The Canvas
Fiction by Laura Hartenberger
The job was simple: knock on the doors of people who hadn’t yet returned their census forms and remind them to do it.
The reality was more complicated. People submitted forms with errors, or they were moving in a week and hadn’t figured out where. They omitted household members after arguments, or included the names of foreign relatives, hoping it would somehow imbue them with citizenship. They were illegal and skeptical of my claim that the census wouldn’t be forwarded to immigration. They hated the government and everything it asked of them. They wrote indecipherably, or with non-English characters. I tried to explain the purpose of the poll and its accuracy: it’s really important because of voting and that kind of thing. I feel terrible, but would you mind? It’s because they really need to have the numbers right so they can create the right number of jobs, and open the appropriate number of schools, that sort of thing.
I was subletting a cheap room in a two-bedroom above back-to-back pizza-by-the-slice shops. I’d moved in the same day I saw the handwritten poster in the window: Apartment for rent.
The sign now read: Fortunes, $20. Trudy, my roommate, was a psychic. She could’ve been thirty or fifty or anywhere in between. We didn’t talk much, but she liked that I let her keep her sign in the window facing the street, even though it blocked out most of the light. “For you, no charge,” she told me. I wasn’t interested in having my fortune told: I doubted there was much to look forward to.
The living room was sparse. Its tattered rug was the colour of mud and cracks in the walls webbed together densely. Trudy had a small wooden table and two chairs, and I’d brought a mattress and an alarm clock. In the mornings, soft flute music played in Trudy’s room as I drank water at the sink. At night, she soaked her feet in a red mixing bowl while I sat at the table and cut coupons or cut up my T-shirts.
Each day, I picked up a new copy of my route, the grayscale ink wearing off on my hands throughout my canvas. If I missed a household, I took note of the address and returned the next day, doubling back over my routes again and again. My stack of maps thickened, adding weight to my pocket and hours to my day. I left cards with a printed reminder:
“Return your census form—It’s The Law!” and a handwritten note indicating that residents should call me if they had questions. I carried a government-issued phone with me and did not receive a single call. Canvassing had sounded easy enough to fill a summer, but now I felt lucky if I finished half of my list each day. At 4 pm, I reported to my district supervisor, a pimpled teenage boy who was probably a decade younger than me.
“I need you to pick up the pace,” he told me a week into the job, snapping his gum, nearly gagging. “Got it?” I wondered how much more per hour he was earning than me. If it was a lot, I’d be irritated. If it wasn’t much, I’d be even more irritated. I tried to pick up the pace. I took elevators in- stead of stairs. “But it’s the law,” I parroted when people refused to submit their forms. I omitted please, thank you and excuse me from my spiel to save time. None of this improved my rate of progress.
At the shift’s end, I tossed my pile of forms onto the district supervisor’s desk. He leaned back, kicking up his feet. His oversized boots were missing laces, their tongues hanging loose, wagging at me.
“We’ve gotta hire,” he said. “Speed things up.” “Are you firing me?” I asked.
“Do you listen? I said I need hires. That’s it.” He spun around in his chair, trying to keep his eyes on me as his body rotated.
Trudy hadn’t told me she was seeing clients at home. I found her sitting in the doorway, across from a girl who was maybe my age, her face pink and hair damp with sweat. A gauzy scarf covered Trudy’s hair and a matching blanket lay across her lap. She didn’t seem to mind the heat.
Trudy held the girl’s hands, examining them by feel, eyes shut. Shimmering paste glimmered on her eyelids. “Yes,” she said. “I see good news coming very soon. Somewhere unexpected, an offer of work will come your way.”
“Oh,” I said suddenly, and Trudy’s eyes opened. “Hi, excuse me.”
I squeezed into the apartment between the women, forcing them to break hands. “Sorry to interrupt. We’re hiring over at the census. No pressure, of course. It’s temporary, and the pay isn’t great, but it’s work. If you want.”
Silence.
The woman began crying. Trudy grabbed her hands again. “Okay,” she said. “See? There you go.” The girl turned to me. “Thank you.” Her voice sounded like it came from the bottom of her soul.
“It’s okay,” I said, uncomfortable. I waited while Trudy took her payment—four crumpled five-dollar bills—and showed her out.
“This is not for you.” Trudy waved the cash at me. “Of course not.” I couldn’t tell if she was angry. Trudy folded her blanket and unravelled her headscarf. I could hear the crunching of TVs in the apartments above and beside ours. “Do you have more jobs?”
“At the census? I mean, they’re hiring, yeah, but—”
“Come back again tomorrow.”
It was another hot day. My stomach twisted progressively throughout my day of canvassing. I visited the same family twice without realizing it, and they patiently filled out duplicate censuses.
The carpet in the hallway of my apartment building glistened like it was perspiring. Trudy sat in our doorway with her client, a middle-aged man with a bad haircut and long-sleeved shirt.
