Nobody Cries at Bingo (2 page)

The teacher laughed when another girl's lisp made her say “shit” instead of “sit.” She didn't think it was funny at all when I said, “hell” instead of “hello.” As a result of my failures to impress my teacher, I spent many afternoons sitting in “The Corner,” which had its own cubicle walls so that you could enjoy your punishment in privacy.

At the end of every Kindergarten day, I rode the bus home with my sister. The seats were huge and my feet would dangle freely. I enjoyed looking at the reflection of myself in the driver's oversized mirror. Here I was sitting and kicking my legs and there I was, much smaller and off to an angle doing the same thing. “Stop kicking,” Tabitha said.

The small girl in the mirror stopped kicking and looked sad.

To distract me, Tabitha asked me about my day.

“Today Teacher . . . ,” I began.

“Did you forget your teacher's name again?'

“Yes. Today Teacher gave us all cookies and Casey's cookie got broken in half and she started crying.”

“Over a cookie?” Tabitha rolled her eyes.

“Casey cries a lot. So Teacher says, ‘look Casey it's like you have two cookies now.' And Casey stopped crying. So then I took my cookie and broke it into lots of pieces. And I said, ‘Teacher, I have lots of cookies too.'”

“And what did she say?”

“Stop making a mess.”

“Did you tie your shoes yourself today?”

I nodded my head. And the little girl in the mirror nodded her head too. Both of us were lying. Learning to tie shoes was turning out to be a nightmare. I had discovered it was easier to loosen the knot and slip off my shoes. Then at the end of the school day, I'd slip them back on and tighten up the knot again.

To distract her from my lie, I asked the question that was always guaranteed to generate an answer. “Where is Dad?”

“I already told you. He's in Saskatchewan at our other house.”

“When is he coming here?”

“I don't know. Stop asking everyone, especially Mom. Okay?”

“Okay.” I made my mouth big when I said it so that the girl in the mirror agreed with me.

You could see everyone else on the bus in the mirror. I made a face at myself. Then I saw an older boy staring at me through it. Caught, I quickly looked out the window. When I dared to look again, the older boy was making faces at me.

I tapped Tabitha on the shoulder. “There's someone staring at me.”

“Where?”

“In the mirror.”

Tabitha looked in the mirror. Little kids picked their noses. Some boys bullied another boy. Girls sat backwards and flipped their hair as they talked to their friends. The older boy in the mirror was gone.

“What did he look like?”

“Big. Like he's too old for this bus.”

“Well, I don't see him.”

He had ruined the mirror game for me. Now all I had left was the window. I could barely see the little girl there.

I tapped my sister on the shoulder again.

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Why didn't you go in school?”

“Teacher wouldn't let me.”

Bathroom breaks were orderly ventures in Kindergarten. Like a short, co-dependent football team, we did everything together. When it was time to empty our bladders, we stood in straight lines and marched down the hallway.

That afternoon our teacher had read us a book about a little boy who was adventurous. “Little boys are always so naughty. I wish I had a little boy!” she had commented to our class, thus kicking off every little girl's journey to self-hate in the room.

Inspired by the naughty boy, I climbed onto the sink and looked over the side of the cubicle. Casey was in there, doing her thing.

“Surprise!” I called down.

Casey looked up, screamed and — predictably — began to cry. She pulled up her panties and stalked out of the bathroom. Before I even had time to climb off the sink, the teacher was there waving her finger at me. I found myself back in “the corner” before I remembered that I still hadn't used the toilet.

Tabitha rolled her eyes at my stupidity. “It's only two minutes to our house. You can last two minutes, can't you?”

I shook my head. I knew without looking at the little girl in the mirror that panic had spread across my face.

“Too bad cuz you have to wait.”

Tabitha was my guide to the world and as such was infallible. This time, however, she was dead wrong. I did not have to wait. The bus hit a bump in the grid road and the decision was made for me. My bladder released its heavy load. I felt sweet relief and my first thought was, “That's not so bad. Actually it's sort of warm and pleasant.”

The good feeling was quickly swept aside as my sister's proclamations of “Gross!” informed the rest of the bus's occupants to my accident. Soon, the kids were echoing my sister's comment and adding new ones: “What a baby,” “that kindergarten baby peed herself,” and “I wish I hadn't waited until now to eat my peanut butter sandwich.”

Fortunately it happened right outside our house. The bus door opened and Tabitha ran inside and announced my shame to everyone. I followed at a much soggier pace. Mom led me into the bathroom and sat me on the slop pail. The slop pail — if you need any further explanation — was a metal pail about three feet high that served the same function as a toilet, except of course, it did not flush.

“What's the point of that?” Tabitha asked. “She already peed all over me!”

As it turned out, there was more detritus that needed voiding. My bowels relaxed as their burden was unloaded.

“See? There was a point,” Mom laughed and David and Celeste joined in. Even I laughed.

“This is the grossest house ever!” Tabitha stalked away.

The slop pail was uncomfortable but Mom claimed we were lucky to have it. “Hell of a lot better than when I was kid. Back then you had to freeze your bum off outside.”

“You peed outside? Like a dog?” I asked.

“No! In the outhouse. We weren't animals, for God's sake.”

“What's an outhouse?”

“A little building that's outside the house where you go to the bathroom. You kids don't know anything about roughing it, that's for sure.”

