Birdie Read online

  “Mah!” she cries out, too loud, as she drops a stitch, leaving a single red bead dangling.

  SKINNY FREDA

  Get outta my ass, old woman! Freda thinks, with not one regret at the meanness. The old bird has been hovering close to her since she got to the house. Freda will be the first to admit that she likes the attention, but Lola’s attention today seems cloying. And her perfume! Eau de toe, Freda smiles to herself.

  “Somethin’ on your mind, hon?” Lola asks over quite possibly the longest cigarette ash that Freda has ever seen.

  “Just thinking,” Freda says, her mind snapping to attention.

  “Worried about your cousin?” Lola clucks sympathetically.

  Freda recognizes a little grain of something in her and she bridles with annoyance. It’s not jealousy, but Lola’s mothering is getting under her skin.

  “I’ spose so,” Skinny Freda allows.

  “Don’t worry, The Kid is made of strong stuff, she is gonna be just fine,” Lola hopes out loud.

  Freda sees it again, a flicker of something so, so hungry? on Lola’s face that she is immediately annoyed. She knows she shouldn’t be. Somehow the old woman had figured out how to find her, and then when Freda called her Auntie Val, Lola had picked her up at the bus depot in her old Malibu when she showed up. They had been camping above and in the bakery ever since.

  Freda worries that Lola’s ash will drop into the batch of dough they are making for cinnamon buns.

  Lola is one of those people who makes smoking look terrible, Freda thinks. Her skin is too taut and leathery and the lines in her mouth are deeply entrenched on what Freda thinks is a surprisingly pretty face. They stare at each other for a moment and both look away and at their own hands as they pound the dough.

  Freda’s hands are remarkably soft. Deep brown with little age showing on them, they are quite nimble and strong. Her fingers ply the concoction and she frowns with concentration, willing Lola to stop fortheloveofgod talking. She reaches up with a clean finger and flicks on the radio. The music is warm and drum heavy and the sound fills the little kitchen. It sounds like an Honour Song, but she is not familiar with it. She stops cold when she hears Lola singing the song an octave higher and trilling in between the beat.

  How the fuck … Freda thinks. Shocked.

  Lola, for her part, just keeps on pounding the doughy batter, now to the rhythm of the drum song.

  There is no way, no earthly way that this old moniaskwew has ever heard the song before. Yet, there she stands pounding and singing like she is at an intertribal. Freda can’t quite get her head around this and quietly resumes her work, listening for some indication that Lola is just making it up as she goes along. Lola, in a rare moment of self-awareness, can feel the quiet in the room. She looks up but sees her work partner is focused on the task at hand and begins to blush furiously.

  Freda is not stunned that Lola knows a pow wow song by heart. She is shocked that Lola doesn’t know that she knows it. For, if you were to ask Freda she would tell you that moniaw always want you to know what they think they know. And. She should know. She has dated them almost exclusively.

  The first white boy she dated was in high school. Phil Filmore. She looked him up on the Facebook last year and saw a doughy bald man who she would not have known. He was, in her experience, like most moniawak who dated Indian women: outsider, fringe dweller, attracted to the otherness but insisting it was sameness that attracted them. What he also was, was exceedingly gentle. He was passive to a degree that still sits with Freda. Only showing affection if prodded, making a move only if she ignored him, he was easy to read and to like. So, while she supposed he liked her best when she did not like him (he only ever asked her out when she had a boyfriend), she enjoyed the easy pattern of his lust and his smart conversation.

  What Freda learned from him, and what she still lives by today, is that men are simple. And that moniaw men who are drawn to Indian women are men who live on the outside of white society. She imagines that gentle Phil is now trying to bed all of his now-married ex-girlfriends in order to keep being unwanted, and that he enjoys the elementary nature of relationships without strings more than the reminiscence of the relationships they had. Since then, there has been a long list of moniawak – not too long. Freda looks for men when she wants company and keeps them around if they are good company. She has always been one of those women who has a boyfriend, but you can never quite remember his name. She is also one of those women who is allied with strong women, so she will be the first to check out of a relationship if there is something better to do with her friends. Or family.

