Birdie (13 page)

Yes, in the city four years could pass by you like the rock in that stream because the alleys and skyscrapers are largely unchanged with the seasons. Weather does not impact your hunt, only how cold your sleep will be.

It was harder to dream in the city. When she first got there and after she would not allow grief to be her travelling companion, she pretended that the white noise of traffic was the sound of crisp snow pelting the aluminum siding of a trailer. It allowed her to sleep better, being soothed by the parallel urban life. For a while, she pretended that the poorly loaded trucks bouncing down potholed streets were cracks of thunder and that the thunder spirits were closer and unsettled on the city skyscape. After the first year, the squealing of old brake pads no longer sounded like the keening nasally caw of ducks. It became what it was, white noise in the white city. After a few months of going to visit her every so often, she looked for and avoided her Auntie Val, by turns. Part of her was so hurt at being taken from the Pecker Palace, part of her was guilty for getting a good life with the Ingelsons. She could avoid family, but it would always find her.

Once in a while, she would run into (not be able to run from) relatives in the mall downtown or on the street.

“Where you been, cousin?” some asked, knowing precisely where she had not been: home. She had built up a thick veneer of unknowingness, a fully constructed naïveté that Cree politeness would allow to stand in the face of impolite questions.

“Heard you had a white family now,” one not-so-polite relative asked/told her.

“Seen your mom lately?” another said pointedly.

She would nod or not nod and be sure not to ask about anything other than immediate concerns. Accidents and wonder were something she didn’t believe in, then. She wasn’t so sure about family, either.

One time, when Bernice was very small, she imagined she was lost in the bush. She was not – no one would have allowed that – but she had convinced herself she was miles from the other women. It was just spring, some ice still clung to the branches of the low-lying trees, and she sat amongst the branches of a pine tree until she was far away from her tiny room under the stairs, miles away from her uncle Larry’s pickup truck and hours from the reserve. She’d thought herself hopelessly and happily lost until Skinny Freda had said, “C’monnnnn, Bernice, you’re slowing us down.”

Even then, she had hidden in quiet. No one spoke to her on the way home and no one noticed when she slipped away to the cubbyhole under the stairs.

As she entered her teens and really started to gain weight, her room felt less like a cupboard-turned-bedroom and more like a jacket that she slipped into when she needed warmth. She believed that if she got big enough there would be no room in there for anyone but her.

In her current darkness at Lola’s, she wills her hand to reach for the string attached to the stairs in her childhood room which she pulled to turn on the light. In the outer world, her gesture is a twitch in her right hand. She can’t reach the string.

The sounds of the house late at night come to her, and she hears pots in the bakery kitchen, Freda setting the table and the muffled sound of CBC North on the radio. These sounds are safe.

But Bernice is no longer there.

She was sitting in the truck with all of her uncles. The Ingelsons had dropped her off for a visit. Wishing she had stayed in her mom’s empty house, instead she was silent and quieted and filled with ill. A cramped Chevy truck, pockets full of cash and a dashboard filled with cigarettes and junk food. Headed to the city for groceries. When everyone decided to spend a portion of the money on booze, Bernice steadfastly refused to leave the truck or let go of the cheque until, angrily, they all went to the Safeway and spent the money as originally planned.

“You’re fucking crazy,” her uncle Larry had spat at her. Freda sat in the back, seemingly oblivious, but willing them not to see or think about her. If Birdie pulled her in, which she never did, she would be visible, on the uncles’ radar. Open for the season. But Birdie never did, and resolutely she stared straight ahead as the uncles circled.

“She’s not even here,” griped the second-least-kind uncle. “She’s off in that fucking dream world so she doesn’t have to …”

“Shhhh,” warned a kinder uncle. “We all got that same world to go to. Maybe you should go there, too.”

They turn up the radio.

Her Gibsons self stiffens at the recall. Her spirit wanders.

She was under the stairs. In her room. Soft tiptoes and breath held tightly in his chest like a secret, coming down the stairs and listening. Paused and listened. For her. For her breathing. For her fear, she imagined. Soft shuffling past her door. And back again. Waiting for the awake sounds of others. She held her breath and pressed her legs against the door – she did this while lying sideways across her bed.

The inevitable shaky hand on the latch. Husky breathing. Scared? No. Something different. She didn’t know this breath. Pushing on the door. Firmly. Sure. And. Then. Angrily. With force. And might. Pushing her girl legs back until they buckle at useless girl knees. The lighter black of the hallway replacing the pitch of her cubby. And. Then black again.

In Gibsons, Bernice lies still as a thistle on a hot summer’s day.

If Bernice notices the drumbeat intensifying and pounding with more vigour, she gives no sign. Her skin feels a tingle, a notice of change, and if she were awake she would expect to find herself changed back to her regular form, in her regular body and in a place she hadn’t known she had gone to. The shift, she would have imagined, made her stronger and more resilient.

What she could not know is that it has also made her cognizant of time as an arch and not a line. In the shift she had been preparing for her whole life, Bernice who is not Bernice is able to move back and forth like a laser on a CD changer. She does not have the cognizance of her body and surroundings as she did in life. She has, instead, the distinct impression of a being disconnected from the living but even more intricately connected to life. The body is not hers. She is annoyed. Freda is mooning around her like she has lost her best friend. With dismay, Bernice notices that the formerly fat body she had (she wondered if, like Prince, she could get a symbol for that) is soiled. She wants to tell Freda, anyone, to clean that up. It is humiliating enough to be half dead with an almost boob hanging out. But this? Too much. No one should have to see their body failing them.
Earth body failing earth me,
she thinks.

In a way, she supposes that this is for the best – sometime she is going to have to talk to her and Lola. Not to mention Auntie Val. She is not ready yet, though. She has “some business to attend to,” as
Kohkom
Maria would say heading out the door to church. Serious business, as the song says. Only with a stronger drumbeat.

She sees herself. In the continuum of time that has graced her. From her bird’s-eye view she sees. Then. Not. Now. Sees who her bodily self became: huge, bigger than she knew, and her shoulders, stooped like she had lost something. A fight. A friend. A life. She was wearing the yellowed top and bottoms from the San, a male patient’s outfit.

That big body of the girl she occupied sat hunched over
a desk, writing in a journal. That girl had bandages on her hands and was writing fitfully.

That girl was not honest in that – she didn’t think she could be at the time. If she had the energy to write it all down now she would have more stuff to say. About things. But really, who knew any sort of truth at twenty-one? At twenty-four? Would she really have been able to be honest, at that? Although, really, it was the THAT she did not want to talk about. But it was in her head and she didn’t want it to stay there. She wrote out a timeline. Didn’t know eventually that she would forget time entirely and fly back and forth between places. Here. There. And time. Now. Then.

Little things keep bubbling over into her changeworld. Like that crazy Freda, who says to that body over ‘n over again, “It’s not your fault.” Isn’t that crazy? Even in her non-Bernice form, the one which had tuned her cousin out for years, she could still be gotten to by that Skinny Freda. She imagines that Freda has something spilling out of her like water from a boiling kettle. Not rage. Guilt or remorse or some ugly cousinemotion. But, like
Moshom
said, “There’s no friend like an old friend.” Freda is Bernice’s oldest friend. She who never sat beside her. Was not there all through her troubles, in courtrooms, in bathrooms, in waiting rooms, hospitals and visitors’ rooms. Bernice had forgotten about that when she would allow herself to ragemember. And she could also not forget Freda’s shaky lip when the door was kicked closed in front of her. The knowing in her eyes. She knew. At the very least, Freda had noticed. And. Was relieved. That. It was not. Her.

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.