The Complex Arms Read online

  After surveying the place with Mona, Montreal was starting to look a whole lot better. I was thinking of going back but Mona persuaded me to stay. So I did. But Edmonton definitely took some getting used to. The trick I learned to keep from losing my way around the city was to focus on a familiar landmark. First day on my own downtown, I had a panic attack. Felt the buildings closing in on me like I was in a Marvel comic book — Superman to my rescue. Didn’t know where I was. Turned a corner and saw Holt Renfrew so found my way to the bus stop. Otherwise, the search party would still be looking for me. I never strayed too far from Holt’s.

  Even when I didn’t get lost, I still felt out of place. People ridiculed my accent. I didn’t know I had one. They thought I was a Newfie, but coming from Quebec and having learned street French, my pronunciation was off. It confused people. Holt Renfrew, I pronounced like the French: Ronfrew. Frosty’s family would laugh and try to correct me. I rebelled. Ronfrew, Ronfrew, Ronfrew. I thought they were the ones who spoke with an accent. I felt lost in a different way. I didn’t know where I belonged. Not Montreal. Not Edmonton.

  It took a while, but I started to get used to this place. It sounds impossible, but I never ever saw a rainbow or a real live elk until I moved out here, so that’s something, and on a clear fall night, the northern lights put on quite a show in all their hallelujah glory. There is a beauty here, for sure. It was a nice change getting up in the morning to read the paper and not being reminded that again Quebec was going to separate from the rest of Canada. Yeah, I guess it’s in the papers here, too, but not as much. Besides, I mostly just look at the comics and the crossword puzzle these days. The front-page headline on my first day — “Deer in Headlights Crossing Road Near Ellerslie” — made me laugh.

  Anyhow, that’s the story there.

  FROSTY

  Frosty is in back hosing down the dust and debris from the cement path that skirts the Complex Arms and spills onto the tenants’ parking stalls. Whenever he does any yardwork at this end of the building, he always whistles or sings an “oldtimey” western ditty to occupy his mind, distract him from the drudgery.

  “Told the Swanks I needed a power washer if they wanted me to keep their property nice lookin’. My wrist can only take so much. Do they listen? Naw.”

  “You talking to yourself again, Frosty?” The leather-skinned, bearded ex-hippie from the sixties’ Summer of Love leans over the balcony rail from his third-floor apartment to spit a glob of brown phlegm, which lands on the roof of a parked van.

  “Told you, Payton, stop with the tobacco chewin’. You’re wreckin’ my work here, and I don’t want any complaints from the tenants about you again.”

  “It’s Rosemary’s van and she don’t care. Give it a wash while you’re at it.”

  “Payton.” Frosty aims the hose at him.

  “Praise be, Jehovah. He is awaiting me,” he exclaims and then disappears inside his apartment.

  Frosty now turns his attention to the front and is on his knees scraping a section of the sidewalk with a penknife. The Swank Property Management Group wants that burgundy stain removed pronto. “Doesn’t look good for us,” his boss said. A repeated rinse with the hose and the offending mark is now a lighter shade of smudge, the colour of a clear rosé.

  Frosty Whitlaw was born in Mirror, a town with a population under five hundred, little more than a pinprick on the map of Alberta — now you see it, now you don’t — that required a magnifying glass to verify its existence. He fled on his seventeenth birthday and never looked back, not even a curious glance.

  Today, although he is now on the cusp of entering his mid-years, he still has the same cockiness, the same swagger of his youth, a cowboy about to mount a wild bull at the Calgary Stampede or exercise a racehorse during his stint as a stable boy in Phoenix.

  Certain no one is watching, he sneaks a full blast of water to the roots of the nearby birches, which border the public property line. He is protective of the trees, the last ones standing and likely to meet a sad fate when the Swanks renovate and build an extension to the four-floor walk-up he and his wife, Adeen, manage.

  Frosty squints, inhales the quiet of the day. He lets the sweat from his forehead carve a mark down his cheekbones to his jaw. A fall of water flows slowly around his chin, down his Adam’s apple, and settles on the already damp neckline of his worn-out white T-shirt. It’s a souvenir from their Vegas honeymoon, shows Elvis Presley with a high collar concealing a sagging chin, silk scarf around the neck to trap the perspiration, microphone near his open mouth. Frosty sporadically dries his face with the bottom half of the now stained T-shirt until a border of grey dampness outlines the hem.