  She has a little shudder of guilt, thinking of her cousin up in bed above them. Birdie had looked so grey when she got there. And her eyes. Her eyes looked like she had left already or was well on her way. Lately, Freda has given herself peace by thinking that Birdie is fasting. Sure, it’s been more than four days, but some journeys and cleansings take longer.

  Back before Maggie left, and way before Bernice went to the San, Freda and Bernice used to see each other every other weekend when some uncle or other would take Freda to the city to visit. That shithole of an apartment, she recalls. How long has Valene lived there? she wonders. Fifteen years? It wasn’t the filth of Pecker Palace that got to her – it was the desperation caulked in the cracks. Stumbling drunks, muttering madmen and soiled women walked around, and around (never in, but clearly they lived there), the apartment block. Freda could smell the gave-up coming through their skin; feel the sadness radiating off their backs. Still, she resented that Birdie got to live with Auntie Val (fun Val! before they found out she was Loony Val!), go to a special girls’ school and eat at an A&W once in a while. When she went to visit her there the first time, when she was going to that nuns’ school, Bernice would barely talk, settled in to the CBC and watching that fat bastard chef while Freda went crazy trying to get her to walk with her to the mall.

  “Berniiiiiiice, I will write down the recipes, let’s just get out of here for a while!” she would wheedle.

  And Bernice, who hid herself in her room until the uncle left, and hid herself behind the TV screen while her cousin waited for her, would stare at her blankly for a second before returning to her show.

  “You don’t even cook the stuff, for fuck’s sake,” Freda had pushed out between gritted teeth. Once.

  Bernice looked at her, surprised, and said, “But I am going to.” Freda was so angry that she grabbed her purse (which had leather tassels on it), stomped out so that her boots struck the floor (with more leather tassels vibrating) and headed to the mall on her own. There she met some Phil or other and had giggly phone calls (him) that carried on until her next visit. Then there was another Phil and another.

  Her most recent Phil was two weeks before she came to Gibsons. He was only part Phil, because he was Metis. She wasn’t sure about that, though, because he pronounced it “Met-tiss.” He was gentle. He was sweetly dull. And. He never laid a hand on her. When she got Lola’s call (“You Bernice’s cousin or something?”), she had dropped Phil, hopped a series of hitches and got to her cousin’s side within twenty-four hours. And. Oh God. She looked and smelled terrible. When she hunted around her little apartment, she found that fucking CBC poster of that stupid Pat John and the same Aer Lingus bag that Bernice had been carrying since she was ten. And. The file. She knew what was in that file and didn’t want to know what was in it. So, it wasn’t so much honouring Bernice or respecting her privacy as letting the dead stay dead.

  If that fucker kills her, I will go dig him up and grind his bones, she had thought.

  For Bernice appears to be truly dying. She had shorn her hair off (did she know about Maggie?), has lost a lot of weight, and clearly has given up on any notion of personal hygiene. If she had had a Phil with her, Freda would have insisted on throwing Bernice in a tub, but she found (as she often found in these instances) that Phils just couldn’t get it. She didn’t want to explain a fast, a vision, a change, or even the fu
cking tightwad chef. She didn’t want to explain Bernice’s “absence,” the San or that night. She just wanted her cousin, her opposite-in-every-way cousin, to come back.

  And. Truth be told, Skinny Freda is pissed off. That she is pissed off indicates one of two things: someone has fucked with her, or she is scared. And while Bernice might be fucking with her, Freda tastes something in the back of her throat while she looks at her cousinsister: an overwhelming need to protect.

  It is likely ironic that she wants to take care of her big cousin now, after Bernice had quite possibly severed the only tie that genetically bound them. She might not know the word, but she knows the actuality: irony. After years of quietly feeling superior to Bernice because of her cousin’s weight and appearance, she finds something else in her throat when she sees Bernice in bed at Lola’s: a wellspring of unshed tears. She is confounded to find, as she stares at Bernice’s soiled and oily form, that they are not tears of sadness but of something else: she is a bit proud of her cousin. Again, she doesn’t know the words, but it’s something like her commitment to silence and solitude. Freda knows she could never do that. This.

