The Antelope Wife (14 page)

Giizis continues on with implacable deliberation.

“I knew a woman with that morning sickness. She ended up in labor for two weeks!”

Helping herself to mashed potatoes, Noodin takes up the theme now, in a darkly relishing tone of voice. “The pain was constant, too, hard labor for a total of twenty-four times fourteen hours. Plus, all the while she screamed. No, it was more a yodel. So pitiful. And people heard her—this was before they set up the soundproof room in the hospital.”

“A big baby?” Giizis purses her lips in knowing fashion.

“They couldn’t stitch her back together in the right order. And yet she somehow lived.”

“Only to die the next time, probably.”

Noodin shrugs.

“On that note,” says Booch, his face sunken and pale, his voice catching, “shall we toast an easy labor and healthy outcome? Toast!”

“I’m not pregnant,” Cecille says uselessly. “I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

But Booch desperately raises his mug of apple cider and downs it like a pirate tossing back hot grog. Still, the grandmas are not finished.

“That’s a bad way to go. And they had to bury the baby in a little shoe box. Me, when I go,” brags Giizis with a long slow wave of her hand across the heaping plate, “you won’t have to take up a collection. My funeral is all paid up.”

“Whose isn’t?” Noodin shrugs her sister’s boast down. “Those vultures. They come around the reservation with those sales handouts—”

“Brochures.”

“Catalogs. They make the rounds and you sit paging through those pictures of the caskets—”

“Mine!” Giizis says loudly. “Mine is frosted, I tell you, frosted!”

“Oh, that sure is wonderful.” Rozin rolls her eyes. “Like a cake.”

“Please,” says Booch, “do we have to—”

“If you must know,” Noodin loudly interposes.

“We don’t need to know,” says Booch, and Frank looks at him gratefully.

But Noodin’s eyes flare with indignation. She ignores him. “I am paid up, too, with money from my checks. I put a small amount away each month. I got the cardinals, red cardinals painted on my casket and it’s made of real oak, not cheap pine board. A cheerful woodsy scene on front. Spared no amount of big expense! I even got the dinner paid for and no jelly and no peanut butter—oh you bet, no commodity funeral for me!”

“Ticking. Mattress ticking. Railroad cloth. I like that on the inside of a casket, though,” Giizis reflects.

“Homey-looking.”

“Like you were really going to sleep or something. And then the sheets.”

“Mine are satin.”

“Don’t you think,” Rozin breaks in again from her corner place, where she’s filled and refilled her plate, picking through her food with furious dispatch, “if you’re going to spend for satin sheets, you could at least get enjoyment out of them in life?”

“You would,” says Giizis sternly, spearing Frank with a look. But her attempt at embarrassing Rozin falls flat, for Rozin just nods and as though struck by some ecstatic thought smiles openly and suddenly at Frank, right across the table. Everyone can see her and notice that smile, too, which is the sort of curious and gloating smile a teenage girl turns on the first boy she’s shown her breasts to in a parking lot. Returning her look, Frank’s is grave and intent. Their look holds, and then, with quiet attention, tenderly, he dips some small morsel of dark meat into the scarlet of cranberries. Placing the tart, reddened flesh in his mouth, he casts his eyes down and chews.

Giizis has removed the slender forked bone from the breast meat already and stripped it clean, handing it to Cally, who has vowed with Deanna never to be tricked into pulling apart a wishbone. She gives it back to Grandma Giizis and has the presence of mind to say, “Share it.” Giizis holds out the wishbone, and Noodin touches it. The bone is cool and faintly slippery in her fingers. The tiny strips of meat cling to it tenaciously. Looking into each other’s brown, sorrowful eyes they seem lost, unguarded. The bone is fragile between them. They know from childhood that to break a wishbone to your advantage you must hold your thumb higher than that of your opponent, your sister.

And so Giizis tries. But Noodin has been harboring some secret anger and her thumb creeps higher. Giizis twists her hand to try wrenchimg the wishbone from her sister. Noodin stands with a cry and snaps off the longer piece of the bone. The two old twins pant and glare at each other and throw down the pieces of the wishbone. They bare their teeth murderously and then, still staring directly into each other’s eyes, they change expressions and slowly, sheepishly, secretly, begin to laugh.

