The Sudden Weight of Snow (22 page)

“I was suffocating. Look, I love you but I don’t want to live in a house where all that seems to matter are the mistakes you made in the past and how the church can absolve all of us from them. The church isn’t going to do that, Mom. They’re still blaming you for those mistakes.”

Vera was silent for a moment before she said, “I’m sorry that you feel that way.”

“I’m sorry, too. But you can’t go on trying to protect me from making my own mistakes. I really need some time to sort some things out on my own, without you or anyone from the church.”

I began to feel dizzy with exhaustion, my mouth dry, an ache stretched taut across my forehead. We were not going to reach a resolution. I wasn’t going home, and while Vera wasn’t giving me her blessing, she wasn’t insisting I return either. I
have wondered many times since, what that must have cost her.

After we said goodbye, I sat at a table in the main hall of the cookshack in the fallout from the kitchen light. When I went back to the shed, I didn’t wake Gabe as I slipped into bed. As I fell asleep, I thought about rites of passage, about baptism. In the Free Church, we were baptized more than once. The first time as babies or – in the case of Nick and me or other kids who hadn’t been part of the church as infants – as young children. A liquid brand to remind our parents that we were marked as one of His. The second time was when we could accept Christ into our hearts on our own and be conscious of Him entering our bodies. For this, I was baptized in the Salmon River. Even though the Friends of Christ had no problem with bathing suits, to be baptized everyone wore clothing head to toe, then pulled on a long white smock like an enormous Victorian nightgown. I stood in the river with Pastor John, my hands on my heart and my back to him while Vera smiled so hard it brought tears to her eyes and other women thanked the Lord.

It was the middle of the summer and the river looked swollen and unmoving but the volume of water hid a tricky current on the riverbed. After Pastor John said his part and I fell back as planned, expecting his palms to cup my head and keep my eyes tipped to the sky, I simply floated downstream. Pastor John had lost his footing and gone under. I paddled back to the shore and struggled through river weeds, weighed down and waterlogged. I made my way back to the congregation upstream, relieved to see that Pastor John looked jovial in his wet robes. “God works in mysterious ways,” he chuckled. Other people
laughed but Vera didn’t. She looked at me as though what happened had been my own fault. After I was dipped again, we ate hot dogs and drank warm Pop Shoppe soda through straws. Vera had forgotten to bring me a change of clothes, so I spent the afternoon drying, river scum trapped in my underwear. I never forgot the look Vera gave me that day.

The next morning I woke sweating, the sheets soaked. When I pulled off my clothes, the feeling of the blankets against me was a dull ache, the air that slipped through pricked my skin. I moaned and when I did, my teeth began to knock against each other, seemingly of their own will. Everything ached – even my hair hurt, felt like it was forcing out from my scalp, breaking the skin. Gabe woke up and began to ask me questions. Each of my responses was a moan. I struggled against the blankets and he pushed me back under them, then got up and added new wood to the stove, blew until fire cracked, then he left the room. He returned with aspirin and water and told me he’d boil up some tea. I fell asleep to the sound of liquid rolling, the wood snapping and hissing.

I woke with my hair wrapped around my neck, in my mouth, or stuck to my face. I woke again and again, fighting it off. It held me there, roped me to the bed. By the second night, everything seemed to smell of it – the pillow slips, the sheets, the blankets. Even Gabe smelled like it.

I sat up in bed and announced, “I need to wash my hair right now or I’m going to go crazy.”

Gabe came in from the workshop. “Wash your hair? Okay. You want me to bring a basin in here or you want to go to the bathhouse?” The bathhouse was between the cookshack and the kitchen garden and adjacent to the sauna. It had been built with the sauna in mind – a place to wash off impurities steamed from pores, not a place to bathe daily. As such, it was a fair-weather structure, not at all airtight.

I craved hot water, wanted to scald the last of the fever out of me, to force each pore open and drain myself. I couldn’t get water that hot with a sponge bath. “I’ll go to the bathhouse,” I told Gabe.

