In her mind’s eye, Bernice sees Auntie Val. Her memory loops through time to an afternoon when Bernice and her auntie sang Andy Gibb and danced to ABBA. No one, no one on the rez or in the settlement was singing Andy Gibb and dancing to ABBA. One of those afternoons, Auntie Val had said to Freda that she was Bernice’s friend because she was the only one who fit in her room with her. Val didn’t know Bernice could hear her, and today, Bernice realizes that her auntie was not being mean. In Cree territory, that would be a compliment, Bernice knows. What she also knows is that her auntie was naming the protection that the girls provided to each other when they stuck together; they could block out the world together. She was insulating Bernice’s scared/sacred self with what protection she could find. Now, upon reflection, Bernice supposes that she was right. A little. Her auntie still had a mean mouth when she drank. But from that she knew the truth that no one talked about: Freda belonged to no one. They were friends and not bloodcousins. She was more friend than cousin because she had no bloodtie. She was family because they were sworn to each other through the ugliest of adoption rituals.
Her mind flits back and forth, looking around, like someone trying to pause a DVD. Sees Big Bernice and an even skinnier Skinny Freda in the Little Loon house mooning over The Beachcombers on TV. What appears is what Bernice never knew: Freda did not even like Jesse. She just pretended to for Bernice. And, most disturbing, Freda seemed to be a little crazy obsessed with Hughie. Stranger things have happened, Birdie supposes.
She starts to enjoy silence instead of dreading its interruption. When Auntie Val goes to the market, she comes back with game and berries. When Freda goes, she brings seafood and rare and out-of-season herbs and plants. When Lola shops, she gathers cuisine and foods that no one has heard of before. And. The list. None is a particularly inspired cook, but each finds herself trying new recipes and stockpiling ingredients. Left alone when the three women go to cook, Bernice is able to feel exhaustion rumble off of her and into the room.
At each meal, the three women cook beside each other. When they go to the kitchen Bernice seems equally unaware of their presence and of their absence, but if she were to awaken and go downstairs, she would most likely faint in shock to learn that Freda has assumed her portion of the duties in the bakery. Besides the odd lout, Freda never takes anything seriously. Cooking for Bernice and learning from the insolent wheezing chef on the television seem to consume the tiny brown woman.
Each day, Freda puts on baker’s whites and soft shoes so that you could barely hear her going down the stairs. It is almost like she had chosen quiet over noisy for once. If Bernice knows, if Bernice is present, she would think that noisy was going to be awful lonely without Freda by its side.
Bernice has been immersed in travelling, lately. The three women moving around her generate some sort of resistance that allows her to travel back and forth (Now and Then, Here and There) without much pain. Somewhere in the back of her mind there is an idea. A memory. A piece of something yet unearthed. Regardless, in some sort of inverted mathematical equation, home no longer lives in her and she can visit it with a tourist’s senses. As a result, she travels to/thinks about home every day now. Sometimes, if she listens closely, she can hear the hum of traffic from the provincial highway that cut through the reserve. (How crazy was that – to put a highway right in the middle of the reserve?) If it gets quiet in the bakery she can imagine that she is sitting near the summer kitchen watching Kohkom pound dry meat. She hears the thump thump thump of her wooden hammer on the tough give of the moose meat. They used to dip it in butter and eat whole pieces like bread. Even the old ladies would chew it until their mouths glistened and the meat was soft again. Kohkom would make enough for everyone, but she always stashed a little away for herself and her favourite granddaughter to take with them on their walks. Sometimes they would take Freda, but she was so noisy that Kohkom would tell stories about noisy girls until she was quiet.
Bernice misses her. She only wishes that Kohkom had passed on before the trouble started. She wonders if Kohkom saw her boys turn into … something. She is saddened to find she is relieved that Kohkom was gone by the time of the fire. She doesn’t know if she could have borne the look in her kohkom’s eyes after what happened. She is just starting to piece that stuff together now, and doesn’t know that it made sense before this. She misses her every day and will miss her most when she has her ceremony; Kohkom taught her how to be a woman.
