Tomboy Survival Guide

by Ivan Coyote

  But it is illegal to bury someone in their own back yard, however beloved they might have been. Apparently someone misused the privilege at some point and went and ruined it all for the rest of us.

  So her bones lie up at Grey Mountain cemetery in Whitehorse, up at the top of a cliff that overlooks her back yard. My grandfather, her husband, is up there too, ever since I was nine years old. We buried her way on the other side of the field from where he is. No one even suggested we put her anywhere near him. It never even came up. I will be there too, one day, if my wishes are respected by whoever is around to follow them out. I am a bit superstitious about going back into the same dirt you were born on. The graveyard is about three kilometres as the crow flies away from the hospital where my mom had me when she was nineteen. The circle of my skin and bones will end almost exactly where it started.

  My cousin Dan told us all a story on the second afternoon of us sitting around in the hospital, about how last fall when Layla was showing the monster side of her teenage self and skipping out of school a lot, Dan had cooked up a deal with my gran. Since Layla just did not seem able to show up for her grueling high school schedule (two classes, I think they were Poetry and Snowboard Making) and kept taking off at lunch to get stoned and what have you, the orders came down from on high that she was going to go to Gran’s for lunch every day, since Gran’s house was only about a three-minute walk from the high school.

  The first couple of days Layla showed up at lunch and generally did as she was told. On the evening of day two, Dan asked Layla how her lunch at Gran’s that day had been.

  Layla was slumped sideways on the couch texting her boyfriend, the ne’er-do-well who would go on to father her child, and I use the word father fairly loosely here.

  Layla took a deep breath and blurted out without pausing, “Lunch was terrible. Gran used moldy bread, I mean with actual green spots on it and everything, and she just cut the moldy bits off, but mold is spores, we learned about it in science, and spores they get on everything, you can’t just cut off the green bits, it all still tastes like what it is, which is mold. And you know how she won’t use real butter, so there was tons of margarine all over the bread and just barely any mayonnaise at all, like mayonnaise was made of gold or something. And the tomatoes, the tomatoes were clear. You could see right through them. Tomatoes are not naturally clear. You have to save them up for a long time before they get soft enough to be actually see-through. I just about gagged.”

  Now, I want to be clear here, that my cousin Dan is generally a fairly calm, cool, and amiable sort of guy. Suffice it to say by this point he had, as my gran herself was fond of saying, had it up to here with Layla. He exploded, his first finger drumming the air between him and his daughter.

  “Are you fucking kidding me right at this minute? That old woman is nearly ninety years old, and her knees are shot and her teeth have all fallen out, and she is nearly blind and almost deaf as a post. She has a ruptured disc in her back and emphysema and diverticulitis, and if she somehow manages to haul her ailing carcass up out of the hospital bed in the living room that she has to lie in now and hobble into that kitchen to fix you some lunch then you are going to eat every last single bite of whatever the fuck it is she puts in front of you and you are going to thank her and you are going to be grateful. AM I MAKING MYSELF CLEAR ENOUGH FOR YOU HERE OR WHAT?”

  You know, and so forth.

  Layla recoiled into the couch cushions, her mouth agape. Then she shut her mouth into a giant pout. “All right all right, you don’t have to freak out at every little thing I say. God, why does my life SUCK SO MUCH?”

  So the next day she shows back up at gran’s just after noon. Gran was out on the deck, smashing out a Player’s light regular butt into an overfull ashtray. She seemed chipper and upbeat, her wrinkled cheeks pink and ruddy in the cold.

  Lunch that day was a classic. Grilled cheese and Campbell’s tomato soup from a can. If you don’t like grilled cheese and tomato soup then, well, I don’t want to know you. And I can’t even eat bread anymore, on account of the gluten. Or canned soup for that matter. But you know what I mean.

  Anyway. Grilled cheese and tomato soup was one of Layla’s favourites, so she slid into a chair and dug in.

