Being healed felt like holding my breath. I tried to keep myself down there, on the ground, limbs spread. Tried to convince myself I was light, floating, full of the Spirit. My unspent laughter blocked my throat and I struggled to pull in air. I shot up from the floor. “Will you stop! Please, just stop.” I left the room to shocked silence, babies still babbling, mothers still mumbling prayers.
I was uncomfortable in groups of girls and women. By the time we left Edmonton, I had been surrounded by family, aunts and uncles, male and female cousins, and had gone to daycare which I didn’t remember as being segregated. When we moved to Sawmill Creek, both elementary school and church seemed to conspire to keep me in the Holly Hobby–themed bedrooms of classmates after school or in the middle of women’s circles whenever they felt I needed support or healing.
Sometime in the sixth grade I started to develop breasts, and I felt that this would only seal my fate, take me farther away from reaching the tops of trees, balancing on the thin edges of fences. I had Vera take both Nick and me to the hairdresser in the mall. I waited until Nick got his standard cut, then took his place in the chair, and asked for the same one. The hairdresser was willing to cut my hair short but wanted to give me style, the option to curl, feather, and spray. No, I had insisted, I wanted the same cut, a boy’s cut, no curls, no cute flips. I wore my hair like that, dressed in baggy jeans and T-shirts and made one last attempt to join the boys. When that didn’t work, I still couldn’t feign interest in Barbie’s dramas. I spent a lot of time alone, sitting on the floor in various parts of the house, sketching floor plans, windows, pieces of furniture, following lines with my eyes and then improving on the design once it was on the page.
Sometimes, mothers pick up on these things, and Vera did. She started taking me along to garage sales where she would ask me what I thought of a desk, an end table, a chair. With chipped paint and mouse turd in the drawers, I didn’t see much but Vera told me, “It’s surprising how much you can do with a good sander and some varnish.” She wasn’t wrong, but after a couple of afternoons with her and a piece of furniture set on old newspapers in the basement, I grew bored of the number of times we would have to sand the paint away to bring out the grain. I flinched at the pressure of her hand on mine, showing me how. The projects we could have completed together started cluttering the basement, banks of half-finished furniture blocking our passage to the cold room. I lost interest in refinishing furniture, grew my hair out. I only had it trimmed a couple times a year after that initial cut, grew it till it reached the strap of the bra that I eventually wore, then beyond.
I was grounded for two weeks and decided not to push it. By the end of the second week, I could smell the snow that was about to fall. A hollow, metallic tang, the sharp edges of things. Each blade of grass was a small green knife. The scent of the mill was intoxicating when it was warm, sawdust and stripped wood hinting at the smell of entire forests – not only wood but dirt, composting leaves, bark. When it was cold, the mill gave off a smell like fermenting apples. It was the whiff of metal and rotting apples that brought with it the awareness it would snow.
Vera couldn’t seem to meet my eyes and constantly lowered her own in both anger and a denial that she was angry. I had learned in Psych 11 that this behaviour was called passive-aggressive. Psychology was new to Sawmill Creek Secondary School. The introduction to the curriculum as an elective caused concern in a town that thought psychology was for shrinks and shrinks were for softies from the city. The class had been in some sort of assessment stage for a couple of years and would likely be until people forgot about it and found something else to oppose.
On one of the afternoons of my term at home, Vera asked me to help her bring up preserves from the cold room. We filled our arms with jars of pears, peaches, jams, pickles; we balanced up the stairs to the kitchen and lined the bottles up in the pantry. Each summer and fall, Vera would devote days to preserving, finishing one batch just as the next fruit was bursting into season. Water in huge stainless steel pots would boil over on the stove, the jars inside knocking a rhythm in their submersion. The thick liquid, a combination of water and seeping juices, pooled on the linoleum and coated the floor with a gluelike membrane. This mimicked the feeling of my own skin in the summer, sticky with a combination of sweat and sugar from Popsicles or Kool-Aid.
On the way up the stairs, I said, “I don’t know why you bother. You can just go to the store and buy these things, you know.”
