•
Yasmeen’s new door had gleaming chrome hinges. It was more than she had hoped for. Paulussie had made an executive decision. There was no point trying to fix what was broken beyond repair, he said. He scrapped the old one and ordered a composite door, caribou-brown with a hollow core. It came with an elaborate locking mechanism and a set of keys that were left to her in a small envelope in her teacher’s box. Yasmeen thought it strange to be given a lock when nobody in town locked their doors, except in cases of imminent danger. Nobody even knocked. It was unheard of. People just walked in, sat down and behaved as though any neighbour’s house was theirs as well. She liked that.
EIGHT
There was one good day for groceries at the Co-op, usually the day after the plane arrived from the South. Wednesday had the best pickings of fresh produce, dairy and frozen foods, although there wasn’t a lot of it. Shelves and freezers were stocked late Tuesday afternoon so that by Wednesday morning, the few new fruits and vegetables in town were on colourful display. Yasmeen figured out by the third week that if she wanted a bag of potatoes or a container of yogurt or one of the few sweet peppers that had arrived on the plane, she had to get it on Wednesday, otherwise it would get snapped up and she’d have to wait a whole week again.
Even so, Yasmeen preferred the electric atmosphere of Saturday mornings when the store crowded with villagers chatting over grocery carts, picking up supplies to tide them over until Monday morning, the Co-op being closed on Sundays. It had the feel of a general store with its eclectic mix of clothing, canned goods, guns, hardware, electronics and toys, everything double the price of what people paid down south. Occasionally the store manager, a white man who had lived there for over twenty years, arranged activities for his youngest customers, treasure hunts or relay races with lollipop giveaways. Just about every toddler left the store with his lips dyed a bright candy colour.
One Saturday, Yasmeen discovered the dusty area behind the accounts office, a neglected back room of empty grocery boxes and two army-green metal furnishings, a dented filing cabinet with a Windex spray bottle on top and a lopsided shelving unit jammed with handcrafted mittens, hats and duffel socks and carvings of all shapes and sizes. Each article had a little tag attached to it with an elastic band. The tags had red serial numbers on them and number codes and spaces for handwritten information, all in syllabics except for the name of the artist, which was in English. But there were no prices on them, or at least none that Yasmeen could figure.
She admired a pair of mittens and tried them on. A perfect fit, she took them to the wicket of the accounts office, where people lined up on Thursdays for their weekly cheques, and inquired how much. The woman removed the tag and punched a long calculation on her adding machine.
“Are you Sarah’s sister?” Yasmeen asked while she waited.
The woman shot her a peculiar glance and continued keying numbers. She shook her head.
“Sorry, I just thought, it’s just that you look an awful lot like Sarah,” Yasmeen finally said. “You know, the church pastor.”
The clerk tore off the part of the adding machine roll on which she had printed up the cost and showed it to Yasmeen. The ink was faded but readable. Two hundred dollars, it said.
“That’s fox fur,” the woman explained, as though she needed to justify the price. She ran the back of her hand along the hide.
But Yasmeen had already decided it was fair. Her heart was set on it. “Let’s do it,” she said and wrote out a cheque.
The woman slid the mitts into a plastic bag that was too big for them. Her expression shifted from serious to playful. “You’re right. Sarah is my sister, I was only joking.”
“You had me going,” said Yasmeen.
“We kid around a lot here, you better get used to it.”
On her way to the exit she was stopped by a woman and her toddler. “I could have made you a pair for half the price.” She lifted her eyebrows to emphasize the truth of her claim. “Aren’t you one of the new teachers?”
Yasmeen nodded. She smiled at the child, who turned his head and hid between his mother’s legs. The woman introduced herself as Annie and invited Yasmeen to her place for coffee.
Coffee? She stammered. Yes, absolutely, she would love to. In her excitement, Yasmeen almost dropped her bag with the mitts. She couldn’t believe her good fortune. It was her first invitation to a real person’s house, besides Sarah. She doubted any of the other teachers had been welcomed so enthusiastically.
