Nobody Cries at Bingo (15 page)

“Can I wash my hair?” I said as I scratched it and hardened hair spray fell onto my shoulders.

“For the last time, no!” Tabitha's normally soft voice was starting to sound strained. “Now put your shoes on, we have to go.”

My shoes were pink to match my dress and they were two inches high. This pleased me.

One of the other bridesmaids glared at me for being a pain in the butt. She was from the groom's side of the family and pretty in a buxom, sulky way. The maid of honour — and let's face it, the only bridesmaid that really matters — winked at me before taking her position to watch over my sister's train. I liked the back of Tabitha's dress. A train meant that you were taking this wedding business seriously. Also, when else would you ever get to wear a train? People should always take full advantage of their train wearing opportunities.

Tabitha walked down the aisle with my dad who looked as shaky as her hands, though his shaking came from a three-day drinking binge. He wandered into the house the morning of the wedding, looking dark and handsome as usual. His face was sweaty and he wore a Mona Lisa smile on his lips.

My cousin Nathan, who dotes on him, polished Dad's shoes as the rest of us ran around the house frantically searching for the secret to a perfect wedding. Dad and Nathan sat in the dining room and laughed as he teased Nathan. Nathan was drunk.

Tabitha cried during the wedding. One of the other bridesmaids murmured under her breath. “Tabitha's crying.” And everyone teared up because she was one of the family pets.

We drove to the valley for pictures. Then the rest of the wedding party went to the bar for a drink. I went directly to the reception, being the only one in the wedding party under age.

The dinner and dance was held in town — this was unusual among Natives. Most receptions were held at the band hall or the reserve school. We chose to stick ourselves right in the middle of town. It was a risky move considering the local RCMP's aggressive policing of Native males like my dad. But Mom wouldn't do it any other way — no child of hers would be stuck on the reserve like some backwards hick. Besides, unlike many Native people, Mom did not fear or resent the police as she had briefly dated an RCMP officer in her youth. Much to the annoyance of my dad, this fact came up quite a lot during my childhood.

The town hall was done up in pink and white, my sister's favourite colours. It was packed with family, friends and the uninvited. It wasn't a great wedding unless it was crashed. Tabitha had been popular in high school, a fact that haunted me, and all of her old high school friends showed up in their dark jackets and jeans. They looked sexy and dangerous to me. I lingered behind them, hoping someone would mistake me for an eighteen-year-old. A girl whispered to another girl, “Why's Tabby getting married? Just cuz you're knocked up doesn't mean you have to settle down.” The other girl nodded in agreement. Tabitha's six-hours-old husband, Mike, glared at them from the head table, as if he could read their thoughts.

When I found out that Tabitha was pregnant, I wanted her to move back home. I would have gladly shared my bedroom with her and the new baby. She didn't need to go off and get married and be all grown up. But this was hardly something you could say when everyone was swept up in the excitement of wedding planning. My sister was married. I had lost the battle and now I had the crinoline scarred legs to prove it.

I sighed deeply and reminded myself that what was done was done. At least her wedding afforded me the chance to attend a party. There were a lot of people at the wedding and I wanted to meet everyone. First I had to get drunk.

My sister Celeste, my cousin Jolene and I had found a stash of beer the night before. Found, stole, it's hard to remember which now. We hid the beer in the back of the hall while everyone else was decorating. When Jolene went to look for the secret stash, it was gone. Of course now when I look back, beer had a way of disappearing when Jolene was around.

It was no matter. Everyone got their hands on drinks. All the adults were drinking and the liquor was spilling over into the mouths of the teenagers. My fourteen-year-old cousin Cindy passed out on the table at ten pm, her head in her hands.

I was the youngest bridesmaid and was paired up with my brother-in-law's nineteen-year-old brother Charles. I hoped that he would have been a tall, lean Corey Haim look- alike.

Not quite. Charles was a shorter, heavier version of my brother-in-law with a buffalo-sized head. Charles and I danced together for a waltz.

“Your parents let you date?” Charles asked.

