Nobody Cries at Bingo (13 page)

At my first recess break, she held me by the shoulders and pointed me at all the students. “Who do you want to play with?” she asked me.

My eyes searched the rows of expectant faces. I recognized one face from a few weeks I had spent at a nursery school on the reserve. “Trina,” I said pointing at a tall girl with long braids. Trina came up to the front and took my hand. Everyone nodded as if this was what they had expected. The matter was decided; I was Native.

From then on there was no expectation that I would ever associate with the non-Native girls.

That didn't mean I wasn't curious about them. I would watch them walk together at recess. They would often surround the supervising teacher and hold her hand as she walked through the playground. Elsewhere, they played in clusters. I observed them from time to time but could not figure out their games. “Hmm . . . it appears that the blonde one is the leader. However, the brunette always gets her way if she pouts. The girl who always has new clothes never wants to do anything. It must be hard to get a good game of wrassling together with this bunch.”

Inevitably my interest would fade and I'd run back to a group of Native (or Indian kids as we called ourselves at the time.)

In our group, I was a much-requested wrestling partner during recess time.

My girlfriends did not share my interest so they would cheer me on from the sidelines as they played “practice smoking.”

“Go on Dawn, take him down,” Trina, now my best friend, cheered. My face was red and sweaty, my hair stuck to my face, but that didn't matter. The only important thing was to wrestle your partner into submission. The boys were surprisingly weak. I threw one boy to the ground with one hand. My feat of strength made my jeans button snap off.

He laughed from the ground, ‘Ha ha, look at her. Her pants snapped open. Ha ha!”

I refused to become embarrassed. What was the point when my face was already fire-engine red from exertion? I calmly buttoned my pants and lunged at him. It wasn't hard to grab his wrists and make him slap himself in the face as I asked, “Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you pinching yourself? Why are you unbuttoning your own pants?”

Though strong as a bull moose, Trina rarely joined in unless someone decided to cheat and attack from me behind. Then she would summon her incredible strength and without rancor grab the boy and deposit him a few metres away. “No ganging up,” she would say and return to watching the match.

We played in shadows cast by the brick walls. That way we didn't overheat. Also, wrestling was against school policy, but as long as we didn't make it obvious and didn't bang into the law abiding students, the teachers were prepared to ignore us. They did not have the energy or the manpower to pull us off one another and send us packing. Once in a while the supervising teacher would walk to the edge of the circle and plaintively ask, “Don't you know any other games?”

We would stop immediately and stare at her. She would stare back. We would stare harder. She would look away and then move away with that slow, steady walk that every playground supervisor had mastered. Each step took at least a second. Watching the teacher stroll through the playground was almost meditative. I wonder if they taught it in teacher's college: Recess Walking 101 — How to Create a Sense of Authority with Your Gait.

The Native girls played on the tire fort, which we shared only with the Native boys. Nobody wanted it anyway because it was so dangerous. A girl had broken her arm the year before; it was a bad break that necessitated surgery and pins and ugly stitches. We had all been dragged into the gymnasium for a school assembly on safe play. Afterwards, all the other kids abandoned the tire fort, so we took it over.

The tire fort had a staircase of tires that led to a wooden platform at the top. To get down you had four choices. You could take the slide, slide down a pole, go back down the tire stairs or take the broken arm route.

One day Celeste led a blonde, pretty white girl over to the tire fort. We welcomed her with curious stares.

“What's your name?”

“Sandy.” She spoke softly.

“Sandy, so . . . ” I wanted to ask her about being white and what it was like and how come she wanted to play with us but it seemed rude to put her on the spot. “Do you wanna play race to the top?” I asked.

She nodded.

It was kind of cool having a white girl hanging out with us. She brightened up the fort. She was also well off which made her and Celeste even more unusual friends.

There was a caste system that everyone on the playground unquestioningly followed. The white girls played with the white girls. The Native girls played with the Native girls. The only exception was the poor white girls who played with us from time to time. Like us, their clothes had seen the inside of a second hand store.

There was an Asian girl and a South Asian girl who went to the school — they played with the white girls. I figured that was because they lived in town. There was one Native girl who went back and forth from the white girls to the Native girls. She was very rich because her dad had won the lottery.

Sandy played with us for a few days. We accepted her as our own, even going so far as to give her a nickname, “the white girl.” Then one day she didn't come over when the recess bell rang. We saw her across the playground, standing in line for hopscotch. I asked Celeste why she went away. Celeste shrugged. My sister had a lot of friends, what was one less?

Walking through the playground one day, I observed the other clusters of students and noticed the hierarchy. I relayed the theory to Trina who listened to my theories with unquestioning patience. This was an important quality in a best friend.

“I notice that there is prejudice here.”

Trina's eyes widened. Everyone knew that prejudice was bad. To call someone prejudiced was to say that they hated Indians.

“The rich white kids are at the top. Then next is the poor kids and then at the bottom are the Indian kids.”

“What about the Chinese girl and the East Indian girl?”

They were always screwing up my theories. “Well they're sort of like white girls aren't they? They live in town; they go to the same birthday parties. It's like they are white.”

Trina nodded in agreement. It all made perfect sense to her. Also, she didn't really care.

Elementary school taught us that we lived in two different worlds. In a classroom setting, the worlds would sometimes bump up against one another. You could not always choose where you sat in a classroom and even if you could choose, inevitably a Native would have to sit next to a white or vice versa. It was simple geometry. Out on the playground where the teachers could not interfere, the separation was complete. They played their games; we played ours.