  And while she resents what she thinks Bernice got – to live in Edmonton with her auntie, taken into care by that white couple and even living on the streets in Edmonton before … before that day and the San – she knows inside of her that Bernice may be, for the first time, making a choice.

  She chose differently. Like Birdie, she had her secrets. It was just easier to hide when you were not so big. Freda did not hide in Phils. Phils hid in her. She found herself too visible in silence; exposed in the quiet of reflection. So, Freda had made the decision never to be quiet. Sit quiet. Think in solitude. For a time, when she was ten or so and back when she left Maggie’s, she hid with booze. It quieted down the noise inside and amplified the sound outside. Each sip snuck. Each slug stolen. Each gulp of glasses forgotten. A return to welcome noise. Living on her own, even for that brief time when she lived with her auntie in town (all the troublegirls got sent to Auntie Val) when things were particularly bad, it was easy to be noisy. There was a constant stream of people, strays, wandering in and out. Each wanting the space filled with sound.

  When Valene moved to Edmonton, Freda slept almost anywhere. Almost. She would stay with people, homes with strong matriarchs, until the noise inside came back or someone’s old man looked at her too long, or the wisp of annoyance followed her into a room. Dirty old men. She was twelve. Once when those things happened, she just left. No one to account to, no place to be. No one to belong to. No family.

  If Birdie left her …

  A bang! in her imagination shakes the memories loose and for a while Freda sits in the chair at the table, watching Bernice over the top of a National Enquirer. If Bernice had tried to read Skinny Freda’s face, she would have seen that there is nothing there. A little wariness is all that her muscles betray. Too tired to ask, and because she only has pissed off or scared to resort to, Freda chooses anger. And. She is definitely not talking to Bernice yet. Something draws her attention to her no-longer-so-fat cousin. Something is missing. Or. There is something new there. She can’t put her finger on it, but Bernice somehow looks less Here.

  After a while, Freda grows tired of staring at Bernice and begins to play solitaire. The snap snap snaps of her long nails, flipping the cards into order.

  acimowin

  And when she got to that little tree

  She saw that

  it was dying.

  No one looked after it

  And it was curling up.

  There was a fire coming

  Her birdself knew it but

  couldn’t do anything.

  All the other animals came and sat by it

  but they couldn’t do anything.

  So she started walking

  until it got too hot.

  Then she flew.

  High.

  And so high

  She didn’t hear a sound.

  8

  WHERE SHE WAS

  kakosoweht: s/he is the one who is afraid of people

  pawatamowin

  She dreams she has one song, one mournful song. Soars at night and stays quiet in the day. She wakes one night. To bars. And knows in her sleepless sleep that she is caged.

  IN CARE, ONCE SOCIAL SERVICES TOOK HER FROM VAL, Bernice made herself as small as possible, as unnoticeable as could be, but still they found her.

  “Hey, fat bitch, get outta my way.”

  “You fat cow, you’re in my chair.”

  “Yo! Buffalo – move it.”

  It seemed that no matter where she was, where she went, she was in the way. Even curled in her little cot, taking as little space as possible (reading, not looking up, not listening for anything but someone approaching her), she seemed to be the epicentre of some unkindness. Some of the other residents were fine, but on the whole she was ignored. There was a toughness pecking order that left her close enough to crazy to be left largely alone. Even so, Bernice knew that to speak was to be noticed, and she did not want that.

  It came as a relief when a British family took her into their home as a foster child. The Ingelsons, with no children of their own, picked her up a few weeks before her sixteenth birthday. It was easy to be quiet with the Ingelsons as they were forever talking.

  “I don’t know, Bernice, I like the pink one better, but it’s your prom.” Ann said sweetly (and Ann said everything sweetly), “Which one do you like?”

  Bernice definitely liked the pink one, it was a light and frilly dress with layers of soft fabric in different shades of pink frothing together in a confection that was age, gender and occasion appropriate. Of course Ann was right, Ann was always right. That’s why she was awarded “Foster Parent of the Year” three years ago. And that was exactly why Bernice was leaning towards the turquoise dress.

