The United States of Us

by Kate Sundara

  * * *

  Rosa’s out of sorts this evening, worn down and like she doesn’t want to talk. When Mia arrives at her place, Rosa just stares at her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asks Mia.

  ‘Nothing…’ she replies dryly. ‘You don’t wear a watch.’

  ‘Am I late?’

  ‘No…’ Rosa hesitates. ‘I don’t know. Do you see a clock anywhere in this place?’ Granted, time is not on display in Rosa’s home. She once told Mia she wakes for her dawn walks by drinking lots of water right before she goes to bed, an old Native American wake-up trick; no need for an alarm when you’ve got to get up to pee.

  ‘Are you alright?’ asks Mia.

  ‘What’s that on your hand?’ asks Rosa, referring to the prescriptions penned there.

  ‘I don’t know,’ answers Mia truthfully.

  They stand in the doorway, Rosa assessing her. ‘You’d better come in,’ she says.

  Mia enters the shack, a sickly-sweet trail streaming from Rosa’s pipe on the sideboard – a pungent concoction.

  ‘What is that you smoke?’

  Rosa doesn’t answer. She’s gazing out the window now.

  ‘Rosa?’

  ‘Hmm?’ she turns to Mia.

  ‘You look a million miles away.’

  Rosa sits down in her rocking-chair, seeming pensive, anxious.

  Mia pops the kettle on, glancing at Rosa who starts to slowly rock. Mia tries to think of something easy and upbeat to talk about, which is difficult after her admission on the balcony the other night. Should she have told Rosa about me? Was it all too much? She recalls all the occasions they’ve laughed together in the shack, at stories of old shape-shifter, Coyote. Mia attempts to warm Rosa by reminding her of some of their previous exchanges. ‘Do you think the bear who attacked us was after one of the boys in our group?’ she asks. It was right here in the shack that Rosa told her legends of she-bears hunting down human men and dragging them back to their caves for sex. Once, Rosa said that when she was a little girl the elders on the rez caught a she-bear and found a human baby in her womb. Rosa was certain the story was true because her grandpa saw it and her grandpa never lied.

  But now Rosa just gives a vacant smile, still half a world away – and not in that clear-eyed ethereal way – tonight her eyes more like crystal balls clouded over before they reveal the future. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you those stories,’ she gibbers, retracting further. ‘No, no’, insists Rosa, beating herself up, ‘I shouldn’t have told you so much.’

  Mia watches her from the kitchen-counter, consternation weighing on her brow. Rosa, her ever-peaceful friend and teacher, appears to be quietly freaking out.

  ‘You’ll be leaving soon,’ says Rosa.

  Is that what this is about? She’s forged a friendship with the lonely dawn treader and soon she’ll be gone. Either that or Mia figures Rosa regrets over-sharing because she holds those stories as close to her heart as Zia does her secret family recipes. Mia has learnt that, traditionally, native stories were told in winter to pass the long nights as families settled in their teepees. Telling them in summer was believed to bring on an early winter. But something tells Mia that Rosa’s anguish isn’t about the weather.

  ‘I still have a week and a half left…’

  ‘There’s still time…’ murmurs Rosa.

  ‘Time for what?’

  Rosa chews on her nails and doesn’t answer.

  Mia keeps talking, knowing Rosa isn’t paying full attention, that her mind’s elsewhere. ‘I’ve no idea where I’ll go from here. Back to England, I suppose. I should go and see family. I miss them.’

  ‘Family’s important…’ says Rosa distractedly. Other than mentioning her grandfather and the baby she’d lost, Rosa never spoke of kin. Mia respects her privacy, her tendency to keep information generic. ‘You got your passport back then?’

  ‘Yes…’

  Mia delivers Rosa a cup of tea and, trying to mollify her creeping ill-feeling, takes the little bag of ingredients she brought with her to the kitchen, lays them out on the workbench. Mia’s opted to make apple pie for their dessert. She measures out flour and salt and adds them to a bowl with butter and shortening…

  Rosa slowly stuffs her pipe with herbal mix. Mia recalls her mentioning she’d given up tobacco in an earlier visit to the shack. Perhaps her withdrawal from nicotine accounts for this recent change in appearance and temperament; she’s unusually restless, tetchy, aloof.