They walked together, heading away from the part of town where the teachers and the other whites lived. The boy, Tivi, lagged behind and eventually dropped out of sight altogether. Annie didn’t seem to mind; there were plenty of other parents who would see to him if he needed anything.
“Maybe you would like to buy a wall hanging I made,” she said, picking up the pace.
Yasmeen smiled and said, “Maybe, possibly, I’ll have to take a look at it.” She walked briskly alongside her until they reached their destination.
Annie stooped to pick an old butt out of an ashtray on the floor. She lit it, took a quick puff and stubbed it out. Her husband or boyfriend, whatever man was in the kitchen, turned around and mumbled something to her in Inuktitut.
“This is my new friend, Yasmeen,” she told him. He barked a monotone hello, switched on the TV and went to flake out on the mattress in their living room, which was really only an extension of the kitchen. He reached into a hamper overflowing with laundry and pulled out a bed sheet to cover himself.
Annie grabbed the last mug from the cupboard and picked one off the drying rack, squinting inside to verify that it was clean. She spooned some instant coffee into them, put the kettle on and went to fetch the white plastic bag that was sitting in a muddle of boots by the door.
Yasmeen sat at the table with her coat over her shoulders. A rerun of Three’s Company was on. The man was already asleep, the sheet all tangled up in his legs.
“This is it,” said Annie, unrolling her wall hanging, a modest embroidery of a mother with a child on her back, standing by an igloo. Overhead was a yellow sun with long rays that reached down and almost touched them.
Yasmeen fingered it gently. She wanted it, of course, but she had already blown a bundle on the mitts. She hesitated to ask the price. It sounded so mercantile.
The kettle whistled and the man groaned and rolled over on the mattress, pulling the sheet up over his head. Annie poured hot water over the coffee crystals and reached into her pantry for a jumbo container of Coffee Mate. “I usually charge one hundred dollars for these, but for you, since you’re my friend now, how about eighty?”
“What if I buy it next week?” Yasmeen hoped she wouldn’t be insulted or think she was putting her off.
“How about seventy?”
“Next week for sure,” Yasmeen said. She heaped some of the Coffee Mate into her cup and stirred with the same spoon Annie had used.
Annie slurped her coffee. “It’s just that, well, um, maybe someone else will buy it before next week. I don’t want you to miss out. How about you pay me half now and the rest next week?”
Yasmeen produced a cheque for half the amount.
“This is so great,” said Annie. “I’m out of cigarettes.” She leapt from her chair and shrugged on her coat. “Oh dear, you haven’t finished your coffee.” She was apologetic but restless. She insisted that Yasmeen take her time, enjoy, it was no rush, but Yasmeen decided it didn’t seem right to make her wait.
Retracing their steps back to the Co-op, Yasmeen voiced a thought. “Is there a sewing circle here I could join?” She said it with such enthusiasm she didn’t know what had possessed her. The only time she had ever made anything it had been a disaster, a skirt for Home Economics that she accidentally sewed on the wrong side of the fabric.
Annie’s face brightened. “Of course. You can come along next week,” she
said. “I’ll teach you everything I know.”
•
Yasmeen made her way to the designated house, the one that Annie had told her to go to. Each week the sewing ladies met at a different place depending on who felt like hosting. Annie explained they were the same women who got together for Friday Night Bingo. Yasmeen was early. She had left her house well ahead of the appointed time, preferring to wait outside and arrive with Annie. At least it was someone she knew.
The house belonged to a woman named Pasha. It resembled Annie’s except it had separate bedrooms, two by the looks of it, and a larger kitchen. Pasha smiled and shrugged her shoulders when Annie introduced them. “She doesn’t speak English,” Annie warned.
Yasmeen pointed to herself and said “Yasmeen-uvunga. I am Yasmeen.” Pasha said aah and signalled for her to sit. The armchair had a squeaky spring. She looked around, trying to seem casual rather than nosy. She liked the relaxed homey feel, furniture arranged for convenience rather than style. Mainly there was a couch, pilled and coffee-stained, and a pair of mismatched wall units crammed with an assortment of household items in no discernible order—electric can opener, rumpled animal hides, skeins of wool, jars of baby food, Sears catalogues, Star Wars action figures, videocassettes. Every surface had a knick-knack on it.