Noodin wipes her eyes. They sit. The pie is coming out, the rhubarb crisp, the cake, the coffee, the swamp tea, the cookies and Jell-O mold salad with peaches set in star shapes. And the men are talking to each other. They have outlasted the women’s hold on the conversation and they are talking about their cars. They are discussing the insides of their cars the way women discuss their own insides. Pre-labor. Post-labor. Just the same except instead of doctors the men talk about their mechanics. Opinions, prognoses, prescriptions, and probabilities.

Dishes clatter. Coffee scents the air. The house is too warm, though, so the girls decide to cool themselves at the back door. They have sneaked out a plastic bag of turkey scraps. With it, they step out onto the tiny porch and stare from the steps out at the frozen gray yard and garage.

The dog appears instantly and smiles lovingly at them as they dump the scraps into his bowl.

T
HERE ARE TIMES
in the city, rare times, when the baffle of sound parts. Cally and Deanna listen for those times of transitory silence. No cars. No planes’ roar. No buses or distant traffic. No spatter of television noise, even people talking. Now, just as the twins define the moment by the absence of all it isn’t, someone laughs, a car door slams, there is a screech of tires. It is gone, their moment of baseless peace.

The noise that brings them back is the muted plastic thump of a city garbage Dumpster and then crisp, slow steps. Rozin and Frank round the corner of the garage but they don’t notice the twins because their eyes rest upon each other. Cally and Deanna can see their mother’s warm three-quarters profile as she gazes seriously up into Frank’s face. He is turned from them, but although they cannot view his expression they know it.

The grown-ups are staring at each other with moon-glow sitcom eyes!

“They are acting like two cows,” says Cally.

The girls laugh in a mean and outraged way. They have also got a parcel of turkey bones they were told to throw in the sealed garbage container and not give to the dog. They give the bones to the dog.

G
IIZIS TAKES A SIP
of the coffee, a bite of pie, and holds up her tiny piece of the wishbone. Noodin laughs, but then her face goes dark as she remembers. She finally speaks to the women sitting at the table.

“Yesterday,” she announces. “Yesterday. That young doctor was forward with me!”

“What?” says Rozin.

“I knew there was something,” says Giizis.

“How?” says Cecille.

All of the women put down their coffee cups and look at Noodin.

“The nurse came and told me to take off my clothes and put the robe on. So I do that. So I was lying there covered with that sheet,” says Noodin, “and he came in for the exam. When he lifted that sheet for the exam he said, ‘My, aren’t we glitzy today!’ ”

“ ‘Glitzy’? You’re kidding!”

Rozin and Cecille say this practically in unison.

Noodin frowns. “I hate when you say that. Of course I am not kidding. That is the way it was, the phrase of words, ‘My, aren’t we glitzy!’ I said nothing, of course. Why in the world do you think he said it?”

“Maybe you’re”—Cecille tries to think—“unusually better than normal down there!”

Giizis and Noodin look aghast.

“Did you wear some fancy underwear or something?”

“I had none on, of course,” says Noodin. “None on at the time. No, it was simple rudeness, or worse. . . .”

“Did you wear some, ah, maybe some perfume?”

“Oooo,” says Giizis.

“That neither,” says Noodin. “I just, well, I used some of that feminine hygiene spray they advertise. I took it from your bathroom, that’s all.”

Rozin looks at her quizzically.

“I don’t have any of that stuff.”

“You don’t have any?”

“No.”

“Then . . . well, it looked like a can of what they advertise. Same color.”

“Mom!”

“What?”

Noodin gets up and goes to check the bathroom. They hear her rummaging through a drawer, and finally she brings back the can. She holds out the can and shows it to Rozin.

“Is this what you used?” Rozin asks.

She nods. Rozin hands her the close-up pair of reading glasses that the twins share. The can is left over from Halloween. She did up Cally and Deanna’s hair with a frosting of gold spray-glitter.

“Read the label, Mama.”

Noodin does, then rears back, thoughtfully blinking.

Chapter 13

Rozin

I
T IS NOT SO SIMPLE
being Rozin Roy. You have a missing carpet stasher for a husband, an ardent baker who keeps dropping off boxes of ginger-frosted gingersnaps, a mother with a secret glitzy place, a job you must go to every day even if the week after Thanksgiving weekend one daughter wakes up with a headache and the other has a sore throat and both are experiencing a sense of loss because their father will soon be divorced from their mother. No matter that he was not around much, or when home, dimly lit or even smashed. He is their father.

