Birdie Read online

  She stirs and feels sweat on her skin, the sheets wet with too much of some sense she doesn’t understand. Sinks lower. Further. Shark cage. Recalls the thoughts in her head as she escaped the dirty motel and the old man.

  One time when Skinny Freda was eighteen and she and Bernice had started spreading the space that existed between them in terms of size, Freda took her cousin to a house party (rather, a motel party) in High Prairie. Bernice had been struck silent as her cousin left the room every so often with a much older man and came back looking more and more dishevelled each time. When Freda looked for her in the morning (she had hidden herself by lying on the floor between the bed and the wall) the old white man, smelling of used clothing store and vomit, had said to her, “You will never find a squaw who doesn’t wanna be found.” She looked up to see Skinny Freda kick him in the groin, wink at her in her hiding spot and tell her, “Let’s lose this loser, Bernice.”

  Remembering that, the fear of her own loser finding her, had lit a fire under Bernice as she made her way to work that day.

  She actually did run then, throwing Art/Al’s wallet out after she took his twenty-two dollars (if he hadn’t slapped her, she would never have considered taking it). Breathless and sweating, she had opened the bakery door and heard Lola in the back, smoking and singing a song that Bernice recognized as a song that Cher sings. Lola was pretty fond of Cher. And Sonny, for Pete’s sake and what that meant. Liking Sonny told Bernice something about Lola that Bernice couldn’t quite figure out. It wasn’t good, though.

  “I knocked twice, figured you had a late night,” Lola said to her, not commenting on the alternative. “You look …” – she had paused for effect because effect was all and cause was irrelevant to Lola – “like you got the worst of it.”

  Bernice marched by her, too-short denim skirt accentuating the broken strap on her Walmart shoes. When she saw herself in the stainless steel oven reflection she realized she had blood on her lip. And, strangely enough, in her eye.

  She didn’t remember getting hit in the eye.

  “Some men don’t know when a woman …” Lola began, but Bernice was already on her way upstairs to shower and change. She had wondered for not the first time whether living so close to work was such a great idea.

  She had felt resentful then, the arrangement making her lie, “… tripped on the way home. Slept at a friend’s. Be right back.”

  Lola knew the truth. Not because Lola presumed bad deeds. But because Lola knew Bernice had no friends. She didn’t even have a telephone, and no phone calls came to the bakery for her. At that point, Bernice had lived in Gibsons for almost a month and not once had there been an inkling that she had any life outside of the bread she baked, cheesecake she prepared or pastries she delivered.

  In fact, Lola knew nothing about Bernice. One time she caught Lola looking in the trash bag that she delivered to the back of the store. She could still see it – Lola’s spidery polyester legs poking out of the red dumpster in the back alley. She imagined the surprised look on the old woman’s face at the balled-up wad of old newspaper clippings and pictures of Jesse from The Beachcombers. She kept only two.

  When she stepped into the shower – it was more of a hose running up the front of the tub, where there were tiles as high as her shoulders – she had let the cold water splash her. There was no hot water in the apartment but she grew used to it. She used glycerine soap to cleanse. Started with her arms and breasts. Cleaned her parts and then the rest of herself. She had no idea what she looked like. Had no knowledge of her body. The rivulets of ice water fell on foreign terrain, crisscrossed everywhere by stretch marks. She went to wash her long hair but remembered at the last minute she had cut it. The braid sat in a basket in the corner of the bathroom – right where she left it when she got the news from home that her mom had left and she sheared herself.

  It only took a second to wash her hair after that. Most of the time she didn’t bother.

  Lola had banged on her ceiling, the noise reverberating through the floor of Bernice’s apartment. Bernice knew it was a sneaker on a broom handle. She also knew it was approaching six o’clock. She lingered, the feel of Art/Al? dripping off.

  She hoped that she was careful and that she didn’t tell him where she worked.

