Birdie (4 page)

“You look so much like your auntie, you are so lucky you got the looks and the brains,” her mom told her. “Good thing you didn’t get her …” Maggie Meetoos paused. “… full nature.” She laughed.

Bernice started and covered her mouth with her hand involuntarily. She didn’t know that her mom thought she was pretty. She had always thought of Freda as the pretty one, the one who got attention. She also wondered what Auntie Val’s full nature was. Something in her ears let her know that it was not necessarily a good thing.

“You know your auntie used to be a bookworm too?” her mom asked her.

Two secrets. Two things she did not know. It came to Bernice that her mom was drunk. Maggie kept secrets like
some women kept canned goods: sealed and in the dark until they were needed. When her mom was drunk, Bernice tried to balance her fear with her fascination. And while it always scared her, her stomach knotting instantly and her back tense, it was a lot like sitting in the lodge: people were quite hard to make out but you couldn’t wait for what you heard next. The problem was, though, that as her mom relaxed, Bernice got more and more tense. On those rare occasions, less rare as Bernice grew up, when her mother drank to excess, Bernice would hide in the basement and read under a shoulder-high lamp near the dryer. She turned the dryer on to generate heat and to block out the noise of the adults upstairs. White noise drowning out the brown noise.

“When you were a little girl,
iskwesis
,” her mother said, “your Auntie Valene hugged you to herself and told me that you were her daughter.”

Maggie shifted awkwardly in her chair, as if the booze made her uncomfortable in her skin. “I’d never seen anyone so in love with another person that was not their birthchild.”

To Bernice’s amazement, her mom’s eyes had filled up.

“She is your
kee kuh wee sis,
your little mother.”

Three secrets. Three. She had another mom.

“When Val went …” – Maggie searched her daughter’s face to see what the smart girl knew – “… away – away from here – she never called or nothing. Just left, mad at us and crazy at the world. When she came back, she wasn’t the same anymore.”

Noticing the worry on her daughter’s face, she said, “She loves you just as much, Birdie, she’s just lost the piece of her that knows how to show it.”

Showing it is precisely the thing that Bernice struggles with as she remembers that moment. Inside her, she swells with memories and prickles with bodily reminders of her life. Before. Here. Her body and her emotions are inseparable now, her Sealy mattress a vessel within which one thing becomes indiscernible from another. Lying there, filled with a mix of emotions and feelings: hurt, pain, longing, love and remorse – Bernice’s body reveals none of this in its calm. To Freda and Lola, whom she can feel the worry on like a hangover, she is failing, but she knows better. This is a gathering.

Her strength is surely being tested, she thinks. Her ache for home, home being something she does not yet understand, and a place she has never been, brushes over her like a skirt hem on the floor. If the women could see her insides, she imagines they would see a churning, a quickening, a real live storm inside of her. Whatever was happening, her pulse remains the same while her skin feels lit from within.

The feeling is a little bit like that moment before fainting, if she remembers correctly. She is a bit of an expert and remembers it felt like taking off and then putting on your skin again. She tries to think of herself as a moose stew. She will know when she is done. Her mom made the best moose stew; maybe it was because the meat was always fresh, maybe it was because her bannock was served with it, but that stew was like a tonic that could cure most things. Maybe, she thinks, moose is home.

The last time she had fresh moose was in the fall, before she moved into the city to go to school. She would have been
twelve or thirteen. Her mom, of course, made it. Tiny and weary, her mom was unusually heavy on her feet as she got up and walked to the tall pine cupboard that she had recently painted and put in the kitchen. Her short brown arm barely touched the rear of the cupboard and she almost disappeared as she reached for something in the back. Bernice saw her eyes flutter as she grasped what she was looking for and tipped it with her fingers in to get it. She pulled out a brown box, which rattled with change. Her mom seemed to have trouble holding her balance, and she veered a bit towards the stairs trying to make it back to her chair at the table.

Her mom had fished out a five-dollar bill. “Can you go and get me some salt from the HiLo? It’s still early and we’re gonna need some tonight.”

“Salt tonight? We still have lots.” She had lifted the shaker, shaped like a fat dancing white woman. It felt heavy.

