Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (18 page)

—

Miss Nolan’s information about Indians came from three sources and three sources alone, two of which she had purchased at a roadside attraction on a childhood roadtrip to the Grand Canyon. One was a coloring book of the Navajo, featuring pictures with titles like “An Initiation Ceremony Means a Mud Bath,” “A Medicine Man Doing a Sandpainting for a Curing Ceremony,” and “Grandfather Tells Interesting Stories.” In every picture, the people wore silver belts and leather moccasin boots and turquoise necklaces. In every picture, the backdrop was a mesa, a cactus, a horse in the distance. The second source was hardcover, textbook size and written by a white Floridian. Its jacket promised information about some of the “most colorful” tribes. It contained chapters on “Plains Indian Braves,” “Women’s Work” and “The Best Dressed Indians.” Miss Nolan had packed and shelved these books in all six of the suburban houses her family had inhabited. She had never been out West again, but it seemed to her an obviously better, richer place than the Atlantic seaboard.

The third and most important source of Miss Nolan’s information was her imagination.

While her father sold knives door-to-door and her mother ran a cake shop, Miss Nolan, who was then only called Anna, revised the family history. Her teacher had assigned a family tree and Anna drew hers on archival paper that included, at its bottommost branch, a fake name: Helen Fighting Water. Anna was nine years old. She wrote an essay for class about this long-ago relation from
Montana and how she had lived in a teepee and tanned the hides of buffalo with the mashed brains and internal organs of the animals and how she had fallen in love with a white trapper who was kind and respectful of her culture and how, for a time, they had lived with the tribe instead of in town, but then there came a terrible winter and half the Indians died and the trapper convinced his bride to move with him into a cabin near a doctor and better sources of food and water and heat. They raised sixteen children, Anna wrote, and each of them was smart and kind. When Anna’s parents looked at her assignment they said, “That’s nice, sweetheart,” because they did not know or care where they had come from. Because where they had come from—West Virginia, North Carolina—was poor and probably dirty and most of the relations had had too many children and died of the flu and it was not a story they had wished to drag with them. They had enough to drag with the house and the daughter and the three-legged dog she had insisted on adopting. They had enough to drag with a marriage, two station wagons, alternating Christmases in the nursing homes where their parents lived, a few good days on the shore in summer, maybe a trip to Florida sometime when it was too cold to breathe in New Jersey. If they wanted to get someplace better, the less they took with them, the easier the passage.

Anna fell in love four times in her life. First with the relative who did not exist, second with a mute boy in third grade who drew pictures for her of castles with moats thick with dragons, third with a college professor who taught her about endangered species, and fourth with the man she eventually married. He was a doctoral student in Post-Colonial Literature. He was proud of his beard and his Mustang and the time he had spent in Senegal, Peru, Burma. He collected antique glass bottles, which he lined on his windowsill above the place where he and Anna lay naked
while he told her that he knew it was ironic that he was a white man studying the danger of the white man studying the brown man. Because the truth was both absent and boring and because she could sense this man’s hunger for an exotic story, Anna told him that she was descended from a Salish brown-skinned woman who had, ten hours into a forty-hour labor in the coldest winter in a hundred years, walked to the rural Montana hospital in snowshoes. The lie worked. The man fell in love with Anna for her stolen stories. When she went to school to become a teacher, she got good grades because of her stolen stories. Without them, Miss Nolan might not even exist.

—

When Cricket went to get the boys at the end of the day, she was told by their teacher that they had painted their faces with ketchup and mustard, trying to look like the Indians Cricket had told them about. Because the boys were not in a Social Studies unit about the American West, they had gotten into some trouble for this, but they seemed happy about it. The teacher asked Cricket about their mother, and when she could have a little chat with her about the behavior of the boys. She said the phrase, “Nip this Savage thing in the bud,” a phrase with which Cricket was unfamiliar.

“My mother is away. We have a sitter. I’ll be sure to relay the message.”

The question, as they walked, was whether anyone would be at the house. A mother, a father, a dog.

Cricket would not tell her mother about the kiss, whether she was home when they arrived or not. She might want to confess to
a
mother, someone else’s, one she imagined to be beautiful and always baking, but not her own. Still, it would have been nice to
have someone to avoid telling, someone to hate a little bit over the course of an evening, from pot roast to homework to dessert to television.

The boys Indian-danced home, or did a dance they had invented that they thought of as Indian. They patted their mouths. Cricket was fairly sure this was inaccurate but they were her pair, and she was in charge of loving them and it was sunny out and they had been indoors all day.

Cricket and the boys unlocked the big red door, put the mail on the small table where the mail was meant to be put.

“Hello?” she called, hopeful. The house made whatever sound a house made, which was not the same sound a waiting parent made.

Evening thickened and the children let the feeling of unrest gather at their feet. They let worry in, a rising tide, ankles, knees, thighs. They swam in it and what struck them was that it felt kind of good. Something noteworthy was happening to them. They were in a situation. You could become an orphan at any moment. You could be motherless, fatherless, alone with nothing but your brothers and sister and your wits. The seconds and minutes meant something, suddenly. How long would they survive on the food left over in the house? How long until someone picked them up and took them to an orphanage? They imagined this place—rows of cots and angry old women and a kindly, powerless man who swept the fallen hairs and dust from below them. The brothers took an inventory of the cupboards. Crackers, cereal, soup. The refrigerator: cheese, eggs, milk, butter. There was a huge freezer in the basement, and though they knew that much ice cream was inside, it was dark and very far and the steps creaked and the light was a bare bulb with a string that snuck up on the back of your neck.

