The Antelope Wife (13 page)
G
RANDMA
N
OODIN AND
Grandma Giizis call the city Mishiimin Oodenang, Apple Town, because of the sound of the word—Minneapolis. Many Apple Us. They call Thanksgiving Day Gitchimiigwechiwegiizhigad, which means the Day When We Give the Big Thanks. It is not an original holiday, but the Ojibwe are big on feasts. Noodin and Giizis still live on the reservation homestead, the allotment that belonged to their grandmother, now a farmed patch of earth and woods and mashkiig from which they gather their teas and cut bark for baskets. The tribe gave them a brand-new prefabricated house, two bedrooms, slate blue. They can sit on the deck with their backs to the lake, and watch the road. Noodin can fold and sew a ricing tray or a makak without looking at her hands, but both she and Giizis prefer to construct and quill fancy boxes bearing animal icons—bear, loon, deer, and bear. They are hard-packed women with wise nimble fingers, heavy ankles, and legs that run straight down like fence posts into their shoes. Their faces originally had the same wide, plain soft beauty, but as twins will they have grown into their differences. They are like two cookie sheets. Noodin’s is the newer sheet, relatively unmarred, while Giizis’s is a pan baked on, burnt, shaded into character.
Noodin and Giizis are arriving early because Rozin has made a doctor’s appointment. This was made for Noodin because she confided a set of feminine symptoms to her daughter, the sort of thing for which it was felt that she should be seen by what she calls “a woman’s expert.” Noodin is furious that she must see a doctor. But none of her own medicines work.
Sitting in a rocker
Eating Betty Crocker
Watching the clock go
Tick, tock, tick, tock
Shawallawalla
Tick, tock, tick, tock
Shawallawalla
ABCDEFG
Wash those boy germs off of me!
The twins are smacking their hands together and singing and rubbing off boy germs. They are not interested in what the grandmas will be angry about or what foods they will tell everyone they prefer—the burnt heart of the turkey to the white breast meat, cranberry sauce made from fresh berries only. Mincemeat pie gives Giizis the runs. Pumpkin stops Noodin’s bowels. Wild rice must be prepared with no salt, and garlic gives both an instant cramp.
Misty snow, plump clouds, occasional breaks of sun. Ice on the sidewalks slick and treacherous under the white dusting. Rozin is just returning from a long emergency run to a convenience mart, when she sees her cousin Cecille back Frank’s delivery truck with expert care into a space across the street. Inside the truck, both grandmas are sitting high and proud on grass-blue vinyl, their stunning Miss Indian America profiles on display in the watery dark of the window. The truck is white. The snow is neat, a new fall outlining the shoveled walk and steps. Rozin breathes blue air stepping out of her car to meet them.
“Take this. Here!”
Giizis opens the truck door. She holds a casserole pan in her lap, a meat-fragrant oblong warming her knees through her red-and-white trader’s-blanket coat. Rozin takes the food carefully. There is the night before Thanksgiving meal to feed everyone and Giizis has arrived with her famous wild rice and duck hot-dish. The grandmas don’t even get out of the truck—they’re too busy reminding Booch Jr., Cecille, and Rozin of their complex digestive needs, which change every year.
“Noodin takes no salt. I eat the whites of eggs only, yolks will kill me. Plus Noodin’s got that sugar in her blood. She craves it, though. Try not to tempt her,” Giizis whispers. “Don’t leave the cookie plate alone in the kitchen. She’ll make a pig of herself behind your back and then she’ll lapse into a coma. Me, you know I’ll eat whatever.”
“No you won’t,” Cecille tells her. “You’re picky as your whole family put together. And the yolks of eggs will not kill you! Rozin has already fried the onions and celery for tomorrow’s stuffing. You’ll have to divide it out.”
“She is making the stuffing already? That’s ours to make.”
Noodin is nervous about her appointment and scurries into the house. She locks herself in the bathroom. She only has a few minutes, Rozin calls through the door. They are going to be late unless she hurries.
“I am hurrying,” shouts Noodin, her voice thin with anxiety.
“Don’t pressure her,” says Cecille. “After all, she’s never been to a gynecologist before. She’s very upset about this.”
“It’s unbelievable,” says Rozin. “Well, I’m taking her to Doctor Carr. He’s very nice, really. I have seen him a couple of times.”