“I never thought you’d be divorced,” Cally weeps. “We hate Frank.”

“No,” says Deanna, “we love him, remember? But as our uncle, okay, Mom?”

Deanna quietly broods on her cereal. Both are mourning with reversals of mood. Rozin looks at the clock and thinks how when she was late just a week ago her supervisor gave her one of those looks of cool skepticism that signal the beginning of lack of trust. It was wrong for Rozin to have spent her three-month perfect record of goodwill. She had coffee this fall, too often, with Frank. All that dependability she’d built up, spent now that her children need her. She should certainly have anticipated this, but she made the mistake a so-called functional parent makes about a so-called dysfunctional parent. Yes, they do miss him! Of course the girls are sad! And now the grandmas have returned home saying they couldn’t eat more of Frank’s cookies. The cookies kept appearing once Grandma Giizis said she liked them. Irresistible cookies. Irresistible like Frank. But perhaps like Frank overbearingly sweet, Rozin thinks, an unworthy thought. He has become her lover. Their blood sugar has also shot way up into the heavens.

“I have to go to work now,” Rozin tells her daughters. “I just have to. I’m going to get in trouble!”

Cally and Deanna look at each other and big burps and bubbles of sobs come up as they feel the same thing together. The feeling bounces back and forth, getting larger. This happened to them when they were babies. Rozin had to separate them to calm them.

They hear a flamenco tattoo, as if a tap dancer was merrily clicking across the floor on the other side of the wall. It is Sweetheart Calico. Tapitty tap tap, tapitty tap tap. Faster and faster. Tapittytaptaptap. The girls’ sobs turn to fascinated hiccups. A door slams. They walk to the window as Sweetheart Calico, now silent, flashes across the weeds. Rozin bolts out the door.

“Wait! Come back!”

Sweetheart turns, eyes wide, and walks back toward Rozin’s beckoning hand. Sweetheart is dressed in tight jeans and a flowing pale pink shirt. Her tiny black boots have steel clips on the toes and heels. Her hair is combed and braided on one side. It loops long down the other. Rozin doesn’t tell her about the lopsided hairdo—maybe she’s got only one hair band.

“Could you please, oh please, babysit the girls? They are too upset to go to school. They won’t get on the bus. It is weirdly hot today! They need time to have their emotions. And I have to go to work.”

Rozin’s pleading rivets Sweetheart Calico and she stands very still and cocks her head forward in order to understand what Rozin is telling her. Rozin goes on, throwing her arms up and down, pointing at the car. Sweetheart’s dog cocks his head side to side as Rozin swishes her arm at the door where the girls stand together, dressed alike as they do for comfort, and sad.

Yes, of course!
Sweetheart Calico’s look says.
I’ll take care of them the same way I would take care of my own daughters!

She nods and walks up to the girls, takes their hands in hers. Now the three are standing in the doorway and Rozin is waving good-bye.

“Good-bye, Mama, we’ll be okay.”

The girls cling to Sweetheart Calico. The dog sits steadfast at the doorstep. Rozin has many doubts but she drives off anyway, afraid of cool skepticism. Afraid of lack of trust. Afraid to offend her supervisor, who could take away the job that pays the mortgage and feeds them and buys all they need to live.

The Spaces

As soon as Rozin drives away, Sweetheart Calico lifts the girls’ hands. She looks from one to the other. The cracked-off tooth in her smile makes her look homely and goofy, but also she is beautiful in her pointy boots and swirling blouse. She has a lot of makeup on—bubble-gum pink lipstick, happy blue eye shadow, blaring black eyeliner.

“You forgot one braid,” says Cally.

“Yeah, you look weird like that,” says Deanna.

Oh this?
Sweetheart Calico touches her flowing hair uncertainly.
Wrong?

“But it’s not so bad,” the girls decide. “It’s a look.”

Sweetheart Calico rolls her eyes, happy.
Here we go!
She swings their hands as she steps down the steps.

“Wait!” says Cally. “We never finished our breakfast!”

