Birdie Page 7

  She knows that they did not talk.

  Once they were done and got outside, Maggie had asked Bernice if she was full. She answered that she was because even if she was hungry then there was nothing that could be done about it and she didn’t want her mom to feel bad. Auntie Val offered her a cough drop, they walked across the street to the rundown apartment block (no security door or lock to impede their progress) and walked up the rickety stairs to Valene’s apartment in the Pecker Palace. It was, she remembers, a room with many doors. Instead of walls, the apartment had doors that led directly to the main hallway. She used to pretend that the doors led to exotic places: islands with palm trees, castles with hidden rooms, or caves with treasure buried within. This was hard to sustain when drunks pounded on the door mistakenly. Those times she had just wished the doors led to other rooms. Rooms with locks.

  She remembers her mom hugging her and telling her to be good. To be a good helper to her auntie. To try to fit in. In her little room at Lola’s, she knows she has never and will likely never fit in anywhere. She can feel that hug. The warmth. Resignation. There was no finality in that hug. Her mom took a last look around the apartment before leaving and said, “I’m going to make you some curtains.” Bernice had wondered anxiously when they would get the window coverings, when her mom would come again, when she would come to get her for good. So she could go with her. To. Someplace. Some new place. Some home.

  Once she moved in with her aunt, the apartment seemed no less forlorn, but she got used to it. Every school day she walked down the hill and then turned left at the Sears store at the base of the hill. There were never exhibits in the Sears store windows, but she often saw people milling about, even during the week, looking for a bargain. No one looked at her and she had begun to feel happily invisible.

  When she walked the last four blocks to school, she began to count her steps. Almost always, she walked eight hundred and seventy-four steps, but some days she would take tiny steps to see how many it would take if she was smaller or older. At eight hundred and seventy she reached the sidewalk before the walkway leading to the school. She was at Christ’s Academy for three years. Someday, her mom had told her, she would go to a school where there were boys. She never minded their absence but couldn’t tell her mom that. She remembers dragging her feet up the stairs and hearing the grandmothers telling her to go straight to class. Some days she had wanted to ignore them, wanted to walk straight past the Academy. With her blue blazer and plaid skirt, though, she knew she was likely to be spotted. Instead, each day she went to her locker, opened it and put her maskihky* bag inside. She took care to wrap the leather thong gently around the small rectangular leather bag and place it in the corner.

  One day Sister Marie Thérèse had asked her what was in the bag, in front of the entire history class. She told the Sister that it was a sacred bag – that’s what the grandmothers told her – and Sister Marie Thérèse sent her to Sister Mary Margaret’s office. The stern principal demanded an explanation for the bag.

  * Medicine.

  She remembers the grandmothers telling her to keep quiet.

  Be still, Birdie, they told her as she wriggled in her chair. She wriggles in her bed at the memory. At the discomfort. At the detainment.

  They used to cut our hair, they reminded each other.

  Remember when they beat us for speaking our language, they whispered to each other in Cree. Sometimes, Bernice still hears them whispering to each other.

  She sees herself as she was then, a chubby fine-boned Halfbreed girl, nervously swinging her legs and brushing her long hair out of her eyes. In her mind’s eye, she sees her legs abruptly stop moving, her features become sharper and a subtle ruffling of her arms. The new plaid skirt cutting the air with its tightly pressed edges.

  “Take that bag off!” Sister had ordered.

  Run! the grandmothers told her. Don’t let her touch the medicine! they reminded her.

  She had run all the way to the apartment. It was only 10:30 in the morning and she wasn’t allowed to have a key. She sat still in the scorching summer sun, her uniform becoming drenched and heavy with perspiration, until her aunt came home.

  She was semi-delirious by that point.

  Auntie Val had, with the dignity the Creator placed in big wimmins, marched to the “Jesus Christly school” muttering something about humility, charity and nunbitches. Bernice ate a box of fake Honeycombs, a row of crackers and a half-jar of generic Cheez Whiz before her auntie came back.

  After that, the Sisters had been really nice to her.

  One day, on that most particular of days, Bernice had walked into her classroom and looked at the clock. It was 8:53. Class started at 8:55 and she was almost never late. She was almost too early. When the bell rang, she remembers, the other twelve-year-old girls skipped gaily to the front of the class to hold hands and pray.