  He keeps his slightly crooked left hand hooked in the back pocket of his jeans and directs another dose of water to the rosé stain. May take more rinses, he figures, but this will do for now. A rainstorm would help. He scans the heavens for the possibility. The sky is without colour.

  He straightens his back to examine the weeds flourishing with wild abandon in the next lot and to the north, where the world seems to tip off its axis. Nothing but parched land bare of vegetation. Worn-out dirt paths meander along the border of Mill Woods into the Pits. Sidewalks and unpaved roads crack like an old leather saddle in the heat of the sun; thirsty trees and shrubs, no longer green, already a faded tan. Wind chimes from balconies remain silent; no breeze to conjure any sense of motion.

  He gives his mouth a wash and gargle with the garden hose then spits out the mixture. So hot! He sprays more water in his hair, his face, his now shirtless chest, and shakes himself like a horse after a good soak in a lake.

  “Hey, Frosty.”

  It’s Shy Shylene — on the right day, or the wrong day, depending on how you look at things, there’s nothing shy about her. She is snapping her fingers as though she is listening to jazz.

  “Hey, Frosty.” Her voice accelerates, the snapping increases in tempo. “Hey, hey, Frosty.” Snap snap snap. She suffers, for lack of a better word, from a mental affliction. Unbalanced is Frosty’s term for her condition. The tenants measure her daily disposition by her behaviour toward them, which can range anywhere from normal to dangerous to normal to anti-social to normal to depressive to normal to overly friendly and back to normal. On the cloudy days, she is inert, gloomy, vacant, aimless, and confined to her apartment until her meds kick in. Today is sunny for her. A good day.

  “Whatcha want, Shy?”

  “Be a sweetheart and tell Adeen I have some clothes for her I’m giving away.” Snap snap snap. “Hardly used. All designer labels and oodles of shoes.”

  “Tell her yourself.”

  “She’s not home. And when are you coming up to install my new air conditioner? The instructions are all gibberish and I’m suffocating up here. I’m getting irritable. And you know how I am when I get irritable.”

  “Go take one of your pills and take a shower to cool you down,” says Frosty and he directs the hose up at her as she is momentarily distracted.

  She yelps, laughing and screaming, “You son of a gun. I’m going to get you.”

  Shylene leaps inside her apartment and reappears with one of those Super Soaker spray guns and blasts him in return.

  “You asked for it, Shy.” He chuckles.

  They are in a water war now, back and forth, until Frosty can’t help noticing the wet outline of her tiny braless breasts.

  “Gonna get you,” he says, taking aim at his target, and she springs back inside again without a snap, waiting for Frosty.

  ADEEN

  Okay. Call me crazy. Everyone else does, so join in the chorus. Maybe it’s because I have so much fatigue; the unbearable fatigue of living. But I swear it isn’t that. That summer everyone and everything seemed to be dying. The land was parched and coughing like it was trying to rid itself of a malignancy. The press described how many of the elderly, those living alone, especially in the rural areas, died from dehydration. No one cared for them. Forgotten.

  I can recall sitting s
louched over the kitchen table, my chest a shelf for my loaded head — how else to describe it? Wounded by a migraine. Anyone would think I was drunk. Uncontrolled dizziness set me off balance, an invisible magnetic force tipped me toward the bathroom. I was alone even though my ten-year-old daughter, Irene, slept on the floor amid her paper dolls. Happy land. No one to help if I cried out. Help! Help! And Frosty, nowhere in sight.

  I remember a dog barking outside as though he wanted to alert someone about my despair. Hormones can create havoc on a woman’s psyche, especially at certain times of the month. You know what I mean. I was a heavy smoker, two packs a day; kept my hands busy and my appetite in check. A harmless crutch — I told myself that’s all it was because most days my life was like crawling through a London fog.

