The Antelope Wife

by Louise Erdrich

  She likes to sit in the back of the bakery kitchen, listening to the radio and watching the telephone to see if it will ring. The next day she is there when the girls’ mother calls.

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Okay, Mama.”

  Frank takes the phone, turns his back on them all as he speaks to Rozin.

  Meantime, Sweetheart sits in the corner smiling her shark-tooth smile and smoking a Marlboro. She blinks her hexing eyes slowly and openly stares.

  The girls don’t want to get her attention, make her grin. That scares them. Cally turns away after a quick, weak smile. Deanna too. But she feels immediately, right in the small of her back, the calm prickle of Sweetheart Calico’s gaze.

  Sweetheart Calico veers close and gives them each a hug. It is a strange, boney, upsetting, long stranglehold that twists Cally in her own sleeves so she can’t speak. Sweetheart Calico is gone before Deanna can untangle her sister. All that is left upon the girls is the scent of her perfume and they find that they can’t get the green smell off. They can’t stop thinking of her. They see her in their deepest thoughts. Her perfume smells like grass and wind. Makes them remember running in the summer with their hair flopping on their shoulders. Her scent is like sun on their backs, like cool rain, like dust rising off a waterless, still, nowhere-leading road.

  Cecille

  The twins also get their first real jolt of Cecille. She’s like a caffeine surge. She teaches in a tae kwan do school right down the block from the bakery shop. Through this, and peroxide, she has made herself a bicep blond-dyed Indian with tiny hips and sculpted legs that she shows off by wearing the shortest shorts. She has the glitteriest, most watching eyes, with green glints.

  Some bloods they go together like water—the French Ojibwes: you mix those up and it is all one person. Others are a little less predictable. You make a person from a German and an Indian, for instance, and you’re creating a two-souled warrior always fighting with themself. There are Swedish and Norwegian Indians who abound in this region, and now, Hmong-Ojibwes, those last so beautiful you want to follow them around and see if they are real. Take an Indian who shows her Irish like Cecille, however, and you’re playing with hot dynamite.

  Rozin thinks it’s the salt.

  When Rozin drives up with the dog in the passenger seat, when she jumps out and runs into the shop and starts scolding and crying, Cecille thinks she’d better calm her sister-cousin down with lunch. She takes her to a café and tells her to try meditative breathing. Rozin breathes deep and slow and begins to focus. First thing, Cecille gets the saltshaker. She salts before she tastes. Rozin has read that’s a habit can lose you a job in an interview lunch. This salting before tasting is supposed to indicate some kind of think-ahead deficiency. Some lack. To Rozin, the pre-salting indicates this notion that the world is automatically too bland for Cecille. Something has to be done, in big and little ways, to liven things up and bring out all the hidden flavors. Something has to be done to normal everyday life, time spent, to heighten and color the hours, to sprinkle interest.

  As salt is to food, so lying is to experience.

  Or not lying, that sounds too bald. How about sprucing up, spicing, embellishing reality? At first as people get to know Cecille they think everything that happened happened just the way she says. But even after lunch, which is simple—health food for Cecille, nuts and carrots and a swipe of peanut butter—she sits back and tells Rozin stories of her students, their progress, then lectures Rozin on all of the amino acids she’s imbibed. On the legendary qualities of the naked almond and the undisclosed secret of ginkgo.

  “My memory,” says Cecille, “used to be a blip. Now I recall every single thing that happens hour by hour, minute by minute. Things I’ve read, even license plates. My memory is getting close to photographic.” She doses herself with more grainy pressed oval pills and swallows bottled water by the gallon to clean her liver.

  “I’m all set,” she informs her cousin, “to live a hundred years. I want to be around to see my grandchildren.”

  She has no kids as yet. Rozin stares at her.

  “I have looked into our genealogy,” she says. “It appears we don’t start menopause until well into our fifties. And then, since we’re running around with a two-year-old upon our hip, we just don’t notice. We don’t have time for that hot-flash shit. We bear late.”

  She gives Rozin a little curious look.

