Nobody Cries at Bingo

by Dawn Dumont

  We knew.

  The principal, Mr. Macdonald, visited the class on a regular basis. When he first started coming around, I had hoped to slip him a note asking for his help. I lost faith in him when I saw how his cheeks turned red whenever Miss Gramiak smiled at him. Instead, we learned to keep him in the classroom by asking him questions about his job: Do you ever have to spank kids? Do you enjoy it? What if a teacher is bad? Do you have to spank her?

  When we ran out of questions, Tyler would beg Mr. Macdonald over and over again to tell us his lame knock-knock jokes. We would laugh uproariously at each joke.

  “Tell us the one about the banana and the orange again.”

  “Oh no, you’ve heard it.”

  “It gets funnier every time you tell it.”

  “I tell you, Miss Gramiak, your class is a bunch of jokers.”

  “Oh, don’t I know it.”

  In a surprisingly strategic move that one might expect of a chess master, Miss Gramiak organized a visit to the beach. She had to, she had nothing left to use against the grade threes. In the war of wills, they were now about even. The grade threes had the look of weathered Vietnam vets. They would sharpen their pencils and stare at her desk. She would sense their eyes on her and shiver as she corrected spelling tests.

  “If you behave, then you can go to the beach,” became her new mantra. And it worked. It held the classroom together for the remaining month.

  However, a day at the beach only increased my fear. Miss Gramiak would be even more dangerous away from the school. The beach was dotted with small thick bushes every twenty feet, perfect for stepping behind to dole out spankings. I decided I wouldn’t go.

  “We can’t go,” I told Trina at lunch break. “I told Miss Gramiak that swimming in water is against my tribal beliefs. And since we’re both Cree, you can’t go either.”

  Trina refused to go along with my plan and placed her permission slip on Miss Gramiak’s desk along with all the others.

  It was annoying to see Miss Gramiak happy that her plan was working: “We’re going to have a great time at the beach — except for Dawn, of course. She has tribal beliefs. Dawn, would you like to come up here and explain them to the class? No? Oh, is speaking about your tribal beliefs against your tribal beliefs?”

  On a piece of paper, I calculated how many seconds I had left in grade four: 166 billion left to go.

  My mom decided to be one of the parent chaperones. She felt that a day at the beach was exactly what she needed after all the stress of the year. Mom had failed to discover the reason behind Celeste’s bed-wettings. The doctor assured her that a few sessions of electric shock would solve the problem.

  I tried to talk her out of it but she was determined to go. I consoled myself with the fact that Mom would finally get to see Miss Gramiak in all her tense glory. She would understand and I would be vindicated.

  My plan quickly went awry. Mom and my nemesis immediately hit it off when Miss Gramiak bummed a smoke off of Mom. Then my plan went further south when they sat on the same beach blanket and introduced themselves.

  “I’m Theresa, Dawn’s mom,” Mom said lighting Miss Gramiak’s smoke.

  “Theresa, I didn’t think you’d come — isn’t swimming against your tribal beliefs?” Miss Gramiak asked with a sly glance in my direction.

  Mom replied, “The only tribal belief I follow is cheap smokes.”

  I lost all hope for retribution when Mom laughed uproariously at Miss Gramiak’s impression of the ever-perky Miss Noble. “’Okay my songbirds, all on three!’ Songbirds, my butt! It sounds like she’s squeezing kittens. Twenty-four students and not one can carry a single note in key.”

  “What about the sounds coming from your classroom?” I wanted to yell. “What about the crying students in the hallway, what about my nervous eye twitch and my sharp pain in my gut that is probably an ulcer?! Grade fours shouldn’t even know what ulcers are!”

  Miss Gramiak surprised everyone with homemade chocolate chip cookies. I could see Trina and Tyler come around as they ate her cookies. I held out, whispering to Trina that they were probably poisoned.

  “C’mon Dawn, they’re cookies.”

  “Don’t you remember the time she held us in all recess? She’s crazy.”

