Birdie Read online

  About Them.

  A little breath, like a baby dreaming, escapes her. She imagines it landing on the floor beside the bed with a heavy thud.

  One time when Maggie came to pick her up after bingo, it was winter, she thinks, Maggie looked at Bernice and asked if she was okay. Bernice wouldn’t talk to her the whole way home. She wouldn’t go to her uncle’s house after that, no matter how hard her mom tried to get her to go. For a little while she stayed with their neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Olson. Mr. Olson peed in a bag so he was okay. Eventually, her mom had to quit bingo and everything. Larry’s wife, her Auntie Maisie, came to talk to her one time after that. She brought her a Tiger Beat magazine with a fold-out poster of Fonzie and it was stuffed in a gift-sized Canada Post mailbox. They must have been on sale after Christmas from the post office. When she found that there was a lock and a key for the mailbox, Bernice threw the whole thing on the floor of her room, enraged at her auntie’s seeming complicity in Larry’s secret-making.

  She had that mailbox with her for years, in the top corner of her closet. It was heavy and metal – if there was one made now it would be made of plastic. Bernice eventually got it down and used it for locking up her journal, wearing the key around her neck. Eventually she outgrew it.

  I’ve got bigger secrets now, I guess, she thinks.

  Sometimes she gets mad when she thinks about that: his wife giving her a gift for secrets. Then she sometimes thinks that she should cut her some slack. There was no way, Bernice thinks, that any woman could live knowing that sort of thing and do nothing. She may have almost given up on men but she still holds a quiet place in her head for women.

  Every once in a while when she was working at Lola’s she thought about what would have happened if she’d known how to use butcher knives back then. She put that out of her head, she had to or her hands started shaking and she had to take a pull off her inhaler. Whatever those were, they usually passed pretty quick, though.

  Well, usually.

  She goes upstairs, heart pounding. Her head is cottony and her chest is too full. She tries to think of three things like they taught her in the San. Three things to calm her down. One thing she hears. The hum of the air conditioner cooling the room from the heated ovens. One thing she sees. The poster tube on the top shelf of her closet. One thing she feels. The butcher’s knife under the mattress leaving a small lump near where she sits. She does not calm down.

  2

  AT HOME

  witokemakan: one who lives with the family

  pawatamowin

  She feels a caress on her cheek, a cool hand on her warm brow, and hears the gentle hoot hoot hoot of kohkohkohow.* She dreams: “Ah, so it’s night, after all.” Looking into the sleepmirror she sees talon scratches on her face.

  * A small owl.

  THE DREAM OF THE OWL comes back four nights in a row.

  When she surfaces on the fourth morning she feels in love. Like she fell in love during the night. She can feel arms around her and thinks maybe she forgot a dream about Jesse. It feels different though – and she has had many a dream where she woke up in love with him. This warmth feels like she thinks home would feel like. Well, someone’s home, anyways.

  She remembers her mom best in the kitchen. Light feet, thick sauces and silences. Heavy sighs. It is hard to imagine Maggie as a girl going to prom in the too-big hand-me-down dress. (“That dress is too old for you,” her date had said. Admiringly and accusingly.) She is petite, bird-like, her small bones placed delicately in her daughter and hidden, early, under layer after layer of fat. Her tininess always undermined by the space she took up in the room. Or rather, by the space her spirit took up in the room. She was seemingly exhausted by the mere effort of being alive. Throw some kids, nieces, nephews and a daughter into the mix, and no matter how kind and how pure her love, they all feel the burden. Of being in the way.

  The area she takes is notional, but Bernice was always aware when she had crossed into a space coveted by Maggie. A purse filled with old chocolate bar wrappers, the candy never having made it into the home. Or worse. Nibbled when no one was around. Bernice always felt this was a betrayal, the hoarding of treats that she would never see. Never taste. It seemed to her to be unsound mothering, the keeping of a secret.

