The Sudden Weight of Snow (8 page)
Sunny Bay was indeed in a sunny bay, one lined with cabins, summer homes, docks. The sand was fine and could burn the bottoms of our feet. Ponderosa pines released their smell everywhere. If you pull a pine needle, sticky with new sap, from the tree and place it on water, the pitch will release, propel the needle across the surface like a tiny motor boat. The camp was across the road from the lake and the counsellors wore reflective vests, walked right out into summer traffic, stop signs in front of them like shields. We would then stream across the road, flip-flops snapping against our feet, line up on the dock in life jackets and bathing suits worn thin on our backsides, later tip each other over in canoes. One afternoon, the canoe I was in was ambushed and I came up under it again and again, my body unable to conceive of any other way out of the water. I knocked my head against the over-turned canoe until I stopped, rested in the bubble of air between boat and water, alone, wet and dark. When the counsellors righted the boat, they wondered why I had stayed there, clinging to the beam of an over-turned seat. It was the first time that I knew my body was something that could also betray me. A moth and the dark underbelly of the canoe, a light.
There were strange names for things at camp: mess hall, canteen, chapel. Chapel was church and we had to go every day, after dinner. Chapel looked like a chapel should, small and white and pointed, complete with a steeple. It was like a church made from the folded hands of children –
Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors, and see all the people
. All God’s children, with seersucker sundresses, shorts and skin that smelled of lake and dirt, lined up in pews in the heat-trapped
chapel until we stuck to each other. The pastor from the Baptist church told us that our bodies were not our own, they were temples of Christ. Our bodies vessels for God’s will. Shipping vessels, I thought, like pieces of the Battleship game. I was a boat on my way to battle, God’s will filling the holes so I couldn’t be hit.
A-3 miss. F-9, miss. D-4, miss
. Later, my counsellor would tell us that girls were more like vases – delicate and fragile, God’s will the water that would allow us to hold things as beautiful as flowers. I didn’t like this analogy. Flowers died after a few days. The water left in the bottom of vases was thick and green and it stank.
Our bodies were also temples. Each evening, after taking horseback riding lessons or making useless crafts out of burlap, seeds, and glue, we met before dinner for cabin talk. All it took was one girl, a memory of her grade three teacher, his hands in her panties behind the desk while he explained subtraction. Four other girls choked out what was locked behind the temple doors: a grandpa who liked a bare bum on his lap; a cousin who played doctor until he was too old, too rough; a father who tickled the wrong places and groaned; the feeling of back-seat vinyl under the weight of an old family friend. Five out of the ten of us. I tried to find myself in the numbers, hoped something would come to me that would have me choking up tears.
One summer, Krista had agreed to come with me to camp. Each night, we sang and swayed with the rest of the kids at the evening service. During one of these services, a camp counsellor was murmuring into a microphone about coming up to the front. We didn’t need to say anything, she assured us, we could just rise and accept the Holy Spirit into our very own hearts.
Another counsellor was playing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” again and again on an aged electronic keyboard. One by one, kids were going to the front, some with hands raised and peaceful smiles, some racked with sobs and being comforted by a row of counsellors, a clean-scrubbed support team nodding empathetically. Even I had felt something as I crooned and swayed. Later, I would explain to myself that I had been afflicted with religious fervour. At the time, I felt God. God had felt like air in my limbs, an expanding chasm of peace replacing whatever had been there before. I would know later that God felt a little like getting high. Whatever it was, Krista felt it too. She didn’t look peaceful but her mouth was set and her eyes were focused so intently in front of her that I was sure she could rearrange air with them. She wanted something. Krista pushed past me and went up to the front, the sign that she had accepted Jesus into her heart, and stood there rigid, not sobbing or swaying like the other kids. She just stood there until the keyboard music stopped and the counsellors led us, blurry-eyed with Christ, back to our cabins.
The evening after Pastor John’s visit, some young women from the church came over to talk about peer pressure and pure living. They were in their twenties and had solemn, presumably faithful husbands and an assortment of babies and toddlers. Pastor John’s wife, Trudy, ushered them into the living room like a herd. Trudy was my mother’s age but she continued to give birth every few years which seemed to keep her in
a state of perpetual youth. We all knew Timothy 2:15: Eve’s original transgression had stained women. Childbirth could save us, bleach us clean with pain. The words were given to us right in the Bible, codes to our salvation.
These were women with names like Wendy, Dawn, and Becky who shook their bangs out of their eyes, cocked their heads slightly, and nodded at the slightest provocation. Their bodies were soft-looking and smelled faintly of baby vomit and Avon creams and perfumes and they spoke in singsong, alternating between baby talk, Bible verses, and giggling. “We know how hard it can be. We were teenagers once too although, look at us now!” They beamed lovingly at each other’s babies. “We’re here for you, whenever you need a friend in Christ, or whatever.” They each nodded toward me, feigning understanding. “Your peers will try to deceive you but His Word will keep you strong, you know?”