“We don’t have jackets! Plus we’re supposed to be sick!”

So what?
Her arm swinging makes them laugh.
We’ll find food. You’re not really sick. It’s weirdly warm today. Time to move, to go, to walk, to tap along, to jump and run!
The girls take jackets anyway because they do not trust the warm sun and they follow Sweetheart down the lumpy old sidewalk with the tree roots bulging up out of the earth. They run past her once they get to the park; they leap and scurry through the swing sets, monkey bars, and field of grass, where they find half an old Frisbee. They toss it awkwardly to the dog, who gamely chases along after it as if he is doing them a favor. Which he is. He is worried about where they are going. Sweetheart Calico always gets lost. He laps all the water he comes across. Pees everywhere he can. He does his best to leave a trail, in the manner of Hansel in the forest, but this has been a dry fall and there are few puddles. He pees like a frat boy. Everywhere. But can’t reach fountains to replenish. They pass the lake and he gulps at the toxic shore until his stomach bulges. They are foraging on and on into the city, into the downtown area near the bus station, past the Irish pubs, music bars, and old buildings made of reddish purple stone dug from the northern Minnesota quarries or fawn-colored Kasota stone dug from the southern Minnesota quarries. Farther yet until they hit the river. There on its banks, the dog smells an entire two-day-old novel that Richard and Klaus have written with their scent in the leaves, on the sidewalks, on the ground, on the benches. They are not here anymore.

The dog tries to communicate with Sweetheart Calico: Let’s go back now, it’s time. Let’s go home. They are not like your daughters. They can’t run forever. They are not as swift, not as strong, and they are human, not like you.

The dog leaps at her, snapping at her one braid. Sweetheart Calico catches his jaw with her pointed steel toe. He yelps and crumples. Gets up showing his teeth. If only I were still a wolf, then I’d hamstring and eat you! The girls are slowing down, slumping over. They sit down on a curb. They are so hungry and thirsty that can’t even cry. Desperate, the dog barks, lolls, leaps at everyone who passes in his most appealing way. Which is not appealing. Someone says, “There are leash laws, you know.” Sweetheart Calico stands watching, twitchy and annoyed. She does not like to stand still. The girls droop on the curb some more. At last a man comes out of the pizza shop behind them with sodas and slices. He can’t stand it anymore. The children gobble up their food with big eyes and he tells Sweetheart Calico that she should take them home. He keeps talking, trying to impress the gravity on her. They shouldn’t be around here. This is not a good neighborhood for children as they could get picked up and drugged and either sold to a Wayzata businessman or trafficked up to Duluth to service the freighters—and it is dark, anyway, and who are they and maybe he should call the police?

Sweetheart Calico gives her most human nod and saunters off. The dog and the girls follow her. The man shrugs and walks back inside. It’s getting cold. Around the corner, Sweetheart leaps high and cuts a little caper. It’s time now! The lights are going to ride up and down! The signs pulse on: There’s girls hot, hot, hot! And free drinks for pretty women! Just past Augies she forgets the twins. But that’s all right because they’re gone, anyway, following the dog, who is following the trail of his own piss marks down the streets and through the alleys and across the parks and backyards and church landscaping across the bus station sidewalk and along old park benches and over the walking bridge that spans I-94 and its torrent of noise.

And do their feet ever hurt. And their sad little hearts feel ever sadder. And will they get back to their mother?

A
COOL FALL NIGHT
on Andrew Jackson Street. Dead cottonwood leaves clattering and traffic a dim snarl to the west. Rozin sits with her back to the open window. She watches her phone as if staring at it would make it ring. She imagines the police voice, We’ve found them. We’ve found them. The police told Rozin to stay home and wait because missing children usually show up. They usually do! They will! But nothing happens. Her heart’s flamenco tattoo taptittytaptap. Hating itself. Adrenaline floods her like poison. She’s alert and leaden. There is the phone, ringing with some crazy new ringtone. But no, that’s just chatter of sleeping sparrows in the leggy vines. She hears the girls outside! But no, that’s the fan in the next room, sifting fire through its sleeves. The light socket with the bulb out grows a new bulb. What thoughts. Stupid thoughts.

Rozin wakes to the telephone’s persistent ring. Downstairs, in the yellow wash of light over the kitchen sink, she raises the phone to her aunt’s voice.

