Birdie (16 page)

It was Lola who had pointed out that Bernice wore a different shirt each day. At first. She makes a mental note to ask Val if she is changing her. Bernice has lost so much weight that Freda and Lola went out and bought her some new tops, thinking that Bernice might want something that fit comfortably. Sometimes when Freda passes those clothes sitting on the tiny dresser, she harrumphs in Bernice’s general direction. Impatient with their tidiness, angry with their newness.

Now. They sit there. Washed but unused. Freda is scared to figure out when the shirt became the same shirt. When the San pants became the only pants. The tops are colourful and vivid, clothes Bernice would never choose herself. They are the types of shirts that a girl of eighteen should wear. Well, not Bernice or Auntie Val (who would not make her wear the new clothes), but certainly Lola and Freda at eighteen.

When Freda was girlish, she fancied herself a snappy dresser. Having seen the girls in Vancouver on the way to Gibsons, she knows she was not. It never bothered her before. Dressing provocatively on a budget had always garnered a certain type of attention, and Freda liked it. She saw Lola looking admiringly at a woman dressed in loose and well-cut
clothes when they snuck off to the city to get supplies for the bakery one day. Lola caught her staring at the woman and Freda knew in that awkward moment that she had been dressing for a different kind of life, her whole life. Her prom dress (well, she didn’t actually graduate, but she did go to the prom with Winston Nighttraveller) was a pink confection. Maggie had started sewing it but became upset one night when she had to remove the gathers from the slippery fabric one too many times. Eventually, they took the dress to a seamstress in Grande Prairie who finished it two hours before the graduation ceremony. Freda remembers the dress. And sometimes, when she allows herself, she recalls Winston’s hand on the small of her back, shaking at their proximity. That was then. Before she met her first husband, Louis. Five years after she graduated from girl to woman. Louis used to like it when she dressed in heels and miniskirts. For five years she bent her back out of shape and wondered if her ass was hanging out every time she walked down the street. At first, he would whistle slowly and a lovely light came into his pale-blue eyes when he saw her walking towards him. Later, that lovely light metastasized into a fierce gleam as griefanger replaced tenderness.

Then came a year of sack dresses and stretchy pants as Louis regrouped and she hoped for the glimmer of that light and a smile not so tight again.

She still has the last note she sent to him, and then took back after he had read it and fallen asleep over too many beers at the kitchen table.

When Freda buys lottery tickets, goes to bingo or plays poker she puts that note on the table and taps it four times before making any decision. Maybe she will win back that money that he took from her underwear drawer when he left. That money was their daughter’s. Money saved for a trip to Disneyland that she would never take. Money saved for a school she would never go to. Crinkled bills in a baggie, stashed away. Disease doesn’t care what plans you have, she thought later, you can have bags of money and your own ideas about what is going to happen. Doesn’t matter. Sickness has its own baggies that it leaves behind. A stash of rage. A freezer-size bag of unrelenting hurt, one of tears and a garbage bag of plans.

After she left, she went back to wearing miniskirts and stilettos for a while. Soon, her back was aching again and her ass dropped. That was the goddamn shame of it – as soon as
she was feeling good enough to wear her cheap and cheery outfits, the bottom fell out.

Still, she wanted to wear those clothes – sheer, high-cut, low-cut, backless, sleeveless (what was left?) – she had wanted to wear them for herself. Not Winston. Not for any white guy. And then. She met Wes Wiebe. Who could have known when Freda fell, really tumbled, it would be for a Phil? She met him at a bar in Edmonton during the rodeo. Black hair and blue eyes, wow, there was something about that combination that did her in every time.

And that time. Oh Lord, sometimes she still gets dizzy just thinking about him. And the way he walked towards her. Asked her to dance and took her hand and led her to the already wet dance floor. Among the beer ruins they slipped and slid together and apart. Two-stepped to country rock. Waltzed to two-steps. Fumbled their clothes off in his old pickup and moved together and apart on horse blankets and Robin’s Doughnuts coffee cups.

Four weekends in a row they met and left the bar as soon as they saw each other. Four Fridays and four Saturdays they had near-drunken expressions on their faces as they looked at each other in shock in the glow of the dashboard. Sometimes she remembers the point where he was breathless and teary, and she responded in the same way, as fear and joy dripped from her mouth in a babble of affection plus. In later years, she will wonder if the baggie of her diseased love was the same as his, or if he actually felt those things. Whether she remembered it in a way that made her feel less shameful in what she gave him. Or, rather, gave away.

She worked at a gas station then, and as she remembers it,
work became effortless. The clients less hostile. The demands less demanding. She began to listen to the radio and really heard and understood what all the love songs were about. Humming and sighing, she made her way through the week to sit impatiently and so patiently on a barstool at a seedy country bar in the industrial area of Edmonton. Anticipation battled expectation for supremacy in her belly. And each time, until the last time, she was rewarded with the glimmer of recognition, hope and appreciation in Wes Wiebe’s eyes.

Until the last time. After a double shift, a whirlwind of get-ready and a shot of rye to calm her nerves, she sat im/patiently at “their” spot. She had arrived two hours later than usual and was giddy to see the frustration and wanting on her man’s face. Glancing under her weekend eyelashes at the door, her hopes rose and fell each time she saw a black cowboy hat. Finally, her fear got the best of her and she started drinking to calm her jangly nerves. She thought about calling him and remembered their playful exchange of the weekend before when she had asked for his telephone number.