January and February were the coldest months in the valley. I put on layers of long johns and sweats. I wore boots, mitts, and a hat, and wrapped a wool blanket around myself. The path from shed to sauna was slick with hard snow and ice. Because both hands held the blanket I couldn’t balance myself. Gabe steadied me down the path. He started the shower and steam was created instantly by the contrast in temperatures. I got undressed under the blanket that he held around me. I no longer felt sick but the steaming air was a sharp pain all over my body. I yelled, laughing and crying at once. Gabe held me, then gently pushed me into the shower where I continued to shriek, this time because of the heat. I shook with laughter, sobbing, as extreme cold and heat ripped across my skin, but after I was under the water for a minute, I felt my body release. I stood in the pounding stream for a long time then reached for the soap and tried to wash myself but even holding the bar made my muscles contract. Gabe was waiting on the bench
beside the shower with his jacket, hat and boots still on. I called to him. “Gabe? Will you wash me?”

He opened the shower curtain, “What?”

“Will you wash me? Please?” I repeated, my head directly in the water, not opening my eyes to look at him. A shiver rode my skin. I felt the shower curtain close and heard rustling, movement. When it was pulled back again, I opened my eyes. Gabe was there, shirtless, reaching for the soap. He still had on his boots and jeans, hair sticking out of his hat. He grinned.

“All right, hold out your body parts.” This was the first time Gabe had seen me completely naked, but I was too sick to care. It was as though the ache washed away any self-consciousness. I held out a foot first, steadying myself by bracing the walls. Then I extended a leg. The other foot, leg. Hands, arms. I leaned forward and he washed my breasts. I turned around and he washed my back. While I was turned, he slipped a hand around my waist, then between my legs and up, washed me there. He washed me there for a long time, until my hands against the shower walls felt as though they would push it out, until the hot water was not only all over my skin but pouring inside of me as well. He was just hands. Nothing else, the rest of his body held away from me, out of the water. He was just hands and when I shook and my own hands slipped from their hold on the walls, he held me up, held my hips like smooth handles.

When I got out of the shower, Gabe was fully dressed again, his hair curling around the lip of his toque. He was ready, holding towels out. He rubbed me so vigorously, I was
unable to sense the cold. In my state, I thought I could feel the dead skin balling up and ripping off. I felt the sharp points of hair that seemed like they were freezing on contact with the air, then Gabe had me lean my head over so he could wrap my hair in a towel. The moisture on my face was thick, at some consistency between liquid and ice. I started to shake and Gabe wrapped me in the blanket, forced socks and boots on my feet, and brought me back into the cookshack. The fire was lit and I stood by it shivering, the wool blanket rough against my skin, the water seeping out of my hair and soaking the towel. I wanted it gone, the hair, the mess of water it released.

I tossed my hair out of the towel, said, “Gabe, cut it, will you?”

“What?”

“My hair. I want it off.”

“I don’t know how to cut hair. I’d be scared to.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of. I just want you to cut it all off. I don’t want any style to it.” My hair hung wet and cold, drops of water on the floor around me. If it was gone, I would be clean and dry.

“What am I going to cut it with?”

“There’ve got to be scissors in here somewhere.”

Gabe went into the kitchen and I leaned toward the stove and shook my hair, listened to the water sizzle on hot surfaces. When he returned, Gabe opened and closed the scissors behind me, a swish of blade against blade, and I turned around.

“Okay, where do you want to do it?”

“Right here, right by the fire.”

Gabe pulled a chair over beside the stove and I sat down,
let the blanket fall off my shoulders and bunch around my waist. He collected my hair in his hands, held it there as if weighing it.

“You’re sure? I’ll do it if you want me to but I don’t want you to be angry with me if it doesn’t work out.”

“Just do it.” I felt a slight pull on my hair, then the scissors entered it. It was not one smooth motion of blade. My hair was thick, wet and tangled. I could feel the scissors struggle against it, then the change in pressure, the tug against my roots release when the scissors made it through some of the hair. The weight of it changed as Gabe made his way around me. He worked silently and I felt hair dropping. It fell in clumps, strands, and knots, got caught on my shoulders, breasts, stomach, back, collected on my lap.