“Did you find them?” Giizis asks.

“No.”

Rozin lowers the receiver into its cradle. She passes her hand across her face, crumples a fist to her mouth, and wonders what she will feel next. Nothing comes. Just nothing, though her blood roars and her skull suddenly feels tight as a helmet. Her brain overstuffed with too many thoughts. She is just about to lift the phone again and call somebody, anybody, when Deanna’s voice floats down from the top of the staircase.

“Mama . . .”

Rozin steps back out into the hallway, stands at the bottom holding the worn curl of the banister.

“Mama?” Deanna asks. “We’re lost.”

Cally says, “Shut up, Deanna. She knows.”

They aren’t up there. The house is empty.

Rozin freezes. An excuse, a little laugh, shoots up inside her and then her throat shuts. If she lets her daughters keep talking, they will never stop. They’ll go on talking. She’ll talk them all the way home. The air at the top of the stairs is thick as black cotton and she can’t see where they went. Her knees give.

“Come home,” she whispers.

Dread like an ice cape. Silence. The dread passes over and a lighter feeling sails in. Her heart bobs and the longing is a stitch in her side. She gasps painfully.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she calls out, hopeful and afraid. But there is no answer. Wax leaves clatter against the side of the house. She crouches on the bottom step, motionless.

She won’t call Frank. Perversely, she thinks he got her into this mess. He poured the coffee that kept her from going to work all those times, which made her paranoid about missing work this morning. And Sweetheart Calico. Her. Her. Why did Rozin ignore her best instincts and leave her children with a woman who has never spoken a word out loud, a woman weird and wild or FAS or learning disabled or suffering a form of autism or some undiagnosed ADD or ADHD or who is off her medication for some mental disorder even though she sometimes seems so pleasant and willing and kind and playful.

Rozin begins to pray to the great and kind spirit. The earth tips its farthest shoulder to the sun and the dark goes solid. Cold air seizes in bands along the mopboards. She sits there, waiting. Incrementally, the dark motes thin to gray. The air stirs with the cold soupiness of dawn. She doesn’t shift her weight. She doesn’t lean or twist to move again, not until the starlings begin to whistle in the tattered cedars.

R
OZIN RISES AND
slips her arms into an old shirt. One of Richard’s that she kept, a black-and-white checkered shirt that reaches almost down to her knees. For he is a tall man, and she is more her mother’s size. She removes a heavy iron pot from its cupboard place and brings it over to the bowl of the kitchen sink. Into the pot, she pours an inch or so of wild rice. A fine sweet dust rises off the rice like smoke, smelling of the lake bottom, weedy and fresh. Next, she runs water into the pot, swirls her hand among the ticking grains. Black-green, brown-green, dotted with paler speckles and very fine. Uncultivated. Not the fake stuff. Knocked into the bottom of Noodin’s beat-up aluminum canoe. A few small hulls, sharp and papery, ride the surface. Poured off, the water carries away green clay, powdery silt. Another water. Five waters altogether, until the last comes clean and she sets the pot aside. Onions now. She holds a kitchen match tight between her teeth so the juice won’t make her eyes water, then she crosshatches the onion from the root end, slicing the tiny cubes into a pile she keeps neatly triangled with the flat of the knife.

Broth will slowly cook the onions into the rice. Before she sets the top on the pot she adds a tiny pinch of white pepper but no more. The twins like simple foods, no spices. Odd they never got their dad’s complex food tastes. Basic foods. Potatoes and cheese for Cally. Rozin remembers the stubborn genius of Richard’s ways and sees him, now, before her suddenly. Dark brown hair and brown eyes with a curved smile and hollow cheeks. Shuts her eyes against the picture. He is a magnet, Richard Whiteheart Beads, with a prickly and unappeasable energy some people resent and others worship. Around him, she was like that herself, never doing things the easy way, always finding the method of most resistance. Even now, she prefers to cook food she’ll have to guide and watch over. A soft vanilla pudding from scratch. Stewed turkey. Creamed corn still from scratch, though she can’t use fresh cobs, only frozen this late in the year. She butters and creams them, pours them back into a plastic bowl. It is good, though, the care she takes with everything, for the smell of this food is going to bring them home.