I’ve heard that one before.
No one likes to be called an apple. Go and act white somewhere else. Go be with your white friends. Shit like that. Sometimes when I’m mad I say to Jerry, Even if I grew up in the city, at least I wasn’t adopted. I know this will hurt him – he’s so sensitive to where he comes from, to being accused of acting white. I know I shouldn’t be so mean, but he shouldn’t be slobbering over that Shirley chick, or whatever her name is.
When I go in, I see they’ve come out of the bathroom, finally, but now he’s sitting with her on the blue couch, listening carefully like he’s taking her confession. I look at her clothes to see if anything’s mis-buttoned or out of line, bed-head on the back of her hair, that kind of thing. But I can’t tell about her hair because the whole thing’s a confusing nest of over-dyed, over-combed, hair-sprayed complexity. She looks all earnest as she tells him her life story, as if she’s pained and maybe going to cry. Jerry’s good at getting that kind of response in women. Emotional stuff. Jerry listens. Chicks eat it up.
Kenny’s tiny basement suite is packed tonight. Kenny anchors the end of the blue couch, beer in hand, case by his feet. He’s got the nods, a sure sign he’s pilled-up again. On the bob upwards he surveys the room with droopy eyelids and a blank gaze, which is really no loss, since there’s not much to look at. Crammed with a couple old couches and a stereo, the tiny living room spills over into the kitchen area. The flattened industrial carpet of the living room is no particular colour besides puke or dirt. Ugly yellow lino does a bad job of covering the concrete floor in the kitchen. Not much to look at, but what do you expect for a party house? And like I said, it’s packed tonight.
Jerry’s been staying here with Kenny ever since he lost his place for trying to go to school and got all screwed up on the training allowance. His landlord kicked him out when welfare stopped paying the rent directly – you’re supposed to manage your own money on training allowance. Landlord didn’t like that idea too much. Now Jerry’s not trying to go to school anymore, the landlord at his old place won’t have nothing to do with him, and Jerry actually owes money to the training allowance people. Shit. I’ve been tagging along with Jerry, staying here too, since my mom kicked me out again. “She’ll cool off in a few days,” I keep telling Jerry. Kenny I don’t talk to if I can help it, because mainly he’s a creep. Some people say he’s a pimp. I don’t know about that, but I do know he buys Ritalin off the single moms in the neighbourhood and then goes and sells it to the hookers for twice as much.
I’ve decided just now, tonight, that for sure I’m never going to let Jerry call me his girl ever again. I know his game. The sneaky bugger. Builds you up, tells you stuff he knows you probably never heard in your life. Him with his Jesus complex, everybody’s fucking saviour. Like when he strokes my face and tells me I look like a princess. Coaxing me to tell him about the bad times in my life, the hurts, the humiliations. At first with Jerry I was pretty suspicious of that kind of shit, since I got burned so bad with my last boyfriend, Taz. Let me just say I’ve learned that when a guy has a name like Taz, there’s a reason for it. Taz asked questions like that too – mostly about who had hurt me in my life, beat me up, which men. I thought he was asking because he cared about me, wanted to protect me or something. When I realized he was asking so he could know that I was used to that kind of thing and he could get away with it on me, I told him I might have been beat on before, but that don’t mean I like it or that I’m going to stick around for it.
Jerry was different. He wanted to know so he could console me, feel sorry for me. I gotta say, I never had that in my life, and it felt pretty good, even though after a while I saw that what he was giving me was pity and it only worked because it was based on me being pathetic. Still. I can’t stand the thought of Jerry saying those same things to that hooker, giving her that kind of attention. I’m going to go tell him he’ll get a disease if he keeps on sitting so close to her that way.
“Jerry!” I call his name across the living room, trying to get his attention through the noise that passes for music around here – I swear if I hear that “Cotton-Eyed Joe” song again, I’ll punch somebody. I think Kenny’s got it on repeat. I hope someone beats him up over it. “Jerry!” I shriek. Some people turn and look at me, turn away again, back to their conversations. I imagine them smirking. I don’t know why I let him treat me this way. One day he acts like we’re together, the next he’s huddled with that whore like they’re the only two in the room.
