Steal the North: A Novel (36 page)

When I move to Berkeley, I quickly realize letters won’t work any longer. I buy a composition journal and begin writing in it to Reuben. I also sketch for him in the journal. I try to stay upbeat. I try to convince him that I’m standing on my own two feet. That I am every bit as stouthearted as Otis. But I am lonely as hell, and my hands are cold.
Remember how they glowed, Reuben, like that night-light?
He must be so cold in Alaska.
Remember when I first touched your belly with my warm hands?

Berkeley overwhelms me academically. No matter how hard I study, I can’t get a solid A. It overwhelms me politically. I have ten flyers handed to me every day, and people wear T-shirts that ask,
DID YOUR DINNER HAVE A FACE?
and
HOW DO YOU LIKE MY MARXIST-FEMINIST DISCOURSE?
This first semester in the dorms has been the worst time of my life. I could endure anything if only I knew Reuben still loved me and thought of me in Alaska.
OPEN DOORS MAKE HAPPY FLOORS
is the sign that greets me every time I step off the elevator. I’m a private person, who grew up without siblings or cousins. When my roommate is gone, the door is shut. Sometimes, when I’m alone in my dorm room, I plug in the praying hands night-light I brought from Aunt Beth’s. Usually I keep it hidden under my dorm bed. A guy on the second floor sells Vicodin. I haven’t purchased any yet.

Freshmen girls, primping for sorority parties, walk around the dorms practically naked on weekend evenings, searching through closets for “going-out” clothes. I spend Friday nights at the gym, working out extra long, taking fitness classes, yoga. I’ve toned up. My body has never looked better, but who cares? Saturday and Sunday mornings I watch the male swim team (with
CAL
in gold on the butts of their Speedos) practice in the pool adjacent to the gym. I watch them just to spite Reuben for never writing. I’ve been growing out my hair in memory of Aunt Beth.

I spend the rest of my weekends either sketching in campus art studios or studying in the basement of Moffitt Library, with its desk lamps and domed skylight. Doe is the most beautiful and historic library with cathedral rooms, but it intimidates me, seems too Ivy League (I can’t help thinking of Reuben in a ship’s cramped hull). I’ve met some really sweet, down-to-earth, wannabe-hippie girls, mostly from Sierra foothill towns. But I’m too shy to call them, or to join their co-ops, or to wear their
I HEART MY CO-OP
pins. I just can’t seem to put myself out there, but if I could, that would be the group. I smoke cigarettes, just like I planned to in college, but I have to hide and do it in corners, not on benches. It’s okay to drink until you puke on the weekends here, fuck everyone, bake pot brownies, or even pop Ecstasy, but cigarettes are just plain trashy and stinky. A few weeks ago an intense-looking, beanie-wearing philosophy student asked me if he could watch me smoke my cigarette. He told me he found girls who smoke sexy because it’s like they’re wielding their signs of exhaustion and imperfection.
Do you believe it, Reuben? Do you wonder if I let him watch me smoke?
I did.
If I let him take me to his room and then watch as I reached up my skirt and touched myself?
I did.
Do you wonder if the next time I got completely naked and let him watch me touch myself again—before falling asleep for hours in his bed, waking to him still watching me?
I did.
Do you wonder if he ever asked my name?
He didn’t.
If the next week, after I again touched myself, he read me Nietzsche and I pretended it was you telling me Coyote stories?
I tried.

I buy a bottle of Vicodin. I don’t tell Reuben.

For the fall, Spencer finds me a fourth-floor apartment off Telegraph with antique wallpaper and a view of the bay from every window. My roommate was born in Eastern Europe, though she’s far from a refugee. She drinks vodka out of shot glasses with Russian leaders’ portraits on them. We crank the windows wide open to feel the breeze. She and I aren’t friends, but we get along. She likes my old-fashioned cooking and that I grow herbs in our kitchen. She even likes my night-light, though she’s an atheist. She calls it vintage. She’s multilingual and helps me with my French homework. A typical Berkeley feminist, she believes empowerment comes through noncommittal sex. She claims that even in drunken stupors, fraternity guys at Berkeley can hold conversations (and usually in more than one language) about global economic principles, good literature, and social policies. I like to sit at the window in the velvet Isabel chair I brought from Sacramento. For hours I sit, sometimes high on Vicodin, looking down at the people walking in the streets, or at the fog in the bay.
I am like Sister Carrie. Am I not, Reuben? Only unlike Carrie Meeber, I know damn well for what—for whom—it is I long.

