Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

“What have you been doing?” It is a light conversational question asked in a tone of voice that makes it into a deep and unanswerable query. What have I been doing?

“Lately?” I suppose my voice is wary.

“In general.”

“We have a lot to do,” I say, although things have actually been slow.

“People die.”

“It’s not only death,” says Elsie. “Sometimes people want to downsize, dramatically. Or they move into assisted living.”

“Assisted living. Beistehendsleben . That sounds better.”

“I’m turning in,” Elsie says, and then she gets up and walks into the house. I try to rise, too, but Kurt puts his hand on my arm (he knows exactly where I am) and says, “Don’t go.”

I am a nondescript-looking person, dark hair, dark eyes, fair skin. A face that is neither flashy nor plain. Medium build, medium height. My size is always medium, my pants length regular. I favor neutral colors. Medium heels. There is really nothing memorable or interesting or odd or certainly beautiful about me. So when Krahe touches me and I feel very suddenly that I am all of these things—odd, beautiful, interesting, drawn in color—it is very difficult. I sit back, his hard-palmed hand still on my arm. I am not capable of moving away. He speaks to me.

“I don’t understand it,” he says.

Outside in the dense black thicket of weeds and scrub that surrounds the mowed portion of the yard, a few hold-out fireflies pulse. Sometimes the wind takes them, scattering their lights. Beyond the tall grass the orchard weeps fruit. The branches of the old trees are loaded with tough little apples that the bears like. I’ve seen one on a dark afternoon, browsing there. Maybe there’s one now.

“Do bears come out at night?” I ask him. I can’t think of what to say, and he doesn’t answer. “Because I think there might be one in the orchard.”

“We never talked. You never answered your phone. You walked away from me.”

“I still don’t want to talk. There isn’t anything to say.”

“Of course there is, there is a lot to say. Why did you do it?”

“I had to do it.”

“Listen, I have not gone to a woman since you locked your door on me. I have been waiting; I work with stone. I know how to wait, but tonight I couldn’t help myself.”

His voice is so raw I put my hands over my eyes. I am silent, paging through my thoughts like a diary, knowing that anything I say will be wrong. Or worse than wrong. I am so afraid that my hand shakes and I know my voice would quiver if I spoke out loud. The last crickets in the grass are seething and sighing, and I listen to them, clinging to my silence with desperation now, waiting for him to leave. He stirs and stretches his arm out and touches mine. I close my eyes and a kind of brilliance is wheeling there, a green, blazing circle. We sit together for a long time, not talking, not saying anything. At last, Kurt tells me things I’ve heard before. Other men have said these things to me. It is almost a relief to hear them. His voice floats up in the dark, disembodied, talking and talking: I am cold. I am strange. I have abandoned him. I have hurt him. I begin answering by rote, apologizing, but not explaining. We fill a crack with words that freezes and becomes a rift that keeps widening until a gulf filled with words plunges down between us. After that we just kept throwing our words into the pit. I know there must be better ways, forms of communication that work, ways that women manage to stay with men and men with women. But what are they, what can they be, other than words? The words collect between us until the coyotes start up. Then we fall quiet, sit there together, and he holds my hand. It seems to me that we are closer, listening to that unknown language pouring out of unknown heart, than we were when we tried to exchange our words. And maybe even closer still after the coyotes are finished, when he does not try to sleep with me, but leaves. And closest of all when I go inside, close the door behind me, bolt it, and walk up the stairs alone.

I sleep so heavily that I forget where I am in the morning and for a few seconds I am oddly suspended. I could be anywhere, dead or still dreaming. But when I open my eyes I have the feeling that I’ve just returned from an unknown journey. My vision’s sharper and there is a newness to my familiar windows, the green pine tips outside, the thin light of autumn. My room is painted a pale cream color and for a few minutes I watch the light move through the tree branches outside and pool across the wall with its formal bookshelves stacked with year after year of journals, notebooks, diaries. Something about last night, despite the waste of words and my fear, has caused this surprised and secret calm.

Sipping thick coffee downstairs, I watch my mother carefully as she slices and chews the same dry toast she makes for herself every morning. This will be our routine every day until she dies, but she won’t take me with her, as in my childish wish. No, I’ll be left on this earth to make what I can of my own days.

“Let’s sell the business,” I say to her.

She turns to me; her delicately slanted eyes have a dark shine to them, a wary challenge. Of course she has always known what she can expect from me, and she has counted on that.

“And do what?” she asks.

“Let’s be wholesale importers and go traveling. We’ll have a house on Grandma’s land and I’ll write. The history of the drum. Everything Bernard told us. Or poems. Poems to Netta. We can do anything.”

She ignores the fact I’ve mentioned Netta. Pretends not to hear.

“On what money?”

“Let’s sell the house, too.”

“No, we can’t, we can’t do that.” She shakes her head, staring at me as one does in the first shock of panic or betrayal. She tries to right herself. “You’re talking wild stuff!” Her mouth sags a little to one side and I see, with the most wrenching tenderness, how old she really has become. It never was my sister’s loss, or the loss of my father, that bound me to this place. It was my loyalty to my mother and the determination that she should not live a life of grief alone. But I see now that she has done that anyway—for what has my presence been to her but a reflecting mirror? I have matched the gentleness and precision of her life with mine. We’ve really been one person, she and I. But we must go deeper now, and perhaps apart. We must see what each of us is made of, what differing stories. I have always been afraid of talking to my mother on this level, of breaking through the comforting web of our safe behavior. We have knitted it daily and well.

“Where were you that day?” I ask.

“What day?” She doesn’t look at me. She pretends this is a normal question.

“The day she stepped out of the tree.”

“Jumped?”

“No, she stepped off a high branch. Daddy let me drop. She saw him let me fall. Maybe she thought I was dead. I don’t know. She just stepped off. The car was gone. You were off somewhere. Where?”

Now she looks straight at me with the crust of toast in her fingers, and sees that I am going to wait until she answers me. She swallows her bit of bread.

“She stepped from the branch,” she says.

She nods and shuts her eyes as though looking into herself, and I know she has always seen another picture and believed another story: which one exactly doesn’t matter—it is just that it had to do with forgiving me, which she has done every single day. And I fear that she cannot stop forgiving me even now. But then she opens her eyes, and with the air of having made a decision, she speaks.

“I was with someone.”

“You had an affair?” I ask this stupidly, for now I’m the surprised one.

She nods and says quietly, “I was not home very much at all. Don’t you remember?”