Blasphemy

by Sherman Alexie

  “Where did it happen?” I asked.

  “The first time was in a hotel,” she said. “The Westin downtown. A suite. Early. Eight in the morning. I got the kids off to school, opened up the shop. Jody ran the register and Rick made the coffee and Christy waited tables. I told them I had a dentist appointment.”

  “You told me you had a dentist appointment,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I lied to you directly. I never wanted to do that. I knew I was lying to you indirectly, but I hated to look you in the eyes and lie to you. I hated it.”

  “The Westin is a decent hotel,” I said. Jesus, I sounded like a travel agent.

  “The second time was in his car. We parked down on Lake Washington. You were down in Tacoma, covering the football championships.”

  “I called home that night,” I said. “Sara was watching the kids. She said you had an emergency at the shop. The espresso maker was overheating.”

  “She didn’t know I was lying. She thought I was at the shop.”

  Once or twice a month, I ran the path alongside Lake Washington. I knew I would never run it again. How can I survive this? I thought. How many more of my routines will I have to change? Again I tried to take my wife’s hand. This time she let me. We interlaced our fingers. A small moment of intimacy, but enough to keep me from running out of the room and house and fleeing down the street.

  “The third time was in his apartment,” she said. “In his bed. Lunchtime. I fell asleep with him. I hated that. That’s why I ended it. Falling asleep with him felt like the worst thing I could do. I never felt evil until I fell asleep with him.”

  She leaned over and kissed my forehead. I felt her heat. I didn’t want to feel her heat. I didn’t want to smell her scent. I didn’t want to taste her. And it felt like time squared and cubed and then exploded exponentially. Days and months and years passed before I would find enough stupid courage to ask my third question.

  “What did you do with him?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean, into which parts of you did he put it?”

  She flinched so painfully that I might as well have punched her in her chest. I was briefly happy about that.

  “Do you really want to know that?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She stood and walked away from me. I assume she was afraid I might really punch her.

  “We,” she said. “He—I mean, we—did everything.”

  “Say it exactly.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You have to. It’s part of the deal.”

  “I can’t. It hurts too much.”

  “You don’t get to feel as much pain as me. Now say it. Tell me exactly.”

  She closed her eyes and moaned like some tortured animal, like she was the first animal feeling the first pain. I heard that sound again when she buried her mother and, thirteen months later, her father.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Exactly.”

  She couldn’t speak. Instead, she pointed at her mouth, her vagina, and her ass. She looked like a pornographic mime. I started laughing. I lay down on the couch and laughed. I couldn’t stop laughing. She stared at me like I was crazy. Then she started laughing with me. Softly at first, but soon she had to sit down laughing on the floor so she wouldn’t fall down laughing on the floor. She crawled across the floor and climbed onto the couch with me. We held each other and laughed. Then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. We held each other in the silence.

  “If you still love me,” she said, “please, please, build me a time machine.”

  She sounded like a little girl talking to her father. I didn’t know what to say. But we lay there together for hours until the kids came home from school and surprised us.

  “Mommy and Daddy were doing it!” the four of them chanted and danced around the living room. “Mommy and Daddy were doing it!”

  Sharon and I danced with our children. We danced the family dance, three quick spins, two hops, and a scream at the ceiling, and then Sharon and I made dinner, and we ate with our kids and gossiped about their school days and played Chutes and Ladders and watched The Lion King and made them brush their teeth and wash their faces and forced them into their pajamas and pushed them down the hallways into their beds and read them Curious George and Go, Dog, Go! and turned off the lights and told them good night and gave them our love, and we sat in the kitchen across from each other and drank coffee and added up our wins and our losses and decided to stay married.

  It was Emily Dickinson who wrote, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” So Sharon and I formally rebuilt our marriage. And it was blue-collar work, exhausting and painful. We didn’t argue more often than before, but we did live with longer and greater silences. There were times when both of us wanted to quit, but we always found the strength to get up in the morning and go back to the job. And then, one winter night two years after her confession, after eating a lovely dinner at a waterfront restaurant and slow-dancing in the parking lot while a small group of tourists cheered for us, she read a book in bed while I stood at our bedroom window and stared out into the dark. We were comfortable in the silence. A day or week or month or year before, I would have felt the need to end such a wonderful evening by making love to her, by proving I could share our bed and her body with ghosts. But I felt no such need that night, and I realized we’d completed the rebuilding project, we’d constructed a brand-new marriage, a new home, that sat next to the old marriage and its dusty and shuttered house. Standing at the window, I could almost see our old house out there in the dark, and I missed it. I often thought of it as we continued with our lives.

  Suddenly, Sharon and I were forty. For my birthday that year, she and the kids all pitched in together and gave me a T-shirt that read LOST CAT on the front and DO YOU KNOW WHERE I AM? on the back.

  I laughed and wore that shirt as pajamas. For two years, Sharon fell asleep next to me wearing that shirt.

  “Oh, Lord,” I said to Sharon on the day I finally tossed the ragged T-shirt into the trash. “With every new day comes a new monument to our love and pain.”

  “Who wrote that?” she asked.

  “I did.”

