Birdie (14 page)

Kohkom
Rose had come to the city, picked her up from the Pecker Palace and taken her shopping for the day, and there was none of the
Seventeen
awkwardness or glee in that trip. There was a certain comfort in having someone so assured make decisions at such an embarrassing time. Still, it was hard to remember that when her
kohkom
whipped out a piece of twine, wrapped it around her rib cage and passed it to the wide-eyed sales clerk.

“This big,”
she had said.

She was this big.

She and
Kohkom
wordlessly shopped as the clerk brought big
kohkom
bras and Bernice, red-faced and breathless, stomped to the change room to try them on. In her shyness, she eventually took the bra that looked the least like bras in the magazines, the only one that fit around her sweater, T-shirt and jacket.

She had that bra for eight years. Eight years. That was longer than she had lived in any place. Longer than
The Beachcombers
was on the air (if you don’t count syndication, which she doesn’t – because if they don’t look like that now it doesn’t count). She threw it out on her nineteenth birthday. That year she felt like the bra looked: too small and too big, grey and worn at the edges. She had carried it in her cart for a few weeks until other priorities arose. Underwear was not her worry at the cusp of her twenties. Footwear had taken over.

She feels uncomfortable when Freda changes her clothes for her, but mostly she is ashamed that she has no bras. Eventually, Freda buys her a pretty purple set. (“This oughta cheer ya up. Nothing like something frilly to perk a girl up.”) Every
day in the beginning of this, this journey from the bed, when that bra was washed and replaced, she had shirked it off and put it under the bed. She noticed her breasts at these times, they are becoming much smaller and flatter and they droop on her now smaller body. She wonders sometimes how much weight she has lost and thinks the bed no longer creaks beneath her when she moves. It could be that she moves less, hears little, but those flattened breasts tell the real story.

When she was getting breasts she could smell the excitement around her. In men, in kitchens, at dances. It was like some strange boob chemical had been released and it didn’t allow anyone to look her in the face for more than a minute. She was a favourite at dances because she didn’t say anything when boymen surreptitiously rubbed themselves against her. Frozen with panic, she was dragged to and from the dance floor without ever uttering a word.

On a particularly hot night at the community hall she had sat in a bathroom stall for three hours, feet pulled up and sizable buttocks perched on a toilet with no seat. She heard girl-women talk about each other and then hug outside her door. Heard her family maligned and herself denigrated.
Slut, tease, hussy, cow, cunt, bitch, whore, hooker, pro, ass peddler, cooze.

“She fucks everyone, you know. Has for years.”

“I heard she blew Johnny Morrissey last weekend at the hockey game.”

“Hope she doesn’t fall over tonight, she’s carrying a big load.”

She hoped she didn’t fall over either. One night when she had come to visit from the Ingelsons’ – she must have been
about sixteen – in a sad state, she drank to deafness and was falling all over the hall when her mother came up, grabbed her arm and threw her into the truck. “Don’t you shame us like that ever again, Bernice.”

“They’re laughin’ at us anyhow, nothin’ I can do can change that,” she sneered. For the first time in her life, her mother smacked her one. “Don’t you dare let your uncles’ shame come home to you.” She stared at her daughter hard.

Shame? She didn’t know the half of it, Bernice thinks. She can feel that flush, that horrible red, spread to her pale staring face. Even on this bed, miles and years away, she feels the disgrace of her first realization: that was the first night that she knew that she was not quite right. Sure, she has always been quiet, something of a loner and a little strange by anyone’s standards. But that night, deaf and blind, it was all she could do not to faint from the stench of her mother’s anger. She knows she could smell pain then, but she isn’t sure that she has ever led a life without that gift. She is too aware of the hurt around her. Sympathy pain. When the smell dissipated, she was staring into her mom’s sad face. “Come on, Bernice, we’re going home.”

Seeing Maggie here in her apartment signals something. There seems to be a space between what she feels and what she thinks. For the past two days she has been thinking about the house at Loon Lake and all the things she felt there. She is no longer afraid of the memories – it was the lag time between thinking about the invasion of her body and her physical response to the memory, she supposes. Bernice knows that she should be feeling: revulsion, fear, anger, resentment.
After any memory, after the thinking, it could take anywhere up to a week (if then) for her to even remember the incident that triggered the emotion. Three in the afternoon Tuesday and she felt a blinding rage that she couldn’t even remove herself from or attach to the thought she had had the previous Thursday about her uncle Larry forcing his way into her room, taking all of the life out of her little room under the stairs. The only indication that anything has changed is the quavering in her arms and legs from her anger.

