Just Pretending

by Lisa Bird-Wilson

  Billy returns to Mooshum’s room just as another nurse is finishing. She leaves Billy with his cheek on Mooshum’s pillow, lips whispering into the old man’s ear a chant something like this – convince me convince me. Billy moves the pillow, damp with tears, from beneath Mooshum’s head and places it so gently and quietly over the old man’s face that none of the other patients are even aware.

  When the nurse returns, Billy’s gone and Mooshum lies quiet on the pillow, his bent arm at ease. The woman in the next bed halts her screams for once, and they all hear a sound like a mighty muskwa bawl just outside the window. The lids of Mooshum’s eyes are still, no longer mapping the fine red stream of veins, the ruby tendril threads.

  grapes

  Last time I saw Cowboy, I told him he looked like a chief, and then I patted his belly and laughed. Later I was sorry because that wasn’t very nice to call him fat like that. Around here, you gotta be careful with your jokes – someone takes what you say the wrong way, then they start some rumour about you. Jeez.

  Like my poor cousin Shirley. Her, she’s just walking down the highway one morning hoping somebody will give her a lift into town ’cause she’s gotta be at work at nine and already it’s at least nine-fifteen. So she keeps looking over her shoulder to see who’s coming. The only place this road goes is between the rez and town, so you know right away if somebody doesn’t stop to give you a ride, well, it must be one of them stuck-up Indians. There’s a few like that around here.

  Anyway, Shirley sees this big green car – well, hears it really – cruising down the highway behind her, and she knows right away it’s gonna be Reuben. So she puts her head down and keeps walking and concentrates real hard on chanting don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop. Even so, Reuben pulls up beside her in his big old Monte Carlo – the car that makes him look like a pimp and got that rumour started around here. And Reuben, he leans across the seat and opens the door for her, not because he’s a gentleman but because his handle’s broke. And at least three cars drive past while this is happening. Round here, those are called corroborating witnesses.

  So Shirley, who’s real nice and doesn’t want to be stuck up, gets into Reuben’s car quick before anyone else sees her standing there, and lets him give her a ride. Before she even gets home from work that day, everybody’s heard Shirley is Reuben’s new girlfriend, on account of those witnesses. And even though nobody necessarily saw them together after that one morning, when Shirley shows up later in the fall for the bannock and stew fundraiser and everyone can see that little bump under her sweatshirt, they all know it has to be Reuben’s baby.

  Around here, when a person gossips, someone might call them out for being part of the grapevine, but usually only because that person’s already heard the story and isn’t too interested in hearing it again. But it’s not too nice to be called out like that.

  So when I hear Sally Cooke telling Kimmy Frank about Shirley’s baby, I decide to try and teach her a lesson.

  “I’m sorry to hear about yer old man,” I say.

  “What?” Sally says, sharply.

  “You know. With Glenda what’s-her-face,” I say, pointing with my chin toward the other side of the hall.

  That makes Sally take straight off to look for her old man.

  While we watch Sally scuttle away, Kimmy says, “What a grape,” and then we both have a real good laugh.

  lost

  When I Was Fifteen

  I was supposed to take care of Marty, but then we got ourselves lost. Who leaves a fifteen-year-old city kid alone to look after her baby brother in the woods, anyway?

  Two irresponsible morons who want to fuck like teenagers in a tent, that’s who.

  Me and Marty heard the water before we came upon it. It was a narrow river, maybe fifty yards across. Silver fish suspended in the current curved this way and that to keep themselves in place. It seemed a lot of effort to go nowhere. Several feet away, a group of ducks sat in the riffles, greedily sucking insects from the bubbles.

  The water looked clean and clear and I knelt to drink from its flow where it rushed over the stones as if from a tap. Instead of being cold, as I had expected, the water had absorbed heat from dark rocks warmed by the sun. I held my cupped hands to Marty Junior’s lips. Open your mouth a little. He did, and I let the water trickle in. We repeated this several times until he was satisfied. After another long drink, I rested on my haunches while Marty poked the soft bank with a stick. Somehow, the ducks’ frantic nibbling helped me feel hopeful.

