The Round House (15 page)

When you are little, you do not know that you are screaming or crying—your feelings and the sound that comes out of you is all one thing. I remember that I opened my mouth, that is all, and that I did not shut it until I was back with Mom.

E
very morning, until I was about eleven years old, Mom and my dad, Albert, tried to round my head and work my arms and legs. They made me lift a little bag filled with sand that Mom sewed into a weight. They woke me first and brought me into the kitchen. The woodstove was going and I drank a glass of thin, blue milk. Then Mom sat in one kitchen chair and put me in her lap. She rubbed my head, then cupped her powerful fingers and pulled my skull into shape.

You're gonna see things sometimes, Mom told me once. Your soft spot stayed open longer than most babies. That's how spirits get in.

Dad sat across from us in another chair, ready to stretch me from head to toe.

Put your feet out, Tuffy, he said. That was my nickname. I put my feet in Dad's hands and he pulled me one way while Mom held tight around my ears and pulled the other.

My brother Cedric had given me the name Tuffy because he knew once I went to school I would get a nickname anyway. He didn't want it to refer to my arm or head. But my head—so misshapen when I was born that the doctor had diagnosed me for an idiot—was changed by Mom's squeezing and kneading. By the time I was old enough to look in a mirror, I thought I looked beautiful.

Neither Mom nor Dad ever told me I was wrong. It was Sheryl who gave me the news, saying,
You are so ugly you're cute
.

I looked in the mirror the next chance I got and noticed that Sheryl was telling the truth.

The house we lived in still has a faint smell of rotted wood, onions, fried coot, the salty smell of unwashed children. Mom was always trying to keep us clean, and Dad was getting us dirty. He took us into the woods and showed us how to spot a rabbit run and set a snare. We yanked gophers from their holes with loops of string and picked pail after pail of berries. We rode a mean little bucking pony, fished perch from a nearby lake, dug potatoes every year for school money. Mom's job had not lasted. Dad sold firewood, corn, squash. But we never went hungry, and there was affection in our house. I knew I was loved because it was complicated for Mom and Dad to get me from the welfare system, though I'd helped out their efforts with my endless scream. All of which is not to say they were perfect. Dad drank from time to time and passed out on the floor. Mom's temper was explosive. She never hit, but she yelled and raved. Worse, she could say awful things. Once, Sheryl was twirling around in the house. There was a shelf set snugly in the corner. It held a cut-glass vase that was very precious to Mom. When we brought her wildflower bouquets, she would put them in that vase. I had seen her washing the vase with soap and polishing it with an old pillowcase. Then Sheryl's arm knocked the vase off the shelf and it struck the floor with a bright sound and shattered into splinters.

Mom had been working at the stove. She whirled around, threw her hands out.

Damn you, Sheryl, she said. That was the only beautiful thing I ever had.

Tuffy broke it! said Sheryl, bolting out the door.

Mom began to cry, harshly, and put her forearm to her face and cheek. I moved to sweep up the pieces for her, but she said to leave them, in such a heartsick voice that I went to find Sheryl, who was hiding in her usual place on the far side of the henhouse. When I asked why she'd blamed me, Sheryl gave a hateful look, and said, Because you're white. I didn't hold anything Sheryl did then against her, and we became close later on. I was very glad for that, as I have never married, and needed to confide in someone when, five years ago, I was contacted by my birth mother.

I
lived in an addition tacked on to the tiny house until my parents died. They went one right after the other, as the long married sometimes do. It happened in a few months. By then, my brothers and sister had either moved off reservation or built new houses closer to town. I stayed on, in the quiet. One difference was I let the dog, a descendant of one that growled at the welfare lady, live inside with me. Mom and Dad had stationed the television in the kitchen. They had watched it after dinner, bolt upright on their kitchen chairs, hands folded on the table's surface. But I prefer my couch. I've had a fireplace installed with a glass front and fans that throw the heat off into a cozy circle, and there I sit every winter night, with the dog at my feet, reading or crocheting while I listen to the TV muttering for company.

One night the telephone rang.