Vera turned to me once she had placed an armload of jars on the shelf. “And I don’t know why you would complain, Sylvia. Someday, you’re going to be buying preserves like this at some over-priced market and wondering why you never appreciated them now.”
“Harper.”
“Yes. Harper. You just let me know when you want to start buying the groceries. Maybe you can call up your father and see if he can chip in for some of ‘these things,’ Harper.”
“Oh, is someone touchy?” I asked
“Does someone not think before she talks?” she responded and turned back into the pantry.
My father had made several attempts to get Vera to come back to Alberta in the first couple of years after we moved to Sawmill Creek. Sometimes, I would answer the phone and Jim would start talking before Vera knew who was speaking to me. There must have been something about the way I spoke into the phone, or my expression, because Vera could tell almost immediately who it was. She would take the phone from me and I would hear her say, “Jim, no. No,” apparently giving the same answer to several different questions. Eventually, it seemed to me, my father just gave up. As if to resign himself completely to the fact that we weren’t moving back, he himself moved to the other end of the country, to a village in Newfoundland called Heart’s Desire. “Well, I certainly hope he finds it there,” Vera had said. I knew that the child-support cheques came sporadically once he was in the Maritimes. Eventually, the phone calls eased off. I hadn’t seen him in years.
Vera brought a jar of peaches to the table, breaking the seal with a large spoon, and we handed it back and forth, eating straight from the jar.
“How’d you guys meet anyways?” I asked.
“Us who guys?”
“Mom, you know. You and Jim.”
She looked at me for a minute, swallowed her fruit, and answered, “In a bar,” and slid the fruit over to me. I fished for one of the peaches with my spoon. I had always imagined Vera barefoot and full-skirted, picking flowers in a field along the road. Jim Harper would have roared by on his motorbike, carved a sharp U-turn into the gravel road when he saw her, and turned around. He would’ve stopped his bike along the field and lit a cigarette by striking a match on his boot. I could see it all. It was hot when they met there, on the side of the road, a ditch between them. Prairie hot – flat and unrelenting. A buzz of insects in the ditch, whir of grasshoppers clinging to the underside of wheat, the dust pitched up by Jim Harper’s turn settling on skin already covered with sweat.
I struggled to balance the piece of fruit as I brought it up out of the jar but it slipped off as I tried to jimmy the spoon through the mouth. “Damn,” I said, then, “Sorry,” before asking, “Really? What kind of bar?”
“Just a bar in Fly Hills. There isn’t much to describe really. It was the Legion – a low-ceilinged room in the basement of a hall, tables lined up down the centre, nothing but one commemorative tray of the Queen’s coronation on the walls. They didn’t even play music in the bars back then. For that, you had to go to a house party.”
“But, how could you fall in love in a place like that?” I asked around the slice of peach that I had finally got into my mouth.
Vera looked at me, then said, “Sweetie, I didn’t say we fell in love there, I said that’s where we met.” She paused. “Your father was wearing a navy blue turtleneck. I thought he looked dashing. That’s it. We didn’t fall in love.” That was all she said, all I asked.
I know even less of Jim Harper’s past than I do of Vera’s. He was
the youngest son of the mayor in Fly Hills, Alberta, the closest town to the farm where Vera grew up. He went to a private academy in Edmonton, one that crawled with ivy and served tea to children, and returned home on weekends to the Harpers’ brick house, the yard trimmed with roses. Not wild roses, Alberta’s provincial flower, but cultured roses. I imagine Jim rebelling against refinement, cutting roses from the bushes with a pen knife, dragging the thorn along the white, fine skin of the underside of his arm, blood appearing like tiny berries. I believed that I used to run my small fingers against the white ridges on his arm. When I told Vera this, years later, she laughed, said my father had no scars.