  When I Was Twelve

  In Italy, with Monique and Dee, and of course Martin – when they were still into pretending we were one big happy family, just after Martin moved in with us and spoiled everything – the tour guide, Daniella, had kept us all in check with her bright pink umbrella, which she held high above her head, arm extended, elbow straight. We followed that tattered beacon dutifully, like moths to a flame, all over Vatican City.

  I remember she spoke to us in English but had a lovely Italian accent that I tried to imitate for weeks afterward. “And now we are entering de Vatican Pinacoteca, de art-eh gallery, built most recently in-eh 1932-eh.” Her hair was dyed a stunning shade of blonde, but I could see just the beginning of black roots. As we went from one attraction to the next, I observed her switching from English, when she herded us around, to Italian when she spoke to the security guards or admissions people. As we waited our turn to enter St. Peter’s Basilica, she stood with a young man who was managing admissions. They talked quickly and closely, then she threw her head back and laughed when he said something to her in Italian. He smiled as his eyes danced along her lovely long neck. The switch from one language and persona to the other was seamless and intriguing, something I also tried to imitate. I desperately wanted to be able to speak Italian, and so for the rest of the trip and even after we returned to Canada and our boring lives, I would insert small words here and there, practicing my Italian accent. Buonasera, I joyously greeted shop owners. Grazie, I told the waiters in the hotel, rolling the r in a circle on my tongue in an effort to banish my flat Canadian accent.

  I thought Daniella must be rich and famous until later, when we were in the midst of the tour and I sat close to her as we waited in one of the churches. I saw the crow’s feet around her eyes and then noticed her shoes were badly scuffed. There was a hole worn through near the knuckle of her big toe. She smiled warmly when she saw me staring at her, and I blushed.

  Fifteen

  So that morning, in the woods, I held my stick above my head in imitation of Daniella the Italian tour guide. Of course, Junior didn’t remember Italy, because he hadn’t been born yet, but he followed along anyway.

  “Tour guide of de forEST-eh!” I hollered and marched ahead with the stick in the air, yelling commands over my shoulder in an Italian accent. “Hurry! Keep-eh up or you will be left behind-eh! Just ahead you will see the amazing evergreen-eh, indigenous to dis part of de world-eh.” And then I would stop and turn abruptly to face my audience – tour group of one. Junior giggled as I used my stick to point out features of the forest in my overdone Italian accent, which began to sound like I was from Transylvania after a while. “And here ve have-eh an aMAZing example of u-MONG-gous fungus! U-MONG-gous fungus is a giant-eh mushroom of de forEST-eh,” I said, pointing to gigantic white and red mushrooms growing from the cracks in a tree stump.

  Twelve

  In Italy, even though we were all under strict orders to stay together and follow the tour guide’s ridiculous umbrella, it was inevitably Dee who wound up lost, left behind with a group of Germans at the tapestries gallery in the Vatican museum. Afterwards, she complained bitterly to me about Martin’s unreasonable response and how nobody understood her.

  “I couldn’t tear myself away,” she said. “They were so beautiful. Exquisite,” she said, with their depictions of women and saints, martyrs and icons, the Virgin Mary, the baby Jesus. The semi-sarcastic smile that played at the corners of her mouth told me something differe
nt.

  “Do you expect us to believe that you didn’t notice the group you stayed behind with were all speaking German?” Martin asked, looking from Dee to Monique and back again. He seemed to be imploring Monique to help him make his point. “I find that hard to believe,” he said drily.

  “Oh, so now you’re calling me a liar,” Dee fumed, throwing up her hands in a way that implied this was the most unforgivable insult.

  “You have no idea,” Martin said in small, measured tones, “how difficult it is to spend any amount of time with those paintings. Access to the interior of the Sistine Chapel is limited. The noise deteriorates the paintings. I have no idea if we’ll ever get this chance again.” We all stopped listening because this was, like, the fifth time we’d heard Martin say this.

  Then Dee said, “Well, maybe if you’re so worried about the noise, you should just shut up then.”

  Martin’s lips clamped shut and his face turned really red, like almost purple it was so red. He took three long strides to reach the hotel room door, which he slammed on the way out.

  “Dee,” Monique said quietly. But that was all.

