by Dawn Dumont
Mealtimes were about eating and Mom liked to keep it that way: “No laughing, no singing, no fighting while you’re eating, or else you’ll get an ulcer.”
“What’s an ulcer?”
“Shut up or you’ll get one.”
Her rules never stopped us from annoying one another from across the table. “Mom, David won’t stop whistling.”
“I’ll stop whistling when she stops snapping her fingers,” David said.
“Then I’m gonna click my tongue. How do you like that?”
“Then it’s time for pig eating noises.” David was really good at pig eating noises.
“I’m getting an ulcer just listening to you all! Art, do something,” Mom said.
Dad had gone to his happy place: a place where there was no shortage of gravy, where the TV was on and tuned into a hockey game, where a man could eat his pork chops in peace.
Another one of Mom’s rules was that we had to finish everything on our plate. If you took something, you had to eat it. In Africa, India and even in some other houses on the reserve, there was a food shortage and any decline in our appetites would make it worse.
“If we don’t finish our food, doesn’t that mean more food goes to other people?” I asked her once.
“No, because we’re gonna just throw it out to the dogs.”
This prompted a glance out the window at the dogs who sat on our verandah, their tongues hanging out of our mouths waiting for the scraps that were promised to them.
I had no issues with the plate-polishing rule. With fourteen hands reaching for food at the same time, I was lucky if I got seconds. In our house, leftovers were a quaint idea, something you might see on TV. The cherub-faced TV kids groaned when their mom put a casserole dish on the table, “Not leftovers, again!” At our meals, we always saw the bottom of the pan, cake dish, or pie tin. Sometimes Dad would even mop up remaining grease with a piece of bread.
David and I polished our plates until we could see our own reflections in them. Then seeing hunger in the eyes staring back at us, we moved onto other people’s food if no one stopped us. Celeste was a picky eater and David and I had learned to hover over her.
We didn’t understand why someone would turn down food so we teased Celeste for what we called “being snotty,” like when she dropped food on the floor and didn’t pick it up and eat it.
“Look at her, thinks she’s too good to eat off the floor,” I said rolling my eyes at David. My gloating was lost on him, as he’d already be under the table clambering for the food.
Wieners and beans. Pork chops and rice. Deer steaks and onions. Rabbit stew with dumplings. These were the dishes Mom knew best. With five kids, a full time job and an addiction to bingo, Mom didn’t have time to research new dishes or experiment with fancy foods like vegetables. However, a foray into Asian cuisine introduced her to canned mushrooms. She mixed them in with some rice and soy sauce and David and I devoured our plates in mere seconds.
Celeste ate her way around the mushrooms and piled them high in the middle of her plate. Mom was feeling plucky that day and said something she had never said before: “If you don’t eat that, Celeste, then you’ll stay there until you do.” Celeste made her face into the shape of a pout and folded her arms. The game was on.
Three hours later, Celeste still sat at the table. Every half hour Mom would walk in and glance at Celeste and then at the clock. Mom was more curious than angry. It rarely took this long to break a child.
David and I perched on the chairs beside Celeste. “Just eat them already and come play.”
Celeste shook her head. “I can’t. They’re gross.”
“They’re just mushrooms,” David said.
Celeste looked at him in confusion. “Is that what they are?”
“What did you think they were?”
“Poo.”
David and I both laughed. “Mom would never feed us poo!” I said. “Mom is not a crazy poo-cooker!”
It turns out that I spoke too soon; two weeks later Mom brought home tripe. She spent all day boiling it and we spent all day making gagging noises whenever we walked into the kitchen.
“What smells so gross?” I asked.
“Get the hell out of here,” Mom replied.
“Is that food?” I peeked a look at the grey thing bubbling on the stove.
“It’s tripe and it’s good for you,” she said and took a deep satisfied whiff. I could not have been more shocked if she had turned her head in a complete circle like an owl.
“What’s tripe?” I asked.
Mom ignored the question as she stirred the pot. I consulted Tabitha, my older sister and my expert on everything.
“Tripe is the guts of an animal,” she explained.
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” I replied. Pretty much every meat we ate was the guts of something.
“It’s where the shit comes from.”
I left the room and went to relay the information to David and Celeste. When suppertime rolled around, we hid ourselves in the basement and snacked on a bag of chips we had stolen from the cupboard. Upstairs our parents ate the tripe with relish. Every once in a while my dad would call out, “If you guys don’t hurry, there’s not going to be any left!”
Downstairs we shuddered.
Later that evening, our uncles and aunts alerted to the tripe meal — probably by the smell — dropped in and filled their bowls with the crap. I guess tripe was their generation’s pizza pops.
My favourite meal was something a lot less “fragrant”; meatloaf day was the best of times and the worst of times. I loved it and so did David, and because he was the only boy, Mom always gave him an extra-large serving. Then David would eat it while I glared at him from across the table, silently planning future “accidents” for my accident-prone little brother.
I started hanging out in the kitchen on meatloaf day. When Mom pulled it from the stove, I volunteered to set the table. Then I delivered it to the table with one serving already missing. My brother figured out my game and started hanging out in front of the stove with a fork in one hand and a bottle of ketchup in the other.