“Ayuh, we’ll need more, I’m gonna dry some meat and make some stew tonight.”

“Tonight?” She was trying to get her mom to talk because she didn’t want to go outside in the dark and in the windy cold.

“Don’t stall, put your clothes on. The sooner you get out there the sooner you will get home.”

Bernice had trudged to the front door and put on her jacket.

“Not that one, the parka, and you’d better put your snow pants on, too.”

“I’ll look stupid, I hate those pants, Mom, they’re too small and they make me look …” – she searched for a word – “… like a bimbo.”

Bimbo the Birthday Clown was on every Saturday at 6:30
in the morning during the
Uncle Bobby
show. He was the worst part of the Professor Kitzel, Max the Mouse and Spider-Man marathon that she, Freda and whichever cousins were over used to watch together.

“Don’t use that word in this house,” her mother spat venomously at her. “Don’t you ever use that word.”

Though tiny, she solidly planted herself in front of Bernice, and assumed a threatening stance. For a second she was afraid her mom would smack her.

“Don’t hit me.” Bernice cowered in the corner, fully dressed and hopefully padded enough with her coat, snow pants and mitts not to feel the blow too hard.

Something had registered on her mom’s face. Something at once shocked and ashamed. She stepped back and said quietly, “Get out, Birdie, go for a walk and get some air. You spend too much time indoors. Go now.”

In the stillness of her room, Bernice hears her own breath, a bit ragged. She can feel her mom’s resignation to something but doesn’t want to know what it is. Above the rumble of the noise from the bakery, she barely registers and refuses to recognize something from her mother that is at once familiar and painful. Her palate for pain, though, is well developed. She recognizes the flavour in her mouth as bitter and dull. It tastes like defeat.

Bernice had put on a toque and stepped into the early evening dark of the near-winter. The wind wheezed and whistled at her as she trudged through the new snow. It was hard and starting to get packed beneath her feet, and she thought that it was starting to get that brown sugar feel. She walked
as quickly as her asthma and padding would allow her. She crossed the main road only when all of the traffic had passed, and when she started to move again she felt a chill in her legs that served as notice that she had been standing on the roadside for a very long time.

She slipped and almost fell on the icy lot of the HiLo Mart.

“Nice move, buffalo,” a voice called out.

It was Tim Lerat, dressed in a jean jacket and hunting cap. He looked even spookier at night with his hair unkempt and a cigarette dangling from his lips. He was, of course, with a group of younger boys who tried to look and act like him whenever possible.

“Yeah, way to go,” echoed Shorty Moostoos. He was fifteen, two years younger than Tim, but he was just a bit taller than Bernice.

“Get bent,” she yelled at them as she reached the door, silently thanking Mickey Spillane for the comeback.

She watched them warily through the glass of the HiLo, but only when she turned corners and stopped to stare at goods on the shelves. They were waiting for her like the wolves in
Call of the Wild.
She imagined them scratching at the glass, the hard nails of animals clicking against glass as they frantically tried to scratch through to their prey.

She looks at Old Man Pocock, he watched her every move, the owner of the HiLo trusted no one. But Bernice knew all about him. He suspected that everyone did what he had been doing for years, trying to make the best of his situation by ripping off the old, imbecilic and immature. Surrounded in his wealth, he wanted more and couldn’t see what he had. He was
like the men in
The Little Prince
who could not see a single rose in their flower gardens because they were always looking for more. She was certain he saw only a hat, and smiled because she could not only see the elephant that lived within the snake, she could hear it call to her.

“What are you looking for, Bernice Meetoos?” He yelled at her from a table-length away.

She glanced at the door; the wolves were still there, spitting and smoking as all bad wolves do.

“I’m, uh, looking for, uh, some salt.” She knew she was standing right in front of the boxed Sifto.

“Are you blind? It’s right there.” He lurched off his stool and pointed to, but did not touch, the salt. It was almost like he didn’t want to touch something that she was about to buy and take home.

“Oh, thanks, yeah, I see it.”

