by Ivan Coyote
For the rest of that summer, the Mormons dropped in to check on us. Reggie would show up with a weed whacker and his lawn mower bumping around in the hatchback of his station wagon, and do our lawn. Eric came by with a small blue bicycle for us all to share, his son had outgrown it, he said. My grandmother was always reserved and polite. She would thank them too many times and offer them crumpled up bills from her wallet, which they refused. As soon as they were gone, she would narrow her eyes at me.
I asked her one time why Catholics like us weren’t supposed to get along with the Mormons. “Was it because they came to your front door without being invited?”
“Well, there is that,” she confessed. “No one should go about telling people what to believe, it’s just wrong. But worse than that is, they believe they’re the only ones who will get to go to heaven.” She set her knitting down to look at me, to see if the gravity of this had registered on my face properly.
I wrinkled my nose. “But isn’t that what we believe too?”
“Go outside and water the garden,” she told me. “Don’t make me tell you twice.”
There was a drought that summer, and every morning after the news about how the police were confident they were making headway on the case of the missing children in the Vancouver area, the weatherman would announce how many days it had been since there had been any precipitation. Fifty-six days, the weatherman said, in the middle of the last week of July.
Then it happened. I felt the air change around me one night when I was bringing in the laundry. There was a new smell in my nostrils, heavy and earthy, like fresh topsoil, and the wind picked up and left goose pimples on my arms as I unpinned the sheets and towels and folded them into the wicker basket.
The first rumble of thunder came as the four of us were playing Monopoly in a circle on the carpet in the living room and my gran was knitting on the couch. The neighbour’s dog started to howl plaintively, and my gran clucked her tongue. “Foolish old hound,” she tutted, her needles clicking together. Then the rain followed, hard and fast and on an angle, bouncing back off of the pavement into itself and hammering on the tin roof of our garden shed. It didn’t rain like that in the Yukon, and we jumped up and pressed our noses to the living room window to watch it come down.
“Can we go play in it?” someone asked and Gran said “Yes, but in bare feet or wear your flip-flops so you don’t ruin your shoes and socks.”
The rain was warm and falling so hard it drummed audibly on the leaves of the apple trees and the big cedar. The ground was parched and dry and the street in front of our house was a mess of little rivers immediately. Lightning flashes lit the world up in blinding colour a couple of times a minute, and we all froze, unsure of how scared we should be. I tried to remember what they had told us in school during the safety assembly about lightning. Were we supposed to stand in a doorway, or was that in case of an earthquake? Stand under a big tree or avoid trees altogether?
I shook danger out of my head and danced around on the lawn with my little sister and my cousins. Then Gran appeared on the front porch.
“Get back in here before you get zapped like little bugs. Mind you don’t tear up the wet grass,” she said. “And strip out of those wet clothes and hang them on the rack in the laundry room.” Her words were stern, but she was smiling.
We had a hard time getting to sleep that night, the rain pelting and rolling down the window in our bedroom, and lightning strikes flash-capturing our naked legs on top of the covers and leaving bleached spots behind our eyelids when we closed them.
It was still raining when we woke up, and Gran announced she was going to go to mass that morning and then to get the groceries by herself.
“You lot can stay in this morning and amuse yourselves on your own.” She shot a look in my direction that I knew meant I was in charge of making sure we stayed out of trouble. “If I’m not back by lunchtime then you can heat up some soup and fix yourselves a nice sandwich.”
I was going to be twelve in less than two weeks. I was in charge of anything that involved the stove or the washer and dryer; even the toaster was off-limits to my little sister and cousins. This was one rare area where my authority was never questioned by the younger kids; Christopher had a thick veiny pale patch of scar tissue on part of his chest and under his arm from where he had pulled a pot of boiling water down on himself when he was just a toddler. The nobody-but-me-touches-the-stove rule was sacred, and went unchallenged.