“Shhhhh,
iskwesis.
” Freda pats her hand and pulls her comforter around her, mistaking her quaking for cold. She doesn’t realize she has called her sistercousin by the diminutive, making her a little girl and not a woman in word and in care. The same cousin who didn’t admit the cigarettes she hid in Bernice’s coat were hers. The same girl who she heard call her Buffalo Gal behind the Rotary statue of the too large Beaver. The same nearwoman who put her in harm’s way with their uncles. This woman, she remembers.

Bernice almost recoils from the touch, old habits die hard, but her face remains impassive.

For inside she is alive. Living through recall. Feeding herself memories. Once, when Bernice was in grade school she was picked to play a snowflake in her class play. One of three snowflakes, she felt certain she could blend in with the other children. However, her outfit, a
papier mâché
costume, was bigger than everyone else’s costume. Her mom didn’t have enough flour to bind all of the spikes that were supposed to form. After reading and rereading the instructions that Bernice’s grade three teacher had written out, her mom had given
up and gone with her brothers to a neighbour’s house to drink. Bernice ran over to Val’s, half-damp monstrous confection in her hands, crying all the way. Auntie Val had eventually taken a blow dryer to the mass and made semi-spikes out of toilet paper rolls, which she stapled to the front of the mess. Bernice was horrified to have to pull the soggy heap on her head and dreaded walking in front of the people gathered in the auditorium.

The next night, she and Freda held hands all the way to the schoolyard. Because it was a winter festival, everyone was expected to dress up for pictures and for the party that would follow. Bernice had worn a dress her dad brought back from the Kresge’s in Grande Prairie. When she took her coat off and picked up her costume, Penny Rein said, “I have pyjamas that look exactly like that, Bernice the Buffalo.” Bernice looked down at her dress, which she now knew absolutely was a nightgown. Waves of shame passed over her as she realized the true nature of her outfit.

“Shhh, Penny,” Mrs. Rein warned her daughter. The admonition was worse than the observation. Bernice felt her heart rate multiply. She busied herself putting on her costume, noted Mrs. Rein’s grimace, and when the Reins walked away and when she was sure no one was looking at her, she walked back out into the night air. She was halfway home before she realized she had forgotten her winter coat. She continued trudging through the snow, wondering what she would tell her parents. When she got home, the lights were off in the tiny house. Stealthily removing her boots, she tiptoed to the little room under the stairs.

“What’re you doin’ home?” uncle Larry, whiskey on his breath, snarled from the kitchen – where he would be sitting alone, as always, with a bottle in front of him.

“Nnnothing,” she whispered. “I mean, Mmmmom and Auntie Val are coming home soon.” She doesn’t dare mention Freda, fearing his excitement.

“Nnnnnno, they’re nnnnnnot,” he mocked her meanly. “Ttthey wwwent tttto tttown twwwo hours ago. Thththth-they will be at the school, llllooooloooolooooking for you.”

Her first instinct was to bolt, but something within her, something she will train herself to forget as she grows older-wiser, told her to try to talk him out of his intention.

“Uh uh uncle, I am so tired and sick, I think I am going to throw up or somethin’.” He was not sure whether to believe her, angling his large frame between her and her doorway.

“Pppplease, let me go by … I need to get my nightgown.”

At the mention of her nightclothes he perked up and she pretended not to notice. He did let her by him and she was trapped in her room with his looming figure blocking out the light. “Well, what are you waitin’ for, put ‘em on.” He stood and stared and then, ridiculously, lowered his eyes. She was aware of the ludicrous nature of this moment, of all of these moments. No one mentioned the obvious; no one said what he was waiting for, what she suspected her uncle Aubrey would wait for if Larry was not around. No one talked about it, said a word, made demands, ordered her to do anything. The pure red rage of her seeming complicity – her failure to scream, to speak of this, to fight it, to cry – washed over her. He sensed her pause, perhaps smells her momentary bravery and lunged
for her. She reached for something, anything to stop him. Tore down the string that turned the overhead light on. And. Off. And then. Nothing but the smell of her own panic and hysteria filling the room.

