by Dawn Dumont
My aunt and uncle loaded us kids into the back of their pickup truck. As I look back, I wonder at the generosity of this couple. Who takes on another two kids when they already have seven? What drives people to want to be around children in such numbers? I suppose locking them in the back of a pickup makes the job easier.
The camper was its own country with its own customs and conventions. First of all, you weren’t allowed to sleep. That was clear from the get-go. As soon as you lay down your head, the other kids descended upon you like a flock of hungry crows. You’d be teased, kicked, pinched and tickled. You would have no rest until the leader — Malcolm — was ready to rest. Unfortunately, Malcolm had the constitution of an ox and never slept. So neither did we.
Malcolm was one of those rare individuals who enjoy torturing others. Physical, emotional or verbal — it made no difference really, all forms of torture brought a gleeful smile to his face. I suppose child psychologists could have found the root of his anger and given it a diagnosis. I liked to think that he was mean simply because he was good at it.
The second rule of the camper was that you could not cry. Only pussies cried. If you couldn’t hold it in, then you had to do it quickly and quietly before an adult noticed and started asking questions. Questions could lead to adult interference, which would inevitably lead to less fun. This rule was difficult for me because crying was a hobby of mine. I cried over pretty much everything including things that had not yet come to pass.
“Why are you crying now?” Mom had asked the week before, the “now” declaring her impatience with my favourite pastime. She didn’t even stop sweeping the floor as she listened for my response.
“Someday Barkley is going to die,” I hiccupped. Barkley was our giant brown German Shepherd whose hobby was hiding in the grass next to the main road and chasing after cars that drove past our house.
A car eventually killed Barkley. Considering his daily itinerary, I think that’s the way he would have wanted to go. Ironically, I didn’t cry when I heard the news, although I did cry when I imagined our new dog, Barkley II, getting hit by a car.
It was a six-hour drive to our cousin’s reserve from ours, and in between we stopped off at a provincial park. Aunt Beth pulled a plastic tablecloth over a picnic table and unpacked a few KFC family meals as all the kids made a long line in front of the table. I put two pieces of chicken onto my plate, looking forward to the fun that we would be having this summer.
“Two pieces? I never saw a girl eat two pieces of chicken before.” I looked up into my Aunt’s surprised face.
“I always eat that much.” And more, I thought to myself. This would definitely not be a four-piece day.
Her question was uttered in a soft tone, not judging, just surprised. That softness was enough to awaken the wolves. Malcolm, in particular, smelled blood in the air. His head cocked to the side as his cunning mind began to formulate the insults that were to come.
After lunch was over, my uncle locked us back of the truck. While I would have rather spent the time napping from the heat of the sun beating down on the camper, the others wanted to play a game of Truth or Dare.
Without consulting one another, all three of us girls had decided in advance that we were going to dare each other to kiss Adrian. We would all respond to the dare with exactly the same high-pitched giggle, a softly uttered, “Gross, I can’t” and then a reluctant dive towards his handsome face.
As anyone who has played it knows, Truth or Dare is a dangerous and revealing game. Before the ride was over, we discovered that Nathan did not like to eat dirt off of Malcolm’s sneaker, that Adrian had a crush on Rachel and that I had a chubby belly. I already knew this. I had stared at myself in my mom’s bedroom mirror enough times with my shirt lifted. I had memorized each and every curve of my tummy. I also knew that if I stood on my toes and sucked in deeply, you could almost see the shadow of my ribs. “That’s what I’ll look like when I grow up,” I whispered to the mirror nightly. The ritual was completed with a quick dance as I hummed Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.”
I acknowledged that my tummy was chubby, but that did not mean I was fat and I said as much to the camper crew. Malcolm begged to differ. “You are fatter than everyone else here. So that makes you: fat.” Nobody dared disagree with his logic.
