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The Sudden Weight of Snow
“The Sudden Weight of Snow declares the arrival of an exciting new voice on the CanLit scene.”
– Kitchener-Waterloo Record
“In this moving first novel, Laisha Rosnau demonstrates a clear, keen eye for the nuances of mannerism and the significance of gesture, and gives a vivid account of growing up in a blind alley of a town in the B.C. interior. She also reaches well beyond her setting by means of a structure of slowly converging, and finally colliding, stories.”
– Steven Heighton
“Rosnau’s tale is about time and place, and the search for roots, a personal grounding place. Her prose has power and weight.”
– Hamilton Spectator
“Rosnau’s sensitive portrayal of the liminal world of adolescence captivates.… Fresh, original, funny and rife with insight.”
– Toronto Star
“The emotional power of Laisha Rosnau’s debut novel descends unexpectedly, leaving the reader tenderly transfixed.”
– Susan Swan
“Rosnau can write a sentence as clear as the sky over Kamloops.”
– Georgia Straight
“Engrossing.…”
– Vue Weekly
“A provocative study of alienation and belonging.”
– Vancouver Sun
“The writing is finely crafted throughout, earthy yet lyrical. Rosnau is a talent to watch.”
– Montreal Gazette
Copyright © 2002 by Laisha Rosnau
Cloth edition published 2002
First Emblem Editions publication 2003
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rosnau, Laisha, 1972-
The sudden weight of snow / Laisha Rosnau.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-700-1
I. Title.
PS8585.08338S83 2003 C813′.6 C2002-904508-8
PR9199.4.R686S83 2003
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN
Series logo design: Brian Bean
EMBLEM EDITIONS
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
The Canadian Publishers
75 Sherbourne Street,
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com/emblem
v3.1
For Nelli Proch and Mathilda Rosnau
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Acknowledgements
About the Author
The story goes something like this: girl meets boy. Something sears inside her. Something empties. The ground freezes. A building catches fire. Things come tumbling down. This story begins before you arrive, and it will end after you are gone. Perhaps it begins even before I start to tell it, when we leave my father – a move that can only be followed by more leave-taking, more absence. Things fall away, leave. I try to use words to bring them back.
I am seventeen, and until this year I have lived in the centre of a triangle formed by the almighty church, my mother’s regret, and the vague idea of what my father may have been like. There she is, my mother, always in the middle of things. She constantly interrupts this story, imposes her own. There are no fathers in this story, although I will write them in. I may try to fill my own father’s absence with other men as I have been assured I will always be compelled to do.
I still catch myself praying, although I try not to. This is what I once prayed for: a way out, hips, breasts, hair so short I could feel air moving on my scalp, love, sex that would split me open gently and then let me go, a large hand cupping the back of my head. I got almost all of those things.
My name is Sylvia Harper Kostak. I prefer to go by Harper. That was my father’s last name, probably still is. Once I was Sylvia Rose Harper. Then we left and my mother took back her name, clipped it to the end of mine. Something had to go and both of us agreed it should be the Rose. I have never liked the name Sylvia either – no one should have a name with two letters so close to the end of the alphabet in it like that. So, I go by Harper.
What else do you need to know? I am probably an unreliable witness. This all starts shortly before the first snowfall.
I marked my own leave-taking with footsteps, counted them from locker to door. Thirty-six. If anyone wanted to stop me, they could call, “Sylvia Kostak, where do you think you’re going? Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” But they never did, not at Sawmill Creek Secondary School.
Sawmill Creek is a small town in British Columbia in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a clearing where several small valleys meet. It is five elementary schools, one high school, one mall, a 7-Eleven, a mill that goes through cycles of lay-offs like seasons and is always threatening closure, and too many churches. A place that hollowed out the pit of my stomach like hunger. People in Sawmill, as we called our town, had distinct values, a moral code that informed the whole community. Some of the things that people objected to were child abuse, homosexuality, vandalism, laziness, single moms, welfare moms, public nudity, lying, cheating, stealing, the decline of family values, zealous feminists, and most prominently, anyone who protested a man’s God-given right to make a living and support his family. The last mentioned were mainly the environmentalists from the city who knew nothing about the land or how to live off it honestly.
Even in a community as strong as Sawmill Creek, not everyone followed the code. There were old draft dodgers living in the hills with ham radios and Marxist manifestos, though the war they were running from had ended thirteen years before. There were those who stitched marijuana crops into the fabric of the forest and clerks at the health food store who claimed we could cure every ailment with the right herbs and tinctures. Somehow, we even had teachers infiltrate our secondary school who taught us about passive aggression, relaxation techniques, and conservationist forestry practices. These teachers were from other, bigger places – Vancouver, Calgary – and came to Sawmill Creek as student teachers, were lured to stay by the fruit-filled valley, the ski hill half an hour from town. We knew better than to tell our parents about what they taught us. We hung on to these glimpses of a larger world. Dreamed of ways to get there. People told us we’d want to return – This is such a good place to raise a family – but we’d been raised here and knew it wasn’t true.
