The Antelope Wife: A Novel Part 8

Noodin unfolds her arms and goes back to fluffing her wild rice, puts the lid back on the pot, carries it in to the table with two dish towels wrapped around her hands as mitts.

"You egg him on," she says pointedly to Cecille, in pa.s.sing. Cecille gives a pleased shrug. The twins and Sweetheart sit looking at the table. The turkeys and pilgrims and golden-eyed deer race along the borders of the tablecloth. Red candles. Ivy plants. Gold paper napkins. The unexpected blue gla.s.s.

THE TABLE IS long, with boards to add and with extra wings at the end. A table made for big gatherings and doings. It's a good thing, because the topics of conversation at the table tend to polarize. Especially the things the grandmas say. Past a certain age the Roy women believe that they have earned the right to talk about s.e.x, birth, blood, the size and shape of men's equipment, the state of their own, even at the holiday dinner table. But at this Thanksgiving, Noodin is strangely subdued. Still fuming and filled with secret hostility.

"There should be no salt on this table!" cries Grandma Giizis. "In the early days we had no salt. We didn't know of it. We had no taste for it. Now look at us." Her blood pressure medication keeps her dizzily alert.

"I can eat as much salt as I want-" says Cecille.

"If you're pregnant-"

"I'm not."

"Eat the head of a skunk," advises Giizis. "In the old days, that was the way to make sure the baby's head would be a little head, easy to push."

"Did you have morning sickness with Cecille?" Booch asks. His mouth st.i.tches together in anxious amus.e.m.e.nt. "That skunk head might not sit too well."

Giizis continues on with implacable deliberation.

"I knew a woman with that morning sickness. She ended up in labor for two weeks!"

Helping herself to mashed potatoes, Noodin takes up the theme now, in a darkly relis.h.i.+ng tone of voice. "The pain was constant, too, hard labor for a total of twenty-four times fourteen hours. Plus, all the while she screamed. No, it was more a yodel. So pitiful. And people heard her-this was before they set up the soundproof room in the hospital."

"A big baby?" Giizis purses her lips in knowing fas.h.i.+on.

"They couldn't st.i.tch her back together in the right order. And yet she somehow lived."

"Only to die the next time, probably."

Noodin shrugs.

"On that note," says Booch, his face sunken and pale, his voice catching, "shall we toast an easy labor and healthy outcome? Toast!"

"I'm not pregnant," Cecille says uselessly. "I don't even have a boyfriend."

But Booch desperately raises his mug of apple cider and downs it like a pirate tossing back hot grog. Still, the grandmas are not finished.

"That's a bad way to go. And they had to bury the baby in a little shoe box. Me, when I go," brags Giizis with a long slow wave of her hand across the heaping plate, "you won't have to take up a collection. My funeral is all paid up."

"Whose isn't?" Noodin shrugs her sister's boast down. "Those vultures. They come around the reservation with those sales handouts-"

"Brochures."

"Catalogs. They make the rounds and you sit paging through those pictures of the caskets-"

"Mine!" Giizis says loudly. "Mine is frosted, I tell you, frosted!"

"Oh, that sure is wonderful." Rozin rolls her eyes. "Like a cake."

"Please," says Booch, "do we have to-"

"If you must know," Noodin loudly interposes.

"We don't need to know," says Booch, and Frank looks at him gratefully.

But Noodin's eyes flare with indignation. She ignores him. "I am paid up, too, with money from my checks. I put a small amount away each month. I got the cardinals, red cardinals painted on my casket and it's made of real oak, not cheap pine board. A cheerful woodsy scene on front. Spared no amount of big expense! I even got the dinner paid for and no jelly and no peanut b.u.t.ter-oh you bet, no commodity funeral for me!"

"Ticking. Mattress ticking. Railroad cloth. I like that on the inside of a casket, though," Giizis reflects.

"Homey-looking."

"Like you were really going to sleep or something. And then the sheets."

"Mine are satin."

"Don't you think," Rozin breaks in again from her corner place, where she's filled and refilled her plate, picking through her food with furious dispatch, "if you're going to spend for satin sheets, you could at least get enjoyment out of them in life?"

"You would," says Giizis sternly, spearing Frank with a look. But her attempt at embarra.s.sing Rozin falls flat, for Rozin just nods and as though struck by some ecstatic thought smiles openly and suddenly at Frank, right across the table. Everyone can see her and notice that smile, too, which is the sort of curious and gloating smile a teenage girl turns on the first boy she's shown her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to in a parking lot. Returning her look, Frank's is grave and intent. Their look holds, and then, with quiet attention, tenderly, he dips some small morsel of dark meat into the scarlet of cranberries. Placing the tart, reddened flesh in his mouth, he casts his eyes down and chews.

