Birdie (6 page)

“Not likely.” Over time, she had found that her capacity to lie had diminished. If she could get away without speaking, she would never have to lie.

“Oh, the type you don’t bring home to …”

Bernice’s head had filled the room with the sounds of flames flickering. She could hear nothing else. Lola’s lips moved and expectation flooded her face, but Bernice was already mixing and pouring, stirring and folding.

One day a letter came from her
kohkom
to the bakery.
Kohkom
was the only person Bernice ever told where she had gone. She had also told her in Cree, as if it couldn’t come into the white world if it was spoken in their language. The letter was in Freda’s handwriting and Bernice knew
Kohkom
had Skinny Freda write down everything that she said. Reading it was just like listening to her. Her mother was gone (and Bernice tries hard not to think
dead and gone
). Or gone dead. The letter didn’t say. It didn’t matter, she had felt as much. Still, she worried about her
kohkom
having to say it and Freda having to write it. No one knew where Maggie was, Freda had translated.

Bernice knew the truth, though. She had killed her mother. Carrying Bernice’s secrets had been too much for her mother. She shouldn’t have told her the truth. Shouldn’t have gone to Maggie in her sleep. Shouldn’t have given her the shame in a dreambundle. Should have let her think she just ran away. But it was too late and there was no one left to carry that bundle except her. A couple of times she was going to tell Freda about it, but changed her mind just as the ugly words tore at the back of her lips to get out. When she left for the San she could have told Freda so she could take care. Instead, she breathed in deeply and held the breath until she squirmed too much and saw stars. Everyone knows too much oxygen can smother unwanted words. And now she is glad she did breathe because those words would have killed Skinny Freda just like they killed her mom.

She was fidgety then, she thinks, like her insides were squirming to fit her outsides. Or her outsides were trying to find the person that formerly occupied them. Lola stared at her.
Spoke words she could not hear. Bernice had soothed herself by running her fingers through her hair and was surprised, once again, at its shortness. At that time, it had grown out three or four inches since she cut it. It is now at her shoulders again, but when Lola saw what she had done she marched her right over to Shear Talent to get the ends evened out. Bernice can’t remember who paid. Maybe it was one of those kindnesses that Lola heaps on her that can’t actually be felt or measured – so much so that you don’t actually notice it. Like the free meals. Like not smacking her gum or speaking too loudly around her. Like when she coaxed Bernice into her ‘74 Malibu and pretended she was not looking for Pat John’s house. How shocked he would have been to see an emaciated sixty-two-year-old in teal tights and red lipstick and an ample Cree woman in baker’s whites parked by the road in front of his house.

With a jolt, she noticed Lola was gesticulating and miming something she and the girls did in Reno last year. Bernice had heard the story already and stared at Lola, only to hear the sound of a crackling fire as wind whipped flames.

“Okay, get me a pack of Salems, too,” Lola had said, reaching for her purse.

“What?”

“You said ‘cigarettes,’ kid, just like ya’ were a smoker yourself.”

“I thought you were cutting down.”

“Not today. Make them lights, okay?” She tried to hand Bernice a ten.

“I’ve got money.” She had grabbed Art/Al?’s twenty-two dollars and walked next door to Ralph’s convenience store.

The sounds of Lola and Freda’s laughter drift up the stairs. She is sensitive to sound now and wonders when that started. She has wolf ears, she thinks, smiling a bit behind her face. Maybe it’s being housed in the same small room for so long, but she feels like all of her sensepowers are sharper. She can tell when Freda is on her time. She knows, with precision, when the sun will rise and set. She can tell when Freda is sneaking up the stairs, hoping to catch her … what? Awake? Alive? In her skin?

She knows, though,
Bernice thinks,
that I am not my self as much. Anymore.

Accepting this as her truth, she closes her eyes and does not sleep. But. Moves.

