by Dawn Dumont
The captured boy looked from one female to the next as they discussed his future.
“Let me go!” He struggled. We ignored him.
“What do we do?”
“Tickle him?”
“Please God No!!!” He got an arm free and tried to make a break for it. He had no chance against our snake-like arms and vise-like grips.
Cassandra pushed her way through the crowd of girls and looked at our wriggling boy.
“You are our prisoner,” she proclaimed.
He laughed nervously. “You can’t do this.”
She pointed at the tire fort. “Take him there and make sure he does not escape.”
She looked at the rest of her girl soldiers. “Catch me another one. An older one this time.” Then she retired back to the tire fort. Cassandra wasn’t one for running.
I ran down the next boy, Jackson. I grabbed him by his arms and pulled him backwards. Jackson was small but he had a bad temper. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Cassandra wants us to catch boys.”
“What the fuck for?”
“I don’t know,” I handed him to the waiting arms of two bigger girls. “I’m going to grab another one,” I yelled back and left.
I noticed quickly that the less-cute guys were easier to catch as I dragged them back to the tire fort. It helped that at our age a girl was at least a head taller than a boy. It also helped that the boys were more curious than afraid.
“What are you going to do with me?” asked Michael, a skinny eleven-year-old from Little Black Bear.
“I don’t know. Maybe beat you up.”
“I thought you were gonna . . . y’know do girl stuff.” He puckered up his lips. I gagged and pushed him away.
He gave me a strange look and ran away for me. He ran slowly though and looked back frequently. “Aren’t you going to catch me?” Michael said, circling back.
“No.” I walked over to an empty hopscotch square that the white girls painstakingly drawn on the sideway, and began practicing my footwork.
Trina wandered over. “Cassandra wants to know why you aren’t playing.”
“It’s a stupid game.”
Trina agreed but she couldn’t say so as she was Cassandra’s cousin. “It’s too hard to catch the cute boys.”
“I don’t see the point. What do we get if we catch them?”
Trina gave me a look as if she wanted to tell me something and decided against it.
My mom had a word for the girls like Cassandra — boy crazy. “Those girls only think of boys, that’s all they can think of it. It’s sick.”
I didn’t understand why the girls got so giggly and silly about it. Don’t get me wrong; I liked boys. I even had a boyfriend, Shane. This meant that when he wrote his name it was always SD plus DD. And when I signed my name, I did the same. When he looked in my direction and winked, I smiled back and gave him the thumbs up sign. (The thumbs up sign was cool because of Fonzie.) Even though Shane had moved away two years before, I assumed I was still his girlfriend.
The next recess, Cassandra gathered the girls together again. She agreed that the game wasn’t as fun as it was in the city. In the city, the boys didn’t run so fast and there were more girls there so it was easier. Also the city playground was fenced in so the boys couldn’t run a kilometre to get away from us.
Taking these factors into account, Cassandra devised a twist on the game: girls catch the boys would now become boys catch the girls.
The girls twittered with excitement. I was nervous. I knew that Jackson wanted his revenge for his captivity. Jackson wasn’t exactly what you would call stable. He smiled when he doled out beatings to his friends. And he was fast.
“That’s a bad idea,” I said.
Cassandra glared at me. “How come you always make trouble? Are you jealous of me?”
“Ohhhhh.” A murmur went through the girls. Everyone knew that being jealous of someone was a horrible thing to be accused of.
I forced myself to laugh. “Ha. As if.”
Another ohhh followed. Cassandra was now within her rights to call me out. But, she didn’t because like most true leaders, she knew when to be tough and when to be magnanimous.
Cassandra smiled and patted me on the shoulder. “You know what Dawn? It’s okay if you don’t play with us. We’ll have a good time without you.”
She stressed the words “us” and “we” and I silently cursed my lack of leadership skills. If I didn’t play by her rules, I’d be thrown out of the tribe, forced to eke out a playground existence with another group.
