“Sylvia?” I could hear Vera’s voice from somewhere. I turned with the wine still held in my mouth, looking for Krista. If I could just see her, everything would be all right. I swallowed the wine, imagining the Lord travelling down my throat in wine and wafers. I felt the dark cold of the schoolyard close around me and the floor rise, hit me in the back of my legs.
GABE
On the way to a place your father keeps calling home, you stop outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to visit your grandparents. Your grandfather can spit, a watery shot, out of the corner of his mouth and calls your dad not Peter but the Ungrateful Little Asshole. “Well, if the Ungrateful Little Asshole isn’t back again,” he says with a mock punch at Peter’s arm that has him wincing even though it can’t have hurt. Your grandfather seems rough but he isn’t cruel, kinder than your grandmother who stares at you and tugs at your clothing. She spits as well, onto her own sleeve and then grinds the wet fabric into your face. She tells you that you are too skinny, you don’t drink enough milk. She tells you that your mother, Whatshername, was an ungrateful selfish little girl, who did she think she was, and where was she, anyway? Both of your parents are little and ungrateful, for what, you don’t know. Later, when you remember all this, your grandparents seem implausible, as though they couldn’t possibly have been that unkind. You can’t tell, though, because you have no other memories of them to compare these with.
These people are not like the adults you left behind on the communal farm in Canada. Despite their age, they move a lot faster, all jerking movements like they are constantly flinching from flies. They seem to have a lot of things to do. Your grandmother slams things into the kitchen counter. Your grandfather is outside, throwing open the shed doors.
“Get that boy out here!” he yells through the kitchen window. You don’t know that boy means you. You think it might mean Peter. After all, your grandfather seems to think he is still a boy.
“Go,” your grandmother jerks her chin toward the back door, frowning. As you leave the room, you hear her say, “Just like his father, slower than molasses on a frozen lake.”
What your grandfather wants to show you is a gun. You have seen guns before, toys, but never handled with pride. Plastic guns could be found everywhere – in the bush around the farm left by some long-gone kid, on the edges of parking lots when you went to town. At the beach in the summer they sold water guns, hung behind the counter in a plastic rainbow of colour. You and the other boys at the farm could spot them like some people have an eye for four-leaf clovers or wild asparagus growing in a ditch. Whenever you brought them back to the farm, though, a fight would rise between someone and someone else. We shouldn’t let them believe weapons are toys.
Play is a healthy way for them to express a natural instinct towards aggression.
They’re pretending to kill each other. How can that be healthy?
If we forbid gun play, that will only make guns more fascinating. You learned what opinions were at the farm. You soon learn that your grandfather has a different opinion about guns than your father does.
Your grandfather names all the parts to the pistol and makes you repeat them. He is about to let you hold it in your own hand, on its side against your palm, to feel the weight of it, the power. He tells you it is so heavy it will pull your arm toward the floor. Your stomach is tickling with excitement. And that place below your stomach. That’s when Peter comes into the shed, yells at your grandfather, and pushes you out. You stand between shed and house, waiting for someone to call for you. A dog from the other side of the fence barks and throws its presumably tiny body against the fence again and again. You don’t know what you are supposed to do, where you are supposed to go. You hear your grandfather. “You’re still a goddamn sissy.”
Then your father. “You have learned nothing from that war, our country’s failure, nothing. Don’t you know what we were trying to tell you when we left, when we refused to take part in such –”
“Refused to defend your country, to defend our way of life - a decent, civilized way of life – against those goddamn Commie bastards.”
“Listen to you, Dad. Just listen to yourself –”
“No, you listen to me. You left, deserted, tail between your legs, and now you’ve come waltzing back in, with a ponytail and a little boy that I have no idea how you’ll raise. What the hell happened to Susie? She finally had enough?”
By this time, your grandmother has come to the back door and reaches her arm right out to the middle of the yard, it seems, to pull you back into the kitchen, push you into a chair and slam a glass down in front of you. She fills it, not with milk but with lemonade, and for a moment, you think you could love her.
“Always been like that, Peter and Wilf.” Wilf, you guess, is your grandfather. Sounds like Peter and the Wolf. She shakes her head, then gets up and snaps on the radio. The news comes through the kitchen in static. You want to say something then. Maybe tell her about the drive down, about all the fun you are having, just you two guys. You are going to tell her your mother is fine but Peter comes into the kitchen then, red-faced, and looks at you in a way that makes you stand up.
“Well, he’s done it again,” he says. “We’re leaving now, Mom.” It is the first time you hear Peter say this. When you came in, he called her “your grandmother.” This is your father’s mom.
“I know,” your father’s mom says back, moving toward the table in the middle of the room. When she meets it, she grips, ungrips the edge. “I know,” she repeats. That was the last time you saw those two people. You don’t know how much of any of that you made up.
