The Antelope Wife (17 page)

Sweetheart Calico.

She doesn’t speak. Her lean face is clear, smooth, pale milk-caramel, sweet as a hen’s egg; her tea-brown eyes are wistful, sad. Her hair is a powerful wing sweeping down her slim back. She has slender, jutting hips, long legs. On her feet black stiletto heels like shiny fork prongs. Perfectly honed features. The girls smile at her and open their mouths to talk. A mistake. For then she smiles back at them.

When she opens her mouth, her eyes go black. Her grin is jagged, a tooth broken and as sharp as a nail. Her smile is fixed, frightful. Her gaze scrapes over them. The scariest thing of all is this: they can sense she is glad they are here, but not in a good way. Excited. She wants them near and as they stand quiet before her they feel it all—her hating need and eager sly wishing washes toward Cally and Deanna like an oily black wave. She wants them in her part of the world, Gakaabikaang.

She wants to steal them again! They have come to believe as their mother says, that they were kidnapped by Sweetheart Calico. It has all gone vague except for their dog who brought them home. It all goes vague now. Then the wave recedes. She is gone as suddenly as she appeared.

Frank walks in, whistling, a tray of crullers on his shoulder.

Their hands are clumsy as they rub the display glass, smearing it. They are not the same afterward, nor will they ever be until they understand the design. They don’t know how to take this, don’t know what to make of it, have never known and do not now want to know a person like Sweetheart Calico. For she alters the shape of things around her and she changes the shape of things to come. She upsets the girls, then enlightens them both with her truthless stare. She scatters everyone’s wits.

S
WEETHEART
C
ALICO STILL
lives secretly in Rozin’s house, which Frank is renovating. She does not break in, really, just melts through the walls and takes showers, endless showers for as long as she wants. She uses up so much hot water that Frank thinks there is a leak in the water heater. He is even thinking of getting a new water heater. Which would be a hassle. He would have to ask Booch Jr. to help him move the old one out. He never even suspects. She doesn’t leave her cloven tracks, now, she is too clever. Nobody is there at night so nobody knows. She hums in her sleep. Sometimes Frank notices the smell of prairie sage, but he thinks that is a wonderful smell and it reminds him of the old days of his youth when he wandered to the place where sky meets earth.

Frank would not be surprised to see Sweetheart Calico in the shop, even though he doesn’t know she lives in Rozin’s house. Only Cecille knows that he felt sorry for this woman adrift, and hired her to work. Although work is not exactly what she does. If she is around, Sweetheart is sitting in the corner, down in the yard, poking through things in the basement, doing the shop chores somehow not quite right—sweeping with her broom between drags on her cigarette, but then forgetting to pick up the piles of dust. Washing pans but not rinsing them, so next day the maple long johns taste faintly of soap. Dusting the blackboard and the pictures of muffins onto the floor. Leaving them there. Washing the bathroom mirrors with toilet paper so the little papery bits are stuck all over. She takes hours in the bakery bathroom putting makeup on and hours taking it off. She lotions her face. Sits on the top of the toilet, at peace. Often, just before she leaves, she tries to get Frank or Cecille to go with her. Tries to pull them out the door. Frank and Cecille never go, though her face is desperate. They are pretty sure she walks and walks, sometimes for days, going places nobody knows. Returning with a silent, baffled, pitiful look on her face.

She likes to sit in the back of the bakery kitchen, listening to the radio and watching the telephone to see if it will ring. The next day she is there when the girls’ mother calls.

“I’m on my way.”

“Okay, Mama.”

Frank takes the phone, turns his back on them all as he speaks to Rozin.

Meantime, Sweetheart sits in the corner smiling her shark-tooth smile and smoking a Marlboro. She blinks her hexing eyes slowly and openly stares.

The girls don’t want to get her attention, make her grin. That scares them. Cally turns away after a quick, weak smile. Deanna too. But she feels immediately, right in the small of her back, the calm prickle of Sweetheart Calico’s gaze.