She didn’t talk for a year after. The funny thing is – no one seemed to notice. No one mentioned that her underwear was bloodied, that there were bruises on her arms and neck. No one brought up her swollen lip or the cut above her eyebrow. Once in a while, when the drinks were just starting to pour, someone referred to the Christmas pageant that they’d all shown up at (“Dressed to the nines!”) and how the odd biglittle girl from under the stairs simply failed to show up. Like pressure on a bruise, all but Auntie Val pushed slowly to remind her of her failing, of her unreliability. She neither commented on it nor ignored it, and for that year she simply did not hear anything at all. Maggie was barely present in her body, let alone the house, by that time. Bernice was under siege and alone.

Auntie Val sees her. Has always seen her. Notices the rigidity in Bernice’s face and her hands clutching the bedclothes in a vise. Deathvise. And. Starts to pray.

WHAT WAS DONE WAS DONE

wahkewisiw
: s/he is vulnerable to sickness

She dreams an old list.

S
HE WAS JUST TWENTY-FOUR
, a baby still really. She had been six years from care and living in Edmonton. One of her cousins had seen her in the Daylight Inn restaurant (which was, ostensibly, Indian tolerant – it let Indian people eat and stay there – but this bred a particular hostility in some of the staff) just off Jasper. She had been to the shelter on 97th Street the night before and had a shower. She imagined she looked like herself, though she rarely felt like Bernice anymore. The word that comes to her is an old one:
kweskatisowin.
It means change of life – not the
moniaw
change of life, but an intricate one that takes root in spirit first and body next. Her
kohkom
had mastered it as a woman, as one who could shift her shape and change her life. But for Bernice, the meaning is different. It’s a shifting of yourself in your life. She thought maybe the cousin could see it, but she did not. The cousin was eating a roast beef sandwich. Bernice was nursing a second cup of coffee when she was spotted. The cousin had hugged Bernice, not having seen her in a long time. She, herself, was living in Winnipeg and did not get much news from home. The news she had gotten, however, was good: the band office was putting on a talent show for the
Pimatisewin
and she was driving up there now. Would Bernice like to come?

She had been dreaming about that tree every day. Well, not every day. Sometimes she could not sleep because of that drum group that practised near the shelter. They pounded day and night and Bernice found that the music was soothing, but hard to get out of her head. Also, she kept dreaming about that fat little chef and was worried she had a crush on him
that she did not know about. But, she dreamed of that tree so often she thought of him as family.

She had to go. The cousin loaded up Bernice’s scant luggage and was polite enough to roll down the windows a bit without mentioning the street smell that her big cousin carried with her, regardless of the shower and Bernice’s fastidiousness. Driving out of the city and heading north on the highway they listened to music that Bernice had not heard for years. Merle Haggard, the Carter Family, Patsy Cline. The cousin tried to get Bernice to listen to some newer tunes, but when Bernice did not respond, she put the Georgie Jones CD back in the player.

They drove and listened, stopping for gas at Swan Hills and passing the road map of her childhood. When they got to Grande Prairie, Bernice noticed that it had really grown. On the highway into town there was a Tim Hortons and a Sawridge hotel where the roller rink used to be. Other than that, the hustle of the town sounded and smelled the same. The cousin chattered and ooohed and aaaahed over the changed city, but Bernice knew better. It was the same people, or their children, in the bars, the same hunger just a ways out of town, and the same noiseless sky at night when you turned to head west from Grande Prairie.

Day turned to night as they edged their way out to their community. Being extra-diligent for deer and moose, they slowed down and felt each bump in the roads. From Gibsons, Bernice looks around and she sees twenty-four-year-old Bernice clutching the armrest and soothes her. Cooooo cooooo cooooo.

When they got to the house, the cousin dropping her and
waiting for her to get in, Bernice held her breath. She did not know whether to knock or to just go inside. Freda took that choice out of her hands, pulling the door open and grabbing a hold of her cousin.

“Bernice! I knew you would come! You came for the talent show, right?” Freda was all glitter and short this, sheer that.

“Hello, Freddy,” Bernice said shyly.

“Come in, come in, it’s gonna snow soon.” Freda grabbed the poster tube, the Aer Lingus bag and the garbage bag (which made tinny whines and glassy tinks as she swung it over her shoulder).

