by Toni Jensen
I think of the music Marianne plays in the same way I think of the songs my grandmother sings as we walk the hills around her farm—songs without words. My grandmother mostly hums melodies but sometimes breaks into what I recognize as words, but not words in English. She points out plants, telling me what they do, how they grow, how they’re helpers, naming them and singing her songs and doing more naming. Both types of songs, in the hills and in dance class, provide comfort. Both anchor my childhood in a rare, peaceful way.
I know now this place, this dance class studio, to be a regular place, to be perhaps even somewhat shabby in its construction. I know now it’s not a fancy place most likely by anyone’s standards. But this fall I feel so fancy in my leotard and tights, and this place feels so fancy.
I imagine the cost of these lessons is made possible by the extra hours my mother works or through a grandparent’s generosity or both. Part of why it feels fancy is because I know, even this young, my presence here to be precarious, anomalous, rare. I know already we don’t have money for a good many things, so I know this is special.
Toward the end of each dance class, teacher Marianne turns us loose to chassé in circles around the room. According to Webster’s, in French chassé simply means “to chase,” and that’s what our feet do, back feet chasing front feet, as we bend our knees and point our feet, moving at something close to a leap/run. We’re together, our hair and cheeks flapping. We laugh and smile wide and breathe hard.
After class, I’m the only one to move by myself down the back steps of the two-story building and up the side steps of the building next door. My father the first day had shown me how. We practiced. By this day, I’ve almost mastered plié and chassé. I’ve well mastered the art of down one staircase and up another. I’ve mastered the art of keeping secret from my mother that my father doesn’t pick me up, that I go over to pick up him.
I hold the secret close because I love both dance class and the bar. I love the songs without words, mirrors at the front, my soft shoes scuffing on the wide expanse of linoleum.
The bar holds low ceiling tiles, dim fluorescent lighting, and metal stools where I sit and am allowed to kick my feet against their rungs. My father drinks beer, and I drink orange soda and snack on barbecue potato chips.
Country music plays on the jukebox or radio, usually old-school country, what my father calls real country music. The other country music that sounds like pop or Top 40 is called horseshit or horseshit country.
Today it’s old-school country, and I know my father hasn’t been drinking too much because he only sings along for one stanza to see if I will, too, so I do though it’s not my favorite thing to sing in front of people. I can sing. I know this already to be true, and it’s a thing I love privately but not publicly, except for church and the bar with my father.
It’s almost pheasant-hunting season, so my father wears camouflage pants, worn leather boots with tie-up laces. He’s been out scouting a new place to hunt. He tells the bartender and other men about it while I crunch chips. They laugh and the bartender offers each of us a refill, and I say yes after my father does.
There’s a danger in writing about my father’s drinking—I know this. Native men, including Métis men, so often are depicted as drunk, hopeless, more drunk, more hopeless. My father is Métis and also he drinks. We’re far from culture and homelands here in Iowa. We’re not returning. My father’s drinking is about many things, not the least of which is the pressure to fit in, to comply with the dictates of whiteness.
When I show him day drinking, then, please note there are other day drinkers lined up beside him on their stools. Please note all of them are this thing America calls white. They are all striving to be better at whiteness, at prosperity. They are all failing. They all go home each night to their families with beer on their breath, with pockets a few dollars short.
These are not stories of people embedded deeply in culture, but, rather, they are the stories of the people who left. These are American stories; these are stories of trying to move into the American space we call whiteness, about trying to live, instead, there.
This isn’t a story, then, so much about being Indian in America or even being Métis in America. It’s a story about being those things and striving toward whiteness; it’s about the cost of that striving.
At four years old, I don’t, of course, understand any of this. I love the bar. I fear and love my father.
Later in the fall, we’ll ride home sometimes with birds in the back of the truck, and later in the winter, with pelts from the trapline. We ride home with a shotgun for the birds or a handgun for the trapline. We ride home hoping my mother does not yet have dinner on the table. We ride home with our secret.
IV.
In the summer that year, for the annual Fourth of July celebration, I perform at the bandstand in the park with a few of my dance compatriots, and my father and his band perform, too. They do covers of country songs and switch some of the words to include our town’s name or to make them more patriotic for the occasion.
My father’s face holds a sheen of sweat, and he swipes at it with a folded bandanna he pulls from his jeans pocket. It’s a warm day, but I know also how long he’s spent in the beer tent and, before that, in the bar. I’m not invited into the bar in the summer because there’s no dance class.
There’s no orange soda before or after my performance, but we do all have cotton candy and ride the Tilt-A-Whirl, round and round like a chassé until we’re dizzy and satisfied.
Once when my father was about four years old, his father took him into town for the Fourth of July parade and carnival, and somewhere in the crush and mix of people in from out of town, my grandfather lost my father. He looked and looked for him, not wanting to have lost him, of course, but also not wanting to return home to my grandmother without him.