Freda was always the spitting image of Maggie. It used to bother Bernice that this tiny little woman had come from another mother and still was more closely related to Maggie than she could ever be. Freda was born looking like a wizened old woman and even, sometimes, resembled one now, but when she was young, her cousin and Maggie used to sit together in the lodge, the space between her mother and herself occupied by the mini-Maggie doppelgänger. While it bothered her, Bernice had accepted it as natural, that she could in no way take the space of niecedaughter next to the tiny mom whom she had eclipsed in size at age ten.

Perhaps what was most paining was that Maggie was able to express warmth to Freda in ways that she could not to her own daughter. Bernice watched as her mom smoothed out Freda’s hair, patted her brow on occasion and took her hand in public. In this, Bernice knew her mom was demonstrating motherlove for her motherless cousin. It was warm and generous. But, she still felt like her mother’s ability to love more than one child at once was meagre. In truth, Freda was a lovable kid. Talkative, interested and light, words rushed out of her like river water on stones. Bernice, who found herself difficult to love, had always believed that her mom could not love her. Could not love BigHer. Could not find enough love within her to spread around.

When she said as much to her Auntie Val, the bigwoman-sisterlittlemother had patted her hand. “No. Birdie. No. She doesn’t love Freda more. She loves you too much to treat you like that.”

Bernice had never known what that meant until she found a bird, still on the ground, after hitting their picture window. She fed it and watered it, watched it for hours and prayed for it to heal. She would not touch it, though. She wanted it to find its kin and fit in again without her tainting it.

And, in truth, Bernice harbours none of the fearanger and rage that seemed to sit on Maggie’s and Freda’s skin like a bruise. Bernice’s injury was more akin to the internal injuries sustained from a crash. They pained, were always there and could manifest at any time. For the most part, they stayed beneath the surface. Unobserved.

Freda’s rage was more accessible and evident than Maggie’s,
certainly. She had a hair-trigger temper (and later, a rye-trigger temper) that flamed and snuffed easily. While Maggie’s would burn less often, the intensity of it was so familiar to Bernice that she grew fearful when she didn’t feel it.

There was a time when Bernice could feel that rage in her mom every day. When Freda stayed with them there was the hum of a potential anger storm. Even she could not get a read on Maggie’s rage. Bernice could, though. The house would grow fat with acrimony; the air pungent with rancour. Her eyes would sting with the vinegariness of malignity. Bernice didn’t know quite where it came from, but there were two distinct eventualities that arose from it. Auntie Val would come over while Maggie took to her bed. She lavished Bernice and Freda with praise, food and hugs. A second effect: Freda moved from Maggie’s house to Val’s and became her daughter. No one ever mentioned it. No one ever talked about a lot of things. What happened to Freda’s mom. Why Freda lived with everyone at one time or another. Why Maggie stopped talking to anyone. When the electricity would come back on. Why no one stayed with the uncles. The silence about what was happening around them seeped into the kitchen, first. Permeating the curtains. Eating into the linoleum. Eventually settling in the fridge. It was like some sort of bad medicine – it made Freda skinny, Bernice fat, and Maggie disappear.

In her mind, which feels oddly sharp and awake in the haze and among the bedclothes, Bernice recalls Freda disappearing for weeks on end. Then, she would show up, all scrubbed up and made up, at Maggie’s with tight clothes on and hickeys on her neck. Once in a while on these visits to her old home,
Maggie would look through Bernice, catch sight of something familiar in Freda and pause. Bernice couldn’t understand it but there was some sort of challenge going on, like Freda was daring Maggie to see her again. Maggie just stared, though. Never said a word. Never raised a telling eyebrow.

Over time, things between Freda and Maggie became like things between Maggie and everyone. A quiet acceptance that this was the way she would be now. The only proof that they had ever been mother and daughter was the angst Bernice carried with her that her mom could give her up, too, at any time.

Bernice’s skin feels electric; the pale cool sheets seem to sizzle around her. This. This is unknown to her. She is not sure, but believes that if she sat up she would be spring-like. This. This is anger.