I had a healthy appetite for a ten-year-old girl, healthy even for a thirty-year-old construction worker. I used to polish off two, sometimes three pork chops at the dinner table. My dad and I once fork-wrestled over the last one.
“What’s with this girl?” he blustered. “She eats like a horse.”
“She’s ten, she’s growing,” Mom explained.
“I’m growing,” I reiterated through a mouthful of meat.
“Are you planning on being eight feet tall?”
“That would be awesome! Then I could play basketball!” I exclaimed. “These are good pork chops, Mom,” I added with a winsome smile.
My mom never gave a moment’s thought to her weight. Taller than average, her hips had always been narrow and her waist, if not small, was never thick. “I’ve got better things to worry about than a few pounds.”
One of our aunties left a Nutri-System shake at our house and Mom drank it more out of curiosity than anything else. “Damn thing tasted so bad I had to have a whole bowl of ice cream to get the taste out of my mouth.”
If she did gain weight, she’d start wearing my dad’s jeans. “Women waste too much time worrying about what they look like,” she’d say as we watched a daytime TV heroine add another layer of lipstick to her face as she tried to seduce her sister’s husband.
“Tell me about it,” I’d add as I polished off a bag of chips on the couch beside her.
Mom had twelve brothers and sisters. Most of them had families and most of these families averaged four children each. I tried counting them once and I always forgot someone. Nowadays trying to count the offspring of my cousins is beyond me. I hope one of us is up to the task before the next generation starts getting married.
We labeled our cousins according to geography. We belonged to the Saskatchewan cousins, which included two other families in the Qu’Appelle Valle
y along with another family in Prince Albert. Then there were two families of Manitoba cousins who had a lot of kids around our age.
The Manitoba cousins were frequent visitors. They were bigger, bolder and more numerous than us. Each summer their parents, Auntie Beth and Uncle Jack, opened the back of their camper truck and our cousins piled out in a clamber of legs, arms and insults. They descended upon us like passenger pigeons, blocking out the sun with their squawking.
My siblings and I observed them curiously from behind our blanket of shyness. Everything about us was weird to them as well. “Why do you talk softly?” “Why do you read books?” “Why don’t you shoot more things?”
They thought up all the fun things to do. “Let’s build a big fire. Then we’ll throw some kerosene on it. Then we’ll jump over it.”
Their sense of fun permeated everything they did. They went from activity to activity, greedily sucking the enjoyment out of it. I envied their hedonism but I couldn’t tell them that. Mostly because uttering a word like hedonism guaranteed a pile driver.
Thanks to the wonderful world of wrestling, my cousins learned a variety of wrestling moves like the pile driver, camel clutch and the suplex. My sister, girl cousins and I got to experience these moves firsthand. The pile driver is when someone much stronger than you — let’s call them the attacker — picks you up, turns you upside down with your head between their knees. Then the attacker drops into a sitting or kneeling position. Your job is to scream for help that never comes.
Once the Manitoba cousins arrived, summer vacation began to move at a breakneck pace. There were three-hour long soccer games played against the fading sun, diving competitions off the dock at the beach, and games of Sasquatch in the woods late into the night.
Sasquatch: there have been few things I’ve done in my life that have inspired such a heady mix of excitement and intense fear. Every night as all the kids headed out the door to play the latest game, I could feel my legs shaking. “This is a bad idea,” I would whisper to myself. But I would never turn back from those dark woods.
The game began after the sun went down. Sasquatch was best when the only light came from the Bics carried in our back pockets or the whites of our eyes. We’d tramp through the woods, crushing leaves beneath our feet, our joking voices and laughter scaring the rabbits and deer across the prairies. There would be anywhere from seven to twenty of us spread through the woods.
The game began when one of the older cousins, usually Malcolm, tied a scarf around his neck until he “passed out” and “became crazy.” I don’t understand why this step was necessary, as the mere act of putting a scarf around your neck on the reserve would at the very least qualify you as eccentric.
Malcolm was a showman. He would wrap the scarf around his neck multiple times and pull on the ends until his eyes began to bulge. He’d continue pulling even as he slowly sank to his knees. His head would fall forward and his dark hair obscured his face. The more naïve of us would approach him with concern. “Malcolm, are you okay?’
Malcolm would begin growling. Experienced players knew it was time to run. The younger ones wouldn’t budge because they were worried about their older cousin. Malcolm would reward their concern with a painful beating.
After “becoming crazy,” Malcolm hunted every one of us. If he found you he threw you down and delivered hard fast punches to your thigh (these were known as charley horses). Sometimes, he got out of control — usually with his younger brother Nathan — and the punches would be delivered to more sensitive areas and then a fight would start. While hiding, the little kids would hear the scuffling of the older kids and we knew that it was a matter of time before one of them, or both, would begin crying violently, as boys do.
