Birdie Page 12
Somehow, amazingly, when Bernice brought her report card home all was forgiven. Those As on the paper convinced the Ingelsons that everything was all right with Bernice. That they were doing something or everything right. And because the delivery of the report card coincided with a late-night confession Bernice made to her caregivers about the origin of her chosen name, Ann and Tom began to call her Birdie. She associated it with their assessment of her goodness. If she was good, she was Birdie. She didn’t mind it at first. It allowed her to try on a persona – one which was able to try happiness, could feel happiness. When she was free and happy, she called herself Birdie, just as her family had. Like Maggie had when she allowed herself tenderness. If she made inconsistent statements or seemed reticent, she was Bernice. She tried not to feel disloyal and tried doubly hard not to resent them for calling her Birdie when she had not earned it. In truth, she often had to work at not begrudging them, resenting them. But was it her fault they couldn’t have children? Could she be blamed for wanting their acreage (on “ancient Indian land” as Tom intones after two Scotches), their refrigerator that makes ice and their complete lack of guilt over their fortune? Years later, at the San, she will remember the luxury of being absolutely provided for when her meals are made, schedules are written and activities are provided. At the Ingelsons’ though, she felt resentment more than peace with the provisioning.
Sometimes she felt shame at her mean thoughts. When she thought of all that the women in her family have done to make sure that she gets anywhere safe. And the Ingelsons tried, after all. They were particularly sweet to her, putting a lock on her door, letting her call home whenever she wanted, and driving her to Little Loon on the rare occasions she asked to go.
“Be good,” Auntie Val told her every time she walked out the door, back to the new Jeep Cherokee. No one told her to think good. To feel good. As if she knew what that meant, anyhow.
Back then, she would later realize, she didn’t understand that kindness was unconditional. In truth, the Ingelsons were profoundly sweet, if unwitting, accessories to her escape from family. From the uncles. They were just a place for her to stop, breathe and get her bearings before she made a break for it.
Ann and Tom treated her warmly, like (the strange cousin at the reunion to whom no one talks) family. She had moments of real tranquility, pieces of peace, that she will hold close to her like a jewel. Never comfortable around men, she and Tom signed a gentle truce. She sat with him in the living room and talked, every night, with Ann in the kitchen or at the dining room table. If Ann left those rooms, Bernice would go to hers. No one ever mentioned it and it did not seem odd, even as she became an adult, not to spend time alone with a man.
She and Ann would sit together for hours, sewing, canning, baking or knitting. It was understood that their hands would always be moving; it was like their hands were the motors that generated their mouths. They came to appreciate a companionable silence, too, and it was in their home that Bernice learned that silence could be empty like a bubble and that quiet was not fuelled by tension. No one ever spoke of what had happened, what her past was like. Neither of the Ingelsons seemed to worry about when she would leave. While she was still a teenager (although not for long), though, Ann did make mention of a store in town that wanted a clerk. Bernice tried not to knead the bread she was working with any more energy than usual. Attempted to regularize her breathing. Channelled only good thoughts to her food. Once she was done, and the loaves were in the oven, she went to her room and took an inventory of what she would take with her when she left: poster tube, Aer Lingus bag and one suitcase filled with paper, clothes and books. She was not so dramatic as to leave a note when she left a few weeks later. However, in the flour on the cupboard that she did not wash before she set buns aside to rise (and which Ann would be able to bake when she got home) she spelled out “Family.”
In the years that passed, she thought of that sometimes as she sat alone and read. She wishes she could tell kid Bernice that the years she spends with the Ingelsons will be the best of her life. She is in no shape to give anyone advice. If she did have the wherewithal to advise anyone, she would have told them: It is easier to be big than little. Say what you want, but the flesh jacket did its job. She found that she could hide in a crowd and walk late at night. She ran from the Ingelsons to the only other nowhere she knew (Edmontonians might be angry to know it was a netherworld for some). It was different that time. She barely recognizes the place where she lived with her auntie when she went to the Academy years before. She was changed, too. She was eighteen and out of the grasp of uncles. But eighteen meant something else to a whole other group of men, especially if you lived on the streets.