  Mia adds the ice water and mixes the dough until it holds together. She tries to remember Rosa’s age. She’s sure she said forty-four. Rosa looks older, but if she’s smoked as much as her tobacco-stained literature suggests, and she’d led a tough life, then forty-four is feasible…

  She turns out the dough onto a lightly floured surface, kneads it together, divides it in half…

  Rosa is an outline against the dipping sun, the steam from her tea rising against the net-curtains as she rocks gently back and forth in her chair. Eventually she addresses Mia. ‘How you going with that Shoshone Tales book I lent you? Did you read the one about Bat?’

  ‘Not yet. Will you tell me? I like the way you tell those tales.’

  Rosa seems to contemplate it. ‘I’ll tell you one last story before you go.’

  Mia smiles, glad to see her take a little step back into life, even if she is on edge.

  ‘I want to tell you that story and if it brings on an early winter, so be it, you won’t be around anyways.’ Rosa wets her broad bottom lip. ‘So… Bat,’ she begins, now steady, focused.

  ‘Great! Just a second!’ says Mia. She quickly flattens each half of the dough into a disk, wraps it in a tea-towel and pops it in the fridge. She licks her thumb, takes her herbal tea and settles across from Rosa, wondering what story could be so important Rosa has to tell it in spite of her fatigue and the risk of tempting bad weather to the township.

  ‘Bat was a mysterious creature. He only came out at night. Was real private.’ Rosa stops, takes a deep breath. ‘Well, one night, while he was out and about, he met a beautiful girl. He fell in love with her, made her many promises. Bat told her what a fine hunter he was, said if she came to live with him, she’d never go hungry. She’d wear beautiful buckskin dresses. They’d lead a great life together. She wouldn’t have to worry about a thing.’

  Rosa pauses. Mia waits expectantly while Rosa coughs. Mia suggested before that Rosa see a doctor about her coughing fits, but she’d answered most adamantly not to fret, not to make a fuss.

  ‘Well, the girl agreed. She loved Bat. She believed everything he said. But alone, back down in his canyon, Bat was a mess. He’d made so many promises he couldn’t live up to. Of course, soon the girl came to live with him and learnt what he was really like. He’d promised her meat, but the ‘fat’ he’d fed them was merely ice that melted to nothing. Bat was ashamed. He’d never let her see him by day, only by night. He was afraid she wouldn’t like the real him, so he stayed hidden.’ Rosa takes a drag on her pipe, taps the ash into a bowl. ‘What do you think to that?’

  Mia is taken aback. What does she think? That Bat is Zak! That she already deemed him an emotional vampire. That it’s absurd Rosa’s still smoking when she had to keep gasping for air in telling that tale. Still, keen for Rosa to start acting like her old self, Mia goes with it. ‘Bat shouldn’t have lied,’ she replies, ‘But at least he tried to live up to his false promises, at least he made an effort for her. Is that the right answer?’

  ‘I told you before, there’s no right or wrong answer. You take from these stories what you want.’ Rosa once explained that native tales mean different things to different people, these ‘ just-so’ narratives aren’t like fairytales with their whopping great moral at the end. Mia’s just too worked up to remember it. Talking about Zak has that effect on her.

  ‘Well what do you want me to take from it?’

  ‘To me that story’s about vulnerability,’ suggests Rosa. ‘Bat wanted to be more than he was, but he couldn’t
cut it. And the girl wanted more than she had.’

  ‘Oh, so it was the girl’s fault!’ blurts Mia ironically. ‘She deserved to be disappointed because she shouldn’t have hoped for love or wished for a happy life! And Bat’s off the hook because he’s just weak, so it doesn’t matter if he cheats and tricks and lies! Silly girl, stupid girl, of course it was all her fault!’ Mia’s uncharacteristically sarcastic, bitter – heartache has made her this way.

  ‘No,’ says Rosa calmly. ‘Bat loved the girl. He just couldn’t give her what she needed. But sooner or later you have to forgive.’

  ‘Forgive! How can you forgive someone if they’re not even sorry, if they don’t see they’ve done wrong?’ Mia marches back over to the sink, starts rinsing the mixing-bowl under the tap. She wishes Rosa never told her that pointless story, it only reminds her how futile the pursuit of love is, how incensed she is at Zak for being such a colossal let-down. Yes, she’s mostly over him, but should the subject be given an airing, an ember will flare up in the ash. As frantically she washes up utensils and slams away ingredients, she almost forgets about Rosa’s strangeness. She doesn’t mean to take it out on her, but being half Italian, Mia gets het-up by matters of the heart.

