North of Normal- A memoir of my wilderness childhood, my unusual family, and how I survived both

by Cea Sunrise Person

  Her mother snatched it up and flashed me a smile. “Well, isn’t this just lovely. Have you been to Paris, dear?”

  I looked down at my hands and pretended not to hear, then got up to find the bathroom. I didn’t have to go, but I wasn’t sure what else to do with myself. Everyone seemed to be playing a game about ducks and geese, but I didn’t know the rules.

  As I walked down the hall, I passed Jenny’s bedroom. I stopped and stared. Her bed was covered with a frilly white canopy, and painted on the wall was a picture of Rapunzel with her long blond hair flowing from a castle window. I checked behind me, and then stepped inside the room. There was a party dress draped across her bed. I touched it with my hand. It was pink satin, softer than a kitten’s fur. Moving slowly, I picked it up and held it before me in the mirror. With my clothes hidden, I barely recognized myself. I looked pretty, almost like Rapunzel. I glanced into the hallway. Nobody was there, and I could still hear shrieks coming from the living room. I took a deep breath, then I stripped off my clothes and slipped the dress over my head.

  It was too small. The hem hung above my knees and the sleeves ended just below my elbows, but I didn’t care. I felt like a real-life Barbie. I twirled in front of the mirror and let my hair fly out behind me.

  Then I stopped cold. Over my shoulder, I could see the reflection of Tina standing in the doorway. She brought her hand up to her mouth and snickered, then she turned and ran back the way she had come. I felt like throwing up.

  Seconds later, Jenny’s mother rushed into the room.

  “Oh dear,” she said fretfully, “I should have closed Jenny’s door. Her room is a frightful mess . . . Here, darling, just turn around and I’ll get the zipper for you. It’s just a tad too small, I see, but a nice color on you just the same . . .”

  I nodded, fighting tears, and as soon as I could get my clothes on I went to hide in the bathroom.

  When it was time to go home, I made sure nobody was watching, and then I picked up my snow globe and slipped it into my coat pocket. I would never be like the other girls, and I hadn’t just been caught trying on someone else’s dress. I had been caught trying to belong.

  All I wanted to do was go home and forget about it, but Tina’s mother had other plans.

  “Tina, you’ve never met Cea’s parents,” she said as her car pulled into our driveway. “Why don’t you go in and say hello?”

  “Do I have to?” Tina asked, crossing her arms.

  “Yes. It’s the polite thing to do,” her mother said, angling the rearview mirror at her face and twisting up her lipstick. “Now scoot.”

  Tina and I climbed the stairs in silence and stepped through the front door. “Mom!” I called loudly. “Tina from school is here! Wants to meet you!”

  “Be right there!” my mother shouted back from the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush, the door open, and then Mom’s footsteps coming down the hallway. She walked into the living room.

  Beside me, Tina gasped and raised her hand to her mouth.

  “Oh, hi there,” Mom said, smiling at her. “I’m Cea’s mom. Did you girls have fun?”

  Tina stared at my mother in horror. For the second time that day, I wanted nothing more than to just disappear. I wasn’t sure what was worse: the fact that Mom was standing before us with a joint in her hand, or the fact that she was doing it topless. I thought about Jenny’s mother serving Kool-Aid in her flowered dress, and I had never felt like more of a freak.

  DESPITE THE MISERY BROUGHT on by Jenny’s birthday party and Mom’s nudist, pot-smoking ways, by May of 1976 my life had settled into the closest thing to normal I’d ever known. The days passed, and there was nothing I wanted that I didn’t have. At home, Mom cooked and kept the cottage clean while Karl got a raise and began to pull in enough money that we could even afford the occasional extra, like dinner in a restaurant or a new winter coat for me. I took baths and helped my mother with the laundry and went to school looking half decent. The other kids never liked me much, but they put up with me and even played with me sometimes. My wilderness years were beginning to fade in my mind. I thought about my grandparents less and less, and when I did, it was mostly to hope they wouldn’t find us and take us back to the tipis. I was happy.

  Then one day I came home from school to find my mother crying on the sofa.

