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CANADIAN LITERARY AWARDS

Welcome to the 2001 Canadian Literary Awards. This year marks the first time the awards are being handed out alongside the Grands Prix littEraires Radio-Canada. It is also the first time that the winners of both awards will be published in enRoute, Canada's premier lifestyle publication.

These prestigious competitions, held in collaboration with the Canada Council for the Arts, present awards in three categories: poetry, fiction and travel literature. This month, enRoute introduces its readers to some of Canada's most original creative voices by publishing the second-prize winners in the fiction category.

Sandy Bonny is a student at the University of Alberta where she is studying geobiology. She is originally from Saskatoon. This is her first published work.

MANDALA

ONE OF MY FIRST MEMORIES IS OF MY MOTHER EXPLAINING WHERE SHE PLANNED to get me a little sister from. I was aghast, picturing a vagina no larger than the slit at the end of my penis, a baby squeezed out like toothpaste from a tube, and my mother deflated afterwards, shriveled and hollow. These misconceptions were graphically corrected when she popped my sister out onto the kitchen linoleum with three ground-shaking contractions, and remained strong enough to shout me into telephoning my parents. I padded importantly to the phone in my parents’ room for that call, awed by my unsupervised responsibility. The part of her sex-ed lecture that stuck with me later was the contribution of the father. Contrary to the popular belief of four-year-olds that mothers made babies solo, I knew that fathers provided the blueprints. Via penis delivery.

The best approach with grizzly bears is to back away slowly while making a lot of noise. If they do charge, you should play dead while they paw you and hopefully do not eat you. If the bear is black, you should also try to back away slowly while making a lot of noise. However, if a black bear charges you, you should fight back with great vigor…poking them in the eye if possible. If you have ever been faced by an angry bear, you know how hard this advice is to follow. Instinctively, the human creature runs away, aiming for silence, but gasping and screaming in anticipation of death.

My sister, faced with a bear that appeared to be both black and brown, ran screaming like the rest of us. She was an avid believer of anything read or read to her, but only three, with little life experience. Little enough to mistake a slobbering Saint Bernard for a rabid bear. She was humiliated by our father’s laughter. I was humiliated for her – she, my mother and I being the proud breed of know-it-all that preferred errors of fact or judgment to be ignored quietly. Not recounted delightedly by my father to the owner of the Saint Bernard, the woman walking by who was flustered by Xanthe’s screaming, or the zit-ridden dickee dee boy.

I was in grade three (grades having replaced years in my estimation of maturity) and my father and I went to Ikea. We were consciously disobeying my mother who thought it was just plain silly to buy a new table when a second-hand table could be covered in a tablecloth and look just as nice. At least, I was consciously disobeying my mother, and so nauseated by guilt that I threw up the hot dog my father bought as a treat. My father enjoyed it all. Shopping around a store with a child, manoeuvring our cart in and out of other family units, picking out surprise items for an imaginary wife and daughter who would enjoy them. I think even the puking was part of the package for him.

My mother died when I was almost ten and Xanthe barely five, she was thirty-three. She died of blood poisoning after cutting her hand on a septic knife that had been left unwashed for three days after being used to fillet a fish, in a Buddhist nunnery, in Thalot, India. I am not kidding. It’s in Ladakh, the northernmost province of India, deep in the Indian Himalayas. She was away from Western medicine and a Tibetan herbalist tried various remedies and blood lettings but what she needed was a heavy dose of antibiotics and maybe a blood transfusion.

We stayed at the nunnery for a week after her death, until the cook found Western tourists he deemed respectable enough to help us track down our father. I don’t know if you’ve ever traveled in northern India? Lots of drugs, lots of Israeli students reveling in their freedom from mandatory military duty, and a few earnest mountaineers lying prone with altitude sickness while they dream of mastering windy passes with a train of yaks. The Buddhists gave us to Rick and Leonard.

