The Sudden Weight of Snow (17 page)

Matthew didn’t answer. “What do those hippies tell you? Do they tell that there is no God, only your almighty self? Do they tell you that we’re all one, that we should worship each other like gods? How do you worship with them, Sylvia? Do you worship with your bodies?”

“Stop it,” I said through clenched teeth, men.

“Hard to face the truth sometimes, isn’t it?”

“Shut up, Matthew.”

“Nice, Sylvia. That all you have to say?”

“What is there to say? You seem to have everything already figured out yourself.” I got up, knocking the chair back as I did, walked past Matthew, through the foyer, and out of the church. I made my way home, thinking not about Matthew but about Vera. When I did, I felt sadness and anger at once. I realized that Vera was being betrayed on some level by the very people that she so desperately wanted to think of as family.

Vera’s desires aren’t complicated. In Northern Alberta, people her age are moving off farms and into the city. They want TVs, hi-fi stereos, rumpus rooms. Vera wants something else – likeminded people, community, a simple life. She wants to meet people who understand you can live without running water or electricity, that you can live this way with community support and cooperation. She has told her sisters about her ideas, imploring them to remember a time when all of them lived like she imagines they can again. Her sisters just laugh and tell Vera she isn’t old enough to remember how hard it was. She is the baby of the family and has always been spoiled.

Jim Harper is the first person Vera meets who understands what she is talking about. He tells her there are places where people haven’t forgotten – where a whole new movement of young people like themselves have remembered how good it is to live simply. To live on love, community, shared experience.
At first, she is worried that he is a dreamer. Her sister, Al, has told her that men like him can’t be trusted and will amount to nothing. They start to sour when the silver spoon in their mouth is no longer full of sugar.

The Harpers, of course, have high hopes for Jim, their oldest. Mr. Harper had been a lawyer in Edmonton before deciding to run an entire town, and would be a lawyer again, once he was voted out of office. The Harpers wanted to move to a small town to raise their children, to give them some sort of an idyllic, Canadian childhood – not too much of one though, hence the private school in Edmonton – in a time when everyone else was trying to move to the city. They would be cultured, yet down-to-earth children, appreciative of literature and astronomy as well as hard work and honest small-town living.

Since he can’t get into McGill, the Harpers send Jim to the University of Alberta, which, they convince themselves, is a perfectly respectable institution. They rent him an apartment of his own in Edmonton because he has had to endure so many years of sharing a dorm room at the academy. Jim switches from sciences to the humanities without telling his parents. He is thinking about studying philosophy. His grades aren’t the best, granted, but they represent only a small fraction of knowledge – that which can be measured quantitatively, doled out in classrooms and lecture halls. Jim returns to Fly Hills most weekends and goes to the bar in the basement to shoot pool or slide rocks up and down a shuffleboard, his slim hip cocked just so.

After their first few dates, Jim takes Vera on rides in his convertible, a high-school graduation gift, to Alberta Beach or
the city. On one of these dates, he starts driving west, towards the Rockies, where he wants to spend the night under the stars, huddled together for warmth, but Vera insists that she has to be home for her mother, alone in the efficiency apartment. She is the vestal daughter, he is the prodigal son, and both families oppose their relationship – he is not Catholic, she is not middle class. Two months later, Jim Harper sells his convertible, buys a brand new 1969 Ford truck with a camper, and quits university.

Vera has the presence of mind to call her sisters – all three of them – to tell them that she is leaving and they had better figure out what to do with Mother. Before they go, Vera goes to the church each day, although never into the confessional, and stays awake all night counting out her rosary. Because she doesn’t know how she will possibly explain herself, Vera writes her mother a long letter in Ukrainian even though she knows her mother has never learned to read. Her mother will wake up in the apartment alone one morning and stare at the pages for a long time. Then she will go downstairs to the store to ask if someone can help her use the phone.

For a few weeks, they live in the camper in the back yard of a friend of Jim’s in Edmonton. On the day before they leave, while Jim and his friends struggle to get the heavy, wooden camper onto the back of the truck, their girlfriends take Vera out and convince her to get her hair cut. They all have pixie cuts and cropped pants, cat’s-eye glasses. Vera feels like the farm girl she is with them and consents. When they return, the guys are toasting the camper with cheap wine. Neighbourhood kids have gathered around. Everyone has seen campers before on postcards and in photographs from California, but few in
Alberta have seen a real one, mounted and ready to go. Even though he doesn’t say anything, Vera can tell that Jim doesn’t like her new haircut. He tells her next day that she’s different from those girls, that he doesn’t want her to feel like she needs to conform ever again.

On their first night together they camp near the Badlands. In the early evening, they walk through the hoodoos, the setting sun rendering everything orange. Vera finds what appears to be a femur. They have been told they will find dinosaur bones here and to leave them where they are. Neither of them imagined they’d find something so large. It is half the size of Vera herself. She runs her hands along the bone, which is jutting out of a crevice. Vera is a virgin and will be until they get married. She cries at not being able to be more free, thinks she must be disappointing Jim but he soothes her in the camper at night, tells her it’s okay. He assures Vera that they will be free together, that he will wait for her to unfurl, then he will be the one to keep her open, keep her face pointed at the sun.