When she was eleven, Bernice got her first bra. It was a woman’s bra – no neat and petite trainer set with a tiny pink rose for her. No, Bernice’s bra had six hooks and eyes at the back and thick white straps capable of confining the heartiest of bosoms.
Kohkom Rose had come to the city, picked her up from the Pecker Palace and taken her shopping for the day, and there was none of the Seventeen awkwardness or glee in that trip. There was a certain comfort in having someone so assured make decisions at such an embarrassing time. Still, it was hard to remember that when her kohkom whipped out a piece of twine, wrapped it around her rib cage and passed it to the wide-eyed sales clerk.
“This big,” she had said.
She was this big.
She and Kohkom wordlessly shopped as the clerk brought big kohkom bras and Bernice, red-faced and breathless, stomped to the change room to try them on. In her shyness, she eventually took the bra that looked the least like bras in the magazines, the only one that fit around her sweater, T-shirt and jacket.
She had that bra for eight years. Eight years. That was longer than she had lived in any place. Longer than The Beachcombers was on the air (if you don’t count syndication, which she doesn’t – because if they don’t look like that now it doesn’t count). She threw it out on her nineteenth birthday. That year she felt like the bra looked: too small and too big, grey and worn at the edges. She had carried it in her cart for a few weeks until other priorities arose. Underwear was not her worry at the cusp of her twenties. Footwear had taken over.
She feels uncomfortable when Freda changes her clothes for her, but mostly she is ashamed that she has no bras. Eventually, Freda buys her a pretty purple set. (“This oughta cheer ya up. Nothing like something frilly to perk a girl up.”) Every day in the beginning of this, this journey from the bed, when that bra was washed and replaced, she had shirked it off and put it under the bed. She noticed her breasts at these times, they are becoming much smaller and flatter and they droop on her now smaller body. She wonders sometimes how much weight she has lost and thinks the bed no longer creaks beneath her when she moves. It could be that she moves less, hears little, but those flattened breasts tell the real story.
When she was getting breasts she could smell the excitement around her. In men, in kitchens, at dances. It was like some strange boob chemical had been released and it didn’t allow anyone to look her in the face for more than a minute. She was a favourite at dances because she didn’t say anything when boymen surreptitiously rubbed themselves against her. Frozen with panic, she was dragged to and from the dance floor without ever uttering a word.
On a particularly hot night at the community hall she had sat in a bathroom stall for three hours, feet pulled up and sizable buttocks perched on a toilet with no seat. She heard girl-women talk about each other and then hug outside her door. Heard her family maligned and herself denigrated. Slut, tease, hussy, cow, cunt, bitch, whore, hooker, pro, ass peddler, cooze.
“She fucks everyone, you know. Has for years.”
“I heard she blew Johnny Morrissey last weekend at the hockey game.”
“Hope she doesn’t fall over tonight, she’s carrying a big load.”
She hoped she didn’t fall over either. One night when she had come to visit from the Ingelsons’ – she must have been about sixteen – in a sad state, she drank to deafness and was falling all over the hall when her mother came up, grabbed her arm and threw her into the truck. “Don’t you shame us like that ever again, Bernice.”
“They’re laughin’ at
us anyhow, nothin’ I can do can change that,” she sneered. For the first time in her life, her mother smacked her one. “Don’t you dare let your uncles’ shame come home to you.” She stared at her daughter hard.
Shame? She didn’t know the half of it, Bernice thinks. She can feel that flush, that horrible red, spread to her pale staring face. Even on this bed, miles and years away, she feels the disgrace of her first realization: that was the first night that she knew that she was not quite right. Sure, she has always been quiet, something of a loner and a little strange by anyone’s standards. But that night, deaf and blind, it was all she could do not to faint from the stench of her mother’s anger. She knows she could smell pain then, but she isn’t sure that she has ever led a life without that gift. She is too aware of the hurt around her. Sympathy pain. When the smell dissipated, she was staring into her mom’s sad face. “Come on, Bernice, we’re going home.”
