The garbage bags full of our clothes shone like beetles under the lamplight. They were difficult to explain and I was relying on Blake’s being a white man to protect us from judgement. We were parked outside our four-story apartment building and I was waiting by the open trunk of our car. Blake was inside grabbing the last few bags. When he emerged with his hands full, he pushed against the weight of insulated doors built to keep the winds off Lake Ontario outside and hungry. If you listened closely, you could hear their centuries-old mourning for the bison and the caribou, their contempt for all this glass and all this concrete. The car was running to let the engine warm up. Its exhaust fumes hung in the air, glowing red at the taillights. A roadside Studio 54 of our very own. Red like the pinpricks on my thighs, sitting pretty beneath my minus-30-degree-certified Uniqlo leggings, raked raw the night before by my fingernails.
“That’s the last of it.” As soon as the words left Blake’s mouth, the garbage bag in his right hand made a clean five-inch split down the middle, threatening to empty its contents onto the pavement.
“Shit. Let’s double-bag them all,” I said.
“Riya, we’re running out.”
He shook the box that held the rest of the bags. His pale beard bristled in the night cold. The bags had been more expensive than anticipated.
We made our way to the nearest laundromat, which wasn’t far, just a few minutes’ drive on Queen Street. It was not yet six o’clock. Steering wheel steady in my hands, we passed the donut shop with its witty pornographic name. My stomach growled as we passed a Tibetan restaurant and its pixelated images of steaming momos. I didn’t have a chance to grab lunch at the office. The new team was watchful of me. All women in their early thirties who used Facebook without irony. They sharpened their discontent through power plays and took every opportunity to show me who was boss. Overqualified and underpaid, I didn’t want to admit the harsh reality of our recent Trans-Canada move. I decided not to share our little bedbugs situation with them. It would have elicited perfunctory empathy at best. Instead, I ignored their cocked eyebrows and matching smirks as I left at five on the dot.
Our fingers were defrosting slowly from the hot air blasting from the dashboard. We said little to each other, presumably to avoid a fight. The snapping had become common of late. Not as common for a couple who’d been together three years but reasonable for one that had moved to a new city with a housing crisis. Far from friends, families, and all semblance of familiarity. During the day, when we were apart, I walked onto the red-and-white streetcars, Todd Terry’s house mix of Everything But the Girl’s “Missing” drowning out my incessant internal monologue. Even the deafening beauty of fresh snowflakes on the streets couldn’t keep me from feeling untethered. My father’s funeral two weeks before our move had broken my knowledge of the world. I was floating in liquid. A specimen of my own ambition and loneliness. No amniotic fluid, no umbilical cord.
The decision to move from the west to the east had always been right in theory. It had everything going for it. My convenient work transfer and Blake’s acceptance into a master’s program at the University of Toronto seemed to come with the stamp of fate. At the end of August, we had taken a risk of leasing an apartment that had dramatically backfired. Located between King and Queen, our living-room window looked onto the four lanes of King Street, and after a drop into the distance, the ruthless jaws of the Gardiner Expressway. Through the same window, far above the traffic, and off in the distance, glimpses of the lake were reassuring. So was the picture-perfect view from my office downtown, with the CN Tower and the dog park at its feet, both framed by an elegant red brick interior.
The beauty we were used to back home was grand. It was in your face. Big mountains, far-flung LSD sunsets, ghostly mists on still Pacific waters. There, trees touched the stratosphere and hid crow’s nests. Maple leaves bigger than my head glowed radioactive yellow in autumn. But here we were unlearning. Who said beauty only looked one way? Here the storefronts were artworks. Knit together like bento box compartments. The sheer peopleness of this city was enough to stun and then immediately comfort.
“You’ve got our change?” I asked as I pulled into a spot in front of the dive bar beside the laundromat. Blake pulled out two twenty-dollar bills. The Google review had said they had a bill-to-coin converter. We took a moment before going in. The fluorescent entrails of the laundromat illuminated all six tragicomic feet of Blake. Something about his cold fingers holding crisp money, as a brand-new graduate student who had recently turned thirty, hit me hard.