Upon my grandfather’s return, my grandmother is reported by all to have said in a steady voice, “Go back to town and find him or don’t come back at all.”
Their farmhouse sat on top of a high hill, a mile or so outside town. When my grandfather made his way down the sharp gravel drive and turned onto the highway to town, there, coming up the steep hill, was my father. He had known his way home. He told his father thank you, but he didn’t need a ride up the driveway. I’m home, he said. I’m already home.
I love this story like I loved the dance studio, the bar, the hills surrounding the farmhouse. It’s okay, I’ve learned, to love the things that make you, even if they also are the things that unmake you.
We don’t know the year I’m four that we only have a decade left with my grandmother. We don’t know how fast the time will go. My grandmother’s presence could stop any meanness in a room. She held us together. She held together our better selves. She helped keep at bay the worst of my father, or more accurately she helped keep him from being all the time his worst self.
She’ll pass on the winter I turn fourteen. By that spring, my father will be drinking and raging almost all the time.
If in a life, in the telling of it, you’re going to give so much of the after, you must also give the before. The year I’m four years old, I’m stitched together tight by love and land and story, and if these things later become my unstitching, what I’m left is a life’s work, learning how to chase a thread and move with it, learning how to make something from leftover ribbon and thread.
The Invented Histories of Domestic Birds
I.
My sister is calling from her house, a trailer outside Boulder where she has a perfect square of backyard, where the air is dry, the sky correct. Only people who’ve loved the West and lived elsewhere know about the incorrect sky. Webster’s might define it as prominent in places such as Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Ohio. God save us from the Pennsylvania sky, says Webster’s. See also: hazy. See also: the irritation of clouds that provide no rain or if r
ain, then no attendant relief from the heat. Under the incorrect sky, rain provides only mosquito infestation, sweaty foreheads, fat ticks, the suck and pull, the humid-thick.
My sister and I are thick with apology. We overflow our do-you-remembers. My sister is calling me at home in Arkansas, where I live under the incorrect sky. My sister is calling because it’s 2016, and we’re deep into the summer of guns. My sister is calling because a nice white woman has pulled a gun on my nephew and his brother, in a nice suburb, on a nice, white-hot June day.
Listen, this is not going to be the kind of story in which someone narrates from a distance the experience of a young man America has decided is Black, a young man with a gun pointed toward him, where his body is used to insert narrative tension into what is, essentially, another person’s story. This is not that kind of story.
This young man is my family. America may have decided my nephew looks Black and I look white, but we’re both Métis. This suburb may be the most American of all territories, but it was once the land of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people, many of whom still live in the area. More than one hundred thousand people who identify as tribal people live in Colorado today. Almost half live in urban areas. To call my nephew Black, to call me white, is semi-accurate at the level of phenotype. To call him Black, to call me white, is the most American form of erasure.
So this hot summer day, we’re both Métis, in this, our America, but I know the difference in our lived worlds. I walk around each day, including this one, in my white-privilege raincoat. It doesn’t matter much that the sleeves are too short, the shoulders tight; I know I’m wearing it. I know its uses and its limitations—I know, for example, the intricacies of how it fits most poorly at the cocktail party when white people want to talk to me about Black people, about Native people, about, about, about. It does not protect against the white people who get between a cocktail and me. But this coat—at a traffic stop—its efficacy rate is almost a hundred percent.
My nephew and his half brother this day in the suburb, the very American suburb, are wearing no such coats. And though what I am about to tell will reduce the thread of narrative tension, so it sags a little, maybe, like power lines after a minor storm, so that even the invented birds go elsewhere to roost, I’m telling you: this is a narrative in which all of us get to live.
II.
In our childhood, my sister’s and mine, our father kept his guns locked on the high shelf. They came down for the trapline—in case some caught thing needed to be shot; they came down for shooting birds and sometimes deer and sometimes rabbit or squirrel. They came down to be cleaned sometimes after he hit our mother or one of us.
Here is the thing about rabbit or squirrel cooked without love, cooked out of necessity, cooked with embarrassment over the necessity: it is dry, stringy, horrible. Cooked with love, say, at a grandparent’s house by someone other than a mother, it tastes like anything else—it is food like any other. It is not the mother’s fault she wishes for grocery-store chicken, plucked and clean and bearing the marker of the middle class, the cellophane pulled tight by unseen hands.
Here is the thing about the sky over the trapline: always blue over white, always the sharp blue of winter, the coldest sky. Here is the thing about the myth of our mother and “one of us”: there is no “one of us.” I’m equivocating, choosing the plural over the singular, all the stall tactics, all the cover. Here is the thing about guns in a house like ours, locked away or otherwise: there is only one person who knows how to shoot.
III.