Assembling a table from Ikea requires no great genius. But, Xanthe and I rarely made crafts or collections or experiments that were not accompanied by extensive instructions – Mr. Dressup’s Rainy Day Parade, Dr. Zed’s Amazing Experiments, A Child’s Book of Bug Collection, Simon and Shuster’s Guide to Rocks and Minerals, Yama Origami. Xanthe read aloud while I assembled, ordered, labeled or folded, and considered the results hers. Reading (mastered by two-and-a-half) was her greatest pride, a satisfaction to my mother and me who had read her letters in the womb, an astonishment to my father (and probably the rest of the family, town, world).

There are no written instructions to an Ikea table. Clutching an unappreciated gift of a green and yellow pillow (which to my father’s credit did match her comforter), Xanthe watched with trepidation as my father began screwing and assembling without even glancing at instructions. I watched with interest. It seemed blueprints were not necessary to construction.

My mother came home. She was steely silent about the table in her kitchen, and breathed shortly and dismissively as my father gestured toward a pair of candles and a set of picture frames. Xanthe and I followed my mother to her room – rewarded by her confidences, and justified in disapproving our father’s extravagances.

I don’t know why the cook picked men to take care of Xanthe and me. Maybe this is a Western prejudice, but were I in his position, I would have petitioned the first neatly dressed woman I saw. Maybe he thought a woman would remind us painfully of our mother? Maybe he thought we should get used to men if we were going to live with our father? Maybe they were the only English speakers he could find and he really wanted to get rid of us.

Bears and dogs are actually closely related in a phylogenetic sense, my mother explained over the rhythm of our toothbrushing. They share a common ancestor that looked something like a wolverine. The divergence probably began by geographic separation, after which the two populations began to evolve divergently in response to different environmental stresses. Likely, dogs evolved in a place where food was scarce and teamwork and agility necessary to survival. Bears, which lead solitary and relatively sedentary lives, evolved in more plentiful environments. We, her children, nodded sagely while we brushed, coordinating the brush stroke and head movement. Xanthe was placated, honour restored. My mother’s omniscience was confirmed.

If my father, who did not know that Dylan Thomas had died from alcohol, and furthermore ignored this fact and brazenly sipped at a beer with dinner on Fridays, could assemble a table without instructions, I was sure my mother could build babies without instructions from him. Suddenly she was dead, and Rick was incredibly tall and old. With hind knowledge, he was 5'7'' and only 23. But those northern Indian Tibetan types are short little people, and the nuns with their shaved heads tend to look younger than they are. Rick was terrified by the idea of taking on diarrhea-ridden children, but saw no better option for us. He was also relieved that taking us on necessitated abandoning Leonard’s two-month high altitude embolism taunting trek schedule.

My father left us on a Tuesday and Xanthe and I didn’t realise until Thursday. My mother knew, of course, but waited until we noticed. Thus, she minimised the importance of his disappearance. Life changed very little for me. I sat in Mrs. Kleason’s classroom much as before, but with the novelty of being the child of a single parent, and enjoyed the curiosity of my classmates. I was tempted to tell stories with violent fighting, thrown dishes, and high courtroom drama. I bit my creative tongue and found that silence added to my classroom mystique. What did change was that my mother no longer felt free to pursue her self-directed education, or Xanthe’s. We would not be beholden to HIM. Xanthe was enrolled in a Montessori day care program while my mother became a research assistant to Dr. Levin, a philosopher of religious studies.

I identified Leonard as what my mother called a pothead. But he dressed well, and had clean smelling hair, despite its being knotted in dreads. I could see why the cook had chosen him. He looked rich. Very geared up in synthetic mountaineering apparel. Not a hippy stuck in India because he was out of money for the flight home.

Dr. Levin had arranged funding for my mother to pursue a doctoral thesis. She was exploring the contrasts between ideal and actualised religion – with a focus on the actualisation of Buddhism in different ecological and economic environments. This began with a month spent at the Mt. Tuam Monastery on Salt Spring Island. We were the only children present. Xanthe, at four, haloed by blonde curls and studiously introspective, was an immediate darling of the monks. I spent my time on verdant hill slopes, taunting sheep under the guise of shepherding.

My father snored. This is why my mother got her own room, and I began to share mine with Xanthe. Xanthe talked in her sleep. We held nightly dialogues.