Last year, he did the same thing with my then-friend Gloria, taking her hard luck story like he was some kind of reporter, giving her all this attention, making me sorry I ever let her come around. We all gave her credit at the time for being this cool white chick who liked to hang around with us instead of her white friends. Then she did that thing with Jerry in Fred’s car at a party. Jerry couldn’t get his pants up fast enough. And later, she stole my government cheque, even though she denied it. I locked her in the hallway closet and asked her what her mother would think when they found her body on the wrong side of town with all the Indians. Of course I didn’t mean it. I let her out when she cried.
For a long time after that, I called Jerry Apple instead of his name every time I talked to him. What bugged me most was to think maybe he went for Gloria because she was a white chick. How am I supposed to compete with that?
Hey Apple, you got a smoke? I knew calling him Apple would bother him because of his background, being adopted and all – red on the outside, white on the inside. He’s pretty sensitive that way. Wants to fit in with us, and yet there’s something about him – something a bit off. Like everybody can tell he spent his life living like a white guy.
I knew he could hear me calling him Apple, even though he pretended he couldn’t, acted like there was nothing for him to be sorry for. Jerry never does anything wrong, you know that kind of guy? Some sort of passive-aggressive thing, like you’re just making shit up, like you’re the one who’s crazy.
I march over to where they sit, and I stand over them. “Jerry!” My voice cracks, and I cringe at how it makes me sound desperate. I hate being pathetic. They both look at me, Jerry’s eyes wide and surprised, like I’m just nobody to him. Like I’m a stranger interrupting their private conversation. Her face is blank. Unreadable. I don’t want to be doing this, but I can’t stop. I glare at her, look her straight in the eye, while I say to him, “Or should I call you John?” Daring her to say she’s not a hooker, but she doesn’t get it. Rather than take the bait, she just blinks her trashy eyes, caked black with mascara, stunned, like she didn’t even hear what I said. I stalk back to my side of the room.
This kind of crap – fighting over guys – makes me think about being back in high school. Me, I never finished. When I was in high school, I wrote a story for my English class. It was called I’m a Potato. I meant it to be a version of being an apple. It was about how my mom raised us in the city by herself, worked two jobs and was real strict with us. We had a house on the east side and went to school with mostly all white kids. In elementary school, my sister and me were the only “Indians” in our school, even though we were really Métis. That didn’t matter – we were Indians there.
My mom, she never took us up north, even though she talked about her parents’ farm, about the scrubby land that was so hard for the Métis to break after being resettled from the south. She told us about the way her parents, our grandparents, were forced from their road allowance home, made to board a boxcar, thinking all the time that when the train dropped them off up north they would just turn around and follow the tracks south to go back home. She told us how those thoughts were dashed when all the people from that community watched their homes doused with gasoline and set to burn just before the boxcar door was shut. The people on that train had to take turns standing on their tiptoes to look out the rectangular air hole at the top of the boxcar. They had lots of time to see their whole community burning before the train finally pulled away.
I would’ve liked to have gone up north, to at least have seen their farm.
For a while, I thought I knew why we never got to go. I thought she didn’t want us to act like Métis, didn’t want us to know our culture – I thought it was because she wanted us to fit in with white people. I’ve changed my mind about that. I think she didn’t take us because she knew what she’d done, by trying to raise us white. She knew how we’d be treated – that people would call us apples, accuse us of being moonias. She understood the scars those words would leave.
A fight’s broken out. Beer bottles crash and people rush to get out of the way to clear a small circle for the skirmish. Bozo’s old auntie has Bozo’s girlfriend by the front of the shirt. Bozo lives upstairs with his quiet girlfriend – the whole main floor to themselves. That ought to tell you something. Damn selfish. The auntie can hardly stand. She must be fifty, more, yet here she is with her heavy bosom and scrawny chicken legs, going at it with this young girl. She staggers around on the carpet in a crazy drunken dance, yanks the girl to and fro as much to keep her own balance as to make a display of giving the girl a lickin’.
“Dir-dee Cree pasdard,” says the auntie in her thick Saulteaux accent.