  “Oh Heavenly Father,” the classroom intoned.

  Creator of all, the grandmothers prayed serenely.

  The white girls continued, “We ask you for forgiveness for our sins …”

  She could not hear them over the grandmothers who reminded her to say thank you for this beautiful day. She thinks now that this was a lovely way to start the day, if you left out all the Jesus and fear and just talked to your Creator about thankfulness. She learned to pray in her own way in that room. Something tweaks in her now, her heels imperceptibly undig from the foot of the bed, and Bernice knows that something in her shifted at Christ’s Academy. She doesn’t know what it was, but she does know that in time, all she could hear was the quiet murmur of iskwewak.*

  When they were done their prayers, the school children settled in for a day of lessons taught by the Sisters. She listened carefully to their teachings because the old ones told her this would be important to her and her family someday.

  At recess she took her lunch and wandered to the highest point of the schoolyard where a few girls seated themselves, two by two. She got to the very top and sat down, making sure that she did not wrinkle her skirt or dirty her white socks. She had pride in that uniform. Most girls had two, but she had one. Before she moved Bernice to the city, her mother had been very quiet when she read the card that had the prices for uniform rentals. The Academy had recommended that each student rent three uniforms. She knew she would only have one. She heard her auntie on the phone at the laundromat beside their apartment one afternoon. She knew by the wrinkle in Val’s forehead that she was talking to her uncles. They had not spoken for some time and Bernice knew it was hard for her to ask them for anything.

  * Cree women, Indian women.

  “For Chrissake, Larry, there is no one else,” Valene had hissed. Her long black hair was piled on her head and she was wearing a big turquoise T-shirt, Bernice remembers. There is one just like it in her little closet. Lola told her, last time she wore it, that she was swimming in it.

  “No. No. No. I don’t know, Larry. No one knows. She said she would come to visit the next long weekend.” Bernice had wondered at the time if Auntie was talking about her mom. Now, she knows.

  Valene looked angry, annoyed, a little hungover and something else that Bernice does not know yet, in her little room over the bakery, and she will not be able to identify that piece of her auntie for years. “Just send the fucking money, Larry.” Bernice imagines her eyebrows must have flown off her little-girl face. Gritted teeth and set jaw displaying a fierceness she wished she’d known when her daughterniece was young. When she thought she knew. When she could have done something. One thing. “You fuckers owe her that.”

  Two weeks later, three crumpled twenty-dollar bills came in a dirty white envelope addressed to Bernice at her auntie’s. There was no note from her mom. She had wondered at the time if that money came from her uncle but quickly put it out of her mind. She had folded the envelope carefully and placed it in her underwear drawer where no one would find it. They had cared for that uniform like it was a precious stone, cleaning it frequently and looking at
it in something like wonder. For this reason, and not because she only had one, Bernice had always been careful to sit like a lady when she wore the uniform.

  When she would sit on the hill, she pretended she was in the woods up north. She had a favourite spot about a mile from their home; a place directly between the town and Loon Lake. She would walk through a field thick with wild grass, weeds and the sweetest-smelling flowers. She had to go through the Williers’ yard to get there and was afraid of the rez dogs that hid from the sun under the trampoline. Sometimes they would follow her amiably, but one time they eyed her warily and curved their lips in a smilesnarl. After that she carried a walking stick with her in case she needed to shoo them away. In the fall, shots would ring out as the men from the community hunted for moose. The cacophonous noise was at once nerve-racking and soothing to her with its power and familiarity. From that hill, how she missed that hill now, she could see the Williers’ and their relations’ homes to the south, the Omeasoos’ to the north and the Cardinals’ to the east. Her family’s home and a few others were scattered (back to back where that could happen) about the west end of the reserve but not on it. With only one of their family members entitled to a house on the tiny reserve (an uncle who lived in the city) the Meetoos family made no complaints about the house or the land they were effectively squatting on until the only legal Indian in their family decided he wanted his house back. Her vantage point from the hill up north told a story of belonging and intolerance that she could not quite understand yet. The hill dwarfed the one at the school, but when she was there she would try to generate that same feeling of belonging/alienation that was familiar enough to resonate with home.

