Birdie (19 page)

Freda busies herself collecting laundry, emptying ashtrays and tidying up. Bernice hopes her cousin takes in the quiet in the room and not the furious sounds that rise and fall within her. At one point, Bernice hears her thumbing through the posters from the ever-present tube. Bernice vaguely hopes she will not put them up. Those. Are not. That. The afternoon heat hits the storefront and Bernice’s living room with a gentle intensity that both women are still unused to. Bernice longs for a cool breeze off the lake like at home. Even on the water here the heat provides a gentle reminder that the B.C. sun can be harsh.

FREDA

The wafting warmth in the apartment serves as a reminder to try to fergodsake get Bernice to the washroom today. Body odour and bile fills the small suite. Not-so-sweet, she thinks with a mean grin. She lights a cigarette to mask the stench, and to busy her hands. Yesterday (was it only yesterday?) she walked to the market to get some cleaning supplies to take care of the mess. While she was out she was certain she saw a glimpse of a former star of Canadian television. His hair was dyed blond and his eyebrows plucked, oh yes quite a dandy indeed, but Freda was almost positive it was the boyman that Bernice had made a fool of herself over her whole life. He was coming out of the magazine shop (News to You) with a copy of
Hustler
magazine.

Figgers,
she had thought.
All them Hollywood types are like that.

Like
that
is precisely why she hadn’t told Bernice yet. Not that she’d understand, but there is something in Freda that tells her that Bernice knows
exactly
what’s going on in her cruddy little apartment. And certainly, if she does, Freda does not want Bernice to know this about
that
.

“Poor kid, you’ve had enough of
that
for all of us.” She places a compress on Bernice’s head, even though she shows no sign of a fever. It calms them both down, though.

When they were kids Bernice was sick a lot. Freda would bring over a bottle of pop, stir the bubbles out and then place wet facecloths on her head while she lay, curled up, on her
roll-away cot under the stairs. She always slept under there, never wanted to share a room with Freda. Almost everyone left her alone, seemingly in accordance with her wishes. One door, no window, no escape.
It’s amazing that she got – well … got out,
Freda thinks.

“Bernice, you will not believe what I bought you.” Bernice was the one Cree person on the planet who does not like teasing or being teased. Skinny Freda knows this. Regardless, she continues, “But I will not give it to you until you get up from that damn rat’s nest and join me at this little table.” She motions to the chair opposite her with her lips.

She holds up a copy of
The Completely Unauthorized Biography (Including Totally Secret Photos) of The Beachcombers.
Bernice lies still. In her shell. In her mess. But Freda has the sense that you get staring at a cat before it springs at you.

“Not coming up for air? Figgers. You always were the most stubborn of the bunch. Remember that time we went to G.P. for groceries? You know, you musta been only fifteen at the time.”

Skinny Freda wants to sit on the side of the bed, but she won’t do that because somewhere inside of her she knows Bernice would not want that. She thinks better of it, and Bernice feels her hovering near the bed.

“Ah Bernice, come back. Come back to me. Come back just to show us how we couldn’t wreck you.” She does not notice the flinch in Bernice’s right hand, and Freda puts her head on her arms and sleeps, sitting up, for the fourth day in a row.

LOLA

Lola sits and stares at the mess that is/was Bernice and wonders what the hell to do.

“Christ, I am too old for this,” she says. But, she doesn’t believe that.

Rather than wonder about what melted down in that kid, she thinks about how to get her out of bed. That was one big buffalo of a gal. Come to think of it, she is more a calf now than a cow. She washes her face, cleans Bernice like a bad housekeeper would – surfaces only. Lola also continues to bring Bernice comfort food, enough for two weeks. What she cannot observe is what happens in her absence. While she was gone, Bernice had, well she couldn’t be sure she had eaten it, but she had disappeared it. None of it was cooked or heated and The Kid seems not to have eaten anything in days.

And does she ever shit?
Lola has been listening for the toilet, watching to see if Bernice changes her position in bed, leaves a drop of ice cream on a sheet, creaks a floorboard overhead. Nothing. Like she’s some sort of. Ghost.

As her employee/tenant stares blankly at the ceiling, Lola wonders what the fuck she did to deserve this.

Their days have taken on an amorphous feeling. Light becomes sleep time, dark is when Bernice’s almost imperceptible shaking starts. Sleep is preferable. Lola considers stopping visiting, but instead comes and sits with Bernice when the other women seem to need a break. She does, however, leave the food just outside the door.
If she is faking it, she should at least have to walk for it,
she reasons.

