Louise Erdrich - The Round House

The air seemed hollow in the house, stale, strangely flat. I realized that this was because in the days since we’d found my mother sitting in the driveway, nobody had baked, fried, cooked, or in any way prepared food. My father only made coffee, which he drank day and night. Clemence had brought us casseroles that were still sitting, half eaten, in the refrigerator. I called for my mother softly, and walked halfway up the stairs until I could see that the door to my parents’ bedroom was shut. I eased back down the stairs into the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator, poured myself a glass of cold milk, and took a big swallow. It was grossly sour. I dumped the milk, rinsed the glass, filled it, and gulped down the iron water of our reservation until the sour taste was gone. Then I stood there with the empty glass in my hands.

Part of the dining room set was visible through the open door, a roan maple table with six chairs around it. The living room was divided off by low shelves. The couch sat just outside a small room lined with books—my father’s den, or study. Holding the glass, I felt the tremendous hush in our little house as something that follows in the wake of a huge explosion. Everything had stopped. Even the clock’s ticking. My father had unplugged it when we came home from the hospital the second night. I want a new clock, he’d said. I stood there looking at the old clock, whose hands were meaninglessly stopped at 11:22. The sun fell onto the kitchen floor in golden pools, but it was an ominous radiance, like the piercing light behind a western cloud. A trance of dread came over me, a taste of death like sour milk. I set the glass on the table and bolted up the stairs. Burst into my parents’ bedroom. My mother was sunk in such heavy sleep that when I tried to throw myself down next to her, she struck me in the face. It was a forearm back blow and caught my jaw, stunning me.

Joe, she said, trembling. Joe.

I was determined not to let her know she’d hurt me.

Mom ... the milk was sour.

She lowered her arm and sat up.

Sour?

She had never let the milk go sour in the refrigerator before. She had grown up without refrigeration and was proud of how clean she kept her treasured icebox. She took the freshness of its contents seriously. She’d bought Tupperware even, at a party. The milk was sour?

Yes, I said. It was.

We have to go to the grocery!

Her serene reserve was gone—a nervous horror welled across her face. The bruises had come out and her eyes were darkly rimmed like a raccoon’s. A sick green pulsed around her temples. Her jaw was indigo. Her eyebrows had always been so expressive of irony and love, but now were held tight by anguish. Two vertical lines, black as if drawn by a marker, creased her forehead. Her fingers plucked at the quilt’s edge. Sour!

They have milk now at Whitey’s gas station. I can bike down there, Mom.

They do? She looked at me as though I’d saved her, like a hero.

I brought her purse. She gave me a five-dollar bill.

Get other things, she said. Food you like. Treats. She stumbled over the words and I realized that she’d probably been given some sort of drug to help her sleep.

Our house was built in the 1940s, a sturdy bungalow-style. The BIA superintendent, a pompous, natty, abnormally short bureaucrat who was profoundly hated, had once lived in it. The house had been sold to the tribe in 1969 and used as office space until it was scheduled to be torn down and replaced by actual offices. My father had bought it and moved it onto the little plot of land near town that had belonged to Geraldine’s late uncle, Shamengwa, a handsome man in an old-fashioned framed picture. My mother missed his music, but his violin was buried with him. Whitey had used the rest of the land that Shamengwa had owned to put up his gas station on the other side of town. Mooshum owned the old allotment about four miles away, where Uncle Whitey lived. Whitey had married a younger woman—a tall, blonde, weather-beaten ex-stripper—who now worked the gas station cash register. Whitey pumped the gas, changed oil, inflated tires, did unreliable repair work. His wife did the books, restocked the shelves of the little store with nuts and chips, and told people why they could or could not charge gas. She had recently bought a large dairy cooler. She kept a smaller cooler filled with bottles of orange and grape Crush. Sonja was her name, and I liked her the way a boy likes his aunt, but I felt differently about her breasts—on them I had a hopeless crush.

Itook my bicycle and a backpack. I had a battered black five-speed with trail-bike tires, a water-bottle clip, and a silver scrawl on the crossbar, Storm Ryder. I took the cracked side road, crossed the main highway, circled Whitey’s once, and slid sideways to a halt, hoping that Sonja had her eye on me. But no, she was inside counting Slim Jims. She had a great big flashy radiant white smile. She looked up and turned it on me when I walked in. It was like a sunlamp. Her cotton-candy hair was fluffed up in a swirly yellow crown and a glossy two-foot ponytail hung out of it, down her back. As always, she was dramatically outfitted—today a baby blue running suit with sequin piping, the top three-quarters unzipped. I caught my breath at the sight of her T-shirt, a paler fairy-wing-transparent tissue. She wore white unmarred spongy track shoes and crystals in her ears big as thumbtacks. When she wore blue, as she did quite often, her blue eyes zapped with startling electricity.

Honey, she said, putting down the Slim Jims and taking me in her arms. There was nobody at the pump or in the store at that moment. She smelled of Marlboros, Aviance Night Musk, and her first drink of the late afternoon.

I was lucky: I was a boy doted on by women. This was not my doing, and in fact it worried my father. He made valiant attempts to counteract feminine coddling by doing manly things with me—we played catch, threw a football, camped out, fished. Fished often. He taught me to drive the car when I was eight. He was afraid all the doting I experienced might soften me, though he’d been doted on himself, I could see that, and my grandma doted plenty on him (and me) in those years before she died. Still, I’d hit a lull in our family’s reproductive history. My cousins Joseph and Evelina were in college when I was born. Whitey’s sons from his first marriage were grown, and Sonja’s relationship with her daughter, London, was so stormy she said she’d never want another. There were no grandchildren in the family (yet, thank god, said Sonja). As I said, I was born late, into the aging tier of the family, and to parents who would often be mistaken for my grandparents. There was that added weight of being a surprise to my mother and father, and the surging hopes that implied. It was all on me—the bad and the good. But one of the chief goods, one I cherished, was the proximity I was allowed to Sonja’s breasts.

I could press against her breasts for as long as she hugged me. I was careful never to push my luck, though my hands itched. Full, delicate, resolute, and round, Sonja’s were breasts to break your heart over. She carried them high in her pastel scoop-neck T-shirts. Her waist was still trim and her hips flared softly in tight stonewashed jeans. Sonja massaged her skin with baby oil, but all her life she had harshly tanned and her cute Swedish nose was scarred by sunburn. She was a horse lover and she and Whitey kept a mean old paint, a fancy quarter horse/Arabian mix, a roan Appaloosa with one ghost eye named Spook, and a pony. So along with the whiskey and perfume and smoke, she often exuded faint undertones of hay, dust, and the fragrance of horse, which once you smell it you always miss it. Humans were meant to live with the horse. She and Whitey also had three dogs, all female, ferocious, and named in some way after Janis Joplin.