  Then I started to guzzle down mugs of that dark rum with cola to begin the day. Should anyone drop by, they would think I was drinking java. Get it? Did I tell you I drink a lot of coffee? Went down smooth. Smacked my lips, it was so good — like a remedy for an imperfect life. An elixir. Here’s to life, I would salute. Didn’t keep much alcohol in the apartment, except for a six-pack of beer hidden behind Irene’s bedroom door in case I got a yearning. Sometimes I’d make a trip to the Liquor Mart. Nothing like that hard stuff. Don’t look at me like that. I mean, come on!

  Anyhow, Frosty never went there. That’s a lie. He turned a blind eye. He had his own problems. His tastes ran to mari-ajua-na. This was not the life I had planned when I came out here from Montreal.

  In the middle of this heat wave I was like a robot — somewhere between waking up and sleeping. Another scorcher. The verticals covering the open patio door remained static. Blasts of hot air settling into the cluttered living room did nothing for my sulky mood. A portable fan going full blast barely dried the perspiration from my face. No relief in sight that summer. I was cranky. Alberta turned me into a cranky bitch.

  Frosty came in to change his wet shirt saying he was going up to help Shylene. That girl put on a good front most of the time. She had a recurrent manic-depressive illness. Everybody seems to be taking something these days to get them over the bumps of living. She’s another tenant that’d been there since the Complex Arms opened its doors. She mentioned her affliction early on in our relationship and we just connected. I guess because I’m nonjudgmental and just accept people, warts and all. I understand. She had no control over her mind. But none of us do, right?

  Later Frosty told me that by the time he got to Shylene’s apartment, she’d had a mood swing — sullen, morose, apathetic, lethargic. Didn’t say much. Her depression could last for months sometimes. Thought I’d give her some time before going up to check out those clothes. Prepare myself for whatever was in store. If she was giving away things, meant she was aiming to go on a shopping spree. Manic rising. Again.

  Apparently, as Frosty was installing her window air conditioner, she sat there on the couch staring into space. Before leaving, he asked if she needed anything else, and she jumped, startled as though someone caught her doing something illegal. When she got down like that, all of us let her be. Didn’t know what to do about Shylene. She had no close family as far as I could tell. Wasn’t about to throw her out into the street. And she paid her rent on time. No complaints.

  I figure there’s something wrong with all of us, so who am I to judge? Nobody’s perfect. Let’s have some empathy. When she was in her manic phases, she had men coming and going, a party every night. Told her I would look the other way when her male companions came for a visit. She didn’t know what I was talking about.

  Shy Shylene. Yep. Like many women, she carried her business like her sadness — hidden. We were friends. She meant no harm. I tried to help where I could, but even I was getting tired of those constant mood swings. I feared what may happen to her.

  Anyhow, that’s the story there.

  THE TENANTS

  Irene, Adeen’s daughter, is ten years old, but her mental disability makes her seem more like a two-year-old, meaning that sometimes she can be as difficult and demanding as one. Right now she is asleep, curled up like a snail on the living room floor. Her shoulder-length blond hair, styled in a Shirley Temple mop of loose ringlets, conceals the right side of her pretty face. Pages ripped from a Sesame Street colouring book blanket her legs; headless cut-out paper dolls and discarded photos from the lingerie section of a Sears catalogue are scattered around the room. She is snoring like an out-of-tune trumpeter swan and every now and then shudders as though flying through a nightmare, or is she somewhere in a winter dream? Irene extends one arm in the air, a ballerina ready to plié, but changes direction with a sudden whimper and plops the arm to her side, rubs her armpit, and resumes her slumber. The care and feeding of Irene is a twenty-four-hour marathon for Adeen and this brief interlude in midafternoon is a luxury. Adeen shuts her eyes and savours every second of peace. The portable fan on the kitchen table whirls in a steady stream of air, blowing the cigarette smoke toward her daughter.

  “EEEEEEeeeee.” Irene is awake now and yawns with a loud groan, her tongue flicking, mouth smacking like a toothless infant after eating a bowl of Pablum. Her howls are intense, her appetite fierce. She is a needful baby sparrow impatient to be fed. There is drool in the corners of her mouth and she is now crying, a scattered mewling that Adeen recognizes but ignores. Instead, Adeen opens the patio door, steps outside, slides the door shut, and massages her temples to reduce the ringing from the scream of Irene’s high-pitched voice. She grips the balcony railing with determination and needs to catch her breath, or maybe to find strength for another round of Irene.

