I called my mother to show her I could leave.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Not be there,” I said.
“Where are you?” she asked.
When a man’s hands become a ghost, there is no way to strip them from a body. Haunting, what a mother does not see. Native women walk alone from the dances of our youth into homes they don’t know for the chance to be away. Their silhouettes walk across highways and into cars at night. They are troubled by nothing but the chance that they might have to come back someday to bury their mothers.
My mother died on Thanksgiving. My brother was watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the next room. Larry was already dead from liver failure. I flew in from a place far removed. I worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I prayed over her body and touched her delicate skin. A bloat protruded from her neck, and I felt that too. I felt the deficit.
I took her house and its contents and let her ghost in. The people said to put away the pictures, but I didn’t. They said to cover the mirrors, but I didn’t. The ritual of death was not interesting. And then I left her home again.
I found humor in leaving.
I punctured a friend’s chest with a fork. He heard me when I said no.
Another dug his knuckles into me. I didn’t cover the marks. He gave me his credit card, and I bought diamonds and hammered silver.
Another, I left in the waiting room of his lawyer’s office. He wanted to prove he didn’t sleep with a student of his. The lie detectors—and his guilt—were enough for me. He gave me my first STD. He gave me three thousand dollars, and I bought summer classes. When I graduated, he asked for a picture, but I didn’t reply.
Another, I left in Miami. He didn’t think I was like that, but I was clearly like that. I only smiled at room service.
“What do you want?” I asked men, like an indictment.
Another has white guilt and thinks it’s progress to bind me.
“Can you say all you want from me in one breath?” I asked.
Barbara asks what I get in leaving. I tell her that my husband left me in the hospital once before we were married.
“I guess I took him back to leave him?”
He visited me in the hospital for finality. Suicidal ideation troubled him too much. I asked if he felt culpable. There was a crafted tree on the walls for the sick women, made of paper and crayon and glue. The tree had leaves, thirty different colors, with words on them like “Intelligent,” “Smart,” “Brave,” “Bold,” “Strong” . . . Casey pointed to “Sexy.” I put the leaf in my pocket and used it as a bookmark for a year.
Barbara tells me to go back. He doesn’t hit me, she says. He’s intelligent. We have a baby. The wet sweetgrass she braided is dry and straight. She puts it below the windshield in my car and when I drive back I’m not sure I will stay.
Her house is a lot of old pictures and plants and draped scarves. A blue budgie sings in her office, and there are a few old drums around. It is everything of my mother and home.
I hold my sons at night, and they are so still, like rocks. I run my fingers over their foreheads and wonder how they don’t collect dust. Boys asleep, and I am a rare carcass in the river, bloated with deficit. Every time I see wings flap I think of leaving. It used to feel like breaking vertigo, and now it is just breaking.
Now that I stay, we have the same fight.
“I’m trying not to be an asshole,” you say.
“Sometimes trying to be the absence of something makes you that very thing.”
I understand I am talking about myself and leaving. We can sit together for hours with the deficit, and it’s not unusual anymore—it’s ritual. Us both, trying to be the absence of something and forgiving each other for the children we have become. I think about my mother, knee deep in the beach with a rake, smiling at Larry. I think about myself, in the back of the truck, needing her. And after all of this there are still rocks in the old home I grew up in, the home that burned down. There are still lava sweat lodge rocks sitting underneath grass that overgrew a fire pit.
There is some stillness, even in my history—a good secret in so much bad. It almost feels like a betrayal to have good thoughts. Sometimes I know part of me is still a ghost, walking next to my mother, looking for something to make an offering to, holding her hand. Either this feeling means that part of me is dead, or that she’s alive, somewhere inside of me.
9
thunder being
honey bear
I avoid the mysticism of my culture. My people know there is a true mechanism that runs through us. Stars were people in our continuum. Mountains were stories before they were mountains. Things were created by story. The words were conjurers, and ideas were our mothers.
Thunder is contrary. Thunder can intuit, and her action is the music caused by lightning. She comes because we ask, and that’s why falling apart is holy.
People said I came from thunder. I thought the quick chaos was my master. My dreams were about a spinning wheel—symbols of an unstoppable force that would ruin me. I was a child when I told my mother there was a large wheel in my dreams. She asked me what I did when I saw it.
“I watched it,” I said.
She looked at me carefully that day. She took out her paints and drew a thunderbird on a white poster board. Before the paint dried, I put my finger on its blue chest.
When I got my period, she gave me a Waterford crystal heart. I wore it like my brother wore his medicine bundle—around the neck and under the shirt. It felt like a new organ.
In a coffee shop, I couldn’t catch my breath and doubled over with pain. I remembered a man in the shower. I went outside. Closing my eyes only disoriented me further from the world, and holding on to things made me feel too connected—receptive to every fiber or bench or tree. I called Casey.
I wondered if he thought this was a real emergency or another dramatic thing—I am constantly in some panic or despair, it seems. I worried more than I could breathe.