I looked around the playground. There white girls and their token South Asian and Chinese members played politely with one another on the sidewalk. I wasn’t looking forward to introducing myself into the non-Native group. Like an anthropologist being introduced to an isolated South American tribe, I’d probably spend a few weeks observing the tribe and learning their customs before they would allow me into their circle. Even after that it would still take me years to learn the intricacies of their language and why they ate so many egg salad sandwiches.
Trina tugged on my arm, “C’mon I need you to help me. I don’t want to get caught.”
I capitulated for her. Trina was a slow runner and therefore a sitting duck.
Led by Jackson, the boys hit us hard and fast. They were everywhere at once. Unlike the boys who split up and ran in different directions, the girls stayed together and huddled against the fort. The plan was to thwart the boys by pushing them off the fort every time they tried to jump onto it. It was a good plan except that few of the girls had ever engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Instead, they kept climbing higher and higher up the fort until we were all squeezed onto the top of the fort, huddled together like refugees on a raft. We dared not let a hand or foot slip over the side.
I fought hard next to my sister and Trina. My sister and I were quick but Trina was strong. One heave from her and a boy was going all the way to the bottom in a hurry.
Cassandra stood in the middle of the girls and called out orders. “To your left. To your right. Behind you. Kick them with your feet.” We knew without asking that the goal was to protect her. If she was captured the game was over. It was also important to avoid Jackson and his hard little fists.
I climbed up on the monkey bars to survey the scene. Native boys chased down Native girls with ease. I’m not sure if I was imagining it but it seemed like the girls . . . wanted to get caught. I was pondering this when Michael from Little Black Bear, grabbed my arm. “I got you now.” He grinned up at me from below me.
“No you don’t,” I said and tried to shake off his hand.
“Yes I do.”
“If you don’t let go, I’m going to kick you in the face.”
Michael let go of my leg. “This game is just for fun, you know.”
“So what? You’re not catching me.” I climbed higher, out of his reach. As I watched him chase after another girl, the feeling of victory was swiftly replaced with disappointment: shouldn’t he be trying harder?
I was distracted by Trina’s yell. Jackson had his arm around her neck and was dragging her backwards off the fort. I hurried to my friend’s defense. I grabbed one arm and Jackson hung onto her other one. We wrestled back and forth with our Trina wishbone. I was on the verge of losing when Celeste peeled Jackson’s arm off Trina. Frustrated, he let go altogether, then jumped back up on the platform and raised his fist at Celeste.
Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!
A whistle shrieked through the air hysterically. Boys and girls froze in their positions, confused at the sound.
I looked down and saw the young teacher in her long coat, flanked by little white girls on each side. She shook her hands loose and put them on her waist in proper pissed off form.
“What is going on here?” She asked, surveying the carnage scattered all over the tire fort. “Jackson, were you going to hit Celeste?”
Jackson shook his head.
“Don’t lie to me.”
She drew herself to her full height of five feet four.
“I wasn’t!” His anger hit out at her like a fist. She flinched, not knowing where to go next.
“Boys don’t hit girls. You know that. That’s not acceptable.” She looked at the girls for verification. We stared back blankly.
Jackson shrugged as if to say, you have your rules, I have mine.
The young teacher held her whistle and its lanyard in front of her like a sword. There was something else she had to do here, but where to begin? Her eyes moved up and down the fort studying us — “The Native kids.”
“I don’t want to see anymore fighting or hear any more yelling from here. You understand?”
She made eye contact with a few of the students. When her eyes touched mine, I felt a frisson of fear run down my back. She may have been a thin twenty-two-year-old teacher a few months out of Teacher’s College but authority of any kind scared me. Especially since my mom always found out what we did on the school grounds.
My fear was not shared. Cassandra didn’t acknowledge the teacher; she looked down at her fingernails and flicked off the nail polish. Jackson stared straight ahead at a point on the horizon.
