The Dance Boots (9 page)

“Here, want to fix a plate for your dad? Take this one with the flowers. Go ask him if he wants a cup of coffee, first.”

“You girls all have such pretty hair, so shiny, eh?”

“Look at her. Doesn't she look like Marguerite?” Our grandmother Maggie died before we were born, and we were each of us girls like her, the aunts told us: Artense, who secretly liked pretty things, brave Suzanne, generous Jeannette, graceful Eveline, bashful Jeanne with our dad's quizzical triangular eyes, all of us like our brave, generous, graceful, bashful grandma, who liked pretty things, who'd looked out at the world with those quizzical triangular eyes like our dad's. And she would be, as she had always been for us, missing,
aandakii
, the Ojibwe word for “somewhere else,” joined then by our finally eternally missing aandakii somewhere-else grandfather Louis, their absence shockingly tangible, permanently and unexpectedly massive in that bright, cold, cleaned dining room.

But that would be nearly two years into the unseen future that was inevitable as the past: for tonight we were between funerals, and the light in front of the house was yellow, soft through the lampshades in the front room, brighter and sharper in the dining room through the
white handkerchief-patterned overhead light fixture. In the kitchen the light was cool blue-white from the florescent ceiling ring, light that thickened and weighted the air, causing the smoke from the cast iron pan of frybread to hover in webs and veils that stuck to our clothes and hair when we walked through the swinging door from the front hallway, where through the beautiful framed oval glass of the front door Uncle Sonny and Uncle George could watch people come up the sidewalk to the front porch, stopping at the door to turn the beautiful egg-shaped iron doorknob, feeling the raised floral design that felt so cool and right, fitting everyone's hand so beautifully. Once in the door, the men slowed or stopped, but the women, their hands full, walked past the old uncles to the swinging kitchen door, into the hazy kitchen, where the aunts and their mother were taking turns at the stove, slowing or stopping only then to talk and drop off what they'd brought—crackers, a bottle of Silver Satin, a saucepan of boiled wieners—and wind up at the dining room table, loaded tonight with food and bottles and cans and ashtrays. When we walked in the house, my mother and I went to the kitchen first, Patsy carrying a plate of her magical peanut cookies, me a bowl of my own specialty, red Jell-O with bananas and whipped cream, passing my father when he stopped by the two old uncles sitting on folding chairs in the hallway, in shadows not touched by the lights. My father said, “Say hello to your uncle Sonny,” who raised one bony yellow hand from where it rested on his cane, weighted by a heavy ring with a red stone, “and your Uncle George,” who stated solemnly, “I haven't seen you in many moons,” and smiled. His smile caused the frame of his glasses, Indian Health Service–issued thick black plastic, to shift crookedly across his wrinkled cheekbones; the heavy glass lenses were two white gibbous moons rising and setting as he nodded slowly.

My boyfriend, Stan, was right behind me. He was a white boy. This was his last night home before he left to go away for college
and I'd decided this was it, it was time for him meet the rest of us. “I didn't know Indians really talked like that,” he whispered behind me. Uncle George heard. He snapped me a look so quickly that I would have missed it if I hadn't expected it—the two white moons rose again and set and then looked down on the plate of food on his lap—after seeing him take in my boyfriend and his starched oxford cloth button-down-collared shirt with amusement earlier. I was mortified but in love; Stan was an exotic, the son of a minister, and was fascinated by us, our family, our neighborhood, our community; he would learn and eventually become one of us, but how could I know that then, in love but mortified. Stan was going away to college in the morning; he would meet college girls who would be dressed like resurrected Indians, white college girls with pretty teeth, white college girls playing Indian in fringed leather jackets and headbands and beads, while back here in the West End, and up on the rez, at Mozhay Point and at Sweetgrass, we kept on biting the dust.