Finally I force myself to become more adventurous.
For you, Reuben
.
Do I still have your heart?
And for Mom, who wishes I realized what a great opportunity U.C. Berkeley is for me—how lucky I am to be in college at all, to live in a state where education is so valued. She’s right. Mom and Aunt Beth didn’t even finish high school.

I write to Reuben about the bums and street performers. And I send sketches. I grew up in downtown Sacramento, so all my life I’ve seen homeless people, but there are fifty times more in Berkeley, and they’re a far livelier and more musically inclined (though also more aggressive) crowd: young accordion players; aged, bearded guitar strummers; Hare Krishnas in robes beating bongos; ancient-looking Asian men playing lutes. The young bums with guitar cases and blond dreadlocks often have creepy comments, but their signs can be witty, like
HUNGRY, HUNGRY HOBO
. One young homeless girl tells me, when I stop to give her a cigarette and she asks if I might also spare a tampon, that she travels with a group of kids between the bay and Santa Cruz, living mostly off grass and selling her ass. I think of Mom at that truck stop. I go to the ATM and withdraw all the cash I can and take it back to the girl. I also give her my bottle of Midol, my Mace, and my wool peacoat. In the early mornings, students leave hot coffee and breakfast bars by the homeless who sleep in the doorways of the frozen yogurt shops and bookstores.

Leading up to Sather Gate is a tree-lined strip called Sproul Plaza, which is constantly filled with campus clubs tabling, handing out flyers, and selling food to raise money. I want to join a few service clubs—I enjoyed the club work I did in high school—but I get dizzy trying to decide which ones. Sproul is where all major and minor protests are staged. And there are always protests. I saw a pro-life organization display blown-up pictures of bloody fetuses. I was horrified and appalled.
I wanted to talk to you, Reuben. You saw what I saw. You knew Aunt Beth
. Another time, during a large protest against animal cruelty, I saw white and Asian students carrying posters against the Omak Suicide Race. What the hell did they know about what that race meant to the Colville? There were protesters at the actual race when Reuben took me. White people protesting how Indians treat animals. I couldn’t believe it. Reuben told me that night just to ignore the protesters, so I do here as well.
You told me the horse and the rider are one. If the horse gets hurt or maimed, so does the Indian rider’s spirit, for good. If the horse gets killed, so does a part of the Indian. Just like with the land and rivers, you said. As long as the Columbia is dammed, so too is the spirit of the Indian. Do you miss your rivers, Reuben, so far at sea?

Students sit under tents on Sproul to hear talks about third world issues, the environment, race, religious tolerance, atheism, veganism. I mail flyers to Reuben in my journals. I mail him bumper stickers for his truck:
EAT LEAF, NOT BEEF
and
JESUS LOVES ME BUT I STILL MAKE HIM WEAR A CONDOM
(both as jokes).
GORE 2000
(not a joke). Performers break-dance or rap. A black man faithfully preaches the Bible. I like to sketch him. He never shouts. His gentle manner reminds me of Brother Mathias, who Matt told me left Moses Lake and hasn’t been heard from. A white man in a tweed jacket carries a clown horn and a briefcase and yells at students. The other day a student yelled back, “Put down the bottle and go home, Professor.”

I want to go home, Reuben. To you and to the Columbia.

Spencer sends me money and tells me to go shopping. I walk around different areas of Berkeley. In the poster shop by my apartment on Telegraph, I buy photo postcards that I glue into my journals for Reuben: the Black Panthers, Frida Kahlo, the Indian occupation of Alcatraz, Bill and Hillary reclining together in a hammock, Tupac. I spend the most time and money in shops that sell herbs, oils, and teas. Just the smell of those shops. I look through comic book stores on Shattuck, thinking of my two brothers in Washington I’ve never met. Uncle Matt says Jamie has called twice for my number, but I’m not ready yet. Finally I buy a stack of comic books and mail them to my dad’s farmhouse without a return address. In the stationery shops on Northside, I pick cards I’d mail to Aunt Beth if she were still alive. I used to make Mom cards when I was young. It feels as if I lost both of them when Beth died.

I am so alone, my coyote.

There is every type of food imaginable in Berkeley. It puts Sacramento to shame. Indian is still my favorite. But I’ve tried Himalayan, Pakistani, and Ethiopian, to name but a few.
Are you satisfied, Reuben? No?
I have street vendors braid hemp into my hair. I have my hands painted at henna stands.
In a single Sunday, Reuben, I go to an early-morning meditation class at a Buddhist center, a Christian church service at noon, an afternoon “herb walk” sponsored by a herbalist college in Oakland, and in the evening, a Japanese tea ceremony.