By the time everyone trickled in there were about a half-dozen seated helter-skelter, anywhere they could find a spot to work. Some sat on the couch embroidering mittens, others were hunched on the floor cutting thick, white duffel with a pair of heavy scissors. The woman who had sold her the mitts at the Co-op, Sarah’s sister, arrived with a large roll of nylon under her arm and was showing it around. Pasha had a paper cut-out of somebody’s foot, a child-sized one that she appeared to be using as a pattern for alirtiks, the tall, warm socks people wore as inner linings for their sealskin boots. Ever since she had seen them in photographs, Yasmeen had wanted a pair.
Annie picked a scrap of duffel off the floor and handed Yasmeen a needle and a length of red yarn. “The best way to learn is to start at the beginning,” she said. She commanded her to stitch a flower any way she could.
Yasmeen held the wool up to the light and tried to push it through the eye of the needle but it kept splitting and curling away. It was impossible to get it through.
“You’re lucky,” said Annie. “In the old days, we used an ivory needle and sinew cut from the hind legs of a caribou. All we had back then was the light from an oil lamp. This is kid stuff.” She giggled.
The other women chit-chatted in Inuktitut as they went about their business, pausing occasionally to light a cigarette or sip their mug of tea or erupt into a great belly laugh. Occasionally Annie translated for her, but the evening essentially took place in a language Yasmeen didn’t understand. Grateful they’d accepted her into their special circle, it didn’t bother her in the least.
When Joanasi walked through the front door, Yasmeen was still struggling to thread her needle. His sudden appearance took her by surprise. Pasha looked up from her work and questioned him rather curtly. He stooped down and kissed her head before replying with a lengthy explanation. When he noticed Yasmeen staring at him he pointed at Pasha and silently mouthed, my mother. I live here.
He returned to what he was saying but appeared to open it up to everyone in the room. Annie sat back on her heels, dragging on her cigarette. She answered something back to Joanasi and then another woman cut in, a little more forcefully. Joanasi cranked up the volume on the radio, which had been on low until then.
Yasmeen couldn’t catch the gist of what they were saying until Annie piped up and told her it was about Halloween. “We’re trying to decide if it’s cancelled or not.”
“Oh my god, I’m supposed to be somewhere!” she said. “I totally forgot.” Yasmeen bounced up off her chair and touched Pasha graciously on the shoulder and said nakurmiik and joked with Joanasi that they had to stop meeting like this.
She wiggled into her coat and asked Annie to translate for her that she was sorry, but that she would return next week for sure. She folded her patch of duffel with the needle still sticking out of it, and stuffed it into her pocket.
•
Sam’s was where she was supposed to have been while she was sitting at Pasha’s trying to improve her sewing skills. As the union rep, Elliot argued it was important to present a common front on the issue of Halloween. The meeting was a last-minute idea. Sam had offered to host it at her place. Despite her tardiness, Yasmeen was first to arrive.
Unlike Pasha’s house, cluttered with stuff but void of greenery, Sam’s was a veritable jungle, overrun with leafy plants and African violets and potted cacti with bright blooms in their centres. Ferns in macramé slings hung from hooks in the ceiling, looping philodendron and spider plants with long hairy tendrils. Sam once admitted to Yasmeen she couldn’t go anywhere without taking along her favourite things, including her plants. They reminded her of home and kept her grounded. Yasmeen was stunned when she saw what Sam had carted with her from the South, a full trousseau of oddball provisions she felt she would never find in the Arctic: Three pounds of dyed pistachios, Scottish shortbread, individual sachets of Sweet’ N Low, Vermont maple syrup, three 40-ouncers of Johnnie Walker Red and two cartons of Players Light (which the Co-op sold but at an exorbitant price). She also brought along her dog, Bailey, for company, a hapless mutt with black-and-brown cow markings and ears that dragged along the floor.