Finally, feeling that she had won for at least a few seconds, the teacher decided to leave with her meager victory. She re-clasped hands with her chain gang and made a wide turn as they headed in another direction.
Back on the tire fort, the Native kids started to laugh.
“Did you see the look on her face? Looked like she ate a rotten orange.”
“ ‘Jackson were you gonna hit Celeste.’ Well, duh.”
“As if she could even do anything!”
We laughed until our guts were sore. We laughed because we almost got caught, because we got off scott free, because we were still separate and wild. We laughed because they could not touch us with their rules, not out here on the playground. We laughed because they had everything else, but we had the best games. Scary, dangerous and violent games — but ours.
FAMILY WEDDINGS
Mom’s Wedding
Mom and I went through the family pictures about twice a year. It was never a deliberate thing. I would be climbing on the cupboards, searching for a hidden stash of candy and I would come upon the photo albums stacked in the cupboard over the fridge. Somehow the stack of photo albums would make its way down to the kitchen table. Then Mom would sit next to me, light a smoke and begin turning pages. The albums filled the centre of the table and cascaded down towards each of us. Loose pictures fill in the gaps, eagerly seeking a new home. I opened the oldest photo album, which was also the thinnest, and dedicated to my parent’s wedding.
“How come you chose green for your bridesmaids? It’s so ugly.” The pale green colour flattered her brown-skinned bridesmaids, but I had a natural aversion to anything green. It reminded me of the algae that choked out all of our swimming holes.
“I liked that colour,” Mom said.
“How did Dad ask you to marry him?” I already knew the answer to these questions. It was a ritual we went through whenever we looked through her wedding album.
“He asked me.”
“What did he say?”
“Well, it was after you were born and I found out that I was pregnant with Celeste and your dad says, ‘I guess we should get married then, eh?’”
“That’s not romantic.” I turned the page. In the next picture, Dad’s face was front and centre and Mom appeared behind him in silhouette as though he was dreaming of her. His expression was a mix of confusion and annoyance.
“So we set a date and we booked the hall and the church.”
“Why’s Dad’s hair so long? Was he a hippie?”
“He went to get it cut the day before—“ “Why did he wait so long?”
“—the wedding, but the barbershop was closed so he didn’t.”
I turned to a photo of a tiny church where the wedding party stood outside, neatly arrayed in a v-line.
“Where was this taken?” I asked.
“We had the wedding out at the old church that burned down. And then we had the reception out on Starblanket at the old hall that burned down.”
“Was it nice?”
“It was. Except your dad passed out at the reception.”
“What a classy guy.” We knew that Dad was an alcoholic although it always surprised me to find out that Mom had known this from day one.
“And so Alvin Rat and his girlfriend helped me get your dad into the car and then we hit the ditch. Went right off the road at the T-stop and flew into the ditch.”
“You were pregnant!”
“We landed in five feet of snow. I got out of the car and I was up to my chest in it. And that stupid wedding dress just billowed out around me on top of the snow as I walked. Froze my legs off.” Mom held out her coffee cup and I went to the counter to refill it along with spoonful of sugar and a pour of carnation cream — the good stuff.
“What about Dad? How’d he get out of the car?”
“I can’t remember,” she said.
“Did you leave him there?”
“I should’ve.”
“Where was I?” I asked. Celeste walked past the table and I glared at her not to join us. She ignored me and took a seat on the other side of Mom. Mom-one-on-one time was always scarce and none of us let any of the others hog her.
“At home with Grandma and Tabitha,” Mom replied.
“Where was I?” Celeste chimed in.
“In Mom’s gut like a giant tapeworm!” I replied, and then, “Did you have a honeymoon?”
“No.”
“Wow. Did you even get an engagement ring?” I had heard about them from watching a soap opera. A guy would fall in love with a woman and then he would ask her to marry him and she would say yes and take the ring even though she really loved his brother or his dad.
“I had a wedding ring,” Mom said.