Sweetheart Calico veers close and gives them each a hug. It is a strange, boney, upsetting, long stranglehold that twists Cally in her own sleeves so she can’t speak. Sweetheart Calico is gone before Deanna can untangle her sister. All that is left upon the girls is the scent of her perfume and they find that they can’t get the green smell off. They can’t stop thinking of her. They see her in their deepest thoughts. Her perfume smells like grass and wind. Makes them remember running in the summer with their hair flopping on their shoulders. Her scent is like sun on their backs, like cool rain, like dust rising off a waterless, still, nowhere-leading road.

Cecille

The twins also get their first real jolt of Cecille. She’s like a caffeine surge. She teaches in a tae kwan do school right down the block from the bakery shop. Through this, and peroxide, she has made herself a bicep blond-dyed Indian with tiny hips and sculpted legs that she shows off by wearing the shortest shorts. She has the glitteriest, most watching eyes, with green glints.

Some bloods they go together like water—the French Ojibwes: you mix those up and it is all one person. Others are a little less predictable. You make a person from a German and an Indian, for instance, and you’re creating a two-souled warrior always fighting with themself. There are Swedish and Norwegian Indians who abound in this region, and now, Hmong-Ojibwes, those last so beautiful you want to follow them around and see if they are real. Take an Indian who shows her Irish like Cecille, however, and you’re playing with hot dynamite.

Rozin thinks it’s the salt.

When Rozin drives up with the dog in the passenger seat, when she jumps out and runs into the shop and starts scolding and crying, Cecille thinks she’d better calm her sister-cousin down with lunch. She takes her to a café and tells her to try meditative breathing. Rozin breathes deep and slow and begins to focus. First thing, Cecille gets the saltshaker. She salts before she tastes. Rozin has read that’s a habit can lose you a job in an interview lunch. This salting before tasting is supposed to indicate some kind of think-ahead deficiency. Some lack. To Rozin, the pre-salting indicates this notion that the world is automatically too bland for Cecille. Something has to be done, in big and little ways, to liven things up and bring out all the hidden flavors. Something has to be done to normal everyday life, time spent, to heighten and color the hours, to sprinkle interest.

As salt is to food, so lying is to experience.

Or not lying, that sounds too bald. How about sprucing up, spicing, embellishing reality? At first as people get to know Cecille they think everything that happened
happened
just the way she says. But even after lunch, which is simple—health food for Cecille, nuts and carrots and a swipe of peanut butter—she sits back and tells Rozin stories of her students, their progress, then lectures Rozin on all of the amino acids she’s imbibed. On the legendary qualities of the naked almond and the undisclosed secret of ginkgo.

“My memory,” says Cecille, “used to be a blip. Now I recall every single thing that happens hour by hour, minute by minute. Things I’ve read, even license plates. My memory is getting close to photographic.” She doses herself with more grainy pressed oval pills and swallows bottled water by the gallon to clean her liver.

“I’m all set,” she informs her cousin, “to live a hundred years. I want to be around to see my grandchildren.”

She has no kids as yet. Rozin stares at her.

“I have looked into our genealogy,” she says. “It appears we don’t start menopause until well into our fifties. And then, since we’re running around with a two-year-old upon our hip, we just don’t notice. We don’t have time for that hot-flash shit. We bear late.”

She gives Rozin a little curious look.

“So are you taking the girls back?” she asks. “I mean, not that I’m criticizing you, but shouldn’t they be in school or something?”

“I don’t know what to do,” says Rozin. “They get into trouble here. But they get into trouble up there. Should I stay here? Should we give the girls those old names our mothers dreamed of? Those old names scare me. As do my feelings. Should I live with Frank? Should I move back into the house? Should I marry Frank? Should I get another job? Where should I be, what should I do? Where is my ex?”

“Whiteheart Beads?”

“Who else?”

Cecille eyes her cousin significantly.

“I know where he is,” she says.

Rozin opens her mouth to ask where, but she can’t put what she really wants to ask into words. There is this big thing stored up in her, she doesn’t know what it is called. Some smooth, round, important piece of data. She keeps tapping the sphere but she doesn’t know what’s inside. The globe is huge, yellow, sometimes changeable of shape and substance. A weather balloon, sometimes it bobs to the surface of Rozin’s day and she must bat it aside, this thing, this ache, this ambition. She shrugs at Cecille now, helpless to describe its bounding weight.

“I think I know what you are feeling,” says Cecille.

