Extra Indians. Eric Gansworth

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a garment bag for another year, I stopped by my office mailbox where a new interoffice mailer held the morning paper’s back section. An article was circled in red marker, a note attached to the upper corner with a paper clip. The rigid, formal, and stiff penmanship was my former mother-in-law’s. It was a note of very few words, each one counting, as if letters were being rationed and Martha Boans were down to her last few.

      My world changed in that moment, within her oddly constipated script, as if I had donned glasses for the first time, or had been suddenly fitted for a hearing aid after years of reading lips and deciphering the intended meaning of dull consonants and vowels. The vague whispers I had heard perpetually throughout the reservation suddenly came into sharp, piercing distilled sounds, like swords drawn. For years, I had been so close to knowing the information held on this scrap of paper, and even as close as I’d come, my mother never flinched, answering my questions with the nonchalance of telling someone what was for dinner. I should have followed my usual rule.

      Every year, I purposefully avoid my campus mailbox on this day. I don’t want to be tempted to bring work with me to Commencement, sneaking glances at letters, calls for proposals, invitations, as the kids walk across the stage. Instead, I daydream my way through Commencement. You can only hear so many “It’s a Big World Out There, but if You Are Determined, You Can Make a Difference” speeches and still be moved by them. I turn the volume down on the Potential Futures of Our Graduates speech, drowning it with future lectures, grocery shopping lists, favorite songs, harvested from memory.

      I always try to appear attentive and smile at the graduates I had known. Any time I think of using a sick day for Commencement, I remember walking across the stage, seeing professors who had made a difference in my life. I have little faith that I’ve changed students’ lives, but this was the only chance for some. Entering, they had been one step away from fast-food franchise assistant manager and they still might take my next Value Meal order.

      My own time in college was spent nearly leaving those halls for good, almost every day. The only thing keeping me there for the first year was my mother’s potential daily glower if I had stopped going. That I studied art merely attenuated her stares. She still scantly believes I talk about art every day and receive a two-week paycheck she wouldn’t have seen over the course of two to three months in any given year. My students’ faces share the same will to stare down doubting parents, and that kept me at Commencement while colleagues had already switched over to gin and sailboats and “good books.”

      Though my grades were in a week before, I’ve continued inhabiting my office even beyond finals week. Some nights my apartment seemed emptier than others. Most evenings, I enjoyed coming home to clean silence. Up to a year ago, before my husband and I separated, every night would have been my ex-mother-in-law’s combination of Jeopardy and smoky haze. During finals week, in past years, Doug would make my favorite dishes, have a bath waiting, and a good film from the little rental place a half-hour drive away. It was the only place you could get decent films without computer-generated explosions or surgically altered couples falling predictably in love, awash in a Top 40 sound track.

      This year, finals week was pizza or Chinese delivery “for one” and whatever was on cable. Once Commencement is over, I want to be anywhere with people, though I frankly have no idea where. My old socializing was with Doug and our families. My colleagues had gradually stopped inviting us to their parties a few years ago. As much as I’d wanted my own space, lately the apartment offered only sterile discomfort. Maybe T.J. Howkowski, sitting next to me on the stage, would want to do something, I had thought through the ceremony.

      I had helped him get his foot in the door, almost eight years ago when he’d come home to the reservation for good, and now we were at the only junior college in all of New York with two faculty members who could legitimately check the “American Indian” box on the human resources form, an improbable situation at best and thus frequently problematic. Though my scholarship research specialized in Indians in American film, every time I admired beadwork for its beauty and craft, the artists thought I was working on a way to turn it into a lecture and make millions talking to fascinated white audiences about their work. The life this reservation has invented for me is far more glamorous than the one I have in reality.

      They never see lectures where the honorarium doesn’t cover costs or see conference presentations where the panel is relieved that there are more people in the audience than there are on the stage. They also don’t see that I’m working at a very small college where there are no courses specializing in media studies or popular culture or even American studies. I am the art historian, period. I can do the research I want, but in the classroom, I had better represent the Renaissance through postmodernism, or it is poor-evaluation time for me. The luxury of a large University, where I could really devote my time to the study of Fred Howkowski and his impact on the roles of Indians in film, is really more a dream than anything else, a way to not make myself crazy repeating over and over again the significance of the first Italian perspective painters or Pablo Picasso’s break with form, or Cindy Sherman’s own ironic take on Hollywood.

      T.J. at least got some response as the chief in Cuckoo’s Nest around the country in the summers, if not from his students. Half the time I’m not sure the audience listens as I lecture through a slide show, the only ways of documenting our culture that I have. He’s also got the advantage of being a poster boy for Indian men in America—slick braids, hawk nose, thick sensuous lips, and the stoic look that just won’t quit. I’m not sure he would get the same stares with a flattop or even a regular haircut but those braids are unstoppable.

      Those same looks drive the Indian men around here as crazy as they do the women. That he is part white and raised by a white couple seventeen hundred miles away doesn’t stop their wives and girlfriends commenting anytime they see him. Even Doug, when we lived together, carried on a running monologue about everything wrong with T.J. whenever someone mentioned him. When T.J. had a small speaking part last year on Justice Scales, Doug was insufferable. He’d even brought home one of the countdown calendars Mason Rollins had printed, with T.J.’s face, but not to mark the days until the broadcast. Doug’s El Marko had given my colleague a pirate’s eye patch, missing teeth, warts, the works.

      I wonder if Doug still has it. He probably took it down last spring when I moved back to the city—the only home I had ever known. I’m convinced Doug had put it up, trying to brew tension, as if his mother’s seven-year presence with us hadn’t been enough. The whole time I’d lived on the reservation, people whispered behind my back, though about what, I never knew exactly. I thought maybe it would stop when I left, but they blamed the breakup on me, the city-Indian woman with the degrees, and not on the hardworking smoke-shop-clerking rez-born and -bred husband, and certainly not on the chain-smoking, soap opera-game show watching, invasive and pervasive mother-in-law who had lived with us since we moved to that trailer.

      It hadn’t been my fault her house burned down, and after seven years, I couldn’t take one more day of that life, not knowing how much longer it would go on. I thought I’d be rid of her for the most part after I moved out. I felt safe living back in the city while she remained in my old trailer on the reservation. It was strange at first not to wake up to Doug snoring, and I had been surprised to discover that in the time I was on the reservation, I had acclimated to its otherwise quiet nights. I guess I missed the place.

      “Did you know about this?” I whispered to T.J., as the students began their march across the stage. I revealed the article from the sleeve of my regalia, passing him the newspaper. He’d glanced, nodded, and handed it back to me. “It’s not every day your stepfather gets on national TV. How come you never mentioned it?”

      “Adoptive father. I don’t know, didn’t think it would be all that interesting to you. You know how that show is. I don’t know what he’s thinking. And besides, it’s not like he’s going to be talking about your favorite subject.” Some days T.J. was willing to talk for hours about his real father’s brief СКАЧАТЬ