  “So what? Recess is over-rated. You’ve said it yourself a thousand times. Who the hell wants to go play outside in a blizzard?”

  I tried to get Tyler on my side. “What about the time she screamed at you until you cried?”

  Tyler stopped chewing and stared at me. “You’re thinking of someone else.”

  I glared at them and grabbed a cookie.

  The grade threes ate the food greedily, not bothering to wipe their faces afterwards. They ran into the water in unison and splashed each other until their clothes were soaked. They and Miss Gramiak had an unspoken truce: you keep your mouths shut and I’ll let you do whatever the hell you want.

  I was silent on the ride home. I felt my mother’s betrayal keenly. How dare she make friends with my mortal enemy? A person for whom capital punishment should be reinstated?

  “She’s not that bad.”

  “You don’t know the real her. You just got to see the smoking her. And the telling amusing stories in the sun her. You don’t know how she treats us when other people aren’t around.”

  Mom was silent for a few minutes. Then as if to explain Miss Gramiak’s behaviour, she said carefully: “Not everyone likes kids you know.”

  “Then why is she a teacher?” I demanded.

  “She’s quitting.”

  “She is?” I sat back in my seat, stunned.

  “Yup, said she already resigned. The principal tried to talk her out of it but her mind was made up.”

  After the picnic, Miss Gramiak was a different teacher. She no longer yelled and her sarcastic comments were kept to a minimum. When students misbehaved, she rarely bothered to notice, preferring instead to look out the window at the flat Saskatchewan landscape or tend to her plants, which in the spring sun were perking up quite nicely.

  On the last day, she brought more of her delicious cookies. We sat in a circle and each of us told her our summer plans.

  Trina said her family would be camping on the pow-wow trail.

  Tyler said he’d be helping his dad with the young steers, learning to bake with his mom and killing as many gophers as he could get his hands on.

  I saw my turn coming and thought about telling her that I was planning on going to the police to report a bad person. When her eyes turned to me, I lost my nerve and said that I would probably just read some books.

  Miss Gramiak smiled at me, “I can see that Dawn. You are a good reader.” Her words hit me like warm sunshine on a cold day. Stunned, I began to cry. I hung my head and sobbed as the class watched.

  Miss Gramiak went onto the next student, commenting dryly, “Let’s keep it together, kids.”

  When the last bell rang, I collected my books and headed for the door, eager to be gone from the class forever. Tyler bounced against my shoulder in the hallway.

  “Hey, Dumont, we survived another one.”

  “Yup. Hope the next one is better.”

  He shrugged his shoulders as if to say the Miss Gramiak’s classroom was already forgotten, carefully stored away in a nine-year-old’s memory attic along with being picked last for a sports team and accidentally seeing your parents have sex.

  Down the hall, Miss Noble said her good byes. She was surrounded by her students, doling out loving hugs to each one and taking their gifts and placing them in a huge box at her feet. My sister was close to the front, on her sixth or seventh hug.

  In our classroom, Miss Gramiak stood alone at the board, erasing the day’s lesson, one last time.

  PREP WORK

  THE JET BOOMED PAST US. IT SWEPT across the flat ground and then suddenly, without hunching like a rabbit might, it leapt from the ground. One second it was right in front of us and the next it was in the air tucking its wheels into its t
ummy.

  “How does it do that?” I stared into the sky.

  “Jet engine fuel. Strongest thing in the world,” Dad said.

  “No, Dad, that’s nuclear energy,” I replied. I was keen to show off my learning to him.

  “As if you could run a plane with fission,” laughed Celeste, who was also keen.

  “Brown-nosers,” David said. He was not keen.

  We stood on the second floor of the Regina airport watching planes take off. David had his body pressed against the window, his hands, nose and chubby cheeks leaving prints. Mom kept her hand on his waistband no matter how many times David tried to shake it off.

  From a few feet away, a security guard watched us with a smile on her face. This was before 9-11 and the atmosphere at airports was different. You could wander in and take an impromptu tour of the area, including the part where the planes were serviced. If you were having trouble seeing the planes, you could walk into the traveller’s lounge where the windows were much bigger and closer to the action.