When the game went well, the best you could hope for was getting to huddle in the dark, cold woods without getting a beating. Yet the whole game was worthwhile for that 30-second chase that happened when the Sasquatch spotted you. You’d run as fast your short legs could take you over the uneven terrain. The Sasquatch toyed with you, sometimes running past you and slapping the back of your head as he passed. You’d try to turn but he’d already be ahead of you again. You both knew there was no chance you could escape him at this point but you’d run anyway. And giggle nervously. This took away most of your breath so finally you’d fall onto the ground, paralyzed with laughter and fear. The game taught me a lot about night navigation and reconnaissance work. More importantly I realized I could run and pee myself at the same time.
Another reason we loved having our Manitoba cousins around was they always had at least one extra boy with them: a boy that we weren’t related to! This was something new for Celeste and me. One summer they had a foster child named Adrian Fox staying with them. Fox: even his name suggested how cute he was. If you were wont to have daydreams about tall, dark and handsome princes, as I was, then Adrian fit the role perfectly. Even better, he came neatly packaged with a sad story of abandonment by his equally beautiful but depressed mother.
“She went crazy and tried to kill herself, right, Adrian?’ Malcolm said behind the barn as he teased a rooster with a stick.
Adrian nodded with a soft smile on his face.
I was in awe of his reticence. Here Adrian had the saddest story in the world and he wasn’t taking advantage of it. I talked about everything bad that happened to me. Once one of my uncles said that my younger sister Celeste was prettier than me and I didn’t stop talking about that for two years.
I didn’t even need to tell people in order to derive satisfaction from the story. On days when I was particularly bored, I would sit on my bed and replay those fateful words, “You’re pretty Dawn but Celeste is like a wildflower . . . ” until I could make myself cry all over again.
Then after my supply of tears had run low, I rehearsed my brave speech to the offender. “A wildflower! Then what am I? A weed? A dirty stinkweed! What do people do with weeds? They cut them down! I am not a weed you mean, old man — I am a flower and there is no such thing as an ugly flower! You cannot appreciate my beauty because you are a sad, old man and you have no imagination.”
Now if I’d had a crazy, yet beautiful, mother and abandonment under my belt, I would have been set. Such unfortunate circumstances would have supplied me with enough self-pity for two lifetimes.
Adrian’s story made him even more adorable to us. What girl wouldn’t want to heal Adrian’s broken heart? Celeste, our cousin Rachel, and I had crushes on him. Publicly we declared that we loved Corey Haim but we all knew that a real Adrian was a thousand times better than a distant Hollywood beau.
Each summer while the boys spent their time taunting the farm animals until the animals chased them, the girls decorated our playhouse in the woods. That summer, however, Adrian’s presence lured us out of the bush more and more often.
At Malcolm’s suggestion one night we were even cajoled into a game of strip poker. The game was a favourite of Malcolm’s who thoroughly enjoyed mooning his younger cousins as they hid their eyes and screamed: “Gross!” He drank our disgust like ambrosia.
Strip poker was a new game for us. If one of the boys had suggested it before, all of us girls would have said, “No way, as if!” Adrian’s presence made strip poker less repulsive, exciting even. We had no cards so we improvised with a bottle. Wearing three sets of clothes each, the game moved pretty slowly. Sadly the bottle never went near Adrian. Malcolm got impatient with the evening’s pace and mooned everyone; unfortunately this was the moment that our parents walked in the door.
After our first foray into nude gambling, we girls began to play strip poker on our own. Strip poker gave us insight into one another’s progress through the mysterious, and mostly gross, miracle of puberty. Some of us had breasts, some of us had hair in new places, some had neither. The dark light we chose to play in obscured anything else. Our cousin Dotty was the oldest of all of us and we were in awe of her breasts.
They were huge and Dotty was understandably very proud of them. Dott
y had always been big. At least once a day someone called her names like huge cow, fat slob, and lazy pig. Adults can be very cruel. Unfortunately, having a life-long experience with obesity did not make the insults go down easier. But, the breasts took the sting out of the insults about her weight.
“I don’t know why they tease me,” Dotty said to me one day. “It just makes me eat more.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, as I tossed another handful of potato chips into my mouth.
At the end of July, Auntie Beth had enough of living out of a suitcase and decided it was time to return home. My brother, sister and I begged my mom to let us go visit our cousins in Manitoba. My mom wouldn’t let my brother go — he was only nine, six in personality — but she agreed to send my sister and me.
As this was going to be the longest visit ever away from home, Mom figured I wouldn’t be able to do it. I was notorious for trying to walk back to our house in the middle of the night or calling my mom and tearfully asking her to come get me. She tried to give me an out: “You don’t have to go. You can stay home and play with your brother. I’ll tell the kids you have to help me out.”
I blanched at the thought of hanging out with my brother for the whole summer. His idea of fun was making car crash sounds while sitting on a pile of gravel. Not exactly an eleven-year-old girl’s style. Besides, I knew it would kill me — literally — if my younger sister was off having fun and I was not. And then there was the Adrian factor. This morning, he had spoken to me. Sure he just said, “Can you pass the milk?” But it was the way he said it!
Even though we would be gone for four weeks, I didn’t see the weeks so much as I saw it as twenty-eight days and twenty-eight chances to kiss Adrian. I replied that I would not need my brother’s company for I was travelling north.
