I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents’ house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it. Yet when I say that I wanted there to be
Halfway to Hoopdance, it occurred to me that the grocery store was closed on Sunday.
Of course it is! My father’s chin jutted, his hands tightened on the wheel. He had a profile that would look Indian on a movie poster, Roman on a coin. There was a classic stoicism in his heavy beak and jaw. He kept driving because, he said, she might have forgotten it was Sunday, too. Which was when we passed her. There! She whizzed by us in the other lane, riveted, driving over the speed limit, anxious to get back home to us. But here we were! We laughed at her set face as we did a U-turn there on the highway and followed her, eating her dust.
She’s mad, my father laughed, so relieved. See, I told you. She forgot. Went to the grocery and forgot it was closed. Mad now she wasted gas. Oh, Geraldine!
There was amusement, adoration, amazement in his voice when he said those words. Oh, Geraldine! Just from those two words, it was clear that he was and had always been in love with my mother. He had never stopped being grateful that she had married him and right afterward given him a son, when he’d come to believe he was the end of the line.
Oh, Geraldine.
He shook his head, smiling as we drove along, and everything was all right, more than all right. We could now admit we had been worried by my mother’s uncharacteristic absence. We could be jolted into a fresh awareness of how we valued the sanctity of small routine. Wild though I saw myself in the mirror, in my thoughts, I valued such ordinary pleasures.
So it was our turn, then, to worry her. Just a little, said my father, just to let her in for a taste of her own medicine. We took our time bringing the car back to Clemence’s house and walked up the hill, anticipating my mother’s indignant question, Where were you? I could just see her hands knuckled on her hips. Her smile twitching to jump from behind her frown. She’d laugh when she heard the story.
We walked up the dirt driveway. Alongside it in a strict row, Mom had planted the pansy seedlings she’d grown in paper milk cartons. She’d put them out early. The only flower that could stand a frost. As we came up the drive we saw that she was still in the car. Sitting in the driver’s seat before the blank wall of the garage door. My father started running. I could see it too in the set of her body—something fixed, rigid, wrong. When he got to the car, he opened the driver’s side door. Her hands were clenched on the wheel and she was staring blindly ahead, as she had been when we passed her going the opposite way on the road to Hoopdance. We’d seen her intent stare and we’d laughed then. She’s mad at the wasted gas!
I was just behind my father. Careful even then to step over the scalloped pansy leaves and buds. He put his hands on hers and carefully pried her fingers off the steering wheel. Cradling her elbows, he lifted her from the car and supported her as she shifted toward him, still bent in the shape of the car seat. She slumped against him, stared past me. There was vomit down the front of her dress and, soaking her skirt and soaking the gray cloth of the car seat, her dark blood.
Go down to Clemence, said my father. Go down there and say I am taking your mother straight to the Hoopdance Emergency. Tell them to follow.
With one hand, he opened the door to the backseat and then, as though they were dancing in some awful way, he maneuvered Mom to the edge of the seat and very slowly laid her back. Helped her turn over on her side. She was silent, though now she moistened her cracked, bleeding lips with the tip of her tongue. I saw her blink, a little frown. Her face was beginning to swell. I went around to the other side and got in with her. I lifted her head and slid my leg underneath. I sat with her, holding my arm over her shoulder. She vibrated with a steady shudder, like a switch had been flipped inside. A strong smell rose from her, the vomit and something else, like gas or kerosene.
I’ll drop you off down there, my father said, backing out, the car tires screeching.
No, I’m coming too. I’ve got to hold on to her. We’ll call from the hospital.
I had almost never challenged my father in word or deed. But it didn’t even register between us. There had already been that look, odd, as if between two grown men, and I had not been ready. Which didn’t matter. I was holding my mother tightly now in the backseat of the car. Her blood was on me. I reached onto the back window ledge and pulled down the old plaid quilt we kept there. She was shaking so bad I was scared she would fly apart.
Hurry, Dad.
All right, he said.
And then we flew there. He had the car up past ninety. We just flew.
My father had a voice that could thunder out; it was said he had developed this. It was not a thing he’d had in his youth, but he’d had to use it in the courtroom. His voice did thunder out and fill the Emergency entrance. Once the attendants had my mother on a gurney, my father told me to call Clemence. Then wait. Now that his anger was the thing filling the air, crackling clean, I was better. Whatever had happened would be fixed. Because of his fury. Which was a rare thing and got results. He held my mother’s hand as they wheeled her into the emergency ward. The doors closed behind them.
I sat down in a chair of orange molded plastic. A skinny pregnant woman had walked past the open car door, eyeing my mother, taking it all in before she registered herself. She slumped down next to a quiet old woman, across from me, and picked up an old
Don’t you Indians have your own hospital over there? Aren’t you building a new one?
The emergency room’s under construction, I told her.
Still, she said.
Still what? I made my voice grating and sarcastic. I was never like so many Indian boys, who’d look down quiet in their anger and say nothing. My mother had taught me different.
The pregnant woman pursed her lips and looked back at her magazine. The old woman was knitting the thumb of a mitten. I went over to the pay phone, but I didn’t have any money. I went to the nurse’s window, asked to use the phone. We were close enough for the call to be local, so the nurse let me use it. But there was no answer. So I knew my aunt had taken Edward up to adore the sacrament, which got them out of the house on Sunday nights. He said that while Clemence adored the sacrament, he meditated on how it could be possible that humans had evolved out of apes only to sit gaping at a round white cracker. Uncle Edward was a science teacher.
I sat back down in the waiting room, as far from the pregnant lady as I could get, but the room was very small, so that wasn’t far enough. She was thumbing through that magazine. Cher was on the cover. I could read the words beside Cher’s jaw:
Looked like that poor woman had a miscarriage or maybe—her voice went sly—a rape.
The woman’s lip lifted up off her rabbit teeth as she looked at me. Her ratty yellow hair quivered. I looked right back, into her lashless hazel eyes. Then I did something odd by instinct. I went over and took the magazine out of her hands. Still staring at her, I tore off the cover and dropped the rest of the magazine. I ripped again. Cher’s identical eyebrows parted. The lady who was knitting pursed her lips, counting stitches. I gave the cover back and the woman accepted the pieces. Then suddenly I felt bad about Cher. What had she done to me? I got up and walked out the door.
I stood outside. I could hear the woman’s voice, raised, triumphant, complaining to the nurse. The sun was almost down. The air had gone cold, and with the darkness a stealthy chill entered me. I hopped up and down and swung my arms. I didn’t care what. I was not going back in until that woman was gone, or until my father came out and told me that my mother was all right. I could not stop thinking about what that woman had said. Those