“Excuse me,” I said, slipping past into the apartment, “just passing through.”
The man kept his gaze on Trudy’s face, which was expressionless.
I washed my hands at the sink, waiting to hear Trudy’s prediction.
“Sooner than you think, an offer of work may arrive.” I smiled, impressed at how mystical she sounded. I’d believe her if she’d predicted my future in that tone.
“Oh, that reminds me,” I turned around casually, waving my dripping hands in the air to dry them. “We’re actually looking for people at my office. In fact, we need people exactly like you. Enthusiastic, hard workers.” I pointed a finger at the man, who stared at me as if trying to focus.
“See?” said Trudy, shaking the man’s hands. “See? You are very, very fortunate.”
“Amazing,” the man whispered. He left a generous tip and I peeled back a corner of the sign in the kitchen window to watch him walk down the street with his head up, smiling.
Trudy asked me not to turn on the sink while she was with a client. “Bad for energy channels. They prefer silence.”
“No problem.” My hands were shaking. My feet, which had ached all day, felt light. The two wooden chairs waited by the doorway for the next client, the hallway light shining on them like spotlights.
“Also,” Trudy said, “you could wait outside. Say you live upstairs.”
“Whatever you think works best.”
The next day, the building was quiet, making the coincidence of me passing by at just the right moment seem even more remarkable. Trudy’s client was so grateful that she hugged me, leaching tears into the collar of my shirt.
By the end of the week, I’d gotten the timing down just right. I waited until I heard Trudy say “good news” and started walking towards the stair- case, passing by the open apartment door right at “unexpected.” I halted with exaggerated force, pivoting to face the client. “Say, you aren’t looking for something starting immediately, are you?” Signing my name in thick ink over blank census forms, I distributed them like business cards. I was becoming quite the actor. Nobody seemed to think it wasn’t authentic surprise on my face as I found someone looking for a job at just the moment I needed to hire someone. Many of Trudy’s clients wouldn’t have taken the job under other circumstances. Minimum wage, door-to-door work in the burning heat—it was worse than telemarketing. But to get the offer right there—it would be a slap in the face of fate to turn it down.
Trudy didn’t split the cash with me, and I didn’t ask her to. I wasn’t in it for the money. The feeling afterwards was like none other. After the clients left, the two of us sat in the dark kitchen with the overhead fan humming and Trudy closed her eyes, maybe napping or maybe just resting. My head buzzed and my ears were hot to the touch for hours. It felt good just to sit and cool down like that.
My canvassing numbers began to improve as I covered a bigger area each day. It was getting easier to knock on strangers’ doors. I no longer tapped quietly, hoping for no answer. Now, I gave a confident pound and invited myself inside.
“Why hello, I’m here with the census! I’d love to help you complete your form. We can get it over with and then you won’t have to think about it. Easy. Why don’t we sit over here.”
Just like that, I was inside. I looked around, making eye contact, taking in the surroundings. I cycled through apartment after apartment with the exact same room layout—couch by the window, bed in the corner farthest from the bath- room. I started counting how many had the same cream-colored kettle, how many the starched bed sheets that sold at the weekend street fairs. The houses had the same wilting impatiens in hanging baskets, grains in bulk jars on the counter, half-opened mail on radiator tops. I could predict which houses had dogs and what breed: the ones with young kids had the biggest dogs—retrievers or German shepherds—and the childless couples had beagles or basset hounds. Single women had chihuahuas or terriers, and single men had cats.
For all the predictability of their living spaces, the people inside were various to an improbable degree. Each person had a distinct voice, a unique alignment of wrinkles and moles, a singular eye- brow arc, a recognizable tic, a specific degree of cleanliness. I lingered, accepting offers of iced tea and granola bars, chatting about families, jobs, dreams.
“You’re easy to talk to,” said a burly accountant who drew his own comic books.
“Oh, no,” I shooed away his smile but was privately thrilled.
A middle-aged woman said, “We should meet for coffee,” after telling me about her divorce and subsequent dating attempts.
“I’ll give you my phone number,” I said.
On my way home, energized, I talked quietly to myself, replaying the encounters.
At the apartment, Trudy and I had a run of successes: I recruited census workers and she made generous tips.
It was only the exchange of information. Trudy’s clients could just as easily have found the job from flyers or subway ads. But something about it felt deeply satisfying. Trudy had the best job in the world. How lucky I’d been to walk past her sublet sign in the window that first day.
“I just can’t wait to meet someone and get married,” a young lady, a medical receptionist, confided in me. She lived alone. We sat together on a floral-patterned loveseat, chatting, with the sun streaming in through the window, her census half-completed on the coffee table.
“You will,” I said. I took her hands in mine, the way I’d seen Trudy do. “Very soon. I feel certain this will happen for you.”
The woman looked at me with big, teary eyes. “I know exactly the person I’m looking for. I just haven’t met him yet.”