  She remembers girls screeching, running, thumping and laughing. She remembers opening her lunch kit and taking out the note from her mom that her Auntie Val placed there.

  Remember you are my little brown dolly. Be strong and good. Love mom

  She had shredded the paper slowly, curling each piece around her fingertips before letting the warm wind blow it away. After that, she remembers, that tingle started in her toes and hands and she had to adjust her vision, like she imagined a crocodile did with his lids. She could hear everything, taste the colours of the sky, the grass, the dirt on the hill. She knew now that something had changed. That she had changed. That she had altered. Girls ran around her like she was not there. She could see the tops of their heads as they chased each other and sat together on this hill. She remembers. They smelled like soap.

  The next day the Sisters sent her home with a note for her aunt, telling her that “her charge” had been absent from school without excuse the previous afternoon. Bernice recalls being livid (possessing the outrage of a teenager wronged by adults) and explaining that she was in class, and getting lectured about the ills and evils of lying.

  Bernice had taken the note home, but Auntie Val hadn’t shown up for three days at that point. It had taken another week for the Pecker Palace manager to notice and three days more for him to call Social Services. Enjoying the quiet, Bernice had been surprised when the police came to the door with the tired social worker. Looking around at Pecker Palace, she tried not to feel relieved. Relief felt like disloyalty.

  When Bernice awakens? Unfurls? Un-changes? Rises? she can smell Christ’s Academy on her skin. It’s impossible, she knows, but she has been there. The line between im/possible is not as absolute as it once was. That there is an arbitrariness in the world that she never suspected existed takes a physical toll on her. She can feel that her hands are clenched in front of her and a grunt of agitation sits bridled in her chest. It is as though her body was waking her spirit up. She finds the space between them awkward.

  She used to wake up to her mother’s singing. Maggie Meetoos had the most amazing voice. Two days out of three she was as tone-deaf as a riveter. On the third day, though – oh the third day! – she had the voice of a seasoned blues mistress. As well, her momma could turn anything into a torch song. Until she was seventeen, Bernice thought “How Much is that Doggy in the Window?” was a blues anthem. Maggie’s deep timbre belied her diminutive size. At five feet tall and one hundred pounds, her daughter’s size dwarfed her. If it wasn’t for her voice and her fists when she drank, you would forget that those sounds came from her body.

  “She wore bluuuuuuuuuue velllllllllllllllvet …” Bobby Vinton on 78. Bernice remembers things frying, meat mostly, in a sizzling frenzy on the stove. Her mom shuffling across the ripped linoleum effortlessly as she stirred this and flipped that. The morning noise was comforting to Bernice who, hunched over her journal at the kitchen table, felt the difference between the stove heat and the summer heat stealing in the back screen door.

  Back Then, before Now, before the Academy and all that followed, she dreamed that she could smell odd things in the lodge and she wondered if this was normal. She thought she smelled olives, but a bit stronger. Well, she couldn’t actually smell it, but she knew it smelled like that in there. Now, of course, she knows this is – well, her normal.

  One day, when her mom still puttered, Bernice sat in the kitchen and asked her questions. She had patience then, and Maggie was sometimes lost in thought before she answered. In that, she and her bigdaughter were the same. They shared an alertness sharpened by long periods of silence and thoughtfulness. In years, in too few years, when Maggie started vanishing, Bernice would remember that the silences could also be rich and full.

  “How did you meet Dad?” “Did you have any other boyfriends?” “Where did you go to school?” “Did Moshom* and Kohkom take you visiting, too?”

  Maggie fluttered and her thoughts landed lightly, with her pecking at the questions and laughing every so often. Bernice learns that her dad gave her mom a terrible perfume their first Christmas together that smelled like rotten grapefruit, that the first time she cooked him his favourite meal – kidneys – their house smelled like pee for three days, that Valene had a crush on Conway Twitty for years, and that her mom dated one man before Bernice’s dad. Sometimes, it didn’t matter what she asked, she just got happy answers.

  “Where did Freda come from?” In her mind’s eye, Bernice sees her mom stop and cock her head, done eating. As if she had heard a potential predator rustling in the bush.

