Birdie Page 9

  She smells her leave: the scent of grief and fear. Bernice waits until her auntie leaves the room after sitting with her for an hour or so, staring at her, to throw a shaky hand over her mouth, and cry into it.

  Seconds, minutes, hours, days later.

  “Do you remember,” Auntie Val looks for the word and then snaps her eyes at Bernice, “sleepwalking sometimes?”

  Bernice flinches, which Freda might miss while picking at her cuticles, but which she fears her aunt will know is her inside trying to get out.

  “Yep, seems to me that this isn’t the first time I seen this.”

  Bernice captures the thoughtwords her aunt is sending her. She sees herself sitting under the stairs, for days on end. Drunken parties that went on endlessly overhead. Crying. Screaming. Yelling. Sometimes it was Freda. But mostly it was Everybody Else. Everybody Else punching (a little of the old Indian lovin’), guzzling, dancing. Laughing, crying, screaming, wheedling, feeling, touching, kneeling, creeping. Like they were trying to get to white man’s hell faster just to prove the point.

  And she sees herself: little Bernice, medium Bernice and Big Bernice lying on her bed, staring straight up. Wishing herself anywhere. But. There.

  Her auntie stares at her for what seems like hours. Bernice makes herself more still than she has been in all of the days since she “took to her sickbed” (as she had overheard Lola telling the Whippets). She knows it is not the silence that will worry Val. No, she has been silent since she was a teenager. Something else. Her auntie will notice something else. Missing. From her eyes. From her spirit. Bernice saw it in her mom and she saw it in the uncles. She is afraid her auntie will notice what is missing, not what is happening.

  Bernice can hear her auntie’s thoughts; they come out cautiously into the room like a lynx leaving the treeline. She knows her little mother wants to tell her about her mom, about Maggie at the end. Bernice can feel the warmth of her auntie and how much she wants to touch her. She lets the thoughts hang there for a second and then wills them to the floor with a thud. Your mom did what she had to do, Bernice, she was sorry for everything, and before she left she told me that she loved her girl Birdie best. The words rush out. Bernice wills them to drop.

  She blocks her auntie’s thoughts. Remembers Val telling her that she had always regretted not learning the medicines from her kohkom; she wonders if her auntie thinks Kohkom (they called her a witch, but as the sisters grew older came to understand that everything had a good side and a bad side) could have done something about – this. This being her, all skinnied up and shaking in what appears to be sleep.

  Kohkom Rose would have taken care of business all right, Val thinks, and slips that one by Bernice.

  Bernice waits her out. Wills her out. Thinks her out.

  Come to think of it, Val thinks at her, the old lady probably would have loved that crazy chef that you are so obsessed with. That guy knows something about herbs, spices and food magic.

  Her auntie’s stomach grumbles delightedly with the smell of pie wafting up the stairs. Bernice feels her take a long look at her and hears her being sure to carefully step quietly in her moccasins as she makes her way down the stairs to see Lola and Freda.

  LOLA

  “Who keeps playing that frigging music?” Lola says, cigarette in lips and full house in hands.

  She and the Whippets are on the fourth hour of their weekly poker game and she is always grumpy when she has a good hand. Whippet One folds when she hears Lola’s tone.

  “Who?” Whippet One asks her, delicately skewering an olive with the one-inch nail on the pinky of her left hand.

  “You heard me, who’s playing it, fer chrissakes?” Lola growls. This time, Whippet Four hears the anger in her voice and folds as well.

  “The band, there’s some sort of … band or kids playing the drums and howling. Sounds like something from that party the Indians throw each year,” Whippet Two, oblivious to the vocal signal (after all, she’s only been coming to the game for two years), snaps in response, pressing her cards together in a tight near-pile, so that only the numbers are visible.

  “I hate that crap,” Lola mutters, throwing more chips (about two dollars’ worth – they have a ten-dollar limit per hand) onto the green felt table set up in the front window of the bakery.

  “It’s been playing day and night at full volume for two and a half weeks now,” she squeals, tossing her cards down and scooping the pot with bangled, tanned and leathery arms.