We walked into the laundromat with our garbage bags like amateurs entering a casino in a heist movie. Our body language and clothing were all wrong. We’d forgotten our suction cup boots at home. If the owner, an elderly Korean man, had any suspicions, he didn’t let on. He met our eyes and smiled in the usual customer-service Canadian. His wife was folding clothes at a long desk close by. Too bad we didn’t have the cash for that kind of VIP service.
The washers here were yellowed, from the eighties, but industrial-sized. We chose one at the very end of the room and started emptying the garbage bags into it, one by one.
“Why do I feel like the Hamburglar? We didn’t do anything wrong!” I said under my breath while wrestling a tangle of bed sheets into the willing mouth of the washer. “And the audacity of Amy to imply that we brought the bedbugs in!” The Maple Leafs game on a mounted flat-screen television nearby drowned out my temper.
“Did you guys take the streetcar?” I said putting on my most rich-white-lady voice to imitate Amy, our landlord, “Did you guys take an Uber?! I saw pictures on BlogTO of a bedbug on the red cloth of a subway seat!” I enacted mock horror and then untangled the legs of a pair of jeans to continue venting, “Um, no Amy, I’m sorry we don’t all have cute Audi SUVs to zip around in and park downtown with. . . . Blake, are you listening?”
“Oh sorry. I am, I am,” he replied, slowly emerging from the trance of the hockey game. He reached for a sweater. The owner was watching the TV screen intently. The Leafs were on a crucial power play. To think it was all happening not more than five miles from us. We were right here, in the centre of the world, sorting through every article of clothing we owned.
A girl walked in with a duffel bag. She headed to a washer near us. Her hair was chin-length, over-processed blonde. Dark circles under her eyes indicated she hadn’t slept in days. Her body was one long, tired sigh under a combination of a faux leather jacket and a hefty U of T hoodie. Without thinking, Blake noisily made a big show of crumpling up one of the empty garbage bags and tossing it in the bin.
She knew. She knew because her eyes became pools of urban horror, while the rest of her face remained bored hipster static. As quickly as she’d come in, she gathered her things and sped out.
“Have a good night!” said the owner.
On the TV, a player had scored a goal and the screen looked like a crime scene with police sirens flashing red and blue. Grown men hugged through padding.
“You know what? I don’t even care anymore,” I said, refusing to feel offended by what had just wordlessly transpired, “this wasn’t supposed to happen! We were supposed to be rubbing up on each other at Soca parties and getting fucked up at the Guvernment on Afro house. And looking at Christmas rentals in Muskoka. But we’re fucking here.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s my fault,” he said, not offering up much resistance or reassurance. It was the very thing that made my blood boil, this passive-aggressive supplication of my nightmares. He looked down at the floor and then up at me with his toddler-blue eyes. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d be in a stable job with co-workers who weren’t bullying you.”
“Yeah. You’re right.” It felt satisfying to indulge his guilt.
“And by the way, they shut down Guvernment. We are two years too late. They also didn’t play Afro house. They played tech house.”
He passed me a healthy handful of quarters. One by one, I fed both the monster in front of me and the negative spiral in my brain. Another goal for the Leafs. Outside, an argument stirred. A woman from one of the shelters nearby was agitated by a man smoking outside the neighbouring bar. The owner stepped out to investigate, while I retrieved my phone to see what we could get to eat.
“Ali’s Roti. Trinidadian. One dollar sign,” I said.
“We have an hour. Will we be back in time?”
“It’s a ten-minute walk away,” I replied, putting on the gloves he’d gotten me in Seattle on Valentine’s Day weekend last year. The gloves were from a thrift store, all he could afford at the time. And truth be told, all he could afford right now. Precariousness was the sign of our times. Or was it the sign of both our insatiable souls?
As we stepped out of the laundromat, the owner, the woman from the shelter, and the smoker were now engaged in good-humoured banter. The woman hollowed out her cheeks further, pulling on a cigarette, wearing ragtag layers. What was the difference between her and us? Three university degrees and 62K split between two people?
We walked east on Queen. The goose down in my jacket was working hard. I felt the cold on my face and ears. We crossed the street that our landlord, Amy, lived on. She had invited us in over two months ago to sign the lease, pretending as best as she could that we were equals. As she moved with ease and openness around the grey marble of her kitchen island, she seemed to say, You too can have all this.