We did the dishes and swept the kitchen. We made our beds and put the Legos away. Then we stretched out on the couch and the carpet and listened to Beatles records for a bit, then Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, and read paperbacks and comic books. Finally we turned the television on.
We could get four channels if you played with the rabbit ears on top of the set for a little bit, but the same thing was on all four channels. Princess Diana was marrying Prince Charles over in England; it had been on the radio all morning too. Even the stations that usually just played all the hits all the time were talking about the stupid Royal stupid Wedding.
I could not have imagined anything more boring to watch on television than two people getting married, even two famous royal people, but there was nothing else on. It took nearly an hour for the motorcade to even arrive at the church. We all sighed and poked each other and argued about whose turn it was to lie on the couch all by themself.
Finally Princess Diana entered the church, her golden hair perfectly coiffed around her rosy-cheeked face and her white gown trailing behind her. Charles looking all Adam’s-apple-and-hair-grease in his uniform and polished medals and epaulets. I could see why my dad hated it so much when people said they sort of looked alike. What an arsehole, I could hear him saying in my head. Not that my father would ever watch the royal wedding, no matter how hard it was raining or how bored he was.
The announcer lowered his voice reverently as the princess slowly walked up the aisle. “Look at her, ladies and gentleman, every inch a royal princess, in every sense of the word. How beautiful. Every little girl in the whole world wants to be just like her today. Every little girl in the whole wide world.”
Those words shot out of the tinny speaker in my grandmother’s old cabinet television and pierced through the skin of my still flat chest like poisoned darts. I didn’t want a dress like that, a dress so long other people had to follow you around and carry it for you. I didn’t want my hair and makeup to be perfect so I could marry some chinless British guy who didn’t even earn his own war medals.
My little sister was staring at the television screen, transfixed. It’s hard for me to find words for the kind of lonely I felt in my belly, in my whole body, in that moment. Felt like lead in the blood in my veins, so heavy it held me down from the inside of me.
I knew already that I wasn’t like most little girls. I didn’t like the things they liked and I didn’t get how or why to play Barbies and I mostly stayed away from large groups of girls at school. I was scared of the way they whispered in each other’s ears and I hated gymnastics and volleyball, too. I was well used to being excluded from their unspoken cliques and only got invited to their birthday parties if our mothers knew each other from working in the same office. I knew I was different and most of the time I was okay with that.
What I didn’t realize until that moment was that I was the only little girl like me in the whole wide world.
On August 11, I turned twelve years old. We had my favourite spaghetti and meat balls for dinner and an ice cream cake from Dairy Queen with Woody the Woodpecker on it stuttering happy birthday in translucent blue icing.
On August 12, serial killer Clifford Olson was arrested outside of Nanaimo, a short car ride from our front door. He had just picked up two female hitchhikers in a rented car.
A DARK BLUE BIKE
The summer right before I started grade seven I got a new bike. A blue ten-speed with curled handlebars wrapped in white plastic tape and hand brakes. My old bike had been a purple
one-speed with a sparkly banana seat. I had never loved it.
My dad drove us back with my brand new bike in the back of his old red Ford truck. Once we got home, he lifted it out of the back of the truck easily with one arm and set it down on the driveway. Then he lifted the back tire up off the ground and spun it with two fingers. It made a very pleasing clicking noise.
“You sure you know how to work the gears on this thing?” He was squinting at me, a smoldering cigarette dangling in one corner of his mouth. “It’s a bit more complicated than your old one, you know. Way easier for the chain to fall off on these ones, too.”
“Jenny Bailey lets me ride hers all the time,” I lied. She would barely let any of us even look at her new bike.
He shrugged and watched me clamber onto the bike seat and coast down our driveway.
I pedaled slowly in too high of a gear along our street and ended up having to dismount and push the bike up the hill in the middle of Twelfth Avenue. But speeding down the other side was no problem, my short hair blowing back away from my face and the wind pulling tears out of the corners of my eyes. I pedaled as hard as I could from the bottom of the hill all the way to the turn-off onto Hickory Street at the top of Mountainview Drive.