We arrived in Delhi just before the monsoon season and withered immediately in the heat. My mother did not approve of man-powered rickshaws and did a lot of walking carrying a hot and sweaty Xanthe and dragging me by the hand. I was dizzied by Delhi. It is a swarm of heat and exhaust. I remember sweating from the bottom of my feet so that my heels slid wetly out of my sandals with every step. We were fascinated and touched by merchants, businessmen, peddlers and lepers. My mother was fascinated by them, oblivious to the knots of pity and disgust that writhed in me. A whole family drove by our bus on a scooter. My mother held Xanthe’s head while she puked out the window – and a man drove a scooter, his son gripped between his knees on the running board, his wife behind him holding an infant, and another boy behind her, gripping her sari with monkey fists. They flew by the bus, heads turning in unison to watch my sister’s puckered face.

Trees and stones seemed more real. I rolled a pebble back and forth over the crest of my knee while Rick and Leonard discussed whether to keep us. Plan B would have been to hand us over to a military base – and the military was busy enough with Sikh/Hindu tensions and periodic border skirmishes with Pakistan. They decided to take us to Delhi where we could be turned over to the Canadian Embassy. I knew the role of an Embassy. I may even have known the address of the Embassy, that being the sort of tangible information I tended to file away. But I was suddenly aware that I had no idea what an Embassy was – a building? a group of people? though improbable, it could be a machine? Rick turned his back to Leonard and me and threw a pebble he’d been palming over the balcony of the nunnery – a long graceful arc that ended whooshing into a field of green wheat. I leapt up beside him and threw my pebble – a short wobbling cosine that bounced back at me from the balcony railing. Rick swooped me up in tanned arms. The scruffy stubble of his chin scraped my forehead, his callused fingers dug into my left arm and thigh, and he swung me over the edge of the balcony after his pebble. I hovered between sky and wheat, long enough for a fearful gasp and the beginning of wonder. And then he swung me back, a stiff, almost ten-year-old boomerang.

Birthing me exhausted my mother, but she knew what to call me right away – Fohn. A fohn is a warm dry wind that blows down the northern slopes of the Alps. It originates over the Mediterranean, and causes all the flowers in the alpine meadows to bloom in the spring. It is a hopeful wind, and a living wind. But my father brought his parents with him to the hospital, and my mother was so tired that she fell asleep, and my father told the nurses my name. Which is Wyatt. Which is also my grandfather’s name, and my dead uncle’s. When my mother was feeling especially silly, she would tease me with Why oh Why Whyatt??? I had Fohn, the perfect name for you. When I began asking questions, she conceded that Why was a fine kind of a name. But she didn’t make the same mistake with Xanthe.

Leonard was a reluctant babysitter throughout, but a responsible one. First off, he talked a pharmacy into giving us Flagyl and relieved Xanthe and me of our dehydrating giardiasis. I remember my first unafflicted morning clearly. We had stopped at a tent camp overnight on a three-day bus trip out of the mountains and I woke up before anyone else. My stomach did not hurt, and sitting up did not produce gassy rumblings. I slipped out from a cozy position between Rick and Xanthe and ventured out of the tent. I was very small, and in the middle of a bone dry crater-like sedimentary basin. We had driven through this same landscape with my mother a month ago, but I was seeing it for the first time. She left a huge void in my psyche and five a.m. light and crumbling mountain passes were filtering into it. I stumbled away from the circle of tents, squatted in full view of anything watching, and shat. A real solid BM.

I was reluctant to admit to myself that Rick was better at taking care of Xanthe than either my mother or I. He was unflustered by vomit, and unanswerable questions, and firmly disinterested in encouraging her meditation. Having asked for a book to read and being told that Milan Kundera was too grown up for her, Xanthe tried tearfully to meditate on a bus ride. I had defected to the Rick and Leonard camp of rough-housing and guffaws. Motion sick, and heart sick, she sought inner resources as our mother and the monks had taught her to do. Rick’s crappy limericks battered at her resolve, his long tanned fingers tickled her sides, he pulled at her toes.

There was a blond girl name Xan-thee
Who tried to be real fan-cy
I am not!
There was a wee tyke from Loredo
who longed for a big baked potato
but she had no chive
and began to jive

(a great deal of wriggling ensued as my sister attempted to escape tickling fingers)

Until she turned into a great big tomato!! Bppppppppp!!!!!