Sometimes, I picture Jim Harper chain-smoking behind the brick private school. I see him sneaking out at night with other boys, drowning cats in the Saskatchewan River just because they can. I watch Jim Harper masturbating over creased movie pin-up centrefolds, hidden when he’s done in no cleverer place than under his mattress. I hear the swishswish, swishswish, of a hundred private school boys’ hands rubbing between sheet and skin at night, all hearing the sounds of each other, feeling too good to care. These boys are different from the ones we have now. These are boys with perpetually rolled-up jeans, hightop sneakers, freckles. Norman Rockwell replicas with longings that smell like soap, snapdragons, the pages of magazines. These boys fish in swimming holes and build tree houses and when they finally do have sex for the first time, it will be brief and intense and consensual. Granted, they will think less of the girl, but will remember the white cotton of her panties for years as the last good, innocent thing.
The first day I didn’t have to return home immediately after school I felt exhilarated. Not knowing what else to do with this sense of freedom, I skipped my final class and spent it in the girls’ bathroom. I stood on the toilet and smoked, exhaling out of a high window, then read magazines. I kohled my eyes until I didn’t recognize them, combed my long hair until static electricity shot sparks off my brush. I knew I wasn’t getting ready to go anywhere – there was nowhere to go. Krista would be working at her mom’s store that afternoon, so I was at loose ends. I walked a long route home to prolong it. With my long hair collecting snow like a veil, my eyes blacked out, and my thin body rendered even more shapeless by layers of clothes, I imagined myself a young bride from another continent, trying to escape an arranged marriage in a cold country, a winter I didn’t understand. When I eventually got tired of walking, I propped up my thumb, didn’t think anyone would stop.
A brand new white pickup truck pulled over and Rob Hanshaw’s face grinned from the other side of the window. I had to stretch up to a step to reach the passenger door. “Where ya heading?” he asked with a chuckle.
“Um, I live on Pottery Road, out by the golf course, do you know it?”
“Yeah. Sylvia, right? You go to SCSS? I gave you and your friend a ride to that party.”
One high school in town; nowhere else I could’ve gone. “Uh, yeah. I go by Harper.”
“What?”
“My name, I go by Harper.”
“Hey, whatever cranks your frank, you know what I mean.” Rob Hanshaw winked, showed me the tips of his teeth. “So you, uh, doing anything?” He asked eventually. I was thinking of how I would have to wash the black liner from around my eyes somewhere between Rob Hanshaw’s truck and my house, wondering if snow would work, the imagined pain of that thought already pinching my brow. Rob elaborated. “I mean, now. You doing anything now?”
“No,” I said in a tone that I hoped would convey that I didn’t necessarily want to do anything. It was four-thirty, cloudy, the sky going from pink to a wash of grey that passed for twilight.
“Ever been to the lookout behind the course?” Rob asked.
He was talking about a bald spot at the turn of a switchback where a small fire had burned the trees to the ground, left an unbroken view of the golf course, the Salmon River rendered flat and motionless, the locked grid of town. “Yeah.” It was the site of several bush parties, always broken up early because the car lights were visible from town.
“You wanna go now?”
I hoped for a shared joint, rolled thick and sweet, thought we might listen to the radio, maybe kiss a little, so I answered, “Yeah, sure.” I watched the field behind my house bump by as the truck attacked potholes on the dirt road that led up to the lookout. Watched my hands fold and unfold in my lap, then stopped when I realized what I was doing.
Rob Hanshaw had brown hair, brown eyes, and brown freckles. He was one year out of high school, worked at the mill, and was the object of several crushes. He was handsome in a dull, small-town way. Cheeks perpetually flushed and a bit of dirt under his fingernails. A baseball cap and a pair of Levi’s. Once the truck was parked, he said few words, his face getting closer as he mumbled something. It took me a while to identify the smell coming with him – Hungry Herbie’s home-cut french fries. I identified it right before he dug his tongue into my mouth.
I pressed myself up against the passenger side and expressed no desire, hoping this would be enough. Rob Hanshaw backed away and stared at me for a moment, then came back in, one arm a vice around my waist, the other hand taking my own and pressing it against the stiff crotch of his jeans. He continued to jab his tongue around in my mouth while I tried to disassociate from my body, but my mind remained pinned between Rob Hanshaw and the truck door. I rubbed at his jeaned crotch to distract him. As he moaned, I twisted my arm, which was pinned behind my back, and groped for the door handle. I fought the instinct to clench my jaw as I slipped my fingers into his button-fly and began popping it open. I had to make him think I wanted it undone as I clawed at the handle with my other hand. Rob Hanshaw noticed and tightened his hold, pulled me up and away from the door in one stiff, swift motion. The force of my grip leaving the handle was enough to jerk it open.
