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

by Cea Sunrise Person

  The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was Barbie, lying facedown on the ice.

  Part Four

  Choice

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to imagine myself through a stranger’s eyes. My Fancy Ass jeans were tight, the neckline of my sweatshirt plunged deeply, and my gold braided headband glittered under the lights. A pair of shoulder pads Velcroed to my bra straps completed the look. I looked super cool, and the best thing was that my outfit hadn’t cost me a penny. This shoplifting thing was working out pretty well.

  I turned in front of the mirror, examining my figure. Way too tall, of course, and no boobs yet, but my legs were long and thin and my waist was small. Not bad for an almost-thirteen-year-old. I picked up my Snickers bar from the back of the toilet and finished it off, then tore open another and devoured it greedily. Then I carefully buried the wrappers under the mass of tissues in the trash can. I ate four or five chocolate bars a day, but it wasn’t because they were stolen that I hid them from Mom. Hash and pot were acceptable in our household, but white sugar was not.

  Down the hall, I heard the front door open and close. I sighed, wishing I had had the foresight to leave the house before Mom came home. The dishes were still in the sink, and I hadn’t done the grocery shopping yesterday. Once or twice a week, when her boyfriend could fake an out-of-town business trip to his wife, Mom would spend the night at a hotel with him. My mother’s boyfriend was a married father. Their time together was precious, she said, so I should understand and help out with the chores as much as I could.

  I leaned on the counter and waited quietly, knowing she would most likely go into her bedroom and spend the day catching up on her sleep. When I heard her door close, I reached behind the pipes under the sink and pulled out my cigarettes. Plucking one from the pack, I held it between my fingers and posed in front of the mirror with my chin lowered. With my lips slicked in frosty pink and my lashes coated with navy blue mascara, I looked about five years older than my actual age. And today, I had someone to impress. Papa Dick was due to arrive for a visit this afternoon. I hadn’t seen him since I’d left the Yukon, and I wanted to be sure he saw exactly who I was now. One thing was for sure: I wasn’t his little Peanut from the wilderness anymore.

  Whoever I had been when I arrived in the city four years earlier was long gone. The shame and rejection I’d experienced since, along with my disgust at my naive bush-girl past, had made me do everything in my power to bury her. During my first few months in Calgary, everything had made me anxious: the bachelors who lived above our basement suite, the public bus, the twenty dollars in Mom’s wallet that had to last us a full week. At school, I heard the other kids whispering about my thrift-store clothing, my ignorance about current TV shows—we didn’t own a television—and my ridiculous height; though I was in fourth grade, I was taller by a long shot than any of the sixth-graders. One day when I was walking home, a gang of teenagers mistook me for a junior-high-schooler, tackled me to the ground and spray-painted my hair green. After that I would have feigned illness to avoid school, but the alternative was even worse: Barry. While Mom went off to her waitressing job each day, Barry stayed behind smoking pot and listening to the Doors on Mom’s freezer-sized ghetto blaster. I refused to speak to him, and used every possible opportunity to cast him glares.

  My mother and me in Calgary, just after I moved there in 1979.

  “What the hell is with you?” he asked me once, gripping my arm. Mom was in the shower.

  “You. That’s what’s wrong with me,” I replied boldly.

  He released my arm and tapped a cigarette from its pack. “Is that right. Well, that’s too bad, since I was planning on helping you guys out. With some money, I mean. Seems you ain’t doing so well.” He waved a hand around at our home. It was a single room, with a hot plate in one corner and red shag carpeting everywhere else. “But if that’s your attitude, I guess I won’t bother.”

  I stood up to my full height. “We don’t need your help,” I said, slitting my eyes at him. “Mom has a job now, and besides, I’m going to make lots of money someday.”

  He laughed and shook his head like I was the biggest joke he’d ever encountered, but a week later, I came home from school to find his red Ranchero gone from the curb. I unlocked our door slowly, knowing the scene that would greet me inside.

  Mom was sitting beside the room’s only window, tears on her cheeks as she blew pot smoke into the air. For once, I didn’t go to comfort her.

