The Sudden Weight of Snow (2 page)

Thirty-six steps down the hall to a door leading out of the school and I was free, a clap of cold hitting my cheeks as I opened the door. Krista was on the other side, waiting for me. This is the moment I mark as the beginning of this story. Then, things still seemed as simple as opening a door and walking away. On that day, the cold was the worst thing we would feel. It was an afternoon in the middle of November and the air was sharp. Too cold to sit in the park by the Salmon River and watch the water pass through town, catching on trees that swept the surface and eddying, then moving on. We walked the twelve blocks down the hill to the centre of town, small and nearly deserted as it was, to the drug store.

Krista and I had a running joke that we could pull a truck up to the doors of Community Drugs and News, walk in, unload the contents of the shelves into the truck, and drive away. The clerk would look up long enough to blink before folding herself back into a tabloid paper. There were three clerks – all women, all interchangeable – who had a distinctly middle-aged air of contempt and resignation, and they were all, it seemed, nearly blind.

In the parking lot Krista stopped walking, straddled a concrete divider, and drew the smoke from the cigarette she was smoking through her nose. I jumped on and off the concrete slabs to keep myself warm and she cocked her chin to
say watch this
. I looked as two cirrus lines of smoke snaked between her parted lips and her nostrils. Around her, a grey cloud. “Hey?” she said, eyebrow raised. She was practising French inhaling.

“Pretty good, Kris, but not quite.”

“Yeah, thanks, slut.”

“No problem, skank.”

“Whew, you smell something?”

Krista flicked the butt and we watched its trail like a comet before we walked across the parking lot. Small bells hit the door and we started talking as soon as we entered the store. We had a routine – talk loudly enough to distract the clerks, fabricate tales that might be more interesting than the tabloids. Keep moving.

“Did you hear about Rick and Tammy?” (
lipstick slipped into a sleeve
). “You mean, after Tammy slept with Rick’s dad?” (
eyeshadow tucked into a sock
). “Yeah, old news. Well, you know how Tammy’s hamsters went missing?” (
facial astringent dropped into a pocket
). “Oh no, Rick didn’t kill them, did he?” (
stomach sucked in, magazine tucked into waistband
). “No, worse” (
at the till, cinnamon gum pulled from the rack
), “Worse? Yes, just this, thanks” (
fumbling in pockets for change, careful not to let anything fall out
). “Worse. One word: felching, if you know what I mean.” (
I did, of course – we consulted the dictionary for the words guys whispered to us in the hall
.) “Thank you. Good afternoon!” (
back out into the parking lot, laughing
).

Krista and I went from the drugstore to the public library downtown, where we emptied out our loot. We traced eyeshadow along lashes and in the crease of lids, flicked on mascara. Krista applied lipstick, her mouth gaping. “So many women miss the corners,” she told me, stretching her lips tight against her teeth. “I hate it when you see the line where lipstick ends.” This was a serious endeavour. “Come with me to the mall. My mom’ll give you a ride home.” Getting from library to mall was a challenge. There were public buses in Sawmill,
but they only appeared once an hour, if that. Everything was, in theory, walkable, but the mall was on the other side of town. We lurked in the library parking lot, following people to their cars until we found someone going in that direction.

Krista’s mother managed a record store in the mall and her father worked shifts at the mill. The mall on a weekday afternoon in Sawmill Creek was a quiet, dark place. It wasn’t like malls in the city – ceilings vaulted and full of glass, palms looming in atriums, chrome gleaming and the sticky odour of perfume wafting out of department stores. Creekside Mall was an L with a Super Valu on one end and a Kmart on the other. The corridors were paved chocolate brown and dark orange and there was a row of benches down the middle, covered in a fabric that appeared to be burlap. The stores included JR’s, which sold dark hard denim and large belt buckles, Sparklers, which sold lottery tickets, key chains and hollow jewellery, Rim Rock Records, and three women’s clothing stores that all started with S and sold the same thin cotton clothing.

“Well, aren’t you two looking like a couple of tramps,” Krista’s mother said when we walked into the store.

“Oh stop, Mom, you’re flattering us.”

“Harper, hon, your mom will have a fit if she sees you with all that makeup on.”

“I know.”

“She knows, Mom. She’ll wash it off. And I believe the proper term is ‘your mother will have a cow.’ ”

“Smartass.” Mrs. Delaney emerged from behind the counter. “Come here, do the till. I’m going for a smoke.” She was wearing tight, high-waisted jeans with tiny, useless pockets
and a white belt that was obviously not there to hold them up. The belt matched her white boots, calf-high and tasselled. When she and Krista changed places, Mrs. Delaney leaned over the counter and began teasing her daughter’s hair with her fingers.

“Mother!” Krista swatted her away.

“I’m sorry, but it’s flat, honey.”

Mrs. Delaney and my own mother didn’t know what to make of each other. Their main interaction was dropping us off and picking us up at each other’s houses, and they liked it that way.

Later, my face clean from scrubbing in the mall bathroom, Mrs. Delaney drove me home, she and Krista in the front seat banging Bon Jovi onto the dashboard together. When I got out, Krista opened her door a crack, yelled, “Don’t forget to pick me up for church Sunday, hey?” We never forgot to pick her up. Krista had yelled that for her mother’s sake.

We arrived in Sawmill Creek when I was six and my brother, Nick, was four. We came with our mother, Vera, and the family van. Our father, Jim Harper, had given up the vehicle without a fight. We had left Alberta, where Vera and Jim had been together before and after we came along. Away from cold winters and the memory of screaming matches packed tight into the house. We were moving, our mother assured us, right into paradise. South, over the Rockies and into British Columbia. Off the flat land, out of the ragged mountains, and
into smooth, rolling hills coated with green. Warm valleys, deep lakes, orchards in bloom. Fruit falling ripe from trees.

