Birdie (8 page)

She remembers girls screeching, running, thumping and laughing. She remembers opening her lunch kit and taking out the note from her mom that her Auntie Val placed there.

She had shredded the paper slowly, curling each piece around her fingertips before letting the warm wind blow it away. After that, she remembers, that tingle started in her toes and hands and she had to adjust her vision, like she imagined a crocodile did with his lids. She could hear everything, taste the colours of the sky, the grass, the dirt on the hill. She knew now that something had changed. That she had changed. That she had altered. Girls ran around her like she was not there. She could see the tops of their heads as they chased each other and sat together on this hill. She remembers. They smelled like soap.

The next day the Sisters sent her home with a note for her aunt, telling her that “her charge” had been absent from school without excuse the previous afternoon. Bernice recalls being livid (possessing the outrage of a teenager wronged by adults) and explaining that she
was
in class, and getting lectured about the ills and evils of lying.

Bernice had taken the note home, but Auntie Val hadn’t shown up for three days at that point. It had taken another week for the Pecker Palace manager to notice and three days more for him to call Social Services. Enjoying the quiet, Bernice had been surprised when the police came to the door with the tired social worker. Looking around at Pecker Palace, she tried not to feel relieved. Relief felt like disloyalty.

When Bernice awakens? Unfurls? Un-changes? Rises? she can smell Christ’s Academy on her skin. It’s impossible, she knows, but she has been there. The line between im/possible is not as absolute as it once was. That there is an arbitrariness in the world that she never suspected existed takes a physical toll on her. She can feel that her hands are clenched in front of her and a grunt of agitation sits bridled in her chest. It is as though her body was waking her spirit up. She finds the space between them awkward.

She used to wake up to her mother’s singing. Maggie Meetoos had the most amazing voice. Two days out of three she was as tone-deaf as a riveter. On the third day, though – oh the third day! – she had the voice of a seasoned blues mistress. As
well, her momma could turn anything into a torch song. Until she was seventeen, Bernice thought “How Much is that Doggy in the Window?” was a blues anthem. Maggie’s deep timbre belied her diminutive size. At five feet tall and one hundred pounds, her daughter’s size dwarfed her. If it wasn’t for her voice and her fists when she drank, you would forget that those sounds came from her body.

“She wore bluuuuuuuuuue velllllllllllllllvet …”
Bobby Vinton on 78. Bernice remembers things frying, meat mostly, in a sizzling frenzy on the stove. Her mom shuffling across the ripped linoleum effortlessly as she stirred this and flipped that. The morning noise was comforting to Bernice who, hunched over her journal at the kitchen table, felt the difference between the stove heat and the summer heat stealing in the back screen door.

Back Then, before Now, before the Academy and all that followed, she dreamed that she could smell odd things in the lodge and she wondered if this was normal. She thought she smelled olives, but a bit stronger. Well, she couldn’t actually smell it, but she knew it smelled like that in there. Now, of course, she knows this is – well, her normal.

One day, when her mom still puttered, Bernice sat in the kitchen and asked her questions. She had patience then, and Maggie was sometimes lost in thought before she answered. In that, she and her bigdaughter were the same. They shared an alertness sharpened by long periods of silence and thoughtfulness. In years, in too few years, when Maggie started vanishing, Bernice would remember that the silences could also be rich and full.

“How did you meet Dad?” “Did you have any other boyfriends?” “Where did you go to school?” “Did
Moshom
*
and
Kohkom
take you visiting, too?”

Maggie fluttered and her thoughts landed lightly, with her pecking at the questions and laughing every so often. Bernice learns that her dad gave her mom a terrible perfume their first Christmas together that smelled like rotten grapefruit, that the first time she cooked him his favourite meal – kidneys – their house smelled like pee for three days, that Valene had a crush on Conway Twitty for years, and that her mom dated one man before Bernice’s dad. Sometimes, it didn’t matter what she asked, she just got happy answers.

“Where did Freda come from?” In her mind’s eye, Bernice sees her mom stop and cock her head, done eating. As if she had heard a potential predator rustling in the bush.

It was five minutes, at least, before her mother answered. “Same as everyone else. From a mom and a dad.” Maggie’s coffee cup slipped a bit, slopping some liquid on the counter.

“Enough. I better get finished in here.” She walked outside, carrying the laundry soap, seemed to remember herself, and headed to the washer and dryer in the basement.

Bernice went under the stairs to have some alone time. When she came upon her auntie, she was only momentarily disappointed to share her space.

“Grab me the scissors, Bernice.” Auntie Val had motioned with her lips to the vanity/shelf screwed in beside the door, which held books, pens and the scissors.

While everyone knew that Bernice’s room was off limits, it also served as a haven for Valene when she visited the
Meetoos family. Never quite satisfied with being reserve-adjacent, Auntie Val took it personally that the family was not allowed to live there.

*
Grandfather.

Looking out the window from the bed while painting her toenails, she had pointed to the rez with her lips. “Don’t know why you guys never got a house on the rez.”

“Mom says we can’t have one,” Bernice had answered, sitting down to do her own nails and immediately smearing her toenail on her bedspread.

“Oh did she?” Auntie Val narrowed her lips, a considerable task when you thought of the size of them. “Be a lot more room for you guys at Little Loon,” she told Bernice.

“Hey dreamy-eyes, how’s your old auntie look now?”

