The White Bicycle

  Copyright © 2012 Beverley Brenna

  <>EPub edition copyright © June 2012 Beverley Brenna

  Published in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 195 Allstate Parkway, Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8

  Published in the United States by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 311 Washington Street, Brighton, Massachusetts 02135

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of Fitzhenry & Whiteside or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5, fax (416) 868-1621.

  By purchasing this e-book you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any unauthorized information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Fitzhenry & Whiteside.

  www.fitzhenry.ca godwit@fitzhenry.ca

  Fitzhenry & Whiteside acknowledges with thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

  Cover design by Daniel Choi

  Cover image courtesy of Taylor Crowe

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  White Bicycle / Beverley Brenna.

  ISBN 9780889954830

  I. Title.

  PS8553.E295532T76 2011 jC813’.6 C2011-905805-7

  Publisher Cataloging-in-Publication Data (U.S)

  Brenna, Beverley.

  White Bicycle / Beverley Brenna.

  [ 232 ] p. : cm.

  Summary: White Bicycle is the third title in the Wild Orchid trilogy following the adventures of Taylor Jane, a young woman with Asperger's Syndrome. In The White Bicycle, Taylor travels to the south of France with her mother and her friends. She is going to be working for the summer babysitting for the Phoenix family. While on this journey Taylor will embark on another quest for independence both personal and universal as she casts her mind back to her earliest memories.

  ISBN: 9780889954830(pbk.)

  1. Adventure – Juvenile fiction. I. Title.

  [Fic] dc22 PZ7.B325Tr 2011

  eISBN 978-1-55244-308-8

  For my grandmother,

  Jane Taylor, (Jeannie) Martin Stillborn

  Lourmarin, France

  Monday, August 4, 2003

  My Dream

  In my dream, I am stumbling along a difficult path in the woods. Tree roots and rocks are underfoot, and vines catch at my ankles. It is very hot, and the silvery olive trees provide little shade. I can hear my mother hollering, "Taylor Jane! Come back!", but I do not obey her, because it is embarrassing to be called after when you are nineteen years old. In my arms I carry a white bicycle, which I cannot put down. It is heavy and I am tired, but I keep walking. At last the path becomes a road, and I ride. The speed and the wind on my face are exhilarating. I forget about my mother; I forget how difficult the white bicycle is to carry; I forget about everything except the journey ahead.

  I do not know whether this is really a dream or a nightmare. My mother would say it is a nightmare because it has unhappy parts in it; but so does life, and life is closer to dreams than nightmares. In life it is your dreams that take you forward, and your dreams that make you human. This is something I have been thinking about a lot lately.

  I am sitting in my bedroom overlooking the cherry orchard, and the white bicycle is leaning up against the trunk of a tree. I am planning to ride it later, but I will probably stay on the road. I remember all too well what happens when I take the white bicycle into the forest.

  Other Dreams

  The word "dream" carries many meanings, and I am thinking about two other types of dreams I have in addition to the sleeping dream about the white bicycle.

  1. I dream of adding pieces to my life story, pieces that were not included in my previous journals. There is much about my life as a child that I want to revisit through writing, and much about that life I do not ever, ever want to forget. While those times were difficult, they are part of who I am now, and should not be passed over in a story of my life. And maybe the past will help me to better understand the present. My high-school history teacher used to say that the past is important to the present. I will explore my past, such as it is, and see if this is true.

  2. I dream of a future where I am independent, able to work and take care of myself. It is possible that my writing will help me achieve this goal. My high-school English teacher said that sometimes writing stuff down makes you feel better. I have translated this to mean that writing words about my life helps me to understand better the situations I am describing. If I do not understand something when it happens to me, I can work on it as one might work on a puzzle, through my writing, piece by piece.

  I should have begun this journal a long time ago, because we have already been in France a whole month, but I have been busy getting used to my new schedule. I have to get up at 7 am in order to help Martin Phoenix eat his breakfast, as that is part of my job as a babysitter. Martin Phoenix is really too old to have a babysitter—he will be in grade eight next fall—but because he has personal care needs related to his cerebral palsy, there has to be someone with him all the time. Maybe "personal care assistant" is a better match. I will speak to his father about this. Then I will put "personal care assistant" on my resumé.

  "Personal care assistant" looks a lot better than "babysitter" on a resumé but either term could support further employment. That is my main goal: employment so I can buy all my own clothes, and everything else I will need. My mother has just now gone into town to see if she can find me something nicer to wear, but what I am wearing is a perfectly good jean dress. I do not know why she is not satisfied with it. I have begun to think that my mother is never satisfied with clothing once it is a year old. She could end up doing a lot of shopping with an attitude like that.