I was not beautiful, not yet. My hair, dark and long, was not the blue-black of Archie’s Veronica but the dull brown of dug earth. Hazel eyes and olive skin, I liked to believe, were the dark Ukrainian in me. Physical reminders of the par
t of my mother’s family that had travelled across the Black Sea from Persia to Ukraine in boats carved out of single cedar trees, large enough to accommodate entire families. This imagined history was as exotic as I could pretend to be.
From the fifth grade until this story begins, I was a toothpick, a tomboy. Not everyone knows this, but when they first begin to rise up, breasts surface beneath the nipples, as hard as rocks trapped under that darker skin. Painful, too. One usually appears first. Just when you have reached the cusp of your fear, another appears. Before I understood what the “life skills” component of phys. ed. was in the fifth grade, I was seeing the uterus lit up on a chart. An upside-down pear, two dangling gloves. The elements the teacher told us about were eggs popping from sacs and travelling tubes, cells sloughing, blood flowing. Cramps. The important thing she didn’t tell us was that the firm bulbs of emergent breasts can easily be mistaken for cancer by the untrained eye and hand, under bedclothes in the dark, confused. My mother, Vera, to her credit, didn’t flinch or laugh when I told her about the cancer. She simply explained to me what was happening, then bought me a training bra as though to test the very name of the thing – a bra to train and coax the breasts along. Mine never did make it to the finish line.
My hips were two bones pushing against skin and my best friend, Krista, believed I could poke an eye out with them. I didn’t think that narrow space between bones could take sex into it. Sex was something thick and unknown, like beauty. My body wasn’t ready for either. Sometimes, I thought I could feel the promise of something – a pain, wound like a spring in my limbs, throbbing in my legs at night – and I would wake and pound my fists into my calves and thighs, trying to knock the ache out.
Thirty-six steps down the hall to a door leading out of the school and I was free, a clap of cold hitting my cheeks as I opened the door. Krista was on the other side, waiting for me. This is the moment I mark as the beginning of this story. Then, things still seemed as simple as opening a door and walking away. On that day, the cold was the worst thing we would feel. It was an afternoon in the middle of November and the air was sharp. Too cold to sit in the park by the Salmon River and watch the water pass through town, catching on trees that swept the surface and eddying, then moving on. We walked the twelve blocks down the hill to the centre of town, small and nearly deserted as it was, to the drug store.
Krista and I had a running joke that we could pull a truck up to the doors of Community Drugs and News, walk in, unload the contents of the shelves into the truck, and drive away. The clerk would look up long enough to blink before folding herself back into a tabloid paper. There were three clerks – all women, all interchangeable – who had a distinctly middle-aged air of contempt and resignation, and they were all, it seemed, nearly blind.
In the parking lot Krista stopped walking, straddled a concrete divider, and drew the smoke from the cigarette she was smoking through her nose. I jumped on and off the concrete slabs to keep myself warm and she cocked her chin to say watch this. I looked as two cirrus lines of smoke snaked between her parted lips and her nostrils. Around her, a grey cloud. “Hey?” she said, eyebrow raised. She was practising French inhaling.
“Pretty good, Kris, but not quite.”
“Yeah, thanks, slut.”
“No problem, skank.”
“Whew, you smell something?”
Krista flicked the butt and we watched its trail like a comet before we walked across the parking lot. Small bells hit the door and we started talking as soon as we entered the store. We had a routine – talk loudly enough to distract the clerks, fabricate tales that might be more interesting than the tabloids. Keep moving.
“Did you hear about Rick and Tammy?” (lipstick slipped into a sleeve). “You mean, after Tammy slept with Rick’s dad?” (eyeshadow tucked into a sock). “Yeah, old news. Well, you know how Tammy’s hamsters went missing?” (facial astringent dropped into a pocket). “Oh no, Rick didn’t kill them, did he?” (stomach sucked in, magazine tucked into waistband). “No, worse” (at the till, cinnamon gum pulled from the rack), “Worse? Yes, just this, thanks” (fumbling in pockets for change, careful not to let anything fall out). “Worse. One word: felching, if you know what I mean.” (I did, of course – we consulted the dictionary for the words guys whispered to us in the hall.) “Thank you. Good afternoon!” (back out into the parking lot, laughing).
Krista and I went from the drugstore to the public library downtown, where we emptied out our loot. We traced eyeshadow along lashes and in the crease of lids, flicked on mascara. Krista applied lipstick, her mouth gaping. “So many women miss the corners,” she told me, stretching her lips tight against her teeth. “I hate it when you see the line where lipstick ends.” This was a serious endeavour. “Come with me to the mall. My mom’ll give you a ride home.” Getting from library to mall was a challenge. There were public buses in Sawmill, but they only appeared once an hour, if that. Everything was, in theory, walkable, but the mall was on the other side of town. We lurked in the library parking lot, following people to their cars until we found someone going in that direction.