Bernice scanned the living room carefully, like a hunter, noted that the gun case was open, there were many bottles on tables and near the door, and that beyond the living room the kitchen looked a mess.

“Tell me, tell me, cuz …” – she looked Bernice over and noted her clothes were rumpled and that her hands looked chapped – “… whattya been up to?”

Bernice sat herself carefully on the couch. Birdie watches her from her perch at Lola’s and sees the way her body transformed from woman to child in that instant.

“Where is. Everyone?” Bernice felt breathless and her heart felt like it was winding up only to release itself and beat even faster.

Something slid across Freda’s face, from her eyes to her mouth, something that might have felt like knowledge. “They had sweat and then everyone went to the hall to get it ready for the show. Oh!” she said, animated again. “The uncles went to town for some beer. They won’t be back for hours.

“Let me get you something to … get you some tea, Bernice,” she said. Bernice said that would be nice and looked around the place she had called home. Got up and locked the door before sitting down and exhaling.

Bird Bernice looked out the window. A single snowflake had fallen.

It started with a snowflake, Bernice comes to realize. Sure, it likely started in someone else’s lifetime, but the beginning of the end started with a stupid snowflake. While Freda made tea, she went to her old room to look for something clean to wear for the talent show. She found a sweater that
Kohkom
Rose had given her with Scotty dogs on the front. It was too small, and the small metal chain that had been drawn from the white dog to the black one had long since stretched, broken, fallen off and been lost. The sweater was part of her old comfort outfit. The bottom was a super-sized pair of old blue jeans.

They were worn through in the knees and were torn and flapped at the ankles. She used to like pulling the sweater over her knees and securing it underneath her feet when she sat on the chair by the front window. Back when the outfit was supposed to give her comfort, she would read a book until it got dark or someone came home. Then, ordinarily, she would go to her room, push her dresser in front of the door and read until she was falling asleep or had to pee.

She remembered that after her Christmas pageant, peeing became a major hassle. She tried to make sure that she didn’t
drink anything after five o’clock but sometimes, if she was pretending to be a normal kid or if she forgot she was under siege, she would drink something and have to move the dresser, flee to the bathroom, and then listen at the door for pure silence before padding down the hall to her room. Once there, she would push the dresser back into place, sit down and try to regulate her breathing.

On the day of the beginning of the end, Bird Bernice watches the big Cree woman and her tiny cousin as they sat and drank tea. She sees that sheBernice was visibly relieved because everyone had money and, she assumed, was partying, hungover or passed out. She didn’t care, as long as they weren’t home, where her uncles spent the night. Freda’s words flitted and fluttered through the room and let her know that Maggie was staying with Auntie Val, whose diabetes had kept her in her bed in the city for a few days now.

It was just starting to get dark, she remembers. She had unpacked her poster tube and she and Freda were looking at that picture of Jesse and reminiscing just before they started supper. Shots broke the late-afternoon silence. People who had not been paid were hunting seriously to beat the snowfall. She and Freda teased each other back and forth. Freda teased Bernice about how long her hair was becoming and Bernice teased her about her latest Phil (this time, it was Little Joe Mayville, a long-time neighbour and admirer). The hamburgers were almost ready when Freda exclaimed, “Snow, Bernice, I saw a piece of snow!”

“What? Can’t be, there hasn’t even been frost yet!” And then, with dread, “Oh Freda, we have to close the sweat.”

“Can’t it wait until uncles come home?” Freda asked.

She looked at her, in the way
Kohkom
Rose looked at her when she was asking too many questions.

“Okay, okay, let’s just see if there’s …”

“No, don’t unlock …” Too late. Uncle Larry was just walking in at that moment and caught the door as Freda opened it.

She and uncle stared at each other. She knew that look. And. Then. He looked drunkenly at Freda. Bernice felt ill. She knew that look, too. The one before the one he just gave her. Freda looked nervously back and forth between them. She had her own look. Birdie remembers it. That look she had when Bernice got heck for having her skinny cousin’s cigarettes. The look said, “Not me, not me, not me.”

“Get out, Freda.”

“Awww, Bernice, I just wanna …”

“Now.” She realized she was almost yelling. “Get your coat and run to the gas station.”

Uncle staggered to block Freda but she was small and not paralyzed by the fear to which Bernice had grown accustomed. She had her shoes on before he could reach her; Freda grabbed her coat and ran to the side door.