We found her apartment on PadMapper by nothing short of a miracle. Apartment viewings were bloodbaths, with at least ten people in line. In High Park, for an apartment with treacherous stairs that promised to turn murderous after snowfalls, the landlord showed us around as the woman in the couple ahead of us furiously filled out the housing application and the man was already on his way to the bank to fetch the deposit. So when we saw Amy’s place, we ignored that the bathroom sink was too small and that Blake would have to stand outside the bathroom and bend to brush his teeth in it. The rusty stain on the mattress didn’t occur to us as a cause for concern. I was impressed by Amy’s Pinterest décor. The coffee table was from Ikea but she had painted it with white lacquer that made it look as if it belonged to Marie Antoinette.
At her place, Amy pushed two large, frosty glasses of white wine in our direction as Blake pored over the lease and I made out twelve cheques. She told us about her cooking blog as her four-year-old daughter wove around all our legs, making cute statements. “I’m sick.” “Blue hat.” “My mommy made cookie.” The girl shared her mother’s full head of golden curls.
Amy’s copper kitchen taps were no-touch. Stylized wooden steps that didn’t have backs led to more luxuries upstairs. From the kitchen, I discreetly spied the expanse of the living room; the toys on the ground made it look humbler than it was.
“When I met my husband, I was running a small catering business. He had saved up all his money and just bought a run-down apartment complex.” She took a swig of her wine; it slid down her gullet like cut velvet. “He fixed it up and bought another building and then another. Now he has around twenty! See, you never know!” she winked at me, implying that Blake might one day do the same. I looked over at him. He was having trouble getting his pen to work.
Afterward, in Amy’s barely 500-square-foot passion project, I couldn’t get over the canyon between her life and ours. I made a matcha latte using a whisk she must have lovingly picked out when stocking this apartment. We sat on the grey couch, heat turned up, watching Big Mouth on Netflix. The swish of the streetcar every twenty minutes became less noticeable as sleep took over. And then. A scurrying from one corner of the living room to the bedroom. Tiny nails on the hardwood floor. It was unmistakable.
Amy, we’ve noticed a mouse around the house this past week. Blake texted her the next day, aiming for a we don’t really care but just FYI kind of vibe.
The response was snappier than he expected. Why didn’t you tell me earlier? I’ll send the exterminator over tomorrow. Will you be home? The exterminator was an Eastern European woman in her fifties who couldn’t get excited about anything. She had seen it all. She placed little blue cubes of poison strategically around the house. A few weeks later, I thought our mouse was a wizard because he was gaining weight, getting really big, and then shedding it, sometimes over the course of a single day.
“Blake, our mouse is a master of deception,” I observed on a weeknight as our edibles kicked in.
“No. It’s not just one mouse. It’s mice.” He let his diagnosis sit in the air. I imagined two. Three. Maybe four. A mum, a dad, and two kids. A family.
Thinking about that time, as we now walked to Ali’s Roti, I laughed at mice being the least of our problems. Amy’s readiness for the mice should have been a red flag.
“It’s why I don’t for one second believe that we brought the bedbugs in,” I said as we crossed a couple on their way to a date. The girl’s earrings dangled wildly. The man made a witty remark about how unreliable the TTC was and made the girl laugh.
“I mean, she did admit that she had Airbnb’d the unit for years. It clocks,” said Blake. The framed map of the world in the living room with red pins all over it made a lot of sense now. Our conversation was pronounced in the pre-snowfall quiet. The earth was eager for blessings.
The side of my finger started to smart when we stood in front of Ali’s Roti. The stirring gained intensity and then the itching began like a chemical fire. The fuckers had somehow got to my hands. Had they gotten into my gloves? The bites on my thighs had subsided but not without leaving big circles of inflammation around them like sulfurous moon clouds of Jupiter. If I didn’t think about them, they ceased to itch.
But now I was thinking about them.
Goddammit.