  “It’s free verse,” she said. “I hate free verse.”

  We laughed and kissed and made love and read books in bed. We read through years of books, decades of books. There were never enough books for us. Read, partially read, and unread, our books filled the house, stacked on shelves and counters, piled into corners and closets. Our marriage became an eccentric and disorganized library. Whitman in the pantry! The Brontë sisters in the television room! Hardy on the front porch! Dickinson in the laundry room! We kept a battered copy of Native Son in the downstairs bathroom so our guests would have something valuable to read!

  How do you measure a marriage? Three of our children still lived in Seattle and taught high school English, history, and Spanish respectively, while the fourth managed a homeless shelter in Portland, Oregon. Maybe Sharon and I had never loved each other well enough, but our kids were smart and talented and sober. They made less money than we did, as we made less than our parents did. We were going the wrong way on the social-class map! How glorious!

  Every Sunday night, we all gathered for dinner (Joshua drove up from Portland with his partner, Aaron, and their son) and told one another the best stories of our weeks. We needed those small ceremonies. Our contentment was always running only slightly ahead of our dissatisfaction.

  Was it enough? I don’t know. But we knew enough not to ask ourselves too often. We knew to ask ourselves such questions during daylight hours. We fought hard for our happiness, and sometimes we won. Over the years, we won often enough to develop a strong taste for winning.

  And then suddenly and mortally, Sharon and I were sixty-six years old.

  On her birthday that year, surrounded by her husband, daughters, sons, and six grandkids, Sharon blew out the candles on her cake, closed her eyes, and made some secret wi
sh.

  One year later, after chemotherapy, radiation, organic food, acupuncture, and tribal shaman, Sharon lay on her deathbed in Sacred Hope Hospital. Our children had left their children to gather around Sharon, and it was good-bye Sarah! Good-bye Rachael! Good-bye Francis! Good-bye Joshua! She asked our children to give us some privacy. They cried and hugged her and left us alone.

  “I’m going to die soon,” Sharon said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I’m okay with it.”

  “I’m not. Because I love you so much,” I said, “I would fistfight Time to win back your youth.”

  “You’re a liar,” she said and smiled, too tired to laugh.

  “I lied to you once,” I said. “But I haven’t lied to you since.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  INDIAN EDUCATION

  First Grade

  My hair was too short and my U.S. Government glasses were horn-rimmed, ugly, and all that first winter in school, the other Indian boys chased me from one corner of the playground to the other. They pushed me down, buried me in the snow until I couldn’t breathe, thought I’d never breathe again.

  They stole my glasses and threw them over my head, around my outstretched hands, just beyond my reach, until someone tripped me and sent me falling again, facedown in the snow.

  I was always falling down; my Indian name was Junior Falls Down. Sometimes it was Bloody Nose or Steal-His-Lunch. Once, it was Cries-Like-a-White-Boy, even though none of us had seen a white boy cry.

  Then it was a Friday morning recess and Frenchy SiJohn threw snowballs at me while the rest of the Indian boys tortured some other top-yogh-yaught kid, another weakling. But Frenchy was confident enough to torment me all by himself, and most days I would have let him.

  But the little warrior in me roared to life that day and knocked Frenchy to the ground, held his head against the snow, and punched him so hard that my knuckles and the snow made symmetrical bruises on his face. He almost looked like he was wearing war paint.

  But he wasn’t the warrior. I was. And I chanted It’s a good day to die, it’s a good day to die, all the way down to the principal’s office.

  Second Grade

  Betty Towle, missionary teacher, redheaded and so ugly that no one ever had a puppy crush on her, made me stay in for recess fourteen days straight.

  “Tell me you’re sorry,” she said.

  “Sorry for what?” I asked.

  “Everything,” she said and made me stand straight for fifteen minutes, eagle-armed with books in each hand. One was a math book; the other was English. But all I learned was that gravity can be painful.

  For Halloween I drew a picture of her riding a broom with a scrawny cat on the back. She said that her God would never forgive me for that.

  Once, she gave the class a spelling test but set me aside and gave me a test designed for junior high students. When I spelled all the words right, she crumpled up the paper and made me eat it.

  “You’ll learn respect,” she said.

  She sent a letter home with me that told my parents to either cut my braids or keep me home from class. My parents came in the next day and dragged their braids across Betty Towle’s desk.

  “Indians, indians, indians.” She said it without capitalization. She called me “indian, indian, indian.”

  And I said, Yes, I am. I am Indian. Indian, I am.

  Third Grade

  My traditional Native American art career began and ended with my very first portrait: Stick Indian Taking a Piss in My Backyard.

  As I circulated the original print around the classroom, Mrs. Schluter intercepted and confiscated my art.

  Censorship, I might cry now. Freedom of expression, I would write in editorials to the tribal newspaper.

  In third grade, though, I stood alone in the corner, faced the wall, and waited for the punishment to end.

  I’m still waiting.

  Fourth Grade

  “You should be a doctor when you grow up,” Mr. Schluter told me, even though his wife, the third grade teacher, thought I was crazy beyond my years. My eyes always looked like I had just hit-and-run someone.

  “Guilty,” she said. “You always look guilty.”