  Pamela, the baby of the family — born seven years after David — toddled through our legs. My uncles called her the “Hail Mary Pass baby.” I don’t know what they meant by that but my mom glared at them when they said it and Dad would throw back his head and laugh.

  As a toddler, Pammy had no interest in airports, just in candy machines and animals. Dad caught her around the waist before she wandered into the lounge where people waited for their planes. “Where are you going?” he asked, “to Las Vegas?”

  That was the only place my parents had ever flown together. The tribal council had chartered a plane for executives and their significant others (not their children). My parents had spent five whole days wandering the Las Vegas strip together. I had heard about the trip frequently. It was part of the family lore: “We barely slept at all. I hear they inject pure oxygen into the air conditioning system so that you never want to sleep. I believe it because we gambled for 48 hours straight.”

  After the trip, Mom could not stop comparing Las Vegas to Saskatchewan. As you would expect, the province did not fare well in such a comparison. “They have better roads in Las Vegas. Way better.” “In Las Vegas, a girl your age would already be a cocktail waitress,” or “Kids don’t sit around watching TV, they’re out there learning to count cards.”

  She made plans to go back every year. They had done it once, why not again? And why just Vegas, why not Atlantic City or Reno? The world was theirs to explore, why limit themselves? But other than leafing through some travel brochures, her plan never went further. “The tribal council needs to get off their butts and plan another trip, that’s what they need to do,” she complained.

  My dad had other trips to compare to the gambling Mecca though they surely weren’t as great as Vegas, either. He had spent a month in New Mexico attending the huge Albuquerque pow wow and a conference for native leaders. My parents had been separated a few months previous so it was confusing when he showed up with a bag full of New Mexican souvenirs including a giant velvet sombrero. We took turns wearing it around the house, and affecting Mexican accents: “Would you like some nachos, senor cat?” The sombrero was overlarge and garishly decorated with rhinestones, but we thought it was authentic. Any Mexican who attempted to wear this on his head would die in a matter of minutes under the hot Mexican sun.

  I thought Dad had left us to go live in New Mexico. For the first time ever, I wished that he had taken me with him. “I would like to live in a hot place where people wear velvet hats and eat nachos all day long.”

  My older sister Tabitha tried to explain that the trip had nothing to do with anything. It was just a work trip like many Dad took from time to time. But no matter what she said, my memory had made the connection between the trip and my parent’s frequent separations. In my mind, Dad wanted us to move to New Mexico. Mom didn’t want to. They fought. He moved to New Mexico but once he was down there he realized that the hot beautiful weather could never replace his family so he hired a donkey to take him to the airport where he said goodbye to the happiest place on earth . . .

  “Holy crap you’re dumb! People don’t ride donkeys down there.” Tabitha could get impatient with me sometimes.

  “What do they ride then? . . . Camels?”

  “They drive cars! They’re exactly like us.”

  “Except that Dad likes us better cuz he came back to us,” I said.

  Tabitha rolled her eyes.

  During our early teens, our dad’s job took him all over Canada. He flew to Edmonton, Ottawa and Vancouver with increasing regularity. We would proudly watch him carry his suitcase to the car. I bragged to my friends about my dad’s globetrotting. “My dad is in Victoria, BC attending a conference on natives and casinos — he’s doing a speech on gambling — he knows a lot about blackjack . . . ”

  It sounded so much better than when I had to tell them, “My dad didn’t come home after New Year’s Eve; my mom drives by the bar and his truck is always parked there.” And yes, I did HAVE to tell them. I spent most recesses telling my friends all our family secrets because it made me feel important.

  Our mother preferred driving rather than flying in planes. She was convinced that planes were inherently dangerous even though we pointed out that more people died in car accidents than in plane crashes.

  “Well, how many of those accidents are caused by planes crashing into cars?” she argued back.