“Not until I'm in grade eleven and I'm only in grade nine.” (This was a lie — the topic had never come up — but there was no way I was gonna let Buffalo Head know that.)

“You're in grade nine? What a coincidence, so am I.”

“Quit lying!” I said giving him a playful swat.

“I'm not.” His voice was hard.

I looked at him in disbelief then wiped the look off my face when I saw him redden.

“Oh right, I think I remember my sister mentioning that.” I nodded my head as if that was a normal thing. “How are you finding chemistry?”

He'd seen the shocked look in my eyes and the waltz was awkward after that, as has been every other encounter since.

The dance with the groomsman ended my bridesmaid responsibilities. Sitting alone at the head table, I sipped cranberry juice from a plastic cup and cursed my heavy dress. It was long and scratchy. There were grandmothers dressed cooler than I was. Everywhere I turned everyone seemed to be tipsy, half cut and fully wasted and I wanted to catch up! I went in search of my extra clothes that I had given Celeste the night before and told her: “Bring this to the wedding, Celeste, so that I won't have to walk around looking like the tooth fairy all night.” I found Celeste at a table in the corner, building a pyramid of plastic beer cups with Jolene.

“Where are my clothes?”

“Hey, it's the pink lady!” Celeste elbowed Jolene and they laughed in that happy, euphoric way that only stolen beer causes.

“Where are my clothes?”

“What clothes?” she asked.

“The ones I asked you to bring for me.”

“Oh, I knew I forgot something. You look nice,” Celeste said. A lie. My skin was red from the scratchy pink dress and I was limping in my one-inch heels. Celeste, on the other hand, was comfortably dressed in a pair of tight jeans with cool Reebok sneakers on her feet.

Nothing, absolutely nothing was falling to place. No cute escort! No cute jeans! It was gonna be the worst night of my life.

My sister finished another beer and piled it onto the top of her beer pyramid.

“Hey, you know what?” she breathed Budweiser into my face.

“What?”

“I think I left a skirt in the change room from the rehearsal dinner last night,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded as she took a sip from another beer that Jolene had placed into her hand.

“What about a shirt?”

“Here you go.”

Jolene drunkenly pulled her T-shirt off to reveal a white tank top underneath. And a black bra underneath that. A pretty risqué look even for the eighties. But like I said, Jolene has always been ahead of her time.

I ran to the back of the hall to the change room. I found my sister's wrinkled black miniskirt. I held it up next to Jolene's beer-stained T-shirt. Wrinkled and dirty, or prissy and pink?

I had nowhere to put my dress so I bundled it up in a ball and stuffed it into a black garbage bag. Days later my older sister would find it and confront me for being an ungrateful brat but that was in the future and I was living in the NOW. I wanted to meet someone, a cute guy, with black hair who played hockey and who looked cool drinking a beer. “He” would be here. I had no doubt.

I looked around the wedding. I couldn't see any cute guys or at least not any that I wasn't related to. I saw a lot of women. Most of them performing the same desperate scan I was making. My eyes locked with an older girl cousin who had been single longer than I had been alive. I quickly looked away.

My brother walked up to me. David's face was red and his hair was stuck to his head.

“Where's Mom?” His voice had a thick milky quality.

“I don't know, why are you talking like that?”

“I'm sick.”

I sniffed him. “You're drunk. Hey, were did you get those?” I asked pointing at his neck.

David's neck was ringed with giant hickeys. You could have matched the mouth to those hickeys, they were so dark and distinct. Wow, even my twelve-year-old brother was getting lucky.

“What are you talking about? Where's Mom?” he asked. Then he stumbled and grabbed onto me. I tried to pry his hands off me. “Go play with our cousins or something,” I told him.

“I want to go home.” His big eyes were watery. I rolled my eyes, now here was someone who could not hold his liquor. Although in retrospect, I'd be frightened to meet a preteen who could.

I went to find Tabitha. She would know what to do with David.

David followed along behind me. “Quit walking so fast,” he complained.