She looks at the thinner, much thinner face of The Kid and pronounces, “You gotta get outta here, kiddo.” Upon reflection, she adds, “Although you have more colour than the rest of us.”

FREDA

Freda opens her purse and takes out the crumpled lists she has been snatching whenever she sees them. Several are Bernice’s. There is also one from each of the other occupants of the bakery. All sit on top of the journal that Bernice has been writing ingredients in for years. She thumbs through it, stops at the first entry and wonders how the hell she is going to find bison marrow in Vancouver. And. Puts her foot on the gas. And. Goes hunting.

VAL

Valene is trying to be humble. For her, it is much like speaking a foreign language. You don’t get to be the gorgeous big woman in the room (she checks herself, forming her tongue around the new word: “Biggest”) without a heaping helping of confidence or madeconfidence. She figures she has been faking it since she was making it for so long … maybe she can do that with humility, too.

“I ain’t gonna get no lessons in that around here.” She points with her lips in the direction of Lola’s, carrying on an imaginary conversation with herself.

Lola and Freda have been filling the quiet in the bakery with nonsensical and non-stop chatter about themselves, and it was getting under Val’s skin. Their words tumbled over each other like puppies some days, each waiting to tell the other of their adventures, favourite something or other, or something else that Val did not understand. There. Was also something else in the room. Val knew it and could feel it, but she didn’t know if those two could yet.

“Not like sense is suddenly gonna stop in for dinner with ‘em.” She smiles a little smile. And then remembers. Humility. Chuffs at herself. Rolls her eyes. The two little seniors on the grass with her give her a wide berth as she walks by.

In any event, she is glad that Freda has gone to the city, gives them all a bit of a change.

She heaves herself up onto the top of a picnic table, can’t feel her skirt and hopes that it has stayed down. That’s all she needs – to be the crazy lady who talks to herself and flashes people near the spirit tree.

Humble, humble, humble. Maybe if she just thinks the word over and over, then she will get there.

Cigarette, cigarette, cigarette.

She has a pack with her and knew she would smoke, but has not had any since she was a teenager. Nope, bannock and butter were her drugs of choice. So, it does not sit well with her that she has such a craving right now.

She and her sister used to sneak smokes from
Kohkom
and sneak out to go puff by the water. The craving that has taken her now was familiar then. Two? Three times a day, she and Maggie would sneak past the old lady and sit by the water, talking about boys and life outside of Loon.

She has a longing for Maggie’s quiet company so fierce that her eyes prick with tears. They were spirit sisters, one bigger than the other, but reflective surfaces of the beauty that ran in their family. When Maggie was in her teens, she had the most gorgeous hair – black as night, thick and long. Val envied that hair.

Humble, humble, humble.

She also had cheekbones. Fantastic, arching and sharp bones that were at once bird-like and reminiscent of some other time. Some other people. No slouch herself, Val remembers, her own big, beautiful Cree nose and finer and curlier hair. Oh, but men loved to look at the Meetoos sisters. Valene was the talker but Maggie had a rich silence about her that people wanted to reside in. She had, Valene realizes for the first time, a real peace with solitude unlike anything she would ever know. Her sister first lived in silence. Then. In noise.

Her breast hurts. She does not have to remind herself to be humble. She has come to offer prayers to the tree. Not for the tree, like many many other of her and many peoples have done. To the tree. She wants to ask the pitiful thing (really, she isn’t sure if it is still alive) to help her family. What’s left of her family. But. The one thing she really feels, sitting here, smoking and crying (and, to be frank, farting a bit), is thankfulness to Maggie. For Maggie. About Maggie. She can’t do the emotional math yet, but she knows she has two daughters because Maggie gave them to her. She is overcome with humility and quiet certitude. She has to raise her girls right. Birdie and Freda. Her girls.

She takes her tobacco offering to the tree and asks for help. Without shame. Without fear.

“I am pitiful,” she prays and cries.

“Please help me,” she cries and prays.

One thing. She can smell moosehide and Tabu perfume. Maggie.

Bernice looks at Lola without opening her eyes and sees Lola’s mouth moving, but can no longer hear her. Bernice has heard her in the shop below at times, but doesn’t know what anyone is saying to the customers and friends who visit. She only knows it is low tone this and murmured voice that. She can no longer make out words, she supposes. She can hear, though.