“Oho,” Rob Hanshaw said. “You’re not trying to leave, are you? We were just starting to have a good time.” He tried to stroke my hair but cursed when he caught a shock of electricity from it. The other hand kneaded my breast in a rhythmic, robotic motion that we girls had all gotten used to after four years of high school. Hand on breast, hand on breast, hand on breast – pulsing there, stuck like one of those small, ferocious dogs that, once attached by the teeth to a limb, will not let go. Hand on breast, hand on breast, hand on breast, while Rob Hanshaw struggled to pry open his unbuttoned fly. I started to move back, an instinct toward fresh air, but soon he had not only his jeans but also his briefs open and was pushing me down there.
Cold metal buttons. Hard denim. Smooth, hot skin. Pieces of my own hair twisted in my mouth. Fingers like a clamp on the back of my neck. A buoyant voice on the radio announced atrocities big and small. Sweat, pubic hair like a Brillo pad, and the rising taste of salt.
I gagged, then struggled to breathe, hit my head on the steering wheel. Rob Hanshaw swore and released his hand from the back of my neck only to push his whole arm between the wheel and my head, wrap his arm around my neck, a lock. My entire body bucked and roared under Rob Hanshaw’s arm. My thrashing legs aimed for the door. I felt a boot hit it, the rush of cold air, the knowledge of space outside the truck. I twisted my body and bit the soft underside of his arm. When he yelped, I was able to pull myself out of the truck, dashboard and seats an apparatus to launch me out. It was completely dark by then, and when I gained balance, I stood staring back into the lit cavity of the truck. Run, I told myself, but I didn’t. Just stood there, my breath heaving, and looked back into the truck.
I saw something pass over Rob Hanshaw’s face – annoyance or embarrassment, I wasn’t sure which – then watched as he gathered that up and wiped his face blank. “Ah, come on,” he said. “Get back into the truck. I’ll give you a ride home.” His tone was like that of a tired parent coaxing a child who had just had a tantrum. I stood there, mesmerized by the wash of yellow light from the cab. Rob Hanshaw sat waiting, staring out the windshield, his arm across the back of the seat. After a moment, he turned to me. “Come on
. What are you going to do? Walk? You can’t walk from here, it’s too far.”
I turned and started walking. Behind me, the truck door closed lightly – he would’ve had to lean across the seat to shut it – and the engine started. I heard a low groan in the axle when the wheel was turned too sharply. Then, the truck was in motion beside me, the window being rolled down.
“Come on, I’ll give you a ride home,” Rob Hanshaw repeated, his arm draped out the window, hand adjusting the side mirror. He inched the truck at the speed of my stride. “Come on, no nonsense this time.” I turned to him and he winked. “I promise.”
It was his gall made me get back into the truck, the offer of a ride home enough of a truce. Later, when I thought about that afternoon, I tried to look for clues to my own lack of anger or indignation. My compliance seemed like something simple. I was hungry for dinner. He was offering me the fastest way home. I felt like larger things were holding me down.
The sky was glowing with impending snow when Rob Hanshaw dropped me off. Right before the first snowfall, the whole valley glows a washed-out, smoky red. I had noticed this every year since we arrived but had never bothered to ask anyone why this was or if they had noticed. I had read that in the Antarctic the sky flashes bright green the moment before the last slice of sun retreats into the horizon. That in Southeast Asia it rains at the same time every year. Even better, in a part of Mexico it rains at exactly the same time each day for exactly forty-seven minutes. I considered the red sky before snow in Sawmill our own climatic sign, something that linked us with the rest of the world, rain falling like clockwork, skies flashing and glowing in preparation for something else – a sunset, snow.
The Sudden Weight of Snow Page 6
