Yes, the whole thing is awkward, more than that. Eventually I’m too hungry and tired to go on cleaning. As soon as I emerge from Little Mary’s room, in order not to have to make conversation, I greet all of my parents with a bright smile.
“Oh, I see you’ve met one another!”
“Yeah!” They all answer at the same time, smiles pasted on their chops. My suggestion, that we all take a sunset tour of the reservation, is greeted with such relief that I know my desperation’s mutual. So we all go out, leaving Little Mary absorbed (Whoa—forgot I bought this one!) in sorting thongs in her half-cleaned room. Riding without seat belts in Eddy’s pickup, we see the old round house, the school, the racetrack, the lake, the turtle-shaped tribal office buildings and fiberglass eagle, and the confusingly circular clinic. We get out and play a few slots at the casino. It is dark by the time we drive over to the Superpumper.
We examine the pumps, then walk into the store, up the candy and condiments aisle, down the utilities and snack foods aisle, over to the fast-food cases and the pressurized latte machine. After the entire station is admired, I watch as without a word Sweetie picks up a pair of clean plastic tongs and uses them to pluck a wiener off the hot moving bars of the countertop grill. Carefully, she puts the dog into its bun, pumps a line of ketchup and a line of mustard along its oily flank, then nestles the finished thing in a fluted paper rectangle. Sweetie then presents this hot dog to my adoptive mom.
I freeze. I watch.
Sera has often held forth on the thirty-nine different deadly carcinogens contained in cheap hot dogs such as the one she is holding now. The nitrates are implicated in esophageal and stomach cancer, the red dyes in systemic foul-ups, the binding agents are bad as warfarin, and among the preservatives there is formaldehyde. And then there is the meat itself. Animal scourings. Neural and spinal material likely to contain the prions that transmit Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Hog lips, snout, anus, penile sheaths, jowls, inner ears. I don’t know how to rescue her. For that hot dog is an innocent gesture of pride and conciliation. It says so much. Thank you for raising my daughter. Thank you for sending her back to me. I am grateful for this chance and want to be friends. That hot dog says all this, and more. Yet it is a chilling object, a powerful nexus of poisons representative of dumb, brutish animal suffering.
Sera raises the thing to her lips. I see her take a bite.
One bite, another.
She eats the whole thing, smiles, and says, “Thank you, that was good.”
Child, if ever I poke fun at or even gently deride my adoptive mom’s fierce virtues, if you ever see me roll my eyes at one of her tirades or groan yeah, yeah when she makes a point I’ve heard a thousand times before, just remind me of that gas-station hot dog. The day she ate it all. It was a magnificent thing she did. I saw her, at that moment, as a hero.
* * *
Sera and Glen drive back to the casino hotel where they are going to stay, Sera tells me bravely, so that I can have some time with my birth family. As I hug her good-bye I know she wants to tell me more. But she holds back. She wants to make my first visit to my biological reservation family good. She wants goodness. That is who and what she and Glen are.
So I do stay with my new family and I even, surprise shock, sleep in Little Mary’s room. On a blow-up mattress. On clean sheets. With three fans going. Before I go to bed, I have a moment with Sweetie, a kiss-good-night moment, in the living room. That’s when I tell her about the baby. When I tell her, she just hugs me. She sits on the couch next to me with her arms around me, hugging me, for about ten minutes, and it does not seem awkward at all, though I become very conscious of her breathing, of the catch in her chest from the cigarettes, and the scent of her green apple shampoo. My Potts family doesn’t seem to be the hugging sort, not like my Songmaker parents, who are always touching, always including me in a knot or a tangle of embraces, always enthusiastically twined. There is something showy about the Songmaker closeness, though it is perfectly genuine. The Potts do not seem to think of themselves as “warm.” So far they haven’t defined family characteristics and they certainly do not seem to manufacture them. But when Sweetie hugs me, it is with a gravity and composure that makes the hug into a serious blessing. While the hug is going on, our eyes are shut—that’s right. My Potts mom and I sit on the couch in front of the TV hugging with our eyes shut for about five minutes, maybe even ten. I am comforted by the hug even though I gradually sense that Sweetie actually does know about the rumors of weirdness in the childbearing universe. I feel in her body, as she holds me, a wordless physical concern.