“Where is it?” Celeste and I asked together.
“I hocked it last year. Remember? For your brother’s hockey camp.”
“You lost it in a pawn shop?” Celeste asked before I could.
“It was the bingo caller’s fault. He should’ve called my numbers.”
“You think you’ll ever go on honeymoon?” I asked.
“Ha.”
Tabitha’s Wedding
As she pinned a flower to my dress, Tabitha’s hand shook. I wanted to grab her hand and hold it in mine. She was too proud for that. Tabitha was the oldest and she took care of us, not the other way around. Her dress curved around her, the scallops defining her slender frame. “She is too good for that dress,” I thought to myself. I wanted her to look like the glamorous model she was in my eyes. Her actual dress was conservative in order to hide her pregnant tummy.
I wore a soft pink dress with a crinoline underneath. It felt like I was constantly walking through a bush of brambles. My parents went all out for the wedding and paid for the bridesmaids to get our hair and makeup done. Unfortunately all our esthetic services were performed by the town’s Greek hairdresser who believed in a more is more approach. I was sixteen- years-old and wearing so much make up I could have passed for a fifty year old who lived a hard life. My hair was teased into a lovely helmet-like shape and for the entire day I received no compliments except when a drunk relative bumped into me and called me Snow White.
“Can I wash my hair?” I said as I scratched it and hardened hair spray fell onto my shoulders.
“For the last time, no!” Tabitha’s normally soft voice was starting to sound strained. “Now put your shoes on, we have to go.”
My shoes were pink to match my dress and they were two inches high. This pleased me.
One of the other bridesmaids glared at me for being a pain in the butt. She was from the groom’s side of the family and pretty in a buxom, sulky way. The maid of honour — and let’s face it, the only bridesmaid that really matters — winked at me before taking her position to watch over my sister’s train. I liked the b
ack of Tabitha’s dress. A train meant that you were taking this wedding business seriously. Also, when else would you ever get to wear a train? People should always take full advantage of their train wearing opportunities.
Tabitha walked down the aisle with my dad who looked as shaky as her hands, though his shaking came from a three-day drinking binge. He wandered into the house the morning of the wedding, looking dark and handsome as usual. His face was sweaty and he wore a Mona Lisa smile on his lips.
My cousin Nathan, who dotes on him, polished Dad’s shoes as the rest of us ran around the house frantically searching for the secret to a perfect wedding. Dad and Nathan sat in the dining room and laughed as he teased Nathan. Nathan was drunk.
Tabitha cried during the wedding. One of the other bridesmaids murmured under her breath. “Tabitha’s crying.” And everyone teared up because she was one of the family pets.
We drove to the valley for pictures. Then the rest of the wedding party went to the bar for a drink. I went directly to the reception, being the only one in the wedding party under age.
The dinner and dance was held in town — this was unusual among Natives. Most receptions were held at the band hall or the reserve school. We chose to stick ourselves right in the middle of town. It was a risky move considering the local RCMP’s aggressive policing of Native males like my dad. But Mom wouldn’t do it any other way — no child of hers would be stuck on the reserve like some backwards hick. Besides, unlike many Native people, Mom did not fear or resent the police as she had briefly dated an RCMP officer in her youth. Much to the annoyance of my dad, this fact came up quite a lot during my childhood.
The town hall was done up in pink and white, my sister’s favourite colours. It was packed with family, friends and the uninvited. It wasn’t a great wedding unless it was crashed. Tabitha had been popular in high school, a fact that haunted me, and all of her old high school friends showed up in their dark jackets and jeans. They looked sexy and dangerous to me. I lingered behind them, hoping someone would mistake me for an eighteen-year-old. A girl whispered to another girl, “Why’s Tabby getting married? Just cuz you’re knocked up doesn’t mean you have to settle down.” The other girl nodded in agreement. Tabitha’s six-hours-old husband, Mike, glared at them from the head table, as if he could read their thoughts.