Giizis has removed the slender forked bone from the breast meat already and stripped it clean, handing it to Cally, who has vowed with Deanna never to be tricked into pulling apart a wishbone. She gives it back to Grandma Giizis and has the presence of mind to say, "Share it." Giizis holds out the wishbone, and Noodin touches it. The bone is cool and faintly slippery in her fingers. The tiny strips of meat cling to it tenaciously. Looking into each other's brown, sorrowful eyes they seem lost, unguarded. The bone is fragile between them. They know from childhood that to break a wishbone to your advantage you must hold your thumb higher than that of your opponent, your sister.

And so Giizis tries. But Noodin has been harboring some secret anger and her thumb creeps higher. Giizis twists her hand to try wrenchimg the wishbone from her sister. Noodin stands with a cry and snaps off the longer piece of the bone. The two old twins pant and glare at each other and throw down the pieces of the wishbone. They bare their teeth murderously and then, still staring directly into each other's eyes, they change expressions and slowly, sheepishly, secretly, begin to laugh.

Noodin wipes her eyes. They sit. The pie is coming out, the rhubarb crisp, the cake, the coffee, the swamp tea, the cookies and Jell-O mold salad with peaches set in star shapes. And the men are talking to each other. They have outlasted the women's hold on the conversation and they are talking about their cars. They are discussing the insides of their cars the way women discuss their own insides. Pre-labor. Post-labor. Just the same except instead of doctors the men talk about their mechanics. Opinions, prognoses, prescriptions, and probabilities.

Dishes clatter. Coffee scents the air. The house is too warm, though, so the girls decide to cool themselves at the back door. They have sneaked out a plastic bag of turkey sc.r.a.ps. With it, they step out onto the tiny porch and stare from the steps out at the frozen gray yard and garage.

The dog appears instantly and smiles lovingly at them as they dump the sc.r.a.ps into his bowl.

THERE ARE TIMES in the city, rare times, when the baffle of sound parts. Cally and Deanna listen for those times of transitory silence. No cars. No planes' roar. No buses or distant traffic. No spatter of television noise, even people talking. Now, just as the twins define the moment by the absence of all it isn't, someone laughs, a car door slams, there is a screech of tires. It is gone, their moment of baseless peace.

The noise that brings them back is the muted plastic thump of a city garbage Dumpster and then crisp, slow steps. Rozin and Frank round the corner of the garage but they don't notice the twins because their eyes rest upon each other. Cally and Deanna can see their mother's warm three-quarters profile as she gazes seriously up into Frank's face. He is turned from them, but although they cannot view his expression they know it.

The grown-ups are staring at each other with moon-glow sitcom eyes!

"They are acting like two cows," says Cally.

The girls laugh in a mean and outraged way. They have also got a parcel of turkey bones they were told to throw in the sealed garbage container and not give to the dog. They give the bones to the dog.

GIIZIS TAKES A SIP of the coffee, a bite of pie, and holds up her tiny piece of the wishbone. Noodin laughs, but then her face goes dark as she remembers. She finally speaks to the women sitting at the table.

"Yesterday," she announces. "Yesterday. That young doctor was forward with me!"

"What?" says Rozin.

"I knew there was something," says Giizis.

"How?" says Cecille.

All of the women put down their coffee cups and look at Noodin.

"The nurse came and told me to take off my clothes and put the robe on. So I do that. So I was lying there covered with that sheet," says Noodin, "and he came in for the exam. When he lifted that sheet for the exam he said, 'My, aren't we glitzy today!' "

" 'Glitzy'? You're kidding!"

Rozin and Cecille say this practically in unison.

Noodin frowns. "I hate when you say that. Of course I am not kidding. That is the way it was, the phrase of words, 'My, aren't we glitzy!' I said nothing, of course. Why in the world do you think he said it?"

"Maybe you're"-Cecille tries to think-"unusually better than normal down there!"

Giizis and Noodin look aghast.

"Did you wear some fancy underwear or something?"

"I had none on, of course," says Noodin. "None on at the time. No, it was simple rudeness, or worse. . . ."

"Did you wear some, ah, maybe some perfume?"

"Oooo," says Giizis.

"That neither," says Noodin. "I just, well, I used some of that feminine hygiene spray they advertise. I took it from your bathroom, that's all."

Rozin looks at her quizzically.

"I don't have any of that stuff."

"You don't have any?"

"No."

"Then . . . well, it looked like a can of what they advertise. Same color."

"Mom!"

"What?"

Noodin gets up and goes to check the bathroom. They hear her rummaging through a drawer, and finally she brings back the can. She holds out the can and shows it to Rozin.

"Is this what you used?" Rozin asks.