  It was five minutes, at least, before her mother answered. “Same as everyone else. From a mom and a dad.” Maggie’s coffee cup slipped a bit, slopping some liquid on the counter.

  “Enough. I better get finished in here.” She walked outside, carrying the laundry soap, seemed to remember herself, and headed to the washer and dryer in the basement.

  Bernice went under the stairs to have some alone time. When she came upon her auntie, she was only momentarily disappointed to share her space.

  “Grab me the scissors, Bernice.” Auntie Val had motioned with her lips to the vanity/shelf screwed in beside the door, which held books, pens and the scissors.

  While everyone knew that Bernice’s room was off limits, it also served as a haven for Valene when she visited the Meetoos family. Never quite satisfied with being reserve-adjacent, Auntie Val took it personally that the family was not allowed to live there.

  * Grandfather.

  Looking out the window from the bed while painting her toenails, she had pointed to the rez with her lips. “Don’t know why you guys never got a house on the rez.”

  “Mom says we can’t have one,” Bernice had answered, sitting down to do her own nails and immediately smearing her toenail on her bedspread.

  “Oh did she?” Auntie Val narrowed her lips, a considerable task when you thought of the size of them. “Be a lot more room for you guys at Little Loon,” she told Bernice.

  “Hey dreamy-eyes, how’s your old auntie look now?”

  In truth, Valene was a vision. A red velvet dress fought for supremacy over her stomach and wearily pledged its allegiance to her auntie’s wide bottom. Her eyelashes, totally regrown since an unfortunate eyelash curler incident, fluttered prettily over amber brown eyes.<
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  And her mouth, her singularly Cree mouth, which laughs so loud and curls up so easily, was bathed in a shade of red that only clowns and Valene Calliou can wear.

  She had stared at her little mother, with the mammoth bosom and the truck driver mouth, the living proof that a fat Indian woman can get laid, and said, “Oh Auntie, you’re a dream.” And meant it.

  For Bernice Meetoos had no doubt that sort of woman, her sort of woman, could be loved. She herself had seen the glowwarm in the eyes of a few men. Mostly they were older, sometimes they were drunk, and often they went home alone. But they were out there. Out there waiting for this gorgeous smart big woman to finally enjoyably, consensually and delightfully screw them.

  Auntie Val, Bernice had no doubt, had all of this and knew it to be true.

  “She’s spending too much time with your sister,” her uncle Larry had told Bernice’s mom, his oldest sister, one night as Bernice stood listening outside the kitchen window.

  She can and did imagine her mom wiping her hands on her dishtowel and brushing her hair from her eyes. Now, Bernice thinks of them as tear-stained eyes, but then she just knew her mom to be exhausted. From taking care. From propping up. From being the one.

  “She’s your sister, too. And it seems to me, Larry,” she said in her soft drone, “Bernice needs someone to lead her.”

  “But that old—”

  Impatience cloaks her words. “Enough.”

  For a while after that she avoided her mother’s eyes. Sometimes it was hard to look at her mom, her mom in the size four dress, and remember that they were related. And that she could not follow her.

  Bernice squeezes her eyes shut and tries not to think of that feeling. Of near home. There. Her mom.

  It seems to her that she has been running on a half a tank since she moved to the ocean. She never thought that she would live near the ocean. Sure, she watched The Beachcombers and wondered about the life Jesse would have outside of Molly’s Reach. Like if he moved to Vancouver or something. She went straight to Edmonton when she left the San. She found it changed since she had lived there last. The Academy had turned co-ed. The neighbourhood feel was gone. What she had liked about the city best when she lived there and was looking forward to upon her return was the anonymity. It still existed, that something about its size and the feeling you get when no one knows you in such a big place. She had liked seeing hundreds of new people and not having a past or a future with them. Walking down Jasper Avenue, perched between rich and poor, its split personality like a memory or a premonition of something unpredictable. Sometimes, just to scare herself, she would lose track of where she walked and would be just like a baby in the middle of some huge shopping mall. Except, no one was looking for her. When she left her auntie’s house the day after the change with deer fur still on her pants, she knew she would not live there ever again. She was done, it was too close to home, and she didn’t want to remember. Those memories littered her mind like a sandstorm.