Malcolm also noted that my tummy had the consistency of bannock dough and so my new nickname was born: bannock belly. On their own, those two words weren’t so awful except when you put them together, then they packed a nuclear punch. The repetitive “b’s” gave the name additional power. Thank God my name didn’t start with a “B” or the nickname would have stuck so firmly I would have been obligated to add it to my driver’s license. As it was the nickname preceded my name awkwardly. “Bannock Belly Dawn.” It didn’t quite fit and I would have suggested something more alliterative like “Dumpy” but that was hardly in my best interest.
By the time we reached our destination and Uncle Jack opened the back of the truck, I was ready to pack it in. I mentally rehearsed my phone call. “Mom, I’ve decided to accept your offer. Now if you can just drive six hours north and pick me up, I will gladly spend the rest of the summer making car sounds with David.”
When I saw the phone sitting on my aunt’s living room table, I did not run to it. Six hours was not even close to one month and I couldn’t give up so quickly.
Auntie Beth showed us around the house. There were three bedrooms, one for my aunt and uncle, one for the boys and one for Rachel and my sister and me. There was one door left in the hallway. “That’s the bathroom,” Auntie Beth indicated. “The toilet doesn’t work.” She pointed at the outhouse about twenty metres away from the house. “That’s where everyone goes.”
Celeste and I stared at the outhouse.
“I’m kind of sorry I came,” I whispered to Celeste.
Celeste shuddered. “I’m sorry I drank two cokes.”
That night as I fell asleep next to Rachel and Celeste, I resolved to be stronger. Everyone got teased, at one time or another. This could be character building, I told myself. Someday I would thank Malcolm for his teasing. For a few minutes, I imagined various scenarios in which I delivered my thanks to Malcolm. In each daydream I was thin, beautiful and rich as I delivered the words, while Malcolm did not fare so well as he fought off leprosy, morbid obesity and a severe goiter.
The next day the boys were gone before the girls woke up. They had woken at the break of dawn and run off to do boy stuff. Before they had left for our reserve, they had set a bunch of traps in the woods and needed to check them. They returned later that day with the desiccated remains of gophers and gopher-like creatures.
While they were tending to their rodent guillotines, I felt a sense of relief. My sister and Rachel were not interested in calling me names. Instead we went bike riding . . . sort of. Rachel rode her bike while Celeste and I walked beside her. We mostly talked about Rachel’s relationship with Adrian, which had been upgraded, to “going out.” Rachel was rather blasé about the relationship and refused to giggle or act excited. Her lack of giddiness grated on me.
“You said that you wanted to marry him when we were talking in our playhouse,” I pointed out.
“I didn’t say that. I said that he would make a nice friend.”
“You said you wanted his babies. Now are you going to have his babies or what?” Everything else on the trip had turned out badly; I wasn’t going to give up on Rachel and Adrian’s happily ever after. No ambivalent eleven-year-old was going to ruin the dream.
“I don’t know. Okay!” Rachel rode faster on her bike forcing Celeste and I into a light jog. As blood rushed from my head, I no longer had the energy to keep up my line of questioning.
Our cousins lived on the Big Eddy reserve. It was named after the river that cut through it. On one side of the river was the city of The Pas and on the other side was the reserve. Even though we also lived on a reserve, there was still a sense of culture shock. Big Eddy had over a 1000 band
members while our reserve had fewer than 300. The reserve had its own shopping mall, rink, school and various band stores. It even had a paved road!
There were similarities too. As Celeste and I walked, the sight of the same cheap bungalows, yards filled with old cars and skinny yapping dogs, comforted us.
Big Eddy teemed with young people. At night, crowds of teenagers and pre-teens walked down its highway looking for something to do. Kids here had social lives. This was new to Celeste and me. At home, our social lives consisted of hanging out with our cousins who lived a mile away or, if we got ambitious, our cousin who lived two miles away. Once we’d walked one of those treks, there wasn’t much energy to do anything other than walk back home.
Rachel’s friend, Mandy, rode up on her pink bike. Mandy was the same age as us but looked younger because she was so small. She was curious and checked us out from afar before riding closer. I found that people from Big Eddy had a need for the upper hand . . . or maybe they just though they were better. That was a huge insult by the way. Telling someone that they “thought they were too good” was the worst thing you could say about them. With the exception of calling them fat.
