Cardinal Divide

by Nina Newington

  ‘The Farmer’s Market. You’ve had it before? I never heard of it.’

  Mum looked at Dad. ‘The camp where we met,’ she said, ‘there was a French fellow from New Brunswick who kept talking about how my oatmeal would be better with maple syrup. Everyone got pretty sick of hearing it but then one day he showed up with a couple of buckets of sap, borrowed my biggest pot. He’d tapped some birch trees. Nobody complained after that. When the camp broke up and we were leaving together, your father and me, he gave us a little bottle. “To keep your life together sweet.”’

  I walk into the living room, bottle in hand.

  “Dad—Ben—did you really meet Mum in a logging camp?”

  He looks surprised. “Yes.”

  “And Mum was the cook? And you used to be a prospector, before that? In the Rockies.”

  “The Selkirks. And the Monashees.”

  “But then you were a lumberjack?”

  “Just for that season. Not all the men were big and burly. Besides, five foot ten was quite tall in those days, even for a man.”

  “And nobody suspected?”

  “Apart from your mother.”

  “How did she know, if no-one else ...?” I stop, let the silence stretch.

  Dad—Ben—says, “I really think I should start at the beginning.”

  “And I ...” Breathe. “I can look at you and I can say ‘Yes, you could be. A woman.’ But Mum. Married to a woman. It’s crazy. Or she was.”

  “Meg, listen. I was in my late sixties when you came into our lives. Your mother was fifty-seven. She’d lived longer than you’ve been alive before you ever met her. She wasn’t always so set in her views.” He’s watching me.

  “What is it?”

  “What you said yesterday. About feeling ambushed.”

  “There’s more, isn’t there? Wait, she was really a man.”

  “I really think it would be better if I began at the beginning.”

  “Sorry. I’m not making it any easier, am I? Do you want some oatmeal to go with that syrup?”

  At last he puts down his spoon. “So.” He spreads his hands on his thighs, pushing down as if he’s about to stand up. “Some of this you know already. I was born into a reasonably well-off family in a small town in Suffolk in the east of England. My father was a solicitor.”

  “But his name wasn’t Coopworth?”

  “No. It was Hunt. I did have two sisters.”

  “Whose names were Lucy and Victoria?”

  “Yes. And a much younger brother.”

  “Oh.” I take that in. “Whose name was Benjamin?”

  “No. Ralph.”

  “So were you the oldest?”

  “Yes. My father’s first name was Charles, hence Charlotte. My mother told me once they were so sure I would be a boy they never even thought of a girl’s name. But no, it wasn’t The Well of Loneliness. They didn’t dress me up as a boy or even treat me like one. Far from it. My father wanted everything to look just so. Most of all, he wanted us to better ourselves. Marrying my mother, he’d married into a better class. They were in entire agreement about what I should do which was to put my foot firmly on the next rung of the ladder.

  “My sisters showed every willingness to acquire the proper accomplishments and to use them in the proper way. I had no use for it, any of it, ever. I was a wolf cub in a litter of Pekinese. My mother was small, delicate. My father wasn’t much bigger. I galloped into adolescence, feet and hands and height improperly growing. They tried to chop me down to size. That’s how it felt. Only amputation could have made me the daughter they wanted.”

  He stops, eyeing me. It’s the torrent of words that surprises me as much as anything. ‘This isn’t Dad,’ I think, then don’t know whether to laugh or cry. “What became of your brother and sisters?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You lost touch when you came to Canada?” That was the impression I got from Mum.

  “Before that. I haven’t seen any of them since I was seventeen.”

  “Oh. How old were you when you came to Canada?”

  “Twenty.”

  “But you came as a girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “On your own?”

  “No.”

  Before I can ask about that, something’s niggling me. “The Well of Loneliness?”

  “Lesbian novel. 1920s. The hero’s a woman called Stephen.”

  “I know The Well of Loneliness, but where did you come across it?”

  He shrugs. “I’m not illiterate, you know.” He leans back in his chair, eyelids drooping.