She felt, at times, invisible. That helped. She could change, too. She could appear and disappear, using only words to unmask herself. Some people, mostly crazy people, could see her. Not that anyone recognized her. She wore black only, hid in crowds and walked the city streets with her eyes down. Some days, on the best of days, she met women’s eyes – only street women – women who were the seen/unseen. On other days, she felt oddly disconnected from her body, like she did not know the nature of her form.
She spent her days walking, endless walking, and would go for weeks without saying a word to anyone. Smiling like she had a secret, she planned her days around getting someplace to sleep by nine at night. This had proven incredibly easy and impossible, depending on the day, the pay period, the weather and her ability to be seen. Every so often, when she saw someone from home, she tried immediately to become invisible. One night she was sure she saw a cousin near her former residence. Pecker Palace. A former home. It almost made her smile. That time, as it did most often, it worked.
When she was needful, when it felt safer than not, and when she understood the need around her as hungry but not desperate, she would let herself be seen by men. Or a man. Always alone. Always someplace where she knew the safety exits. Then, she shifted her shape and became a woman whom other people admired but still feared. It was easier to be big than little, especially then.
Some days, when she was still and when she had will, she could absolutely disappear. From herself as well as others. She knew she could separate who she was from where she was; that shift had started years before. But, at a certain point that separation changed not only people’s ability to see her, but her ability to see herself. She began to lose time. It was actually more of an intentional shifting of gears in time. By the time she got to the San, she had perfected it. In Edmonton, though, it was still an imprecise, unmapped trip. Where she went depended upon something that she could not control. All she knew was that she usually ended up someplace where the past lives with the present, and they mingled like smoke. Once it cleared, she was almost sure she would see her future. She never did, though.
As she began to really understand the nature of her inheritance – when time welcomed her in and sent her back – Bernice was mostly unafraid of the forgotten travel. When she came back, she would come back to treasures. She was rarely surprised and often delighted at her bounty. Edible gifts in her pockets or in her Safeway cart (she imagines, to those people who can see her, that she looks like a shopping cart lady; she realizes with a start that she actually is one and laughs, a big belly and full of delight laugh). Few would understand the joy of looking into a bag and finding a delicately braided length of dried sweetgrass. A tin filled with dried herbs that she did not recognize. Gingerly, like she was burying something precious, she would cover them and put them in the bottom of her cart. Other times, she would find herself weeding through garbage like it was a treasure chest. Old socks and a torn Gap T-shirt got stuffed into her cart amongst tin boxes, a bulletin board and a hot water bottle. She had imagined herself a raccoon, small and fragile hands moving quickly over the bounty, starting at the sound of others approaching. She would smile and stand straight when she found something that made her richer. It was like an endless hunt, except she had no map, no clues and there was no dis
cernible treasure. Just scraps in a shopping cart, things a crow might collect, nothing so heavy that she couldn’t grab it quickly and run. And, if it seemed endless, the time ran together and rushed by her like droplets in a springtime stream. Her years in the city (which had a forest in it, deer through it and the odd moose lost within it) were divided into two times of day: dangerous time and safe time. For her, nighttime mostly was safer. She could hide in the corner tables of darkened bars – being the only sober one made her automatically more aware of any danger. She could hide in the hotel rooms of people who were flush and wait until they passed out to dig out her treasures or surf the ancient TVs for cooking shows or reruns of The Beachcombers. When she could not find a place to sleep by nine, she wandered. Nighttime sometimes allowed her to find quiet in crowds and luxury in squalor. The day times were scarier. She was, just by her sheer size, recognizable. There was no hiding in the rushing downtown traffic. No rushing away from the too-large spotlight of the gleam of morning light. No avoiding contact in spaces where people brushed up against strangers and shared space with enemies. There was no way to hide your treasure in a spotlight, no time to grab your belongings when people could approximate your capacity to get away.