  Adeen is disoriented from the drinking and the frequent migraines. Rum with coffee eases her pain. So simple to just fling oneself over the balcony, fly away, and push the restart button to a new reality. Dear God, let’s get it right next time! Her life has come to this: a developmentally disabled daughter, a self-absorbed wannabe cowboy poet for a husband. She is the one managing everyone’s lives, custodian of an apartment building with an assortment of diverse tenants who also rely on her generosity and compassion. At least she and Frosty live rent-free, his excuse for not seeking better employment.

  Irene, Frosty, and the Complex Arms, with its cargo of eccentric tenants, tax her stamina and vitality. The stable residents who originally signed long-term leases are like family. She’s their Mother Teresa, their confidante and adviser, to whom they confess all their transgressions. Adeen can keep secrets, and they take advantage of her goodness and vulnerability. She thrives on others’ neediness, though; attracts them like bees to the hostas under the birch tree in back. It is a distraction for her own broken spirit, and it gives her a temporary sense of self-worth.

  “Mommaaaaa. Mommaaaaa.”

  “All right, all right. I hear you.” Adeen snaps her focus back to Irene, who is now in full-blown tantrum mode, scrunching up torn pages from the Sears catalogue and hurling them against the patio doors like baseballs into a practice net. Moments like this, Adeen will reach out and cling to her daughter, arms in a complex restraining position around the girl’s waist as though Irene were still a stubborn three-month-old kicking up wind for attention.

  “Oh, Irene. Come and give your momma a kiss.”

  Irene, confused, violently shakes her head side to side with increasing vigour and speed, the ends of her ringlets whiplashing against her cheeks, adhering to the cracks of her dry lips. She unfurls herself from Adeen’s grip and reaches for a black marker lying on the floor and scrawls graffiti lines and circles against her mother’s veined cheeks and ruddy nose. She sniffs the peppermint scent and licks at the markings like melting ice cream, her wet tongue lapping Adeen’s face with doggie-like kisses.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” Adeen subdues her long enough to whop the side of Irene’s head then catches herself. “Sorry, sorry, baby.”

  Both stare at each other, stunned, as though they were strangers. Irene returns her mother’s blows. The smacks escalate back and forth, a slapstick scene from the Th
ree Stooges, until Adeen yanks the long blond curls and punches her daughter with a violent hand against her back. Irene’s head jerks backwards, and she’s on her knees in a supplication of screams and whines.

  “No. Nawdy nawdy.” Adeen, almost in tears, shakes her index finger at Irene, who slaps the wagging finger away from her face.

  A disturbance in the hallway interrupts their scuffle and Adeen rushes out, leaving the door ajar and a bewildered Irene among her broken crayons, scented markers, and cut-up paper dolls. She is a forgotten nuisance for now. Adeen trips over Derrick, Zita’s ten-year-old, who is shouting, “Bubbe down! Bubbe down!” and points to the knot of people in the foyer. Frosty, who had just come in from the yardwork, is kneeling over a body. He sees Adeen and yells, “Get some orange juice.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Not again! Where the hell are her damn kids?”

  An agitated Adeen returns, leaving a liquid trail of juice in the hallway for the mice to lap up. She halts beside Mrs. Lapinberg, spilling the liquid this time over the old lady’s blue, fresh-from-the-hairdresser hair as she passes the drink to Frosty, who has propped up the elderly body in a sitting position.

  Mrs. Lapinberg, who lived next door to the Whitlaws on the first floor, was diabetic, had a heart condition, and was prone to fainting spells if she forgot to take her medication, a weekly occurrence by Derrick’s count. The poor woman lived alone and bothered no one. When she left her apartment, it was to sit on a bench at the bus stop in front of the Complex Arms and talk to passengers as they disembarked: students, other seniors, and young mothers with toddlers. Her son, Barney, visited weekly and accompanied her to the hair salon. Sometimes they would take a detour through the park nearby to rest in the playground and observe the children at play.