  What did they have, a little lesbian book club? Mum and Dad. Ben. Charlotte. One or two other ranch couples I never thought twice about? I shake my head. There’s one thing I’m pretty sure about. Mum did not think of herself as a lesbian.

  Dad’s snoring lightly now, chin tucked down on his chest. Usually his head tips back.

  Looking at this house is like looking at him. One eye sees the square little Prairie house I grew up in. Through the other, it’s their shell, thick and hard enough to shelter the secret. They let me into one but not the other.

  WEEK TWO

  Chapter Twelve

  “WHERE ARE WE going?” the guy sitting across the aisle from me asks. Don. He operates some kind of heavy equipment in the oil-patch. “You’re allowed to tell us now.”

  “The AA meeting in Beverly. “

  “Beverly.” Don shakes his head. “You guys pick these neighbourhoods on purpose?” Short back and sides, brown hair, little moustache. Everything annoys Don. Particularly all the no good welfare bum clients. He doesn’t quite say drunken Indians but he’s thinking it. Only he has to put up with it all because he’s going to lose his job if he doesn’t stay the full seven weeks.

  Can’t Get No Satisfaction blasts out of the speakers. I’m sitting next to Theresa. Head half-turned away from me, she’s gazing out of the window. Dark fields slide past, then squat commercial buildings with big metal doors, then houses, rank on rank, too big for their lots, cars gleaming in the driveways. The bus rocks with laughter and catcalls. The ear-battering beat of the music is the wild throb of survival. I close my eyes, just want to swim in the crazy soup.

  The bus swings left. “Ooh, trigger,” someone yells. We’re on 118th Avenue already, passing the East Glen Motel.

  “Been there,” one of the men shouts.

  “Shut up.” A woman’s voice.

  At the light by the library a sign reads, This neighbourhood does not tolerate prostitution.

  Theresa’s eyes are closed. She’s a beautiful woman. Straight nose, perfect sculpted lips, hair black as a raven’s wing. A beautiful Cree woman. No-one would ever take her for Ukrainian. She used to run an escort service. Jay told me. ‘Hired a couple of her brothers as muscle. Bunch of girls working for her. Quite a businesswoman, our Theresa. Only then she started using crystal, right? Ended up on her back like the rest of ‘em, brothers pimping.’

  The bus jolts to a stop. Her head jerks. “Are we there?”

  “Not yet.”

  She turns to look at me. “You’ve been sober a long time, eh?”

  “A day at a time. You’re leaving on Wednesday, aren’t you?”

  She nods.

  “How does it feel?”

  “Scary.”

  “Because of last time?”

  “I was so sure. Too sure.”

  We all thought she’d be the one. One and a half out of fifty. Those are the stats. She went tree planting in BC. Good money, no meetings. The day the helicopter brought them out on break, she picked up.

  Everyone piles out and lights up. Doug and I stand on the street edge of the cluster. He seems okay with just watching, a little smile on his lips. They’re a soft, beige pink, his lips, the edges indistinct.

  “I used to come to this meeting,” I say at last.

  “You live around here?”

  “Few blocks away. Nicer neighbourhood.”

  His lips twitch.
/>   “Not hard, eh?”

  “You like living in the city?”

  “No.”

  “Hey Doug. See that?” It’s James, pointing his lips at a white SUV parked a few yards up the road.

  “Uh huh.”

  “Know what that is?”

  “Mm. No.”

  “You?” James looks at me.

  I shake my head.

  “Undercover cop.”

  “How do you know?” I ask.

  “Antennas.”

  I look again. The car’s bristling with them.

  “Learn something every day,” Doug says. “Thanks, James.”

  He nods, pleased, and saunters off.

  “All who care to, join me in the Serenity Prayer.” The guys doff their caps. Shining black hair, shaggy blonde, orange. Mona. The regulars are all seamed faces, grey hair or no hair. Beverly is old guard white working-class even though the main drag has a Caribbean restaurant now. My eyes travel round the circle again.