Three times I’ve gone to Bancroft’s special collections and held Narcissa Whitman’s actual journal, written in her hand. I don’t tell Reuben. I was more scared than excited when I first discovered Narcissa’s journal was at Berkeley. The viewing room has long, slablike tables, and I have to wear white gloves. But still, holding the journal makes me feel close to Aunt Beth. Narcissa never learned the Cayuse language, or so she stubbornly claimed, but in one of her last letters to her beloved sister, with whom she was never reunited, Narcissa expressed her deepest longing for her sister in the Cayuse language. It’s the only such example in all her correspondence. It moves me. If only I could express my longing to Reuben in his native language, maybe then he’d believe me.

My favorite part about Berkeley is the amazing lectures. Mom would love to hear me say this (and to hear the lectures), but I won’t give her the satisfaction. I either try to scribble down every single word or just sit there in awe and bliss. The most memorable lecture, which I don’t tell Reuben about, was a cultural anthropology lecture to which the teacher invited a very, very old Native American man to speak to us about how Berkeley holds the bones of his ancestors in filing cabinets below our museum and he isn’t allowed to see them. I had dreams about Aunt Beth’s bones and Indian bones and Narcissa’s bones and Donner Party bones. I even had a dream in which Narcissa, who couldn’t stop bleeding through her long prairie dress, made soup with Indian bones and forced me to drink the broth. I begged Reuben to at least come visit me. I told him I was having nightmares, but not what they were about. I see the Pacific beyond the Golden Gate Bridge.
Come to me, Reuben, if you still love me. Please still love me.
I take four Vicodin pills in one day.
I’m sorry, Reuben
. I don’t tell him what for.
Please
.

Mom and Spencer drive to Berkeley for the opening reception of the student art show. My exhibited piece is a four-panel sketch that depicts an origami salmon unfolding itself to reveal genetically crossed wires, parasites, nonhealthy eggs. The last panel shows only a piece of unfolded, wrinkled paper stamped
HATCHERY MADE
. In my short explication I state that I’m a Pacific Northwest native concerned about natural salmon runs being further damaged by genetically weak hatchery stock. Mom stays relatively quiet, though she gets emotional when, unbelievably, I win third place. I don’t tell Reuben about the sketch panel or winning an award. Our final week together he apologized numerous times for calling the origami salmon that I made for him retarded. He said even hatchery salmon need prayer.

I like to go to Sacramento almost every other weekend on Amtrak. I like my bedroom in Sacramento better than my apartment in Berkeley with a view of the Golden Gate. What is wrong with me? I liked the Nutcracker Museum in Leavenworth, Washington—with its Yoda, Minnie Mouse, and Mormon missionary nutcrackers—as much as I like MOMA and the de Young in San Francisco. I love holding my chubby brother and playing with him. I like to eat dinner with Spencer and Mom, although lately Mom’s been hinting again about how she hopes I make friends soon in Berkeley.
Where
are her friends? Then one evening she mentions my finding a boyfriend. I laugh in her face, which confuses Liam in his high chair. He grins, then starts to sob, which makes me cry and then Mom cry. Spencer just puts his hands up.

“Sorry, Dad,” I say.

“Don’t apologize, kiddo.” He has tremendous patience with me. He looks hard at Mom. “You either, Kate.”

Both Mom and Spencer talk to me about looking into semester abroad programs. I tell them I will, but I don’t. I’m not ready yet to be that far away from Reuben. I’m far enough away. Mom wants me to pick a major. Maybe English or history or American studies or gender studies. I enjoy them all. If I were more outgoing, I’d pick anthropology or international relations. Really, I want to major in education—
I have told that to no one but you, Reuben—
and teach young kids like Lena and my two Palouse brothers.

Finally I mail Reuben a list of a few of the classes I’ve taken at Berkeley and some textbook titles. I’ve hesitated to do so because I didn’t want him to think I should remain here. But it’s becoming agonizingly clear that he already does. So I mail the list, almost in spite, though I also include a few made-up titles as jokes:
The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, Chicken Soup for the American Indian Lover’s Soul
,
What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, U.S and the Global Forest, Why “Fag” Shouldn’t Be Part of Your Vocabulary, Approaches and Paradigms in the History of Rhetoric, How to Speak French in a Trailer Park
.