  Mom stood up and rushed toward me with open arms. She hugged me hard, pulled me into her lap and then started sobbing again. We weren’t alone. Just across the room, a strange man sat in Karl’s favorite chair.

  “Why are you crying?” I asked Mom, fiddling with the roach clip that hung between her breasts. I had made it for her years before, and she had attached it to a string of leather to wear as a necklace.

  She steadied herself with a deep breath and then told me the news: Karl had broken his back in a logging accident, and it was very bad. He was unconscious and had already been flown to a hospital in Nanaimo. We were to meet him there, but before we did, we were to pack our belongings and have the logging company ship them to our destination. We would not be returning to the cottage.

  I jumped up. “No!” I yelled angrily. “I don’t want to leave!”

  “Cea, this isn’t the time—”

  “I said no! You can’t make me!”

  “Honey, please . . .” Mom tried to take my hand, but I kept it tucked stubbornly under my armpit. “Wait a minute,” she said suddenly, as if realizing something. She turned to the man. “How could he tell you all this if he was unconscious? And Vancouver is closer than Nanaimo. Why didn’t they take him there?”

  “Mommy!” I howled.

  “Just a minute—”

  The man reached into his shirt pocket, took out an envelope and from that an unfolded a sheet of paper. “We have all our men fill out one of these forms in case of an accident. Family contacts, special instructions, what have you.” He pointed halfway down the page. “See? It says right here. ‘Pack all belongings . . . ship to my mother’s house in Nanaimo’—”

  “His mother?” Mom’s jaw dropped to her chest. “His mother is dead! His whole family is. Except his brother, I think.”

  The man shrugged. “I can only tell you what it says here, ma’am.”

  “There must be some mistake. Anyway . . .” She looked around. “I don’t know how he expects us to get there. I don’t have any money—”

  My heart leapt. No money, of course! That meant we couldn’t go. But the man reached into the envelope again and pulled out a thin stack of cash.

  “Karl put this aside for you. It should be enough to get you through.”

  “Oh . . .” Mom’s hands fluttered to her lap. She looked around the room, slowly taking it in. “Well, I guess then . . . we better, um, get packing . . .”

  I ran to my room and threw myself on the bed. Someday, I thought, I would buy a cottage just like this for Mom and me and my little baby girl to live in, and nobody in the world would be able to make us leave. But in the meantime, there was nothing left to do but cry. And I did, until my mother came upstairs an hour later and wrapped her weary body around my own.

  “Here,” she said quietly, holding an eyedropper in front of my mouth.

  I shook my head and kept my lips clamped tightly shut. Mom thought Rescue Remedy was the miracle cure for everything, so I always acted like I felt a little better when she gave it to me. But tonight, I just didn’t feel like pretending anymore.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Mom and I showed up at Mrs. Hofler’s house on a bright day in May, squinting against the sunlight as we waited on her tidy front porch. Karl’s mother was expecting us. The day before, after packing up the cottage and getting a man from the logging company to drive us to the Greyhound bus terminal, Mom had had a short phone call with her.

  “The hospital already called her,” Mom told me after she hung up. “Karl is awake. He let her know we were on our way.”

  “Was she . . . Did she sound nice?” I asked.

  “It’s hard to say. Strong Austria
n accent, she was kind of hard to understand.”

  “Oh. Maybe you should call Karl and ask him why he made her dead.”

  “I already did.” Mom shook her head. “He didn’t want to talk about it. Just told me that his father had been a Nazi, and that he really did die a few years back.”

  “What’s a Nazi?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. Some crazy assholes who did a lot of bad stuff during the war.”

  “Like what kind of bad—?”

  “Not now, honey, okay? Anyway, Karl wouldn’t say why he lied.”

  Mom raised her hand to knock on Mrs. Hofler’s door again, but just then it swung open. Before us was a woman holding a can of Lysol. Besides the smell of her, which made my nostrils burn, she looked like any of the old ladies I had seen on the ferry ride over here: shapeless dress, wrinkled face and short hair in tight silver curls.

  She nodded at us unsmilingly. “Your room is downstairs.”

  I had never heard consonants pronounced the way Mrs. Hofler said them, as if they were almost too heavy for her tongue to push out. “It is up to you to keep it clean.”