  Amen. Hai, hai.

  A barrel-chested man, bald pate ringed with sparse silver hairs, stands up. “My name is Vince and I’m an alcoholic. Welcome, everyone from Dreamcatcher Lodge and anyone else who’s new to this meeting.” He leans forward, scans the back rows. “I want to tell you, I envy you. You’ve got a shot at getting sober now. Don’t have to wait to be an old fart like me.”

  People always say this at meetings. People said it when I got sober and it annoyed me then. James is leaning back, jiggling his knee. A couple of the girls are whispering.

  The old men are old men. Stubbled faces, pot bellies. Dad didn’t have to shave. I never thought about it. Dad squatting on his heels, gold hairs on his arms. Her arms. Something curled in the palm of his hand. ‘A caterpillar. One day it will be a moth or a butterfly.’

  “I was fighting four cops at once. When I was drunk I was ten foot tall and tough as a grizzly. Next thing you know, I’m on my face in the dirt and after that I’m in a cell, no belt, no bootlaces, puking in the jake.”

  Is it easier for a woman to pass as a man? The only woman here besides the Dreamcatcher crew is Amelia, heavy-breasted, pear-shaped. She does have a moustache.

  “You know what I did, the minute I got out of jail? Went and bought me a bottle, get the taste out of my mouth.”

  The regulars have heard it a hundred times but they’re laughing too. I sit down next to Theresa again. She glances at me, half-smiles then goes back to the window. The driver cranks up the radio. We pass the library and the Lucky 97, lights green all the way. My street now. Couple blocks back from the mansions along Ada Boulevard. Four blocks south of crack and cops and tricking. Like layers of clothes sliding over one another, the worlds, all separate, all happening all at once. In my old job I fit right into the Highlands. Slipping off my pumps at the end of the day.

  Voices erupt in the back. I half stand, twist around. Doug’s got it. Laughter now. Theresa’s cheek is pressed against the glass, her eyes closed. Last time she was in, she talked about the day child welfare took them from her grandmother, Theresa and her four brothers. Not before Theresa got a cracked skull and a bunch of broken bones. Foster care was worse. Her foster father raped her. Social worker too.

  Theresa stirs then sits up. She rubs her eyes. “I know I have to go to meetings. But those guys ...” She tips her head back. “It’s all the same disease but ...”

  “Not all the meetings are like that. Are you going to stay in Edmonton?”

  She nods.

  “You’ve been to the Mustard Seed, right? That’s my home group.”

  She looks away. “That neighbourhood.”

  Crap.

  She looks at me. She knows I know. Her chin comes up. “I have a plan,” she says. “I’m going into the concrete business. Couple of my cousins are into that. Driveways, pavements. Start small. Build it up.”

  Let her do it, let her succeed. Whatever You are.

  “If you stay sober,” I say, “you can do whatever you want.”

  “I could hire my brothers. We’d work together. A family business, you know?”

  ‘The Pen boys,’ Jay calls them. ‘They’ll always get her, those brothers. Welfare split them up. She’s always trying to put them back together.’

  “First things first,” I say.

  Theresa nods, turns to stare out of the window again.

  She was old school, my kokum. Taken from her family, sent to residential school. She never cried again.

  A few weeks after I started at Dreamcatcher, Dad asked me how it was, the work.

  ‘At least I feel like I’m doing something useful. But it’s frightening. Because I can’t.’ I shrugged, the wall of everything I couldn’t make different rising up in front of me. I wanted to cry but I was sick of crying, sick of Mum being dead, sick of everything I couldn’t change.

  ‘You can’t but you want to. That matters.’

  Then I did start crying. It undid me, the gentleness, and I cried until I was dripping and red-eyed and my nose was chafed. He sat there while I cried and made little mm-ing noises, him in his chair, me on the chesterfield, then he made a pot of tea.