I experimented with one gearshift, and then the other, and heard the gears grinding near my back tire. The bike shuddered and the mechanism that I would soon discover was called the derailleur skipped back and forth to accommodate my inexperienced shifting. I pedaled with my head bent, eyes down, watching the chain slide from one sprocket to another and back, starting to see how everything worked.
Next thing I knew I was blinking my eyes and trying to get them to focus. Everything was upside down and spinning, and my mouth tasted like dirty pennies. I stared straight ahead, trying to understand what my eyes were telling me I was looking at. A curb. A black truck tire. A bumper with a muddy licence plate bolted to it. Blood. My blood.
Blood all over my shirt, pumping still out of my nose and onto the dusty road under me. I sat up and put my head back, pinched the bridge of my nose like they taught us to do in softball when you caught a line drive with your face.
I had apparently pedaled my bike straight into a parked truck, and its back canopy window was a maze of cracks. I wasn’t sure if those cracks were from the crown of my pounding head or not, but I wasn’t going to stick around to find out.
I stood my new bike up and brushed the dirt and gravel off of my jeans and hopped on, standing up on the pedals so I could race away as fast as I could.
But my bike chain had fallen off, and my front rim was bent enough to bring upon a serious wobble, and when I pedaled hard the lack of resistance sent me sailing over my own scraped handlebars and I bit the pavement again, this time palms and chin first. A dog started to bark from behind the living room window of the house that the damaged truck was parked in front of.
I cried all the way home, pushing my broken bike and choking on tears and blood and dirt and snot. My dad was in the front yard, dragging the sprinkler across the grass, another smoke dangling. Or maybe it was the same cigarette? I had been gone a total of about seven minutes.
I thought he would be mad about my damaged bike, but he didn’t say a thing about that. He just smiled with one side of his mouth and asked if I was I missing any teeth.
“No,” I said, touching each one of them with my bloody tongue. I had stopped crying as soon as I saw him. Crying made him nervous for some reason. He tolerated it from my little sister, but not so much from me.
He held my chin between his greasy thumb and forefinger, and squinted down his nose at me, turning my face to the right, and then the left.
“Go clean yourself up before your mom gets home from her night school,” he said. “Spray that stain cleaner stuff on that shirt and put it all in the washer right now. I can fix your bike.”
If we were a hugging kind of family I would have hugged him, but we weren’t, so it didn’t cross my mind.
I SHINE MY ARMOUR EVERY NIGHT
My best friend from grade two until about grade ten was named Janine Jones. She had freckles and big front teeth and two brothers, a mean older one named Jerome and a mostly useless younger one named Marcus. Her brown hair was much thicker than mine, she would say, which is why she needed to use conditioner but I didn’t.
Her parents were Catholic like my family was, so we never had to explain any of that to each other, and we liked most of the same things. We were both into books: Nancy Drew, Harriet the Spy, Encyclopedia Brown, and later, anything with even a passing mention of sex in it: Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret, and those Clan of the Cave Bear books, the whole Flowers in the Attic series. But mostly we were obsessed with a book called The Chrysalids.
We spent a lot of time lying on our backs on the side lawn of her house on Pine Street, before the new subdivision went in when her street was still quiet, wishing we had been born special with extra toes, and practicing our powers of telepathy. I would think of a colour and imagine it in my head. She would try to mind-meld with me and see if she could see the colour and name it. We did the same thing with numbers and playing cards, guessing over and over until one of us got it right and then rolling around on the grass laughing, convinced that our supernatural powers were growing stronger.
I would check my oversized wristwatch repeatedly to see if it was 4:30 yet. That was when we had to split up; she would head back into her house to start dinner and make her and her brother’s lunches, and I had to ride my bike home and put the Shake ’N Bake chicken in the oven or pour the can of mushroom soup over the pork chops and put the rice on.
