Sherman Alexie - Ten Little Indians

ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON IN the student union café, Corliss looked up from her American history textbook and watched a young man and younger woman walk in together and sit two tables away. The student union wasn’t crowded, so Corliss clearly heard the young couple’s conversation. He offered her coffee from his thermos, but she declined. Hurt by her rejection, or feigning pain — he always carried two cups because well, you never know, do you? — he poured himself one, sipped and sighed with theatrical pleasure, and monologued. The young woman slumped in her seat and listened. He told her where he was from and where he wanted to go after college, and how much he liked these books and those teachers but hated those movies and these classes, and it was all part of an ordinary man’s list-making attempts to seduce an ordinary woman. Blond, blue-eyed, pretty, and thin, she hid her incipient bulimia beneath a bulky wool sweater. Corliss wanted to buy the skeletal woman a sandwich, ten sandwiches, and a big bowl of vanilla ice cream. Eat, young woman, eat, Corliss thought, and you will be redeemed! The young woman set her backpack on the table and crossed her arms over her chest, but the young man didn’t seem to notice or care about the defensive meaning of her body language. He talked and talked and gestured passionately with long-fingered hands. A former lover, an older woman, had probably told him his hands were artistic, so he assumed all women would be similarly charmed. He wore his long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail and a flowered blue shirt that was really a blouse; he was narcissistic, androgynous, lovely, and yes, charming. Corliss thought she might sleep with him if he took her home to a clean apartment, but she decided to hate him instead. She knew she judged people based on their surface appearances, but Lord Byron said only shallow people don’t judge by surfaces. So Corliss thought of herself as Byronesque as she eavesdropped on the young couple. She hoped one of these ordinary people might say something interesting and original. She believed in the endless nature of human possibility. She would be delighted if these two messy humans transcended their stereotypes and revealed themselves as mortal angels.

“Well, you know,” the young man said to the young woman, “it was Auden who wrote that no poem ever saved a Jew from the ovens.”

“Oh,” the young woman said. She didn’t know why he’d abruptly paraphrased Auden. She wasn’t sure who this Auden person was, or why his opinions about poetry should matter to her, or why poetry itself was so important. She knew this coffee-drinking guy wanted to have sex with her, and she was considering it, but he wasn’t improving his chances by making her feel stupid.

Corliss was confused by the poetic non sequitur as well. She thought he might be trying to prove how many books he’d skimmed. Maybe he deserved her contempt, but Corliss realized that very few young men read poetry at Washington State University. And how many of those boys quoted, or misquoted, the poems they’d read? Twenty, ten, less than five? This longhaired guy enjoyed a monopoly on the poetry-quoting market in the southeastern corner of Washington, and he knew it. Corliss had read a few poems by W. H. Auden but couldn’t remember any of them other than the elegy recited in that Hugh Grant romantic comedy. She figured the young man had memorized the first stanzas of thirty-three love poems and used them like propaganda to win the hearts and minds of young women. He’d probably tattooed the opening lines of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” on his chest: “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” Corliss wondered if Shakespeare wrote his plays and sonnets only because he was trying to get laid. Which poet or poem has been quoted most often in the effort to get laid? Most important, which poet or poem has been quoted most successfully in the effort to get laid? Corliss needed to know the serious answers to her silly questions. Or vice versa. So she gathered her books and papers and approached the couple.

“Excuse me,” Corliss said to the young man. “Was that W. H. Auden you were quoting?”

“Yes,” he said. His smile was genuine and boyish. He had displayed his intelligence and was being rewarded for it. Why shouldn’t he smile?

“I didn’t recognize the quote,” Corliss said. “Which poem did it come from?”

The young man looked at Corliss and at the young woman. Corliss knew he was choosing between them. The young woman knew it, too, and she decided the whole thing was pointless.

“I’ve got to go,” she said, grabbed her backpack, and fled.

“Wow, that was quick,” he said. “Rejected at the speed of light.”

“Sorry about that,” Corliss said. But she was pleased with the young woman’s quick decision and quicker flight. If she could resist one man’s efforts to shape and determine her future, perhaps she could resist all future efforts.

“It’s all right,” the young man said. “Do you want to sit down, keep me company?”

“No thanks,” Corliss said. “Tell me about that Auden quote.”

He smiled again. He studied her. She was very short, a few inches under five feet, maybe thirty pounds overweight, and plain-featured. But her skin was clear and dark brown (like good coffee!), and her long black hair hung down past her waist. And she wore red cowboy boots, and her breasts were large, and she knew about Auden, and she was confident enough to approach strangers, so maybe her beauty was eccentric, even exotic. And exoticism was hard to find in Pullman, Washington.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“Corliss.”

“That’s a beautiful name. What does it mean?”

“It means Corliss is my name. Are you going to tell me where you read that Auden quote or not?”

“You’re Indian, aren’t you?”

“Good-bye,” she said and stood to leave.

“Wait, wait,” he said. “You don’t like me, do you?”

“You’re cute and smart, and you’ve gotten everything you’ve ever asked for, and that makes you lazy and dangerous.”

“Wow, you’re honest. Will you like me better if I’m honest?”

“I might.”

“I’ve never read Auden’s poems. Not much, anyway. I read some article about him. They quoted him on the thing about Jews and poems. I don’t know where they got it from. But it’s true, don’t you think?”

“What’s true?”

“A good gun will always beat a good poem.”

“I hope not,” Corliss said and walked away.

Back in Spokane, Washington, Corliss had attended Spokane River High School, which had contained a mirage-library. Sure, the books had looked like Dickens and Dickinson from a distance, but they turned into cookbooks and auto-repair manuals when you picked them up. As a poor kid, and a middle-class Indian, she seemed destined for a minimum-wage life of waiting tables or changing oil. But she had wanted a maximum life, an original aboriginal life, so she had fought her way out of her underfunded public high school into an underfunded public college. So maybe, despite American racism, sexism, and classism, Corliss’s biography confirmed everything nearly wonderful and partially meritorious about her country. Ever the rugged individual, she had collected aluminum cans during the summer before her junior year of high school so she could afford the yearlong SAT-prep course that had astronomically raised her scores and won her a dozen academic scholarships. At the beginning of every semester, Corliss had called the history and English teachers at the local prep school she couldn’t afford, and asked what books they would be reading in class, and she had found those books and lived with them like siblings. And those same teachers, good white people whose whiteness and goodness blended and separated, had faxed her study guides and copies of the best student papers. Two of those teachers, without having met Corliss in person, had sent her graduation gifts of money and yet more books. She’d been a resourceful thief, a narcissistic Robin Hood who stole a rich education from white people and kept it.