Yes, in the city four years could pass by you like the rock in that stream because the alleys and skyscrapers are largely unchanged with the seasons. Weather does not impact your hunt, only how cold your sleep will be.
It was harder to dream in the city. When she first got there and after she would not allow grief to be her travelling companion, she pretended that the white noise of traffic was the sound of crisp snow pelting the aluminum siding of a trailer. It allowed her to sleep better, being soothed by the parallel urban life. For a while, she pretended that the poorly loaded trucks bouncing down potholed streets were cracks of thunder and that the thunder spirits were closer and unsettled on the city skyscape. After the first year, the squealing of old brake pads no longer sounded like the keening nasally caw of ducks. It became what it was, white noise in the white city. After a few months of going to visit her every so often, she looked for and avoided her Auntie Val, by turns. Part of her was so hurt at being taken from the Pecker Palace, part of her was guilty for getting a good life with the Ingelsons. She could avoid family, but it would always find her.
Once in a while, she would run into (not be able to run from) relatives in the mall downtown or on the street.
“Where you been, cousin?” some asked, knowing precisely where she had not been: home. She had built up a thick veneer of unknowingness, a fully constructed naïveté that Cree politeness would allow to stand in the face of impolite questions.
“Heard you had a white family now,” one not-so-polite relative asked/told her.
“Seen your mom lately?” another said pointedly.
She would nod or not nod and be sure not to ask about anything other than immediate concerns. Accidents and wonder were something she didn’t believe in, then. She wasn’t so sure about family, either.
One time, when Bernice was very small, she imagined she was lost in the bush. She was not – no one would have allowed that – but she had convinced herself she was miles from the other women. It was just spring, some ice still clung to the branches of the low-lying trees, and she sat amongst the branches of a pine tree until she was far away from her tiny room under the stairs, miles away from her uncle Larry’s pickup truck and hours from the reserve. She’d thought herself hopelessly and happily lost until Skinny Freda had said, “C’monnnnn, Bernice, you’re slowing us down.”
Even then, she had hidden in quiet. No one spoke to her on the way home and no one noticed when she slipped away to the cubbyhole under the stairs.
As she entered her teens and really started to gain weight, her room felt less like a cupboard-turned-bedroom and more like a jacket that she slipped into when she needed warmth. She believed that if she got big enough there would be no room in there for anyone but her.
In her current darkness at Lola’s, she wills her hand to reach for the string attached to the stairs in her childhood room which she pulled to turn on the light. In the outer world, her gesture is a twitch in her right hand. She can’t reach the string.
The sounds of the house late at night come to her, and she hears pots in the bakery kitchen, Freda setting the table and the muffled sound of CBC North on the radio. These sounds are safe.
But Bernice is no longer there.
She was sitting in the truck with all of her uncles. The Ingelsons had dropped her off for a visit. Wishing she had stayed in her mom’s empty house, instead she was silent and quieted and filled with ill. A cramped Chevy truck, pockets full of cash and a dashboard filled with cigarettes and junk food. Headed to the city for groceries. When everyone decided to spend a portion of the money on booze, Bernice steadfastly refused to leave the truck or let go of the cheque until, angrily, they all went to the Safeway and spent the money as originally planned.
“You’re fucking crazy,” her uncle Larry had spat at her. Freda sat in the back, seemingly oblivious, but willing them not to see or think about her. If Birdie pulled her in, which she never did, she would be visible, on the uncles’ radar. Open for the season. But Birdie never did, and resolutely she stared straight ahead as the uncles circled.
“She’s not even here,” griped the second-least-kind uncle. “She’s off in that fucking dream world so she doesn’t have to …”
“Shhhh,” warned a kinder uncle. “We all got that same world to go to. Maybe you should go there, too.”
They turn up the radio.
Hey-ya-hey ay yay yah hah.
Hey-ya-hey-ay-yay-yah-hah.
Hey ay yay hey yah
Hey ay yay hah.
Her Gibsons self stiffens at the recall. Her spirit wanders.
