Birdie (5 page)

And later still, the clank of beer bottles being placed on the floor and the thump of boots removed as the party moves from the garage to the next house. She looked at the little clock her mom gave her for Christmas. It was four-thirty.

There was the sound of hushed talking and then louder arguing and she faintly heard her mom speaking harshly to her husband and then her brother. There was yelling and then some scuffling. Bernice was not sure how long this went on for, as she dozed, but she was awakened by the sound of the beer bottles clinking and a door slamming. Later, she woke and heard nothing, assumed everyone had passed out, and felt herself grow less nervous.

Ahhhhhhh. She misses her mom. The ache in her stomach grows and reaches her chest. Soon it will spill into her throat and well up in her eyes if she is not careful. That love, that love that runs through her veins rushing like a stream threatening to spill onto the flood plain was rich and thick. The memory stills her and her breathing, quite unnoticed, stops.

She can smell the dark in the room, hear the sounds of emptiness, and Bernice feels Freda’s small body move onto the mattress. How long has she been … travelling? She keeps her eyes closed but thinks she feels her cousin’s eyes on her. That lasts a long time.

She feels Freda’s agitation next to her as her cousin flips over, the old floor in Bernice’s apartment barely sighing as if the movement punctuates a sentence filled with tired verbs and exhausted pronouns.

She wonders if Freda can even see her anymore, or if there is an empty space in the bed where she used to settle.

I’m not here,
she thinks.
I’ve changed.

WHERE SHE IS

kasakes
: a glutton, one who eats a lot

She dreamsmells almonds and pesto.

T
HE SMELL IN THE LITTLE BAKERY
is yeasty and rich and chases the aroma from her head. Lola must have made dinner buns in the night, Bernice thinks to herself. That was her job before … before she took to her bed.
With a sick headache,
she thinks, opening her eyes. And, while she doesn’t miss getting up at four to bake, she realizes she has begun to miss the steady stream of chatter around her that customers brought into Lola’s with them. She would rarely wait on anyone but was always pleased when someone was kind to her. Her legs ache a bit, like she has been sleeping outside or walking all night. In that continuum that now exists between her body (which she has come to think of as a shell) and her spirit (within which emotions, thoughts and memories layer over each other, tendrils of fog on a road), she recognizes that her body is emotively moving. Anyone watching her would think she was in the throes of a deep sleep and suffering from restless leg syndrome. In the tendrils, Bernice realizes there is remorse in her body and she is trying to kick it out. Her shell rejects remorse. Shame. Feeling bad over feeling good.

When she first arrived at Gibsons she behaved … well, she did not behave. Some mornings she awoke lying alone in her room. Some mornings she sat up with a start, realizing she was in some strange place with some strange person next to her. One morning she awoke next to a stinky man. There was something entirely unpleasant about the person in bed next to her. He had a military haircut – and god – he couldn’t have been an active serviceman for some twenty years. It was a brush cut, salt-and-pepper hair splayed straight up and out for the world to see. He was no Jesse.
He was not even Nick Adonodis. He rolled over, farted, and she stiffened, bracing herself for the unpleasant feel of his touch or growl of his talk. The stench was unaccompanied and therefore welcomed.

She knows she shouldn’t have gone to the motel with him. There are a lot of shouldn’t haves. Drunk gin. Flirted. Talked to strangers. Drunk gin. Flirted with strangers who bought her gin. It really was a limited and vicious circle. The first drink was the hardest. Well, getting to the first drink was the hardest. She didn’t allow herself the luxury of just one drink (or just one anything, for that matter). Getting over the guilt of being a dry drunk/drinker (because, let’s face it, she was never going to admit it) cost the most. Beyond that, though, when the world turned rosy and her armour gelatinous it got easier and easier.

She drank. She drank and the lines between her and other people blurred. She could hug, express love, laugh at things that her sober self would not allow her, and dropped thinking for feeling. She drank to feel something like she feels now, wrapped in the mink blanket Freda has brought, peaceful in her wakesleep, and able to feel her past without experiencing it – able to see it without reliving it.

That helps, because some of it was really quite – humiliating? No. She refuses it, feeling her hands tighten on their own. Humbling. It felt to her like she had slept in that cheap hotel with that married man about a hundred times. Not really, but the feeling of that particular model of man would not leave her easily. Art? Al? She remembers his name had only one syllable – about all she could manage by midnight. Come to think of it,
maybe that was why she went home with him, instead of his two-syllabled friend. His last name was one of the Christmas reindeers. Well, it really doesn’t matter anyhow, she supposed.

