Stolen Life (31 page)

Even with a few beers I didn’t know how to act around Dwayne Wenger. I was so attracted to him, the way he danced with me, I got a kick out of his paint polka-dots and the screw in
his boot. And then we were driving under a streetlight and I saw his face clearly, a big man, sombre and serious, and I knew he was playing the game with me he’d started when he spoke to his friend at the other table, a love game, and I could sense he was absolutely serious about it when he said to me, though talking to Perry, “Can I kiss your sister?”

I wouldn’t have known what to answer. I felt no strength in myself, I was shy, giggly like a young girl—embarrassed almost—but I didn’t make a sound. I didn’t feel like saying anything, not yet.

But Perry answered; he wasn’t even eighteen yet, but serious as could be too. “What are you asking me?”

“I’m asking for a date with your sister.”

And Perry spoke carefully, as if he was explaining something very important, very exactly; I couldn’t believe he knew how to think or talk like that:

“I have to tell you something about my big sister. I can tell she likes you, and you should know this—Vonnie is a very romantic person.”

We all burst out laughing; we were kidding around, avoiding something special. I wanted to have a date—when in my life had I ever had a
date?—
and it all suddenly seemed too heavy and there was the Heritage and I had to get Chantal and my key from the babysitter and I was running around, and Dwayne Wenger hadn’t come up to the third floor with everyone else. I hadn’t said anything to him, but I was thinking of nothing else—what do I say to him? what?—and knowing if he listened I wanted to talk all night. I was running around, so busy with my sleepy baby, and Perry was laughing with stupid Dale—who was awake enough to laugh now—they must have just ditched Dwayne in the hall and he was too shy—I looked out the window to see if I could catch him, but on the street under the light was a space of blank snow. He was gone.

I was holding Chantal and staring around, dazed. Perry said, “Dale’ll sleep it off, I’m going,” and he was gone too.

A baby asleep and a drunken mooch in the next room snoring off a trayful of beer. Sit alone in an apartment, some sixties
songs on the stereo, snow crawling across the little balcony outside: live for months, motionless, just deal with what comes minute by minute and don’t move, don’t think, avoid, avoid, and then one small, sudden, hurt and the pain that’s always waiting inside by the year kicks over into impossible. I always was so scared Mom was right, I was truly crazy, and how can a crazy woman raise a beautiful child? I instantly liked Dwa so much, but he’s gone and I’m still stuck with Dale—I thought, I’m a loser, I’ve left it too long.

In the bathroom cabinet were two large brown bottles of multicoloured pills. Shirley Anne’s girls must have lifted them from behind a drugstore counter. They looked as if there were enough. I slammed them all back, opened my throat and poured them down with a pitcher of water. The songs sounded far away, I was getting groggy … but I needed to see Chantal once more. I stood by her bed. I had survived my life without love … but I loved her. I was capable of love now, I knew it. I did not really want to die, because I did not want to let go of Chantal … but … I wanted to let the pills make the choice of life or death, let the pills decide—or God, if there is one … like a child with continual abuse, you lie and take it, knowing you will surely die, there’s too much brutality to live, and yet if you do survive once more you accept that outcome too, that’s the way life happens to happen, what could you do about it, maybe next time.

But I wanted my baby near me, whatever the pills or God or both decided. I picked her up, I would lie down carefully on the couch with her, I was slipping away and I would never drop her, no, but she fell and I tried to pick her up—my hands wouldn’t work, I couldn’t balance, I fell to the floor beside her, crying, and Chantal was awake, she knew something was wrong, she tried to help me up. I cradled her head, whispered, “Mommy loves you, it’s okay, Mommy.…”

But she started to scream. I lay with tears running over my face. I should have left her sleeping in her bed.

Dale stumbled out and saw me. He phoned Emergency; an ambulance came. I felt I was deep inside myself, like padded walls; perhaps I hung on by listening, and the ambulance attendant
helped: he slung me over his shoulder and carried me out, swearing about stupid women, mothers, drunken Indians, why don’t they just go off in the bush and die like they do in the movies, or a car crash, oh no, I have to carry her sorry ass all the way down from the third floor!

They wouldn’t take Dale along. The nurse called him so stupid—he had put on his own jacket and brought Chantal out in her night clothes—and what was an Indian woman doing with a guy like that anyway, trying to pass her baby off as White? I could see the lights flashing as the ambulance rolled and cornered, and a silly song did too: “When they come to take you down, when they bring that wagon ’round … and drag your poor body down … please forget you know my name, my darling Sugaree …” whining around corners, the nurses in Emergency rolling me out of the cold on a gurney, sarcastic and joking:

They all laughed, the man giving them more punchlines about Indians—their Emergency got so many damaged and dead people from the Hobbema reserves we’d become a joke—the women laughing at his cracks. An older nurse was working on me, she tried to get me to drink something black and foul and ordered a tube, when another nurse came and said that stupid guy was in the next room with the baby, raising hell.