  “So are you taking the girls back?” she asks. “I mean, not that I’m criticizing you, but shouldn’t they be in school or something?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” says Rozin. “They get into trouble here. But they get into trouble up there. Should I stay here? Should we give the girls those old names our mothers dreamed of? Those old names scare me. As do my feelings. Should I live with Frank? Should I move back into the house? Should I marry Frank? Should I get another job? Where should I be, what should I do? Where is my ex?”

  “Whiteheart Beads?”

  “Who else?”

  Cecille eyes her cousin significantly.

  “I know where he is,” she says.

  Rozin opens her mouth to ask where, but she can’t put what she really wants to ask into words. There is this big thing stored up in her, she doesn’t know what it is called. Some smooth, round, important piece of data. She keeps tapping the sphere but she doesn’t know what’s inside. The globe is huge, yellow, sometimes changeable of shape and substance. A weather balloon, sometimes it bobs to the surface of Rozin’s day and she must bat it aside, this thing, this ache, this ambition. She shrugs at Cecille now, helpless to describe its bounding weight.

  “I think I know what you are feeling,” says Cecille.

  Rozin looks at her eagerly.

  “I have these books,” says Cecille, “that belonged to our ancestor Augustus Roy. He was interested in time.”

  Rozin is disappointed. Time got her in trouble, in the form of being late. Time lost her job for her. Time seems to be trying to steal her daughters from her, too.

  “He tried to trace the effects of time on his women. You remember how they hid their identities from him, how he never knew—or at least pretended not to know—which one was whose mother? How this got them into trouble and they were investigated by the priest and that crooked Indian agent? How his children nearly got taken away until they arbitrarily wrote down Mary as his wife, even though we suspect it was Zosie?”

  “Yes,” says Rozin, keenly listening now.

  Cecille goes on, tapping the table with her clipped nail.

  “He writes about all sorts of connections in the margins of those old books. He writes about Blue Prairie Woman and about how after she was given the name Other Side of the Earth she walked west looking for her daughter. How she found her daughter and gave her the song that she herself learned from her first husband, supposedly a deer husband. The song that called the antelope.”

  “I get all that,” says Rozin. “Or I remember it, vaguely, the stories.”

  “But haven’t you ever asked yourself,” says Cecille, “how this all affects us? Haven’t you ever wondered how history is working on us? Don’t you sometimes pause in the midst of things?”

  “Yes,” says Rozin. “I do pause in the midst of things.”

  “And wonder?”

  “Yes, I wonder.”

  “Think about it,” says Cecille. “We developed as a people over many thousands of years. Our culture. Our ways. Our adaptations. Then all of a sudden in one generation—wham. Warp-speed acculturation. And now we’re the products of two cultures. Something happened in our family that cannot be explained by the culture we live in now. When our mothers tell the stories they heard from their grandmothers and great-grandmothers, we listen and nod as if we think the stories are true. But we don’t think they’re true. We don’t think they’re historical facts. Our minds don’t work the same way as our ancestors’ minds worked. Our minds sort fact from fiction. We think the stories are powerful, maybe, but metaphor
ical, merely.”

  “Yes,” says Rozin. “Yet . . .”

  “ . . . yet. I know what you’re thinking.”

  “I can’t explain her.”

  “I can’t explain her either,” says Cecille. “Do you know I’ve followed her? To try and figure out if her tracks change?”

  “And did they?”

  “She walked the whole time on sidewalks and streets. So no tracks. But she walked miles in stilettos, which to me seems inhuman.”

  “I couldn’t do it,” says Rozin.

  “No woman I know could do it, or at least she’d be limping, which Sweetheart wasn’t.”

  Rozin nods, thoughtful. “I have this feeling . . .”

  “Exactly,” says Cecille. “It’s not the heels, the tracks, nothing you can put your finger on. Yet. It is no accident that Klaus brought Sweetheart Calico here. Her presence is meaningful. History is at work.”

  “History is random events, not fate, or coincidence.” Rozin shakes her head.

  “How do you know?” says Cecille.