I nodded sympathetically.
“Hispanic, five years older than me, a doctor,” she said, laughing. “That’s my checklist.”
“That doesn’t sound so unreasonable.”
“Thank you. It’s just so hard to wait, not knowing when he’ll show up. What if I don’t get what I want?”
“I promise you will. It’s going to happen.” I pulled a blank census form from my bag. “Let me prove it to you.” Taking a pen, I copied down her identification and demographic information. Then, under “additional household members,” I wrote “one.”
“What are you doing?” she said. “Oh!”
I filled out her future husband’s age, ethnicity, and occupation, then folded the form and sealed it into the envelope.
“There,” I said. “Now, it’s definitely going to happen!”
She smiled gratefully. “Thank you.”
“I worry I’m too old for children,” said a police-woman, home with the flu, her gun sitting out on the kitchen counter. “Maybe it wasn’t meant to be. I’m not superstitious. But I’m thirty-nine and I work long, hard days—I don’t think it’s in the cards.”
“Do you want it to be?” I asked.
The woman put a hand over her heart. “More than anything.”
“Well,” I said. “I will do everything in my pow- er to make it happen.”
She laughed. “How—prayer?”
“I can do better than prayer.” I didn’t show her my additions to her census—she was a police- woman, after all. But after our talk, I knew, overwhelmingly, that she’d want me to do it. I gave her twins: one boy, one girl.
A sixty-year-old man had been living with his elderly mother through her battle with cancer. She’d passed away two weeks earlier and the apartment was filled with flowers wilting in their vases, the aftermath of the funeral and reception. The water in the vases was murky and beginning to smell. As I helped the man spill out the water and compost the old flowers, he told me, “I know it’s been coming for a while, but I’m not ready for her to be gone. I want another month with her— just a month.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “These things take time.” I included his mother on the census, and gave him a hug before leaving.
Next door lived a couple with three beagles and an elaborate fish tank that completely encircled the living room. We sat on upholstered stools in the centre while the dogs snarled at the fish. “We only let them into the fish room for special occasions,” said the man.
I was reluctant at first to add their pets onto the form: I didn’t want this to get out of hand. But, as they pointed out, the creatures were essentially family, not to mention true household members. Indeed, the form did not specify that only human household members should be listed. The couple, pleased, sent me off with a baggie of Oreos.
One young woman about my age in a pink tracksuit closed the door in my face. “No thanks,” she called flatly.
“It’s the law,” I shouted through the door. “I’m only here to help.”
“I said no, thanks.”
“You need my help.” I knocked again. I pounded, hurting my wrist. “You’ll wish you’d asked me to come in.”
I filled out her census right there in the hall. She was no older than twenty-three, but I wrote down forty. Gender? Other. Children: four, named after fascist dictators. I licked and sealed the envelope. The heat intensified and the smell of August— garbage about to rot, leaves about to turn, things on the verge—hung in every hallway. One day, in- stead of my canvas route in my mailbox, I found a memo requesting that I proceed to the central office.
A promotion, maybe? I imagined the district supervisor saying, with a serious look, “She deserves this job more than I do. That’s all there is to it.”
He was there, with his baggy T-shirt and greasy yellow hair. He sat next to the central manager.
His chair had no wheels but he rocked in it any- way, clunking its legs heavily on the floor each way he leaned. The office had no windows. Papering the walls were district maps, highlighted and drawn over so many times the street names were illegible.
The central manager wore a full suit. He greet- ed me with a handshake.
“We have had some reports,” he said, “of discrepancies.”
I wasn’t worried. “Isn’t that natural for this sort of thing, to have a certain number of—”
“Discrepancies. Yes. But there have been a surprising number. You do know,” he leaned forward, revealing smudges on the panes of his glasses, “that we cross-check everything with voting records, social security, the works.”
I frowned. “Information changes. People don’t stay the same forever. They change things about themselves.”
The man coughed. “Well, yes. But the numbers are, as I said, surprising.”
In the next room, the photocopier whirred and crunched, and somebody cursed.
I reached across the desk to hold the man’s hands. The man yanked his hands away. Beside him, the district supervisor laughed into his hand. “Told you she’s a nut,” he said, leaning back so far his chair tipped over and he jumped up while it toppled behind him.
“I’m sorry,” the central manager said. “We have so many folks lined up to work for us. I’m going to have to let you go.”
“Go?”
“This isn’t the place for you.”
“No—I belong here. On the route.”
“We’ll mail you the cheque for this week.”
I couldn’t speak. All those people I’d helped. Everything I’d created.
Walking home, I tossed handfuls of my business cards in the trashcans at each corner. Trudy sat alone in the doorway as if she knew I was coming.
“It’s over,” I said.
She sighed. “This came in today’s mail.” She handed me a postage-paid envelope and a form.
I stared at it.
“Fill it out for me,” I told her. »