It was clear to her from the start that this was no ordinary guy. A skinny white dishevelled man hanging out at an Indian bar (how come they all have imperial names, she wonders: King George, The Empire Hotel, The Lord Tupper, The Royal?) was not such an odd thing. That he was somewhat attractive and well dressed was something of an oddity. But, when she looked into those eyes, those blue eyes (what colour were Knud Rasmussen’s eyes?), she saw that something was amiss. What it was became clear soon enough, but at the time it just looked like near-crazy. Quasi-nuts. Pseudo-maniacal.

And while he was generically white-guy attractive, she had never been that attracted to generic. Or white guy. Or attractive guys. He honed in on her the moment he saw her. Then: she thought it was her spirit. Now: she knows it was blood in the bar water that drew him like a shark. Before she sank, back when she was willing to sleep with Art/Als, during the time of the shark, she didn’t know that you couldn’t really bury your pain and fear. And. While they were not the largest part of her, they rose to the surface like soured cream in coffee.

In the discord that floats through bad barrooms thicker than cigarette smoke and which runs faster than the beer on tap, her radar for mean was off.

That morning. The morning of Art/Al? she was a particular mess. Her shift at Lola’s was starting in twenty minutes. Time enough to wash him off and out of her and get to the
bakery. If she ran. Which she didn’t. Opting to go unnoticed, she did the sneak. Pulled him close and flipped over – no small task for her two-hundred-plus-pound frame. He growled in his sleep (she seemed to recall that he growled in his wakened state as well). Taking care not to tip over the gin bottle, she had pulled on her 3X panties, 2X denim skirt and size 5 shoes. Picked up her purse, the gin bottle and his wallet. And left Art/Al to his humming, farting and snoring.

She stirs and feels sweat on her skin, the sheets wet with too much of some sense she doesn’t understand. Sinks lower. Further. Shark cage. Recalls the thoughts in her head as she escaped the dirty motel and the old man.

One time when Skinny Freda was eighteen and she and Bernice had started spreading the space that existed between them in terms of size, Freda took her cousin to a house party (rather, a motel party) in High Prairie. Bernice had been struck silent as her cousin left the room every so often with a much older man and came back looking more and more dishevelled each time. When Freda looked for her in the morning (she had hidden herself by lying on the floor between the bed and the wall) the old white man, smelling of used clothing store and vomit, had said to her, “You will never find a squaw who doesn’t wanna be found.” She looked up to see Skinny Freda kick him in the groin, wink at her in her hiding spot and tell her, “Let’s lose this loser, Bernice.”

Remembering that, the fear of her own loser finding her, had lit a fire under Bernice as she made her way to work that day.

She actually did run then, throwing Art/Al’s wallet out after she took his twenty-two dollars (if he hadn’t slapped
her, she would never have considered taking it). Breathless and sweating, she had opened the bakery door and heard Lola in the back, smoking and singing a song that Bernice recognized as a song that Cher sings. Lola was pretty fond of Cher. And Sonny, for Pete’s sake and what that meant. Liking Sonny told Bernice something about Lola that Bernice couldn’t quite figure out. It wasn’t good, though.

“I knocked twice, figured you had a late night,” Lola said to her, not commenting on the alternative. “You look …” – she had paused for effect because effect was all and cause was irrelevant to Lola – “like you got the worst of it.”

Bernice marched by her, too-short denim skirt accentuating the broken strap on her Walmart shoes. When she saw herself in the stainless steel oven reflection she realized she had blood on her lip. And, strangely enough, in her eye.

She didn’t remember getting hit in the eye.

“Some men don’t know when a woman …” Lola began, but Bernice was already on her way upstairs to shower and change. She had wondered for not the first time whether living so close to work was such a great idea.

She had felt resentful then, the arrangement making her lie, “… tripped on the way home. Slept at a friend’s. Be right back.”

Lola knew the truth. Not because Lola presumed bad deeds. But because Lola knew Bernice had no friends. She didn’t even have a telephone, and no phone calls came to the bakery for her. At that point, Bernice had lived in Gibsons for almost a month and not once had there been an inkling that she had any life outside of the bread she baked, cheesecake she prepared or pastries she delivered.

In fact, Lola knew nothing about Bernice. One time she caught Lola looking in the trash bag that she delivered to the back of the store. She could still see it – Lola’s spidery polyester legs poking out of the red dumpster in the back alley. She imagined the surprised look on the old woman’s face at the balled-up wad of old newspaper clippings and pictures of Jesse from
The Beachcombers.
She kept only two.