  Deals another hand. Lights another smoke. “Party? No, I think it’s a …” – she searches for the right word and lowers her voice (she also lowers her voice when discussing things that are foreign to her, among them: Africa, Native and the word black) – “… a wow wow. I don’t get these kids today.”

  The Whippets all murmur their assent. The Kids Today are a frequent topic of discussion at their weekly games. And their weekly pub hop. And their daily coffee talks. The Whippets, a peculiarly uniform group of sixty-year-old skinny women from across Canada, found each other because they all suntanned at the same beach back in 1982. All but Lola divorced and smokers, they have a lot to talk about. In ‘82, though, they still considered themselves The Kids of Today. But Whippet Three’s hysterectomy, menopause and Lola’s on again, off again AA meetings have forced them to recognize the unrecognizable: Time owns you. You don’t own it.

  “I can’t hear anything,” Whippet Three says. She was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, anyhow, but it still seems odd to Lola.

  “What? Listen closely, dear.” Spearing a baby dill with her ever-present toothpick, Lola wills her to hear it.

  “Umm. I think it’s a pow wow.” Whippet Four is never comfortable pointing out the obvious.

  “Spit it out, Jaysus, Margo, you’d think you just learned to talk,” Lola bites at her.

  Margo folds. “Pow wow. I think it’s called a pow wow. And I don’t hear anything, either, Lo’.”

  “Damned if I’m not going penile,” she hisses in Whippet Lingo. They all laugh at the oft-repeated joke.

  Whippet One folds.

  “Or maybe that’s catching.” Whippet Three points to the roof of the bakery, Bernice’s floor.

  Lola looks around quickly to see if the girl’s relations are nearby and then slowly and deliberately stares hard at all of the Whippets, most of them avoiding her gaze. Whippet Three does not. She is not particularly fond of Whippet Three (who replaced the original Whippet Three who did not fight a valiant fight against pancreatic cancer).

  “You watch your damn mouth, Missus,” Lola orders her, thumping the heel of her hand on the counter.

  The floor overhead creaks and Lola stands up, ear cocked.

  The familiar clatter of cheap plastic heels on hardwood clack clack clack overhead.

  “It’s that damn cousin of hers.” She throws her hand in, in what looks like disgust but which is not.

  “How long is she staying, Lola?” Whippet Two asks not-so-innocently, stoking the fire. Whippet Two has not done anything innocently since she was a pre-teenager.

  Lola busies herself getting beers for everyone from the cooler. “As long as she needs to, I suppose.” She clearly enunciates every word.

  “That aunt of hers came with enough luggage to move in,” Whippet Two snipes.

  None of the Whippets understands the softness of Lola’s heart and the feelings of kindness that she has for Bernice. Lola has thought about that and tries to convince herself that she thinks of The Kid the same way she thinks of those homeless people around the corner. With embarrassment that she has while they do not. Not that she thinks Bernice would even want any of her stuff. No, that desire is quite below The Kid. Nope, the stuff that Lola has that she is aware and embarrassed of in front of Bernice is right in this room. Friends, conversation, peace of mind. She feels tenderness for the girl because she suspects no one has been tender to her before.

  On those nights when Bernice teetered awkwardly on heels down the stairs, and to godknowsw
here, Lola could not sleep until she came home. And egads, when she came home. Bruised. Bloodied. Empty. Those scars on her arms and hands lookin’ like they want to jump out from underneath the skin. They look like burns, and Lola wonders what and when. It just broke her heart.

  She is a reminder to Lola that she herself used to be with rough men, too. That she used to have those same black eyes, same torn lips and same bloodied teeth. But only with one man, she reminds herself. Yep, this was a completely different kettle of fish. It is almost like The Kid is going out to get beat up. And that is impossible.

  When the Whippets leave, she treats herself to the last of the cold cuts, cheeses and assorted pickled vegetables. She no longer goes to a great deal of trouble on poker nights. When they first started the Whippet Club, the Wednesday night poker club, the Whippets would exercise their culinary one-upmanship and prepare feasts of dainties, finger foods and banquet offerings. As time went by, the feasts became less lavish, and now they all order deli trays from Sal’s Sausage Emporium.