  Frank’s Bakery

  The bakery has huge steel witch ovens and a concrete floor slippery with grease. There is a dough-pounding table of blocky wood covered with sparkle-shot linoleum. The high windows, coated with years of flour dust, look to Rozin like something from a fable or a movie with their tiny blocks of glass. A tulip, gold stem and leaves, bursts fierce red in the pane. It is an old bakery, much loved and tunneled to by rats, floors creaky with shadows. The doors all set crooked or stuck. There is a built-in deep-fry pit, too, which can be zapped up to bubbling or left to glaze over. It takes up one entire corner of the kitchen. There is a wonderful scent that rises when the grease is fresh. Frank slips in the little slabs of dough and they bob there, bubbling, reminding Rozin of back home at powwows and sweating ladies at the fry-bread stands laughing, pushing those gold rounds at you, hot and welcome.

  Rozin, Cecille, and the girls stay in the shop to help Frank the next day. He is absorbed, melting and beating at some transparent substance in his treasured copper pan. The girls asks questions. They can’t help but ask questions. They ask questions even though it takes him so long to answer that they have thought of about twenty more before they manage to pierce his distraction.

  “What’s that pan made of?” Cally asks, just a question to warm him up. But he takes a long time even to answer this.

  “This pan is made of spirit metal,” he says at last.

  “What’s that?” Deanna says immediately, so he won’t lose his train of thought.

  “Miskwaabik,” he mumbles, absent in his work. “They say the thunder people sent down this red stuff, put it in the ground.”

  “Why’s it your favorite pot?”

  “Conducts the heat real good.”

  “What about those bowls?”

  “Smooth the batter out.”

  The answers are getting closer, quicker.

  “What are you making?” Rozin herself asks, even though she could look into Frank’s sweat- and butter-stained recipe notebook, a tattered spiral-bound, and find out for herself. He won’t answer for a long while, though, and this makes Rozin naturally curious. So she peeks over his shoulder at the notebook, sees a word she has never seen before, although she has heard of it. Blitzkuchen. Written on top of the lined paper in tired ink.

  Blitzkuchen! All of a sudden, he gets talkative. Frank sets the egg timer. He is always timing—this, that—because of course there always is something in the oven to rescue or to check. Anyhow, that day, Frank is working again on his life project. The cake of all cakes. Early in his life, says Frank, he tasted it—light as air with a taste of peach. A subterranean chocolate. Citrus. Crumbled tears. Sweet lemon. A smooch of almond.

  “It explodes on your palate,” he says, eyes fixed and grave.

  “Oh, gimme a break,” says Cecille, who has heard this before. “Stick with our daily bread. Or daily doughnut.”

  Frank considers. An aura of furious effort. Concentrated baker’s conversion of heat, light, energy.

  “I make the staff of life,” says Frank in a dignified and measured voice. “That is my calling. But I will never stop attempting the blitzkuchen.”

  He’s trying to reconstruct the recipe. Trying to capture time. Or at least the punch line of an old family story. The cake is a fabulous thing, he says. The cake is holy. Extraordinary with immense powers of what sort nobody knows. He calls it the cake of peace. The cake of loving sincerity.

  Rozin looks at him in wounded skepticism. This is a very different Frank. He has never spoken this way. He has always been down-to-earth. That is something she likes about him. This streak of mysticism, over a cake of all things, makes Rozin nervous, makes him suspect.

  For years, he says, he has searched and tested for the exact recipe. In fact, the hunt for this recipe could be called his life quest. Always, between other concoctions, even inventions like his popular rhubarb sludge bars, when he has a little moment to himself, Frank makes a trial cake. Attempts a variation on the length of time he beats the batter. Amount of ground hazelnuts. Type of sugars and butters. Whatever.

  “Of exquisite importance,” he says to Rozin, waving a darkly wrapped bar of chocolate now, his wide-boned, pleasant face remote and concentrated. “Cocoa content seventy-seven percent. Strong and dark.” He writes this in his notebook, scrawls it, and sighs over the batter he is now whipping in the bowl.

  “Perhaps,” Rozin says, “it is all in the stirring.”

  He frowns, lost in concentration now, and doesn’t answer for the longest time.

  “Hey, Frank,” Deanna says, wanting to break the spell and change the subject, “why don’t you do the nose trick?”

  He looks at the twins, shy.

  “Come on, Frank.”