  Lola was tap tap tapping her cigarette as she rolled herself a fresh one. Bernice had come to value soundlessness. Some days, entire days, she would not speak to anyone. Not even silencetalking. She didn’t answer the voice that was moving around in her head. Regardless of where and who she was. It never occurred to her then that she might have been sick. That her silence was unhealthy. That her speech may have had value. That the pain of death needed to be released. Most of the time, when she did talk, it was in her bad Cree.

  “Mah,” she chided, when she had done something clumsy. The word floated like a willow seed to the ground. Sometimes she thought her words moved out of her way, light enough to be airborne, when she swept the flour, sugar and baking powder from the floor at night. Other times, like the day she felt her mom was gone, they sat heavily and would not move, no matter how much she swept. Her arms were leaden too, sawing at her hair for what seemed like hours, before the give of the final strands left her holding her braid and staring at it without recognition.

  “Go to bed, my girl,” Lola said to her that night in Bernice’s own language, and they had both looked at each other hard because Lola does not speak Cree. For that one gift, Bernice let Lola order her down the stairs today.

  “Did you hear?” Lola let her words bounce, like they had places to go, even though she knew Bernice had pulled the cord of the radio from the wall.

  “Some computer whiz kid shut down the radar at the Vancouver airport. Planes almost crashing everywhere.”

  To her, Lola had seemed dismayed that no one had crashed yet. Sometimes Bernice thought mean thoughts and didn’t take them back. Other times she thought good thoughts and let them powder the room – just in case there was a running count on them. Also, it gave the ugly thoughts a soft place to land.

  It came to her that maybe she was losing touch. Not with reality – a place where she was often a visitor – but she was actually losing her sense of human feeling. She looked at her hands, soft from the butter and lard, and noticed that even though she had placed them on the oven door, they felt no heat.

  “… and I told the girls this would happen with all of that newfangled computer chips,” Lola pronounced proudly.

  “Hmmmm,” Bernice said.

  Other times she would say “interesting” or “wow” but on that day she couldn’t find any words to take the places of the ones she puts out there so she only hummed. On that day, the voices and the shift were hovering around her like summer fog on grass after a rain. She remembers thinking of Art/Al? puffing over her and of her fear that he would have a stroke on top of her. She wonders what she would have done then.

  “You have a nice time last night?” Lola asked her, unkindly, and would have been hurt if you suggested she was being unkind.

  Bernice tried to hum again, surprised by the question.

  “Yes.” She was living a secret life inside her head, she thought. She remembered when she and Skinny Freda used to wonder about the secret life of cows. Some days they would take Freda’s beat-up truck out onto the open road and honk to see if cows would respond. They never did until that last cold Sunday before she left. She was on a day pass from the San and Freda and she went for a drive in the country. Reaching a pasture, they were delighted to find that one cow looked up at them when the horn tweaked. She and Freda finished their Cokes and went home. They have not spoken since. She feels like the cow sometimes – like it was chance or some strange unexpected expected response that sometimes fuelled her. As a reactor and not an actor, when Lola spoke to her she sometimes found herself responding, even though she had dwindling capacity for interaction. Lola, still impatiently wondering about Bernice’s evening, had continued to ask questions – completely una
ware that her employee was travelling right in front of her.

  “Makin’ some new friends?” Lola tweaked, twisting her cigarette-stained hand in a mime of some act Bernice didn’t want to recognize.

  But did.

  “A couple.”

  “Men friends?”

  “A few.”

  “Anyone you’ll bring home to meet your old pal Lola?”

  Home. Like they lived in this extended oven. She wanted to lie but found that space emptied.

  “Not likely.” Over time, she had found that her capacity to lie had diminished. If she could get away without speaking, she would never have to lie.

  “Oh, the type you don’t bring home to …”

  Bernice’s head had filled the room with the sounds of flames flickering. She could hear nothing else. Lola’s lips moved and expectation flooded her face, but Bernice was already mixing and pouring, stirring and folding.