  They have also developed a conversational shorthand, in the way that old friends do together. It wasn’t until their twelfth year that they got tipsy and renamed body parts and functions. Twelve years to come up with “hoo ha” and “dry heave.”

  Nope, she does not love the Whippets. She sees their cruelty and deplores the mirror image in herself. And the way she looks when she sees her reflection in how Bernice looks at her. Looked at her. It moves her. A different woman. A different Lola. Quiet kindness and soft intelligence meets harsh observations and boiling wit. She is a patchwork quilt made up of who she would have been. If her life had turned out differently.

  Lola has never had any children herself and cannot imagine what motherly feelings are like. Still, The Kid touches on a place that she had forgotten existed.

  She lights a smoke, still picking her teeth with the toothpick, and stares at the streetlights outside of the bakery.

  The Kid is dying, she thinks, and rejects the notion almost as quickly as she thought it. If she is dying, Bernice was doing it before she got to Gibsons. Until her aunt got there, she and Freda had noticed there was still a spark in The Kid. A look in her eyes some days, a look in her eyes that reminded Lola of something familiar and too painful to call up. But she recognized and knows it, and sees it in that mirror.

  And no matter what that look betrays, Lola also sees something in her that reflects in both of their mirrors. Survivor.

  When Lola first moved to Gibsons from Biggs, California (“Just two hours off route 99!” went the jingle), she didn’t have this, this coating on her. Of harshness, of weatheredness, of having felt. But that was two near-husbands, six jobs and countless lovers ago. She felt old at eighteen. But she was still kind.

  In her youth, she had been a stunner. Petite and athletic, without all of the Whippetishness that yo-yo dieting, a pack of Carltons a day and the fevered California sun can have on a person. She felt more. She gambled more. She was on the run, she always told the Whippets, but in truth she was not being chased but was chasing. Something. Anything out of the Biggs, California ordinary. And when you are attractive and chasing in Vancouver, eventually you get caught yourself.

  She was caught by Stanley Manklow. A completely beautiful specimen of a man. She hadn’t learned to read tarot cards or mean eyes yet. And both would have told her more than she wanted to know about Stan Manklow. Oh, he had been good at first. Flowers, little notes and secret caressing touches when she wasn’t expecting them. The thought of those days still left her a bit breathless. Or maybe it’s the Carltons. But he had a way. “The touch,” her mom called it. Yep, he had the touch with women, generally. More particularly, he could drive Lola completely crazy with desire.

  It wasn’t the last time she would learn the lesson about gifts in bright shiny packages.

  How she had loved him. And oh, how he loved. It started out innocently enough. After they had been married for a few weeks, he was a little rough in his lovemaking. By the second month he was pushing and prodding in a way that was foreign to her. Not one to play the dutiful wife, she began to fight back.

  It wasn’t until years later that she knew he was hitting her for that. He wanted a submissive woman in the bedroom, didn’t really care who was boss outside of it, and he was going to make her one, dammit.

  After her fourth trip to the emergency ward, her dad and her brother drove up to Vancouver just to beat the living hell out of Stan so he would know what brutality felt like. She kept his stuff so he would come back, but he never did. Later, she heard from one of the Whippets that he had become a born-again Christian or something.

  “Figgers,” she mutters. And it really does. It figures that he had to turn to God to get that demon out of him. It figures that he would think that all was forgiven. That the bruises, which he never had but enjoyed raising, had healed. And the ironic thing was that after he left her, for a time she became the subservient woman that he was looking to create.

  Two relationships later, and the physical violence started again. She wondered, wonders, if there is something about her that inspires this. Invites this. She didn’t have her dad to beat the hell out of him the next time. The next time, she did it herself. And found herself pleased at the power she possessed. This next time she left, both Vancouver and the Vancouver man (the quintessential Vancouver man and city councillor, as it turned out). Whenever he runs for re-election, and he always runs and he always wins, she scribbles “Woman Hater” on his posters over his doughy family photo.

