Blasphemy

by Sherman Alexie

  It was July and the sand invaded my apartment and car and mouth. All day long, I swigged and gargled water to clean the grit from between my teeth.

  My coworkers didn’t get sand in their teeth so they thought I was imagining it. They teased me and wondered if the heat was driving me crazy. I wondered if they were correct.

  I was born and grew up on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula between a rain forest and a saltwater strait. My parents loved the place so much that they named me BlueGrouse, a bird only found in our rain forest. Lucky me. So, of course, as soon as I turned eighteen, I legally changed my first name to Melissa, the second most common one in the United States that year. In partial honor of my parents, I did keep Blue, but lopped off Grouse, as my middle name.

  In any event, a woman originally named for a slug-eating bird doesn’t belong in the desert.

  One morning late in July, the temperature was already over 100 degrees at dawn. And, minute by minute, it was only getting hotter. I could have hidden in the air-conditioned apartment, but I’d felt the need to challenge myself. I wanted to see how long I could endure that heat.

  I was dizzy after a few minutes. And I was so thirsty that everything—the buildings, cars, and mountains—glistened like bottles of water.

  And then I saw it.

  To the east of the city. And approaching fast.

  A massive wave of sand.

  It stretched hundreds of feet into the air. And it was at least thirty miles wide.

  All around me, my neighbors—none of whom I knew but who must have been watching the morning news—had stepped out onto their decks to stare.

  “What is that?” one neighbor shouted to nobody in particular.

  “A haboob,” somebody else shouted.

  “What’s a haboob?”

  “It’s Arabic.”

  “Okay, it’s Arabic, but what does it mean?”

  “The rough translation is ‘big fucking sandstorm.’”

  As it rolled closer, the haboob swallowed the city. I wondered if it was strong enough to destroy buildings. Could the sand be propelled with such force that it stripped metal from cars and skin from humans?

  I imagined that a million people—sudden skeletons—were buried and would remain so until an archaeologist discovered them centuries from now.

  My neighbors fled back into their apartments, but I remained on my deck and waited for the storm. I welcomed it. But as the wind blew down power lines and exploded a few transformers, I was forced to retreat and watch the storm through the sliding glass door until a fine layer of dust obscured my view.

  Later, after the skies had cleared and the electricity had been restored, and the mayor had announced that the city had sustained only minor damage, I remained in my dark apartment and stared at the sliding door. The dust had rearranged itself into ambiguous shapes and lines. It seemed to have formed letters of a strange alphabet. I wondered if God was punishing me by sending a message that I couldn’t read.

  I’ve been a member of eleven book clubs in the last twenty years. I’ve read approximately one hundred novels during that time and I’ve enjoyed maybe half of them.

  While reading books, I write notes in the page margins and I circle and memorize certain lines and passages. The people in each book might be different, but the plotline is basically the same: Somebody is unhappy and they do dangerous and foolish things trying to become happy.

  I’ve been married and divorced twice. No kids. I’m quite positive that I’ll marry and divorce the next man who whispers my name.

  Like I said, dangerous and foolish.

  In my thirties, I made documentaries.

  Or rather, I was the script supervisor for many documentary filmmakers. I kept things organized. I kept track of camera angles, dialogue errors, and continuity. If an actor picked up an apple in the first take, then I made sure she picked up an apple in each subsequent take.

  In the old days, they called them script girls. These days, the script supervisors are still mostly women. But nobody comments on that. Not aloud.

  I didn’t get paid much, but I enjoyed the privilege of traveling the country.

  One autumn, I worked with a director making a short film about cranberry bogs in Wisconsin. He was a soft-spoken white man and he spent most of his time and budget interviewing the Indians who worked the bogs.

  “What is the magic in cranberries?” he asked the Indians again and again. And they’d laugh at him. Or they’d say, “There’s nothing magical. It’s just a good job, if you don’t mind getting wet.” One old Indian woman said, “Aren’t cranberries supposed to muscle up your bladder so you pee good?” The director, desperately hoping for a new answer, would rephrase his question in a dozen different ways.

  In bed, after good sex, he’d stare at the ceiling and chastise the Indians and himself.

  “They don’t trust me,” he said. “I’m just another white guy with a camera. If I were an Indian, I wouldn’t trust me. Do you trust me?”

  “Of course not,” I said. He was married and had three kids. I’ve never understood why mistresses fall in love with their married lovers. And I really don’t understand those mistresses who steal away husbands from their wives and children. Why would you want to destroy marriages and families and friendships? I’ve always thought the hottest thing about affairs was the secrecy.

  “But I know these Indians think cranberries are magical,” the director said. “They just don’t want to share the magic. But I respect the magic. I want the world to respect the magic.”

  He was a calm and kind man. He never lost his temper, but he so desperately wanted the Indians to answer his questions with spiritual force. He wanted the Indians to think of themselves as more than just blue-collar workers.

