Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

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.”