Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

  “A sweat what?”

  “Grandma and Eddy doctored Little Mary. That was her on the phone. Anyway, it’s right beside the house, a little back, in the yard.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, and there’s some birdhouses too. And a shrine, you’ll see that first of all. Mary.”

  “I don’t go by Mary, naturally. My adoptive name, my real name, is Cedar.”

  Long pause. “That’s a pretty name.” Her voice is tender again, pained and wistful. “I just always thought of you as Mary. But I was actually talking about the shrine, you know, it has the Blessed Virgin.”

  “Mary? Mary in an inverted bathtub?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess you could say inverted, you must be smart, ha! But I would call it stood on end and half buried. How’d you know? We took the tub from the old house. Eddy put that up. I planted the flowers.”

  “Wow.”

  Something hits me then, really just about floors me. It loosens up some of the anger and makes me quietly say good-bye and express the polite expectation of being glad to see Mary Potts. When I put the phone down I just sit there looking at it, thinking. Here it is—inherited genetic congruence. I became a Catholic before I got in touch with my biological mother; Catholicism drew me, and I was fascinated by it all: the saints, the liturgy, even the little shrines. Now it turns out that the saints and the church are things we have in common. Me and her. Sweetie. Mary Potts Almost Senior.

  August 9

  The next morning, I travel the highway north to my Potts reservation home. I’m having flashes of poignancy. Everything that I am seeing—the pines, the maples, the roadside malls, insurance companies and tattoo joints, the ditch weeds and the people in the houses—is all physically balanced on this cusp between the now of things and the big, incomprehensible change to come. And yet nothing seems terribly unusual. A bit quiet, perhaps, and some sermons advertised on church billboards are more alarming than usual. Endtime at Last! Are You Ready to Rapture? In one enormous, empty field a sign is planted that reads Future Home of the Living God.

  It’s just a bare field, fallow and weedy, stretching to the pale horizon.

  I pull over, take a photograph of the sign, and keep driving. A car passes me bearing the bumper sticker Come the Rapture Can I Have Your Car? Oh good, not everybody’s getting ready to ascend. I love driving. Thinking while I shoot along. If it is true that every particle that I can see and not see, and all that is living and perhaps unliving too, is trimming its sails and coming about and heading back to port, what does that mean? Where are we bound? Is it any different, in fact, from where we were going in the first place? Perhaps all of creation from the coddling moth to the elephant was just a grandly detailed thought that God was engrossed in elaborating upon, when suddenly God fell asleep. We are an idea, then. Maybe God has decided that we are an idea not worth thinking anymore.

  These notions turn over and over until I stop. I go through a typical car entrance at a typical fast-food franchise, and eat an egg-cheese biscuit and drink two cartons of milk. So there is still fast food, and I am grateful. Eating grounds me. My head clears, and a few hours later I am on the reservation. I pass the Potts Superpumper without stopping, though I do slow up a little. Well, there it is, I think as it goes by, my ancestral holding—a lighted canopy of red plastic over a bank of gas pumps, a cinder-block rectangle with red trimmed doors that match the canopy. Big lighted windows, a bony-looking man at the cash-register stand, bent over on his elbows, peering into what looks like a book. Probably the used-car blue book, at best a techno guy-thriller. I hope not porn. Probably the skinny man is the husband of my biological mom. Eddy. He was mentioned in the letter. No mention of my biological father.

  I cross a bridge with a trickle of water underneath—qualifies just barely as a river, I think. But no turn for a while. The left turn I do take leads past six houses. Five are neat and tidy, trimmed out and gardened, birdhoused, decorated with black plywood bears and moose or bent-over-lady-butts with dotted bloomers. One yard is filled with amazing junk—three kid swimming pools of brilliant blue and pink plastic, a trampoline, dead cars, stove-in boats getting patched I guess, heaped-up lawn mowers and little rusted-out lawn tractors and barbecue grills. Dogs pop from the ditches here and there, at random, and chase after the car, snapping at the wheels. The last house isn’t yellow. I stop the car, pull over. A frowzy tan terrier mix springs up and down outside the passenger window, tireless. I turn back. Maybe there’s another river. She did say big. The dogs pop out in reverse all the way back to the highway.