In the Native student world, people were always coming and going. A girl might show up at the school for a month and then leave, only to be replaced by another girl with new knowledge of the city or a different reserve. I was always curious to hear their stories. They were worldlier than us having lived in the country and in the city.

One year a girl named Cassandra showed up right after Christmas break. She was ten going on thirty. She had both ears pierced, more than once. She wore nail polish and frosted lipstick that she applied every chance she had. She had a boyfriend too, in the city. The city was one of her favourite subjects.

“In the city, there's like thousands of kids in elementary school. And recess isn't fifteen minutes, it's like half an hour.”

“Half an hour? What do you play?”

“We don't play.” She laughed at my conventionality. “In the city, we just . . . y'know . . . hang out.”

“Hang out? What's that?”

Cassandra laughed and other girls joined in with her laughter. “It's . . . y'know . . . hanging out.”

In practice, hanging out turned out to be sitting around on the tire fort talking about boys. In my opinion, hanging out was a giant waste of time. My sister and I were country girls — used to walking wherever we went — and our legs begged to be stretched each recess. Standing next to Cassandra and the girls gathered around her was torture. While they leaned languorously, my legs jiggled nervously.

“Hey, everybody, how about we have a race?”

“Why would we do that?” Cassandra had no interest in being a good runner. Instead she would light a smoke and pass it around the circle of girls who were eager to cast off their country values in favour of city vices.

A few days later, a teacher caught Cassandra smoking in the bathroom and confiscated her smokes. After a few detentions, she sauntered back onto the playground with a new plan for our recess time. She suggested a game of Girls Catch the Boys.

“How do you play that?”

“We run after the boys and then we catch them.”

“And then what?”

“Then you do what you want to them.”

“Like . . . ?” Beat them up? Make them eat dirt? Spit on their faces? There were a lot of possibilities out there, each with a different level of difficulty. I needed to know how to play this game if I was going to win it.

Instead of answering my question, Cassandra raised a plucked eyebrow like a ten-year-old Mae West and smiled. The other girls twittered. I rolled my eyes. They didn't know either but they didn't want to look stupid in front of Cassandra.

“Sure sounds like fun.” My voice dripped with fake enthusiasm. How could chasing down smelly boys be any fun? Wouldn't pushing one another on the swings or having races to the top of the monkey bars be a better use of our time?

Even hopscotch was preferable — and hopscotch was the dumbest thing anyone could do. Hamsters would find hopscotch boring. (A giant wheel, on the other hand, would have kept me busy for months at a time.)

At least you knew when you lost hopscotch — it was when your kneecap fell off. I couldn't see how a winner could be proclaimed from the game, Girls Catch the Boys. Would it be the girl who caught the most boys? Or the girl who caught the fastest boy?

We did not notify the boys about the game, we just ruthlessly ran them down. One second they were standing in the ball field waiting for a fly ball, the next a group of giggling girls had descended upon them. Once the first boy was captured, the other boys knew to run. And soon they were half way across the sports field.

The captured boy looked from one female to the next as they discussed his future.

“Let me go!” He struggled. We ignored him.

“What do we do?”

“Tickle him?”

“Please God No!!!” He got an arm free and tried to make a break for it. He had no chance against our snake-like arms and vise-like grips.

Cassandra pushed her way through the crowd of girls and looked at our wriggling boy.

“You are our prisoner,” she proclaimed.

He laughed nervously. “You can't do this.”

She pointed at the tire fort. “Take him there and make sure he does not escape.”

She looked at the rest of her girl soldiers. “Catch me another one. An older one this time.” Then she retired back to the tire fort. Cassandra wasn't one for running.

I ran down the next boy, Jackson. I grabbed him by his arms and pulled him backwards. Jackson was small but he had a bad temper. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Cassandra wants us to catch boys.”

“What the fuck for?”

“I don't know,” I handed him to the waiting arms of two bigger girls. “I'm going to grab another one,” I yelled back and left.

I noticed quickly that the less-cute guys were easier to catch as I dragged them back to the tire fort. It helped that at our age a girl was at least a head taller than a boy. It also helped that the boys were more curious than afraid.

“What are you going to do with me?” asked Michael, a skinny eleven-year-old from Little Black Bear.

“I don't know. Maybe beat you up.”

“I thought you were gonna . . . y'know do girl stuff.” He puckered up his lips. I gagged and pushed him away.

He gave me a strange look and ran away for me. He ran slowly though and looked back frequently. “Aren't you going to catch me?” Michael said, circling back.

“No.” I walked over to an empty hopscotch square that the white girls painstakingly drawn on the sideway, and began practicing my footwork.

Trina wandered over. “Cassandra wants to know why you aren't playing.”

“It's a stupid game.”

Trina agreed but she couldn't say so as she was Cassandra's cousin. “It's too hard to catch the cute boys.”

“I don't see the point. What do we get if we catch them?”

Trina gave me a look as if she wanted to tell me something and decided against it.

My mom had a word for the girls like Cassandra — boy crazy. “Those girls only think of boys, that's all they can think of it. It's sick.”

I didn't understand why the girls got so giggly and silly about it. Don't get me wrong; I liked boys. I even had a boyfriend, Shane. This meant that when he wrote his name it was always SD plus DD. And when I signed my name, I did the same. When he looked in my direction and winked, I smiled back and gave him the thumbs up sign. (The thumbs up sign was cool because of Fonzie.) Even though Shane had moved away two years before, I assumed I was still his girlfriend.