  But two bites into her grilled cheese Layla realized something was not right with that sandwich. A funny, chemical taste, she recounts to me much later. But the previous day’s lecture still rung in her ears. So she sucked it up and ate her sandwich, swallowing and chewing each mouthful methodically, trying not to make any kind of a face and tip my gran off that she wasn’t digging her lunch again. Plus, Gran had gotten someone to get a fresh loaf of bread, so she just stayed silent and chewed her weird sandwich like a champ. It wasn’t until the very last bite, which she spun around to pop crust-first into her mouth, that she realized what the odd taste had been. My gran had forgotten to remove the plastic wrapper from the Kraft single before she fried it all up in her cast iron pan.

  I found her will when I was going through some of her old papers, I almost missed it because in true Flo Daws fashion, it had been written on the back of a Yukon Electric hydro bill and stuffed into a recycled birthday card envelope with someone else’s name on the front of it. In capital letters on the outside of that envelope Gran had scrawled, “This is my will. I know what I want, & please carry them out God Bless you all, Mum.” My grandmother’s last will and testament read, in point form: “Cheapest coffin. No flowers. All donations to Sacred Heart Cathedral & no tea afterwards. Lots of singing at the mass. And please, no fighting. And thank you God, for keeping us all together.”

  There was a postscript, in a different coloured ink, like an afterthought. “These are my last wishes. Please, carry them out. I will be watching.”

  LONELY STRIPPER ON CHRISTMAS

  My most vivid memory of the girls is bath night. The girls were what we called them, my little cousins Racheal and Lindsay, my mom’s sister’s two youngest kids. I was nearly fifteen when Racheal was born, and seventeen when Lindsay came along, so we were never kids together, and part of me will always only remember them as the girls. No matter how old we all manage to get, in some place in my head they will always be two scrawny little squeaky girls on bath night in Aunt Roberta’s old house on Kennedy Street in Nanaimo.

  My gran had this rule about clothes dryers being a luxury phenomenon, a shocking waste of good money that bred an inherent weakness into those lazy enough to use them, and Roberta believed it. We were a clothesline-only kind of family all the way, rain, shine, or forty below. But, sometimes on weeknights my aunts or my gran would go out to bingo, leaving me to babysit. We would lie around in our pajama pants, eat ripple chips and make iced tea … and use the clothes dryer. I know. Such rebels.

  The trick was to get the laundry in and folded and put away in time for the clothes dryer to cool before anyone got home from bingo and busted us for wasting electricity, a crime second only to throwing perfectly good food out when there were children starving in Africa, or leaving the front door open and heating the whole universe.

  It must have been somewhere between drying the towels and folding them, still almost damp and warm, and stuffing them into the hallway linen closet that we got the idea for Kiddie Burrito. Anyone who has ever had the first four layers of their skin sandpapered off by a threadbare towel straight off the old Yukon clothesline knows what a true luxury a fluffy towel fresh out of the clothes dryer really is.

  The trick was all in the timing. Christopher and Dan, the girls’ much older brothers, would wait downstairs, standing at the ready next to the rolling and rumbling clothes dryer, with the basement door propped open with a boot or something, until they got the signal from me. The signal was a yell, and this happened seconds before the little girls stepped out of the bath. The boys would whip two hot towels out of the dryer at the last possible minute and fling themselves up the stairs three at a time, then toss the towels to me. I would wrap Racheal and then Lindsay in huge hot-as-humanly-p
ossible towels, their pencil-thin baby arms pinned at their sides, like little, well, kiddy burritos, and then proceed to squeeze them until they complained of not being able to breathe. “You’re squishing all the air out of me,” they would whine, but truth was, we all loved it. Inherent in this bliss was the following truth: small luxuries are never lost on the unspoiled.

  Or, maybe we just all needed a better hobby?

  Whatever the case, I will always remember those winter nights, the girls pink-cheeked and smelling like cheap apple-scented shampoo and sitting perfect in their clean jammies on the couch waiting for me to figure out exactly which of the much used VHS tapes crammed into the drawer under the television actually had the Saturday morning cartoons dubbed over somebody’s old exercise video on it. Peeling scotch tape over the holes on the VHS cassette and ballpoint ink-chicken scratch that had once said JANE FONDA, now crossed off and replaced by BUGS BUNNY scrawled underneath it.