You leave your grandparents and keep driving. When the van stops in Arcana, California, you and Peter have decided that you might stay a while. He has included you in this choice with statements like questions – “What do you think, huh?” and “We’ll like it here, hey?” – to which you nod. Peter makes friends with other adults in a loud, joking way that you later realize makes people like him at first, avoid him later. You hear him tell people, “Don’t have a lot of material wealth but I’m good with my hands, can do just about anything.” This is how you and Peter find places to stay. He helps people with things – greenhouses, staircases, stone fireplaces – and you both stay in their houses while he does. You eat cereal with whichever kids live at the house you’re at, liking the places where they serve what Susan called sugar bombs, loathing the places where they feed you granola stirred into bitter yogurt. You and your instant friends – whichever children are there – read comics, build forts, and are sent outside where you run from object to object, climb things, and yell for very little reason.
You know, although Peter has never told you, not to mention the unfinished A-frame in Canada. Later, you will also know that it was more than an unfinished A-frame that came between your parents, but as a child you will attribute everything to this – Susan’s crying, Peter’s indifference, how you left, quickly and with so few words.
Friends could heal with well-chosen verses, circles of prayer. Could wipe sin clean away within the length of a song. Pastor John came over the evening after I had fainted at church.
“Come in, Pastor John, God bless!” Vera chimed like a bell when she opened the door. I was in the living room waiting and could only hear them.
“God bless, Vera,” he said, his tone sounding more serious. They spoke quietly and I couldn’t make out what they were saying until they were standing outside the living-room door. Then, I heard Pastor John say, “It must be hard for you on your own, Vera. You know, I do believe that God meant for children to be raised by both a man and a woman, but we can’t always know his plans for us, can we?”
They were coming into the room. “Oh, no. No we can’t,” my mother laughed nervously and stopped in the doorway, her hand reflexively to the nape of her neck, pulling at the fine hairs there. “Well, it is difficult sometimes, as you know, but we do try.”
I thought their voices skated on the surface, thin and sharp and insincere.
I greeted them with a forced smile. Vera stood in the door for a moment until Pastor John asked her to give us some time alone.
I had never seen Pastor John uncomfortable and he wasn’t then. He pulled at the legs of his pants as all tall men do, making room for his knees, and set a Bible in front of him on the coffee table. “Have you been praying, Sylvia?”
“Yes.” Not exactly a lie. I didn’t so much pray as ask for signs.
“You will be easily deceived, Sylvia – you are young and impressionable – we understand this. I understand this, your Friends in Christ understand this, and we are here for you. But it takes more than you, it takes more than our entire congregation. No one knows you – your temptations, your weakness – better than your personal saviour, Jesus Christ.” I nodded, kept a straight face. Pastor John had his hands on his knees, his eyes at some place above my head. “And no one but our true Friend, Jesus Christ, can guide you on the right path. If you ask for forgiveness with a clean heart, He will guide you. You must be ready, though. He’ll know if you’re not. Will you read Proverbs 20:1 with me, Sylvia?”
We said together, “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging; and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” The last part referred to me, I knew, the one who was deceived. There was a cure, however. I read Ephesians 5 out loud at Pastor John’s prompting. “And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit; Speaking to yourselves in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.” The Friends of Christ were doing the right thing, singing down the chosen path. A path that ended, “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.”
Pastor John had me stop reading there, though the rest of the chapter was already committed to memory. Pastor John quoted it again and again to explain the hierarchy of the Free Church. Wives submitting themselves to the will of their husbands, husbands loving their wives like their own bodies, like temples. All of us flesh, bones, and blood of a greater body, submitting ourselves to Christ.
Sometimes I felt estranged from my own body, as though it were a symbol of something else. Once, it was something I didn’t think of often. Something to get me up trees and onto every potentially dangerous thing at the playground, teetering on metal, standing on slides. Something that got restless in vans and cars or itchy after being in bays coated with duck crap like the ones at Sunny Bay Bible Camp. The Friends of Christ Free Church had no summer camp of our own so we were sent to camp with the lesser of evil denominations, the Baptists. We met a bus in the mall parking lot, clutched duffle bags, sleeping rolls, and pillows in quiet horror as the bus opened up, took our belongings into the bottom of it, while we climbed aboard, sandwiched into seats between strangers.
Sunny Bay was indeed in a sunny bay, one lined with cabins, summer homes, docks. The sand was fine and could burn the bottoms of our feet. Ponderosa pines released their smell everywhere. If you pull a pine needle, sticky with new sap, from the tree and place it on water, the pitch will release, propel the needle across the surface like a tiny motor boat. The camp was across the road from the lake and the counsellors wore reflective vests, walked right out into summer traffic, stop signs in front of them like shields. We would then stream across the road, flip-flops snapping against our feet, line up on the dock in life jackets and bathing suits worn thin on our backsides, later tip each other over in canoes. One afternoon, the canoe I was in was ambushed and I came up under it again and again, my body unable to conceive of any other way out of the water. I knocked my head against the over-turned canoe until I stopped, rested in the bubble of air between boat and water, alone, wet and dark. When the counsellors righted the boat, they wondered why I had stayed there, clinging to the beam of an over-turned seat. It was the first time that I knew my body was something that could also betray me. A moth and the dark underbelly of the canoe, a light.