  IF GRANDMA JEANNE’S LETTER informing us of her separation from Papa Dick had come as a surprise to Mom, it hadn’t to me. She left him just a few months after I arrived in Calgary, on New Year’s Day of 1980—in honor of a new beginning, she wrote. Grandma Jeanne moved in with a friend while Papa Dick remained at the tipi. Shortly after that, we received a letter from my grandfather saying the Indians had discovered his camp and threatened to burn his tipi to the ground. He was looking for a new campsite, he said, and if Mom had time could she send him a batch of date cookies? He never even mentioned my grandmother, or the separation.

  As for the rest of my family, I’d had little contact, but what I’d heard was more than enough. My Aunt Jessie had given birth to a mentally handicapped baby, who was removed from her care when my aunt called her social worker, worried the baby wasn’t feeding properly. When help arrived, the screaming baby was trying to suck formula through a capped baby bottle. Despite my aunt’s best intentions, she had failed both herself and her child. My Aunt Jan had disappeared once again into the world of hard drugs, and my Uncle Dane had finally been released from hospital, though his freedom had been fleeting. After only a few months, he was recommitted when his roommate found him trying to scale the outside wall under his window, shrieking that aliens were coming to turn his bones to liquid.

  As for my father, his life seemed as happy as could be, but it was pretty clear that it didn’t include me. He now had another child, a two-year-old daughter, who I could only imagine was the light of his life.

  After Barry, there had been a parade of men through Mom’s life. She brought them home from parties, from friends’ houses, from work, and she had sex with them three feet from my bed. She called them “just a friend” and then slept with them the next night. She said she wasn’t in love, and then cried when the phone didn’t ring.

  Eventually we moved from the basement suite into a more decent place, a duplex in a low-rent neighborhood that we afforded by sharing with an endless string of roommates, and that was when she had met her current boyfriend. Within days of starting a job as his secretary, the two of them began an affair. One year later, she was still spending her nights waiting for the sound of his key in the door and her days waiting for his phone calls, so oblivious to the rest of the world that she could barely remember what grade I was in. She didn’t even work anymore, instead depending on her lover’s sporadic handouts. When things were good between them, there was food in the fridge and a new silk blouse in my mother’s closet. When they weren’t, often because of my refusal to acknowledge him, Mom would start checking the classifieds or ask one of our roommates for a loan.

  Our lives would be made so much easier, Mom said to me, if I would only be nice to him. I stared back at her coldly, infuriated by her betrayal. Whenever her boyfriend got particularly impatient with me, he would threaten to send me to live with my father. Mom never did anything but sit silently by his side. I would threaten back, saying I’d tell his wife about their affair, even though I knew it probably didn’t hold much water since I didn’t really know who she was. Eventually my mother and I would turn furiously away from each other, adding yet another layer to the thickening wall of resentment between us.

  In my family, there were no weddings or baby showers or anniversary parties. When my school friends moaned about being forced by their parents to attend this or that family event, all I felt was a raging jealousy. I would have given anything to have their complaints, a
nd to exchange my crazy, self-centered relatives with theirs.

  “PAPA DICK! OH MY God!” I said, pulling the front door open. Immediately, my cheeks reddened. I had been planning on playing it cool, letting my grandfather observe and wonder about the new Cea before him, but I was so happy to see him that I couldn’t help myself.

  “Peanut!” he exclaimed, smiling back at me. Then his eyes swept over my face. “What on earth are you wearing on your lips?” he frowned, swiping his fingers across my mouth and rubbing them together. “Don’t you know what’s in that stuff? Preservatives. Poisons. Carcinogens.” He shook his head and pushed past me into the house. “Your mom around?”

  “Yeah, she’s—” Just then, Mom came around the corner. She had changed out of her skirt and blouse—her lover liked her looking like the lady she was, she had told me once—into a pair of jeans with a woven hippie belt and T-shirt with no bra. Her eyes were red from crying. More and more dates and phone calls with her boyfriend were resulting in tears these days, and I could only hope this meant that the end was near.