Even though I’ve seen the girl lots before, I can’t think of her name. She’s quiet, serious, goes to university. I always think of her as smart, but I also sense she doesn’t like us very much. Her and Bozo are the kind of couple that make you wonder what they’re doing together. Bozo’s a fat guy with slack lips that seem like they should be shiny with drool, even though they’re not. I’ve seen Bozo drink eighteen beer in a couple of hours and then walk away as if nothing happened. The guy’s a big fat walking mess. The girl is tiny, skinny, like a little kid or something, no hips. And cute as hell with her pixie face and big round eyes. She’s so shy it’s practically painful, even though you know by her eyes she’d have a lot to say if you ever got her to talk. I sometimes want to talk to her, to tell her something, maybe to show her that I’m not like she thinks – but then I sense her pushing me away before I even try.
The auntie swings her around by the t-shirt, twisting and stretching it in her fist. The girl doesn’t fight back, just stares wide-eyed and red-faced while she tries to pry the auntie’s fingers loose from her shirt. She steps lightly this way and that, struggles to keep her balance, tries to avoid collapsing into a heap on the carpet with the auntie, which is surely where this is headed. The girl twists diligently at the fingers while the auntie continues her string of curses, spit flying from her lips, white foam forming in the corners of her mouth. Soon Bozo is there, joined by his brother. They too grab the auntie’s hand, attempt to steady the two, work on the fingers and plead with her to let go.
“What chew see in dat skinny pitch?” she asks Bozo.
He ignores the insults. Bozo – a good boy – is respectful of the old auntie. He’s been taught well. He begs her to stop, to sit down, promises they’ll talk about it. In a way that must mortify the girl, he refuses to deny what his auntie says, as if he agrees with it: Yes, Auntie, yes, a skinny bitch, now let’s sit down and talk about it.
All at once, the auntie lets loose her grip on the girl’s shirt, steps back, and sits heavily out of breath on the couch. The girl disappears in an instant. The auntie’s head flops forward – she’s passed out. She sits still, and soon people refill the cleared space like water seeping from a leak. The old auntie lets a thin string of vomit run onto that great bosom. I can’t help but wonder about the children and grandchildren who’ve been hugged to that bosom, been carried alongside it, strong, reassuring arms cradling them next to a warm and reliable heartbeat. I want her to be that woman instead of this one. No one notices that she’s sick.
When I got the potato story back from my English teacher, she had crossed out all the places where I said “white people.” This choice of wording might offend someone, she wrote. I noticed she didn’t circle “Indian” the same way. I crumpled the paper into my backpack when I saw that – didn’t even bother to read the rest of her comments. It was like she was saying white people are supposed to be invisible or something. It’s okay to call ourselves Indians or halfbreeds, but white people are supposed to be just nothing. To her it was a “choice” whether they got labelled or not. Like no one’s supposed to notice white people are white.
When I handed in the final draft, I didn’t change the places where I said “white people”. She handed it back a few days later with a big red F circled on the front. I think she enjoyed giving me that F.
I stopped going to school. My mom was a wreck about it. She cried when I told her my teacher was racist.
Shit. Jerry’s gone, and so is that chick from across the street. They must have snuck out during the scuffle with the auntie. I get up and reel to the bedroom at the end of the hall, expecting to find Jerry with that woman. Instead, I find Bozo’s girlfriend. She sits at the edge of the bed. I don’t know whether to say something or leave.
“You okay?” I finally ask.
Her eyes are round, not scared anymore, just confused. She holds her hands in front of her, looks at them, is very still. The neck of her shirt is stretched out of shape. I think she must hate me, must hate us all, for witnessing that humiliation, for being here at all.
“Why does it have to matter?” she says, looking up at me. And then more urgently, “Why do we have to do this to each other?” When I have no answer, she shifts on the bed, turning her back to me. I stand there for a while. I could count her ribs through her shirt if I wanted. She won’t look at me again.