Despite still smarting from the insults from the day before, I still had some confidence, inborn from being an older sister. I asked Mandy if I could ride her bike. She said no, explaining that I was too big for her bike. I knew this was unreasonable. I outweighed her by about twenty pounds not two hundred. I pointed this out to her. Mandy continued to demur so I snapped. “Is that a real bike or is it made out of papier mache?”
“You’re fat!” Mandy said and then pedaled out of my reach. I thought about chasing after her but there were too many unknowns — like who were her cousins? And how mean were they?
“That Mandy is a jerk,” I told Celeste and Rachel on our way home.
“Oh, yeah. Well, she’s cheap, that’s all,” Rachel replied. “You can ride my bike.”
I looked up excitedly.
“When we get home,” she added.
Mandy’s insult worried me more than I could admit to Celeste and Rachel. It showed me that it wasn’t just my cousins; I was too fat for Big Eddy reserve. And if I wanted to make it through the next four weeks, I had to learn to deal with the insults.
Being the fat kid makes you a lot faster on your feet. You must anticipate the insults and be ready for them. I would leaf through the TV guide, making sure to avoid those shows that would call attention to weight. Anything starring Dom Deluise or Dolly Parton was to be avoided at all costs. I didn’t anticipate all the jokes that could be made out of Orca or even Jaws. I silently cursed the producers. How could they not know that a movie about a creature composed of blubber or one with razor sharp jaws and huge appetite was an open invitation to fat jokes?
I was the fat kid and barring some inexplicable thirty-pound weight gain in one of the other kids, I’d better buckle down and accept it. I tried to find other labels for myself. I made sure to fix the beds every morning and asked my aunt if I could help her with the dishes. “Well, aren’t you a hard worker,” she said.
Yes I am, I smirked to myself. A hard working kid was a helluva lot better than the fat kid.
Malcolm saw through my act, “Hey, brown-noser, get your lardass out here to play some tag.”
(Halfway through the visit, Malcolm decided that it took too much effort to say “Bannock Belly” and started calling me, “Lardass.”)
At home when I felt stressed, I could retire to my bedroom with a book. Here I had no bedroom and they had no books. The only things to do were to play outside with the judgmental wolves or stay inside and watch TV with my uncle whose idea of good programming was back-to-back taped hockey games. I was caught between a rock, and a slightly bigger — way more boring — rock.
I stopped eating dinner with everyone else. There was no real dinner time anyway, not like at our house where we sat around the table and told our mom about our day. This was more like a scrimmage through the fridge and cupboards and then a free for all when one of the kids would decide to cook some Kraft Dinner. I stayed away from the kitchen and ate only when no one was looking.
“Isn’t it strange how Dawn is fat but she never eats?” Nathan mused while wolfing down a half cooked cake.
I stared at his chubby cheeks and soft belly and knew that when I wasn’t around he was the fat kid. In fact all of the kids, except Malcolm and Celeste, were within a few pounds of me. It was that I had been passed the torch and it wasn’t possible to give it away.
I decided to fight back. I studied a picture of Malcolm in the living room. He had to have some weakness that I wasn’t seeing. He had dark eyes, slightly slanted — I suppose I could get some mileage out of calling him “chinky eyes.”
But I knew better. My mom had taught us that racial slurs were wrong. My aunt had different views and one of her nephews had the nickname, “Nigger,” on account of his darker than average skin. Celeste and I cringed every time one of my cousins said the word. We asked Rachel what his real name was.
“Gaylord, but he likes Nigger better,” she said without a trace of irony.
Celeste and I avoided directly addressing him for the rest of the visit.
Malcolm had a long hawk nose which some might say was too big for his face. My own chocolate bar nose was a constant source of disappointment to myself and I did not want to invite the comparison. Malcolm’s only flaw — if it could be called that — was that he had a set of Mick Jagger-sized lips. My own lips were more big than small so I knew I was taking a chance with this one but it was all I had.
The next time Malcolm fired one of his zingers at me, “Hey, Lardass, I found some gum under the table, you want it?”