“Bernice …” She stood ten feet away from the house, and looked at her cousin with wide eyes.

“Go Freda. Go.” She pushed roughly past uncle and closed and locked the door.

Her birdself watches. And. Waits.

Get away from me, dirty old man.
She thought she said it, but it was hard to know. Everything, in her mind, was happening at 7/8ths speed. Sort of like when you just slowed down a record a bit by lightly weighting it with your finger. It made sense, it just wasn’t quite regular.

Not again. Never again.
She was not sure if she said that, but she does know that she said this, “You want to be sure about this.”

Through clenched teeth and with similar fists.

The tremor that had been visiting her for months now, almost like a chatter from the cold, was conspicuously absent. She also knew that her movements seemed steady, although that may have been in comparison with the uncle’s movements. He seemed jerky and agitated, and she would like to say that he was not there, that she could not see him, but she could. He was in there somewhere, behind the smell of whiskey and the reek of cigarettes, peeking from behind something that shared a shadow with fear. Maybe it was birdher’s eyes but it seemed that, for once, she could Now see him/bravadohim, perhaps even saw him Then, as he really was. He said something about liking a fighter and, repulsed as she was, she almost laughed. Instead, it sounded like a choke or a wheeze from deep within her. Of course he liked a fighter. But he loved passivity more. He thrived in her silence. She thought, in a flash, she needed to be silent tonight.

One last time.

“Where you goin’, my girl?” uncle says to Freda, minutes gone. It is the dearness of the phrase, the sick understanding of what the
my
means. The resemblance between uncle
and Freda clear, only in that instant. Freda’s paternity. The link. Between Freda and the family. This. This as much as his wheeze, “C’mere little Bernice. C’mere you sweet thing. Did you miss your old uncle?” Changes her.

For a long time, since it started, she pretended that her uncle was not an uncle when he did this, that he shape-shifted and became something less than uncle and more than animal. She had also assumed that when he shifted, his vision was blurred and she was no longer Bernice, just a body. Now she knew, as she saw him behind his eyes and heard her name, that he was just uncle. Not a wolf. Not a man. And he was bad.

She remembered, in that glint of his eye, him playing fiddle and devilishly jigging around all of the women in the room at dances and gatherings. Sitting for hours at the kitchen table, telling stories and laughing, black hank of hair twisted over his eye like Elvis. And later. Other dances. Walking like a child getting off of the tilt-a-whirl. Other tables. Slamming fists and shouting. His mean mouth and menace aimed at Maggie with seemingly no impetus. The distance her mother and the aunties created between uncle and the girls. Uncle and themselves. And now all she saw was a lecherous old man, still muscular and quick, for he was now in his fifties, heading towards her with a mixture of malice and something that her mind processed as desire.

Bernice had watched enough TV to know that it was possible for someone to “snap.” When one’s mind snapped, it was thought to signal the beginning – of a new consciousness, of a new behaviour, of a new personality. Watching
NYPD Blue
and
Law and Order
had taught her that. When it happened to
her, however, snapping was the sign of the end. Like the closing of a book, if you will, her ability to numb herself to what the uncle did was closed. No longer able to harden herself, to forgive him this trespass, to will herself to forget every day after, her eyes were wide open. Her nerve endings were alive and her muscles were taut.

Watching herself from her Bird’s-eye view in Gibsons her body is similarly ready for attack.

Snap. Snap. Snap (like the fingers in
West Side Story
when the rival gangs meet). He walked towards her, unsteadily, but not unsure.

Snap. Snap. Snap (like twigs being walked on late in the fall). She saw his left arm rise towards her head and his right arm move towards her chest.

Snap. Snap. Snap (she sidestepped him and he lurched forward, running into the living room wall by the door). She flew across the room, airborne and graceful. She heard the air in his chest release and imagined his anxiousness rising in him like a helium-filled balloon.

Snap. Snap. Snap (she grabbed for something, caught air, which birdshe notices magically became the uncle’s work boot). He placed his hands on the wall and slid down to his knees.

Snap. Snap. Snap (hands raised effortlessly with the leather footwear, a coloured rainbow arcs as she swung the steel-toed boot through the air). She stopped at the last instant, aware that he was not moving and was continuing his slide to the floor.