let’s go in your room,” I said inside, my eyes adjusting to the shadowy midday light.
“No one else is here,” she said. “He can’t hear.” She kept the blinds drawn and the curtains half-drawn, as she always had when we lived in the city. There, it had been for privacy. If you left any blind open in our old place, you were bound to catch some old pervert sitting at his window in the next building over, waiting to catch a glimpse of anything we might be up to. It didn’t matter if it were washing dishes or vacuuming. You could see the fantasies they were cooking up, even as they watched you sweat across the alley. Back here on the rez, my mother no longer needed the privacy. Her nearest neighbors would need to have Superman’s eyes or a really decent set of binoculars to catch her at her quilt-making but she was taking no chances or merely had grown accustomed to her darker life. T.J.’s shadow floated by us, just beyond the living room window.
“Come on,” I said, sitting in the plush chair near her bed. She turned on the television, sat on the bed, and skipped though the few channels her antenna received.
“See, it works fine. Those are all the channels you get without cable or one of those dishes like they have the next trailer over. How much does the dish cost?” On the screen, images phased in and out like the badly spliced educational films they showed in high school, the sixteen-millimeter projector whirring and clacking from the back of the room, all but obscuring anything the people on the screen said.
“Ma, today, Martha left this morning’s paper in my mailbox at work,” I said. My mother would not make eye contact with me, staring instead at the people arguing on her television, ghosts of them crossing one another in T.J.’s adjustments.
“ Well, that was nice of her, wasn’t it? She probably had to hire one of her kids to drive her all the way out to the college, to get you that newspaper. What are you complaining about?” she said, finally, pretending she had no idea what I was talking about, or perhaps just hoping that I had no idea what was really in the morning paper. Surely she must have known what would cause her best friend and my ex-mother-in-law to make that special trip, but my mother would never resent Martha for anything, always looking the other way. What kept those two together was the meanness they inflicted on one another over sixty years, keeping each other going, pushing every day forward with new bitterness.
“She left a note with the paper, too. That was how I knew it was from her. I recognized her handwriting. Have you seen it?”
“The paper? Early this morning, probably before you were even up,” she said. I tossed the entertainment section across the room to her. It fell about a foot short. She didn’t bother to pick it up.
“The note was clipped to an article about that show Prime Hours tonight. Did you see it?”
“I don’t watch that show, or that channel even,” she said, waving her hand as if she were being bothered by a fly. “I never went in for the The Twilight Zone or the The Outer Limits or In Search of . . . like you kids did. And that show? What they do to people is just pitiful. If I want to see people behaving badly, I’ll just walk down to Moon Road. I don’t need to see it on my TV.”
“You wanna know what the note said?” I took it out of my purse and read it aloud in my best Martha Boans snippy fashion: “‘You might want to watch this show tonight, if you want to see your real father.’” I flashed the note in front of my mother so she could also see that, indeed, it was Martha’s handwriting, and then folded it back into my purse. We both knew that the reservation was consistently very closed-mouth about suspicious parentage, but only to the child in question. Otherwise, everyone was gossipy as hell with each other. I’ve known of other people who reached adulthood confident in their parents’ marriage, only to discover at the age of thirty or so that they are not exactly who they thought they were. I just never suspected I might be one of those people, but I don’t imagine any of those who’d been zapped before me did, either.
“You know, I had always heard people talking, making vague suggestions just within earshot, at Community Fair, the Feast, Culture Night, National Picnic, all those places, but you know how people gossip, and they never offered anything other than innuendo.” People on the reservation have also talked nonsense and believed it as truth forever—aspects of the culture that outside scholars tag as cute or charming or quaint. Those scholars have never had to convince an adult that a Tin Man, like that character in The Wizard of Oz, did not live below the hill, lurking around the picnic grove at night. When I became the subject of gossip, myself, I should have been thankful for the Tin Man, but he must have moved on, replaced by the smart girl who could not add two and two.
“What’s that, innuendo?” she asked. She was a whiz at cross-words, keeping a dictionary by her bed, but she never remembered the words for longer than it took to box them in to Five Down, or Four Across.
“Vague words, with double meanings, suggesting something without really saying it. So I went to see Royal at the pumps, and I asked him to tell me the truth. I had asked him a long time ago, years ago, in fact, and back then, he said he didn’t know anything, had no idea what I was talking about.” If I had gotten a useful answer, I might not have left out that I had gotten him drunk to do it.
“Oh,” my mother said.
“So when I asked him today, do you know what he said?”
“I don’t know what you asked him.”
“I asked him if Dad thought I had a different father from the rest of the kids. If that was why he left. You know what he said?” The fear in her face, as she grimaced and stared at the TV, told me she had no idea what he said. Maybe he truly didn’t know anything about that hazy period.
“He said, ‘If you need an answer to that question, then you better go ask Ma.’ So, here I am. Am I the reason Dad left for good all those years ago?” There, it was out, the one question I had practiced in front of mirrors, on dark roads, on top of the dike, anytime I was alone, for years. Even the cat I left behind with Doug was tired of hearing that one, usually glancing at me for a second before returning to grooming itself in the sun.
“He was never at home much,” she said. Royal had mentioned that sometimes our father would live in other cities for a year at a time—Detroit, Cleveland, New York—wherever they needed buildings erected. “Even before you. I don’t know why he would leave. We gave him all the freedom he wanted, and the kids adored him. He just wasn’t a happy person, I suppose. I tried dragging him out of other women’s apartments, at first, but then he would just leave, altogether, for longer periods.”
“He used to come back, every now and then, before I was born. But whenever I saw him anywhere, he always looked through me like I was glass. How come?”
“I don’t know. He just did.”
“When he died, I was the only one who went with Royal, none of the others, to go clean up that little apartment he kept down in Buffalo. I found his address book and calendar. You know all the birthdays and anniversaries, and all that, they were all neatly entered, as recent as Joanie’s kids, and one of them hadn’t had a birthday yet. But one date was missing, Ma. My birthday. Any idea why that was?”
“I bet my birthday wasn’t in there, either, was it?” She stopped me dead, there. I hadn’t looked, had randomly flipped through the pages, and judged it to be otherwise complete. “I went to that apartment before you and Royal went. I saw that book first, and I put it back. I knew you would look for your own birthday. You know what? I considered writing it in there. I knew how to forge his handwriting, had to learn to years before, just so I could get some money to feed you kids out of that account he kept. I figured if you wanted to look in that book for answers, though, you deserved to find them.” She frowned at me, there in the dark, her face nearly disappearing in the shadows for a minute, reappearing when T.J. would move something on the roof, then her features softened.
“It’s okay. I knew you wouldn’t look for my birthday,” she repeated, for emphasis. “You weren’t the only one who became invisible to him, and there, you got off lucky. When we were first married,