Rozin looks at her eagerly.

“I have these books,” says Cecille, “that belonged to our ancestor Augustus Roy. He was interested in time.”

Rozin is disappointed. Time got her in trouble, in the form of being late. Time lost her job for her. Time seems to be trying to steal her daughters from her, too.

“He tried to trace the effects of time on his women. You remember how they hid their identities from him, how he never knew—or at least pretended not to know—which one was whose mother? How this got them into trouble and they were investigated by the priest and that crooked Indian agent? How his children nearly got taken away until they arbitrarily wrote down Mary as his wife, even though we suspect it was Zosie?”

“Yes,” says Rozin, keenly listening now.

Cecille goes on, tapping the table with her clipped nail.

“He writes about all sorts of connections in the margins of those old books. He writes about Blue Prairie Woman and about how after she was given the name Other Side of the Earth she walked west looking for her daughter. How she found her daughter and gave her the song that she herself learned from her first husband, supposedly a deer husband. The song that called the antelope.”

“I get all that,” says Rozin. “Or I remember it, vaguely, the stories.”

“But haven’t you ever asked yourself,” says Cecille, “how this all affects us? Haven’t you ever wondered how history is working on us? Don’t you sometimes pause in the midst of things?”

“Yes,” says Rozin. “I do pause in the midst of things.”

“And wonder?”

“Yes, I wonder.”

“Think about it,” says Cecille. “We developed as a people over many thousands of years. Our culture. Our ways. Our adaptations. Then all of a sudden in one generation—wham. Warp-speed acculturation. And now we’re the products of two cultures. Something happened in our family that cannot be explained by the culture we live in now. When our mothers tell the stories they heard from their grandmothers and great-grandmothers, we listen and nod as if we think the stories are true. But we don’t think they’re true. We don’t think they’re historical facts. Our minds don’t work the same way as our ancestors’ minds worked. Our minds sort fact from fiction. We think the stories are powerful, maybe, but metaphorical, merely.”

“Yes,” says Rozin. “Yet . . .”

“ . . . yet. I know what you’re thinking.”

“I can’t explain her.”

“I can’t explain her either,” says Cecille. “Do you know I’ve followed her? To try and figure out if her tracks change?”

“And did they?”

“She walked the whole time on sidewalks and streets. So no tracks. But she walked miles in stilettos, which to me seems inhuman.”

“I couldn’t do it,” says Rozin.

“No woman I know could do it, or at least she’d be limping, which Sweetheart wasn’t.”

Rozin nods, thoughtful. “I have this feeling . . .”

“Exactly,” says Cecille. “It’s not the heels, the tracks, nothing you can put your finger on. Yet. It is no accident that Klaus brought Sweetheart Calico here. Her presence is meaningful. History is at work.”

“History is random events, not fate, or coincidence.” Rozin shakes her head.

“How do you know?” says Cecille.

Frank’s Bakery

The bakery has huge steel witch ovens and a concrete floor slippery with grease. There is a dough-pounding table of blocky wood covered with sparkle-shot linoleum. The high windows, coated with years of flour dust, look to Rozin like something from a fable or a movie with their tiny blocks of glass. A tulip, gold stem and leaves, bursts fierce red in the pane. It is an old bakery, much loved and tunneled to by rats, floors creaky with shadows. The doors all set crooked or stuck. There is a built-in deep-fry pit, too, which can be zapped up to bubbling or left to glaze over. It takes up one entire corner of the kitchen. There is a wonderful scent that rises when the grease is fresh. Frank slips in the little slabs of dough and they bob there, bubbling, reminding Rozin of back home at powwows and sweating ladies at the fry-bread stands laughing, pushing those gold rounds at you, hot and welcome.

Rozin, Cecille, and the girls stay in the shop to help Frank the next day. He is absorbed, melting and beating at some transparent substance in his treasured copper pan. The girls asks questions. They can’t help but ask questions. They ask questions even though it takes him so long to answer that they have thought of about twenty more before they manage to pierce his distraction.

“What’s that pan made of?” Cally asks, just a question to warm him up. But he takes a long time even to answer this.

“This pan is made of spirit metal,” he says at last.

“What’s that?” Deanna says immediately, so he won’t lose his train of thought.