Seeing Maggie here in her apartment signals something. There seems to be a space between what she feels and what she thinks. For the past two days she has been thinking about the house at Loon Lake and all the things she felt there. She is no longer afraid of the memories – it was the lag time between thinking about the invasion of her body and her physical response to the memory, she supposes. Bernice knows that she should be feeling: revulsion, fear, anger, resentment. After any memory, after the thinking, it could take anywhere up to a week (if then) for her to even remember the incident that triggered the emotion. Three in the afternoon Tuesday and she felt a blinding rage that she couldn’t even remove herself from or attach to the thought she had had the previous Thursday about her uncle Larry forcing his way into her room, taking all of the life out of her little room under the stairs. The only indication that anything has changed is the quavering in her arms and legs from her anger.
“Shhhhh, iskwesis.” Freda pats her hand and pulls her comforter around her, mistaking her quaking for cold. She doesn’t realize she has called her sistercousin by the diminutive, making her a little girl and not a woman in word and in care. The same cousin who didn’t admit the cigarettes she hid in Bernice’s coat were hers. The same girl who she heard call her Buffalo Gal behind the Rotary statue of the too large Beaver. The same nearwoman who put her in harm’s way with their uncles. This woman, she remembers.
Bernice almost recoils from the touch, old habits die hard, but her face remains impassive.
For inside she is alive. Living through recall. Feeding herself memories. Once, when Bernice was in grade school she was picked to play a snowflake in her class play. One of three snowflakes, she felt certain she could blend in with the other children. However, her outfit, a papier mâché costume, was bigger than everyone else’s costume. Her mom didn’t have enough flour to bind all of the spikes that were supposed to form. After reading and rereading the instructions that Bernice’s grade three teacher had written out, her mom had given up and gone with her brothers to a neighbour’s house to drink. Bernice ran over to Val’s, half-damp monstrous confection in her hands, crying all the way. Auntie Val had eventually taken a blow dryer to the mass and made semi-spikes out of toilet paper rolls, which she stapled to the front of the mess. Bernice was horrified to have to pull the soggy heap on her head and dreaded walking in front of the people gathered in the auditorium.
The next night, she and Freda held hands all the way to the schoolyard. Because it was a winter festival, everyone was expected to dress up for pictures and for the party that would follow. Bernice had worn a dress her dad brought back from the Kresge’s in Grande Prairie. When she took her coat off and picked up her costume, Penny Rein said, “I have pyjamas that look exactly like that, Bernice the Buffalo.” Bernice looked down at her dress, which she now knew absolutely was a nightgown. Waves of shame passed over her as she realized the true nature of her outfit.
“Shhh, Penny,” Mrs. Rein warned her daughter. The admonition was worse than the observation. Bernice felt her heart rate multiply. She busied herself putting on her costume, noted Mrs. Rein’s grimace, and when the Reins walked away and when she was sure no one was looking at her, she walked back out into the night air. She was halfway home before she realized she had forgotten her winter coat. She continued trudging through the snow, wondering what she would tell her parents. When she got home, the lights were off in the tiny house. Stealthily removing her boots, she tiptoed to the little room under the stairs.
“What’re you doin’ home?” uncle Larry, whiskey on his breath, snarled from the kitchen – where he would be sitting alone, as always, with a bottle in front of him.
“Nnnothing,” she whispered. “I mean, Mmmmom and Auntie Val are coming home soon.” She doesn’t dare mention Freda, fearing his excitement.
“Nnnnnno, they’re nnnnnnot,” he mocked her meanly. “Ttthey wwwent tttto tttown twwwo hours ago. Thththth-they will be at the school, llllooooloooolooooking for you.”