I didn’t think much of the bites at first. Blake dismissed them as spider bites. He’d seen a few spiders scuttling around corners. Two months after we’d signed the lease at Amy’s, half-drunk on a glass of wine each, and two weeks after our first mouse spotting, I was reading on the couch with a coffee before work, and there it was, sitting on our couch cushion: a pear-shaped, brown-red fleck, fat from feasting on me. It could barely move to defend itself. Blake got ready to strike but I forced a quick photo for identification. An image search pulled up its relatives and ancestors. The same rust-coloured scales, paper-thin, small head, tiny arms, and an oversized ass.
“You can shoot me if I’m wrong, but that’s a bedbug all right,” I said.
I crushed it under the weight of a book and it left behind a long, thick smear of something that had to be blood.
When Amy arrived, she was in her rain gear and Hunter gumboots. Distress was knotted between her brown eyebrows. She had brought her toddler along.
“Look Mommy!” said her daughter as she jumped into a garbage bag full of our contaminated clothes. We’d already found a Reddit thread about next steps and knew what we had to do. Amy had a hard time believing that this wasn’t our fault, and I had a hard time not blaming her. But we kept it civil. I pulled up my leggings to show her the damage to my broken skin. That’s when my tears decided to defy me and rolled off my cheeks.
At Ali’s Roti, my anger for Amy stopped me from thinking about the new bite on my finger. We ordered doubles and a goat curry combo. The man at the counter said little. It was clear he wasn’t looking to socialize or answer stupid questions about his food or country. This neighbourhood interaction wouldn’t lead to the spontaneous kinship that I was hoping for. Our brown skin and Indian ethnicity weren’t going to cut it. We were one too many oceans and migration cycles apart.
Blake attempted to eat the doubles like tacos and got chickpea curry all over his face. Despite the differences between the owner and me, the goat curry reminded me of what my grandmother made on Sundays when we visited her in Mumbai on school holidays. It was filling a hole in my heart that I didn’t know I had. Yes, we were worlds apart, and our languages far cousins, but Ali, assuming that was his name, had access to my memories.
“This food is good,” I said. The goat curry was rich, the nutty fat of the meat falling off the bones.
“The mural is cool too,” said Blake.
In my disappointment at everything and everyone, I had missed the wall-to-wall still life of a Trinidadian beach. On both sides of us, someone had captured crystal blue waters, and white, sunbaked sandy beaches. There were islands, wind-bent palm trees elegant like a woman’s wrist, and ships. It wasn’t realistic but more of an impression. Someone missed their home so much they collected the things they loved most about it and compiled them into this greatest hits of a mural. Someone created the warmth of their home sun in this land of blizzards and harsh lake winds. Would that someone have felt better after adding the last brushstroke? Did the mural act like medicine on the bad days? Did the artist move up north for more space and cheaper rent? Did their children say wah g’wan and wallahi to be cool at school? And did that make it all better?
Or maybe the mural was a marketing tactic meant to evoke authenticity and make the big one-dollar-sign bucks.
“Are you going to have that?” Blake pointed to the remaining goat curry just as the phone chimed for us to return to the laundromat.
❦
I couldn’t take the day off when the exterminator came for her second visit but Blake kept me abreast with a texting blow-by-blow. After a quick look around, she extracted a bug from the seam of one of the sofa cushions with tweezers and placed it on the coffee table. Amy squirmed, finally convinced. She didn’t stay long after that but arranged for the building super to throw away the bed, the couch, and any furniture made out of cloth or wood, as soon as new furniture arrived.
“We’ll do a spray today,” the exterminator told Blake and the super. “Stay outside for three to four hours. Keep everything bagged up. We’ll do another spray after one week. One week after that, you can take your things back out of the bags.”
Blake spent the rest of the day at a café on Roncesvalles sitting at the communal table with students and freelancers with fifteen tabs open on their browsers. That night, and the next few nights until the new bed and mattress arrived, we slept under our coats like orphans in an Irish novel. We woke up covered in fresh bites. We tried to have sex on our sheetless mattress but it was too depressing.
At work, I hoped my personal heater would fry any bugs on my shoes but it turns out nothing less than 46 degrees Celsius can make a difference. At a lunchtime yoga class, my child’s pose brought me face-to-face with a wooden fleck on my mat that I recognized too easily. It was already dead. So I brushed it away.