  Other secrets crawled out from under dark spaces. In arguments peppered with profanity, shooting like buckshot at the unfortunate man/men drinking nearby, Maggie yelling that she couldn’t stand being around all of “those damn kids.” Like Bernice hadn’t come from her body. As if Maggie’s nieces and nephews weren’t of her blood. Weren’t her responsibility. Thosing a wedge in between them. Or, during drunken reminiscences where her mom told her that if she had only married her teenage boyfriend (was it the one who thought her prom dress too mature? Bernice wondered) she would be a little Spanish baby. “But, I wouldn’t be me then, Mom, would I?” she had asked a silently brooding Maggie.

  All of it added to a knowledge, lodged as deep as those chocolate bar wrappers in a purse, that Maggie would rather an Other. Another. Another life. With fewer nieces, nephews and Bernices around. Kids who weren’t so noisy. A kid who she wouldn’t catch gulping mashed potatoes by the handful in the kitchen after dinner one night so that she couldn’t fit hand-me-down clothes and had to have new clothes every time she gained weight. Which was often.

  Maybe if she had an Other, Bernice wouldn’t have found her lying on her back in bed every night, staring at the ceiling as if she could not see it, possibly dreaming of the life she would have had. In her mind’s eye, Bernice remembers important moments like snapshots that she has taken. Luckily, she can bring up the images anytime she wants. Since she sank, she flows through past and present easily, like water flows through a drainpipe. Time became fluid in the days in between Edmonton and Gibsons. She doesn’t have recall – not the way she can look back at her time at Little Loon. Different than thinking about living at the San. This is something else. Time does flow, but it is not with the rush of a river. It trickles like a stream that Bernice can float down, paddle back in, and start over at a new current. In a way, Gibsons was a tributary branching off the crashing flow of her past. She drifts lazily, some eddy pulling her. She arrived in Gibsons on a gentle tributary off the roar of the river that carried her from Loon to B.C. Was pushed to Lola’s. Paddled in place until Freda roared up and started keeping vigil at her side in the little bakery apartment. Felt her cousin next to her, solid in her small bones, the curve of her back next to her on the bed, trying to anchor her. Bernice lies in bed, motionless, but feels the gentle rush of water against her as she makes her way upstream. Past her past. It feels peaceful. She knows she will have to push her way upstream sometime. For now, she floats, feeling anything but free. For now, she knows it is enough to be able to slip along without plunging. For now, she stays in bed, none of the womengathering around her aware that she is travelling. Bernice knows, somewhere at the core of her, that she is on a voyage. Whether it is to someplace or from it, she is not sure. All she knows is that water is woman. Protective. She does not fear sinking. Not because it cannot happen, but because she prefers it to open terrain. Lola noticed, of course. She must have called Freda. Freda, who never panicked, must have called Auntie Val. And now, all three of them take turns sitting on, standing by, waiting on the mattress. Taking to her bed (“Her sickbed”) was as easy as, or even easier than, breathing. Her un/conscious decision was one her spirit made. When it was time, and when the fury of her past began to race ahead of her future, she simply lay down.

  From her bed, she sometimes imagines her mom into the old pictures she has seen of Indian women in historical books and anthropological texts. She can see her there easily – dark, unsmiling and with two black braids, long and thick and hanging down her back. She had pure brown chocolatey skin, not mocha latte like Bernice’s own. She would have, always in motion, stopped only for the moment it took to snap the photo: a tiny whirlwind on chromatic tape.

  Sometimes Bernice can see
Maggie’s bones when she looks in the mirror. Most usually, though, they are like fishbones; you don’t see them but you know they are there. With those bones buried deep within her, Bernice knows she has protection that no one knows about.

  She is not like her cousins or her aunties who wear their bones like armour. Cousin Freda’s bones stick out every which way. She looks like someone’s idea of an Indian. Like a warrior. Cheekbones, hipbones, collarbones jutting out in warning. It seems to her that Freda’s little bones are angry. Notice me! Notice me! Notice me!

