31

Pregnancy made February in Ithaca twice as depressing. I couldn’t escape the chill that snuck under the door, up through the ugly carpet squares stuck to the floor, the chill that kept the tub icy no matter how hot I ran the water. Six months along, I figured the extra weight I was carrying should heat me up, but it didn’t.

My upstairs neighbor, a round Ukrainian with a hairdo and beard like Grizzly Adams, with whom I’d exchanged maybe three words in a year and a half, left a typed note informing me he was moving to Boca Raton at the end of May, and he and the landlord had discussed the fact his apartment was more suitable for a couple with a newborn than the studio I now occupied, so on June 1, 1992, I and Frank and the baby would move into the two-bedroom he was vacating, and my rent would increase by sixty-five dollars. The note annoyed me. It read like an eviction notice more than a kind offer. We would move in June, not we could. I showed it to Frank and was surprised when he said only, “That’s good news.”

His classes seemed to be going well, and his systems had dwindled to dishwashing and bed-making. Hiding from the cold in the apartment, the hectic first month of the semester over, I sorted library books to take back before the baby was born. At the bottom of a stack I found the monograph about Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and opened it to the dog-eared page where I’d stopped reading on the way back from Cleveland. Pat Caldweel had scowled and advised, “Don’t lose focus” when I mentioned enjoying the book.

I flipped through the last chapters and my eye fell on a sentence inside parentheses: (Because he feared for their safety while imprisoned, Cody used his influence to effect the release into his custody a number of survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre. These Lakota Sioux performed as part of the Wild West during the show’s European tour of 1891–1892.)

There was no tiny superscript number leading to an end-note, no further mention of the survivors in the index. My hands shook. I put on my coat and my scarf and then took them off. The index was nearly as long as the book itself. The reference had to be obscure, maybe even untrustworthy, but that didn’t matter.

I composed my essay over the next two weeks, calmly sitting in my library carrel from eight in the morning to noon, penciling each day seven hundred and fifty words onto the pages of a yellow legal pad. I felt no need to rush to record my ideas. For months I’d fed information into the little machine inside my head—the two versions of Sarah Weed’s narrative of captivation by Indians, one in which her husband cowered in a dress, the other in which he died bravely defending her; Pocahontas watching a Ben Johnson masque in London with King James; Buffalo Bill saving Ghost Dancers from prison by having them play Indians in a show about the Wild West that toured Europe; Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The little machine sorted and cross-referenced and connected. For months I’d been writing the essay while I slept, worried about Frank, worried about giving birth, worried about taking care of the baby, had sex. All I had to do was transcribe, and while the calm I felt was almost disappointing, I couldn’t deny the thirty pages were perfect—too perfect to share. I couldn’t take the chance that instead of praising my work Pat Caldweel might scold me for losing focus. On the last day of February I typed up and printed the essay, deleted the file from my Mac’s hard drive, put the printout in an unlabeled manila folder, and slid the folder between one holding my soon-to-be-obsolete lease and one holding a copy of my 1990 1040EZ.