Cousin Butchie had come in right behind us and stood there with two six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon, which he was trying to balance in his left arm so that he could shake hands. Uncle George looked from Stan toward Butch with his lips; Stan understood. He took the beer and led my cousin around several small children, who were playing Candy Land on the floor, and over to the couch. Stan used a church key on the beers for both him and Butch, remembering to be watchful and alert because of what he'd heard about Butchie's being accident prone. So as not to hurt Butch's feelings, Stan clowned, opening the beers with a flourish and presenting Butch's with a deep bow and “Your beer, Sir.” Uncle George watched approvingly; I felt relieved.

We didn't want Butch to lose another finger, like he did at the cannery, where he worked, and which wasn't his real job. His real job, his occupation, was to be Butch, waking before the sun each
day and stumbling gently through the hours simple and pure in his thoughts and ways, his temperament sweetening what life gave us to chew and swallow. Our job was to watch out for if he held his cigarette backward with the lit end too close to his face and for what was in the chair he was going to sit in and to let him know if he didn't notice the streetlights changing color when he took us out in his car. Stan was doing all right; he didn't point too quickly at anything or call Butchie's attention to things that might cause him to have to turn suddenly and spill his beer or collide with the spirits, motions, and thoughts of other people in the house, tonight or in the past or future.

There was an empty chair at the dining room table, next to a white girl with red hair. She seemed almost asleep, hunched over a plateful of food, her left hand holding her rum and Coke in a circle
OK
. She raised and turned her head when I pulled out the chair to sit and stared at me with round green eyes that were unmoving, unblinking, and set as marbles in marble for a moment before they began to drift upward and to the left, then back to my face. Shirley, the most sociable of the aunts, said, “Artense, do you know LaDonna Muldoon? She's from next door. Did youse know each other from school?” and stepped into the kitchen, where someone was calling, “Shirley! Where does Babe keep the hot pads?”

The girl stared at me as if horrified but unable to look away, with those unblinking green marble eyes that set, drifted, set, while I took a plate and filled it, stared without speaking when I offered her the bag of potato chips. I realized that she was not frightened, fascinated, or shocked but only physically stunned by the inability of the potato salad and broiled baloney and cheese sandwiches to soak up her rum and Coke at the same speed she'd swallowed it. She finally blinked, as I imagined a turtle would, slowly, enjoying the burn relief of lids over dry eyes, turned to her drink, took a slow-motion sip, turned back to me, and asked, “Hey … gotta c-c-c-cigarette?”

“She doesn't smoke,” my mother answered for me. She was sitting at the end of the table, perched really, on a kitchen stepstool, with a straight back and an eye I had felt on me as long as I could remember, through walls and over distances and now across Auntie Babe's dining room table.

“What's her name, Muldoon? Muldoon, pleased to meet you.” My dad spoke from the window, where he was sitting against the sill, leaning into the window and stretching his legs so that he almost was the same height as if he'd been standing up. He was as amused by LaDonna's name as Uncle George had been by my boyfriend.

“We were in school together, we know each other,” I began to explain, and LaDonna turned again, slowly and carefully, to see if she could recognize me, appearing to try to focus each eye separately. Because her head was drooping a little, she turned from one side to the other, using only one eye at a time, toward first my right, then my left breast, then because her hair was beginning to lose its teased and sprayed shape, the bird's nest at the top of her skull sweeping a red wing across her face anyway, that eye disappeared while she thought, “Where would I know her from? Smoking in the girls' bathroom? No…. Detention room after that fistfight in the Special Class room? No…. Benched in gym class with the rest of us who left our gym suits at home, that's right.” Muldoon nodded. “Artense … gotta c-c-cigarette?”