Her eyes sting with the sheer shame of it, but she tells herself it’s the vinegar she is using to clean the countertops and tells Lola she is heading outside for a smoke.

Her cheeks still burning, she remembers: “I don’t have a phone,” he teased her, and then kissed the thought from her head. She blushes again thinking of what he wrote on the paper with the pen she had forced on him:

She knows it is stupid, but she kept that note, too. Carries it with her every day. Of course, she now knows with certainty the moment when she unlocked the gate and let her stupidity out. The liquor lubricated her brain, quite opposite of the effect she was hoping for, and her synapses made connections she had talked herself out of. Before. When he was with her. As she got drunker, her folly played out in her head.

“I’m too busy for a girlfriend.”

“I only come to town on weekends.”

“Tell me where you work, so I’ll always know where to find you.”

“We’ve got a good thing here, why ruin it with commitment?”

“I would love to end up with a girl just like you.”

“Don’t you have other friends who you can hang out with?”

“Maybe you could meet me outside the bar?”

“They’re not really my friends; don’t pay any attention to them.”

And when they said goodbye, always: “Nice knowin’ ya.”

She didn’t know, really didn’t understand his cruelty, until the Canadian Club clarified it completely.

That roughness in his mouth extended to his hands and she recognized now that her bruised breasts and scraped thighs were something more than passion. Less than passionate.

And she had responded in kind. Bruising his shoulders, scraping his back. She had thought it was love and had given in to that part of herself that wanted to be hurt. And that piece of the hope of something bigger, something loving, turned into a kernel of something indescribably hard. She wonders
now how desperate she must have been to accept that ugly gift and return it. To have felt aroused at the near-beating. At that moment, she began to reject and loathe that thing in her that needed to be hit, hard. And she knew within that fury that she hated him, too. For introducing it so glibly. For making her a one-time offer.

That last night, as her legs got wobblier and her head fuzzier, she began to crave regular, to unkink herself. She undid her shirt to her navel, small brown breasts peeking out every time she almost fell off her chair. She spread her legs lasciviously on the barstool in an open invitation to all the normal men at Cowboys. The man she ended up with was surprised by her lack of responsiveness, and why not, put off by her prudishness.

“Gimme your phone number,” she had cried in the middle of the night to the long-empty room.

She showed up at Cowboys for the next four weekends, hoped not to see Wes, prayed that he would show up. And hated herself for needing him. Needing it. Again. Still.

She started wearing stretchy pants again then, wears them to this day, with long sweaters and vivid tops and high heels with the skinniest of heels. It is almost too hot for her clothes in Gibsons, in a week or two she will have to think about shorts and T-shirts. Possibly, she could wear those new tops of Bernice’s if her cousin doesn’t take a liking to them. Or. Doesn’t. She walks into the heat of the bakery, muttering. “Pilsner and Cheezies. Jesus Christ.”

She sometimes thinks that she was raised by good women and educated by less than good men. Bernice was one of those
good women. She took care of Freda, made sure doors were locked, that Freda had a ride, that she got out safe. Her cousin protected Freda from the uncles. Without knowing that Freda was doubly in jeopardy, more at risk for an unkind life than even Bernice. She loves her cousin dearly for protecting her, even without knowing the uncles’ particular interest in her.

Pausing at the doorframe, she is sure she hears that crazy fat wheezing cook in the storefront of the bakery. She looks around, sees Lola sitting in the front window, staring, and goes to look at the ovens. There are pies in the new oven and bread in the old one – it gets and stays hot faster and is better for the loaves that seem to multiply in it. There is an odd smell in the bread oven, something familiar mingles with something she recognizes but does not know well. It smells like the ceremony soup.
Iskwesisihkan.
*
And something else. Tamarind? She doesn’t know the taste, but the smell is like something she tried at one of those Indian buffets Birdie sometimes made her go to. She goes to ask Lola about it, thinks better of it and heads up the stairs, careful not to alert her cousin to her presence. She feels guilty about her stealth. Rather, she thinks she should feel guilty about her stealth. Not wanting to face Bernice or Lola with all of this Wes around her, she hits the top of the stairs. Stops. Gathers herself and walks in to see her cousin. Valene had driven to the city hours ago, telling Lola and Freda she was “getting Birdie’s groceries.” The big woman had a list in her hand and determination in her eye as she walked out the door. Freda knew better than to say anything, but suspects the list was not her aunt’s. But Bernice’s. Which is ridiculous. But it has been a while since she believed in reason, anyhow.

*
Barley.

Bernice is on her side, facing away from the door. Her breath is regular, but a bit ragged at the end. Freda feels something heavy in her throat and is surprised to find she is about to cry.

Freda never cries.

She didn’t cry when she found out she was adopted. She didn’t shed a tear when someone mean told her that she was related by awful birth to Maggie and Val. Didn’t spill a drop, not on one day, that she was a “throwaway” baby. Not one salty smattering when her uncles tried to get a hold of her. Not one piece of sadness given over to the knowledge that she was conceived by her uncle’s hideous act. Maybe she didn’t cry because tears were a currency in her life for so long that holding them back meant she was richer. Whatever the reason, looking at her biglittle cousin, the one who gave up her lifebody so Freda could have her own, she is filled with sadness and pain that she cannot pinpoint, could not describe and will not share. And there is something else. Twin sisters, remorse and regret, sitting next to the ugly cousin at the wake: responsibility.

Freda thinks Birdie is dying. But she also knows she is cooking something up in that head of hers.

That kid never wasted a thought,
she says to herself. Stops. Because she sounds like Lola.