  “Of course,” Mom replied, smiling stiffly. “Thank you. I’m Michelle, by the way. And this is my daughter—”

  “Yes, I assumed that to be the case.” Mrs. Hofler opened the door wide enough to let us in. “Have the girl leave her boots here,” she said to Mom without looking at me. “Then go into the bathroom and have her remove her clothing.”

  I shrank behind Mom’s legs.

  “Just do as she asked, sweetheart,” Mom said softly. “I’ll go with you.”

  I took off my snowmobile boots and walked through the house, looking behind me to make sure Mom was following. The smell of Lysol was everywhere. Every surface of Mrs. Hofler’s home gleamed. I found the bathroom and took off my sweater, jeans and socks, then sat on the toilet to wait with Mom beside me. The door opened, and Mrs. Hofler came in with a plastic bag in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other.

  “Underwear,” she said, pointing.

  I glanced at Mom, then slipped them off and put my hands over my crotch. Using the tongs, Mrs. Hofler picked up my clothes one piece at a time and put them in her bag. Then she handed Mom a bottle with a drawing of two screaming lice on it.

  “Wash her hair three times with this shampoo.”

  Mom stared at the bottle. “But she’s never had—”

  “Just do it, please,” Mrs. Hofler replied, and turned on her heel.

  A minute later, we heard the washing machine starting up. After Mom washed my hair, she wrapped a towel around me, and we went downstairs to find our bedroom. Our backpacks were sitting outside the door with the zippers open.

  “That’s nice,” Mom said with forced cheer. “It looks like she’s done our laundry. Anyhow . . .” She looked around. “This is great. It should do just fine. Right, sweetheart?”

  I nodded. My mother was right; it was fine. The room was small, but we each had our own bed, and there was a lamp and a large dresser to share. There was even a telephone and a small television set. Maybe everything would be okay, I thought. But that night, after a silent, boiled supper with Mrs. Hofler, the sick feeling in my stomach still hadn’t gone away.

  THE NEXT MORNING, MOM and I took the bus to visit Karl. As she and I passed through sleepy streets lined with cute houses and pretty rose gardens, I suddenly felt homesick for the wilderness. My grandparents, I thought. How would they ever find us now?

  When we got to the hospital, Mom and I found Karl’s room and walked cautiously through the door. He was asleep with his mouth open, and I barely recognized him. His entire torso, right arm and thigh had a hard white cast on them. His leg was slung up in a shiny metal pulley, and there was a bandage wrapped around his head. Mom put her hand on his arm, and he opened his eyes and slowly rolled his head toward us.

  “Hey, pretty lady. Hey, Small Fry.” He smiled weakly.

  Mom took his hand. “Wow. You look pretty rough. How are you feeling?”

  “Been better. Hanging in, though.”

  “Yeah. So what . . . what happened?”

  Karl rubbed his good hand across his stubbly chin. “Managed to get myself on the business side of a falling tree. Didn’t even see it coming.”

  “Wow,” Mom said again. “How long will you have to be in here?”

  “The doctors say at least three months.”

  She swallowed hard.

  “Yeah, I know.” He turned to look at the window. “How . . . how you doing at my mother’s?”

  “It’s, uh . . . fine.” She cleared her throat as if to continue, but Karl quickly nodded and changed the subject.

  “Listen, you think you could bring me some real food next time you come?” he asked. “The meals in this place are killing me.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Mom replied. “Whatever you want. Of course.”

  THE DAYS CRAWLED TO a stop at Mrs. Hofler’s house. In the beginning, Mom spent most of her time at the hospital or sneaking out to the park to smoke a quick joint. I usually stayed behind in our room when she went to visit Karl, but I liked to go with her to the park. I would swing or climb the monkey bars while she puffed away in the trees, fanning the smoke with her hand to keep the busybody parents at bay.