  She hears the heavy clumping of Val’s moccasin-clad feet and then the tick tick tickiness of Skinny Freda’s heels above her.

  Probably scratching the hell outta my hardwoods with those damn boots of hers, she thinks, unkindly. But still, something in her has warmed to the Indian version of herself, if only because she is so close to The Kid. She thinks about inviting Freda down for coffee, and of course the aunt, but the room is too full tonight, what with her ghosts and all.

  That skinny one keeps looking at her. Big smile that doesn’t flower in her eyes, pulled lips around square teeth. When she isn’t looking, Lola sees a little collapse in her, like the air popped out when no one was looking. And if she ever ate, Lola had yet to see it. One day when she reached for the coffeepot – that thing had never worked as hard as when Freda showed up at the bakery (tiny skirt, big sweater and tottering on heels like a girl going to her first dance) – Lola spotted a rash of scars from her wrist to the last visible space below her elbow. Sensing the old woman’s eyes on her, Freda quickly adjusted her sleeve and made a joke about drinking one cup and paying three. From then on, Lola could never get a look because the girl wore that great big blue sweater over everything – even in the heat of the morning when the ovens made the kitchen fiercely warm.

  Until the Big One got there, Lola thought the chatter and small talk was going to drive her mad. That woman could talk the ear off a goat, she thinks. She, herself a nervous talker, realizes she has nothing on Bernice’s tiny cousin.

  That is one thing that strikes her as strange about Freda. She is, to anyone’s read, almost waiflike. But, Lola thinks she fills each room she comes into, what with her stream-of-consciousness nattering, fidgeting and constant alertness. It’s something else, though, she thinks. She is bigger than her body. The thought is both lovely and uncomfortable to Lola.

  Watching her enter the kitchen, head to the carafe and take an ever-present cup of coffee with her, Lola’s eyes trail Freda as she makes her way up to Bernice’s apartment. There is no noise from up there, all three of the women seem to be sharing the space with silence. However, Lola could swear that the upstairs is filled with communication that sometimes slips down the stairwell, pauses at the kitchen and lands around her.

  No, she tells herself. Such things are impossible.

  But, she makes a promise to herself and to The Kid that she will find out what is going on in there. All in good time.

  AUNTIE VAL

  Toda
y Val nodded at Bernice and she thinks she caught her niece about to nod back. Val is not one to fool with, and even though she feels Go Away! Go Away! Go Away! emanating from Bernice, she takes no offence. Valene catches it all and files it away with other things dear to her.

  Bernice, to Val’s eye, looks to be sleeping, but she knows better. She knows that needing to dream this much meant that Bernice was communicating with spirits. Val welcomes those spirits by smudging every day and by leaving food out for them with each meal. That little moniaskwewmonia downstairs has not said a word about it – every shared meal portioned equally four times, and Valene taking the first one out the door. She knows from this that Bernice’s boss is either kind or lacking curiosity.

  She also knows that she will never again let anyone make Bernice do anything she doesn’t want to do. So, since she seems to want to sleep, Auntie Val lets her sleep. Freda and Lola have long since stopped objecting to this – maybe skinny people’s organs are so close to the skin that their feelings are desensitized, she thinks – and they let her sleep now, too. While Bernice sleeps, her auntie slathers bear grease on her scars, as though she can heal the years-old damage. Bernice does not respond but she does not shift an inch (which she will do if Freda is making too much noise or rambling on too long), so Valene takes this to mean her niece is comfortable with the application of the medicine.

  Bernice also seems to like that little weird cook on the TV, so Auntie Val puts that on three times a day. Thank heavens for the CBC and Canadian content, she thinks. No matter what her state before the show – moaning, thrashing, snoring or peacefully resting – when that man comes on Bernice is rapt (as rapt as you can be with your eyes closed) with attention. Years later, she will remember an added detail that had escaped her; Valene could feel impatience in the room after the show ended. She would also construct that she heard shuffling upstairs after she went to the kitchen, but in her heart she knows that is not true. What she does know for sure is that she leaves as soon as the show is on and that when she returns later there is a feeling of accomplishment or business in the room.