Her first instinct was to bolt, but something within her, something she will train herself to forget as she grows older-wiser, told her to try to talk him out of his intention.
“Uh uh uncle, I am so tired and sick, I think I am going to throw up or somethin’.” He was not sure whether to believe her, angling his large frame between her and her doorway.
“Pppplease, let me go by … I need to get my nightgown.”
At the mention of her nightclothes he perked up and she pretended not to notice. He did let her by him and she was trapped in her room with his looming figure blocking out the light. “Well, what are you waitin’ for, put ‘em on.” He stood and stared and then, ridiculously, lowered his eyes. She was aware of the ludicrous nature of this moment, of all of these moments. No one mentioned the obvious; no one said what he was waiting for, what she suspected her uncle Aubrey would wait for if Larry was not around. No one talked about it, said a word, made demands, ordered her to do anything. The pure red rage of her seeming complicity – her failure to scream, to speak of this, to fight it, to cry – washed over her. He sensed her pause, perhaps smells her momentary bravery and lunged for her. She reached for something, anything to stop him. Tore down the string that turned the overhead light on. And. Off. And then. Nothing but the smell of her own panic and hysteria filling the room.
She didn’t talk for a year after. The funny thing is – no one seemed to notice. No one mentioned that her underwear was bloodied, that there were bruises on her arms and neck. No one brought up her swollen lip or the cut above her eyebrow. Once in a while, when the drinks were just starting to pour, someone referred to the Christmas pageant that they’d all shown up at (“Dressed to the nines!”) and how the odd biglittle girl from under the stairs simply failed to show up. Like pressure on a bruise, all but Auntie Val pushed slowly to remind her of her failing, of her unreliability. She neither commented on it nor ignored it, and for that year she simply did not hear anything at all. Maggie was barely present in her body, let alone the house, by that time. Bernice was under siege and alone.
Auntie Val sees her. Has always seen her. Notices the rigidity in Bernice’s face and her hands clutching the bedclothes in a vise. Deathvise. And. Starts to pray.
acimowin
One day the wolf he comes
Upon this land and he wants to make it his
See, said the Storyteller.
So he runs circles around it again and again
And nothing will grow there
From that day on the wolf,
He bounces like
What is that thing you kids like?
Like a pinball? Yeah, a pinball
Back and forth on his land
Until one day
One tree
One tiny tree
He sees it and it sits in his way
But he sees it too late and smashes into it
That was the end of that wolf
He was too too greedy
Had to have it all
9
WHAT WAS DONE WAS DONE
wahkewisiw: s/he is vulnerable t
o sickness
pawatamowin
She dreams an old list.
Pemmican
moose gut
deer brain
Glosettes raisins
SHE WAS JUST TWENTY-FOUR, a baby still really. She had been six years from care and living in Edmonton. One of her cousins had seen her in the Daylight Inn restaurant (which was, ostensibly, Indian tolerant – it let Indian people eat and stay there – but this bred a particular hostility in some of the staff) just off Jasper. She had been to the shelter on 97th Street the night before and had a shower. She imagined she looked like herself, though she rarely felt like Bernice anymore. The word that comes to her is an old one: kweskatisowin. It means change of life – not the moniaw change of life, but an intricate one that takes root in spirit first and body next. Her kohkom had mastered it as a woman, as one who could shift her shape and change her life. But for Bernice, the meaning is different. It’s a shifting of yourself in your life. She thought maybe the cousin could see it, but she did not. The cousin was eating a roast beef sandwich. Bernice was nursing a second cup of coffee when she was spotted. The cousin had hugged Bernice, not having seen her in a long time. She, herself, was living in Winnipeg and did not get much news from home. The news she had gotten, however, was good: the band office was putting on a talent show for the Pimatisewin and she was driving up there now. Would Bernice like to come?
Birdie Page 13