“Him? I would never have a
him
.”
“How ridiculous,” says Rozin sharply. “They are professionals. They’ve seen a million of ’em.”
“ ’Em?” Cecille laughs. “And isn’t he young?”
“Okay, he’s seen thousands of ’em.”
“ ’Em.” Cecille walks off. “Booch,” she calls, “how many of ’em have you seen?”
“How many of what?” Booch asks.
“ ’Em,” says Cecille.
“Oh stop it,” says Rozin.
Noodin is still in the bathroom. The water is gushing and there are frantic sounds of hurry.
“Just relax,” says Cecille. “I’ll call and say you’re running fifteen minutes late.”
But they are at least half an hour late by the time they get Noodin into the car.
A
N HOUR PASSES.
Noodin slams into the house and Rozin follows.
“What’s the problem?” asks Cecille, her hands deep in flour.
“She won’t tell me.”
Noodin throws her purse in the corner, glares at everyone, and then thumps into the kitchen. She microwaves a heaping bowl of her own hot-dish, eats it. Without a word to anybody else she begins to tear up loaves of bread for her own stuffing and to chop apples. She likes apples and raisins and sausage in her stuffing. She takes a big package of sausage from the refrigerator and dumps it into a frying pan. Noodin broods as she cooks it, breaking it with the edge of a spatula.
“What’s wrong with you?” asks Cecille.
No answer. Cecille shrugs. “What’s wrong with her?” she asks Giizis.
“She’s like that,” says Giizis.
Eventually Noodin stomps off to bed, still without a word to anyone.
“What was the diagnosis?” asks Cecille once Noodin is sealed in the bedroom.
“Normal,” says Rozin. “Everything benign! Except her! Maybe she’s just mad because she went to the doctor for nothing?”
R
OZIN’S KITCHEN IS
a long, sunny galley with three windows over the sink and a chopping board built into the side opposite the stove, underneath the cupboards of dishes. Out in the other room Cecille sets the table with Rozin’s holiday cloth—turkeys, pilgrims, and golden-eyed deer—and plates with the border of twined green leaves. Cecille has brought her own special water glasses. Beautiful rummage-sale cut glass of an elemental blue that does not match anything.
Just like her, Rozin thinks, annoyed but also obscurely pleased. Everything else on the table is red, orange, or gold. I’ve set it carefully, and here comes Cecille insisting on her blue water goblets.
Cecille is slender as a dancer. She shows off her breasts and shoulders by wearing leotard tops. Her eyes are wide, deer-brown, caramel-cream, and she has grown her hair long, thick, and wild. She likes to streak it with henna. The twins are proud of her. Sometimes her earnest and pedantic air as she discusses her martial arts annoys everyone. But she is a second-degree black belt now, tae kwan do, she is going to school to become a drug counselor and holding down a regular job selling food supplements. Cecille is a success. Her apartment over Frank’s shop is filled with textbooks, meditation mats, and bowls that sing when struck with a wooden mallet.
Rozin sugars the rhubarb Noodin brought, frozen from last June. Following Frank’s recipe, she spreads it on the bottom of a baking pan with strawberries and then mixes the butter, oatmeal, brown sugar, and crushed walnuts for the topping. Spreads the sweet stuff evenly across. She slides the pan into the space below the turkey, which is almost ready, its small red-plastic timer button half extended. Cally and Deanna hold out spoons to baste the tender, crackling skin. The heat fans their faces and they suddenly think of their mother’s face brushing against Frank’s. They put down the spoons and flee.
Miss Mary had a baby
She named it Tiny Tim
She put it in a bathtub
To see if he could swim
He drank up all the water
He ate up all the soap
He went down the drain
In an envelope
“Nothing makes sense about that drain,” says Cally.
“The envelope would dissolve and anyhow a baby wouldn’t fit,” says Deanna. “Let’s spy on Sweetheart Calico.”
She is in the small apartment watching Klaus’s television and trying out colors on her toenails. She takes the polish off with pink acetone, then paints them a new color. She must have a hundred little bottles of color. They are scattered everywhere. The room reeks.
Cally and Deanna are worried.
“Let’s not spy,” says Deanna. “Let’s paint our nails too and show her how to put the tops back on the nail polish.”