My sister is calling because she has a story but also because she wants mine. Something past or present that is funny, maybe, if possible, from someone who knows her, who will joke away the hurt. She does not often come to me this way. Childhood prohibits this closeness, maybe. I was the one who put my body in between. She was the one who shut herself in her room. But the narrative is never that simple, of course. No narrative is ever that simple.
My sister was born before I was, and she was born premature, less than four pounds. The story my father tells is one of going home from the hospital in Minneapolis to change his clothes and returning to find my sister gone from her spot in the ICU window. All the other tiny, sick babies lined up in their pastel blankets under the bright lights—all but her. “It stopped my heart,” he says. “It stopped my heart.” My father is not prone to such speech, and the look he gets on his face is an even rarer sighting—like love and fear in equal measure, given equal weight, like the wings of a crane, the push and pull before the flight into sky.
When my father and I talk in that 2016 summer of guns, he wants to know what my yard is doing, here in Arkansas, in the humid-thick. The yard that summer is always doing things, inexplicable things—making food and drawing in creatures and ticks, oh god, the ticks, a horror movie amount. He is especially interested in the birds who come to my feeder—what kinds and when and what do I feed them.
The truth of the bird feeder is that it’s not mine, it’s ours, or more particularly it is my then-husband’s. I am an academic, yes, but not in the field of ornithology. Even by casual observer standards, I know less than I probably should about birds. In the end, in the near future, I will learn I also know less than I probably should about husbands, about marriage, about permanency.
As for these summer birds, they fly or they don’t, are colorful or dull. To illustrate further, I give the example of the hummingbirds. I know them to be small and lovely creatures, and I overhear my then-husband one day talking about them with my daughter, and I say, “Where are they?” I say, “I’ve never seen them.” I’m squinting through the patio double-doors at the large, black feeder where other, larger birds congregate.
“At their feeder,” my then-husband says. He says this to me like he says a good many things—like this is a thing about which I would know if I’d bother.
“Where?” I say. I’m not at all sure now that I care very much about hummingbirds after all. This is getting a little boring, maybe, or he and our daughter are making things up just to tease me, or who knows. Birds, perhaps, remain unknowable.
He leaves his desk, puts down his elaborate sandwich, and stands behind me at the double doors. He turns my shoulders, so I am facing off at a right angle instead of straight ahead. “There,” he says, “at their feeder.”
A red, beautiful object hangs there, made of glass or ceramic, containing some dark liquid. As if by magic, there is, in fact, a minor swarm of hummingbirds.
“What did you think that was?” he says.
“A hummingbird feeder,” I say. “Of course.” Really, though, I had thought it was some sort of art.
Each time my father calls, I have the impulse to hand off the phone to my then-husband, who chafes at all chores categorized as housework, at picking up or dropping off from school our daughter, at anything resembling full-time employment. But he is a man who has bothered, who will continue to bother on behalf of these birds.
My father, though, calls to talk to me. So each time I do what I’m good at—I make things up. There are almost never any birds at the feeder when he calls, but I report them, these invented birds. I craft and deliver their lives, their histories: the yard features birds with flecks of orange on the undersides of their wings, and dark red birds who fight each other over the seed, and a nest of baby birds, one time, to which a large, blue-winged mother delivers seed and sometimes worms and sometimes ticks. I have no idea if birds eat ticks, but if I am inventing, dear god or gods, dear Webster’s, make it so.
My father posits various bird names, possibilities, based on my bullshit, and I say, “Yes, I’m sure that’s the bird.” It goes like this for a good half hour and then we hang up.
But I don’t want to bullshit my sister. Not today, not right now. “Remember how I used to steal your candy?” I say.
She says, “Just candy?” and “Is that right?”
I did steal her candy and also her blank notebooks, her clothes—everything but her shoes, which were and are a full size too small. She was better at caring for things and so her things lasted longer. Only one of us could make an Easter basket’s contents, its Peeps and odd, pastel M&M’s, last till summer. My sister’s best practices for candy longevity included the following:
Step 1: Tear the M&M mini-pack across the top, making a straight, even line.
Step 2: Select no more than two M&M’s, preferably of complementary colors.
Step 3: Eat said candy through nibbling, through bites so small they would shame any decent mouse.
Step 4: Seal shut the perfect cut with a straight, perfectly fitted and aligned piece of Scotch tape.
Repeat steps 1–4 each day until Fourth of July or, if possible, till Halloween.
A whole package of mini-M&M’s is, of course, already so small. Impossibly small. My belief then and now is that her behavior was directed toward me—was a form of torture designed to antagonize me, to test my belief systems, which, then and now, include efficiency and consumption, which include the ripping of a corner jagged, the pouring of all contents into my waiting mouth—where all the little pastel pieces fit like perfect, colorful magic.
Once my sister had finished her taping, she bit the heads off one or maybe two marshmallow Peeps and returned their bodies to the package for other days. Other days.