  A Twelve List

  Mom made me go to bed early that night in Rome, as if I had done something wrong. I spent my time making up a list of things I wanted to change about myself:

  My name. Sunny was a tall order. Sunshine, rainbows, happiness, lollipops. Perpetual summer. Give me an ugly name any day. Make me a Eugenia, with its associated low expectations. I really wasn’t up to Sunny.

  Bad things. Stop doing them. Stupid things too.

  Body hair. Grow some. Its absence was giving me a complex. Normal was overrated but necessary.

  Mom, I mean Monique, tried to pretend she wasn’t crying, but later I woke up and heard her rush to the door when Martin came back. It was long after I had fallen asleep. I knew then she was pathetic.

  Fifteen

  How long me and Junior played the tour guide game before I realized we had strayed from the rough path I couldn’t say. The mosquitos were getting thicker, biting our faces and through the thin fabric of my hoodie. Junior began losing interest in the game and I started to look for the path to get back. Only by that time everything looked off – both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I couldn’t see any of the landmarks I had just been pointing out to Junior, or else I saw too many of them. Each time I thought I recognized a mossy rock or a diseased tree, by the time we arrived at it, it looked all wrong. I thought that if only I could see the path, I’d know what to do, so I scoured the ground for a sign. I no longer held my stick in the air. Junior started to whimper and when he had to pee I tried to help him, but he peed all over his pants anyway because he was only three and still incompetent. At least that’s what Dee would say. Peeing on his pants made him cry, so I had to help him feel better before we could go again, giving him hugs and telling him jokes so he wouldn’t think about his pants.

  “What did one toilet say to the other toilet?” I asked. Anything about toilets or farts was usually a hit.

  “I dunno,” Marty said, brightening.

  “You look a little flushed!” I paused. “Get it? You flush a toilet.”

  Junior laughed.

  I made a farting noise with my mouth and held his hand.

  He laughed and we started walking, making farting noises back and forth.

  “What did one clown say to the other clown?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “You look funny.”

  Junior smiled.

  As we walked, I showed him how to put his bare forearm to his lips and blow on it to make farting sounds, and we did this until we found the river.

  Sitting on the bank, I admitted to myself that we were lost. I tried not to let Marty see me crying, but after a while he came up to me and took my face between his hands, one flat open baby palm pressed against each of my cheeks. It reminded me of a joke where you squish your own face between your palms and say, Buth Driver, open the door, I’m not in yet! But Marty Junior didn’t know that joke. He held my face firmly in his hands and looked into my eyes. His face was close to mine.

  Finally he said, “Sunny, will you marry me?” and he was so serious and his words were so unexpected that I just had to laugh.

  I hugged Marty and told him sure.

  I convinced myself to follow the river upstream. I was sure we’d seen this river before, earlier in the camping trip with Monique and Martin. We drove by the river twice on our way out to look at the marina (boring), and I kept expecting to see the overpass of the road any minute. If we followed the river long enough, we had to come to a road or someplace where there were other people. Didn’t we? Once we were out of sight of the ducks, I began to feel less certain.

  Twelve

  A little while after Mom met Martin, we stopped calling her Mom and started calling her Monique, which was weird at first but seemed okay later. She said she needed to get her own identity back, whatever that meant. Dee said it was stupid and refused to call her anything but Excuse me and Hey. She tried Moan-ique because of the whole thing about the disgusting noises coming from their bedroom in the middle of the day and everything, which Dee said was just gross. Martin went into her room and threatened her about that one, which was what I learnt from Dee before she left. They all said Dee didn’t leave because of Martin but I couldn’t see any other reason. Martin moved in. Shit changed. Dee moved out. It might have taken a whole year to unfold but it looked straightforward to me. When I tried to ask Monique about it, she only said, “It’s complicated,” which made me want to scream. All’s I knew was that every time Dee came in and let the back door bang behind her like an announcement, I could see Martin’s shoulders square up and his knobbly spine stiffen a notch like someone had adjusted the pole Dee said he kept up his backside. Only Dee didn’t say “backside” either. Then Dee started not coming home, and the door banged less, and Monique looked anxious and relieved all at the same time.