  There are two other false-alarm rivers, and left-hand turnoffs, all of which lead back into the same first road with the yard full of kid swimming pools. One pool is filled with a couple inches of water and there is a big woman in it, wearing a long T-shirt, letting a little naked baby play in front of her. Aw, cute. Fuckit! Where’s my birth home? Where’s my family? Once again, a false turnoff, a winding road, the dogs newly thrilled each time by me and my car, the woman in the swimming pool now watching me like I am from the FBI. I decide that I will ask directions of her, and turn into the driveway. The dogs go crazy now, foaming with righteousness. I’ve invaded their territory and don’t dare get out of my car. I roll the window down. The woman looks up at me—she has a flat, beautiful, closed-up, suspicious face. She says nothing.

  “Could you tell me where the Potts live?”

  The dogs throw themselves at the car now, thumping their bodies on the doors, hysterically excited by my voice. The woman puts her hand to her ear. I’m not afraid of dogs, generally, but one is chewing on my tire.

  “Looking for Mary Potts!”

  “Dunno!”

  “How about . . . Sweetie?”

  The woman slowly raises one arm, keeping the baby safe with the other, and points back down the same road. Tears sting my eyes. So it’s no use, I think, shoving the car into reverse, pulling out of the driveway. Bitterness rises in me. I’ll probably take every left turn off this road and cross every bridge and river—how many can there be? Is it all one river, maybe, bigger and smaller in places, winding through like a snake? Is there some kind of settlement besides the casino? A water tower? Maybe a food store? Some place that people can visit for the education and health care I have read is guaranteed to us by nation-to-nation treaty? I get back on the highway and drive, sorrow welling up, lost self-pity, that awful feeling of loneliness. I’m also getting very hungry, a serious kind of pregnancy hunger, ravening hunger, and now I just want to stop the car and cry. I drink some water. Eat a little bag of peanuts from my glove compartment. Compose myself. Back on the road, it occurs to me that I could turn around and go back to the Superpumper and get junk food, then introduce myself to Eddy. I’m about to do just that when I come to a bridge and a big river. A real river. At last, one with moving water. And a left-hand turnoff right after with a promising road I know will end in a yellow house.

  And there it is. I turn into the gravel drive that leads to my birth family’s yellow house—fairly new, three or four bedrooms. There is the wheelchair ramp and birdhouses out front, the broken-down black van with purple detailing, the well-kept BVM bathtub shrine, and the bent wooden—willow, I think—frame that must be the sweat lodge. And there, about the appropriate age, Mary Potts Almost Senior. She wields a garden hose, an unattached garden hose, and she is beating the crap out of a dusty couch cushion. She grins a sly, lopsided smile as I drive up, and gives the cushion a few finishing whacks.

  Here is the woman who gave me life.

  “Holeee.” She puts her arms out and comes over to the car. She is sweating lightly in a tight black muscle shirt that shows pink bra straps, and a pair of flared black capris. Her shapely, bearlike body is all muscular fat, and she has a pretty face with neat features. She’s young. She has gleaming white teeth and shifty little merry black eyes. Her dark brown hair with red highlights is fastened on top of her head in one of those plastic claw clips, a blue o
ne, and she wears pearl earrings. They look like real pearls. I exit the car into the stifling hot air.

  We stand facing each other, completely awkward. This is not a hugging moment for me, and I don’t know what to do about the tears filling the eyes of my birth mom.

  “Pretty,” I say, touching my ears. “Pretty earrings.”

  “Yeah, Eddy got’m for me.”

  She sniffs and looks away, blinking.

  “I think I saw him in the Superpumper, reading.”

  “That was him. Always got his head in a book.”

  “What’s he like to read?”

  “Him? Everything. Everything but the sex manuals.” She sighs. “Ha! Just kidding. Aaaaay.”

  My birth mom stands beside the car with her hands on her hips. I notice that she is chewing on a shoelace. She notices that I notice and says that she does that when she’s trying to quit smoking. Then she starts smiling at me, a little, but with the shoelace in her mouth this is strange.