  ‘You’re right, Mia, but youth is for learning these things. When you’re young and you see the world with a pure heart, you believe in love, romance, beauty. You take risks.’

  It’s no surprise to Mia that Zak is manifest as Bat – he’s either in his dark cave, comatose, or flapping around like he’s caught in a room. She recalls him on the island, how he only came out at night, how he kept himself in the shadows for so long, the eternal mystery. What surprises her is how Rosa draws upon that metaphor – or totem – and she doesn’t even know Zak! Thinking about it now, Mia’s sure she’s never heard Rosa mention his name – not once – although Mia had referred to him often. It’s as if he’s inexplicably taboo. An unspoken, un-indulged topic – just like the child she lost…

  ‘Zak lied like Bat and made false promises,’ says Mia. ‘Only Zak made no effort to live up to them, no effort at all! He never let me know him, and he never knew me.’

  ‘It can be hard to let others know us if we don’t know ourselves,’ says Rosa. She rests her pipe in the bowl, takes a deep breath.

  ‘He could be a moth. Zak’s place is full of moths… I used to think he was a butterfly.’

  Moths and butterflies look the same in a shadow, she’d recently written in her journal.

  ‘I understand your confusion, Mia.’

  ‘You do? Because I don’t understand anything.’

  ‘I think I can help you.’

  ‘Thanks, but stories only help so much.’

  ‘You believed in something. The world’s full of cynics.’

  ‘Then I gotta stop living in a dream world.’

  ‘Dreams are important…’ Rosa pauses, looks out the window,

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she tells Rosa after a moment. ‘It was my fault. I’m only angry at myself. I was foolish coming out here in the hope if I got the relationship aspect of my life sorted then the rest would fall into place. I thought I’d be having a love-affair, not an existential crisis. You’ve got to be whole in yourself first, you can’t expect anyone else to complete you. One and one make two – that’s why it’s called being in a couple. I came to Zak as an open wound and expected him to heal it. Now I know it’s not another person who makes us whole, that’s a lie we’ve been sold. A fairytale.’

  ‘You followed your heart, your intuition, why don’t you trust it?’

  ‘Because it lead me here.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘To I don’t know where! I’m still lost!’

  ‘You’re not lost, Mia. I told you before. Wolf. Pathfinder. The wolf in you is finding its way.’

  ‘Then I hope it hurries.’

  ‘You listen to what’s in here,’ says Rosa, banging her fist on her chest like a drum. ‘You’re finding out who are. Shouldn’t everyone know who they are?’

  Mia looks at her intrigued. What’s with her? Everything rings with a double meaning tonight.

  ‘You told me you wanted to write,’ says Rosa, ‘What’s stopping you?’

  ‘It’s too hard to write about my own stuff.’

  ‘Everything you told me the other night…’

  ‘I definitely don’t want to write about that.’

  ‘Why not? Writing can be cathartic, a way of releasing things. Write it out of you.’

  I think the lady might have a point.

  ‘It’s what I did when they took my baby boy. The pain never went but writing helped me to process.’

  ‘Someone took your baby?’ asks Mia. ‘I thought you meant… when you said your child wasn’t with you for long… Who took your baby? Who are they? Why would anyone do that?’

  Rosa doesn’t answer, she pulls herself heavily out of her chair, shuffles over to the sideboard and takes more mix from the pouch. She seems nervous again, as if the activity is to lessen her anxiety. Mia wonders if it’s so she won’t notice her hands shaking, but she does notice, just like she notices how old and pale Rosa’s round face has become; she’s starting to look like the moon. Mia doesn’t push any further, but, mystified as she is, she takes up her own activity too.