  This story will be about how I got to France for two months of summer employment. But it starts long before this, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. What I have written in my other journals does not go back far enough, and does not present the set of first-person images I carry inside me: images of being a child, and going to school, and the bewilderment of understanding no one, and of being misunderstood. Those journals do not tell much about my father leaving home when I was eight and they certainly do not tell about all the yelling my parents did against each other. Things were uneasy for me most of the time in those days.

  Until I learned about my diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome when I was eleven, I had no explanation for why some things were so difficult for me. Why, for example, when people spoke too fast all I heard was vowel sounds. And why feelings suddenly exploded in my head until all I could see was white. It is possible my parents blamed each other for my challenges, thinking I had not been raised well, or that I was too much like one or the other of them in my stubbornness. But I don't think I broke their marriage in half. They were just getting in each other's way. My mother wanted to date men who wore polyester golf shirts and then progress to dating my friend Luke Phoenix's father, Alan Phoenix, who looks like the actor Kevin Costner. My father wanted to open a business in Cody, Wyoming and move there and get a girlfriend named Sadie Richards who looks like the actress Julia Roberts. Neither my mother nor my
father could do these things as long as they were married together.

  I remember being happy in the time period before I went to kindergarten, although my mother tells a different story. In my memory, before-school was a time when I did what I wanted, when I wanted, and there was very little opportunity for anger. In my mother's memory, before-school was just as bad as once-school-started. But mothers don't know everything, and in my case, mine actually knows very little. I don't know if she's lying when she talks about my early childhood, or if memories have escaped from a hole in her collection. Either way, she's wrong about the before-school period. I barely wore any clothes then, which was altogether pleasant; it wasn't until I was five that I had to bear any kind of scratchy cloth against my body when I didn't feel like it. Unfortunately, there was a rule that said you had to wear clothes to kindergarten. One of my earliest memories of school is sitting on a hard bench with my skin hurting all over from the clothes, and watching other kids climb and slide on an apparatus that looked very dangerous. Part of me wanted to climb up there as well, but the other part of me was afraid, and that is the part that won.

  I am working hard not to let the "afraid" part win, now that I am nineteen years old. I do not want to be like Stanley in Harold Pinter's play, The Birthday Party, who never left his bedroom and who was at the mercy of his landlady. I am referring to Harold Pinter the playwright, not Harold Pinter my gerbil, who is in Canada with his son, Samuel Beckett, getting looked after by my friend Shauna. Technically, Harold Pinter the gerbil is a female, being Samuel Beckett's mother, but gender can be flexible and so I think of him as male, just as his name suggests.

  I am working especially hard not to let the afraid part win each time I think about my future, although it reminds me of a precipice that if I am not careful I will just fall from. Instead of hiding in my bedroom, I am putting one foot in front of another—just like the old woman I met last week in Cassis. If she can do it, when she was probably about a hundred years old, then so can I. I hope she is not dead. My mother said we can find out by phoning the hospital, but I do not remember her name.

  This journal is to investigate my thoughts and feelings, like my English teacher advised me to do. It is to take the steps I have collected in my journey so far—en cachette, the French would say—and privately explore them as best I can. It is also to write about the dreams that carry me forward. It is not to blame anyone for my misery, or my joy; it just tells it like it was.

  There is a little gray book on the wooden bookshelf in my bedroom here in France that intrigues me. It is a discussion of consciousness, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Jean-Paul Sartre says that it is critical to select the order of our bits of knowledge, to set things out in a way that makes sense in our own personal search for freedom. That is what I am considering now as I sort through my memories and begin this journal. What to put first, what to put second, and where to place all the things that must somehow fit together to compose a person, to create a life. My life, such as it is.

  I think I will start by writing about France, and how I got here, and the events that fill my time. Then I will go back and tell about my childhood. And then I will come forward and see if I have learned anything important.

  The Butterflies in France

  There are many different kinds of butterflies in France, but I have not seen any Painted Lady ones. The most common here in the south are the Swallowtail, the Large White, the Small White, the Pale Clouded Yellow, the Clouded Yellow, and the Wood White. We found a Wood White on the side of the car one day, and my mother said it was a moth, but I know she is wrong. My mother is often wrong and that is one reason I do not want to listen to her. For one thing, the Wood White butterfly's antennae had rounded clubs on the ends. For another, its wings were held vertically as it rested. It did have a fuzzy body, but so do some other butterflies that are not moths.

  When I look for butterflies, I always make sure to find seven of them. Then I start a new search. I do not restrict my findings to one species, because that would be too difficult. Just seven butterflies, in total, and then I begin again. One day I did see seven Pale Clouded Yellow ones, though, and that was a good day indeed.