  Little Lindsay ended up marrying a firefighter and works up at the hospital, a pushing paperwork kind of job, not pushing wheelchairs or meal trays or pills or a mop. Lindsay lived with our gran right up until she got married and moved in with Cameron, and more than any of us, she inherited through osmosis our gran’s now notorious frugalness. Lindsay’s bookshelves are empty on account of we have libraries full of free books, so who in their right mind would buy a book, and she started saving for her retirement before she graduated from high school, true story.

  And Racheal, well Racheal takes after Racheal. After a brief career as a scantily clad lady mud-wrestler sponsored by a tequila company, she became a dancer. The gentleman’s nightclub kind of dancer. She made down payments on designer handbags and three rounds of breast augmentations and majored in taking selfies, doting on miniature dogs and hairless cats, and reapplying her flawless lip liner at stoplights.

  Nature versus nature. I love them both fiercely.

  A couple of Christmases back, my partner at the time Zena and I made a promise to each other. We were going to spend the day just her and me, alone together. No travelling to visit friends or family, no big dinner to prepare, just her and me and the little dog on the couch. A no-pants day. I was going to make a shepherd’s pie.

  The only commitment I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to forgo was my family’s custom of everybody calling everybody ridiculously early on Christmas morning. The phone is passed around and you say quick hellos to hungover uncles and technically second cousins whom we call nieces and nephews who are whipped into a sugar and new Barbie or snowboard-induced frenzy. This process takes about three hours, give or take. I have a big family. Zena had her mother, who was frail and then breathing with the help of an oxygen tank, so her single-mother-only-daughter salutations were over in minutes. This used to be a bit of an issue for us, until we got married and she grew to love the whole motley mess of us, and they started to demand that I pass the phone to her when they were finished with me. So we did the rounds. I called Racheal last, because I know she often works until last call at the bar.

  I could tell as soon as she picked up that something was wrong. Her voice was more the little girl I remembered than it was the young woman she had become. She sounded small, and sad. Told me that her boyfriend, the rich Russian oil patch heir, was at a big family dinner, and that he couldn’t take her. Subtext went unspoken but I heard it resounding in her somber silence. The boyfriend was loaded enough to have the stripper arm candy girlfriend, but it was too loaded to bring her to meet the relatives. My baby cousin was being covered up, like a long sleeve hiding a fading forearm tattoo, or an inheritance taking care of a gambling debt, or a low grade point average.

  I looked over at Zena, who had been listening to my half of the conversation. I shrugged my shoulders to ask, can we? And she nodded yes, of course. I told Racheal that we would wait until she got here to start cooking the pancakes, and that she was staying for dinner, too. She said she would be over in an hour, sniffling a little in the background just before she hung up.

  The three of us spent the better part of that Christmas day on our couch, in a swirl of blankets and pillows and bits of dropped potato chips. We told Zena all of our top twenty remember-the-time-when-we stories, and I played Racheal a recording of the song my friend Jon wrote for our gran and we cried until Racheal got mascara on the arm of my t-shirt.

  I don’t remember exactly what it was that Racheal said or when, we talked all day and well into that night, but I do recall at some point looking at the profile of her sweet face lit up from behind by the streetlights outside and realizing that the little girl I had known was now not only grown up, but grown into herself, somehow. That I, just like almost everyone, had failed to look past the false eyelashes and silicone of her and see the truth there. She was hilarious, and smart, and possessed just as much insight into the murky world of gender as either Zena or I did.

  I have often wondered why my extremely devout grandmother never raised much of a Catholic eyebrow when it came to Racheal’s choice of profession. My grandmother always just told Rachie to be smart with her money, to sock it away for a rainy day. Same thing she told all of us.

  I walked Racheal out to her car that night. Hugged her under a streetlight. It was starting to rain a little. I watched as the windshield wipers blurred her face and then squeaked for more rain. She was tapping her iPhone with a bejeweled fingernail, and its blue screen lit up her features in a glowing square. She looked older than her twenty-six years should have let her look, and a little lonely. She blew me a kiss and her taillights blinked goodbye at me when she turned the corner.

