She first saw the city through the window of a Greyhound bus – a sudden subdued glow just over the early morning horizon. The face reflected in the tinted window is one she can barely imagine now; a much younger woman, tremulous and anxious, hopeful of a new future with the young man who waited there. More than a decade later she and her three children would leave in a yellow Ryder moving truck with a different man, headed west to Edmonton, her original point of departure.
Like photographs tossed in a box, her memories of Moose Jaw remain undated and disordered. She remembers a place assaulted by relentless prairie winds that stripped sun-scorched fields, winter mornings when wisps of smoke froze above the chimneys from overworked furnaces and hoar frost clung like crystal to leafless branches.
From a one-bedroom attic apartment in old converted house on the corner of Oxford and Main, she watched teenagers cruise after dark in their parents’ cars. They honked and called to friends, gathered in the parking lot of Mr. Submarine, leaned against the posts of street lamps and sat on the hoods of parked cars, laughing, smoking cigarettes, the boys hooting at passing girls who pretended not to notice.
At City Hall, a stately brick structure on Main and Fairford, with arched windows and a historic clock tower, she worked with Jean, the city commissioner’s secretary -- a middle-aged woman the shape of a pear with a gargantuan bottom and a small head with pointed features. She had a child’s high-pitched voice, wore blouses with frilled collars, trousers with elastic waistbands, and lived with her aging mother in a tiny two-bedroom house on the southwest edge of the city. On quiet evenings, the two women sat on lumpy living room chairs covered with granny-square afghans while loaves of bread baked in a wood-burning oven, knees almost touching over the small cluttered coffee table. Racks of spoons from places they had never been to and framed pictures of Jean’s only son, Stanley, hung on the walls. No one knew it at the time but he would die before his mother and grandmother.
The Oriental Palace next to City Hall, where city police officers and municipal staff met for morning coffee and cinnamon buns, and returned for noon-hour specials of sweet-and-sour chicken balls. Kresge’s with a cafeteria counter at the rear of the store, serving burgers and grilled cheese sandwiches, pickles on the side, thick cream soups and plates of greasy fries slathered in gravy. Narrow aisles crowded with bins of Campbell’s soup and racks of two-dollar T-shirts, the smell of cheap plastic toys.
Around the corner from the squat square offices of the city’s daily newspaper, Carr’s Confectionery sold newspapers from larger cities, magazines with glossy covers, cigarettes and sweet pipe tobacco. Down the street, Super Meats supermarket delivered phone-ordered groceries to senior citizens in the city’s only high-rises, wrapped orders of baby beef liver and pork chops in brown butcher’s paper
In a home on Henleaze Avenue on North Hill, seven houses from her in-laws, she lived as a married woman and a young mother, her three children splashed in a plastic pool in the backyard and each Christmas put together an artificial tree with colour-coded branches. Third from the corner on a street with cracked sidewalks, crumbling curbs, shaded by overarching trees thick with summer leaves, the narrow two-storey house, built in the early 1900s, had an enclosed veranda that sagged at one end. In a tall poplar tree on the boulevard out front, Sammy the cat climbed and wouldn’t come down, until the neighbour rescued him from his anxious perch, while she and the children held their breaths on the ground below.
Her friend Mona lived in a house on the east side of town, eyes leaking tears after the birth of her third child, only son. She quoted Biblical passages over coffee in her immaculate kitchen and one night doused herself with gasoline from the can in the backyard shed and set herself afire on the front porch steps.
One summer under a taupe-coloured sky, the wind swept tumbleweeds down the city’s South Hill streets, stacked them against the entrance of the apartment building where she and the children later lived. Known to some as the “single mom’s hotel,” it abutted a farmer’s field the children explored, looking for gophers and wounded birds, stirring up grasshoppers and mosquitoes. In a roomy but plain three-bedroom apartment on the third floor, with orange shag carpet in the living room that flattened with every footprint, the children watched a black and white television; she slept for a year on a borrowed, fold-out cot. When she came home that December with a spruce tree with real branches and scented needles, the middle child cried – it wasn’t a real Christmas tree if they couldn’t put it together.
The ex-wife of her ex-husband’s best friend lived on the floor below. At night, from her balcony, she could hear distant downtown sirens, the rumbling of passing trains. Sometimes she could hear the lion roar from the zoo down the hill.
One evening a work colleague named Sylvia took her to the downtown United Church, asked the caretaker to let them in to look for winter clothing and boots for the children in the basement crammed with other people’s discards. Stale damp air mixed with the scents of musty fur coats and men’s tweed jackets, piles of folded sweaters on folding tables, old patent leather shoes and ladies’ handbags. The children ran up and down the aisles searching for treasures, played hide-and-seek amongst the clothes racks, while she rummaged through cardboard boxes, tears in her eyes.
At Gabby’s Bar in the Westward, every local band played “Cadillac Ranch” and “Stairway to Heaven,” and men with wedding rings in their pockets bought drinks for women who toyed with their own ringless fingers. Young men in cowboy hats and boots affected country drawls. Pilots in training with close-cropped hair from the Armed Forces base pulled at their ears, drank mugs of beer from bar stools, and watched, as she did, couples circle a spotlighted dance floor.