MANY TRIPS, MANY SUFFERINGS

misiwanacihow
: someone who fell victim to suffering

In the old dream, the one she kept having when she lived at home – when there was a home – she was too fat to get into the sweatlodge. But she does get in and sits near the door on the women’s side – a place of honour – but only because she knew that if she ventured past the women in the lodge she would fall into the fire. She was the last person in and it was a full house – her legs were pressed too tightly together.

Flesh folded on flesh.

A man, an invisible and too near her man, was passing the pipe to her. She had to reach over the empty space in front of the door. Her arms felt heavy and dough-like and she had to heave her weighted self towards him to grasp, too roughly, the offered pipe.

She is seated by her Auntie Val and Skinny Freda. There was a
moniaskwew
*
seated right beside them, but the woman didn’t look like anyone she knows. Everyone was real quiet, listening to a Storyteller.

*
White woman.

T
HINKFEELING IT NOW,
Bernice would have to say that the change had started in Edmonton. She went there after she left the San. She didn’t sink; she skipped on the water. First, she started to dream in black-and-white. Not just any black-and-white, but Charlie Chaplin, old film new machine black-and-white. Stilted motions and pantomimed facial expressions, she could never quite understand what was being said as there was no sound in these dreams. No piano player to indicate the action is intensifying or that the emotion has deepened. Each morning since the movies started, well, every afternoon if truth be told, she had awakened with a too-familiar ache in her chest; the pain below her breastbone felt nothing like a bird. She couldn’t discern if it was her conscience or her feelings that hurt, so she ignored it.

In the time before she truly sank, the dreams would linger with her throughout the day, almost forgotten, as she rushed to get out of her pyjamas and into whatever clothes were sitting nearest to the bed. Although they started when she was in Edmonton when she left the San, those dreams fill her now, floating in and out of the room whether she is awake or not. Now, she suspects that not inviting the dreams in made her a bit wonky in Alberta. (
Wonky and wonkier,
she often thought to herself, stifling a laugh.) But it was in Edmonton that her dream life and her waking life had begun to fold over each other, seamlessly, like dough in a pan. In order to maintain what she understood as normal, she found that she had to be very quiet. She stifled a lot, then. It is strange, while immobile now, she feels more awake, aware and engaged than she ever has. She stifles nothing. But then. Then: loud laughs, too-big
smiles and inappropriate questions at people on the street. She swallowed frank stares at, crazy thoughts about, and unsuitable gestures towards any person who happened to pass by her. The “trouble,” as near as she could figure it, began almost as soon as she left the San. One day, she decided she was going to visit her Auntie Val. She had planned to stay with her, initially, but found the space between her dream and waking life too precarious and did not want to take that to her auntie’s place. Her auntie had given her a key for her apartment the last time she visited Bernice at the San and she remembered it that morning. On that day, when she was changed, she walked down Jasper Avenue, waited at the bus stop and was sitting there when the line between dreaming and waking life seemed to blur – she became someone else. At first, she thought that she had made herself scarce, but on the second day of no eye contact and no acknowledgment, she knew the truth: she had made the change.

Her
kohkom
*
used to be able to do the change. When she got to the city and told people who her
kohkom
was, someone gave her a book about that. It was called
Shapeshifters
and it was filled with a whole bunch of phony-baloney stuff. There was, however, a picture of Rose Calliou, her
kohkom,
on page seventy-seven.
Kohkom
was squinting like she couldn’t quite make out who was taking her picture. She had her hair in an ever-present braid, and if the sepia page had been in colour, she knows that the skirt, shirt and shawl would have matched only in their brightness and not their colour scheme. Rich purples, oranges and pinks filled
Kohkom
’s wardrobe. Seeing
her flat and two-dimensional on the page had upset her and she felt like crying but didn’t need to – by then, and not since she sank, she had cried so often that when she wasn’t crying the space occupied by where the tears used to be felt like a phantom limb. So disconnected is she from her body, or perhaps so intertwined are emotion and body, that she is not sure she would know if she was crying. Pain currently registers in her skin and sorrow in her breasts. Whether that translates to tears or not is still something of which she is not aware. She knows, as well as she knows the indentation of that knife beneath her, that it could mean she is detached. She also thinks that she is registering and responding to the change in a way that lets her shroud and feel things as she needs to. It reminds her of cocooning – and the thought at once soothes her.