  But they were blue-collar workers, and they were strong and scarred, and many of them made passes at me. I was tempted by a few of them, especially this muscular man with long black braids. His skinny butt looked great in his Wrangler jeans. But I politely declined all offers because I knew I couldn’t hop into bed with an Indian man without thinking of that Indian boy from my past. Even though I’m what the prigs would call promiscuous, I believe in making love to one man at a time. I didn’t want to have a threesome with a real person and a ghost.

  On the last day of shooting, the director gathered up all of the Indian bog workers—a few dozen men and women—and organized them for a group shot. Just as he was about to film them waist-deep in a bog, they started laughing. No, they were giggling. And that made me giggle, too. I don’t think there’s anything funnier than a crowd of big Indians giggling so hard that they cry.

  The director didn’t understand what was happening. I’m not quite sure that I understood.

  “What’s so funny?” the director asked.

  One of the Indians, a woman, stopped giggling long enough to speak.

  “We’re laughing,” she said, “because white people always want to take photos of Indians. But you’re taking a picture of us at work. It might be the first photo ever taken of Indians working.”

  And then she and the others laughed. They laughed so hard that the director realized he was finally capturing a spontaneous moment. He filmed the Indians laughing and slapping one another on the backs and shoulders. He filmed the Indians as they grew weak-kneed and weak-backed from laughter. He filmed them as, one by one, they had to flee the bog to avoid drowning due to hilarity. He kept filming until the only Indian left was that sexy guy with the long braids. He hadn’t laughed as hard as the others, but he was smiling with all of his teeth.

  I lived with my second husband in Malibu.

  One August, we stood on the roof of our house and fought a wildfire with garden hoses.

  Can you believe the madness?

  All my life, I’d promised myself that I would never become the kind of person who’d risk her life for material possessions.

  Houses can be rebuilt. Your entire fucking life can be rebuilt if you don’t die first.

 
I’m not even sure that I loved that house. Or that husband.

  We’d gotten married with the agreement that it would be open. We had explicit and implicit permission to pursue sexual partners outside of our marriage.

  The only rule: Don’t fall in love.

  But how could such a rule ever be enforced? How could anybody make such an unrealistic promise?

  In any case, our open marriage was only slightly ajar.

  Despite all his best efforts, my husband had only gone to bed with an older woman from work. She was a talkative lady who was bad with money and couldn’t retire, so she’d have to keep answering phones until the moment she died.

  And while I could have had sex with many men—every woman can have all the men she wants if she lowers her standards a bit—I’d only made out with three guys while dancing in crowded bars. It wasn’t fun. And it was with great relief that we closed the marriage. Hell, we slammed it shut.

  So, newly faithful, my second husband and I defeated a wildfire.

  We won.

  We saved our house.

  Our barn.

  Our three horses.

  Three months later, my husband left me for that near-elderly receptionist. She was sixty and he was forty-two. I was happy for him. And I was especially happy for her. Old men always have young girlfriends, but how often does an old woman land a young guy? And my husband was rich, too. That elderly receptionist was living in a goddamn fairy tale. How could I not be happy with that romance?

  We conjured up a no-fault divorce. And my dear husband honored the prenuptial agreement.

  He kept the horses; I kept the house.

  My first husband died in a motorcycle wreck. We lived in a state that didn’t require helmets so he split open his skull on the windshield of a Toyota Corolla.

  I loved him so much that, twenty years later, I still keep a photo of him in my wallet. I don’t talk about him with anybody.

  Though I’ll dance with almost any man in a crowd, I prefer to grieve alone.

  I’ve slept with thirty-two men in my life. I suppose that’s a high number. My male friends give me high fives for my carnal productivity, but my female friends think it’s too many.

  “You’re just trying to fill up all the emptiness inside you,” said my best friend. “You’re just trying to not be lonely.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “But I fail to see why feeling that way should prevent me from trying not to feel that way.”

  I remember all of my lovers’ names. I write them down in a book with the Titanic painted on the cover. But, on the front page, I’ve only sketched a nameless portrait of that Indian boy fancydancer, who made love to me in a wheat field that had been left fallow that season.

  On my computer, the bathroom mirror, the front door, and the refrigerator are sticky notes that share the same message: “I’ll respect your various hungers if you respect mine.”

  Two hundred and sixty-six days after I had sex with that Indian boy, I gave birth to our daughter.

  “Who’s the father?” my parents asked me.

  “I’m not going to tell you,” I said.

  I never held my baby. I didn’t want to touch her. I thought it would hurt too much. So they took her away before I could change my mind about the adoption.

  It was my choice to give her away. I felt that I deserved the punishment. I needed to serve a lifetime sentence in a jail of my own making.

  My daughter was black of hair and brown of skin. It was strange to see such a dark shadow slide out of my white body.

  Strangers adopted and raised my daughter. I don’t know her history. Sometimes, I think about searching for her. In this Internet age, with its invasions of privacy and wholesale distribution of all the information in the world, I would guess it’s easy to find people, especially those who have no reason to hide.

  My daughter would be thirty-one now. I’m sure she is dark, pretty, and slender. I wonder if she, like her father, covers her mouth when she laughs.

  I wonder if I would recognize her if I saw her on the street.