Krista’s mother managed a record store in the mall and her father worked shifts at the mill. The mall on a weekday afternoon in Sawmill Creek was a quiet, dark place. It wasn’t like malls in the city – ceilings vaulted and full of glass, palms looming in atriums, chrome gleaming and the sticky odour of perfume wafting out of department stores. Creekside Mall was an L with a Super Valu on one end and a Kmart on the other. The corridors were paved chocolate brown and dark orange and there was a row of benches down the middle, covered in a fabric that appeared to be burlap. The stores included JR’s, which sold dark hard denim and large belt buckles, Sparklers, which sold lottery tickets, key chains and hollow jewellery, Rim Rock Records, and three women’s clothing stores that all started with S and sold the same thin cotton clothing.
“Well, aren’t you two looking like a couple of tramps,” Krista’s mother said when we walked into the store.
“Oh stop, Mom, you’re flattering us.”
“Harper, hon, your mom will have a fit if she sees you with all that makeup on.”
“I know.”
“She knows, Mom. She’ll wash it off. And I believe the proper term is ‘your mother will have a cow.’ ”
“Smartass.” Mrs. Delaney emerged from behind the counter. “Come here, do the till. I’m going for a smoke.” She was wearing tight, high-waisted jeans with tiny, useless pockets and a white belt that was obviously not there to hold them up. The belt matched her white boots, calf-high and tasselled. When she and Krista changed places, Mrs. Delaney leaned over the counter and began teasing her daughter’s hair with her fingers.
“Mother!” Krista swatted her away.
“I’m sorry, but it’s flat, honey.”
Mrs. Delaney and my own mother didn’t know what to make of each other. Their main interaction was dropping us off and picking us up at each other’s houses, and they liked it that way.
Later, my face clean from scrubbing in the mall bathroom, Mrs. Delaney drove me home, she and Krista in the front seat banging Bon Jovi onto the dashboard together. When I got out, Krista opened her door a crack, yelled, “Don’t forget to pick me up for church Sunday, hey?” We never forgot to pick her up. Krista had yelled that for her mother’s sake.
We arrived in Sawmill Creek when I was six and my brother, Nick, was four. We came with our mother, Vera, and the family van. Our father, Jim Harper, had given up the vehicle without a fight. We had left Alberta, where Vera and Jim had been together before and after we came along. Away from cold winters and the memory of screaming matches packed tight into the house. We were moving, our mother assured us, right into paradise. South, over the Rockies and into British Columbia. Off the flat land, out of the ragged mountains, and into smooth, rolling hills coated with green. Warm valleys, deep lakes, orchards in bloom. Fruit falling ripe from trees.
We arrived in June, the valley already holding the promise of heat
for us like a gift, and we stayed at Ed’s Motor Inn on Lakeshore Avenue for the first month. There was no lake at that end of the avenue but we didn’t mind. Nick and I lived in flip-flops and sticky bathing suits that stank of chlorine from the motel pool. Vera wore loose sundresses and sandals with leather straps that criss-crossed up her leg. She would sit on the motel bed, her feet still strung into the sandals, wipe the heat from her forehead, and sigh. This is the only time in my life that I remember being allowed to sit in the blue glow of a TV for hours, jump on beds, and eat food that came directly out of boxes. Vera didn’t know what she was doing with us yet. She was on her own with two young kids and memories of a man who told her she should allow us to do anything, let us explore our world.
We were given Tahiti Treat and Mountain Dew to drink through straws in the car, windows open and heads hanging out in the heat, while Vera went in and out of grocery stores, banks, and houses with For Sale signs posted on lawns outside them. This was a time when you could still leave children alone in cars. You could ply them with candy and leave them on benches in malls, saying Stay right here. Especially in paradise. Nick and I were fairly accommodating.
We all chose the house. “A farmhouse,” Vera crooned over and over. There were two rooms tucked into the slope of ceiling on either side of the staircase. Nick and I liked these tiny rooms. They were like forts, and our mother’s room was far away, down an entire flight of stairs. The house was on the edge of town and our yard skirted a cul-de-sac in a new subdivision. On the other side, the lawn fell into a ravine before it rose to a tiny, manicured golf course. A small abandoned field behind us ended blunt where the hill began, suddenly thick with forest. We heard Vera on the phone, telling people that she, a Prairie girl, had never lived so close to an honest-to-God forest. Nick and I didn’t discriminate yet between forest and parking lot, ravine and road, back of van and bedroom. We didn’t yet know the difference between moving and staying still.
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