  Bernice and her Auntie Val are not the type they took pictures of – the type they remembered and wanted to remember. No one likes the fat Indian women. Well, the men sure did, but no one wants to put them on postcards and imprints to send back home. Maybe fat was not noble enough. In a way it has always made Bernice proud. She and her auntie, much like the pioneers who had to “break their land alone,” she thinks, and covers her mouth to stifle a laugh which could alert Freda and Lola downstairs to her presence in her body.

  Those images run through her mind. While outwardly still, inside, Bernice’s mind is churning, alive. A charged battery in a resting machine, only her body idles in wait. For a sign. For completion. For the moment. When she is safest. Pictures swim together with memories like a slide show. Val and Freda active, her diminutive mom passive and almost out of frame. One shot, of her father, walking away. Remembering them, re-remembering them, she wanders around the borders of her emotional ground zero, never quite approaching and never quite looking directly at it, hoping to find survivors of the place she ran away from.

  Another image. One hot Alberta summer when her mom and her Auntie Val were in their cups, she heard them become loud louder loudest after a night of drinking. She didn’t really understand the link between the booze and the joy that was coming from the kitchen and pictured the two sisters sitting close and laughing like best friends over their near-empty glasses. The Canadian Club bottle, she had imagined, would be sitting between them as they by turns laughed and swung their long black hair over their shoulders, and curled over in their chairs with laughter.

  They were so pure in their appreciation of and love for one another that she felt lightheaded. That night, she had thought about waking Freda up to see this joy, but that girl slept like her conscience was clear. Which it shouldn’t be, Bernice reminds herself.

  Listening to the sounds from the kitchen, she had imagined them braiding each other’s hair and whispering secrets to one another whenever the room got silent. She pressed her ear to the wall separating the kitchen from her tiny bedroom and heard:

  Her auntie saying, with pure emotion, “Sister, promise me when I get old that you will pluck my chin.”

  Maggie responding, with all of the seriousness of a bride at the altar, “I will, sister. I will.”

  From this evening, she learned two things. First, she was likely to have a facial hair problem when she grew up. It was okay, she had a sister (well, Skinny Freda anyhow) too. Also, she would have to learn to do anything for one other person in her life. She would find a person with whom she could exchange a solemn vow when they were in their cups. And they too would be alive in her memory.

  The creaking from another kitchen and the bakery heat rising give her pause from her memory travelling for a moment. She is taking stock. It is less an inventory than a patchwork quilt. No matter where she starts, body still and mind moving, emotions on high alert, she ends up at Loon. Freda’s wild laugh makes its way up the stairs, landing on her comforter expectantly. Bernice does not move, does not want to feel it. Will not welcome it under the covers. She remembers that laughter.

  The roar of the powerboats is alive in her mind. Water. Sunshine. Auntie Val. Freda. In her mind’s eye she sees pictures change and exchange. They pull her attention to the water. She can see the engine churning up an angry lather which a pink man jumped over with either fearless agility or reckless disregard. A girl in a multicoloured near-bikini cheered him on – a flash of white teeth, white hair and brown skin, browner than Bernice’s own. The skier fell with a spectacular splash, his body stopped fully and quickly as he snowplowed under a crest. She remembers that day.

  “Leggo’ve the rope,” Auntie Val, Skinny Freda and Bernice yelled in unison.

  Bernice peeled an orange and telekinetically willed the blond bikini woman from the seat where she sat perched, healthy and mane tossing, into the churning wake behind the outboard.

  “Too bad about Willie Belcourt, eh?” Skinny Freda said to them, leaving the blond bikini momentarily safe from Bernice’s ire.

  “Eh?” Auntie Val cocked an eyebrow. While Skinny Freda was actually her niece, Skinny Freda was also Valene’s best friend and adopted daughter and was well known never to let the truth get in the way of a good story. Val offered her a cookie and motioned for Skinny Freda to go on. Bernice remembers with particular delighthorror the silver sparkly two-piece bathing suit that her auntie wore with the pride and assurance of someone wearing a buffalo robe.