*
Kohkom
means “your/her/his grandmother.” (
Nohkom
means “my grandmother.”)

In Edmonton, still numb from the incessant thrum and howl of the San, she used to try and try to turn herself into a bug. She thought about wandering through the treacherous orange shag rug that Auntie Val had in her living room. She imagined she would be able to climb up the door jamb and out the window. Then she would imagine doing the change and becoming a butterfly and flying high high high until her breath was hard to find. She never imagined coming back. Auntie Val’s apartment, unkindly regarded as “Pecker Palace” by the people who knew such things, was on a busy street between a convenience store that always smelled of spoiled hamburger (although they did not sell meat) and a halfway house for men. It served as a post house. Post-marriage, post–skid apartment, post–last bad job. What kept them from thinking of their home, their lives, their jobs as pre-anything was also something
understood by those in the know. Now she thinks often about how much she hated going there, thinking of it as home. Then, she could not afford the luxury of disdain.

When she felt the change coming on that time, she found herself oddly teary all week. There was a sense of alteration, of movement, but she couldn’t tell if it was that she had lost something or found something. Keeping her head up, interacting with the world in small ways made it clearer: something had shifted. It wasn’t as if she needed it quantified, but a general animal, vegetable or mineral categorization might have helped. Something about the San had altered her; it was like being amongst so many crazies had allowed her one crazy thought of her own: I can shift. With so many skewed, altered and created realities around her, Bernice no longer felt her foot tethered. To Here. Now. By the time she left for Edmonton she had a comfort in her that she had never known. It was Edmonton where she learned how to skip on the water. Presently, it is not hard to imagine how she got Here. It is infinitely more difficult to understand what Here is. It is not the soiled Sealy, the smell of sweatsadness or Freda and Lola’s endless “pop ins” to see if she has moved. Eaten. Changed. She wants to tell them that the change is precisely the thing. She knew she could change by the time she left the San, but the story of the change started in Edmonton, is too much to tell, and can’t possibly be translated to there. That bed, that room, that bakery. Here started on Edmonton public transit.

On that day, the day when she shifted entirely, she got on the Edmonton City Centre bus, its exhaust pouring out like the steam from a dragon’s mouth. She was the last one to get
on. Walking unevenly to the back of the bus, and trying to balance her bigself as the city bus pulled away from the curb, her skin, she remembers, felt alive and ancient. She sat across from two old women who were speaking a language she didn’t recognize. It sounded throaty and nasally like Blackfoot but the language also felt liquid and had the rich cadence of Dene, so she couldn’t place it. Every so often the old women would pepper their conversation with terminology for which there must not be translations. “Microwave,” one woman said between a rush of other words. The other old woman nodded and smiled, smiled and nodded. There was comfort in their familiarity with each other. She felt the longing for the women in her family so acutely that it gnawed at her like a presence.

Back home, sometimes the grandmothers would gather for tea and whatever they were working on together. They would talk about their children and grandchildren in Cree. Every so often words would come out that had no Cree translation. “Satellite dish!” one of her grandmothers would pronounce.
Kohkom
would smile and nod, nod and smile. Those children and grandchildren who had moved to the city got special mention and a firmness in the lips when they were discussed. Back then, she believed that this was an indication that moving away from home – be it the rez or the town next to it – was a failure of sorts. Once she had made the move to the big city and become a big shot (the only two times when “big” had a pejorative meaning) she re-wrote the firm lips and the deliberate mention of relocation. She equated the city, once she lived there, with jobs and resources that don’t exist in Little Loon.