When she stepped into the shower – it was more of a hose running up the front of the tub, where there were tiles as high as her shoulders – she had let the cold water splash her. There was no hot water in the apartment but she grew used to it. She used glycerine soap to cleanse. Started with her arms and breasts. Cleaned her parts and then the rest of herself. She had no idea what she looked like. Had no knowledge of her body. The rivulets of ice water fell on foreign terrain, crisscrossed everywhere by stretch marks. She went to wash her long hair but remembered at the last minute she had cut it. The braid sat in a basket in the corner of the bathroom – right where she left it when she got the news from home that her mom had left and she sheared herself.

It only took a second to wash her hair after that. Most of the time she didn’t bother.

Lola had banged on her ceiling, the noise reverberating through the floor of Bernice’s apartment. Bernice knew it was a sneaker on a broom handle. She also knew it was approaching six o’clock. She lingered, the feel of Art/Al? dripping off.

She hoped that she was careful and that she didn’t tell him where she worked.

Lola was tap tap tapping her cigarette as she rolled herself
a fresh one. Bernice had come to value soundlessness. Some days, entire days, she would not speak to anyone. Not even silencetalking. She didn’t answer the voice that was moving around in her head. Regardless of where and who she was. It never occurred to her then that she might have been sick. That her silence was unhealthy. That her speech may have had value. That the pain of death needed to be released. Most of the time, when she did talk, it was in her bad Cree.

“
Mah
,” she chided, when she had done something clumsy. The word floated like a willow seed to the ground. Sometimes she thought her words moved out of her way, light enough to be airborne, when she swept the flour, sugar and baking powder from the floor at night. Other times, like the day she felt her mom was gone, they sat heavily and would not move, no matter how much she swept. Her arms were leaden too, sawing at her hair for what seemed like hours, before the give of the final strands left her holding her braid and staring at it without recognition.

“Go to bed, my girl,” Lola said to her that night in Bernice’s own language, and they had both looked at each other hard because Lola does not speak Cree. For that one gift, Bernice let Lola order her down the stairs today.

“Did you hear?” Lola let her words bounce, like they had places to go, even though she knew Bernice had pulled the cord of the radio from the wall.

“Some computer whiz kid shut down the radar at the Vancouver airport. Planes almost crashing everywhere.”

To her, Lola had seemed dismayed that no one had crashed yet. Sometimes Bernice thought mean thoughts and didn’t take
them back. Other times she thought good thoughts and let them powder the room – just in case there was a running count on them. Also, it gave the ugly thoughts a soft place to land.

It came to her that maybe she was losing touch. Not with reality – a place where she was often a visitor – but she was actually losing her sense of human feeling. She looked at her hands, soft from the butter and lard, and noticed that even though she had placed them on the oven door, they felt no heat.

“… and I told the girls this would happen with all of that newfangled computer chips,” Lola pronounced proudly.

“Hmmmm,” Bernice said.

Other times she would say “interesting” or “wow” but on that day she couldn’t find any words to take the places of the ones she puts out there so she only hummed. On that day, the voices and the shift were hovering around her like summer fog on grass after a rain. She remembers thinking of Art/Al? puffing over her and of her fear that he would have a stroke on top of her. She wonders what she would have done then.

“You have a nice time last night?” Lola asked her, unkindly, and would have been hurt if you suggested she was being unkind.

Bernice tried to hum again, surprised by the question.

“Yes.” She was living a secret life inside her head, she thought. She remembered when she and Skinny Freda used to wonder about the secret life of cows. Some days they would take Freda’s beat-up truck out onto the open road and honk to see if cows would respond. They never did until that last cold Sunday before she left. She was on a day pass from the San and Freda and she went for a drive in the country.
Reaching a pasture, they were delighted to find that one cow looked up at them when the horn tweaked. She and Freda finished their Cokes and went home. They have not spoken since. She feels like the cow sometimes – like it was chance or some strange unexpected expected response that sometimes fuelled her. As a reactor and not an actor, when Lola spoke to her she sometimes found herself responding, even though she had dwindling capacity for interaction. Lola, still impatiently wondering about Bernice’s evening, had continued to ask questions – completely unaware that her employee was travelling right in front of her.

“Makin’ some new friends?” Lola tweaked, twisting her cigarette-stained hand in a mime of some act Bernice didn’t want to recognize.

But did.

“A couple.”

“Men friends?”

“A few.”

“Anyone you’ll bring home to meet your old pal Lola?”

Home. Like they lived in this extended oven. She wanted to lie but found that space emptied.