  “I don’t care, whatever,” Bernice said, definitely caring and not at all willing to accept whatever.

  Ann was perplexed. Bernice had been hemming and hawing all day, this was supposed to be a lot more fun than it had been and her patience was, she was sure, being tested.

  “Well,” she thought out loud, doing the calculations, “we could take them both home and you could decide later? Then, we could bring one back … or keep it if you want.”

  Bernice headed back to the change room and closed the door so Ann wouldn’t hear her crying. She had wanted a fight, words of some sort, and this was somehow worse. As she wishes, whatever she wants, she should choose. She buckled under the weight of this degree of autonomy and felt the walls of the change room begin to push at her.

  “Bernice? Maybe we could just keep both, and then you could have a dress just in case …” Ann feels bad, she knows, and this made Bernice cry harder. Soundless crying in change room three of Fanny’s Finery. What did she have to be sorry about, anyhow? More importantly, what were these “just in cases” that kept coming up? Just in case she decided to dress inappropriately and head to the reserve? Just in case she wanted to rub everyone’s nose in her good fortune? Just in case Bernice had a hearing and she really wanted to deck herself out for it?

  With thoughts of returning, she steeled herself. In her head, she saw moving into Ann and Tom’s place as a choice that no one made for her. She couldn’t stay at Ann and Tom’s forever, she knew that, but she would have liked to pretend that she was so she didn’t feel so bad all of the time.

  “Bernice? Birdie, are you all right?” Ann asked her tenderly.

  The tenderness also hardened her resolve. If, when, she left these people she would have to do it like the provincial park signs say: “Please leave nothing but footprints, please take nothing but pictures.” She didn’t want them to hurt and worry when she goes, because she definitely had to go. Definitely, but after the prom, she supposed.

  “I’m okay, just a little tired. Let’s get the pink one, okay?” One pink dress could not hurt.

  One canopy bed, one fish tank, one set of back-
to-school clothes, one trip home every couple of weeks, one amazing sleepover birthday party with no locks on the door, one trip to Vancouver Island, one computer, one bookcase and all the books she needs, one package of envelopes with stamps on them, her own bathroom and three good meals a day were not too much, were they?

  The first two months she was at their house, Ann and Tom didn’t ask anything of her. No one ever went in her room and it was her responsibility to keep it clean. It wasn’t until the pork incident, as Ann and Tom laughingly called it to dinner guests, that she felt some sort of peace in the house. The peace, she thought, came about when she was no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  Every day, Bernice offered to clean the table and set the dishwasher. In this time, she would have forty-five minutes to herself. What no one mentioned in the telling of the story that has become dinner fodder was that she always did the dishes. And kept the kitchen and dining room immaculate. This was important to Bernice. Not because it justified her actions, but because it spoke to her good character.

  But all that anyone remembered, in the infamous storytelling that she has sat through on three occasions now, was this: Ann caught her storing fresh food under her bed. In her perfect room with the canopy bed.

  “And I kind of thought that something wasn’t right, that there were kitchen smells where there shouldn’t be any,” Ann said kindly, looking at Bernice kindly, transmitting her kindness kindly to her kind guests who look at Bernice less kindly, not understanding Ann’s kindness but wanting to emulate being kind.

  “This sweet little girl was afraid,” hushed and conveying shock, “that we would run out of food!” The horror of the notion and of Bernice’s supposed past fills the dining room. Takes the place of the food that was hidden under the bed.

  They could take a flying leap as far as Bernice was concerned. She wasn’t afraid that they would run out of food, she needed food should she decide to run. There was always food to be had at home. Sure, sometimes you had to plan more and work harder for it, but there was always an aunt or uncle, or Kohkom, to turn to in a pinch. And, yes, most certainly, the Meetooses had more pinches than the Ingelsons. But that was the result of history and design, not some flaw in her family or her people. When she leaves the Ingelsons’ and is street living in Edmonton – learning about protection, pride, loyalty, danger and madness – THAT will feel less like a pinch than living with the white couple.