Sherman Alexie - Ten Little Indians

“Every time you masturbate, you give birth to ten thousand mosquitoes!”

“I hope Hitler eats your dog in hell!”

So my mother was naive and vengeful, just like Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, and about 99 percent of all the other famous world leaders you ever heard about. But she wasn’t famous; she was only my mother, and she so miserably failed the parenting quiz that she decided to become my best friend. She never asked my opinion of her parenting skills, but I would have told her this: “Dear Ma; you forgot my ninth birthday, and still to this day have not remembered you forgot it. I’ll probably be presented with a ninth-birthday card on my elderly and senile deathbed. But you’re also the woman who drove me to school during my entire scholastic career, all the way from White Rabbit’s Wonderful Preschool until I graduated from Garfield High School, because it’s pretty darn cute to ride the bus when you’re six years old, but you’re on the Loser Cruiser once you enter the teen years. As a mother, you suffered from a soap-opera style of amnesia ( Let’s deal with stressful events by pretending they never happened! ) but were critically aware of the Jane Austen-Dinner-Party-meets-Cannibal-Zombies-on-the-Moon social structures of public schools. I truly hated the goofy clothes you wore, which were all sorts of white-hippie-chick-porn-star-Jane-Fonda-in- The Electric Horseman trendy, but you did frame three of my baby outfits and hang them in the front hallway. So I guess you were hopelessly romantic and easily distracted, a B-plus mother, certainly good enough to get into Matriarchal State University but not quite good enough for St. Mary’s College of the Blessed Womb Warriors.”

But my mother never asked me what I thought of her, and she went crazy after she failed that parenting quiz, and attempted to spend every moment of her waking life with me. She took me to seven baseball games and fourteen poetry readings, and I found both pastimes remarkably similar:

Am I supposed to clap now?

Was that a strike?

Why is he scratching his nuts?

She took me to folk-music concerts and ballets. Once, during Swan Lake, a secondary ballerina took a wrong turn onstage and smashed into the prima ballerina, sending them both sprawling to the ground. Undaunted, the women jumped back up and resumed dancing, eliciting tremendous applause from the previously sedate crowd (as if they’d only then realized these women were serious athletes and had made a highlight-worthy recovery), but my mother wept.

“What’s wrong, Ma?” I asked.

“That poor woman,” she said. “Her career is over.”

“No, they’re okay, they’re both okay, look at them dance.”

“But the young one,” said my mother, weeping so profusely that people around us were getting uncomfortable. “She will never get to dance with the prima again. They’ll punish her. I know it. They’ll make fun of her. They’ll fire her, and she’ll quit dancing and regret it for the rest of her life.”

“I think you’re overreacting, Ma.”

“No, no,” she said, so loudly I’m sure the ballerinas heard her. “Don’t you see? Your whole life can be determined by one moment. You make one choice, one mistake, and that’s it. You’ve made the map you’ve got to follow for the rest of your life.”

“Ma, you’re making a scene.”

She was always making scenes. She yelled at mothers and fathers who publicly spanked their children ( Hey, Mussolini, how would you like me to do that to you? ), and commented loudly at any display of public rudeness:

“Oh, look at Prince Pushy of Monaco, cutting in line. Hey, Prince, do you keep your crown in your ass?”

“Oh, excuse me, excuse me, Ms. Moneybags, but I see that your party of eight left only a dollar tip for the waitress. I assume that was an honest mistake.”

“Okay, okay, everybody, listen up, we’re all waiting in line to get our driver’s licenses, but this man here, he’s cursing a lot, so he obviously needs his license more than anybody else in the history of the world. Can somebody please get him a special driver’s license, please, hurry.”

If she’d been a man and talked like that to strangers, she would have been punched four times a week. How does a self-proclaimed pacifist get herself into so many confrontations? I don’t know; I don’t understand her, not then or now. She’s a contradiction. She has always contained multitudes. But no matter how unpredictable she can be, she fought plenty of justified battles as well. When my elementary school principal, a ROTC pack leader named Wolff (not his real name!), wanted to control my exuberant nature by shoving sedatives down my throat on a highly regular basis, my mother stormed into his office with a bottle of lithium. She poured the pills onto Wolff’s desk, swallowed one dry, and then told Wolff it was his turn.

“I figure if we’re going to give my kid a narcotic,” she said, “then we both should know how it will make him feel.”

The Wolff-Man never mentioned pills again. And my mother never told anybody (not even me) her lithium pills were only aspirin. I discovered it only when I took one of the pills and expected to see a life-altering vision but felt nothing except pain relief.

That was my mother: fierce and protective, open and permissive ( No, don’t call it your wang-doodle, it’s your penis ), and a total embarrassment.

“Ma,” I yelled at her. “Why can’t you ignore me sometimes, like all of the other moms and dads? Why can’t you just give me a pair of scissors and tell me to run, boy, run?”

She sat me down once a week and gave me sex advice:

“Condoms make you less sensitive, and you’ll last much longer, thereby giving your partner a much more pleasurable experience.”

“If you spend an hour kissing every part of your lover’s body while purposefully ignoring her orifices, then she will feel more like a holy woman and less like a pincushion.”

“Make her laugh while making love, and she will love you forever.”

Yes, I admit my mother’s sexual advice was outstanding, but what son wants to hear these things from his mother?

“Ma, you’re going to kill me,” I shouted.

“I understand your anger,” she said.

She “understood” everything because she bought self-help books that taught her how to understand the teenage male ego. She understood my rage, my volcanic need to kick holes in every interior door of the house.

“I understand your need to physically express yourself,” she said, “so I won’t fix these doors until you find an alternative means of communicating.”

Man oh man, she talked exactly like that. She negotiated with me as if I were holding twelve hostages at gunpoint.

But she really started to fall apart when she decided to become a “progressive and whole woman.” I have nothing against progressive and whole women—

Q: What kinds of men could resent those kinds of women?

A: Almost all of them.

— but I was a reflexive and cracked teenage boy. If Estelle had pursued her wholeness by herself, I would have supported her gladly: “Go get whole, Ma, rah, rah, rah, sis, boom, bah, go get whole, Ma!” But since she was my new best friend, I was forced to attend every single one of her wholeness seminars, consciousness-raising workshops, and spiritual discussion groups. Don’t misunderstand me. Even at thirteen years of age, I knew I was a liberal with socialistic leanings and would vote for socialistic liberals my entire adult life (my spouse, Mary, is the information officer for the local chapter of the Green Party), but there’s no boy or man alive who could have survived that summer without serious emotional repercussions.