It was what we did. Weekend nights we would sleep in a tent in her back yard, and record giggling broadcasts for the radio show we were going to have one day, pretend-interviewing each other being the guy who rescued ten people from a burning apartment building or the first woman to walk on the moon or a farmer who broke the Guinness World Record for growing the biggest squash.
When we started band class in grade eight, she picked the clarinet and I settled on playing the alto saxophone, because there were too many boys who signed up to play the drums already. We would practice every night, playing “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” faster and faster until she would squeak a fart out from blowing so hard and I would fall off my chair laughing.
And then late that September David Altman asked her to go to the nine o’clock late show of The Empire Strikes Back with him. The late show. On a Friday night. Janine said yes and bought light blue eye shadow at Shoppers Drug Mart and started wearing it immediately.
She borrowed her mom’s pink Daisy Razor and nicked the freckled skin on her legs in six different places. Started talking about getting a pair of grey tights to go with the dress she wore to her uncle’s wedding in Alberta. Asked her mom if she could get another spiral perm.
I felt a strange combination of jealousy and disgust every time she crooned David Altman’s name or wrote it on the front of her binder in purple ballpoint pen with a heart for the dot over the i. I didn’t want to take her to the movies and tongue kiss in the second to last row from the back while Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. It wasn’t that kind of jealousy. It was more like I just didn’t want her to want to go with him so much. None of the boys at school ever noticed me like that; it was like they looked straight over me to Tracy Darling or Wendy Buss or Sandra Chounaird. Those girls and their tinkling laughs and mascara-draped eyes, the way they lowered their lids halfway and not quite stared back at those boys. The way their pink angora sweaters hugged the bumpy little beginnings of their chests and rode up over their flat bellies when they reached for something on the top shelf of their lockers. The way they snapped their gum and whispered the important stuff and said everything else that didn’t matter loud enough for everyone to hear them.
If Janine Jones was going to start acting like the rest of them then I was going to have to find a new best friend because none of that
type of business came naturally to me at all.
It was nearing the end of September and Janine’s whole back yard smelled like poplar sap and pine needles in the late afternoon sun. The poplar and willow and birch leaves had turned bright yellow and pylon orange but hadn’t fallen; one good wind and they would be all over the grass, but they weren’t yet. They looked so postcard bright, framed by the deep dark green of the pine trees and the dusty green of the spruce, and not a cloud in a perfect blue sky. The Macleods’ stupid standard poodle was barking at nothing as usual across the street. The soft whup whup of a sprinkler from the yard next door.
We were reading and eating popcorn from a bowl on the grass between us, stretched out on our backs on an old baby blue wool blanket with soft satin trim. It smelled like the floor of a tent in the sunshine.
Janine rolled on her side and looked at me, blowing her newly curled bangs out of her eyes.
“I’m going to the movies with David this Friday. The late show.”
I rolled my eyes. “No duh. It’s practically the only thing you’ve talked about for like two weeks already.”
“I have an idea,” she said, ignoring my lack of enthusiasm for her romantic life. She propped herself up on one elbow and leaned over me, her face only a couple of inches from mine. I could smell popcorn and cherry lip-gloss.
“You want to sneak downstairs and see if we can catch Jerome whacking off again? It’s four-oh-three p.m., after all.”
Janine laughed and shook her head. “Father Mickey made him say so many Hail Marys last week after mass, the rest of us had to wait in the car for him for twenty minutes. But no. Different idea.”
I shrugged.
“I think you and I should practice kissing,” she said. “Together. Like, not for real, just to build up our skills. French kissing. David went out with Michelle Richards for all of last winter. She went to Whitehorse Elementary before she moved to Porter Creek. You know what those girls are like. I’m going to need to practice. You’ll have to learn too, you know, sometime, right? You can’t just stick your tongue down a guy’s throat. You need to learn a technique for it.”