  “So, what do you think? How are people taking the news up here?”

  I don’t know what to do. She’s not inviting me in, not giving me any of the usual signs of welcome. I try to make conversation.

  “You know, the news? The big news?”

  She doesn’t react at all and I am desperate to make some sort of impression now.

  “You look like . . . ,” she says.

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Who? Really?”

  “Well, me.”

  “I do not,” I say instantly, without thinking, just a gut reaction. She looks down, at her feet. Then she turns with a little shake of her topknot and walks away, which makes me notice that she’s got a perfect heart-shaped butt. As it is packed tightly into those black capri jeans, she moves with an oiled rhythm that I can’t help but wish, for a moment, I’d inherited. I’m tall and big-boned, thin, and my butt is flat. When I do not follow her—I am actually just watching her ass, as lots of people probably do—she looks over her shoulder, jerks her head at the house. I walk behind her, up the wheelchair ramp, through the little porch, in the front door. The house is almost bearable, there is an air conditioner somewhere, I think. The living room is thickly carpeted and smells of wild stuff—bark, maybe, or bird seed, or boiling berries—and cigarette smoke.

  “You wanna smoke,” she says, “I got a coffee can of sand outside for butts. I don’t smoke in here, though.”

  Somebody does, I think.

  I put my backpack and my laptop by the door—I wasn’t going to leave them in the car. Mary Almost Senior rumble-walks into the kitchen. I follow her and decide to sit down at the table—speckled Formica. I watch while in silence my BM (having trouble with what to call my birth mother, can’t call her that) makes a strong pot of tea. She gives me a mug of the tea, sugared, and sits down across from me.

  “You turned out nice,” she says, then yells into the next room. “She turned out nice!”

  “Who’s in there?”

  “Your grandma. She’s old. She had me when she was fifty-three, no lie, remember that. Use condoms until you’re sixty, ha!”

  “Hundred and twenty-eight,” says a reedy little voice from around the corner. A tiny, brown, hunched-up little lady then wheels herself incrementally—she’s wheeling herself on carpet—around the corner.

  “Here,” says my birth mom, “Mary Potts the Very Senior.”

  The ancient woman gives a breathy, whispery cackle.

  “Pleazzzzzz,” she actually buzzes, or hisses, inching closer. I jump up and push her to the table.

  “She really might be over a hundred,” says my birth mother. “She’s not kidding you.” She tells me about some other relatives with endless lives.

  “Mary Bodacia,” says the grandma, nodding wisely. “Hundred and eleven.”

  “Bodacia. Very funny. Everybody’s driving me crazy,” says my birth mother, to nobody. “And her”—she gestures at me —“she calls me Mary Potts Almost Senior. She thinks that’s funny.”

  “Well, it’s almost funny,” I say. “I don’t know what to call you. You’re not Sweetie to me.”

  “Hehhehheh.” The grandma laughs, nodding at the cup of tea that Mary Almost Senior is pushing carefully across the table. I can’t bear this and decide to get it over with. I lean forward and address my birth mom.

  “Two things. First, why did you give me up? Second thing. I want to know about genetic illnesses.”

  Both of the woman are quiet, now, sipping hot tea in the warm room and looking at the top of the table. My birth mom studies the freckles in the Formica like she is divining the future from their pattern. At last, she gives one of her sighs—I’m getting to know her sighs—and then she starts to cough. She’s getting wound up to speak. After several false starts, with the kind of helpless lack of verbal skill that came upon her when she tried to give me directions, finally, she begins.

  “It wasn’t because I was that young,” she says, “though I was young.” Big sigh again. Restart. “It was because I was stupid. Not one day has gone by, since then, when I have not thought about how stupid I was.”

  She looks right at me, frowning, puzzled.

  “Stupid,” she says again, and nods. She curls and uncurls her fingers from the handle of the cup. “Took drugs. Not while I was pregnant. After. Fucked every jackass in sight. Just dumbass stupid,” she whispers. “Til I found Eddy. Not one day has gone by, though, when I have not thought about you.”