  On the way back to Mrs. Hofler’s house, Mom often liked to talk about the wilderness days in a breathy, stoned voice. Somehow, it was these times that always made me feel a little better. As much as I wanted to be a part of the city, it also frightened me. Passing cars, crowds of people and loud noises made me jump. One time when Mom was talking about my grandparents, I stopped on the sidewalk and started to cry. Mom hugged me, then took out her pocketknife and cut some roses from the yard beside us. When we got back to our bedroom, Mom put the flowers in an empty jar. She said it was as close to bringing us back to the wilderness as she could manage here. I inhaled and tried to send myself back there, but it didn’t work. The roses I remembered in the bush were loose and ragged-looking with petals that blew in the breeze, nothing at all like this perfectly shaped version from the city.

  A BLACK AND WHITE cat ran after a yellow bird. The cat ran into a wall, slid onto the floor like a pancake, then shook himself back into a cat shape and walked away on two legs. I flipped the channel, searching for commercials. Mrs. Hofler had cable, which meant she even had a channel that played kids’ shows until late. It was nine o’clock at night, and Mom was out again. She had promised to be home in time to tuck me into bed by ten, and so far she had always kept to her word.

  Even though Mom still visited Karl at the hospital most days, she now spent many of her evenings out. When I asked her where she went, she said something about some new friends she had met through Karl’s brother Marcus, who lived upstairs with Mrs. Hofler. A few times, I had wandered up to find Mrs. Hofler watching TV or drinking sherry at the kitchen table, but each time she had waved me back down the stairs without a word. The thought that she hated having me in her home touched me at a fearful place I couldn’t quite understand, but I didn’t need to.

  My world was slowly shrinking to the shape of a ten-by-twelve-foot basement bedroom. I ate there, I read there, I sewed there and I played with Suzie Doll there. I turned on the TV in search of Breck Shampoo commercials, whose glamorous girls always made me feel hopeful, but mostly I just pretended here. Sometimes I imagined I was back at the cottage lying in my old bed, other times I was back in the wilderness with my grandparents. I named myself Cindy and made myself eighteen, an age that seemed both magical and ancient to me. As Cindy, I was a beautiful model who wore pretty dresses, and even though all the men wanted to have sex with me, I never did because I thought sex was gross and I never wanted to be pregnant because then everyone would know I’d done it just by looking at me. After a while, I would get tired of pretending and look up at the window, wondering when Karl would get out of the hospital so everything could go back to the way it used to be.

  By the time we had been at Mrs. Hofler’s for six weeks, each
day felt like forever. Only Mom seemed happy—in fact, happier than I had seen her in a long time. She smiled a lot and swung my hand when we walked to the park. I didn’t want to question her new good mood, but I couldn’t help wishing that it hadn’t come because she was spending so much time away from me.

  ONE MORNING, I WAS in the kitchen grabbing an apple when I heard Mom and Mrs. Hofler talking. Their voices were low, so I crept closer.

  “. . . not her babysitter,” Mrs. Hofler was saying. “Maybe you have a friend . . .”

  “. . . not an option,” Mom replied. “. . . think of something . . . never meant to be a burden . . .”

  “Perhaps you could stay home,” Mrs. Hofler suggested, and she sounded mad. “Anyway, these are my rules. I trust you understand.”

  “Of course,” Mom said.

  I tiptoed back across the kitchen floor and hurried downstairs. A few minutes later I heard Mom’s footsteps, and then she was standing in the doorway to our bedroom.

  “Well. Fuck a duck,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Oh, just . . . I had a little disagreement with Karl’s mother. Anyway, it looks like I’ll be staying home at night from now on.”

  “But that’s good!” I said happily.

  “Yeah, I know. Only . . .” She shrugged. “Anyway, what do you say we go to the park? I just had a good idea.”

  THE PARK MOM LIKED to take me to had three parts to it: a playground, a picnic area and, on one side, the woods where Mom always hid to smoke her joints. The area wasn’t big enough to get lost in and the trees weren’t very thick, but no one other than Mom and I ever seemed to go in there. Sometimes we would walk in far enough that we could barely hear the sounds of the playing children and could see nothing but nature in every direction, but I still only felt as if I were in a fake forest in the middle of the city.

  When we reached the park, Mom took me into the woods. “So last time we were here, I noticed something,” she said, leading me over to a large spruce tree. “Look at this. Isn’t this just a perfect little fort for you?” She lifted some of the bottom branches and crouched down.