What a salesman,’ Mik said. To me.
    She took him upstairs. It was nice and bright, I’d cleaned it before going to West Vancouver, and it had new curtains. But it wasn’t much, I guess. The bed cost ten dollars and the vanity, one of those elaborate three-way mirror things, was eight, from Love’s auction. Jocelyn contributed the rug, a shag. There was a built-in cupboard arrangement for shirts and so on.
    Jocelyn said to me later, ‘Do you think that was all right? Sixty-five?’
    Mik has asked for board as well as room.
    â€˜I didn’t think he’d go for the share system,’ said Jocelyn. We’d had actresses for a while and we shared everything four ways: food, rent, utilities. Our food never came to more than four dollars a week each.
    â€˜He asked for board too, so I said sixty-five,’ she said to me on the telephone. She was worried about making a profit. Neither one of us believed in landlord profits. ‘But I figure our time is worth something, cooking and putting up bag lunches and all that.’
    Mik said, with professional tenantese, ‘How about linen?’
    â€˜What? Oh, sheets, you mean? Okay. Sure.’
    â€˜My personal laundry?’ he said, pressing his luck.
    â€˜Oh sure, just throw it down the chute there. Don’t leave the door open though, Sally got excited the other day and fell down.’
    â€˜Unh?’
    â€˜Our cat. They were tearing around the place and she got excited and jumped into the laundry chute. She went all the way down. But it was okay, there was a whole week’s wash down there. It was all right. It just scared her. Only we have to keep the chute door closed.’ She was worrying the problem of bag lunches. Mik