  On our sight-seeing trips to the airport, Mom could barely stand to watch the airplanes take off, convinced that they were going to veer towards her at any moment like kamikaze pilots searching for a suitable target. “Aim for that window with that woman in the red coat surrounded by all those kids.”

  Mom didn’t trust technology more complex than slot machines. She felt that planes were unnatural tools of evil. “What if someone steals one of those planes and drives it into a building, what are you gonna do then? And what if it’s something really important like the Empire State building?”

  We would shake our heads. Where did she come up with these crazy ideas?

  She was so afraid of planes, I wondered aloud how she even made it to Las Vegas to gamble for a week straight.

  “Listen carefully to what you just said, and the answer will be clear,” Tabitha answered dryly.

  Dad was eager to show us his old haunts on our visits to Regina. He had attended a year of business college right after graduating from the residential school. During that time he partied hard with his childhood friends. As we drove through the city he pointed out the places where they had hung out. “My friends were wild and crazy guys,” he said. We already knew that, as he had spent our childhood hanging out with the same wild and crazy guys.

  He took us to the secondhand bookstore where he used to buy his textbooks. We spent at least one afternoon there a month, picking through the stacks. We would only leave when each of us had a plastic bag full of comic books. A Ukrainian man ran the store and he remembered Dad from his college days: “See what happens when you party too much, you get a houseful of kids, yes?”

  My dad would laugh and say something off-colour back, like, “and these are just the ones I know about!” Mom would make an annoyed sound and Dad would ignore her while he segued into a series of dirty jokes. We would wait, wanting the conversation to be over so that we could head to the back of the station wagon and start reading our comics.

  Our next stop was on a street filled with second hand clothing stores. “When you’re a college student, you have to watch every dime,” Dad explained.

  ”Especially when you drink like your throat is on fire,” said Mom, under her breath.

  Dad’s favourite second hand store was a mysterious place. It was dark and crammed to the rafters with historical treasures.

  “It stinks in here,” David said.

  “That’s the smell of a discount,” said the woman behind the counter. She looked like she had been bought and sold in a second hand store, herself. She wore a pillbox hat on her he
ad and a furry scarf around her neck. Her thick accent and indomitable manner told us she came from a tougher place. When she wasn’t glaring at us as we picked through her wares, she stared out the window or at the window because the window was so dirty it would take x-ray vision to see through it.

  Her bitter smile suggested she was wondering what she could have done differently with her life, particularly how could she have stopped herself from settling in Regina. “When the plane landed, why did I get off? Why didn’t I keep going to Paris?”

  While she daydreamed, we perused the racks of clothing. We usually shopped at places like the Saan store, Zellers and Superstore. The difference was staggering. At the second hand store, we had enough money to buy what we wanted. “How much for the fur jacket?”

  “Fifty cents.”

  “The high heeled boots?’

  “Fifty cents.”

  “This couch?”

  “Fifty cents.”

  My first second hand store purchase was a black sweater with a lace collar. When I wore it to school, it drew comments from teachers. “Did that belong to your grandma, dear?”

  “Maybe.”

  The sweater looked incongruous when I stood next to my friends who had taken to wearing heavy metal t-shirts everywhere they went. We were still in elementary school but they were preparing for high school where we heard that everyone was either a headbanger or a prep. As Natives, we would be automatically drafted onto the former team. My shirt confused my friends as the lace said old lady, but the black said badass.

  While playing baseball one recess, the sweater gave off a special smell. It was as if the sweater had a memory that was awoken in the hot sun. Standing in the outfield, I relived its memories.

  “Baby powder? Vicks? Cabbage?” I concluded that the former owner was a Ukrainian mother who was susceptible to colds.

  One afternoon our dad took us to the south side of the city to see the university campus. Upon hearing our destination, a cold sweat broke out on my body. “Not yet, not now,” I wanted to yell, “The smart, beautiful people will judge me.” University was my Mecca, my heaven, my Hollywood and I always imagined that when I went I would be thin, well dressed, with super long thick hair and escorted by my football player boyfriend.