Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

“Listen.” Klaus tries to look pitiful. “Go get her, will you? Bring her back to me.”

“Get who?”

“You know,” says Klaus, very shy, “please. My sweetheart.”

“Your sweetheart who doesn't love you. Let her go,” says the dog.

I WONDER IF I am going to change now, thinks Richard, as the ambulance rockets through Gakaabikaang. I am not going to die, which is a disappointment. After he left Frank’s bakery, he walked about a mile, then collapsed on his head. He may have a concussion, but he can’t seem to pass out again. Richard pauses in his thoughts to feel the piercing regret. But there is also an odd pulse of pleasure as his life threads strongly through him, stabilized. His ambulance-ride meditation continues.

Why not live as if I did die? Why not live as if nothing matters? All the consequences of being the old Richard will land upon me, but perhaps I can endure. After all, I am the last of a family who mostly perished underneath a grand piano that nobody knew how to play. At my grandmother’s funeral a young nun tried, but the piano was ruined by the same rain and snow that had weakened their lungs. Yet here I am, a survivor. This life is heavy, but also, it is nothing.

The ambulance stops and he is wheeled into a lighted place of shining surfaces. He is obviously an indigent man with no insurance, so he is parked in the hall with no painkillers. When the pain starts, it is fierce. He moans and sobs until a nurse gives him a wonderful shot that erases his disappointment in living.

Don’t ever forget, says the morphine, how sweet I am.

The hallway lights dim and a humming hush falls over the actions of the nurses and doctors and trained paramedics and cleaning people and the other patients, too, with their urgent complaints and serious faces. A young girl is wheeled by; she is the age of his daughters. A pale child weeping with fear.

Richard thinks of the young nun who tried to play the piano for his grandparents. Love washes powerfully through his heart.

Oh, pale child, he thinks, pale child of astounding beauty. Don’t be afraid. But she continues to wail down the hall until heavy doors shut soundlessly.

RICHARD DRIFTS, SLEEPS, and when he wakes he is stitched up, bandaged, discharged, and walking the street. The morphine leaves his body stealthily, whispering, You want me. And then the pain is outrageous. Richard picks up one foot and then the other until he is at a shelter where they know him. They feed him mashed potatoes, gravy, watery corn, and give him a cot to sleep on. He sinks into a long blackness. But then the ripsaw snore of the man sleeping next to him stabs regularly into his brain, and that night, staring into fuzzy space, Richard understands he can no longer bear the random snores of other winos. In prison, he will be safer from random snores — a roommate, maybe, whose snore he will get used to. He will be warm. He will be fed and there will be lots of other Indians. There will be a television and a routine and maybe he can figure out his next move in life.

I will surrender myself to justice, he says to the snoring man.

THE NEXT DAY, Richard walks to the police station, through the doors that open so easily and shut so completely.

“I surrender,” he says to the desk clerk.

The desk clerk takes his information and puts it into a computer.

“Stay here,” he says after a moment, and indicates a line of chairs.

“Good-bye, random snores,” says Richard, and sits down. He waits for an hour. The officer makes a phone call. Richard waits some more. Finally, a man in a gray suit with no tie walks up to him and hands him a packet of papers. The man walks away. Richard opens the packet. They are divorce papers.

Richard walks back to the desk clerk.

“I surrendered to a different thing,” he says. “I disposed of toxic carpet in an ordinary barn. There should be some charges against me sitting in your computer.”

The desk clerk politely looks Richard up again, but says that there is nothing pending.

“No warrant? Nothing from the EPA?” Richard can hear desperation in his voice.

“Not at this time,” says the clerk.

“This federal administration sucks,” says Richard as he walks out the door. “No concern at all for illegal dumping. And my head hurts like hell.”

“Wait!” says another officer. “Your name once again?”

“I was in the newspapers,” Richard says modestly. From his pocket he takes a wine-blurred clipping.

“So you’re the asshole that screwed that nice old Norwegian couple,” says the officer. “I’m sure there is a warrant somewhere.”

Richard reclaims his chair and sits back, shuts his eyes.

THE BRUISED PODS of cardamom. Sweet cake flour fine as powder. Scent of vanilla easing up the stairwell. Frank is browning tart crusts. Makes his own lemon curd to fill them. Juices the lemons, shreds the peel, stirs the pudding in a thick-bottomed kettle with the timeless assurance of a man whose beloved wife is just upstairs. They have finally moved in together, so they are, he figures, married in the old-time Indian way. As in the old-time traditions, he will keep fixing up her house forever. But instead of hunting, he’ll bake. Rozin is at her desk organizing, studying, taking notes, all with the relieved intensity of a born-again student. She has decided to finish her undergraduate degree and go to law school. She breathes the vanilla wafting up the stairs and feels on her skin the slow increasing tension of the baking crusts below her. Vaguely she anticipates the moment of piercing sweetness, the first bite, the taste he will bring her at noon.

She shuffles her note cards and lets the screen saver — silver bolts of lightning turning purple, magenta, yellow, silver again — streak and snag across the humming face of her computer. Rozin wants to do something special for Frank’s birthday, something memorable, something even a little outrageous so that, in the future, he will remember how much she cared about his birthday. Even if they never get married (she considers this just living together), they will tell each other about it and eventually the birthday narrative will be just as good as, say, a wedding.

Frank is bored by gestures of storybook romance. Flowers and music leave him blank, even fancy wines. Those things are too predictable anyway. She needs something more, something that will reach toward Frank in a way that touches some essence of who he is, and it will be private, and it will be just the two of them, which will surprise him, because Frank has heard her speak wistfully of gathering together the very people he would invite to, say, a wedding. But she will instead create some sexy private moment, some personal ritual that would be known only to them.

To this end, she sets her mind.

In a how-to-get-him magazine article, she once read about a woman who greeted her man at the door wearing only plastic wrap. It is, she considers, a sort of miracle substance to Frank — he uses it all the time when he bakes. She thinks of getting a roll from the kitchen and making of herself the surprise. But then, the stuff itself is so clingy, so staticky, so dry and unwieldy and easily ripped that she doubts it will feel that good to make love dragging in its folds. She thinks of wearing only chocolate, or homemade raspberry jam, or sugar frosting, or peach. She thinks of lemon curd and cheesecake filling. Considers buttering herself and rolling in a bath of cinnamon. Or fluff, she thinks, go cheap maybe. Marshmallow fluff. Marshmallows. A bikini of tiny multicolored marshmallows. Frank can take his time eating them, but then, once she is naked, he will be stuffed full of stale marshmallows. Rozin’s mind drifts. Whatever they are. Are they made of marsh? Or mallow? She imagines preparing the cake, the thing itself, the cake from the recipe he has perfected. The blitzkuchen. Theirs. But then what? How will she wear it? How will they eat it? What if she makes a mistake? In her dream she sees them grind the cake to crumbs between them. Yes, and no. She will wear something else, or some lack of something. She comes full circle to the plastic wrap. Thinks obsessively about the way to devise her dress.