  “Dad!” she said, throwing herself into his arms.

  When they finished embracing, I followed them into the kitchen, trying to look casual.

  “Cea,” he said, smoothing his hand over his bushy gray hair. “I’m starving. How about whipping me up a little something to eat?”

  “Oh . . . okay.” I moved to the fridge, wondering what I could possibly make that wouldn’t offend him, and started slicing an avocado.

  The phone rang. Mom picked it up and walked with it, stretching the cord down the hallway. I rolled my eyes inwardly. “So,” I said to Papa Dick as I buttered bread, “it’s been so long since I’ve seen you. How are you? I mean . . . are you and Grandma Jeanne still in touch? I was really sad to hear the news. I mean I know it wasn’t always easy for you guys, but after more than thirty years together—”

  “Oh, Peanut, that’s all in the past now,” he said, waving a hand at me. “There’s no need to dredge all that up. I want you to dig on what’s happening in my life right now, and I have to tell you that I’ve met the most amazing woman. The first time I saw her—”

  “Oh,” I cut in, unable to help myself. “A new woman? Um, okay, well . . .”

  “Yes. Truly, she’s just the most unbelievable person you could ever meet. She’s a little younger than me, and we have the most explosive sexual connection—”

  I felt myself blanch. “Papa, um, that’s kind of embarrassing for me—”

  He looked at me levelly. “Remember, Peanut, embarrassment is just another form of fear. You need to open your mind a little. As I was saying . . .”

  I tuned him out, though I managed to nod in all the right places. Finally, I set the sandwich in front of him and sat down again. He lifted the bread to examine the contents, grinned approvingly and took a bite. I waited until he was finished and then cleared my throat, wondering if he’d noticed yet how grown up I was.

  “So . . . I got, like, ninety-two percent on this English paper I wrote last week. My grade seven English paper, that is. Do you want to see it? It’s about bears. I was actually thinking about you when I wrote it.” I smiled brightly. The truth was that I was also dying to show him some of the poetry I’d written recently. I spent hours scribbling down poems about forbidden passions, voiceless abused children, and the fall of nature to man’s brutal hand—poems that I never let anyone read. But I felt like Papa Dick would appreciate them, especially the ones about man versus nature. I loved writing, and I knew I wasn’t half bad at it. If modeling didn’t pan out, I figured maybe a career as a novelist could be my fallback plan.

  “Sure thing, Peanut, sure thing,” Papa Dick responded. “All in good time. First I need to get a little exercise.” He stood up and stretched, then walked to the bathroom. Five minutes later he entered the living room, stark naked, and settled down on his yoga mat with his palms turned up on his knees.

  I quietly cleared his plate away, and then went into my bedroom and closed the door. Hot tears welled up in my eyes. There was a deep emptiness in my chest, almost as if my grandfather had died right before my eyes. It wasn’t just that he hadn’t observed and wondered about me as I had hoped and planned. It was that he hadn’t even noticed me.

  BY THE TIME PAPA Dick left us two days later, I thought that if I ever saw him again in my life it would probably be too soon. Not only had he not asked me a single question about myself—or my school project, for that matter—he had spent the entire time lecturing me on the evils of Cheerios, insisting I use sphagnum moss instead of maxi-pads for my period, and performing his embarrassing gut roll for my friends. He squatted on the toilet and left the door wide open when he pooped. He went on and on about the evil confinement of our walls and insisted on sleeping in a tent in the backyard to escape them. But at least he eventually left. Unlike Grandma Jeanne.

  It was three months later that she came to live with us. Within a few weeks, she was spending most of her time in bed with her new lover, a stoner thirty years her junior who appeared to be homeless. He wore oven mitts around the house and brought her boxes of Tide with bows stuck on them.

  Sometimes at night, I would sit in my bedroom thinking about my life. My family was crazy, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to change it. I was twelve years old, and for at least the next six years, I would be their prisoner.

  I WAS SITTING AT the kitchen table doing homework when the doorbell rang. Mom, at home on a rare weekend afternoon, got up to answer it. I heard a hoot and a holler, and then everyone was talking at once.