At the end of the evening, Vera joined us in the living room and we prayed together, a ring of faith, palms sweating between our joined hands. Then, the women formed a healing circle around me, their babies strapped in Snuglis to their chests or, if old enough, placed between their crossed legs. I lay in the middle of their joined hands, my back on the floor of our living room, limbs splayed. Each woman prayed to Jesus in a high, soft pitch for my forgiveness – “We just ask you, Lord Jesus, to let Sylvia know that we are here for her. To guide her, allow her to release her own sins, and fill her with your own spirit” – I stifled laughter after that last sentiment while the women started to sing. A couple of them began murmuring in tongues, babies gurgling their own cries and demands. I was to lie still,
eyes closed. To be healed by the buoyancy of prayer and song.
Being healed felt like holding my breath. I tried to keep myself down there, on the ground, limbs spread. Tried to convince myself I was light, floating, full of the Spirit. My unspent laughter blocked my throat and I struggled to pull in air. I shot up from the floor. “Will you stop! Please, just stop.” I left the room to shocked silence, babies still babbling, mothers still mumbling prayers.
I was uncomfortable in groups of girls and women. By the time we left Edmonton, I had been surrounded by family, aunts and uncles, male and female cousins, and had gone to daycare which I didn’t remember as being segregated. When we moved to Sawmill Creek, both elementary school and church seemed to conspire to keep me in the Holly Hobby–themed bedrooms of classmates after school or in the middle of women’s circles whenever they felt I needed support or healing.
Sometime in the sixth grade I started to develop breasts, and I felt that this would only seal my fate, take me farther away from reaching the tops of trees, balancing on the thin edges of fences. I had Vera take both Nick and me to the hairdresser in the mall. I waited until Nick got his standard cut, then took his place in the chair, and asked for the same one. The hairdresser was willing to cut my hair short but wanted to give me style, the option to curl, feather, and spray. No, I had insisted, I wanted the same cut, a boy’s cut, no curls, no cute flips. I wore my hair like that, dressed in baggy jeans and T-shirts
and made one last attempt to join the boys. When that didn’t work, I still couldn’t feign interest in Barbie’s dramas. I spent a lot of time alone, sitting on the floor in various parts of the house, sketching floor plans, windows, pieces of furniture, following lines with my eyes and then improving on the design once it was on the page.
Sometimes, mothers pick up on these things, and Vera did. She started taking me along to garage sales where she would ask me what I thought of a desk, an end table, a chair. With chipped paint and mouse turd in the drawers, I didn’t see much but Vera told me, “It’s surprising how much you can do with a good sander and some varnish.” She wasn’t wrong, but after a couple of afternoons with her and a piece of furniture set on old newspapers in the basement, I grew bored of the number of times we would have to sand the paint away to bring out the grain. I flinched at the pressure of her hand on mine, showing me how. The projects we could have completed together started cluttering the basement, banks of half-finished furniture blocking our passage to the cold room. I lost interest in refinishing furniture, grew my hair out. I only had it trimmed a couple times a year after that initial cut, grew it till it reached the strap of the bra that I eventually wore, then beyond.
I was grounded for two weeks and decided not to push it. By the end of the second week, I could smell the snow that was about to fall. A hollow, metallic tang, the sharp edges of things. Each blade of grass was a small green knife. The scent
of the mill was intoxicating when it was warm, sawdust and stripped wood hinting at the smell of entire forests – not only wood but dirt, composting leaves, bark. When it was cold, the mill gave off a smell like fermenting apples. It was the whiff of metal and rotting apples that brought with it the awareness it would snow.
Vera couldn’t seem to meet my eyes and constantly lowered her own in both anger and a denial that she was angry. I had learned in Psych 11 that this behaviour was called passive-aggressive. Psychology was new to Sawmill Creek Secondary School. The introduction to the curriculum as an elective caused concern in a town that thought psychology was for shrinks and shrinks were for softies from the city. The class had been in some sort of assessment stage for a couple of years and would likely be until people forgot about it and found something else to oppose.
On one of the afternoons of my term at home, Vera asked me to help her bring up preserves from the cold room. We filled our arms with jars of pears, peaches, jams, pickles; we balanced up the stairs to the kitchen and lined the bottles up in the pantry. Each summer and fall, Vera would devote days to preserving, finishing one batch just as the next fruit was bursting into season. Water in huge stainless steel pots would boil over on the stove, the jars inside knocking a rhythm in their submersion. The thick liquid, a combination of water and seeping juices, pooled on the linoleum and coated the floor with a gluelike membrane. This mimicked the feeling of my own skin in the summer, sticky with a combination of sweat and sugar from Popsicles or Kool-Aid.
On the way up the stairs, I said, “I don’t know why you bother. You can just go to the store and buy these things, you know.”