  With one eye on Rosa, Mia starts to measure out the flour on the weighing scales. She figures if her friend here wants to impart any more information then she’ll do so in her own time. Their silence does nothing to quieten Mia’s mind: Rosa has a boy… who might then still be alive? Has she searched for him? Does she want to? Where would she begin? Mia remembers the nearby reservation where Rosa grew up, how Rosa said she’s too Indian to fit in here, too white to go back there. That’s what happened with a lot of people from the rez, she once told her: they went to the cities to find work but when they returned they didn’t fit in anymore. They’d become assimilated, given up being Indian. A lot of resentment when one goes back to the rez looking like city-folk. Others are in limbo and don’t belong anywhere. Mia relives that day they’d chatted about such things in Chokecherry Shack, how animated Rosa had been, compared to now.

  Mia switches on the oven and, perturbed as she is, starts making the fruit filling for the pie. She mixes honey, salt, flour, nutmeg and cinnamon together in a bowl, catches a dollop on her wrist with her mouth, sets the apples aside. She takes the pastry from the fridge and lines the round dish, trimming off the edges, reminding her for a second of the all the other circles in Rosa’s home – the most elaborate things in it those bright circular tapestries. Back when conversation had been free-flowing, Rosa had explained that they symbolised the universe working in circles: the earth, sun, moon and stars, blooms, harvests, rains and seasons – even how old people seem to orbit into infancy again. Those tapestries, said Rosa, remind her that suffering, too, is just part of a cycle, affirming what Mia learnt in Utopia. Mia’s thoughts loop back to Rosa’s disclosure.

  Just then, Mia sees a circle of a different kind: jutting out from beneath a stack of newspapers is a listings guide with something on the page circled in red. Taking a peek at what’s inside the circle, ‘The Mach Band!’ exclaims Mia. ‘Did you go to their concert? You never mentioned it! I didn’t have you pegged as a fan of indie rock!’

  Rosa doesn’t answer again, an emerging pattern that reminds Mia of Zak. Maybe Rosa’s insulted; why shouldn’t she like young upcoming music? She’s not that old – only forty-four. Forty-four and already packed so much into life. She was years younger than Mia when she gave birth to her baby boy – aged just sixteen.

  Forty-four minus sixteen equals twenty-eight. Twenty-eight years ago. So Rosa’s son, out there somewhere, is twenty-eight. Just like Zak. Like Zak…

  ‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ utters Rosa, ostensibly to herself. ‘It’s not my way to be dishonest, to deceive… never has been… It wasn’t intended. I didn’t mean to mislead you.’

  Apples turn to chokecherries and tumble off the counter. Mia
doesn’t pick them up – her mind instead seized by her quick calculations, Rosa’s riddle-speak, her baby boy, her stories of Sacajawea and Bat and all her invitations to the shack – that newspaper with the red ring, Rosa’s cheekbones, her mouth and raven hair – her striking similarity to someone else she knows. That someone who she came here to be with.

  Following the intuition Rosa’s been telling her to trust, she says, ‘The baby. Your baby… It was Zak…’

  Silence.

  ‘Jac. Jacaranda. They changed it to Zak. I named him after the miracle tree. He was so soft and warm, tiny sleepy little thing. The children. They were taking the children. They took Martha Amos’, they’d sure as heck take mine…’

  ‘Rosa?’

  ‘I kept a journal too. Letters to Grandpa. It’s all in there. You need a story. I have a story.’ Trance-like, Rosa walks away and reappears with a battered looking book. ‘I can’t bear to be adding to your confusion. It’s not right. None of this is. You’ve been a good friend to me. To him. You should know the truth.’

  Even I didn’t see that coming.

  * * *

  Harvest Moon 1978

  Grandpa,

  They’re still coming for the children. Stealing them off the rez. Sammy and I helped our cousins build a hiding-hole, the little ones down there like jack-rabbits in their burrow so scared they’ll come take them too. Since I’ve turned sixteen Sammy says we’re too old for them to take us.

  I’m old enough to work now. I took a job at the factory down in the valley. I was walking there one morning, passing Old Maurie’s Piano Bar, the one you told me never go near but now I know what that place really is, the factory girls said. That’s where I saw him standing out on the veranda. A man I’ve never seen before, his eyes the color of the turquoise you gave me. I passed by, feeling him watching me like a fox with a muskrat in his track. That night, after work, I was walk- ing Main Street when the man showed up, making a song of the factory machines, Pow-chu-chu-chu, pow-chu-chu-chu. I picked up a rock in my fist but he flashed me a grin and I didn’t throw it. He left me be.