She was under the stairs. In her room. Soft tiptoes and breath held tightly in his chest like a secret, coming down the stairs and listening. Paused and listened. For her. For her breathing. For her fear, she imagined. Soft shuffling past her door. And back again. Waiting for the awake sounds of others. She held her breath and pressed her legs against the door – she did this while lying sideways across her bed.
The inevitable shaky hand on the latch. Husky breathing. Scared? No. Something different. She didn’t know this breath. Pushing on the door. Firmly. Sure. And. Then. Angrily. With force. And might. Pushing her girl legs back until they buckle at useless girl knees. The lighter black of the hallway replacing the pitch of her cubby. And. Then black again.
In Gibsons, Bernice lies still as a thistle on a hot summer’s day.
Hey-ya-hey ay yay yah hah.
Hey-ya-hey-ay-yay-yah-hah.
Hey ay yay hey yah
Hey ay yay hah.
If Bernice notices the drumbeat intensifying and pounding with more vigour, she gives no sign. Her skin feels a tingle, a notice of change, and if she were awake she would expect to find herself changed back to her regular form, in her regular body and in a place she hadn’t known she had gone to. The shift, she would have imagined, made her stronger and more resilient.
What she could not know is that it has also made her cognizant of time as an arch and not a line. In the shift she had been preparing for her whole life, Bernice who is not Bernice is able to move back and forth like a laser on a CD changer. She does not have the cognizance of her body and surroundings as she did in life. She has, instead, the distinct impression of a being disconnected from the living but even more intricately connected to life. The body is not hers. She is annoyed. Freda is mooning around her like she has lost her best friend. With dismay, Bernice notices that the formerly fat body she had (she wondered if, like Prince, she could get a symbol for that) is soiled. She wants to tell Freda, anyone, to clean that up. It is humiliating enough to be half dead with an almost boob hanging out. But this? Too much. No one should have to see their body failing them. Earth body failing earth me, she thinks.
In a way, she supposes that this is for the best – sometime
she is going to have to talk to her and Lola. Not to mention Auntie Val. She is not ready yet, though. She has “some business to attend to,” as Kohkom Maria would say heading out the door to church. Serious business, as the song says. Only with a stronger drumbeat.
She sees herself. In the continuum of time that has graced her. From her bird’s-eye view she sees. Then. Not. Now. Sees who her bodily self became: huge, bigger than she knew, and her shoulders, stooped like she had lost something. A fight. A friend. A life. She was wearing the yellowed top and bottoms from the San, a male patient’s outfit.
That big body of the girl she occupied sat hunched over a desk, writing in a journal. That girl had bandages on her hands and was writing fitfully.
That girl was not honest in that – she didn’t think she could be at the time. If she had the energy to write it all down now she would have more stuff to say. About things. But really, who knew any sort of truth at twenty-one? At twenty-four? Would she really have been able to be honest, at that? Although, really, it was the THAT she did not want to talk about. But it was in her head and she didn’t want it to stay there. She wrote out a timeline. Didn’t know eventually that she would forget time entirely and fly back and forth between places. Here. There. And time. Now. Then.
Little things keep bubbling over into her changeworld. Like that crazy Freda, who says to that body over ‘n over again, “It’s not your fault.” Isn’t that crazy? Even in her non-Bernice form, the one which had tuned her cousin out for years, she could still be gotten to by that Skinny Freda. She imagines that Freda has something spilling out of her like water from a boiling kettle. Not rage. Guilt or remorse or some ugly cousinemotion. But, like Moshom said, “There’s no friend like an old friend.” Freda is Bernice’s oldest friend. She who never sat beside her. Was not there all through her troubles, in courtrooms, in bathrooms, in waiting rooms, hospitals and visitors’ rooms. Bernice had forgotten about that when she would allow herself to ragemember. And she could also not forget Freda’s shaky lip when the door was kicked closed in front of her. The knowing in her eyes. She knew. At the very least, Freda had noticed. And. Was relieved. That. It was not. Her.