I answered it with a simple hello. There was a pause. A woman asked if this was Linda Wishkob speaking.

It is, I said. I experienced a strange skip of apprehension. I knew that something was about to happen.

This is your mother, Grace Lark. The voice was tight and nervous.

I set the phone back down in the cradle. Later, that moment struck me as very funny. I had instinctively rejected my mother, left her in the cradle the way she'd left me in mine.

As you know, I am a government employee. At any time, I could have found out the address of my birth parents. I could have called them up, or hey, I could have gotten drunk and stood in their yard raving! But I didn't want to know anything about them. Why would I? Everything I did know hurt and I have always avoided pain—which is maybe why I've never married or had children. I don't mind being alone, except for, well . . . That night, after I'd hung up the phone, I made a cup of tea and busied myself with solving word puzzles. One stumped me. The clue was double-goer, twelve spaces, and it took me the longest time and a dictionary to come up with the word doppelganger.

I had always identified the visitations of my presence as one of those spirits Betty's doctoring let into my head. It first came when I was taken from Betty for that brief time, and put into the white room. At other times, I had the sensation that there was someone walking beside me, or sitting behind me, always just beyond the periphery of my vision. One of the reasons I let the dog live inside was that it kept away this presence, which over the years had grown to seem anxious, needy, helpless in some way I could not define. I had never before thought of the presence in relation to my twin, who'd grown up not an hour's drive away, but that night the combination of the call out of the blue and the twelve-letter word in my puzzle set my thoughts flowing.

Betty told me she had no idea what the Larks had named the baby boy, though she probably knew. Of course, as we were different genders, we were fraternal twins and supposedly no more alike than any brother and sister. The night my birth mother called, I decided to hate and resent my twin. I'd heard her voice for the first time, shaky on the phone. He'd heard it all of his life.

I had always thought I hated my birth mother, too. But the woman had called herself, simply, mother. My brain had perfectly taped the words she said. All that night and the next morning, too, they played on a loop. By the end of the second day, however, the intonation grew fainter. I was relieved that on the third day they stopped. Then, on the fourth day, the woman called again.

She began by apologizing.

I am sorry to bother you! She went on to say that she had always wanted to meet me and been afraid to find out where I was. She said that George, my father, was dead and she lived alone and that my twin brother was a former postal worker who had moved down to Pierre, South Dakota. I asked his name.

Linden. It was an old family name.

Was mine an old family name as well? I asked.

No, said Grace Lark, it just matched your brother's name.

She told me that George had quickly written my name down on the birth certificate and that they had never seen me. She went on talking about how George had died of a heart attack and she had nearly moved down to Pierre to be near Linden but she couldn't sell her home. She told me she hadn't known that I lived so close or she would have called me long before.

The light, conversational chatter must have caused a dreamlike amnesia to come over my mind, because when Grace Lark asked if we could meet, if she could take me out to dinner at Vert's Supper Club, I said yes and agreed on a day.

When I finally hung up the telephone, I stared for a long time at the little log fire set going in the fireplace. Before the call, I'd laid the fire and looked forward to popping some corn. I would throw kernels high in the air and the dog would catch them. Perhaps I'd sit in the kitchen and watch a movie at the table. Or maybe I'd stay by the fire and read my novel from the library. The dog would snore and twitch in his dreams. Those had been my choices. Now I was gripped by something else—a dreadful array of feelings yawned. Which should I elect to overcome me first? I could not decide. The dog came and put his head in my lap and we sat there until I realized that one of the reactions I could have was numbness. Relieved, feeling nothing, I put the dog out, let him in, and went to bed.

S
o we met. She was so ordinary. I was sure that I had seen her in the street, or at the grocery, or the bank perhaps. It would have been hard to have missed seeing anyone, sometime, in a person's life around here. But she would not have registered as my mother because I could detect nothing familiar, or like myself, about her.

We did not touch hands or certainly hug. We sat down across from each other in a leatherette booth.

My birth mother stared at me. You aren't . . . her voice fell off.

Retarded?

She composed herself. You got your coloring from your father, she said. George had dark hair.