What do I do with my hands, I thought. What do I do with my eyes, which felt obscene in the light.
Thunder can awaken one’s soul, even the atheist without. We have clowns in my culture, who carry a subversive nature. When women wail, or when they won’t speak, a clown will throw its snot, or contort its body to point to how absurd our pain is—or how pointless it is to try to contain it. That contrary nature can awaken the dead.
I thought about my mother’s body, weak. My father’s body, jaundice. His pubic mound was black, and beneath the steam and soap, I can smell him—years away, I can smell him. I covered my nostrils. I remembered showering with my father, more than once, and I remembered my fear of breathing.
I had a new knowledge, or memory, and knew to be ashamed. The truth sometimes doesn’t appear exact but approximate. I knew my own fingers and my father’s were shameful. I remembered, in the coffee shop, something so brief and kinetic that I didn’t want to be in my body. My father, in the bathroom, had asked me to shower with him when I was five or six.
Things connect with the right conduit: one right memory had been absent.
As a child, I had drawn in my journal a male figure, naked. My mother was shocked, so I told her a friend had drawn it. I was forbidden from going to the girl’s house again, and my mother explained to me that men hurt children. They’re capable.
“What Michelle drew,” she said, “is not right.”
She called Michelle’s parents, and I remember thinking how right the drawing was. How I scaled each limb and part well enough that the girl next to the man appeared small, and her smile was not a real smile, but a sign. My mother, she believed my lie easily, without question. Not one.
Thunder Being made me feel like I had forgotten ten thousand irons plugged in. I couldn’t go home. I could only let things burn while I looked at my hands.
My husband held my shoulders.
“I don’t know what to do with my hands,” I said.
A graduate student approached us and ignored my eyes. I felt more present than I ever had, and invisible. It was Thunder Being’s game, or a gift of memory. This was more than simple traumatic stress, or me, open and gawking at my true misery. I was the third generation of the things we didn’t talk about.
Casey and I went to the car.
“Do you want a margarita?” he asked.
My husband. Six-four, large head, large blue eyes, hapless and already acclimated to the chaos of me. My calls and my anxiety and the idea that I might never be okay were acceptable by now—usual.
“It’s okay to not be okay,” a mentor had said to me once.
I held the armrests of the car, looking outside like a child, waiting for my body to feel organic again, like when I’m teaching: bouncing around the room with an agenda. At thirty-two I was a child, a victim of something. I saw his pubic mound in my mind. I was afraid of what that meant. Afraid that I might remember clearly what happened. I made a life out of naming things, and I couldn’t speak this.
“I need to see someone about this,” I said.
The therapist tapped my kneecaps, one and then the other. I closed my eyes.
“What’s your safe space?” she asked.
Her office was small. She was licensed, just enough to deal with my trauma, but not educated beyond my comprehension. She was not so smart that I would worry what she was writing in her notebook. Her hair was short. She scared me, with her aura, as someone who believed in God and would have me believe too if I wasn’t mindful.
“My safe space is outside my childhood home.” Outside in the yard, overlooking forty acres of corn. I liked the whistle of the stalks and loneliness. There were only coyotes in the field, and crows, and wild things—weaving through dry stalks.
My eyes moved back and forth as she tapped me, left and right. I felt like a pendulum, or something open, steady and drawing to a time. Ready to greet some horrible memory beneath the safety of my space.
“How is your stress?” she said.
Her name was Adrienne, like a poet I loved. A woman of exclusion, who loved women enough to give her work solely to them. Adrienne was part of a continuum working against erasure. I think my counselor was too, by letting me remember. I believe Indian women remember often, like me, but mostly it is while their hands are wrist deep in the dishes. There is always something on the floor to pick up with a rag—always a counter.
“Get a teddy bear,” she said. “You’ll want to let her pick it out.” She pointed to my heart, indicating the child within me. “Hold it like you would hold yourself. Comfort yourself.”
At Walgreens, the only one that struck me was a light brown bear who reminded me of honey. It had a bowtie. His head was bigger than my inner child’s head. He reminded me of a bear my mother brought home from the Nechi Institute, a place where she studied to become a counselor.
During that time, she was very experimental. She’d test our tongues for candida, observing how white they were. She made us eat wild rice but never learned to cook it properly. She made us beat pillows, stuffed animals, and rugs when we misbehaved, because she wanted us to release our tensions. My brother and I could only laugh at her parental antics, unable to combat her theory, only able to see its silliness. It was all a response to Grandma dying, and my father leaving, and my tuberculosis.
She brought me a bear like the new one I found at Walgreens, and she told me she loved me. I might be misremembering the words, but I know that she meant to say she loved me. She loved dearly, and often gave me things to nurture. I received so many dolls, bears, and small animals before I became a woman.
The first time I held Honey Bear I was alone in my bedroom. I told him it was okay. I was here, and he was safe. I was part of a continuum against erasure, I told myself. My body felt stronger when I embraced it. I felt connected to a lineage of women who had illustrated their bodies and felt liberated by them. Thunder might have been within me the day I had coffee, freeing the memory of my father, revealing some chaos to me too quickly to comprehend.