And I heard Chantal cry. With that peculiar sound of baby desperation; she had never had to cry that way before. I was stretched out with a will to die, but her screams called for me. I whispered, “I want my baby, please …”

One nurse said, “She’s coming in and out,” and the other one working on me was more sarcastic than ever, “… her kid’s screaming and she lying here, useless woman …”

Now I just wanted to get Chantal and leave, all their insults—doing their “civic duty” on me while their self-righteousness
chopped me in pieces. And as always my defence was offence; my arm shot out and grabbed the nurse by the throat, and she hit me in the chest, trying to make me let go. I had just one hand on her; I was lying motionless in too much pain to move. They were keeping the shell of my life alive and insulting my spirit, and another nurse ran up swearing about dumb Indians, so I let go the first and punched her in the mouth. Then the male nurse jumped on my stomach, hit me in the jaw, and pinned my arms until the nurses got my arms and knees strapped down. Chantal was wailing so close, and I was finished, limp as meat. Completely strapped flat, I broke down and cried.

The head nurse was gentle. “You never know how much they can hear.” She was wiping my face.

I wanted desperately to help my baby and they worked on me spewing words as if I was a plank—Do we really have to do this? You help these people and they choke you, punch you in the face—but finally the head nurse said if I calmed down they’d bring the baby, and then Dale brought Chantal to me. They unstrapped one arm so I could hold her. She stopped sobbing, she crawled onto me, hugging me, and I knew I had to live. I was whispering to her, “Mommy loves you. It’s okay, it’s okay sweetheart, Mommy loves you.”

Touching her, I felt overwhelming shame and guilt. I told Dale to take her to my aunt at the Heritage, and I swallowed their tube then, right down into my stomach. I passed out when the pumping started and came to in a hospital bed with my whole body ringing the way it does from an overdose. Pills creep up on you, they take too long and you can get stopped and be dragged back with your body ringing your self into life again like a thousand tiny church bells. Better to use a gun quick—and for sure.

My mother came with Aunt Josephine—Mom had driven back from Winnipeg to pick up her stuff, so now she was here on time to report to the whole family about my suicide attempt. They came to the hospital to see me loaded with tubes. But the two barely spoke to me; they always talked Cree to each other so we kids wouldn’t understand them, and since in our family kids
don’t talk to their elders unless spoken to—Mom says that’s the Native way—it didn’t much matter. However, all their lives my mother and her sister have played a kind of cruel game, a competition about who’s tougher in punishing their kids. Josephine has two daughters and a son, and in front of Mom she always calls Shirley Anne and Darlene down unbelievably—never Carl of course; sons are always perfect, especially only sons. So now to prove how strict she was, Mom really got into me. In English, running up one side of me and down the other, irresponsible, stupid, thick numbskull, nuts, crazy, slicing me into slivers—why o why didn’t I speak Cree? It has no vocabulary for abuse like this—while Aunt Josephine listened carefully, nodding, and I had to take it. You don’t talk back to your mother.

She finally ran out of words—“I’m not taking care of your kid too. If she’s damaged it’s your own fault”—and she left.

Then Aunt Josephine asked me, “Where’s the sixty dollars I left with you, that Dale drank up? I need it now.”

I told her she’d get it when I could get outa here. So she left too, and I freaked out, the pain hit me so hard; they’d play their cruel games over me if I was dead in my coffin. I was ripping out tubes, staggering around for clothes, I was getting out, who cares if I die, my mother coming from Winnipeg just to yell and my aunt demanding sixty lousy bucks! I was screaming.

A nurse came running, one of the kind ones. She talked me down, calm, and convinced me I needed help, I must stay till I was strong. I needed someone to talk to, and she found a psychologist at Mental Health for me. When I got back to Heritage Apartments the first thing I did was tell Dale he had to pay back Aunt Josephine’s money and leave. And he did both.

Drinking was as common as sleep in the world where I grew up, and it had nothing to do with “social” drinking. In our family you drank head-on steady to get drunk. And so I learned by watching, and drinking hard liquor off and on in Butte until I hit the blackout and that scared me—I hardly drank again till the four-week
drunk at Stand Off. I started on beer in Winnipeg and drank steadily for almost two years. I stopped for most of the two and a half years with Fred; I abstained completely when I was pregnant and until Chantal was a year old. I limited myself to two beers the few times I went out in Wetaskiwin before I met Dwa.

So I did not recognize that I was an alcoholic. Though I didn’t know what, or why, I did know something was wrong with me; sometimes I was so horribly
down
. Except when I was alone with Chantal.

Affer the hospital, the apartment building was free of family: Auntie Rita had married Albert Yellowbird and moved out; the others had left too; and I wouldn’t answer the buzzer, so no one I knew could gain access to the building. One day the buzzer went and I wouldn’t open the door but I listened on the intercom: it was two girls, one a schoolgirl cousin. I heard her say to her friend, “Just as well we don’t visit. Her mother says she’s crazy.”

Chantal came and hugged my legs; I was crying but she looked up at me with her deep black eyes and I knew all was fine; who needs to care what name-callers say anyway. A short, stocky little girl sixteen months old and lovelier than ever, a chatterbox all day long and speaking only the language we had between us. She’d sing and prattle and I’d ask her, “Is that right, really?” and she’d nod laughing, it was such a funny game; she always caught the words, the tone when I said it, “Is that right, really?” and she’d nod so hard her whole body bounced yes, yes! I just hugged her, both of us rolling around on the rug.

If the weather was a bit warmer, we’d go out on our little balcony to play on a blanket in the fresh air. I told her the story of the girl locked in a tower by a wicked witch and one day her prince came, she let down her hair, and he climbed up to her, and they had lots of babies, little brothers and sisters, and so lived happily ever after. The balcony faced a street going north, distant lines of trees and roofs of houses all around, but there was
never a boxy 1961 Chevy van down there splattered with paint.