  I thought we never touched because he was old and English.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “IT’S HARD TO describe what it was like, being a girl in those days. I was full of energy and curiosity but all I was supposed to do was wait. Wait for a man to shelter me from the world.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I waited. And read. I read Shakespeare, George Eliot, Dickens, Hardy, Mrs. Gaskell. Whatever I could find in the library of the holding tank for young ladies that passed as a school. At least it was better than the governesses we had for a while. I lived inside the worlds those writers made. I don’t know if I can explain this. How little room there was to move or dream. To believe there could be anything different. I was thirteen when the War began. It was supposed to be over by Christmas. At first it was all speeches and cheering. The gardener’s boy went off to fight. But so many died. The nearest gentry. They lost one son, then another, then the last. My mother had dreamed of the youngest son for me or for Lucy.”

  He stops, takes a drink of tea. “God help me, I thought it was an adventure. One that I was barred from, as I was barred from anything exciting.” He shakes his head. “The other thing I did was act the leading man in any number of Shakespeare’s plays. I was the tallest girl in the school and besides I had no trouble learning my lines. As long as I read them out loud.”

  “That’s how you know such huge chunks of Shakespeare?”

  “They didn’t need a prompt, if I was on stage.” The skin crinkles around his eyes, creases upon creases.

  “Is that what you’ve been doing all these years, acting?”

  He studies me for a moment. “No. The other day, when you asked if I wanted to go back to being a woman. It took me by surprise. I really haven’t considered that as an option. When I was a girl, I was a girl. Frustrated by the limitations. But I didn’t feel I was a boy. And yet”—he shrugs—“I don’t feel as if I am a woman pretending to be a man. Does that make sense to you?”

  “I think so.”

  “So perhaps I’m a woman or a man.” He hooks an eyebrow at me.

  “Not ‘and’?”

  “I don’t know if there’s room for ‘and.’ Not yet. What’s the matter?”

  I shake my head. “I could be having this conversation with a friend in the city. With a client, even. But here”—I look around the living room—“it means Mum is really gone.” Tears spill down my cheeks.

  “Ah Meg.”

  I wipe my eyes. “Sorry.”

  “I miss her. Not every minute. That would almost be easier. The jolts of remembering. And then ...”

  “And then?”

  “The house is very empty.”

  After a while I say, “So Mum was the only person who knew?”

  “There were two other women I’m fairly sure guessed the truth.”

  “But you didn’t
talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “So you never told anyone else?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I was thinking what a bond that must have been. For Mum and you.”

  He studies me, surprised. Is it really so unusual for me to look at things from his point of view?

  “For better and worse,” he says.

  “Did you ever consider telling me?”

  “A few days after your mother died I found myself telling you, in my mind. The whole story.”

  “I meant when Mum was alive.”

  Slowly he shakes his head. “No.”

  I wait but he doesn’t say anything more.

  Chapter Fourteen

  OUTSIDE THE WIND snatches at my hair. The sun is a pale suggestion of itself, as if snow is on the way. Instead of taking the path to the river I go back behind the barn where every bit of old machinery Dad ever owned is stored. Teeth and gears and tines, axles, tires. Bleached grasses tick against rusted metal. Here and there flakes of the old brave colours cling on. Green, orange, red. Poppy red.

  ‘Put it on,’ Dad said. We were standing in the driveway. A cold, sunny November day.

  I held it straight out in front of me, opened my finger and thumb. It dropped to the ground. I didn’t see it drop because I was watching his face. His eyes went flat and flint grey.

  ‘You don’t know anything.’ His voice was as hard as his eyes. He marched off.

  Mum, hanging clothes on the line, turned at the sound of his voice, a wet shirt in one hand, clothes pegs in the other. She looked down at the poppy lying in the grit.

  ‘Meg.’ Her voice was a whisper.

  I bent over, picked it up, dusted it off, pinned it to my coat. I wanted to cry but wasn’t going to give anyone that satisfaction. In another year I’d have ground it under my heel.

  “Nice walk?”

  “Just poking around. I was remembering the poppy.”