  A CIRCLE GOES ROUND

  My grandmother was prone to strange acts of ritual; she routinely performed them and taught us all to do likewise. None of us questioned these habits until we got much older. She would throw a pinch of salt over her left shoulder with her right hand if she had spilled any, and we were forbidden to hang pictures of living people up on the walls, in case the picture should fall down and bring death with it. Our school photos were framed and leaned against the wall on the mantle, or on top of the bureau, never hung up. Hanging pictures of already dead people was acceptable. We were not allowed to ever place a hat on a bed, and if you gave someone a purse or a wallet as a gift you had to put a shiny penny in it, or you were dooming them to bad financial luck. No empty wallets, and no questions. This is just what you did.

  I guess we thought it was all Catholic stuff, and yours is not to wonder why, yours is just to do or die, as the saying goes. It wasn’t until I started interviewing her in 2003 for what my family had taken to calling “my little art projects” that she began to show us the dusty corners of her life story. She had been told to lie about who she was. It was not a good idea to be part Irish and part Roma in London, England during Hitler’s rise to power and the Second World War. It was better to just be an English girl, even a poor one, and so that is what she always said she was. Fear of being the other. The unwanted. The disposable. One of the greatest tools for forced conformity we have ever invented. Powerful enough to sustain a lie across an ocean and through generations. Even in the last years of her life, tucked safely into her chair at the end of the kitchen table with a cup of tea, the truth still came out in little fits and starts. And I was there to hear it and save it from the past.

  My gran had a New Year’s Eve ritual she taught us all, maybe it was a Roma thing passed down to her from her secret people, I don’t know. She would take one stick of firewood, a fistful of silver dimes she would sock away all year in a Crown Royal bag in the drawer of the bureau in the hall (they were real silver back then, dimes were, remember?), silver candlesticks, her turquoise and silver ring (anything silver), and one loaf of bread. Just after midnight at least one person was selected, usually an unmarried young man, I think with brown hair, to lead a contingent of revelers in a run outside around the house three times, clockwise, carrying these items. I would join them, sometimes with my parka on over my pajamas, following my mom and aunties, who were drunk o
n white wine or maybe gin-and-tonics, slipping on the ice and laughing until Deb Walsh from up the road peed a little in her gabardine pantsuit, thirty below and our breaths growing into ice on our eyelashes. Later, as a preteen, I would run wearing just a Lee Storm Rider jeans jacket or sometimes a Levis one, and bald tennis shoes and no mitts or scarf because I thought it was cool, we all thought it was cool, then later still, drunk myself or stoned on mushrooms, and then later, as a young person out on my own, around my beat-up but beloved rented attic suite that burned down, fourteen years I ran around that house until it was no more.

  The firewood is for warmth, and a safe roof, shelter. The silver is for prosperity, and good work given and done. The bread is for your table, and the wish is may you break it and share it with loved ones. You run to conjure these things up, to invite warmth and wealth and plenty into your new year.

  A few years ago my partner at the time Zena and I threw a party on New Year’s Eve. I hadn’t been planning it, but at about nine p.m. I called my friend Cynthia, who has a fireplace, and asked her to bring a couple of prime pieces of kindling with her. I inherited my grandmother’s love of the pre-1968 silver dime, so I had a couple stashed away. I stuffed them into a faded Crown Royal bag with some candlesticks, an antique spoon, and some jewelry. A leaden loaf of gluten free sunflower seed and flax bread was procured from the freezer. Just before midnight I gathered a few folks game enough to come and run with me.

  I had never run around a roof I owned before. It is a very small roof, connected to a lot of other people’s roofs, and I won’t truly own it for another twenty years or so, but still. When we stepped out of the lobby onto the sidewalk I realized that this wasn’t going to be three drunken loops around a single family dwelling like the good old days. It was going to be three pretty much sober laps of the entire block, because we were living in a fifty-seven-suite building attached on all sides to the buildings next to it.