“He’s a good-looking bear,” Casey said, observing it.
“It feels good to hold it.”
When I was a little girl I had a dog named Buddy. His fur stood up in thunderstorms. His coat was all antennae. He used to fall asleep with his nose against my skin. I never let him sleep alone in storms. He was mauled by coyotes and survived.
After he recovered, he kept running away, and I felt like he was running away from me. There was a blue house down my street, where a German shepherd was chained up in the front. Buddy was cuddled up to that big dog. He was so small next to her. I pulled his body away from her by the collar, and he started to piss on me. I felt so betrayed. He was my only friend. It wasn’t long after that—he ran away for good. The dog was something good and small and the first thing in my life I could hold. I remember that I confided in him that I had been hurt. I think he was the only one I told. I thought the burden of knowing was too much, and that’s why he ran away. I’m still somehow convinced.
After I was gifted with approximate memory—after crying a few hundred times, Casey squeezed my hand, and we kissed each other. I felt the sticky notes of my lips pull apart from his. The right love is an adhesive. I realized that I had a singular mind with Casey. Even with my duplicity and my rambling. I felt unworthy of that kind of love and ready for it.
“My father,” I said.
Just saying the two words cracked my voice. It was enough for him to know.
“I remember my father.”
Just the three words were too many and enough for me to know.
“He hurt me,” I said.
The rest of the year was a practice in language. Every new word became more horrific. I can say full sentences. In the shower, before I knew how to be scared or protect myself, I disappeared. Ten minutes of my life were enough to kill me. Every day I negotiate the minutes of my life, remembering that I can’t remember enough. I spend hours convincing myself that no child is ruined—and the one inside of me is worth remembering fondly. My mother’s looming spirit guides me some days, telling me that nothing is too ugly for this world. I am not too ugly for this world.
10
indian condition
My education was a renaissance, and I know what comes after discovery. I graduated in a woven cedar cap and blue shawl. I was given a sovereign land to write every transgression.
When I walked across the stage, I remembered, some years ago, when Isaiah had lice. Doctors couldn’t see the nits and told me I was just imagining things. I put two rooted teardrop eggs that were attached to my son’s hair into a sandwich bag. The nurses looked at it closely and told me it could be nothing.
Only when I started to pick his scalp with my fingers, on the plane to America, did people seem to care or see. The entire flight, my hands worked and found each clinging thing. Isaiah was happy to be still, and happy to have my fingers acknowledge each exposed space—his follicles too. Every child deserves a type of servitude. He fell asleep and dreamed. I know because he salivated and murmured against my chest. When every tiny seed and itch was stripped, we landed, and he woke up.
I remember how well my work on his head was timed, and that America would be the beginning of our new life. I remember being ashamed to have groomed my baby like an animal on a flight filled with white people. I remember that motherhood is mostly bearing shame to dress my children, to feed them, and to spare them the things I wasn’t spared.
I came to America because I lost my baby and had one in my care—to feed. I came because I didn’t have my GED. I came because I was done with ghosts. It was all too ugly to say, until I received an education and walked across the stage.
Sherman Alexie read my work and said, “It’s no wonder that this narrator is
crazy. She’s Indian, and she’s smart. Who could survive that?”
If the Institute of American Indian Arts was a renaissance, then this is what comes after discovery.
I became an editor. They pay me for my work. I became a fellow. Words I never knew to be—I am.
More than a drunken father or monster, and more than the bright of my iris, or the hope I was given from my grandmother. I’ve exceeded every hope I gave to myself.
I still hold my coffee, and remember until it runs cold.
When I hear empty bottles, I remember. Empties are a cliché—the sound of them is so familiar. The collective sound of glass against glass, muffled by brown paper bags and collapsing tin. Empties are my father and Larry.
Sometimes I hide my empties because I don’t want to be a drunk Indian. I do get drunk, and I am Indian, but not both.
My mother took pictures of my father when he was passed out drunk to remind him that he was a drunk. Those pictures, at a time, were all I had of him.
I wonder if he ever felt this ugly, trying to exact the truth of me. A little ghost he lost. I hear empties, and I hear him. I learned to hide my bottles like him and sometimes take from the world like him. I don’t think he was wrong for demanding love—it was the manner in which he asked, and whom he asked that was unforgivable.
It’s strange that his ghost won’t abandon me. It is the type of strange that compels me to take each bottle from my trash and consider the volume of my stomach. I want to consider what I poured into myself and how my father made a life of not remembering. I know the limit of what I can contain in each day. Each child, woman, and man should know a limit of containment. Nobody should be asked to hold more.
When I walked across the stage, I thought of you.
I believe you want my sorrow, and now that it is more sophisticated, it’s less contrite—less of a beggar. I’m less of a squaw. I can’t entreat as well.
This story is yours, culprit of my pain. Which one of us is asking for mercy?
Heart Berries Page 9