In truth, Valene
was
a vision. A red velvet dress fought for supremacy over her stomach and wearily pledged its allegiance to her auntie’s wide bottom. Her eyelashes, totally regrown since an unfortunate eyelash curler incident, fluttered prettily over amber brown eyes.

And her mouth, her singularly Cree mouth, which laughs so loud and curls up so easily, was bathed in a shade of red that only clowns and Valene Calliou can wear.

She had stared at her little mother, with the mammoth bosom and the truck driver mouth, the living proof that a fat Indian woman can get laid, and said, “Oh Auntie, you’re a dream.” And meant it.

For Bernice Meetoos had no doubt that sort of woman, her sort of woman, could be loved. She herself had seen the glowwarm in the eyes of a few men. Mostly they were older, sometimes they were drunk, and often they went home
alone. But they were out there. Out there waiting for this gorgeous smart big woman to finally enjoyably, consensually and delightfully screw them.

Auntie Val, Bernice had no doubt, had all of this and knew it to be true.

“She’s spending too much time with
your
sister,” her uncle Larry had told Bernice’s mom, his oldest sister, one night as Bernice stood listening outside the kitchen window.

She can and did imagine her mom wiping her hands on her dishtowel and brushing her hair from her eyes. Now, Bernice thinks of them as tear-stained eyes, but then she just knew her mom to be exhausted. From taking care. From propping up. From being the one.

“She’s your sister, too. And it seems to me, Larry,” she said in her soft drone, “Bernice needs someone to lead her.”

“But that old—”

Impatience cloaks her words. “Enough.”

For a while after that she avoided her mother’s eyes. Sometimes it was hard to look at her mom, her mom in the size four dress, and remember that they were related. And that she could not follow her.

Bernice squeezes her eyes shut and tries not to think of that feeling. Of near home. There. Her mom.

It seems to her that she has been running on a half a tank since she moved to the ocean. She never thought that she would live near the ocean. Sure, she watched
The Beachcombers
and
wondered about the life Jesse would have outside of Molly’s Reach. Like if he moved to Vancouver or something. She went straight to Edmonton when she left the San. She found it changed since she had lived there last. The Academy had turned co-ed. The neighbourhood feel was gone. What she had liked about the city best when she lived there and was looking forward to upon her return was the anonymity. It still existed, that
something
about its size and the feeling you get when no one knows you in such a big place. She had liked seeing hundreds of new people and not having a past or a future with them. Walking down Jasper Avenue, perched between rich and poor, its split personality like a memory or a premonition of something unpredictable. Sometimes, just to scare herself, she would lose track of where she walked and would be just like a baby in the middle of some huge shopping mall. Except, no one was looking for her. When she left her auntie’s house the day after the change with deer fur still on her pants, she knew she would not live there ever again. She was done, it was too close to home, and she didn’t want to remember. Those memories littered her mind like a sandstorm.

In the city, you could smell earth, but it was the disposable and compostable earth (mould, mildew and dust) that she found suffused her clothes, her hair and the stuff she carried in her cart. The smellmemory competes with the yeasty richness of the bakery and she feels it in the room. Her home. Her old home. Her notional home. Living in Edmonton, around Edmonton, about Edmonton, under Edmonton was the same as living in and about the rez. Living next to the reserve in a house at the outskirts of town was no different than living
under the pedestrian bridge next to the Kinsmen Centre. There were woods, a river, she didn’t fit in, and she had to rely on herself for protection.

It was a life she chose, or that chose her, once she was in the city. When her auntie lost her job. When she was left alone. She was old enough. After the Academy, care, and when she came back to Edmonton before the San, she made her way just fine – for a long time she appreciated and lived off the goodwill of friends, then friends of friends, and eventually strangers. Inevitably, when the goodwill ran out, so did she. Much of that time is perfectly clear in her head. She had moments of perfection living on the streets. Philosophical discussions, arguments about Indian rights, and exchanges about the old ways and how to live them in a new time. Of course, those were tempered by lost times. Times that are not so perfectly clear, even with the clarity she seems to possess on the Sealy, where she was flanked by harsh words, cruelties and fights. Then, she escaped and changed herself. She has little memory of Then, but when she came back from wherever her spirit spirited her she liked to imagine she was a wolf, living in the green and watching the city through wolf eyes. Until one night. She didn’t know how long she had been gone before she slept. Didn’t know how long she slept.

The next morning. She had a crow feather between her lips when she woke up.

When she allows herself to think of the past, it is a past that was safe and from which she had taken pieces to construct a manageable present. Most often, she thinks of who she was then in terms of what she could see and smell around her.

There is a cacophonous noise in the bakery below her. She can hear Lola enjoying the busy work of preparation. Thump thump thump. Murmur. Dull thud dull thud dull thud. Laugh. Bernice imagines she can smell yeast and butter in the waves of rising heat. The ovens make a low hummmm and ground the cooking in something solid and permanent.

“Can you imagine?” Lola cackles, and a new cadence answers. Chops and softens, rises and lilts, with no discernible word pattern. For some reason, Bernice is struck with a thought: that sounds happy.

True, she has the smell of loss on her and is anxious in her demeanour and stares too long but she knows this feeling.

She can feel Freda’s bones, tired and sad, curving so much like her own, below her.

No one told Crow that a scavenger’s breath always smells like death.