“A baby!” She pulls away from me and puts her hands on my shoulders and looks into my eyes. “A baby.” I think she might dissolve into sobs and gulps, but she only hugs me again, this time with bursts of back pats. There is so much feeling in her and she suddenly seems so open and so revealing of her heart that I decide to ask about my biological father.
“Did my father, my biological father, have any features or genetic illnesses that my baby might inherit?” I ask her. “I should know, now, Sweetie. Please tell me.”
“Oh, god.” She draws away from me and jams her hand in her pocket and pulls out the shoelace, puts it in her mouth. “Makes me wanna smoke.” She begins to chew the lace. “I only had one yet today. I don’t wanna smoke around you neither.” She waves her hand at me, pulls passionately at the shoelace between her teeth.
She wants to tell me, she says, but she still freezes when she attempts to talk about him. Their relationship was one of trauma and heartbreak, she says.
“He’s a kinda medicine man.”
That intrigues me, probably more than it should. Perhaps there is someone in my background with extraordinary powers, after all. The words ‘‘medicine man” give me hope. Maybe Sweetie went to him for healing and maybe something else happened, they fell in love perhaps. Maybe his family could not accept her. Things got so bad that she drank and drugged until I was removed from her. It is all suitably vague.
“It would mean a lot for me to know,” I say, although I already see that my fake memories might be the ones to keep.
“Ey”—she looks at me with the shoelace dangling—“ey.”
“Yes,” I prod. “Was he tall, fat, skinny? How brown? What did he look like?”
“Kinda good-looking in a brutal way,” she nods, her eyes wide. “Like his face, it was high-boned like them Lakota guys, and he was tall. From a knife fight scarred here, and here.” She lightly touches her left cheekbone, her upper lip. “Not so good-looking when I met him. But he had a dark power.”
I smile at her, eager for more.
“You’re kidding! Oh my god, a dark power? Like an Indian Darth Vader!”
Sweetie shrugs and looks away and I know she will say nothing more now. I suddenly realize that what I said was way too close to sarcasm, or maybe it was the way I said it. I’ve embarrassed her and I am instantly ashamed of myself. Sweetie goes to get a drink, she says, of water. I think she might hook herself a beer from the fridge and I get even madder at my thoughtless remark. Maybe this attraction to a scary kind of energy in men is passed down from woman to woman, through time. There was Sweetie’s mistake, and I have had my share of sociopaths. But no more. I have broken precedent, for your father is neither enraged nor depressed. He is not a twisted spiritual advisor. He is not a desperation junkie or a mental health survivor. He is, however, not my type.
The next morning, before I leave for the casino, to meet Sera, I turn on the television. Reports are coming in of experiments hastily conducted on fruit flies, DNA experts who say on the molecular level it is like skipping around in time, and that small-celled creatures and plants have been shuffling through random adaptations for months now. And hasn’t anyone noticed that dogs, cats, horses, pigs, et cetera have stopped breeding true?
And yet . . . there is something about this wash of information that strikes me as too much, and what I mean by that is the information seems flimsier, with bouts of . . .
cuteness. Why would I think this? Am I infected with Eddy’s paranoia? I lean closer. The people who are reading the news are different, I think, and although I never watched the news much it seems that the people are all the same person. And they don’t seem like trained television journalists. They stumble over their words. Fret. They make faces. The women are fewer, the ones who appear seem awkward, all in their twenties, white with white teeth, yellow or brown hair, sparkling eyes. The men are all white with white teeth, sharp jawlines, sparkling eyes. I switch through the few channels that come in, over and over, increasingly panicked. There are no brown people, anywhere, not in movies not on sitcoms not on shopping channels or on the dozens of evangelical channels up and down the remote.
Something is bursting through the way life was. Everything has changed while I wasn’t looking, changed without warning or word.
