Weekends without her son are lonely ones, and Linea fills them up with her have-to list. Today is one of those days, and she finds herself heading downtown to visit a co-worker who’s recently had her second child, a girl. Linea goes early, to avoid the inevitable jostling on the Dundas streetcar. Some days she doesn’t mind the crush of people, almost needing the physical touch of strangers, but today she needs space. She leaves her apartment, remembering to take the pink gift bag, and inhales deeply as she walks toward the streetcar. The leaves are turning red early this year. Linea and her small son, Caleb, live on a tree-lined street near the chocolate factory. She can’t decide which smell is sweeter: the daily intoxicating aroma of chocolate or the fresh burst of today’s September roses. She loves this neighbourhood mixed with Italian and Portuguese families who take pride in growing thick, colourful gardens in their tiny front yards and clusters of small, sour wine grapes in the back. She imagines what sunny gardens these immigrants left behind in their birth countries, and how they have tried to transplant something from their old home into their new.
Excerpts
Jewels
Eva had light brown skin that was as smooth and glossy as polished stone. Carol always wondered how it was that skin could be so smooth—and so soft. Eva’s skin smelled of soap and Nivea. Sometimes Carol put Nivea on her skin too—her hands, her arms. The smell enveloped her, became her. “Nivea Skin Cream” it said on the royal blue tin, in square white letters. The cream was thick and white.
Eva wore a uniform. She always wore a uniform. Carol had never seen Eva wearing anything except her uniform. Eva’s uniform was blue—usually. Sometimes it was a pale blue uniform, and sometimes—other days—it was a turquoise blue one. Perhaps, Carol thought, she had a white one too. The uniform was crisp and clean, and freshly ironed—after being washed in the big stone sink where all the clothes were washed. It must have been dried in the sun, on the idly spinning washing line. The uniform smelled of the sun, and of the iron.
Eva wore a uniform because she was Carol’s nanny. She was also Carol’s brothers’ nanny, and was especially in charge of the baby brother—whom she called, affectionately, Tsoko.
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
these are things that grow in winter
cold weather birds redouble efforts, wrenching invisible crumbs from dirty ice; fake flowers bloom into expectant second faces, spring anachronisms against mint houses melting into peeling, pistachio porches . . .
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
Circus
As soon as I saw him leaning up against the tent’s support wires, his shoulders hunched to keep the rain out of his collar, I knew he’d be the photograph that would make the cover that month. I had ducked out of the tent during the trapeze show because my camera couldn’t catch the Kravitz sisters at the speed they flew across the ring. The day was dissolving and I wanted to try to capture the red and gold striped tent as the fog slinked onto the muddy circus grounds.
When I noticed Jimmy, he was smoking a limp, hand-rolled cigarette. He held it tight up to his lips as he sucked what was left of it into his small chest. His other hand clenched a fistful of tired paper flowers. He wore an old bowler hat and a tuxedo that was a throwback to the vaudeville style, with tattered black tails and a slice of red silk peeking out of his breast pocket. He shifted his weight from side to side, making loud sucking noises as he lifted his feet from the mud. The thick white paint on his face was beginning to run down the lines in his cheeks.
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
A Change of Seasons
Amba sits alone in her brother’s small basement rental, warming her hands around a cup of tea. Bars of weak sunlight dip in through the window, painting stripes on the vinyl flooring and over the pile of laundry she has gathered. Her brother’s trousers are on top, the pockets inside out. A quarter, a dime and five cents are lined up neatly on the kitchen table in front of her. Beside the coins is a bowl of lemons, mute promises of summer.
It has been four months this week that she has lived here, since she exchanged her life with the man she came here to marry for picking up after her brother. The white noise inside her head is quieter, has been replaced by the blank silence of the sleeping city outside.
On the radio, an accented voice reports that interest rates are being cut, the IMF is warning of global recession. The steam rising from Amba’s cup licks her face with the scent of cardamom. If she closes her eyes it feels like someone’s breath on her cheek.
She hears the door shut above her, as it does at this time every day, and then footsteps drumming louder, closer.
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
the menu in my heart is all wrong
my stare
goes from the plate
to the dainty language on the menu Golden Baskets, a tiny quintet
of brittle pastry shells . . .
then back to my plate,
and I wonder what my spice-obsessed
hawker-stall friends in Bangkok would think
of defrosted veggies baked in cardboard-stiff pastry cups
on the Danforth, limits of Greektown,
middle of a snowstorm . . .
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
Toronto locations referenced in this piece
“I wonder what my spice-obsessed hawker-stall friends in Bangkok would think of defrosted veggies baked in cardboard-stiff pastry cups on the Danforth, limits of Greektown, middle of a snowstorm . . . ” —Danforth