One Hundred Days of Rain Read online

  7.

  They take refuge. It’s a modest building downtown, on Barclay Street. Their sixth-floor corner apartment studded with Air Wick fresheners but she fixes that. The heat is always on. A boon given their meagre wardrobes. They’re camping out. At least life is simple, she says.

  Let’s make everything normal.

  Let’s pretend like nothing bad happened.

  Her child wants to call M. Why not. Because M will recognize the number, know where they are. M will call the landlord, who she happens to know. An acquaintance of theirs. Concerned, she’ll be. Just thought you should know.

  Sure, go ahead. Of course. Her child’s treble. Outside, the rain continues. From the sixth floor the sky behind the building opposite (stained stucco, faux-cheerful iron tubing in primary red) is a featureless pale grey, undifferentiated even to the extent of clouds. There is no way to tell it’s actually raining: the drops themselves are invisible both in the air, as they fall, and on the ground. Only the continuing darkness of the pavements below explains.

  You never get wet in this sort of rain: you never get dry either. The state is an interstice, an amphibious aquatic one. She can see the people outside, on the sidewalk below. They scuttle along with their heads bowed. A whole city of penitents, praying. She knows what they want & need and for what they yearn.

  They pray for the clouds to lift.

  They pray to see the sun again, however briefly, even once. The sun to them a precious object each person has at some time wandered away from, absently, taking it for granted. Has casually saluted: Oh hi. You again.

  Never again. This time I’ll. But who will believe them, now?

  Sometimes they are given a chance. There is a part of the day, hours after they leave the apartment on Barclay Street, when she receives her allotment. For whole minutes a shaft of sunlight will reach directly into the alleyway behind the building where she works. Their lane an empty bowl filling up with bright. On the way home, framed by the window of the bus, the sun shows itself in the sky above. It’s a kind of sleight of hand, the gleaming silver coin winking in the magician’s grasp. Then vanished, and the grey curdled over once again. The trick.

  There is a jogging track on the low roof of the next building, a rust-coloured oval, dark with moisture, that nobody ever uses. Across the street the red metal railings, turned over the stained frontage of the facing building. Everything built in the past two decades holds the wet. This sort of construction, with its stucco cladding, nobody considered ruinous at first, nobody questioned it. The processes were internal and invisible: for years everybody would have said everything was fine, nothing had changed. There was no excuse for this really: everyone was familiar with the rain, its duration and persistence. Then the walls began to sag and they opened them up and found the rot.

  There’s an old man in the elevator one day as they come back from their errands, a cheery, sprightly fellow. He has gleaming eyes and springy white hair and if he looks a little grey around the edges so do they all, in the rain.

  He begins to tell her about his wife who died in hospital nearby. I’ve been here since the building was built, he tells them. In 1962.

  He probably tells everybody that, in the elevator.

  8.

  They move to her friend Trouble’s apartment in a four-storey stucco complex off a main street where the traffic never stops. Trouble is away for a week and says she is welcome to use the place in her absence. Her lover S comes to visit from Seattle that night. The next day M picks up the child for a visit. It’s another anniversary, the day they met, although neither of them feels much like celebrating, now.

  Instead she and S spend the day cleaning. S gets down on her hands and knees and scrubs at the oily black smears on the linoleum with a toothbrush. When evening comes M phones. M says she will not give her son back. They drive to the verge of the road a block away from her former home, as close as she is allowed. Pull the borrowed car over to the side. Overhead the hammered sky. Shifting grumbles. A muttered threat. A few drops fall and hang there on the car’s curved windshield. The angles all wrong. The speckled sign of rain suspended above.

  The police come. She sees so much of the police lately. The social workers too. Seems her reputation precedes her, however unearned. They accuse her of being in unsatisfactory surroundings. They accuse her of not having the child’s best interests at heart. They threaten her with foster homes. Is this what you want for your child they say.

  Eventually, grudgingly, someone consents to inspect her accommodations. They are pronounced adequate. Can she get her boy now then. Not possible, the social workers point out smugly. Her child has gone to bed hours ago, in M’s house. Surely she would not be so cruel as to disturb him.

  The weather holds, as she and S see the skilled helping professionals to the door. Beyond the breezeway it is almost quiet, but for the sigh of cars passing. No torrent. No drenching. No downpour. The sky has turned black.

  9.

  The squall that has threatened for days finally breaks. The rain comes in sudden savage bursts. Drops fling themselves at the unprotected faces of pedestrians, sliding sideways under umbrellas and hoods. There is an angry pattering insistence to the tattoo. Their weather is on the march. No more of these sullen sodden half-measures. A mother in a tantrum, the rain exhorts them with angry exclamations. Get busy! Get going! Clean this mess up right now!

  They get into the swing of things. They match storm’s rhythm. They pick their feet up in the eddying swirls of water that rush for the drains. They stomp and splash in galoshes and boots. They resign themselves to wet socks. Their pants are wicks. Hair under their caps catches rain and curls from it.

  On the way to work, lunch must be found for her and her son both. Her native frugality warring against the necessity of buying them readymade. And then the child is so very difficult. How about this. No. How about this. Not that. What then, for the love of God. I can’t go on looking forever, she says. You like pasta. Try pasta salad. Knowing he won’t. That the salad will come back untouched, inevitable, a reproach.

  They buy Pellegrino in little bottles. She half-fills the empties with milk. This she can do. The child confiding on their walk to preschool: I tell the teacher I drink beer.

  She halts. Visions of the social workers. Why? Why would you do that? It’s not beer.

  The child shrugs, nonchalant. I know. I just like to pretend.

  At work she coaxes herself like an invalid, small portions at intervals. It all goes. She eats a lot of yogurt. It doesn’t help. She knows that she is pining, as she sits staring out at the storm. She reminds weather that it is she who is inside, trapped, but rain still slaps at the glass, demanding to be let out or in, demanding that nothing be put in its way.

  10.

  The next day puddles hopscotch the sidewalks. Some of them stretch the whole way across, others shrink timidly from contact with the green. Her little son hops from wet to wet. Splashes add to the general ruination. The rain has settled at least. There is a gentle strafing on the multiple surfaces of water, nothing more.

  Her lover S comes to visit. For two nights they take a room in a hotel. That night they sit in the bar, drinking, while her son sleeps in the room upstairs. There’s a street outside, running under their room, and on the right-hand side of the hotel a sort of cobbled courtyard, made out of a section of street taken up and given over to pedestrians. At one point this part of the downtown was a veritable open-air prostitutes’ mart, and in response the city created all sorts of one-ways and dead-ends, so that you drive through them backtracking and detouring in maze fashion. The rain falls lightly against the leaves of the trees and shrubs put in to enhance the park-like effect. They can hear it, faintly, from where they sit at the bar. She eddies the ice cubes in her glass in pale sympathy and the bartender looks up alertly to ask if she wants another.

  S says very little. There is little to say. S will of course be back, as she was after the child’s birth, to help for the enormous work
to come. The extracting of the belongings, and the moving, and the dealing with the police, and the days in court that might follow. In between S will return to her own city and thank her lucky stars for distance. But there’s nothing they can do now, as the child tosses in one of the big beds upstairs.

  In the morning there’s a bust across the street. A police cruiser is pulled in to the curb and a skinny, dirty fellow half-lies against it, his arms fastened behind him. The sun has come out again. The light it affords is watery, a warning of impermanence. On the sidewalk the officers stand around, conversing in desultory fashion. She watches them from behind her gauzy nylon curtain. Until recently her sympathies would have been all with the forces of law. Nowadays she is less certain. She glances up at the sky. A few clouds drifting. The weather holds.

  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 wai
l 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.