  Frank can push his nose all the way to one side and tape it there. He can also pop his joints, vibrate his ears, and roll back his eyelids. He was the high school clown. He used to be ironic and jolly, always with a sly humor and a broad goofiness. But his fear of losing Rozin has made him serious.

  Humor or the suggestion of it reminds him that he might say something to offend Rozin. He is stilted, stunted, stymied by his need to win her. Jokes puzzle and panic him. Put him in a sweat. Like right now, just thinking of a stupid old funny trick that made him look like a big dork, he gets upset. He thrusts his smooth hands deep in the flour barrel. Looks like he’ll cry until a teary dough forms around his fingers. Maybe, Rozin thinks, watching him knead and sugar and tenderize, this is how he works through the unresolved grief that Cecille says sociologists have begun to suspect every Indian is born with. Rozin has no idea he has lost his humor because of her.

  Chapter 17

  Nibi

  KLAUS AND RICHARD have medicine breath from the family-size bottle of Listerine they are drinking. They are sitting by the art museum, half asleep in the heated shank of the day. The air is stifling. The heat is very unseasonable. It is April and should have been cool, but the heat gags thought. The heat makes everyone uneasy. Cars rush by on the other side of the bench.

  “Nice to get that breeze from the traffic!” says Richard. “That carbon monoxide. Ah.” He takes a deep breath, sits up, and hits his chest. Klaus, a red bandanna wrapped around his head and a T-shirt torn from collar to waist, lies curled, booze-thin, his legs folded neatly as a cat’s, his arms a pillow. He opens his eyes and croaks.

  “Nibi. Nibi.”

  “Oh shut up. I got no water, Klaus. Go to the drinking fountain.”

  “Where’s it at?”

  “Over there.”

  They both know it is dry, always is. No fountains work in this part of the city. They share out the last of the Listerine. Richard screws the black cap carefully onto the empty bottle. He sets the bottle on the margin of grass beside the museum steps.

  The bench feels good to Klaus, hard but broad enough to curl his knees on. He is so comfortable that he does not move, decides to endure his thirst. He shuts his eyes.

&
nbsp; A woman comes out of the museum. She is carrying a huge orange cloth purse slung over her shoulder. It thumps against her as she walks, like a big soft pumpkin. Richard calls out, “Hey, white lady!”

  She frowns.

  The woman isn’t all white. She is something else. Hard to tell what she is, exactly. Richard thinks maybe a Korean or a Mexican or maybe, but probably not, she could be an Indian from somewhere else. She takes some money from her purse and puts it in his hand. Bills.

  “Oh,” says Richard, “that’s very nice of you. I’d like you to meet my friend.”

  The woman walks away.

  “Still,” Richard calls after her, “I thank you. I’ll put down tobacco for you.” She does not turn around. “That’s a sacred gesture. We’re still Indians.”

  “You got cigarettes?” Klaus peers at Richard and holds out his fingers.

  Richard gives him a cigarette. “That is my last cigarette,” he says, although he has more. Klaus holds it lightly in the palm of his hand, in his fingers again. He does not smoke the cigarette.

  “How much did that lady give?” he asks.

  “There’s four here,” says Richard, counting the bills over slowly, twice.

  Holding the cigarette, Klaus shuts his eyes again and listens. There is music. A sweetheart song playing between his ears. He is still dancing from some long-ago night, as he always does in his dreams. Even now, though her image sags like air is escaping, he pictures his Niinimoshenh and her twenty-six sisters and her daughters in shawls of floating hair. Over and over again they spring into his dreams. Gallop at him. Brandish their hooves like polished nails. He bats them off. She is alone again. There for him again. But he can’t stop his mind from turning his sweetheart into a Disney character. The Blue Fairy. Her light increases. Her smile spreads slowly into jag-toothed mercy and then her voice flows, the cool of a river. Once, very drunk, he watched the movie Pinocchio eight or ten times in a row with successive nieces and nephews, their friends, their friends’ cousins, then the cousins’ cousins and friends. By the time the night came on and the children were draped in slumber on the floor and on pillows and heaps of blankets and clothes, he had fallen in love with the Blue Fairy.