  The old woman in Cassis was wearing a nightgown that had butterflies on it, and I wonder if she was thinking about flying when she headed toward the sea. I wish I could remember her name so that I could phone the hospitals. It sounded something like Kool-Aid, but it was not that. Maybe we will go sightseeing to Cassis again, and I can ask someone where the hospital is or find it on the map. Then I could go in and ask whether a woman wearing a butterfly nightgown was brought there, and what happened to her. When I pulled her out of the water, she did not look as if she was going to die. But then again, my grandmother died in the spring and she did not look as if she was going to die either. Nothing was sticking out of her, like you see in movies when people get shot or stabbed. All my grandmother had was pneumonia, which I have had twice—but it killed her. My mother said she was only 75, and I do not know what she meant by that. There isn't an age you can be in addition to being 75, is there? Either you're 75 or you're not, and my grandmother was.

  Traveling to France

  Making up your mind means making a decision. Once I made up my mind to go to France for the summer, I told my mother and she made up her own mind to come along. At first I did not particularly want her to come, but then I decided that it would be okay. She had the right amount of money from Grandma's will, and she said she had been waiting a long time to take a summer off and travel. Having my mother in France with me will not prevent me from putting the job with Martin Phoenix on my resumé, and that is the main thing I care about, although sometimes I regret letting her join us. She keeps trying to be the boss of me. A few weeks before our trip to France, we drove to the airport in Saskatoon and watched the airplanes landing and lifting off. Then my mother took me to a parking lot near the edge of the city where we simulated an airplane on the runway. She brought out a hair dryer and an electric razor, plugged them into the double-socket cigarette-lighteradapter she got at a garage sale, and turned them on. I put my hands over my ears and my mother offered me earplugs, but I didn't want them. Then my mother drove the car over bumpy potholes until my teeth banged together.

  "Okay, enough!" I said. "This is not a smart way to spend our time." I turned off the hair dryer and the electric razor.

  "You'll thank me when we take off in the airplane and it doesn't bother you," my mother said.

  "It would make more sense for you to use the razor on your chin," I said. "You are growing a beard."

  My mother felt her chin and began to laugh.

  "Easy to say, but you'll be glad we practiced when you get into the airplane," she said. "And maybe I will shave my chin before we go to France. Or get a waxing, or whatever they do. Heck, maybe I'll get the whole works—a pedicure, a facial, everything. After all, it's France."

  I do not know what she meant by that but getting the pedicure was a mistake. They accidentally cut into the base of her big toenail with one of their tools and the chemicals got in there and killed the nail. Now she has an ugly yellow crust for a toenail and she will have this ugly thing on her foot until the new toenail grows in. If it grows in. I prefer cutting my own fingernails and toenails and I will continue to do so; it is much smarter to take care of yourself than to have somebody else do it, especially if that person has sharp instruments and shaky hands. And chemicals.

  We left for France on Friday, July 4. On the airplane my mother and I watched a movie, just like we used to do in the old days—except when we watched movies together at home we weren't on a plane. The movie was Mary Poppins, and we saw it on the tiny TV screens that hung on the back of the seats ahead of us. We had seen Mary Poppins together when I was little and it was interesting seeing it again because some parts I remembered and some parts I did not. I remembered all the things the children said, but nothing Mary Poppins said. This time, I found Mary Poppins the most interesting character because she was a
governess. Governess is the old word for babysitter, and if I was living in the past I would be putting "governess" on my resumé for the summer.

  If my mother had blue eyes, she would look like the actress Julie Andrews who plays Mary Poppins. My mother, however, cannot sing, although she sometimes tries hard. When I think about my mother and me on the plane, it is like I am watching a film, replaying the images as if they were happening right now. I can see her sitting there, leaning forward and laughing, as Mary Poppins slides up the banister.

  "Don't sing along," I say to my mother when the music starts, but she will not listen and keeps singing very quietly. I am not overwhelmed by the experience of the airplane, as she had predicted I would be, but I am bothered by my mother.

  On the airplane, I feel very restless and clean the tray in front of me seven times with a piece of damp paper towel. Then I walk up and down the aisle until the person in the blue jacket comes and tells me I need to sit down because of turbulence. I do not think I am rocking the plane but I suppose when you are up in the air, a bit of weight in the wrong place can make a difference.

  When I sit down, I look at my mother and say, "You have a very smooth chin."

  "Thank you," she says, and laughs. We have supper, which she eats and I do not because it is something disgusting rolled up in a pancake.

  We land in Toronto, change planes, and then land in New York to change planes again. When we look at the digital signboard in the New York airport to find our departure gate, our flight is missing. I think we should go and find another signboard, but my mother says we have to talk to a ticket agent. Even though there is a long line of passengers waiting to speak to an agent, two of the agents are sitting on their stools visiting while one of the other agents is just working at her computer. I crane my neck to see what she is doing. Maybe she is playing a computer game because she is a computer game addict. After seventeen minutes, which I time on my atomic watch, we are called to a station where a man who looks like the father in Mary Poppins tells us about our trip delay.