  One day a letter came from her kohkom to the bakery. Kohkom was the only person Bernice ever told where she had gone. She had also told her in Cree, as if it couldn’t come into the white world if it was spoken in their language. The letter was in Freda’s handwriting and Bernice knew Kohkom had Skinny Freda write down everything that she said. Reading it was just like listening to her. Her mother was gone (and Bernice tries hard not to think dead and gone). Or gone dead. The letter didn’t say. It didn’t matter, she had felt as much. Still, she worried about her kohkom having to say it and Freda having to write it. No one knew where Maggie was, Freda had translated.

  Bernice knew the truth, though. She had killed her mother. Carrying Bernice’s secrets had been too much for her mother. She shouldn’t have told her the truth. Shouldn’t have gone to Maggie in her sleep. Shouldn’t have given her the shame in a dreambundle. Should have let her think she just ran away. But it was too late and there was no one left to carry that bundle except her. A couple of times she was going to tell Freda about it, but changed her mind just as the ugly words tore at the back of her lips to get out. When she left for the San she could have told Freda so she could take care. Instead, she breathed in deeply and held the breath until she squirmed too much and saw stars. Everyone knows too much oxygen can smother unwanted words. And now she is glad she did breathe because those words would have killed Skinny Freda just like they killed her mom.

  She was fidgety then, she thinks, like her insides were squirming to fit her outsides. Or her outsides were trying to find the person that formerly occupied them. Lola stared at her. Spoke words she could not hear. Bernice had soothed herself by running her fingers through her hair and was surprised, once again, at its shortness. At that time, it had grown out three or four inches since she cut it. It is now at her shoulders again, but when Lola saw what she had done she marched her right over to Shear Talent to get the ends evened out. Bernice can’t remember who paid. Maybe it was one of those kindnesses that Lola heaps on her that can’t actually be felt or measured – so much so that you don’t actually notice it. Like the free meals. Like not smacking her gum or speaking too loudly around her. Like when she coaxed Bernice into her ‘74 Malibu and pretended she was not looking for Pat John’s house. How shocked he would have been to see an emaciated sixty-two-year-old in teal tights and red lipstick and an ample Cree woman in baker’s whites parked by the road in front of his house.

  With a jolt, she noticed Lola was gesticulating and miming something she and the girls did in Reno last year. Bernice had heard the story already and stared at Lola, only to hear the sound of a crackling fire as wind whipped flames.

  “Okay, get me a pack of Salems, too,” Lola had said, reaching for her purse.

  “What?”

  “You said ‘cigarettes,’ kid, just like ya’ were a smoker yourself.”

  “I thought you were cutting down.”

  “Not today. Make them lights, okay?” She tried to hand Bernice a ten.

  “I’ve got money.” She had grabbed Art/Al?’s twenty-two dollars and walked next door to Ralph’s convenience store.

  The sounds of Lola and Freda’s laughter drift up the stairs. She is sensitive to sound now and wonders when that started. She has wolf ears, she thinks, smiling a bit behind her face. Maybe it’s being housed in the same small room for so long, but she feels like all of her sensepowers are sharper. She can tell when Freda is on her time. She knows, with precision, when the sun will rise and set. She can tell when Freda is sneaking up the stairs, hoping to catch her … what? Awake? Alive? In her skin?

  She knows, though, Bernice thinks, that I am not my self as much. Anymore.

  Accepting this as her truth, she closes her eyes and does not sleep. But. Moves.

  Freda was always the spitting image of Maggie. It used to bother Bernice that this tiny little woman had come from another mother and still was more closely related to Maggie than she could ever be. Freda was born looking like a wizened old woman and even, sometimes, resembled one now, but when she was young, her cousin and Maggie used to sit together in the lodge, the space between her mother and herself occupied by the mini-Maggie doppelgänger. While it bothered her, Bernice had accepted it as natural, that she could in no way take the space of niecedaughter next to the tiny mom whom she had eclipsed in size at age ten.