I go outside and sit on the front step, light a smoke and shiver in the early fall air. The first hint of morning light starts to creep into the empty streets, a time of day that always calls up a bubble of regret. I watch the house across the street where Sherry or Shirley or whatever her name is stays. I wonder if Jerry’s over there, but I’m too tired to go check just yet. Instead, I think about him and the way his parents, the ones who adopted him, told him he was French. That worked for them until an old man came up to Jerry one day in the mall and started talking to him in Saulteaux.
Jerry told me the story early in our relationship, when we were still courting. He was drunk.
“I didn’t know what he was saying to me, you know?” Jerry said, leaning in toward me. I let him. His eyes were only half open.
Not understanding the language, Jerry politely waited for the old man to finish talking. Jerry described the old man to me, and I pictured him with a slight build and two slim grey braids, one on either shoulder. Sometimes in my imagination he has glasses, sometimes not.
“I watched that old man talking there,” Jerry said, his one hand now on my knee, the other holding a beer tipped dangerously forward. “His tongue, I mean, his language, it was like it was rolling around, like invisible marbles, off his tongue and over his lips and those words, it was almost like I could see them, you know?” Jerry gripped my knee for emphasis. “I didn’t know what the fuck he was saying, but still it was like, I almost knew. You know what I mean?” Jerry sat back and took a swig of his beer, then leaned forward again. “It was like I knew their rhythm or something. So fucking familiar.” He placed his hand on my knee again. “’S ’at okay?” he slurred. “Can I put my hand there?”
He was cute, acting like that. Spilling his guts to me. I knew I’d let him take me home that night.
When Jerry told me about the sensation of those words like that, he said it was almost physical. Like nothing he’d felt before in his life. I imagine those words, in that language, rolling like a soft warm wave over him, and at the same time that he was engulfed by them they also cracked open a deep longing inside him. That’s the way I feel when I hear the big drum with men singing. That’s how I imagine that old man made him feel. He said he wished he could answer in the man’s language. Instead his own thick tongue sat in his mouth like a sledgehammer. He hardly trusted himself to say anything intelligent. Instead, he fell back to his usual line, the one he’d
been fed all his life.
“No, no. I am French,” Jerry imitated himself, waving his hands in front of him, his beer spilling over the lip of the bottle. “Jer-ée,” he mocked, with a French accent.
I laughed, wiping spots of beer into the knee of my jeans.
“Suddenly the air goes cold, after I say that,” he said, wiping my jeans for me with the palm of his hand. “It’s like all the air got sucked outta the place, and all the noises in the mall just faded into the background,” Jerry explained, his wiping reduced to running his fingertips lightly over the beer spots on my leg. “Those seconds passed, and it was just me and him. He looked me up and down with his cloudy eye and I just stood there.”
“Then the old man says to me in English, ‘Someone’s been lying to you.’ That’s what he says.” Jerry’s eyes were half shut, looking off into space, and he’d stopped rubbing my leg.
The line of his jaw was beautiful. I could have watched him all night.
He leaned forward, like he was trying to get into my sightline. “It was like a whole bunch of little things added up, right then, to this one big thing.”
And just like that, in that instant, with that old man there, Jerry knew he wasn’t French at all. His whole life suddenly looked different than it had the moment before.
“I went to my parents and finally, finally they told me the truth. For the first time, you know? And it was just like the old man said.” Jerry shook his head. I put my hand over his fingertips, pressing them into my leg.
I press my fingertips to my leg again now, remembering. The old man’s words ring in my head. Someone’s been lying to you. I wasn’t even there and they haunt me.
Now when someone asks Jerry where he’s from, he doesn’t know what to say. It’s like he just crawled out from under a rock, the way his eyes go big and he blinks a lot. In those moments, I witness Jerry’s humiliation, too. Halfbreed. That’s what they say when he finally says Métis. Maybe not to his face, but sometimes. Still, I know he’d rather be called Halfbreed than Apple or Cracker. Sometimes they say wannabe, but I don’t think that’s it. He’s not so much a wannabe as he’s just kind of lost. I mean, where can he go from here? He knows he’s a halfbreed; he can’t pretend he’s “French” anymore – can’t go back to that. Yet other Native people mock his new understanding of himself, along with his privileged white upbringing. He’ll never measure up, either way, and he knows it.
Just Pretending Page 3