I hit the power button and try to breathe. Adrenaline isn’t good for a baby, right? Eventually, I go to the kitchen and sit down for tea and toast with Sweetie. Little Mary is already off at school, and Grandma Virginia is still dozing lightly underneath her golden quilt. We talk of little things, ignore the big. I call the casino to talk to Sera and Glen and make plans, but they checked out early. Probably they decided to drive back down to Minneapolis, but Sera does not answer her cell phone. Out of range, I think, but it makes me uneasy. As I leave, Sweetie hands me a folded sheaf of paper through the car window and says, “Read this when you stop to pee.”
The first is from Sera. It says, “Martial law. Remember what that means.” I do remember.
Okay, I think. I can do that. Get prepared. Stock up. Get my money. Hide my passport.
The other papers are from Eddy.
* * *
Page 3028
An Announcement That Brought Incongruous Joy
By rights, knowing what we do know even now, the announcement made to me by my stepdaughter should have been a reason to kill myself today. I should have feared the inevitable pain that a pregnancy in times like these—uncertain to say the least—will bring to her and to our family. I should have wanted to opt out of my role. But instead, as she told me she would be having a baby, I found myself thinking in a very natural and even excited way about this child, who will be our first grandchild. It was an unexpected reaction, given that in this present world crisis we have no idea what this child might be like, and given that Mary a.k.a. Cedar is so recently rediscovered. But I am not about to argue with any positive emotion that breaks through the darkness of the veil. I felt as though for a moment the curtain was ripped aside and the light shone lovingly in.
Then, just as abruptly, the curtains were again pulled shut.
At present, although the counter of my convenience store is brightly lit, and I have just handled a large number of lucrative transactions, I once again exist in the blind monotony of my illness. The pen is too heavy to lift.
After shopping at the giant discount grocery halfway back down to the Cities, I go next door to the Wells Fargo bank branch. I’ve kept eight thousand dollars in an old-fashioned savings account, which I’m supposed to be able to access anytime. The teller, however, purses her lips when she sees my withdrawal slip. “I don’t think so,” she says, sliding back the slip.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think we’ve got that much cash today.”
She’s a round, burly, fluffy-haired blond lady with apple rosy cheeks and bright lipstick. She’s wearing lime green with dark red touches here and there. If she were in her twenties, she could definitely be one of the fake newscasters. Maybe I look more Native than usual today, darker and more raven-haired from being on the reservation. I hope that’s it. I hope she’s not telling the truth.
“I’d like to see the manager.”
“He’s off.”
“Well then, I’ll wait.”
A wilting, heat-mad line is forming behind me. The teller—Marjorie, a name plate informs me—says, “I’m going to have to ask you to step aside, ma’am.”
“But I can’t do that.” I use my most pleasant passive-aggressive manner. “I need my money because I’m pregnant.”
With a deep, resentful, ominous stare, Marjorie picks up the telephone and pushes a button. Her cheeks purse, she pulls in air. Puts down the phone.
“Okay,” she hisses at me, “walk back please and Hawaii will be waiting for you.”
And this woman named Hawaii is waiting. I quickly fill out paperwork and close my account. Hawaii counts the money out in hundreds and fifties.
“You’ve got a nice name,” I say. She was probably conceived in Hawaii, I think, on a happy and expensive honeymoon.
“What’s happening?” I ask her.
She shrugs. Her face is pale. She looks up at the clock.
“I don’t think we’ll last til noon.”
As I walk back down the hall, I see that the line I was in now stretches out the door. I cross the parking lot and enter the red doors of a Target, where I do something overly normal and self-indulgent. I shop for you. I buy tiny clothes and blankets and diapers, even a couple of toys recommended for newborn babies. I fill two huge white bags and pay with my emergency credit card. I ignore the lines around the bank, stretching on and on, into the parking lot. I pat you. I get into the car, but instead of starting it up, I freeze. The line to the bank is even longer. And the cash is probably, now, being parceled out to each person in small amounts. If things go way south, and we head into a barter economy, I need the new cash.
I see a drive-up liquor store at the end of the strip mall. So I drive up.