We arrived in June, the valley already holding the promise of heat for us like a gift, and we stayed at Ed’s Motor Inn on Lakeshore Avenue for the first month. There was no lake at that end of the avenue but we didn’t mind. Nick and I lived in flip-flops and sticky bathing suits that stank of chlorine from the motel pool. Vera wore loose sundresses and sandals with leather straps that criss-crossed up her leg. She would sit on the motel bed, her feet still strung into the sandals, wipe the heat from her forehead, and sigh. This is the only time in my life that I remember being allowed to sit in the blue glow of a TV for hours, jump on beds, and eat food that came directly out of boxes. Vera didn’t know what she was doing with us yet. She was on her own with two young kids and memories of a man who told her she should allow us to do anything, let us explore our world.

We were given Tahiti Treat and Mountain Dew to drink through straws in the car, windows open and heads hanging out in the heat, while Vera went in and out of grocery stores, banks, and houses with For Sale signs posted on lawns outside them. This was a time when you could still leave children alone in cars. You could ply them with candy and leave them on benches in malls, saying
Stay right here
. Especially in paradise. Nick and I were fairly accommodating.

We all chose the house. “A farmhouse,” Vera crooned over and over. There were two rooms tucked into the slope of ceiling on either side of the staircase. Nick and I liked these tiny rooms. They were like forts, and our mother’s room was far away, down
an entire flight of stairs. The house was on the edge of town and our yard skirted a cul-de-sac in a new subdivision. On the other side, the lawn fell into a ravine before it rose to a tiny, manicured golf course. A small abandoned field behind us ended blunt where the hill began, suddenly thick with forest. We heard Vera on the phone, telling people that she, a Prairie girl, had never lived so close to an honest-to-God forest. Nick and I didn’t discriminate yet between forest and parking lot, ravine and road, back of van and bedroom. We didn’t yet know the difference between moving and staying still.

Vera got a job as a secretary in Dr. Holland’s office. She assured us it was temporary. She had worked as a librarian in Edmonton and she wanted to do that again. There was one small library in Sawmill Creek and apparently a lot of women who wanted to work there. I’m not sure why. By the time I was seventeen, Vera was still at Dr. Holland’s office. She hadn’t mentioned it being temporary for years. When I overheard her talk about it, she would say, “It’s comfortable,” or, “We have a good relationship. It’s been so long we’re almost like family.”

Vera, I realized as I got older, liked to think of other people as family. It seemed easier for her to think of them as closely related to her, rather than accepting them simply as friends, acquaintances, or colleagues. I remember Dr. and Mrs. Holland being invited to dinner, Nick and I fidgeting at the table in our church clothes while the forced geniality of the adults’ conversation lurched on. My mother and Dr. Holland were definitely not like family. By the time I was in high school, I only saw him when I stopped by the office, or the odd time when I was walking along the road and he drove by on his way to the golf
course. He would honk his horn and acknowledge me with a quick, assured chop to the air, looking away before I could wave back.

When we first lived in Sawmill Creek, Nick and I both became aligned with a band of children that radiated from the cul-de-sac out, into the field behind our house and then into the bush behind the field. They came to us, and they were all boys. With these boys, we threw robins’ eggs from nests just to collect the shards of blue, which when ground and spread on the skin were a sure source of incredible strength and courage, or so we believed. We collected windfalls from the abandoned apple trees, twisted and dwarfed with lack of care, and launched apple wars across the field. The windfalls were in various stages of rotting and usually didn’t hurt when they hit, but they made a satisfying snap of apple skin breaking open and releasing juice as they did. With these boys, we crawled tunnels into the brush at the edge of the field, prodded at piles of rocks with sticks to taunt garter snakes, caught grasshoppers in our hands and stuffed them down each other’s shirts. There is no way to describe the feeling of a panicked insect’s fine, sharp legs against your skin, looking for a way out.

Dungeons and Dragons marked my exodus from the group. It was played with dice and glossy manuals, warlocks and dungeon masters dictating an entire afternoon’s activities. Play had moved inside, into the houses that circled the cul-de-sac and lined the neighbouring streets. It was in houses that my girlness became apparent. There were mothers who said, “Oh, look, you’ve brought your sister,” to Nick as though I was a novelty or a baby-sitter. And there were other sisters. Sisters
were summoned from within the house, even from neighbouring houses. Sisters my age, or younger, or older, driving Barbie’s Star Trailer toward me or waving a life-sized bodiless plastic head with long blond hair. “Look, we can do her hair!” they would say, smiling in a calm and oddly convincing way. Boys had basements where they could play D & D or manoeuvre joysticks and buttons through games on Atari. Girls had bedrooms where we could pull clothes on and off dolls, seduce Ken with Skipper, and slam their hard plastic bodies together until Barbie raised her bent arm and slapped Ken, then changed into a new outfit.

The cul-de-sac is where we went between school and home. When we walked across the field to go home for dinner, we both knew not to tell Vera all the details of our day. Once, Vera, Nick, and I seemed to exist as a single entity. We had always been with Vera, sharing the front seat of the van while she drove, sharing a grocery cart while she shopped, or Nick propped on her hip, my hand in hers as she walked. She must’ve been happy to find a small house and a large yard. Somewhere she could put us down and let us run. I don’t know when it happened but by the time I was walking home with Nick across the back field, we had become three separate people.