“So what’s the story on Halloween?” Yasmeen asked. “Any decision yet?”
“They’re talking about it on the FM,” she said. “As we speak.”
“So turn it on.”
“I don’t know about you but my Inuktitut is a little—how shall I say?—rusty.”
“For fuck’s sake. Why would Paulussie go ahead and let us get the kids all worked up about it and then tell us no? Where’s the logic in that?”
“It’s not him, it’s all the evangelical nutcases.” She said it knowledgeably, as though it were a fact of life that everyone should know by now. “I’m not talking about the normal ones, if you can call them that, who play by the rules. The ones who just pray and go home and eat dinner with their families. It’s the others I’m talking about, the hypocrites.”
“Hypocrites?”
“Yeah, as in drinking themselves into oblivion, beating up their wives and then going to church on Sunday to pray their asses off for forgiveness.”
Were they talking about the same village? Sam’s version of Saqijuvik didn’t jibe with Yasmeen’s experience of it. It didn’t even come close.
“Take your coat off and stay awhile,” said Sam.
Yasmeen pulled down her zipper. She stuffed her hat into her pocket, accidentally jabbing her thumb on the needle she had hurriedly stuck into the duffel before leaving Pasha’s place.
They heard a stampede up the porch steps. Sam snatched the Johnnie Walker off the table just as the front door flew open and a clutch of rosy children in tuques and coats poked their faces in, smiles of crusty snot under their nostrils.
Sam shooed them back outside. “Not tonight, kids.”
“Awww!”
“Vamoose!” she said. “Maybe tomorrow.”
They watched them scamper off into the grainy darkness. Sam was about to shut the door when Yasmeen noticed Paulussie headed toward the house with his head down and his hands in his pockets. He was kicking up clouds of dust.
“My woman is crazy sometimes,” he grumbled, pushing past them. He unzipped his jacket and installed himself at the table, slapping down his pack of cigarettes.
Sam plucked a clean glass from the dish rack and poured him a shot from the bottle she had hastily hidden away. She slid the glass across the table and said, “I’m taking one of your cigarettes,” pilfering two from the pack before he even had the chance to process her request. She stuck one between her lips and tossed him the other.
&nb
sp; He let it dangle, unlit, at the corner of his mouth while he dredged up all that he was stewing about. “It’s just like last summer when Sarah got it in her head she had to convert all the poor Anglican … heathens.” He said “heathens” through clenched teeth. Sam reached across and lit his cigarette before lighting hers. He took a long haul. The tip flared like a tiny brush fire.
“So what happened last summer?” said Yasmeen.
“I thought everyone knew.” Paulussie glugged down the whisky and banged the glass on the table, signalling for another. He leaned forward in the chair. “Picture a big bonfire just up on the hill and everyone dropping their stuff in, tape recorders, cassettes, records … everything that the devil gave us,” he said. “We had to burn all of it, even the Hank Williams.” He shook his head and repeated “crazy woman” under his breath.
Yasmeen turned the radio on, hoping he would fill them in with the missing pieces of the puzzle. She twiddled the knob until she got a clear signal. Paulussie shushed them and leaned back to listen, eyeing the coal of his cigarette. She heard the word Halloween in English, but everything else was in Inuktitut. Callers went on and on with their prolonged explanations, clarifications, justifications, some with a hint of outrage, others maintaining the usual monotone.
Paulussie shook his head and frowned. He squashed his cigarette in the ashtray and lit another. He snapped his jaw and blew a smoke ring across the table. A voice came on that sounded like Sarah’s.
Another delegation herded up the steps—Jacqueline, followed by Tommy and Elliot. They dropped their coats on the couch and joined the others around the radio. Bailey yawned and stretched his body out like a sausage. He lumbered over and curled up at Sam’s feet.
“News?” said Elliot, clapping Paulussie on the shoulder.
Paulussie shook his head. “Sarah’s warming up for a fight.”
“How does it look?”
“I hate to say this, but I think it’s going to be cancelled.”
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