In the Lot

In the empty lot across the street from my house, which was a mobile like the other homes on Turner Avenue, Bailey took off her training bra and flung it in a birch tree.

     Everything brown and grey, and not even winter. It was October, I think, because there were cider-skinned gourds in Mom’s garden, and we were all in our big coats except for Bailey’s little brother (but I knew he owned one because I’d seen his mom trying to wrangle him into it when I passed their house on Tuesday, which would have embarrassed him because I was Older and A Girl).

     Most days, my brother Caleb and I had passed their driveway, crossed Aberdeen Road, and cut through the field to the Nicola-Canford schoolyard (they called us Nicola-Can’t Afford) before we saw Bailey and Cole running up Turner after the first bell. But sometimes the four of us met at the mouth of their driveway and walked together. Bailey and Cole were from the United States of America, which lent them an air of foreign glamour among us BC kids. Bailey should have been in Grade Four (we say Fourth Grade in Utah), but something about her birthday being in November had confused the adults, so she was the only nine-year-old in Grade Three. I would have hated being older than the other kids in my grade, so I let her hate me a little. In our backyards on Saturdays, I submitted to serfdom under Queen Bailey’s rule. On weekdays, I kept a half-step behind her on the walk to school. And on the day I discovered the New Land across the street, I showed Bailey even before I showed Caleb. I wanted her to know that I'd got there first, but only by accident.

The lot didn’t look empty, which is why it hadn’t been conquered by any kids yet. I walked our old lab after school some days (back then, Lower Nicola felt as safe as my backyard), ’round the cul-de-sac on Carrington and back home past the little wood between Dora Lee’s and the Joes’. My dog was the real discoverer. She’d gone tearing into the trees between the two mobiles (do not let her pee in people’s yards, missy!), which is where I—we—stumbled on the unmistakable evidence of terra nullius: deer pellets, Dubble Bubble wrappers, saskatoon bushes, Lucky cans, and a copper carpet of birch leaves mouldering underfoot. I left my initials in the mud in lieu of a flag.

     Other than Bailey, I didn't know any girls who wore bras. The only specimens I’d seen in person were on the ladies in the Sears catalogue and hanging up in our laundry room: cream and white and black, and one the same shade of purple as the Pelican Nebula in my night skies book. Bailey’s bra wasn’t like my mom’s or the Sears ladies’. The strip of material she fished out of her sleeve was the colour of an old tea towel, and I couldn’t tell it was a bra straightaway because it didn’t have the bowl-shaped parts where boobs go.

     "It itches." She tossed the complaint over her shoulder with the bra, Cool-Girl style. Neither of our brothers looked up; Caleb and Cole were too young for female things—especially female things their moms wore—to distract from the male business of moat-building. I continued to etch our kingdom's borders in the earth, seeing only the end of my stick and not the shape that hung over Bailey, or the expression on her regal, reddening face. Bailey’s bra seemed to me like a killed thing, a still-warm animal strung up in the cold air. I wanted to tear it down from the tree and bury it. I wanted Bailey to hide it back inside her sweater, secret and safe. While it hung there, it was my future flapping from the end of the branch, aggressively real and close.

     I wouldn’t need a bra until I was thirteen. Then the fat on my chest grew in dense—more like sinew than flesh. I would roll my breasts between my hands and flinch. Ever tender, ever growing cob-sized nodes that swelled and shrank, came and went, as did a tirelessly renewing fear, because a lump is a lump is cystic tissue is a breast exam every three years, then every two after thirty, then every year after forty, because mammograms miss 50 percent of cancers in women with your degree of density. I’ve considered a mastectomy. Over and Done With. Kids can’t predict the decisions they’ll grow to weigh, can’t know about the genetic anomalies taking shape under our skins, because we’re focused on how to arrange our winter coats like buffalo hides over our teepee of bent birches (none of us could get permission to use an axe).

One of our games was Hunters and Wolves. Bailey and I sparred over who would play the hunted animal; the boys were happy to kill either of us. I felt I made a better wolf than Bailey, with her bra and her American accent. To prove my wolfishness, I shucked my skate shoes and went barefoot on the pine needles. I’d got it into my head around age six that I would go barefoot as often as my mom would allow, which wasn’t often enough to produce soles so calloused that not even hot asphalt or a gravel drive could daunt me. I would be a real wild girl. I was carrying the gene that day, but I made it to twenty-nine before my antibodies went feral and attacked the joints in my feet. My search history swung from causes of pain ball of foot to sudden fatigue why? to anti-inflammatory supplements OTC. I never got my callouses as thick as I wanted them anyway; my mom kept making me put my shoes back on.

     What wolf lauds the hunter for sparing her life? What kid feels grateful for being born without defects? Was a functioning body not the exception, but the rule? It wouldn’t have occurred in my herniated, eight-year-old brain to celebrate that I was born with the gene for rheumatoid arthritis and not myocarditis; with cystic breasts but not fibrosis; with a brain whose parts were intact, just not in all the right places. Adults were the unlucky species that got the Bad Stuff: black glasses and white canes, chunky hearing aids the colour of Juicy Fruit, crutches and knee braces and artificial hips and compression socks and pills in orange bottles. I ate a Flintstones vitamin every morning. It would be years before I heard the words Valium and Methotrexate and Chiari malformation.

     Luckily, we weren’t adults. We weren’t even four Lower Nic’ kids getting our good shoes dirty. We were First Peoples harvesting berries in imaginary handfuls to get us through the harsh Canadian winter—no, we were toy soldiers come to life, like in that one movie—actually, this was Terabithia and I’m pretty sure I could hear the trolls coming. Which one of us would fall off the rope swing and die? We’d have to build a rope swing first.

     Bailey and Cole must have had Bad Stuff waiting dormant in their bodies or futures, but I didn’t see them again after Grade Six when I started going to middle school in town. I wonder what Bailey got? Everybody gets something. Ectopic pregnancy? Alcohol poisoning? An old baseball sprain that turned into tennis elbow? BPD? Something worse? The kid in the grade below me got cancer in her lymph nodes. The diabetic girl from camp didn’t wake up from her coma. The boy I danced with at the Grade Nine Snowball is paralyzed from the neck down. Maybe we'd hoped to stall Time by ditching our training bras and grow-into-it coats in the lot across the street. If we played hard enough and didn’t come home for supper, maybe Life would stop making us get used to things. Maybe it would let us be wolves instead.

I adjusted my blue ski coat to make a respectable teepee wall, like my great-great-grandmother might have done with a skin. There’s a photo of her in my auntie’s album, young and grand-looking in an eagle-feather headdress, with beads dripping down her cheeks like tears. I wanted to be like her. I bet her feet were calloused as hell. She could probably run over broken glass and feel nothing. She probably didn’t even feel fear.

____________________________________________________

*Forthcoming publication in Geist's Summer 2025 edition