(A tomato to Rick is a raspberry to most people – which we didn’t know then. His lips forming a shuddering, noisy volcano that erupted on your stomach or arm seemed surely a phenomenon unique to him.) My sister erupted into giggling. Her sunburnt, tear-streaked face turning all smiles. Xanthe was five years old, and would not remember our mother.

When they thought I was asleep, nestled between them on the final leg back to Delhi, I listened to what I considered a candid discussion of sex. Leonard was a poet with words, Rick a sleepy and receptive listener. The sweet smoke of Leonard’s pipe wafted above my head. I had come to think of it as incense, no different from the kind my mother burned to centre herself before writing. Learning is opening yourself to the world, writing is opening the world to your thoughts. It requires silence and centring. Leonard was lecturing Rick on technique and timing.

Sure if she’s wet you could dive in, is the phrase I awoke to.

But you don’t want her in her body when you go in, or you in yours. Because the physical touch is one thing, but it’s sex without connection unless you’re above that. Way above it. You’ve gotta wait until going into her is the only thing you can do because you’re riding a wave that won’t stop for a gate. It’s birth in reverse – you are diving through a portal into the workshop of when you were born – and she is right to be angry at losing you. Because man is a part of woman, man is of woman. So when she lets you back in she’s being f***ing generous, and you’ve got to be grateful. Not just horny and hungry but full of worship and thanks. Sex is f***ing and it’s nothing. You want to make love to a woman. And don’t think you need to love her to do that. It’s man and woman, not a man, not a woman, and she is in every woman. She is the world. And she’s in every female thing, man, woman is creation, woman is potential. If you want Carol bound to you in any way, man, you’ve got to tie yourself into that love...

The discussion continued.

But I was looking at penis delivery in a very different way. And the idea of putting myself into a woman’s body, which I had only vaguely considered before, became suddenly immediate and frightening. Because man was the vulnerable one enveloped in a force as strong as Leonard described. And I knew about this portal to woman, I had seen one bloody and angry. And my father had entered it. Shivery, guilty of eavesdropping, I coughed and sat up.

At one monastery we visited, my mother explained the scenes in a Mandala. All of creation in all of its states in one picture. Birth, growth, work, death, again and again cycling infinite. She tried to key me into the power of life, asking if I remembered the speed of Xanthe’s birth – the way she clambered into the world. I was hot, dehydrated, needed a washroom, and dying to escape the heat and expectancy of my mother’s body hunching over me. I nodded an escape. She smiled. Because We delivered Xanthe, and We named her. But I had become a reluctant conspirator. At nine, I could barely remember the birth. I did remember my pleasure at dialing the phone in my parents’ room though – previous to that day, I had only pressed individual buttons to hear them beep. And I had done so stealthily, while my mother was in the shower.

Xanthe decided to be normal(ish). She is smart, but I think she would have been so without our early coaching. She is artistic and musical and popular, and these were born in her too. My father, who became Dad, sees our mother in her. Tempered. Deeply capable of love. In me he claims to see Rick. Inevitable after years of mentorship and conscious mimicry. I see some Dad in me too. My mother swirls deep.

We drove Rick and Leonard crazy in Delhi. Panicky and frightened of losing our tenuous claim to them, we demanded piggyback rides in 40 degrees heat, refused to use the washroom unaccompanied, and begged for song. We took a rickshaw to the Canadian Embassy with their promise to visit us in Canada clenched in our fists. The last person we expected to find behind the doors of the Embassy was our father. Happy to see us but prepared to handle us like stemware. He expected us crippled by loss – or still angry with him for leaving. He stumbled over greetings, apologetic and uncertain how not to offend our or our mother’s ideals. These restless, shaggy headed, tanned creatures were not who he remembered his children being. We had succumbed to instinct. In the darknesses of night and stillness we were safekept by strangers who offered nothing but food, humour, and physical presence. Most children are born trusting the constancy of matter, the solidity of their father’s chest, they learn to stand beside the tall trunks of their mother’s legs. We were born to our father late, free of imagined need.