That day on the bus, when it lurched to a stop and picked up a family, she watched as a young mom had difficulty getting her stroller up the steps. One of The Kids was a short and pudgy boy about three years old. His face was smeared with grape something and he seemed to be still enjoying it. Another of the children was a little older, but not by much, she thought, with two long black braids hanging to his waist. There were four kids in all. Every one of them had a runny nose.

Cluck cluck cluck said an old woman with her tongue against the roof of her mouth but without opening it. Nod and frown, frown and nod said the other. Bernice realized without surprise that she was becoming someone else, someone who could speak without talking. The change took her voice and gave her a new talk (that this new talk could include old white woman Ukrainian did not give her pause).

The woman with The Kids had sat next to her and said, Oh it’s cold on here! Her lips didn’t move and Bernice had wondered how she had learned to talk this way.

Yeah, the newer ones have heaters all the way to the back though, Bernice answered her.

Just as well, they need to keep bundled anyhow, the mother said, pointing in her kids’ direction with her lips.

Must be Cree,
Bernice thought.

You from the city? the woman asked her.

No, up north, Bernice answered.

I thought so, did I see you at Little Loon?

Probably, my mom lives there, well, in Big Valley.

Bernice looked her in the eye. You from here?

Woman with four kids laughed a big laugh, so hard her
belly shook a little. No my old man and I moved here from Poundmaker’s in the spring, he hopes to find work. She shifted her ample bottom on the seat to half-face Bernice. I told him there wasn’t no use – nobody in Edmonton’s gonna hire one of us. Bernice smiled and nodded.

You got a job? She pointed at Bernice.

No, I am going to visit my aunt.

The two old white women looked at Bernice distrustfully, she thought. Maybe they thought she had deceived them by not being Indian with them right away. She looked at her reflection in the half-window of the bus that was closed. Long brown hair, high cheekbones and medium tone. She was medium. At least, that’s what she had been told at the cop shop. Why do they want your colour listed, anyhow? she had thought. Old ladies whispered with lips moving to themselves, now afraid to let even a little of their secret language be shared with the other women on the bus.

The cold air whistling through the bus was quite unbearable. She wished she had worn a hat and scarf. Her threadbare gloves were no match for the biting cold. She pulled the cord, the effort of raising her arm through her heavy coat and sweater draining the last of her energy. She pulled her purse to her side, picked up her Thermos and got off the bus. She gathered the last remnant of her strength and readied herself for the three-block walk to the Pecker Palace.

There were no trees to shield her from the wind. She cut through a back alley, it was shorter that way, and was surprised to see another woman taking the alley shortcut. It was late now and it was dark. One thought crossed her mind: What is
the big awful, so terrible that walking through a putrid alley alone, at night, seems safe? It was thirty below and her breath formed a foggy halo above her head as she walked. She was going full speed when she tripped over them. Deer legs. Finding them in the city surprised her. Finding them unused and discarded surprised her even more. At home the legs would be used for sausage. In the big city, they were litter. Although it was cold, she thought she could smell the hide smell.

She had tanned hides with
Kohkom
as long as she could remember.
Kohkom
would speak to her only in Cree, even though her mom had told the old lady not to. It seemed to Bernice that she could understand everything
Kohkom
said, although today she could not remember a word of Cree. They would scrape scrape scrape the remaining tissue, meat and fat from the hide,
Kohkom
with a deer bone, Bernice with a fashioned bed leg. The smell of the fat on her hands was strong and almost putrid. Nowadays, they had to keep the hides in a freezer and then thaw them out. Kind of like killing them twice,
Kohkom
told her. The smell was from freezing, thawing and freezing, not like the old days,
Kohkom
said in Cree. Bernice wondered silently if in the old days
Kohkom
used a wringer washer to soak the hides in like she did now. Wisely, she kept her mouth shut.