Two aspirin took twenty minutes to abate the relentless pounding in my jaw, then I could sleep for twenty minutes, until the surge of my heartbeat to the blood vessels below my molar rolled in waves that increased to the inevitable hourly relentless pounding. Walk between the beds to the hall to the bathroom, take two aspirin, wait twenty minutes, sleep twenty, and wake as the tide rose again. Once,
as I sat up in bed, knees up, with my hands flat on my knees and my forehead resting on the backs of my hands, Eveline woke and looked at me for a minute, her face turned toward me and her head not moving and her eyes not blinking, just watching me through those eyes brown by day and black by night, and I wondered, would she think this was just a dream, would she remember. She was the third of the sisters, and after high school—that would be six months after Louis's funeral—she would get her first job, working for Mr. Fix-All, who squeezed her rear end every time he passed back of the counter where she clerked, and so she didn't go back after the first day. Then she would go to work at the hospital busing trays and loading the dishwashers and wondering if this was as good as it would get and my mother told her to stay there because maybe she could meet a doctor and get married, which of course was not going to happen, why would a doctor notice some skinny young Indian girl who sure she was pretty but why would he ever look to see her bus his tray after he had left, scrape his plate, and throw out his trash, and besides, she was too bashful to ever look at somebody like that, anyway.

All the last week I had pressed cloves into the hole in my molar every few hours. Relief was burning and sweet smelling, sweet tasting and brief. The last several days I had poured Patsy's recommended treatment, a half-teaspoon of whiskey warmed bowl-side in my hand for a minute, over the tooth, between aspirin doses. When I exhaled that relief expelled in fiery fumes that burned my eyes.

In the dark, watching my sister's eyes slowly close in her worried and pretty face as she fell back asleep, I knew this would have to be the last night.

When I got up in the morning and looked in the mirror, my face was yellow, my eyes two peeholes in the snow, as my mother would say. My jaw was a lemon. My limp and sleep-starved hair shone with oil and clung to my head and neck so that from the back I looked
sleek and greasy as an otter. I had thirty dollars, so I called a dentist and took a bus downtown to his office where he handled me too roughly and used both hands to hold the chrome vise he used to twist out my back molar. The dental assistant, a beaten-looking birdlike blonde, reached to hold my hands in hers as he started to pull. He growled at me from his clenched teeth to let go of her hands. She kept her nervously sympathetic blue eyes, forget-me-nots damp and trampled limp on a sidewalk, on mine while he writhed and sweat large teardrop-shaped patches under his arms until with a wrench that pulled my head to the left then the right then the left again he waved my tooth, large, gray-green, long-rooted and bloody, with a hole down the center and side, darkened from the cloves I'd pressed into it, in front of my face. The drained assistant feebly put the tooth into a tiny brown envelope, which I put in my coat pocket, and apologetically charged me eighteen dollars, which left me a girl without a job and twelve dollars to last until I found one. I caught another bus home and rested the left side of my hot face against the cool and greasy window, watching my life thus far, and my father's before me, in the west end of town, rolling dreamscapes of hills, frame houses, corner stores passing across my unmoving and consuming eyes. Artense. Twelve dollars, no job. No Stan, really. Gone to college, dormitory, roommate, nowhere near the West End. Back in the summer, he said. He wasn't really mine, anyway.

When I got home, Patsy had her car coat on, that white corduroy one that she let me borrow once in a while, and the wig I'd bought her when I'd been working, dark blond with light streaks, and a green headband. My dad would be out in front of the house any minute to pick her up. She needed me to watch the kids because they had to go to the hospital. Louis was dead, and somebody was going to have to identify the body. She buried a handful of clean hankies in her coat pocket and fished out a pack of Pep-O-Mint Life Savers. “I know I'm gonna have to be the one to do it; here, have a Life
Saver. Did they pull your tooth? I made hamburger gravy; fix the kids some supper.” Her gestures were hesitant, not her usual quick moves that made it look like she was ready for anything, had prepared and practiced and knew what to do; in those gestures I saw and realized that each day was as new for my mother as it was for me, including this one, and that she wasn't really that much older than I was.

She was wearing my sister's tennies and the mood ring my brother bought her at Target (on her it never varied color from the violet blue of serenity and general well-being). Her skin was smooth and tender around her gray eyes. Here's a true story: A neighbor lady said to me once, “You have a beautiful mother, Artense,” then did one of those free-association things and said in the next beat that I looked just like my dad. My dad and I still laugh about that, and it's what, how many years ago, now? I always liked to look at my mother and never thought to envy her. And she had some big plans for us all. What they were, neither of us knew. But they were big.