They drive through Montana, the truck climbing and sputtering up mountain passes; stop at Yellowstone and watch, with a ridge of other people, the canyon turn bright ochre with a band of sun. The truck doesn’t make the gutted road to see Old Faithful but other people tell them it wasn’t much, a column of steam. They are looking increasingly dishevelled, and Jim is sworn and spat at when they stop for milk in a town in Wyoming that boasts the world’s largest antler arch. In Idaho they watch potatoes the size of baby’s heads cascade out of chutes into large trucks. By Arizona, Vera’s resolve is wearing thin. She thinks of her will being ground into fine, fine sand
every night when they stop and sleep side by side. And each night, Jim Harper comforts her, holds her close, and tells her there’s no hurry, his breath ragged, the lower half of his body tight and hard. There is no hurry – they are almost in Las Vegas and soon they will be married.

Peter and Anise don’t seem to notice you much. The girls are a handful, but you can take care of yourself – and you do. You realize that by cultivating this self-sufficiency, you don’t call too much attention to what you are doing or when you are coming and going. You realize that you can live on the edge of your family, just as you exist on the periphery of the world of the junior high and the kids there, not truly part of either sphere. Sometimes this makes you feel free and undomesticated, other times just lonely. It’s as though you could slip off either edge, fall into that chasm between family and school, and it would take a while for anyone from either camp to notice.

One afternoon you ask Peter for Susan’s phone number and he doesn’t get it to you for several days – whether he simply keeps forgetting or he has to locate the number, you don’t know. He doesn’t ask you why you want to talk to her, but you guess it requires no explanation. She is your mother, after all. Nonetheless, you wait until Anise isn’t home to call. Somehow you think it might offend Anise, make her feel lacking, even though she doesn’t seem to try very hard to be a mother to you. It takes a couple of calls before you are able to connect with Susan. When you do, she seems genuinely pleased to
hear from you, though a bit surprised, as though you are an old friend who has just thought to call. She asks you all the right questions – how living in California is, how your schoolwork is going, if you have friends – but you don’t have the right answers. You don’t have the words to tell her that nothing seems as it should be, though you don’t know yourself what that would be.

Perhaps this is because you are at the age when, you’ve been told, new and powerful hormones are being secreted throughout your body. Although you have not been to public school in two years, Anise and Peter decide you should attend the sex ed. classes at a local junior high. This seems not only unnecessary but slightly absurd. Peter hasn’t told you much, but Anise has gone on and on as she does about most things. When you are finished breakfast and about to start your work, she calls out to you from the kitchen. The youngest girl is almost three, but Anise still has her sitting in a high chair. Another is colouring at the table. The oldest is running laps around the kitchen, living room, and dining room, the last of which has been converted back into your study.

Anise calls over her shoulder as she does the dishes by hand. There’s a dishwasher, but it’s never been used while you’ve lived there as anything other than storage. “You know, you’ll be getting feelings that may seem strange to you, they may not, I don’t remember them feeling particularly strange – good yes, strange no –” You were going to try to continue your work while she chattered, but realize she is about to start a roll. “But then, I’m not a boy, am I? Although I think a lot of the so-called gender differences between the sexes are socialized, another
reason, by the way, that you’re not in school, nothing but reinforcement of socialized norms and stereotypes, anyway, you’ll get these feelings, I’m sure you know the ones, know what I’m getting at.” You stare at her back, her shoulders moving as she moves dishes from sink to rack, continues talking, and you think,
stop stop stop
. “I’m not trying to be coy but how does one describe
those feelings
? I guess, well, okay, let’s be honest here, although I know that you know what I’m talking about –
sexual
feelings, feelings that make you want to, well, okay, maybe we don’t need to get that honest, huh?” Anise turns and winks here, and you look down at your textbook. “And I think, I know Peter thinks too, that you shouldn’t deny those feelings, you shouldn’t repress them or pretend they’re not there, of course they’re there and they’re great! The thing is, you should know how to deal with them in, you know, an open and honest way, you should know how to respect your body and other people’s bodies because the universe gave us these great, juicy, meaty, sexy bodies for a reason, you know?” She shakes her hands into the sink and turns around. “How do you feel about this? Am I overwhelming you, I didn’t mean to overwhelm you, I mean, I just want us to be able to talk about this – all of this – openly, honestly, as a family. I know you’ve been talking to Peter about this, have you been talking to Peter about this?”

At this point, you say, “Sorta,” still looking at the page of your book, equations arranging and rearranging themselves under your gaze. Anise is crossing the kitchen, and just as you are hoping that she won’t sit down across from you in the dining room, the girl at the table jumps down to join her sister running laps. Unfortunately, they are running in opposite
directions and collide as they each round a blind corner. Anise is deflected and guides your two sisters to the bathroom where she will apply herbal salves while you look after the youngest. You lift her out of the high chair and she toddles from the kitchen and climbs up into your lap. You hold her around her waist with one arm, while your other hand is pencilling equations. She is not usually a calm child, but this morning she sits on your knee in seemingly perfect contentment while her sisters wail down the hall in the bathroom. She even breathes a small sigh and leans against your bony chest, her head a globe of warmth.

You have had a few days like this, Anise telling you about the feelings you will be having. She seems to forget who she’s talking to or that she’s talking to anyone at all and sometimes she tells you things followed by “Oops, guess you didn’t need to know that much about your old step-ma, huh?” It seems unnecessary after all this to go to a sex ed. class at the junior high but both Peter and Anise insist. “We know a lot about sex, we do, I’m not saying we don’t, hey, Peter? But we must be missing something, I mean, about sexual development – who knows what new information they have about hormones and all that these days – not that you should take what they say as some kind of guiding truth, Lord no, the opposite, believe half of what you see and none of what you hear, but you want to get as much information as you can so you can make up your own mind. We believe you are old enough, mature enough, really, to make up your own mind, to make choices, respectful choices, don’t we, Peter?”