“I'm not walking fast, you're really slow,” I replied. I headed out of the hall over to the bar/motel. To escape her family and friends, Tabitha had booked a room in the motel next to the hall with her husband. I knocked on the door of her room. Tabitha opened it looking like she was tired of being asked for things.

“Where's Mom?” I asked.

“I don't know. You better get him home,” she said, looking at David who staggered under the weight of her gaze.

I had no intention of doing that — I was pawning him off on Mom as soon as I found her. “Where are the keys to the truck?”

“Dad must have them,” she replied and shut the door.

I ran next door to the bar. I heard my dad's giant laugh from outside. “You stay here,” I told David.

“I'll do whatever you want, I just want to go home,” he said. (Whenever David drinks, he becomes oddly obedient.)

I pushed my way into the bar, sure that my heavily made up face would get me past the bouncer. I was right. I stood in the bar and enjoyed the ambiance for a moment. The ceiling was low, clearly no one anticipated any NBA players popping by. People were crowded around the bar, talking loudly. A man sat by himself at a table with his head in his hands as he sobbed. The air was stale, like it had died and lingered. (There was also a smell of burnt cabbage but the bar served no food. Odd.) My heart beat excitedly to be in such a glamorous environment.

My dad was holding court among old friends and new. He had married off his oldest daughter; not many men at the table could say that. He knew he had done something right. If you asked him to tell you what that was exactly, he would have been at a loss to explain.

I asked him the question that I've surely asked him a thousand times since I've learned to drive. “Do you have the keys, Dad?”

“How's your dad gonna get home?” one of my uncles asked.

“I'm gonna ride Nathan home,” Dad said, and the whole table broke into laughter.

By this time Nathan was passed out in a chair beside my dad, his face looking young in an old, grey suit.

Dad handed me the keys and I hurried out of the bar. With the keys to the family vehicle in my hand, I still believed that something amazing could happen. In order of most exciting: 1. A cute guy would kiss me. 2. I'd get invited to a really fun party. That's it. At fifteen, there was not much else on my mind.

I went back into the hall and was disappointed to find that it, and the opportunity for the best night of my life, had emptied out. The tables were bare now and one of my more formidable aunties was cleaning up. I edged into the shadows so that I couldn't be enlisted to join the cleaning patrol. This is where my mom found me. She walked out of the bathroom and ran straight into me. My mother rarely drank. When she did, she made it seem like a tedious job. She was only tipsy and already seemed hung over.

“Find your sister and brother,” she demanded. “We're going home.”

I was caught.

A few minutes later, five people had piled into our pickup truck. It was a single cab, meant for three at the most. I drove; Celeste, Jolene, my mom, and my brother sat next to me. It was too cold for someone to sit in the back, although if someone could have, my vote would have been for Celeste who spent the whole trip dry heaving beside me.

Celeste was in good spirits, however, and laughed at everything she saw. David complained that Celeste's laugh was hurting his ears. Mom kept telling everyone to shut up and Jolene sat quietly, calculating the quantities of beer in each of her secret stashes located throughout the province of Saskatchewan.

I was happy to be the driver, as I didn't even have my license yet. My happiness would have been complete if: 1. A cute boy had kissed me, or 2. I had been invited to a cool party, and 3. My mom had passed out instead of giving me frequent orders to slow down.

We got to the house and I thought, there's still a chance. I enlisted Jolene as my wing woman because she was one of those rare creatures who was always up for fun and because Celeste was already snoring on her bed. I couldn't use the truck because Mom wisely tore the keys out of my hand before heading to her bed to pass out. So Jolene and I snuck out of the house. At the very least, I knew my family members would be partying next door at Uncle Frank's house. It was less than five minutes way at a brisk jog. The path was dark but we had walked it a million times.

The path was wet with dew. The sky looked half awake and I ran faster because I knew my chances for a fun night were running out

We got into my uncle's yard just as three cars pulled into the driveway. I didn't recognize any of them and I was glad because I knew it was my older sister's friends, the leather and jeans clad teenagers. I ran up to one of the cars and the driver rolled down the window.