❦
It wasn’t Drake night at the Raptors game but it was the most fun I’d had in years. We were exhausted, sleepless, and roughed up. In the few selfies I have, haggard is the right word. We treated ourselves to an Uber home and started building our new bed after midnight. Amy dropped off new sheets the next day. Charcoal grey and classic whites. She stood awkwardly at our front door.
I marked our calendar with a big red circle around “Unpacking Garbage Bags.” We got used to wading past the bags in the living room to spend time in the bedroom instead. In the night, we heard the mice attempt to cut through the black plastic but by then we had run out of fucks to give.
Week One of Garbage Bag Living. Blake worked out at the gym on campus but didn’t attend classes. Snowy banks lined his path around the stony university buildings. Glad to be out of the house, he perused grocery aisles. He made us rockfish with dill and lime to get our minds off things. He sent me to work with beautifully packed leftovers. At the office, the girls were impressed. They disguised their jealousy with compliments. They learned Blake’s name. I took on more work. The sun shone generously in my eyes as I walked the different combinations of downtown streets on my breaks, their colonial names ringing in my head. Spadina, Adelaide, King, Wellington. After work, I’d grab caffeinated green smoothies and race to make house dance classes in the financial district.
On the weekend, we drove to the Junction, where young parents pushed second-hand strollers around. I could hear my thoughts in this semi-residential neighbourhood, with its health food stores and no real pull other than affordable rent. Blue skies were out. To celebrate the end of Week One, we joined fellow West Coast transplants at a College Street bar. Its white walls showed off generous gold chandeliers overhead.
“To Blake and Riya! We’re so glad you both made it out to Toronto.” Patrick raised his scotch in the air, which he’d started drinking since he’d made principal.
“Welcome to the freezer!” said Dapo, clinking his square martini glass to mine, then Blake’s.
We talked about work. It’s what everyone in this city talked about. We went to three bars after that, including one with a classic Asian convenience store exterior. Inside was a lounge lit by peach light and filled with houseplants. At a colourful diner at three in the morning, Patrick got pancakes and the waiter forgot Dapo’s order.
Week Two of Garbage Living. Our spirits stayed up and time passed faster than the week before. A fresh dumping of snow made for messy commutes. We got high and wore sunglasses to walk through Trinity Bellwoods Park. The sun on the snow was ultraviolet. We watched children toboggan down the inside bowl of a hill and laughed when they crashed into each other.
The end of Week Two came like Christmas but we decided to play hardball and wait another week. If we were going to deprive ourselves of joy, might as well make it worthwhile. When we finally did unpack, everything was in its place within a day. Sweaters were folded with care, arms crossed in a V on the back. Jeans assembled into squares. My dresses filled up two drawers in the Ikea Malm dresser and Blake’s T-shirts took up the rest. Socks, stockings, leggings. Boxer briefs, flimsy girly underwear folded like silk handkerchiefs, fraying man vests, and workout gear. Dress shirts and pencil skirts. Ready for use, ready for our lives. I could walk across our floor again without tripping, and the smell of garbage bag plastic was gone. Blake played Bruce Springsteen loud, and I signed up for a poetry workshop that was five stops away on the streetcar. We ate dinner on the couch and put our feet up on the coffee table. The sun mellowed over the lake and threw shadows of trees on our living room wall.
For the poetry workshop, our teacher invited four other girls and me into her home. Her short hair was dyed black and she wore big, black-framed glasses. She sat back and let the students critique each other’s works. We gave her forty dollars, and for homework, she told us to write down our dreams to free our consciousness from its everyday prison.
Domesticity swayed around us like kelp. On a Sunday evening, melancholy was threatening to open dams of homesickness. It teased memories of noble mountains. Blake was ordering textbooks online in the living room. I was lying on my stomach on the bed, reading a hardcover from the library.
I heard it before I saw it. A column of gravitational pull that ended on the page of the book before me. There, like a cat with nine lives, the pear-shaped, paper-thin rustiness of it struggled to find its bearings. Like a burglar in an action movie, it had dropped from the ceiling with paranormal accuracy.
I shut my book and walked to the living room. Blake looked up from his laptop screen. I decided not to tell him for another day or two, or until I could pick up my heart from the heights from which it had fallen. ▪️
You might also like