  “Why should I be a doctor?” I asked Mr. Schluter.

  “So you can come back and help the tribe. So you can heal people.”

  That was the year my father drank a gallon of vodka a day and the same year that my mother started two hundred different quilts but never finished any. They sat in separate, dark places in our HUD house and wept savagely.

  I ran home after school, heard their Indian tears, and looked in the mirror. Doctor Victor, I called myself, invented an education, talked to my reflection. Doctor Victor to the emergency room.

  Fifth Grade

  I picked up a basketball for the first time and made my first shot. No. I missed my first shot, missed the basket completely, and the ball landed in the dirt and sawdust, sat there just like I had sat there only minutes before.

  But it felt good, that ball in my hands, all those possibilities and angles. It was mathematics, geometry. It was beautiful.

  At that same moment, my cousin Steven Ford sniffed rubber cement from a paper bag and leaned back on the merry-go-round. His ears rang, his mouth was dry, and everyone seemed so far away.

  But it felt good, that buzz in his head, all those colors and noises. It was chemistry, biology. It was beautiful.

  Oh, do you remember those sweet, almost innocent choices that the Indian boys were forced to make?

  Sixth Grade

  Randy, the new Indian kid from the white town of Springdale, got into a fight an hour after he first walked into the reservation school.

  Stevie Flett called him out, called him a squawman, called him a pussy, and called him a punk.

  Randy and Stevie, and the rest of the Indian boys, walked out into the playground.

  “Throw the first punch,” Stevie said as they squared off.

  “No,” Randy said.

  “Throw the first punch,” Stevie said again.

  “No,” Randy said again.

  “Throw the first punch!” Stevie said for the third time, and Randy reared back and pitched a knuckle fastball that broke Stevie’s nose.

  We all stood there in silence, in awe.

  That was Randy, my soon-to-be first and best friend, who taught me the most valuable lesson about living in the white world: Always throw the first punch.

  Seventh Grade

  I leaned through the basement window of the HUD house and kissed the white girl who would later be raped by her foster-parent father, who was also white. They both lived on the reservation, though, and when the headlines and stories filled the papers later, not one word was made of their color.

  Just Indians being Indians, someone must have said somewhere and they were wrong.

  But on the day I leaned through the basement window of the HUD house and kissed the white girl, I felt the good-byes I was saying to my entire tribe. I held my lips tight against her lips, a dry, clumsy, and ultimately stupid kiss.

  But I was saying good-bye to my tribe, to all the Indian girls and women I might have loved, to all the Indian men who might have called me cousin, even brother.

  I kissed that white girl and when I opened my eyes, she was gone from the reservation, and when I opened my eyes, I was gone from the reservation, living in a farm town where a beautiful white girl asked my name.

  “Junior Polatkin,” I said, and she laughed.

  After that, no one spoke to me for another five hundred years.

  Eighth Grade

  At the farm town junior high, in the boys’ bathroom, I could hear voices from the girls’ bathroom, nervous whispers of anorexia and bulimia. I could hear the white girls’ forced vomiting, a sound so familiar and natural to me after years of listening to my father’s hangovers.

  “Give me your lunch if you’re just going to throw it up,” I said to
one of those girls once.

  I sat back and watched them grow skinny from self-pity.

  Back on the reservation, my mother stood in line to get us commodities. We carried them home, happy to have food, and opened the canned beef that even the dogs wouldn’t eat.

  But we ate it day after day and grew skinny from self-pity.

  There is more than one way to starve.

  Ninth Grade

  At the farm town high school dance, after a basketball game in an overheated gym where I had scored twenty-seven points and pulled down thirteen rebounds, I passed out during a slow song.

  As my white friends revived me and prepared to take me to the emergency room where doctors would later diagnose my diabetes, the Chicano teacher ran up to us.

  “Hey,” he said. “What’s that boy been drinking? I know all about these Indian kids. They start drinking real young.”

  Sharing dark skin doesn’t necessarily make two men brothers.

  Tenth Grade

  I passed the written test easily and nearly flunked the driving, but still received my Washington State driver’s license on the same day that Wally Jim killed himself by driving his car into a pine tree.

  No traces of alcohol in his blood, good job, wife and two kids.

  “Why’d he do it?” asked a white Washington State trooper.

  All the Indians shrugged their shoulders, looked down at the ground.

  “Don’t know,” we all said, but when we look in the mirror, see the history of our tribe in our eyes, taste failure in the tap water, and shake with old tears, we understand completely.

  Believe me, everything looks like a noose if you stare at it long enough.

  Eleventh Grade

  Last night I missed two free throws which would have won the game against the best team in the state. The farm town high school I play for is nicknamed the “Indians,” and I’m probably the only actual Indian ever to play for a team with such a mascot.

  This morning I pick up the sports page and read the headline: INDIANS LOSE AGAIN.

  Go ahead and tell me none of this is supposed to hurt me very much.

  Twelfth Grade

  I walk down the aisle, valedictorian of this farm town high school, and my cap doesn’t fit because I’ve grown my hair longer than it’s ever been. Later, I stand as the school board chairman recites my awards, accomplishments, and scholarships.