  “Cea,” Mom yelled, “there’s someone here to see you. You’ll never believe it.”

  I rose from the table, curious, and walked to the front door.

  “Hey,” a chubby teenager said to me, blowing a fat pink bubble with her gum. “Remember me?”

  I blinked at her and started to shake my head, and then it came to me. Kelly. I shifted my eyes to the man behind her. Larry grinned at me and pulled a joint from behind his ear. “Well, well. Look who’s all grown up.”

  I gave him a wan smile, and then turned back to Kelly. “Oh my God,” I said to her. “You look so . . . different.”

  “Yeah,” she said, letting the bubble collapse onto her face. “I’m all grown up now too. You got anything fun to do around here?”

  “Um, well, there’s the mall—”

  “That’ll do. Let’s mosey.”

  “Okay, just let me—”

  Larry pushed past me into the house, already lighting up. “Stay out of trouble,” he said to Kelly, jabbing his joint at her. She smirked and held out her hand, and he pressed a five-dollar bill into it.

  “Okay, I guess we’re going to the mall,” I said to Mom before following Kelly down the steps. I was still trying to match this teenager’s appearance with the girl I’d known in the wilderness. Her face looked bloated and hard at the same time, plastered with orange makeup in a failed attempt to cover a bad case of acne. Never a skinny girl, she was now officially fat, with her exposed belly hanging down from a too-short KISS T-shirt.

  “Um, wow,” I said as we walked, “this is, like, really crazy. You don’t still live—”

  “In the bush? Hell, no. Thank God.” She stopped on the sidewalk, digging through her fringed black purse and withdrawing a pack of cigarettes. She lit up and offered me one.

  I hesitated, and then took it. My cigarettes under the sink at home were more for posing than anything, but I didn’t want to look uncool in front of Kelly.

  “So,” she said, lighting my cigarette behind a cupped hand. I inhaled, willing myself not to cough. “You done any drugs yet?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, I figured. You always were Little Miss Perfect.”

  “Little Miss Perfect? What are you—?”

  “Yeah, you know. Little Miss Purity. Never got in trouble, always everyone’s favorite. Fuck, I hated it in the wilderness. Not like life in the city’s much better.” She snorted and spat up a green loog
ie on the pavement. “Me and my boyfriend, we do glue a lot. Or hash when we can get it. My old man keeps it in his underwear drawer, like he’s being so goddamn sneaky or something.” I stared at the sidewalk, certain that whatever I said would be wrong. Kelly snorted again and flicked her cigarette butt on the ground. “Fuckin’ parents. All the drugs they’ve done, where the hell do they get off telling me I can’t. I don’t know. Hated it in the bush, but it sure was a lot easier than this shit. Don’t you think?”

  I nodded, realizing that in her own way, Kelly was trying to connect with me. I was the only person she knew outside her family who had lived through such craziness, and it had done its damage to her. She was sixteen years old, jaded and bitter beyond her years, and already far down a beaten path of self-destruction. In short, she was becoming her parents.

  “Yeah,” I replied agreeably, but mostly what I felt was relief. If there was one thing I was certain of, it was that I was nothing at all like Kelly.

  I SLUMPED ACROSS THE sofa, reaching for my glass. I missed and tried again, giggling as it swam before my eyes. I was on drink number three, and there was a very low 7 Up–to-vodka ratio in my glass.

  Someone sat down beside me. I turned my head slowly and saw dark hair, blue eyes and muscular arms. Chris Something. He reminded me a little of Karl. “Hey,” he said, sliding his arm along the back of the couch. “How you doing there, pretty girl?”

  “Good. I’m gooooood,” I answered, and then burst out laughing. Finally getting my hand around my glass, I tipped it back and took a long swallow. “Wow,” I said, heaving myself into a sitting position. “It sure is noisy in here. Great party, huh?”

  “Yeah. They always are.”

  I smiled up at him. Teenage boys were all too short, but this was a man, and he was even taller than me. “You’re cute,” I said, inching a little closer to him.