She lifted it off the shelf and dropped it immediately, the sound of Shorty’s laughter as Tim howls startling her. She looked towards the door and sees that Tim had taken his pants off, no – had pulled them down, to reveal his bottom, cleaved, spread and pressed against the glass directly in front of her.

She stared at this display in wonder. She was quite sure he had hair on his bum.

She looked at Old Man Pocock and pretended she didn’t see what he knew she saw. Walking to the till, she pulled off her mitten and took out the five-dollar bill. She passed it to him and watched him carefully as he counted out her change with the three fingers he had on his right hand. She waited for him to put the change on the counter, but as usual, he
stood there until she put her hand out to receive the change. He has stopped trying to shortchange her as her math skills have caught him twice before. Freda told her that the old man does it for fun, to separate the smart kids from the dumb ones. Bernice didn’t care and never lingered in the store.

“I’d like a bag, please.”

He grunted and reached under the counter; he had never offered her a bag in her whole life.

She turned slowly on her heel and was relieved to find that the wolves had disappeared. She knew that they wouldn’t be far away, though, and she ran the three blocks home. When she reached the corner of her street she was wheezing and puffing, her breath was shallow and it came from her throat. She slowed down and tried to do her deep-breathing exercises.

By the time she reached her house her breathing was almost normal. There were vehicles parked in the driveway and in front of the house. She walked to her uncle Larry’s truck, as it seemed to be in the centre of the driveway. Sometimes he had cases of beer in the back of his truck. She thought that she would hide them if he did. She had done this before, and on two of the occasions the party broke up early. She looked in the window of his Chevy and saw Terry’s purse spilled on the seat. She can tell that it was hers because the leather was bright green. It must have come from a cow something like the horses in
The Wizard of Oz
at the Emerald City, she thought.

She looked in the back of the truck and found not beer, but blood. It looked like a pink Slushie, the blood in the truck box crystalline and frozen. There were pink drops and red
blotches leading over the open end of the box and up the driveway. She followed them to the garage door. Nancy Drew would know what to do, but all she could think to do was to climb up the snow piled on the side of the garage between her house and the Olsons’ and peek in the window.

The party was now a post-hunt party. Terry, her uncle Larry, her dad, Colin Ratt, Leonard Auger and Billy Morin sat on milk crates around an inky black moose. She saw that the beer had made it into the garage and that the men were flushed and talking with lots of gestures and movement. Terry laughed and tipped her head back at something her dad whispered to her. She went to grab a beer and bent over right in front of her dad.

“Bimbo.” She breathed onto the small glass pane, fogging it up instantly. The frost covered Terry’s miniskirted legs.

There was plastic on her dad’s workshop tables, which had been pushed together, and there was a big roll of brown butcher’s paper on the cement floor.

The men, as if receiving a signal, moved towards the moose. The garage tilted and blurred towards her as she saw the flashing of a knife in her uncle’s hand. He skinned the moose cleanly and quickly, leaving the nose. The nose is a delicacy, she knew, and they would have it at feast. Steam rose off the still warm moose as cold air hits its nakedness. Terry grabbed a knife, like a prisoner on a prison break, and grabbed the moose’s ear. The blood clouds Bernice’s eyes and she retched, missing herself and hitting the lilac shrub. She sat down and watched the brown Cokey liquid freeze to the sparse bare branches of the tree like tiny ornaments on a Christmas tree.

Sometime later, she heard her mom calling her name and after that she felt her arms around her.

“Come inside, my girl, you’ve been gone so long.” She peeked in the window. “They enjoy this more than they should.” Her voice sounded funny and as she clung to her mother, she thought she saw tears sparkling in her tired liquid brown eyes.

Bernice was put in a hot bath, her mom squeezed oranges into it.

Bernice kept adding hot water until the heater was empty. She pulled on her mom’s Sturgeon Lake T-shirt and crawled into her own bed. Her mom had put an extra blanket on the bed and came in every once in a while to see if Bernice was asleep yet. She was achy and thought she might be sick, but she was too tired to talk.

Later, the sounds of heavy boots walking in the front door and pounding across the floor, to the freezer, she imagined, woke her up.