“I need some help,” I tell the clerk, a droopy fellow with spiked gray hair.
“All right.” He leans on the window.
“What do people like to drink when they’re desperate?”
“Anything. But you don’t look desperate.”
“It’s not for me, it’s for the end of the world.”
“Oh, that. Well, pull around and I’ll load you up.”
“And while you’re at it, twenty, thirty cartons of Marlboros?”
“No problem at all.”
It is as if the liquor store man deals with end-times hoarders on a regular basis. I load up. Put it all on my credit card, again, in a bet against the survival of credit card companies. On the way home I make another stop and fill the spaces between the cases with a thousand dollars worth of shotgun shells, bullets, and deer slugs. Back on the road, I drive with calm care. If I were stopped, the car searched, could I claim that I was stocking up for a drunken target-practice party? I’d be the first to arrest me. And what about a random spark of flame? I drive carefully and am exceedingly relieved when I pull into my driveway. I decided to unload the cases through the half-built garage, then treat myself. I can’t wait to clean out a drawer for you, to snip off the tags and wash the newness from everything that will touch your skin. To gather up the little T-shirts and jumpers and flame-retardant sleepers and place them in perfectly folded piles.
August 11
My midwife, Gretchen, scheduled an appointment for me on a health plan left over from a job I had last year. My COBRA has lapsed, but all hail some computer glitch, because it worked. But even Gretchen isn’t going to show up today. She doesn’t want to risk getting caught on the insurance thing. I refused amniocentesis but persuaded her to order me a class 2 diagnostic ultrasound mainly because I knew the equipment was sophisticated and I wanted to see you as clearly as I possibly could. I’ve researched you, kiddo. You are between months 4 and 5. You have passed through the age of miracles. Gone from tadpole to vaguely humanoid and lost your embryonic tail. Absorbed the webs between your toes and fingers and developed eyelids, ears, a tiny skeleton. Grown a 250,000-neuron-per-minute brain. You can already squint, frown, smile, hiccup. In fact, you are hiccuping regularly as I walk down the long, sage green corridor.
The medical attendants in the ultrasound room are unusually perky, cheerful, and snoopy.
“Didn’t anyone come with you??
?? one asks.
“The baby did.”
“Just pull your shirt up,” says another in a gratingly musical voice. I am on edge because who wouldn’t be? And also, I am suddenly self-conscious about being so alone among these strangers. Apparently other women bring friends, maybe even a husband.
A brawny curly-headed blonde helps me onto the table and I tuck my shirt up underneath my breasts. The doctor, tall and businesslike, unsmiling, enters and shakes my hand. He sits on a stool next to the swivel chair just at my right thigh, where a technician, another young blond woman, but sinewy, more serious and formal than the first one, touches a keyboard, adjusting a computer screen.
“Let’s get going,” says the doctor.
The technician puts a dollop of clear gel on my skin and holds the probe like a fat pencil. I know the probe contains traducers that produce and receive sound. The machine is already producing sound waves at frequencies of 1 to 20 million cycles per second. Impossible of course to hear. Propped on my elbows, I watch as the computer interprets the signals bouncing off you, a modest white mound in the dim air.
“This will be cold,” says the technician, but it isn’t very cold. I put the attendants out of my mind. My pulse jumps. I am thrilled to be exactly here. I decide that I have come alone on purpose, in order to meet you in the privacy of my heart.
The technician moves the wand carefully, stopping twice. “There you are,” she says as she discovers you. She rotates the traducer to one side of my stomach and keeps moving it. At first there is only the gray uterine blur, and then suddenly the screen goes charcoal and out of the murk your hand wavers. It is detailed, three-dimensional, and I glimpse tiny wrinkles in your palm and wrinkle bracelets around your wrist before your hand disappears into the screen’s fuzz. There is something about your hand, just a feeling, and I am upset for a moment. Just a hand—but a sense of clarity and power. I want to get off the table. I want to say Enough, no more, but at the same time I want to see you again. The way you waved, just that second, and disappeared—I am so overcome that I can hardly breathe.