  “Hey,” I’d say. “It’s you. It’s you. I always knew I’d find you. I always knew I’d recognize you.”

  But I never see her. Or rather, I always see her. Every other woman in Los Angeles is dark, slender, and pretty. And it seems like half of them cover their mouths when they laugh.

  I sometimes stop those women and ask them if they recognize me. I love it when they take me seriously and study my face. But they always smile with regret and rue, and say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know you.”

  BREAKFAST

  The son cracked an egg, expecting yolk and egg, but instead dropped his father’s impossibly small corpse into the mixing bowl. The son was only mildly surprised. His father had died eleven years earlier, so grief had become a predictable clown.

  But what should the son have done with his father’s body? He couldn’t recycle it or toss it into the trash or compost bin. And he didn’t want to wear it around his neck like jewelry or hang it from the rearview mirror like a dream catcher.

  The son wondered what advice his father would have given him.

  He would have said, “Don’t embarrass me.”

  He would have said, “What kind of warrior are you?”

  He would have said, “Put on the war paint, you faggot, and ride your pony into battle.”

  So, like his father would have done, the son added onions, green peppers, diced ham, and egg yolks and whites into the bowl, folded his father into the mix, poured it into the oiled frying pain, and cooked it golden.

  One would have expected the omelet to taste bitter, but the son only thought that it needed salt—more salt—tons of salt—all the salt in the world.

  NIGHT PEOPLE

  Across the street from my apartment there is a twenty-four-hour manicure joint. This is only possible in New York City. Amazingly enough, there are a few other twenty-four-hour salons in town, but those are modernist little palaces. The joint across the street looks more like a 7-Eleven—brightly lit, inadequately mopped, and likely to be robbed soon. When it first opened, I was convinced that it was a front for a drug and/or prostitution ring. But, night after night, I sat on my minuscule terrace (I fit into it like it was a bathtub) and watched through the large picture windows as women—and men dressed as women and/or on their way to becoming women—arrived in the middle of the night to get their fingers and toenails done. Who knew there were so many insomniac transsexuals and transvestites?

  The manicurists were all Asian women, most of them older than fifty and battered by their graveyard-shifted lives. But there was one twenty-something woman who fascinated me. She was plain-featured and plain of dress, but she gave the appearance of beautiful without being beautiful. I wasn’t the only male fascinated with her confident mirage. My building’s night doorman, a polite and quiet man otherwise, shouted street poetry at her and tried to find every rhyme and half rhyme for “Japanese,” though I’m pretty sure she was Korean. She’d always smile and wave, but would not acknowledge his advances in any other way. I don’t know if she ever looked up from my doorman to see me watching her from my third-floor terrace. Could I be seen in the dark?

  And so I watched her ply her trade. While her coworkers labored with a silent hostility that I could feel from across the street, she was animated. She seemed to enjoy her customers. She laughed often and made them laugh as well. What kind of person can be that charming at 3:33 A.M.?

  After months of this surveillance, I decided that I needed to see the woman up close. I needed to speak to her. I needed to get a manicure, though I knew I could never get a pedicure. A manicure seemed like a public act but a pedicure felt like something private, even sexual. I felt like I’d be cheating on my girlfriend if I got my toes done. But I had a bigger problem than podiatric infidelity. I’m a nail biter. A nail chewer and eater. I was too embarrassed to walk into a manicure place with disfigured nails. So I gave myself an amateurish manicure, worried that my clipping
and sanding would wake my girlfriend, and then left my apartment and walked across the street for a professional one.

  “Hello, sir,” the receptionist said. “How can we help you?”

  “I want her,” I said, and pointed at the subject of my affections.

  She saw me pointing at her, smiled, and waved me over. Her name tag told me that her name was Saundra. Underrated how name tags give a man permission to briefly study a woman’s breasts.

  “Hello, Saundra,” I said. “Can you fix these?”

  She took my hand and carefully studied my nails.

  “You just cut your nails?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Her voice was teen pop culture American with a hint of Queens.

  “You sanded them, too?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Like, two minutes ago, right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’re a nail biter,” she said.

  “Yeah, how’d you know?” I asked.

  “We get them all the time,” she said. “I’m a biter, too. That’s how I fell into this job. To stop biting. I started getting really expensive manicures. I figured I wouldn’t chew on my nails if I’d paid a hundred bucks to make them look good.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No,” she said. “So I started coming to cheap places like this one.”

  “And how’s that going?”

  “Still chewing my nails. But I’ve got a job.”

  Saundra placed my fingers in a warm, soapy liquid. And as I soaked, she prepared her tools.

  “We use a cold bath on these,” she said. “Kills everything.”

  I imagined a tiny freezer filled with nail clippers and files.

  “The subzero is better than heat,” she said. “I think dentists use them, too. Dentists and manicurists. Dirty, dirty jobs.”

  “You’re funny,” I said, instead of just laughing, which was, I admit, pretty damn weird. But she didn’t seem to notice. She took my hands from the soaking bowl and began her work. It felt amazing. It had been months since I’d been touched with any real kindness. And even that slight, professional intimacy was exhilarating.