  Perhaps what was most paining was that Maggie was able to express warmth to Freda in ways that she could not to her own daughter. Bernice watched as her mom smoothed out Freda’s hair, patted her brow on occasion and took her hand in public. In this, Bernice knew her mom was demonstrating motherlove for her motherless cousin. It was warm and generous. But, she still felt like her mother’s ability to love more than one child at once was meagre. In truth, Freda was a lovable kid. Talkative, interested and light, words rushed out of her like river water on stones. Bernice, who found herself difficult to love, had always believed that her mom could not love her. Could not love BigHer. Could not find enough love within her to spread around.

  When she said as much to her Auntie Val, the bigwoman-sisterlittlemother had patted her hand. “No. Birdie. No. She doesn’t love Freda more. She loves you too much to treat you like that.”

  Bernice had never known what that meant until she found a bird, still on the ground, after hitting their picture window. She fed it and watered it, watched it for hours and prayed for it to heal. She would not touch it, though. She wanted it to find its kin and fit in again without her tainting it.

  And, in truth, Bernice harbours none of the fearanger and rage that seemed to sit on Maggie’s and Freda’s skin like a bruise. Bernice’s injury was more akin to the internal injuries sustained from a crash. They pained, were always there and could manifest at any time. For the most part, they stayed beneath the surface. Unobserved.

  Freda’s rage was more accessible and evident than Maggie’s, certainly. She had a hair-trigger temper (and later, a rye-trigger temper) that flamed and snuffed easily. While Maggie’s would burn less often, the intensity of it was so familiar to Bernice that she grew fearful when she didn’t feel it.

  There was a time when Bernice could feel that rage in her mom every day. When Freda stayed with them there was the hum of a potential anger storm. Even she could not get a read on Maggie’s rage. Bernice could, though. The house would grow fat with acrimony; the air pungent with rancour. Her eyes would sting with the vinegariness of malignity. Bernice didn’t know quite where it came from, but there were two distinct eventualities that arose from it. Auntie Val would come over while Maggie took to her bed. She lavished Bernice and Freda with praise, food and hugs. A second effect: Freda moved from Maggie’s house to Val’s and became her daughter. No one ever mentioned it. No one ever talked about a lot of things. What happened to Freda’s mom. Why Freda lived with everyone at one time or another. Why Maggie stopped talking to anyone. When the electricity would come back on. Why no one stayed with the uncles. The silence about what was happening around them seeped into the kitchen, first. Permeating the curtains. Eating into the linoleum. Eventually settling in the fridge. I
t was like some sort of bad medicine – it made Freda skinny, Bernice fat, and Maggie disappear.

  In her mind, which feels oddly sharp and awake in the haze and among the bedclothes, Bernice recalls Freda disappearing for weeks on end. Then, she would show up, all scrubbed up and made up, at Maggie’s with tight clothes on and hickeys on her neck. Once in a while on these visits to her old home, Maggie would look through Bernice, catch sight of something familiar in Freda and pause. Bernice couldn’t understand it but there was some sort of challenge going on, like Freda was daring Maggie to see her again. Maggie just stared, though. Never said a word. Never raised a telling eyebrow.

  Over time, things between Freda and Maggie became like things between Maggie and everyone. A quiet acceptance that this was the way she would be now. The only proof that they had ever been mother and daughter was the angst Bernice carried with her that her mom could give her up, too, at any time.

  Bernice’s skin feels electric; the pale cool sheets seem to sizzle around her. This. This is unknown to her. She is not sure, but believes that if she sat up she would be spring-like. This. This is anger.

  acimowin

  The Storyteller chuckles and says

  Just before she wakes, the owl,

  she is flying over

  a forest and sees that all of the trees

  have died. All of the trees

  except one.

  She flies over it and poops.

  5

  MANY TRIPS, MANY SUFFERINGS

  misiwanacihow: someone who fell victim to suffering

  pawatamowin

  In the old dream, the one she kept having when she lived at home – when there was a home – she was too fat to get into the sweatlodge. But she does get in and sits near the door on the women’s side – a place of honour – but only because she knew that if she ventured past the women in the lodge she would fall into the fire. She was the last person in and it was a full house – her legs were pressed too tightly together.