  Forget about the practical issues. I’ll get those later. Right now I’m struggling. Thinking. Not one day? How about not one hour? I want to cry. I wanted you. I needed you.

  “Well, you thought about me more than I thought about you,” I say, shrugging.

  Nobody talks after that. Her tears dry up and we sit there in silence.

  “You got a good family, yeah, rich as hell,” she says, shaking herself up straight. “They sent me pictures the first year. Then I wrote and said no more, I can’t take it.”

  “You couldn’t take it?” I feel my eyes narrow, and this thing builds up in me, this thing I know well and which I say rosaries to avoid, this anger. It fizzes up like shook pop. “You couldn’t take it?”

  There’s the sound of a motor roaring off outside and footsteps, fast clunking footsteps, the door behind me slams, and I turn around to witness the dramatic entry of the Queen of the Damned—Little Mary. She stalks into the room on five-inch-heeled black boots, in ripped fishnets, too many piercings to list and long hair with short bits spiked purple, though limp from the humidity, not sticking up except for a wisp of bangs. Her eyes are surrounded neatly with red and black paint. Magic Marker? Sharpie? Her pupils are black and luminous. She sways in the doorway, obviously high.

  “Soooo,” she says.

  “This is your sister,” says birth mom, “the one I told you about last night.”

  “Oh, nobody?” Little Mary smiles at us, dreamily vicious. Her teeth look sharpened—could they be? Her canines are a bit longer than her incisors and very white against the black lipstick, like elegant fangs. She’s pretty, like her mom, prettier than me, I think, instantly doing that thing girls do. Who’s prettier. I suppose sisters compare all of the time and right at this minute I am glad I didn’t have a sister, ever before, in my life. I’m glad I didn’t have this mom and this family, except maybe the grandma. I think of Glen and Sera and all that we share, and tears now do come into my eyes. I turn to my birth mom and I reach over. I hold her fingers and then warmly grasp her whole hand in mine.

  “It’s all right, Sweetie. Really, it’s all right,” I say, with the sincerest note that I can muster in my voice. “Just looking at Little Mary I can tell what a good mom you would have been.”

  * * *

  My sister Mary is sixteen and it turns out, after Mary leaves, and we really start to talk, it turns out that Sweetie believes that, although she isn’t doing very well in school, Little Mary has no drug habit, she does not abuse alcohol nor does she smoke. Sweet
ie actually shakes her head, marveling.

  “I know you meant your comment as sarcastic, you know, ironic, what have you. Good mom. I know I’m not the best mom. I know that. But Little Mary’s really doing good. She’s the only girl who doesn’t fuck and do drugs in her whole class. She says that she’s about to crack.”

  “Crack? And who can blame her.” I swallow the urge to fall down on the floor and laugh and thank every saint in the book, once again, for the life I’ve had. “It’s hard to be the only sober one at the party. It’s hard to be the sole intelligence.”

  We sip tea quietly for a while, contemplating the difficulties of Little Mary’s social life. Of course, as soon as I think about a sole intelligence I imagine whoever the last of our species will be . . . that last person contending with all of the known and the unknown; for all I know that last person might be you. Or me. I find that I might be unusually long lived, like Grandma. Or maybe, darker thought, the last of the species will be Little Mary.

  “Can she talk to Eddy?” I ask. “Is he an understanding type of guy?”

  Sweetie shakes her head, a bunch of shakes, real quick, a gesture I’m beginning to like as it jiggles her messy upsweep in a pleasant way. “Them two had a helluva fight the other day and traumatized us all. Eddy caught Little Mary hauling all the Sudafed from the Pumper storage to the car—she let him catch her, of course. A cry for help. Hey, though, she don’t do the stuff, but she was selling it behind our backs to some meth kid.”

  “Sure,” I say, “yeah, so Eddy. What about him?”

  “Eddy,” says Sweetie, and her face goes soft while Grandma’s goes sharp. “My Eddy.” She gives that happy shudder. “Meow!” She makes a little claw of her fingers and she and Grandma laugh.

  “So what’s his life story?” I ask, trying to push things along. I don’t really want to picture what that little meow means.