The Reader Berlin - HOME IS ELSEWHERE - An Anthology

I leaned out my window into a shock of icy air to search the top of the airshaft for Orion. Instead of a deep distance of stars, the night held an immediate iridescence of snowflakes.

Summer was Elsewhere.

*

“Vegans can’t be choosers.”

Nana thunked this hard little nugget of wisdom down on her barn door of a table every time my adult self came to visit. Worried smooth after so much use, it rolled back across the listing oak toward her own plate. She trapped it between her thick calloused fingers and spattered it down in the spreading pool of thinned-out blood under the roast beef. She said it and laughed. Served it up with potatoes belly-up in butter, soft-boiled carrots, green lettuce ripped from her garden, hand-cranked rosemary ice cream. I smiled, plastic-eyed, slurped my limp carrots, masticated my dry salad. Made myself the spitting image of what was once the cow whose rump had sat medium-well on her white serving platter.

Nana was raised on the reservation. A half-breed, she called herself cheerfully. No one else ever dared to. She married my grandfather and immediately took up his peculiar no-no-don’t Methodism. No booze, no gambling, don’t even think about dancing. Her inky hair and her swirling cotton dresses were long. She marked her Bible with rainbows of paper, one color for each shade of heathen. When they came wading up to her door through the summer air, shiny new Mormons on a mission in all their white short-sleeved button-down earnestness, she’d invite them in for a sweating glass of her bitter iced tea. She’d open that doorstop of a Bible to whatever passage matched their particular sins, and fling the words into the freshly ironed air as the boys let go of their crisp outlines and melted. Then she’d pour more tea and stare them down while they sweated through her questions as penance. One firefly spangled night, I asked why they kept sending new recruits all the way out to her. “Training,” she told me, with her silver coyote grin.

Her house was a summer sauna and a winter igloo. It had corners. Spider-webbed nooks and crannies, shadowy window seats. Drawers crammed with mysterious bits of iron and porcelain, treasure chests of buttons, a shiny sugar maple clothes-press full of sweet straw hats and stiff white gloves and secret lacy things to wear under clothes.

The nearest town was Elsewhere, Oklahoma. Used to be called the Cherokee Strip before it was Elsewhere, OK. Between town and Nana’s house the two-lane blacktop time-traveled back to rutted gravel and packed dust. The gardens in Elsewhere were orderly rows of roses and irises, hollyhocks and snapdragons, tomatoes caged in chicken wire. Nana’s riot of earth blazed with useful plants. Wild Bergamot, Beebalm, Horsemint. Lavender breathing with bumble bees, Prickly Pear for her cactus jelly. Mysterious twists dried and labelled in amber medicine bottles. Compassplant, Spiderwort, Selfheal, Sassafras. Larkspur, Shooting Star, Black Samson, Firewheel. Chickasaw and Mexican Plum, Blood Sage and Indian Fire. A poetry of plants on her pantry shelves.

Blooming on the prairie beyond her borders were bittersweet Butterfly Weed and plumy Juneberry, carpets of Bluestars and Wild Columbine in crimson and white, Indian Paintbrush staining the billowing grasses orange. Amethyst Ironweed, tender Buffalo Grass waving, waiting for long-gone buffalo. Outsize sage the perfect stage set for a Clint Eastwood finger-gun scene. Stands of River Birch where there were no rivers, Loblolly pine in the folds of low rolling hills like the rolls above Nana’s knees. Black Hickory singing with purple martins. Slippery Elm for climbing just to challenge the name, every kind of ash tree sifting the sunlight. Burr Oak, Blackjack, Chinkapin. Names to ignite imagination, to tie a little girl to earth.

*

Nana was brimful of stories. Trails of tears, land runs. Talking coyotes playing tricks. Cannibal women with hearts of unmeltable ice. Young girls swinging on lariat ropes hung from the stars, all of them dreamlike, disappearing with the dawn. As the years circled and closed in around her, she went quiet. She stopped writing letters when the palsy shook her hands. I’d call on weekends and she’d listen down the long-distance line. Every three minutes she’d squawk, “Well, this is costing you a fortune. Better say goodbye.” I was the one who couldn’t let her go.

Nana used to greet the stars by name from her porch swing on liquid summer evenings, crickets singing backup. But her favorite constellation only rose above the horizon in winter. We were first introduced on a Christmas visit. The ebony net of sky brimming with snared stars, the crunchy snow beneath our boots so bright it made me squint. Orion, the hunter.

“We came from there,” she told me, pointing to the brightest star in the middle of his belt. Alnilam. A name like a magic spell. “Our people. And one day we’ll return.”

Jericho. Nana’s name for the shoebox apartment where I spent the schoolyears of my childhood. Whenever my parents threatened to shout down the walls, I’d tell myself my real people were made of stardust, and one day they’d come for me Those deep winter nights I’d kneel on my bed with my face pressed to the icy breath-fogged window, keeping watch, prey to the hunter, until the last stars stepped back into the dawn greying sky.

Granddad died before I was born. Tractor, tornado. They found the tractor two counties over, sitting upright like a lost dog waiting for its master. They never found Granddad. Nana drove his tractor to the funeral. After they lowered the empty casket into the dry earth, Nana puttered straight out and sold that tractor, walked the eight miles home. The Nana I knew did everything for herself, always wondered why everyone else couldn’t manage to do the same.

“So leave him there. Come on out here.”

Her voice is the natural finale to the symphony of my father tire screeching home after dawn, snare drumming his key in the lock, buzzsaw snoring on the arm of the sofa. I sat ten feet away with a bowl of cereal I’d poured myself. Our cereal came off the bottom shelf at the supermarket, generic see-through bags all the way down below the bright boxes with fairytale frogs, talking tigers, leaping leprechauns. My small fingers and a spineless, unruly plastic bag, stray Honey-Os on the counter, in the sink, on the floor. My mother, the phone wedged between her jaw and her shoulder, sighed a tornado sigh and swept them all up, put them back in the bag. Iceberg jugs of milk flooded our thin bowls. My mother, next to me at the table, about to brim over herself. The phone pressed to her ear, her chin changed into a walnut, a thin hand over her eyes. I stared hard at the line of spittle dropped down into the lake of saliva under my father’s cheek, the thin thread of it connecting him to the threadbare sofa, to the tiny living room, to us. Nana’s voice conducted down the line, clear as Elsewhere.

“Well, if you can’t, then what are you calling me for?”

*

The winter my father juiced our maroon station wagon through the front wall of the neighbor’s living room was the first Christmas I spent alone with Nana. “Why a stallion?” Nana demanded. “Are they anatomically correct?”

I turned him on his back to check, saw the smooth, perfectly uncomplicated plastic. Shook my head.

“Little girls and their stallions.” Nana muttering for me to overhear. “What’s wrong with a nice strong mare?”

The set had come wrapped up in red paper printed with white snowflakes, a stiff stick-on bow like a frozen firework. The only thing under Nana’s Christmas tree that wasn’t hand-knitted or educational. A beige plastic stagecoach with six little plastic horses in different stages: standing, walking, running, rearing. Hooked two at a time into the rigid harness. Five were brown, but the most majestic was black. No plastic adults to steer this wild west world, only a mustang in the lead.