When he stopped to brush the hair off my body, I felt as though there was more air than had ever made it to my skin before, as though my senses were clearer, the awareness of my surroundings more acute. Then the scissors began to move again, more easily and quickly. Soon, there were no more long wet strands falling, just short pieces of hair. These were even itchier. Gabe brushed me off and continued cutting. Brushed and cut, brushed and cut.

He kept going, and as the scissors got closer to my head, he began cutting more slowly, the cool pressure of the blades against my scalp. Gabe hummed. My eyes had been closed the whole time. The stove cracked and sizzled behind me. My skin was hot and clean. The sound of the scissors and Gabe’s humming became a strange lullaby. He tilted my head in every way, held my ears lightly, bending them away from the blades.
When he put down the scissors, he began to brush all the stray hair off my scalp, shoulders, face. He blew on me then got the fan used for fuelling the fire and sprayed me with air. My scalp felt electric, like it was going to split open and release something. I raised my eyes and the cookshack slowly came into focus around me. There was dark hair everywhere, fanned around us. Gabe was watching me, scissors in hand. I could smell the stink of hair that had landed on the stove and begun to burn.

Despite your initial success with high school girls, it takes you longer to actually
do it
than it does most of your friends. Surprising, as these friends are the losers Saffie was referring to, their acne dried into patches with medication just in time for them to get laid. They use their classes in common with the girls to their advantage, ask them over to study, then get them in the mood with wine, Beat poetry, old Doors albums. They begin to refer to the girls they’ve slept with as the girls they’ve made. They tell you that girls love an underdog, especially the ones who recite poetry, even though they themselves know it’s a bit of a hoax. You believe them too, although you wish you could convince yourself they were lying, that you are not close to becoming the last virgin in your group of friends.

You can’t invite any girls home with Anise and your sisters always there so you go to the school dances and the parties. You do the things you think you are supposed to – lead girls under bleachers or onto guestroom beds. It is relatively easy to get them to come with you, but since you have become a legend, you can’t use any kind of underdog status to your advantage, no matter how nervous you feel. The girls are most often already drunk, slightly sloppy. You want to be able to experience the
awkward moments of slowly gaining their trust, but instead they lie like dead weight, giggle and slur, “Oh, come on, you can take me, Mouse, take me!” but something always happens. They start to laugh or cry or, worse yet, they don’t move at all. There you are, kissing and sucking and kneading, and they are almost immobile, nearly silent and, while you struggle with your fly, everything seems so overt and so pointless at once that you can feel yourself deflate. This is not what is supposed to happen. Your desire should be insatiable. You know this from everything you’ve ever read or heard.

You like the magazines better. You and a joint and a centrefold. It’s not the centrefold, herself, though she is alluring, but everything she represents. She represents those same high school girls under the bleachers with you, their small breasts and narrow hips, but instead of blubbering or uncertain, they are sober and confident, with an uncanny knowledge of exactly what to do with their hands and their mouths.

The young guy that Peter works with at “the conservatory” – you’ve found out his name is Gord – has been keeping you supplied with magazines for more than a year now. It is Gord who brings it all together, gives you that one invaluable tip. He knows you love both girls and pot, so one evening when Peter and Anise are having a barbecue, your sisters running screaming around the lawn and the adults closing their eyes and bobbing their heads to music, Gord joins you on the deck, props his feet up on the railing and gives you the clue. “You been sharing that weed you skim off the old man?” When he asks you this, you must respond with a look of pie-eyed terror because he reassures you. “Relax. I’m just wondering if you’re
sharing it with any of the young ladies. I’ll tell you this, if I tell you anything, nothing gets the young ladies hotter than a little toke. Used to think alcohol was the thing but that just makes them silly. It’s the ganj that gets them horny. Give it a try.”