Birdie Read Free Page A

in between them. Or, during drunken reminiscences where her mom told her that if she had only married her teenage boyfriend (was it the one who thought her prom dress too mature? Bernice wondered) she would be a little Spanish baby. “But, I wouldn’t be
me
then, Mom, would I?” she had asked a silently brooding Maggie.
    All of it added to a knowledge, lodged as deep as those chocolate bar wrappers in a purse, that Maggie would rather an Other. Another. Another life. With fewer nieces, nephews and Bernices around. Kids who weren’t so noisy. A kid who she wouldn’t catch gulping mashed potatoes by the handful in the kitchen after dinner one night so that she couldn’t fit hand-me-down clothes and had to have new clothes every time she gained weight. Which was often.
    Maybe if she had an Other, Bernice wouldn’t have found her lying on her back in bed every night, staring at the ceiling as if she could not see it, possibly dreaming of the life she would have had. In her mind’s eye, Bernice remembers important moments like snapshots that she has taken. Luckily, she can bring up the images anytime she wants. Since she sank, she flows through past and present easily, like water flows through a drainpipe. Time became fluid in the days in between Edmonton and Gibsons. She doesn’t have recall – not the way she can look back at her time at Little Loon. Different than thinking about living at the San. This is something else. Time does flow, but it is not with the rush of ariver. It trickles like a stream that Bernice can float down, paddle back in, and start over at a new current. In a way, Gibsons was a tributary branching off the crashing flow of her past. She drifts lazily, some eddy pulling her. She arrived in Gibsons on a gentle tributary off the roar of the river that carried her from Loon to B.C. Was pushed to Lola’s. Paddled in place until Freda roared up and started keeping vigil at her side in the little bakery apartment. Felt her cousin next to her, solid in her small bones, the curve of her back next to her on the bed, trying to anchor her. Bernice lies in bed, motionless, but feels the gentle rush of water against her as she makes her way upstream. Past her past. It feels peaceful. She knows she will have to push her way upstream sometime. For now, she floats, feeling anything but free. For now, she knows it is enough to be able to slip along without plunging. For now, she stays in bed, none of the womengathering around her aware that she is travelling. Bernice knows, somewhere at the core of her, that she is on a voyage. Whether it is to someplace or from it, she is not sure. All she knows is that water is woman. Protective. She does not fear sinking. Not because it cannot happen, but because she prefers it to open terrain. Lola noticed, of course. She must have called Freda. Freda, who never panicked, must have called Auntie Val. And now, all three of them take turns sitting on, standing by, waiting on the mattress. Taking to her bed (“Her sickbed”) was as easy as, or even easier than, breathing. Her un/conscious decision was one her spirit made. When it was time, and when the fury of her past began to race ahead of her future, she simply lay down.
    From her bed, she sometimes imagines her mom into the old pictures she has seen of Indian women in historical books and anthropological texts. She can see her there easily – dark, unsmiling and with two black braids, long and thick and hanging down her back. She had pure brown chocolatey skin, not mocha latte like Bernice’s own. She would have, always in motion, stopped only for the moment it took to snap the photo: a tiny whirlwind on chromatic tape.
    Sometimes Bernice can see Maggie’s bones when she looks in the mirror. Most usually, though, they are like fishbones; you don’t see them but you know they are there. With those bones buried deep within her, Bernice knows she has protection that no one knows about.
    She is not like her cousins or her