There were strange names for things at camp: mess hall, canteen, chapel. Chapel was church and we had to go every day, after dinner. Chapel looked like a chapel should, small and white and pointed, complete with a steeple. It was like a church made from the folded hands of children – Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors, and see all the people. All God’s children, with seersucker sundresses, shorts and skin that smelled of lake and dirt, lined up in pews in the heat-trapped chapel until we stuck to each other. The pastor from the Baptist church told us that our bodies were not our own, they were temples of Christ. Our bodies vessels for God’s will. Shipping vessels, I thought, like pieces of the Battleship game. I was a boat on my way to battle, God’s will filling the holes so I couldn’t be hit. A-3 miss. F-9, miss. D-4, miss. Later, my counsellor would tell us that girls were more like vases – delicate and fragile, God’s will the water that would allow us to hold things as beautiful as flowers. I didn’t like this analogy. Flowers died after a few days. The water left in the bottom of vases was thick and green and it stank.
Our bodies were also temples. Each evening, after taking horseback riding lessons or making useless crafts out of burlap, seeds, and glue, we met before dinner for cabin talk. All it took was one girl, a memory of her grade three teacher, his hands in her panties behind the desk while he explained subtraction. Four other girls choked out what was locked behind the temple doors: a grandpa who liked a bare bum on his lap; a cousin who played doctor until he was too old, too rough; a father who tickled the wrong places and groaned; the feeling of back-seat vinyl under the weight of an old family friend. Five out of the ten of us. I tried to find myself in the numbers, hoped something would come to me that would have me choking up tears.
One summer, Krista had agreed to come with me to camp. Each night, we sang and swayed with the rest of the kids at the evening service. During one of these services, a camp counsellor was murmuring into a microphone about coming up to the front. We didn’t need to say anything, she assured us, we could just rise and accept the Holy Spirit into our very own hearts. Another counsellor was playing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” again and again on an aged electronic keyboard. One by one, kids were going to the front, some with hands raised and peaceful smiles, some racked with sobs and being comforted by a row of counsellors, a clean-scrubbed support team nodding empathetically. Even I had felt something as I crooned and swayed. Later, I would explain to myself that I had been afflicted with religious fervour. At the time, I felt God. God had felt like air in my limbs, an expanding chasm of peace replacing whatever had been there before. I would know later that God felt a little like getting high. Whatever it was, Krista felt it too. She didn’t look peaceful but her mouth was set and her eyes were focused so intently in front of her that I was sure she could rearrange air with them. She wanted something. Krista pushed past me and went up to the front, the sign that she had accepted Jesus into her heart, and stood there rigid, not sobbing or swaying like the other kids. She just stood there until the keyboard music stopped and the counsellors led us, blurry-eyed with Christ, back to our cabins.
The evening after Pastor John’s visit, some young women from the church came over to talk about peer pressure and pure living. They were in their twenties and had solemn, presumably faithful husbands and an assortment of babies and toddlers. Pastor John’s wife, Trudy, ushered them into the living room like a herd. Trudy was my mother’s age but she continued to give birth every few years which seemed to keep her in a state of perpetual youth. We all knew Timothy 2:15: Eve’s original transgression had stained women. Childbirth could save us, bleach us clean with pain. The words were given to us right in the Bible, codes to our salvation.
These were women with names like Wendy, Dawn, and Becky who shook their bangs out of their eyes, cocked their heads slightly, and nodded at the slightest provocation. Their bodies were soft-looking and smelled faintly of baby vomit and Avon creams and perfumes and they spoke in singsong, alternating between baby talk, Bible verses, and giggling. “We know how hard it can be. We were teenagers once too although, look at us now!” They bea
med lovingly at each other’s babies. “We’re here for you, whenever you need a friend in Christ, or whatever.” They each nodded toward me, feigning understanding. “Your peers will try to deceive you but His Word will keep you strong, you know?”
At the end of the evening, Vera joined us in the living room and we prayed together, a ring of faith, palms sweating between our joined hands. Then, the women formed a healing circle around me, their babies strapped in Snuglis to their chests or, if old enough, placed between their crossed legs. I lay in the middle of their joined hands, my back on the floor of our living room, limbs splayed. Each woman prayed to Jesus in a high, soft pitch for my forgiveness – “We just ask you, Lord Jesus, to let Sylvia know that we are here for her. To guide her, allow her to release her own sins, and fill her with your own spirit” – I stifled laughter after that last sentiment while the women started to sing. A couple of them began murmuring in tongues, babies gurgling their own cries and demands. I was to lie still, eyes closed. To be healed by the buoyancy of prayer and song.
The Sudden Weight of Snow Page 5
