Birdie Read Free Page B

aunties who wear their bones like armour. Cousin Freda’s bones stick out every which way. She looks like someone’s idea of an Indian. Like a warrior. Cheekbones, hipbones, collarbones jutting out in warning. It seems to her that Freda’s little bones are angry. Notice me! Notice me! Notice me!
    Bernice and her Auntie Val are not the type they took pictures of – the type they remembered and wanted to remember. No one likes the fat Indian women. Well, the men sure did, but no one wants to put them on postcards and imprints to send back home. Maybe fat was not noble enough. In a way it has always made Bernice proud. She and her auntie, much like the pioneers who had to “break their land alone,” she thinks, and covers her mouth to stifle a laugh which could alert Freda and Lola downstairs to her presence in her body.
    Those images run through her mind. While outwardly still, inside, Bernice’s mind is churning, alive. A charged battery in a resting machine, only her body idles in wait. For a sign. For completion. For the moment. When she is safest. Pictures swim together with memories like a slide show. Val and Freda active, her diminutive mom passive and almost out of frame. One shot, of her father, walking away. Remembering them, re-remembering them, she wanders around the borders of her emotional ground zero, never quite approaching and never quite looking directly at it, hoping to find survivors of the place she ran away from.
    Another image. One hot Alberta summer when her mom and her Auntie Val were in their cups, she heard them become loud louder loudest after a night of drinking. She didn’t really understand the link between the booze and the joy that was coming from the kitchen and pictured the two sisters sitting close and laughing like best friends over their near-empty glasses. The Canadian Club bottle, she had imagined, would be sitting between them as they by turns laughed and swung their long black hair over their shoulders, and curled over in their chairs with laughter.
    They were so pure in their appreciation of and love for one another that she felt lightheaded. That night, she had thought about waking Freda up to see this joy, but that girl slept like her conscience was clear. Which it shouldn’t be, Bernice reminds herself.
    Listening to the sounds from the kitchen, she had imagined them braiding each other’s hair and whispering secrets to one another whenever the room got silent. She pressed herear to the wall separating the kitchen from her tiny bedroom and heard:
    Her auntie saying, with pure emotion, “Sister, promise me when I get old that you will pluck my chin.”
    Maggie responding, with all of the seriousness of a bride at the altar, “I will, sister. I will.”
    From this evening, she learned two things. First, she was likely to have a facial hair problem when she grew up. It was okay, she had a sister (well, Skinny Freda anyhow) too. Also, she would have to learn to do anything for one other person in her life. She would find a person with whom she could exchange a solemn vow when they were in their cups. And they too would be alive in her memory.
    The creaking from another kitchen and the bakery heat rising give her pause from her memory travelling for a moment. She is taking stock. It is less an inventory than a patchwork quilt. No matter where she starts, body still and mind moving, emotions on high alert, she ends up at Loon. Freda’s wild laugh makes its way up the stairs, landing on her comforter expectantly. Bernice does not move, does not want to feel it. Will not welcome it under the covers. She remembers that laughter.
    The roar of the powerboats is alive in her mind. Water. Sunshine. Auntie Val. Freda. In her mind’s eye she sees pictures change and exchange. They pull her attention to the water. She can see the engine churning up an angry lather whicha pink man jumped over with either fearless agility or reckless disregard. A girl in a multicoloured near-bikini