  I was also not supposed to call Martin Junior Marty – so said Martin Senior. It was Mar-tin. In two crisp syllables. So I called him Marty when Martin wasn’t listening. I was also not supposed to let Marty dress up in my flower girl dress from the wedding and put on my shiny white patent leather shoes so he could click around my room on the hardwood floor that Martin put in for me. Sometimes Marty wanted me to put makeup on him and pull his hair back with a headband. When Martin caught us, he got very angry. The next day, he took Marty to the barber’s for a haircut. Dee said that pretty soon the poor kid would have no hair left.

  Fifteen

  How had more than three years gone past and Martin was still here? I had to reconsider my approach. Hadn’t I tried with the pictures of my father all over the house? Didn’t I show my disdain for the idea of being an art historian with his clean fingernails, crisp button-down shirts and stiff laugh? Wasn’t it clear how pale he was in comparison to my real dad, who was a logger and a miner, who worked and laughed hard and who told stories and played the guitar? Wasn’t it obvious that Martin didn’t hold a candle to my dad? And yet, there he was, three years later, still hanging around with his stiff white shirts, still trying too hard to make us see his way of thinking. Like on family movie nights.

  “Jim Carey’s funny,” I said, defending my choice when it was my turn to pick.

  “Slapstick funny is different than being cleverly funny,” Martin said. We all knew his bias for being “witty.”

  “Well I like him,” I replied, staring at the TV, refusing to look at Martin.

  Halfway through the movie, Martin went to his study and quietly closed the door, which I thought was rude, since we’d all sat through Annie Hall when it was his night to pick.

  Twelve

  One night, early on, I came to the dinner table in my Groucho glasses and nose. I was planning to conduct a social distancing experiment. Instead of sparking a discussion, which was what I had hoped for, and which is what would have happened before Martin moved in, grumpy Martin bit my head of
f. “Take those off,” he demanded. Monique didn’t even say anything because they were already having a fight. I considered going to my room and sulking but then decided that would be too easy for Martin. Instead, I took the glasses off and then pretended to be made of granite. I sat there still as stone at the kitchen table, quietly seething, willing my mind cold instead of boiling. My eyes burned everything they touched but refused to look at Martin. I glared at Monique, but she wouldn’t play that game. My jaw was so tense I thought it would snap.

  While I sat there, I promised myself again that I was always going to remember what it felt like to be a kid so that when I had kids I wouldn’t treat them that way. I wouldn’t go around being a jerk, hurting the kid’s feelings over nothing and making the kid feel irrelevant and small and useless and a nuisance. I would definitely make an effort to make my kid feel not stupid. Martin had this way of making you feel so stupid that you started to feel like you might actually be a retard. I spent a good deal of time being concerned that I might be mentally retarded and then trying to keep people from finding out. I sometimes did these crazy things where I got angry and completely freaked out. I’d throw things and yell and it was like I couldn’t help myself. At those times, grown-up people would say things like There’s something wrong with her, which didn’t help. Once, a woman told me, You have a chip on your shoulder, and she was staring at me so hard I thought she meant for real, so I looked at my shoulder to see what was there. But there was nothing. Then I really did feel like a retard.

  I made up a new list of the ways Martin was different from my real dad.

  My dad was Métis like me. Martin was not.

  My dad loved me because he did; Martin said he loved me because he had to.

  Martin was alive.

  Twelve

  At first, before Marty was born, Dee said Martin had no idea what it was like to have kids. I thought she must be right, judging by the way he tried too hard to make us like him at first, grinning and exclaiming all over himself in a way that you knew was all about Monique and had nothing to do with us. After a while, that changed. It’s like when you go somewhere and you’re on your best behaviour and then after a while you can’t help it and you start to act like your true self. That’s what happened to Martin after they got married and he moved in – his true self came out. I personally thought he should have tried out his true self from the start, although I don’t know if it would have made Dee like him any better. But it might have made her despise him less. Martin did things to try to hide his true self from Monique. They had this sickening thing they did together where they talked in fake voices and teased each other about their age difference. Martin was only thirty-one, whereas Monique was forty, so they said stupid things like “robbing the cradle,” which Dee said meant our mother had married a child. It was at those times I could see that Martin was not being his true self with Monique.