  Bernice ignored the cookie and closed her eyes to the sun. She had lost seven pounds, most of it from her legs, and had daringly worn shorts that day. She had been at Loon for a month and did not have to go back to Christ’s Academy for six more weeks. That is, if they found the money for another school year. She hoped that her weight loss and tanned legs would keep the other fourteen-year-old girls at bay.

  “Well,” Skinny Freda started, with a Storyteller’s expertise, “he took off to St. Albert with that white woman, you know.” Freda said it all with a natural lilt and no judgment. She herself had dated a few moniawak* since Val started letting her date. Bernice looked at her sideways; her sistercousin seemed an inverted version of herself. Bernice had always thought that Freda’s confidence flowed out from under shadowed crevasses and angled bones. That some mélange of svelte certitude, magazine model skinnyhappiness leeched out of her in places where silence and stuffing found Bernice wanting. It would be years before she understood that the funhouse mirror of their shared childhood would alter the ways they saw themselves and warp what others saw in them.

  “Freddy, just tell the story.” Bernice said it with more impatience than she felt. She remembers that her auntie looked at her from the corner of her eye, wondering about her agitation, she imagined.

  “Anyways,” Skinny Freda said, deliberately slow, “he leaves Flora behind, just like every year, only this year his trapline has that white woman on it.”

  She looked at Valene and then Bernice expectantly.

  Auntie Val, clearly interested, pretends not to be. Freda could be antagonistic, the kind of person who left bannock on her plate, knowing you wanted it, and not offering it until you were about to walk away. It’s a style of Cree passive aggressiveness Bernice has come to know well. Val, used to this, feigned lack of interest. “And …” she begrudgingly nudged.

  “And, when he comes back from St. Albert to rest with Flora for the winter, she has got a great big white guy living with her!”

  * White men. White people.

  Auntie Val was ecstatic. “Flora? She never fools around!”

  Skinny Freda’s enthusiasm escalated. “And, he is living on the reserve with her.”

  “No!” Valene and Bernice echoed each other.

  “And …”

  “Don’t say it! Don’t say it! She’s …” Valene was flailing with her own bigelegance and people on the beach were staring.

  “… having his baby!” Skinny Freda finished triumphantly, taking Val’s cigarette and flicking two inches’ worth of ashes to the sand, enjoying the laughter bubbling from Val’s substantial belly.

  “True?” Bernice asked.

  “Yeah. She met him at that benefit at Loon, you know, the environmentalists put it on. The Pimatisewin,” Skinny Freda added, as if more details made it more believable.

  Sated, they sat in silence for a while pondering good love gone bad. After a bit, Auntie Val and Skinny Freda traded stories about other romances. If
they noticed Bernice’s silence, they ignored it and let her be.

  She thought about the Pimatisewin and the benefit and wondered whether that old tree would make it. There were supposed to be four of them, two in North America and two in South America. The one at Loon Lake was in sad shape. She had heard the one in B.C. was dying too, from pollution, they said. Chief and Council and the whole community had joined together to try and save it. She hoped they would spend the benefit money on something that would make the tree better.

  She grabbed a Coke, opened it and passed it to her auntie. When she was done, Valene offered it to Skinny Freda, who shook her head and passed it to Bernice. She was just about to decline when a pale towheaded boy from a pack of teenagers yelled out to her, “Hey, you think you need that?”

  Skinny Freda had sprung up from the blanket and started walking towards the group.

  “Fuck you!” Skinny Freda yelled at him, startling her friends as much as the youths, who were still young enough to be frightened by the authority or unpredictability of adults.

  “Such a lady,” Bernice said with some degree of awe.

  “Don’t give respect and you don’t get it,” Auntie Val pronounced like she said it herself. She was proud of her daughterniece’s spirit.

  They packed up their belongings and headed for Skinny Freda’s truck, leaving posturing and bewildered boys in the wake of their grandeur.

  There is something about that summer, something stuck in her that she can’t quite figure out. Like a hint or a whisper, it gently sits in her mind while she steeps in her own disquiet on her mattress. The feeling that joins her in the still room is one of almost longing. Near aching. She becomes aware of her physical self because the emotions pain her.