Lola shakes her head, turns on the TV and leaves.

Bernice feels the familiar vibration of the opening strain of the
Frugal Gourmet
theme song. In her waking hours she knows that this is a vision within a vision, and that it has some meaning for her. She is not certain she could ever bring herself to mention the cooking show to an Elder in order to get guidance.

“Keskawayatis.”
*

*
“She is behaving foolishly.”

LOVE THE ONE THAT BRUNG YOU

Mîcimâpôhkêw
: s/he makes stew, s/he makes broth

She raised her eyes in the lodge and tried to see who was there.

There was no one she recognized – everyone seemed quite old.

She heard a murmur from beside her and reached for the pipe.

With the greatest of effort, she raised her head and saw that the Frugal Gourmet was offering her the pipe.

She walked from the sweatlodge, across the meadow, to her home. The steam rose into the air off of her wet clothes and hung above her in a dense and sluggish fog as she lifted unwieldy left leg and then unwieldy right. The
Pimatisewin
is right beside her house.

There was a piece of paper taped to the tree. In her dreamwalk, she was graceful and light. As she moved closer to the tree, she noticed two things that scared the crap out of her.

The piece of paper had the words
“basil and corn flour”
written on it.

Also, it was in her handwriting.

S
KINNY FREDA HAS BEEN GONE
, maybe two days, Bernice doesn’t really know how long. After a while she had heard her and Lola talking downstairs. She considers getting up to crouch next to the heating grate to eavesdrop, but is conserving her strength. And. There was nothing interesting enough in their tone to get her out of bed. Physically, she doesn’t know if she
can
get up. She is aware, somewhere in her body, that things are shutting down. But from the same place, Bernice knows this is okay. She has not resigned herself to anything but occupying the space she is in, taking one raspy breath whenever she can, and trying to come back to her skinself. When she does this, she has peace with whatever happens. A knowledge is born in her: that she has been to Then. And. She might not make it back. To Now.

Little pieces of Now trickle in to her. One time Bernice heard Lola and Freda talking about Chuck Woolery from the
Love Connection
and the next day, well she thought it was the next day, the bakery didn’t open. She thinks that maybe they went visiting or something but wasn’t sure. She had felt a little peevish that they had gone without saying anything to her, but also that she had better keep her mouth shut.

Skinny Freda may be a lot of things, Bernice thinks, but she is no fool and she does not suffer fools. When she does wake up, if she wakes up, Bernice thinks, she’d better have a pretty damn good story to tell her. One thing Freda likes more than cigarettes and honky-tonk music is a good story. She doesn’t quite know what she will tell Freda if she unsinks. She can feel her body now, it’s loose and stiff at the same time. Her head, though, that will be the hard
part. Part of her was lost for so long that it is hard to enunciate what, exactly, she has found. That she left for the first time the night of the pageant. That she steeled herself at the Christly school, and found in that steel a chance of escape. That care, the group home, lent her the knowledge that she could be strong in silence. That the Ingelsons taught her that home was not a mélange of stuff, kindness and chance. That Edmonton, her real school, taught her to change, because she had to. That returning to Loon taught her what family was not. Too much, too few words to describe it and none of them adequate to explain it. Nope, Freda would not like this story, she supposes.

Bernice suspects that Skinny Freda is up to something. She’s started buying smokes (not rolling her own) and has worn lipstick for two days. Bernice wonders if someone is coming. Maybe Freda told someone, she thought. Maybe she called Momma. Bernice would like to but finds herself unable to shake her head. She knows what no one is telling her. Momma is gone. She had pretended she believed it before, to punish herself. Now, she can feel Maggie’s absence, like the smell of smoke once cedar has burned. She is gone, Bernice tells herself, but even in her sleepingwake state, she can feel her mom. Not around her or near, but in another way that she can’t quite figure out.

One thing she is certain of, and that is that Skinny Freda – the same Skinny Freda who swore off white men because they “smelled funny” – and Lola are planning something. They keep laughing and talking and Bernice wonders, a bit grumpily truth be told, what they are doing when they are
not spending their time taking care of her. She would like to chew her nails and is too weak to do so; she tries to look at them and sees through some haze (is that new? Now? Then?) that there is silver paint and sparkles on them. That Freda, she thought that if your toes and fingers looked good, you would have to feel good because they’re closest to the world. Bernice almost smiles.

That crazy Skinny Freda.