Louise Erdrich - The Round House

Mom began to cry, harshly, and put her forearm to her face and cheek. I moved to sweep up the pieces for her, but she said to leave them, in such a heartsick voice that I went to find Sheryl, who was hiding in her usual place on the far side of the henhouse. When I asked why she’d blamed me, Sheryl gave a hateful look, and said, Because you’re white. I didn’t hold anything Sheryl did then against her, and we became close later on. I was very glad for that, as I have never married, and needed to confide in someone when, five years ago, I was contacted by my birth mother.

Ilived in an addition tacked on to the tiny house until my parents died. They went one right after the other, as the long married sometimes do. It happened in a few months. By then, my brothers and sister had either moved off reservation or built new houses closer to town. I stayed on, in the quiet. One difference was I let the dog, a descendant of one that growled at the welfare lady, live inside with me. Mom and Dad had stationed the television in the kitchen. They had watched it after dinner, bolt upright on their kitchen chairs, hands folded on the table’s surface. But I prefer my couch. I’ve had a fireplace installed with a glass front and fans that throw the heat off into a cozy circle, and there I sit every winter night, with the dog at my feet, reading or crocheting while I listen to the TV muttering for company.

One night the telephone rang.

I answered it with a simple hello. There was a pause. A woman asked if this was Linda Wishkob speaking.

It is, I said. I experienced a strange skip of apprehension. I knew that something was about to happen.

This is your mother, Grace Lark. The voice was tight and nervous.

I set the phone back down in the cradle. Later, that moment struck me as very funny. I had instinctively rejected my mother, left her in the cradle the way she’d left me in mine.

As you know, I am a government employee. At any time, I could have found out the address of my birth parents. I could have called them up, or hey, I could have gotten drunk and stood in their yard raving! But I didn’t want to know anything about them. Why would I? Everything I did know hurt and I have always avoided pain—which is maybe why I’ve never married or had children. I don’t mind being alone, except for, well ... That night, after I’d hung up the phone, I made a cup of tea and busied myself with solving word puzzles. One stumped me. The clue was double-goer, twelve spaces, and it took me the longest time and a dictionary to come up with the word doppelganger.

I had always identified the visitations of my presence as one of those spirits Betty’s doctoring let into my head. It first came when I was taken from Betty for that brief time, and put into the white room. At other times, I had the sensation that there was someone walking beside me, or sitting behind me, always just beyond the periphery of my vision. One of the reasons I let the dog live inside was that it kept away this presence, which over the years had grown to seem anxious, needy, helpless in some way I could not define. I had never before thought of the presence in relation to my twin, who’d grown up not an hour’s drive away, but that night the combination of the call out of the blue and the twelve-letter word in my puzzle set my thoughts flowing.

Betty told me she had no idea what the Larks had named the baby boy, though she probably knew. Of course, as we were different genders, we were fraternal twins and supposedly no more alike than any brother and sister. The night my birth mother called, I decided to hate and resent my twin. I’d heard her voice for the first time, shaky on the phone. He’d heard it all of his life.

I had always thought I hated my birth mother, too. But the woman had called herself, simply, mother. My brain had perfectly taped the words she said. All that night and the next morning, too, they played on a loop. By the end of the second day, however, the intonation grew fainter. I was relieved that on the third day they stopped. Then, on the fourth day, the woman called again.

She began by apologizing.

I am sorry to bother you! She went on to say that she had always wanted to meet me and been afraid to find out where I was. She said that George, my father, was dead and she lived alone and that my twin brother was a former postal worker who had moved down to Pierre, South Dakota. I asked his name.

Linden. It was an old family name.

Was mine an old family name as well? I asked.

No, said Grace Lark, it just matched your brother’s name.

She told me that George had quickly written my name down on the birth certificate and that they had never seen me. She went on talking about how George had died of a heart attack and she had nearly moved down to Pierre to be near Linden but she couldn’t sell her home. She told me she hadn’t known that I lived so close or she would have called me long before.

The light, conversational chatter must have caused a dreamlike amnesia to come over my mind, because when Grace Lark asked if we could meet, if she could take me out to dinner at Vert’s Supper Club, I said yes and agreed on a day.

When I finally hung up the telephone, I stared for a long time at the little log fire set going in the fireplace. Before the call, I’d laid the fire and looked forward to popping some corn. I would throw kernels high in the air and the dog would catch them. Perhaps I’d sit in the kitchen and watch a movie at the table. Or maybe I’d stay by the fire and read my novel from the library. The dog would snore and twitch in his dreams. Those had been my choices. Now I was gripped by something else—a dreadful array of feelings yawned. Which should I elect to overcome me first? I could not decide. The dog came and put his head in my lap and we sat there until I realized that one of the reactions I could have was numbness. Relieved, feeling nothing, I put the dog out, let him in, and went to bed.

So we met. She was so ordinary. I was sure that I had seen her in the street, or at the grocery, or the bank perhaps. It would have been hard to have missed seeing anyone, sometime, in a person’s life around here. But she would not have registered as my mother because I could detect nothing familiar, or like myself, about her.

We did not touch hands or certainly hug. We sat down across from each other in a leatherette booth.

My birth mother stared at me. You aren’t ... her voice fell off.

Retarded?

She composed herself. You got your coloring from your father, she said. George had dark hair.

Grace Lark had red-rimmed blue eyes behind pale eyeglasses, a sharp nose, a tiny, lipless bow of a mouth. Her hair was typical for a woman of seventy-seven—tightly permed, gray-white. She wore stained dentures, big earrings made of cultured pearls, a pale blue pants suit, and square-toed lace-up therapy shoes.

There wasn’t anything about her that called to me. She was just any other little old lady you wouldn’t want to approach. I’ve noticed people on the reservation don’t go toward women of her sort—I can’t say why. A mutual instinct for avoidance, I guess.

Would you like to order? Grace Lark asked, touching the menu. Have anything you like, it’s all on me.

No, thank you, we will split the check, I answered.

I had thought about this in advance and concluded that if my birth mother wanted to assuage her guilt in some way, taking me out to dinner was far too cheap. So we ordered, and drank our glasses of sour white wine.

We got through the dinner of walleye and pilaf. Tears came into Grace Lark’s eyes over a bowl of maple ice cream.

I wish I’d known you were going to be so normal. I wish I hadn’t ever given you up, she wept.

I was alarmed at the effect that these words had on her, and quickly asked, How’s Linden?