So the twins spend Thanksgiving preparation time screwing the tops on the bottles and arranging them in a row along the side of the mattress where Sweetheart Calico curls. They have heard their mother worry about bills and say that Klaus has paid enough rent for the rest of November but after that Sweetheart Calico will have nowhere else to go. They will open the big door that divides this part of the house from the rest, and she will then live with them.
“She’ll have to get a job,” Rozin said, looking doubtful.
“T
HE GROWN-UPS ARE
sitting down,” Cally tells Sweetheart. The girls comb her hair out and blow on her fingernails and find a pair of thongs for her feet. They find a white shirt for her to wear over her tight push-up bra low-cut tank. They take her hand and lead her to the table.
Cecille is talking about Klaus and Richard.
“They’re on the streets, looking like hell warmed over. Making signs that say they are war veterans! For which they could get arrested!”
Booch Jr. hands Frank the gravy pitcher, pretending not to hear Cecille talk about Klaus, his favorite uncle, like a father to him. Frank’s face is pained, he is searching for the right tone, stalling. Frank has eaten with the family before, but never with Richard out of the picture, never with the potential to be Rozin’s man. He wants to make sure that everyone knows he isn’t taking Richard’s place. That he has no hostility. That he doesn’t want to hear gossip. He takes the pitcher in two hands and leans over to Cecille.
“He’s the girls’ dad, so have some respect.”
“Yeah. Give it a rest,” Booch says to Cecille. She pauses, but only to gather momentum. Even with no marriageable male attention, she preens in her short skirt, folds her arms against her breasts. Her eyes are perfectly lined and shadowed and her neck is sultry with a thick gardenia perfume. She bends her mouth into a seesaw smile of irony and does not give any satisfaction. Does not back off her subject.
“I know. It’s not in the family, maybe our culture even, to speak out, to mention these sad, hard topics. I know that. But how much better if we all accepted truth and spoke with honesty, from the heart! For instance, Cally and Deanna are at a higher risk for depression and substance abuse because their role model exhibits self-destructive behaviors. I’m saying it. Because I want them to realize!”
“They’re not depressed,” says Booch Jr., “but all of us could get temporarily deranged, by you.”
Booch grips a salad bowl of honey-colored wood. He stares back at Cecille and slowly, imperceptibly at first, then with increasing force he trembles, mildly jittering, from the feet up, from the ground, then with more vigor until his head tips to the side, his eyes roll back to the whites. The mass of dark leaves jumps. He grips the bowl even tighter until he is shaking all over in explosive starts and jerks.
“Quit it, Booch,” laughs Rozin.
Giizis starts forward, scared. Booch stops. Looks around at the table, blank. “Where am I?”
Cally and Deanna think he is hilarious.
“Booch?”
Cecille’s voice is instantly suspicious. “What was that?”
Grandma Giizis shakes the serrated knife she’s using on the bread. “Get out of here, you crazy boy, or I’m gonna take this to you!”
Noodin unfolds her arms and goes back to fluffing her wild rice, puts the lid back on the pot, carries it in to the table with two dish towels wrapped around her hands as mitts.
“You egg him on,” she says pointedly to Cecille, in passing. Cecille gives a pleased shrug. The twins and Sweetheart sit looking at the table. The turkeys and pilgrims and golden-eyed deer race along the borders of the tablecloth. Red candles. Ivy plants. Gold paper napkins. The unexpected blue glass.
T
HE TABLE IS
long, with boards to add and with extra wings at the end. A table made for big gatherings and doings. It’s a good thing, because the topics of conversation at the table tend to polarize. Especially the things the grandmas say. Past a certain age the Roy women believe that they have earned the right to talk about sex, birth, blood, the size and shape of men’s equipment, the state of their own, even at the holiday dinner table. But at this Thanksgiving, Noodin is strangely subdued. Still fuming and filled with secret hostility.
“There should be no salt on this table!” cries Grandma Giizis. “In the early days we had no salt. We didn’t know of it. We had no taste for it. Now look at us.” Her blood pressure medication keeps her dizzily alert.
“I can eat as much salt as I want—” says Cecille.
“If you’re pregnant—”
“I’m not.”
“Eat the head of a skunk,” advises Giizis. “In the old days, that was the way to make sure the baby’s head would be a little head, easy to push.”
“Did you have morning sickness with Cecille?” Booch asks. His mouth stitches together in anxious amusement. “That skunk head might not sit too well.”