They sat down at their familiar kitchen table and everything around them felt new and strange and they each took a spoon and ate one soup can cold, gathered around it like it was a source of heat. The room sounded different now that they knew for sure they were orphans. So many more noises than any of them had noticed before: the refrigerator working to keep cold, the clock tracking time, time that felt quite endless. Without a mother, there was no suppertime, there was no bedtime. No one would make them brush up and wash up and kneel down to pray. They could, if they wanted, become nocturnal, walk the streets at night with the skunks and raccoons, get into trash and trouble and shine flashlight bulbs into the downstairs windows of every house, examine the leftovers from the day. Probably there were unlocked doors, and Cricket imagined slipping inside, rearranging other people’s books, eating their food, reading the letters on the kitchen table, living a whole life in their house while they slept so that the house would have two families: day family and night.

She thought then of efficiency, which was a word her third-grade teacher had often used. The old woman had valued this thing above other things, commented on how well or badly the world was managing at it.

Once, Cricket had taken note of the concept and decided to leave her bookbag in the car, so she would not have to remember it in the morning. But the next day the teacher had sent home a note:
Cricket did not do her homework
. She had explained to her father the reason, that she was being as efficient as possible, and her father had both patted her and scolded her and Cricket had not known whether she was smart or dumb. That night she had decided to sleep in her clothes so that she would not have to get dressed in the morning, and when she had woken up, she had begun to think up a system. She called it Efficient Life. The main
idea was to do each type of thing all at the same time rather than switching around: eat all the butter for the year at once, all the peas, all the rice, all the toast. One week is egg week and you eat eggs until you can’t stand to anymore. Then it’s time for bread. School should be twenty-four hours a day for however many weeks and then you take a long break. One month you do nothing but swim. One month you do nothing but dig.

Her own empty house now made her think of the downstairs of all the houses quiet and empty at night while the families slept upstairs, and she thought of the poor, whom she had only ever seen once, on Thanksgiving years ago when her mother had taken them all to the soup kitchen where they had tied kerchiefs around their heads and sawed at turkey carcasses for two hours until their palms had been blistered and their clothes meaty. The poor had come by in a line like a dirty river and the volunteers put a slop of cranberry next to a slop of stuffing on their white, white plates, and the poor had looked grateful, but not as grateful as Cricket thought they might have. She had looked forward to this day, to being charitable, but now the poor had just walked on down the line and sometimes even turned down one offering or another.

No gravy for me.

I can’t stand sweet potatoes.

Stuffing looks like it’s already been digested.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Cricket had said to one old woman with teeth like chinks of pearl in her head. Her father had said it to her at many dinners before while she rearranged the peas on her plate.

Mother had smacked her on the cheek. “They aren’t beggars,” she had said. Cricket had apologized but she was confused. Weren’t they, though?

Anyway, now she had an idea that the poor could live in the
downstairs of the houses while the other people slept upstairs. The owners would never even notice. The poor would have to get used to being awake at night, but that seemed like a small enough task. Father would be proud.

—

The three orphans ate their soup without slurping, even though no one was there to notice. They were still very hungry afterward and ate bread and butter, but they did not enjoy it because these were their reserves and they were being depleted.

They went to the living room and turned on the television. The newsman in his maroon jacket and fat tie came on to tell them that Mao Tse-tung was dead and five white journalists were killed in rioting in Cape Town and it was flooding in Mississippi. They showed a picture of a house floating away and another of a lot of men in overalls building a wall out of bags of sand.
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I
, all the children said in their heads. They wished their state had a little song you sang every time you thought of it.

How long had it been? Cricket looked at the watch she had been given for her tenth birthday. One hour. One more small hour, of one more small day. There was so much time left to fill. It was a darkness, dragging at the children. If only Maggie was there, they thought. Mother and Father, yes, maybe, but Maggie, for sure. No one should have to be an orphan and dogless too. Cricket imagined gathering around the warm, furry body, petting and handfulling the extra folds of skin. The heat of her. The encouraging repetition of her breathing.

The children lay down in a huddle on the floor. They felt very tired. The house sounds ticked along, as if it were not a small
lonesome island. The children fell asleep in the dusking dark, alone on the earth.

*   *   *

T
HE
TROUBLE
WITH
CHICAGO
had always been history and now it was the future too. The whole point of Fern’s endeavor was
away
, not
home
. The city approached on the horizon, skyscrapers looking out over the wind-howled flatness of the prairies and lake. Fern had sprouted here; all the strange fruit bearing up across her life was planted in this land. Outside the car the corn should have been a city itself, stalking and spawning and smelling the way it did, but it was fall and someone had just razed it for the winter. Miles of chopped-down, miles of spiny want.

“This portion of the trip is not helping your mood,” Mac said.

“I grew up over that way. And Edgar’s parents are probably switching out the wicker furniture and summer décor accents for a lot of gourds and leaf garlands. No doubt there is one last pitcher of fresh lemonade on the counter and a cleaning staff of ten.”

“We should confront this, get it out of your head.”

“We should keep driving.”

But, Mac reasoned, they were hungry and the food would be so much better here. All through pizza and soda Mac nibbed at Fern about her family, about coming up against the past so she could move on. He had once read a book on the subject. It was a question of killing off your demons by facing them down.

“It sounds dramatic,” Fern said.

“This is serious. You’ll never be free. Let’s start with Edgar. What does he do for a living?”

“He hasn’t had to earn a living.”

“Oh?”

“Steel. It’s the family business. Only Edgar doesn’t believe in it. It’s complicated.”

“He doesn’t believe in what?”

“Industry. Making money on the backs of poor people who work in factories and mines and get paid hardly anything. Money in general.” She waited for Mac to scoff but he didn’t. “That doesn’t sound stupid to you? Hating money? Hating one’s good fortune?”

“Of course not. We all need enough of the stuff and sometimes there’s fun to be had, but it’s not exactly a new idea, that money doesn’t buy happiness.”