Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

All day, people stagger in from the tae kwan do school down the street, exhausted from Cecille’s workouts, craving butterfat icing and reflex-slowing caramel-fudge fritters. They have to touch the cases where these things are displayed on doilies. They press close to the delectables, breathe, smudge, cough the air full of predatory microorganisms. Rozin can see their instant relief, after they have paid. Opening the crinkly white bag, exposing sweet deep-fried dough, biting into the spot on the powdered bismarck that holds the squirt of cherry jelly, they sometimes give out a small involuntary moan.

The grandmas drive down to stay a week. Noodin comes into the shop wearing a pair of pink-beaded earrings that Rozin gave her. It is clear from the implacable set of her mouth and her blink at the sight of Frank that she is sneaking away for a jolt of sugar. She is small as ever and her face reminds Frank of one of those squashed-in little dogs. Soft round flat cheeks, heavy chin, a grim wide mouth. Her nose is pug round, brown as a knot of tobacco, and her eyes are dark and yielding with a kind of liquid mournfulness. Her big gaze sweeps over the cakes and cookies. The contents of the lighted case seem to her a tragic puzzle. She sighs over all the choices. She slowly opens her purse. And here’s where when Frank knows he is in trouble, not one word yet exchanged. Her little plastic snap purse is held together with a rubber band.

Those rubber-banded snap purses. Watch out, Frank thinks. You see an old lady slowly draw one forth and you know you are going to pay for her lunch and pay beyond that in ways more than money or time. No way you can spiritually afford to charge an old lady with a broken, old, green-plastic snap purse who has, in her pride, saved and used to close it a blue rubber band off a bunch of broccoli she bought to aid her slow digestion. No way you can charge her a dime. Even if she points at the biggest, puffiest, creamiest, most expensive piece of cake in the case you can’t charge her.

No way you can get out of marrying her daughter, either. Not that you want to.

“Please,” Frank says, sliding the piece of cake at her over the counter, already on a six-inch paper plate, with a plastic fork and napkin beside. “It’s on the house.” Grandma Noodin rears back as though suspicious. As though she has just recognized Frank.

“Frank,” she says, and already her snap purse has vanished.

“I’ve been hoping you would stop in.” Frank comes around the counter to sit down with her, intent on not letting her out of his sight. It is unseasonably hot, one of those wild April heat waves that tell you humans may not last on this planet. Frank has already closed the door and turned on the air-conditioning.

“Miigwech,” she growls. “What kind of cake is this?”

He tells her, by pulling out a chair and tidying the corner that he is going to try to keep her in. “This is my attempt at the world-renowed blitzkuchen.”

Grandma takes an immediate bite.

“Needs something.”

“What?” he asks.

Her face goes intent with thought, trying to discover what spice or ingredient the cake is missing. He watches her sit back, solid as a gray lake rock, chewing in meditation. In the window, looking out as she slowly licks the schlag from her plastic fork, she gives a secret little smile. A familiar expression from up north. Frank is the one suspicious of her now. She’s toying with him, this tiny bulldog lady.

She knows, but she won’t tell.

“So Nookomis, I’ve actually been looking all over for you,” Frank starts again.

“Oh?” She opens her eyes in what may even be real surprise. “Good thing I came in here then. What did you need?”

She asks Frank, right out, what he wants of her. Just like that. And just like that, faced with the question, he asks not for permission to marry Rozin, which requires many gifts and a longer buildup, especially since Rozin is still married; no, he asks Noodin for the secret ingredient.

“Secret of what?”

“This cake.”

Noodin looks down at the crumbs.

“You know the story,” she says. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“No.”

“I’ll tell you then.”

Frank holds his breath.

“The cake was baked by a man afraid for his life. He put his fear into the cake.”

The revelation sets Frank back in his chair. If he were to make the cake, say, as he was misdiagnosed with cancer or if someone held a gun to his head only it was loaded with blanks… or if you desperately loved a woman and were trying to think how to marry her when suddenly her husband showed up…

Noodin makes significant eye contact with Frank, tips an imaginary bottle delicately to her lips. And there he is.

FRANK DOESN’T RECOGNIZE Rozin’s husband at first, for Richard Whiteheart Beads is saggy-skinned, drooping like a week-old helium balloon, and he is sick, with a bruise the green of old cooked liver on his cheek, and puffy eyelids. Around his head a frayed red bandanna. A U of MN Golden Gophers sweatshirt from the Salvation Army with its sleeves chopped off and the gopher just a faded ghost gopher. Shorts sagging underneath a watermelon-tight paunch. Shorts held up with rope. Flapping tennies and no socks. He stands before the counter barely holding himself upright and then he turns. Directly, for he knows, he fixes Frank with such a stare, like looking down into the bottom of a dry well. His mouth opens. A powerful wave of sour breath hits Frank as he croaks three times like a raven, “Cawg… cawg… cawg…,” then stops, gulps dry, and looks even harder at Frank and croaks in a terrible whisper.

“Nibi…”

Wheeling backward, whirling his arms like a suddenly light scarecrow tossed by a wind in the air, Richard stagger-skips backward to the door. Frank leans toward him in a tangle of conflicted feeling, but he is out, into the street. Frank, Grandma, and Klaus watch his runaway figure round the corner and vanish.

“That was quick.” Noodin returns to her cake, presses up the remaining crumbs with the tines of her fork.

“Aawww… we just wanted… a drink. A drink of water.”

Klaus is still standing in the middle of the store. He voice is wracked, bone-dry. Klaus tries to speak more words, tapping his throat. He’s in an even worse state than Richard. He sways back and forth making small mewling noises of thirst.

Frank steps up to Klaus and catches him before he can pitch down. He pulls Klaus’s arm over his own shoulder and drags him back into the bakery. Once behind the swinging steel doors, Frank rolls Klaus gently out on a stainless-steel bread table. Makes him drink a cup of water sip by sip. Turns down the lights. Frank takes an apron or two off the wall hooks and drapes them across his cousin’s arms and chest and bare legs.

Rozin walks in with Cally and Deanna. Frank can tell from their faces that they missed seeing Richard, and he’s relieved. The girls’ eyes go big when they see Klaus sprawled out on the bread table.

“Major disinfection needed there,” says Rozin.

“Klaus needs rest,” says Frank to the girls, his big face steady. “You come on out to the front. Your uncle needs to sleep.”

For an hour or so, Frank works out front, doing nothing more than checking the ovens in the bakery, the specific one in which he’s got the next blitzkuchen. Fear! What about frustration? From time to time, he makes sure that his relative is still peacefully passed out. Frank mops down the entry floor and even goes outside and sweeps off the spotless sidewalk. Rozin watches him standing there gazing out at street life, massive from behind, casting a shadow around his feet like a little black pool. She blinks, thinks maybe a dog pauses, just for a moment, out of the searing noon sun. The hot and sticky day is the reason Klaus became desperate enough to throw himself into the entry of the bakery shop.