She nods. Rozin hands her the close-up pair of reading gla.s.ses that the twins share. The can is left over from Halloween. She did up Cally and Deanna's hair with a frosting of gold spray-glitter.

"Read the label, Mama."

Noodin does, then rears back, thoughtfully blinking.

Chapter 13.

Rozin IT IS NOT SO SIMPLE being Rozin Roy. You have a missing carpet stasher for a husband, an ardent baker who keeps dropping off boxes of ginger-frosted gingersnaps, a mother with a secret glitzy place, a job you must go to every day even if the week after Thanksgiving weekend one daughter wakes up with a headache and the other has a sore throat and both are experiencing a sense of loss because their father will soon be divorced from their mother. No matter that he was not around much, or when home, dimly lit or even smashed. He is their father.

"I never thought you'd be divorced," Cally weeps. "We hate Frank."

"No," says Deanna, "we love him, remember? But as our uncle, okay, Mom?"

Deanna quietly broods on her cereal. Both are mourning with reversals of mood. Rozin looks at the clock and thinks how when she was late just a week ago her supervisor gave her one of those looks of cool skepticism that signal the beginning of lack of trust. It was wrong for Rozin to have spent her three-month perfect record of goodwill. She had coffee this fall, too often, with Frank. All that dependability she'd built up, spent now that her children need her. She should certainly have antic.i.p.ated this, but she made the mistake a so-called functional parent makes about a so-called dysfunctional parent. Yes, they do miss him! Of course the girls are sad! And now the grandmas have returned home saying they couldn't eat more of Frank's cookies. The cookies kept appearing once Grandma Giizis said she liked them. Irresistible cookies. Irresistible like Frank. But perhaps like Frank overbearingly sweet, Rozin thinks, an unworthy thought. He has become her lover. Their blood sugar has also shot way up into the heavens.

"I have to go to work now," Rozin tells her daughters. "I just have to. I'm going to get in trouble!"

Cally and Deanna look at each other and big burps and bubbles of sobs come up as they feel the same thing together. The feeling bounces back and forth, getting larger. This happened to them when they were babies. Rozin had to separate them to calm them.

They hear a flamenco tattoo, as if a tap dancer was merrily clicking across the floor on the other side of the wall. It is Sweetheart Calico. Tapitty tap tap, tapitty tap tap. Faster and faster. Tapittytaptaptap. The girls' sobs turn to fascinated hiccups. A door slams. They walk to the window as Sweetheart Calico, now silent, flashes across the weeds. Rozin bolts out the door.

"Wait! Come back!"

Sweetheart turns, eyes wide, and walks back toward Rozin's beckoning hand. Sweetheart is dressed in tight jeans and a flowing pale pink s.h.i.+rt. Her tiny black boots have steel clips on the toes and heels. Her hair is combed and braided on one side. It loops long down the other. Rozin doesn't tell her about the lopsided hairdo-maybe she's got only one hair band.

"Could you please, oh please, babysit the girls? They are too upset to go to school. They won't get on the bus. It is weirdly hot today! They need time to have their emotions. And I have to go to work."

Rozin's pleading rivets Sweetheart Calico and she stands very still and c.o.c.ks her head forward in order to understand what Rozin is telling her. Rozin goes on, throwing her arms up and down, pointing at the car. Sweetheart's dog c.o.c.ks his head side to side as Rozin swishes her arm at the door where the girls stand together, dressed alike as they do for comfort, and sad.

Yes, of course! Sweetheart Calico's look says. I'll take care of them the same way I would take care of my own daughters!

She nods and walks up to the girls, takes their hands in hers. Now the three are standing in the doorway and Rozin is waving good-bye.

"Good-bye, Mama, we'll be okay."

The girls cling to Sweetheart Calico. The dog sits steadfast at the doorstep. Rozin has many doubts but she drives off anyway, afraid of cool skepticism. Afraid of lack of trust. Afraid to offend her supervisor, who could take away the job that pays the mortgage and feeds them and buys all they need to live.

The s.p.a.ces As soon as Rozin drives away, Sweetheart Calico lifts the girls' hands. She looks from one to the other. The cracked-off tooth in her smile makes her look homely and goofy, but also she is beautiful in her pointy boots and swirling blouse. She has a lot of makeup on-bubble-gum pink lipstick, happy blue eye shadow, blaring black eyeliner.

"You forgot one braid," says Cally.

"Yeah, you look weird like that," says Deanna.

Oh this? Sweetheart Calico touches her flowing hair uncertainly. Wrong?

"But it's not so bad," the girls decide. "It's a look."

Sweetheart Calico rolls her eyes, happy. Here we go! She swings their hands as she steps down the steps.