Grace Lark had red-rimmed blue eyes behind pale eyeglasses, a sharp nose, a tiny, lipless bow of a mouth. Her hair was typical for a woman of seventy-seven—tightly permed, gray-white. She wore stained dentures, big earrings made of cultured pearls, a pale blue pants suit, and square-toed lace-up therapy shoes.

There wasn't anything about her that called to me. She was just any other little old lady you wouldn't want to approach. I've noticed people on the reservation don't go toward women of her sort—I can't say why. A mutual instinct for avoidance, I guess.

Would you like to order? Grace Lark asked, touching the menu. Have anything you like, it's all on me.

No, thank you, we will split the check, I answered.

I had thought about this in advance and concluded that if my birth mother wanted to assuage her guilt in some way, taking me out to dinner was far too cheap. So we ordered, and drank our glasses of sour white wine.

We got through the dinner of walleye and pilaf. Tears came into Grace Lark's eyes over a bowl of maple ice cream.

I wish I'd known you were going to be so normal. I wish I hadn't ever given you up, she wept.

I was alarmed at the effect that these words had on her, and quickly asked, How's Linden?

Her tears dried up.

He's very sick, she said. Her face became sharp and direct. He's got kidney failure and is on dialysis. He's waiting for a kidney. I'd give him one of mine but I'm a bad match and my kidney is old. George is dead. You are your brother's only hope.

I put my napkin to my lips and felt myself floating up, off the chair, almost into space. Someone floated with me, just barely perceptible, and I could feel its anxious breathing.

Now is the time to call Sheryl, I thought. I should have called her before. I had a twenty-dollar bill with me and when I landed I put that money on the table and walked out the door. I got to my car but before I could get in, I had to run to the scarp of grass and weed that surrounded the parking lot. I was throwing up, heaving and crying, when I felt Grace Lark's hand stroking my back.

It was the first time my birth mother had ever touched me, and although I quieted beneath her hand, I could detect a stupid triumph in her murmuring voice. She'd known where I lived all along, of course. I pushed her away, repelled with hate like an animal sprung from a trap.

S
heryl was all business.

I'm calling Cedric down in South Dakota. Listen here, Tuffy. I'll get Cedric to pull the plug on this Linden and you can forget this crap.

That's Sheryl. Who else could make me laugh under the circumstances? I was still in bed the next morning. I'd called in sick for the first time in two years.

You're not seriously even considering it, Sheryl said. Then, after I didn't answer, Are you?

I don't know.

Then I really am calling Cedric up. Those people ditched you, they turned their backs on you, they would have left you in the street to die. You're my sister. I don't want you to share your kidneys. Hey, what if I need one of your kidneys some day? Did you ever think of that? Save your damn kidney for me!

I love you, Sheryl said, and I said it back.

Tuffy, don't you do it, Sheryl warned, but her voice was worried.

After we hung up, I called the numbers on the card Grace Lark had put in my pocket, and made hospital appointments for all the tests.

W
hile down in South Dakota, I stayed with Cedric, who was a veteran, and his wife, whose name is Cheryl with a
C
. She put out little towels for me that she had appliquéd with the figures of cute animals. And tiny motel soaps she'd swiped. She made my bed. She tried to show me that she approved of what I was doing, although the others in the family did not. Cheryl was very Christian, so it made sense.

But this was not a do-unto-others sort of thing with me. I already said that I do not seek pain and I would not have contemplated going through with it unless I couldn't bear the alternative.

All my life, knowing without knowing, I had waited for this thing to happen. My twin was the one just out of sight, right beside me. He did not know he had been there, I was sure. When the welfare stole me from Betty and I was alone in the whiteness, he held my hand, sat with me, and grieved. And now that I'd met his mother, I understood something more. In a small town people knew, after all, what she had done in abandoning me. She would have to have turned her fury at herself, her shame, on someone else—the child she'd chosen. She'd have blamed Linden, transferred her warped hatreds to him. I had felt the contempt and triumph in her touch. I was thankful for the way things had turned out. Before we were born, my twin had the compassion to crush against me, to perfect me by deforming me, so that I would be the one who was spared.