The slop pail was the next step up on the bathroom evolutionary ladder. While never a pleasure to use, it was even more difficult to operate if you were short. My hands would have to go down first, on either side of the slop pail, and then I'd have to jump a little and get my butt on. But very carefully because when it comes to slop pails, failure is not an option. If you slip, you might fall in the murky waste — bum first — or, much worse, tip it over and decorate the bathroom with the contents. That's a mistake you only make once in your life. (Or if you are my brother David, every single day for a month until Mom decided to move him
back
into diapers.)

Despite the slop pail challenges, our cousins loved coming to visit us. Young's Point was off the reserve; it was undiscovered territory and they were eager to make their mark. The highlight of every visit was walking through the woods to a convenience store so small it was basically amounted to an enterprising hippie couple who sold chocolate bars and potato chips out of their kitchen.

“We could get mugged,” Norman said, peering into the trees. “Up in the city, people get mugged all the time.” Then he etched his name into a fir tree with his knife.

I stared into the dark woods trying to discern the muggers. On a walk with Tabitha, she dismissed my concerns. “As if. There aren't any muggers here, just bears,” she said as she practiced smoking with a twig.

Tabitha not only knew everything, she was willing to try anything. Her long legs discovered a stream running through the woods and she immediately began to wade into it. “What about polio?” I asked her, even as I scratched the huge polio vaccine scar on my arm.

“There's no such thing,” she said. “Now get in here and wet your feet.”

I moved slowly, entering only one foot at a time, sucking in my breath as the cold water found its way through my runner, through my sock to my foot. “I got a booter! I got a booter!” I cried.

Tabitha shook her head. “I told you to take your shoes off!” she said, as she ushered me and my wet feet home, sloshing all the way down the muddy path.

Walks with Tabitha were important for figuring out the world.

“You know Tabitha, I can't tie my shoes. Other kids can do it, but I can't,” I said, on another trip to the junk food store.

“Did you try the Bunny ears?”

“Yes, I tried the Bunny years.”

“E-ears.”

“I thought you said, Y-Years.”

She kneeled down. “You make two loops, each one looks like a Bunny ear. You see?” she explained.

I sighed in relief. “Oh right. I thought I was going crazy.”

“You're not crazy.”

“I have another question. How come I can't ride my bike yet?”

“Cuz your legs are too short,” she said.

“So when they grow, I can do it?”

Tabitha lingered on her answer for a few seconds. I waited — my heart clenched. Oh please don't say I won't ever ride my bike, I have to ride my bike! Please don't say there's something wrong with me that can't ever be fixed.

“When your legs grow, you'll do it.”

“Thank goodness.” I let out my breath. “I have another question. How come the priests take our money?”

“I think they . . . use it for God.”

That didn't answer my question exactly. I figured there was some stuff people had to figure out on their own. So I thought about it that night and by morning I had my answer.

I decided the big sister thing would be to share my newfound information with my younger sister, Celeste, who was badly in need of some world knowledge. Over our cereal bowls the next morning, I pontificated on the subject of priests and our money. “You see, Celeste, priests take our money because they are stupid.”

Mom dropped a pot in the sink with a loud clang and spun around. “What did you say?”

“Priests take our money?”

“The other part,” she growled.

“I love you?”

“What did you call priests?”

I looked at Celeste for help. She was smiling into her cereal. “Uh . . . stupid,” I replied in a small voice.

“How dare you! They are good and holy men who help spread the word of God.”

“How come they can't use their own money?”

“Hush! God is listening to everything you say and he will be angry at you for insulting his workers. And you don't want God to be mad at you.” Mom was understandably upset. Her parents, graduates of the residential school system, had grown up with a healthy fear of the clergy and it had been passed on to their children.

My mom's anger was the reason I ended my religious teachings. I wasn't scared of God's anger. If he was like Santa, he never listened when I asked for things, so why would he listen to anything bad I had to say about him?

I was annoyed at Mom for interrupting my lesson because it undermined my credibility with my younger sister. Celeste had had a smirk on her face during the exchange. Although to be fair to Celeste, I think her face was just like that.

Mom was going through a stressful time. She was attempting to re-make her life. She was in her early thirties and she'd wasted enough years on a dead-end marriage. She had moved to The Pas to start over, and although it was hard, things were starting to work out for her. She had her kids in school, a welfare check coming in every month and a good job cleaning motel rooms that paid under the table. She had two sisters who had married guys on the nearby Big Eddy Reserve who were also willing to help out when needed. Mom felt like life was finally moving forward. It was the longest time that she had ever left my dad.

Mom was a new woman, an independent woman. And why shouldn't she be? Times were a' changing. It wasn't the seventies anymore when women took shit. It was the eighties. Women didn't need to stick around and get beaten by their husbands; they had choices. Hadn't Mary Tyler Moore proven this? Sure Mary wasn't a single mother burdened by the demands of looking after four children under the age of eleven, and true, she didn't have to contend with racism, but the message was the same: women could do things on their own.

Our next-door neighbour was also a Mary but she wasn't a spunky go-getter like the television Mary. She was a shy, thin Cree woman who was too timid to even knock on our door. When she was in the mood for gossip, she opened her door and lingered on her front steps until Mom noticed her and invited her in for coffee.

Then Mary would smile and gather her children around her. Her kids were like her, thin and shy. They were shadows next to our pudgy shapes. They crept along behind us as we played in the centre of Young's Point in our “playground.”

The playground consisted of one piece of equipment — a huge slide. Nothing else, just an empty field and a giant wooden slide rising out of the earth like Ayers Rock. No one knew where it came from or how long it had been there.