I was ready.
“Maybe you should use it to keep your big lips closed,” I replied.
Silence filled the room. Malcolm looked shocked for a second, and then his pillowy lips broke into a wide grin.
“Oh so you noticed I have big lips? What else did you notice?” His eyes crackled with laughter as he welcomed the challenge.
I swallowed. “That’s it. The lips. But they’re really big!”
In my peripheral vision, I could see Celeste shaking her head ruefully. I had entered a gunfight with only one bullet.
Malcolm laughed. I admired his laugh; if only I could laugh then I could beat him. Malcolm wiped tears from his eyes and began his attack.
For the next few minutes, I listened as Malcolm discussed my weight problem and its possible implications: being harpooned after being mistaken for a land whale, falling into a well and being wedged in it, being shot by a moose hunter and ending up on someone’s living room wall. He probably would have gone on but I escaped into the bathroom and locked the door.
“You can’t take a joke!” Malcolm yelled from the other side.
Rachel and Celeste urged from nearby, “Ignore him!”
“Don’t use the toilet!” my aunt yelled.
Celeste sidled up to the door a few minutes later and whispered. “Just come out. Or let me in.”
It was too late by then. I’d already started crying and once I started it took weeks to finish. Even after I was done, my face turned red and swelled like a tomato. I had to put cold compresses on it to return it to normalcy, which was impossible in a bathroom with no running water.
I climbed on the dusty sink and stared out the window at the dark bushes behind the house. Even though there were bears in those woods, at that moment I felt like I could walk home if I wanted to. Sure it would be hard in the beginning but once I got used to sleeping outside, I’d be all right. I could eat blueberries ((which I loved) until I reached the border, and then once I got into Saskatchewan, I could switch to Saskatoon berries (which I also loved.) The best part was after I got home I would be thin. Way thinner than Rachel, maybe even as thin as Celeste.
I heard everyone settle down around ten pm and came out of the bathroom. The boys were in their bedroom planning the murder of Rachel’s favourite cabbage pa
tch kid. Rachel and Celeste were in her room discussing the injustice of Barbie doll clothing not fitting on all dolls. Celeste pointed out, “What if my cabbage patch doll wants to wear a mink coat? Now she’ll feel too fat to wear nice clothes.”
My heart jumped at the word fat. I didn’t feel like facing them. I walked into the backyard and sat down on the picnic table. The woods looked a lot darker and scarier close up. There was no path through the woods, just brambles and sticks blocking you in every direction. No wonder bears always looked so rough and matted when we saw them down at the dump.
I looked down at my legs as I swung them. Were they fat? They looked the same as they had always looked. (Though a lot less skinned since no one would let me ride a bike since I’d been here.)
I heard a noise a few feet away and looked up. Adrian stood by the camper. He was leaning his beautiful head against it and his shoulders were curled inwards as he silently wept. While every hormone coursing through my body told me to go over to him, I held myself back.
The next morning, I decided to bring in the big guns. My heart told me it was time; I called home. I tearfully asked my mom to come pick me up. She was either having a crisis of money or perhaps she was enjoying her vacation. I turned the tears full blast, and claimed that I was having migraine headaches and that I might be going blind and deaf.
“Well, if you go deaf and blind, then I guess it wouldn’t really matter where you are then,” Mom reasoned.
I hung up.
A day later my mom called back. Her cousin Wha-hoo was travelling through Manitoba and said that he would stop by and pick up my sister and me. It was only 500 kilometres out of his way. He was a tall, friendly guy who had stopped by our house a few times and had coffee with my parents. I didn’t like the idea of travelling with a relative stranger with a strange name but it was the best plan I had.
Wha-hoo pulled up at my aunt’s house in a camper truck just like my aunt’s. My aunt and uncle greeted him warmly as they set out the coffee cups on the table. Nobody asked him why he was there. I sat around the corner in the living room and nervously waited for him to tell them that he was taking us away. Mom had expected me to tell my aunt and uncle that we were catching a ride with Wha-hoo and I had not . . . mentioned it.