CLAUDIA STROLLED THE dry goods aisle, forcing herself to find the cheapest brand of coffee. A white-haired lady in a warm up jacket rolled by in an electric wheelchair with a wreath tied to its back, clipping a middle aged man, his wide face broadened by the center part of his long hair.
“Beep, beep, beep.” He backed up.
“Beep beep!” She toggled the switch on her armrest to charge at him.
They disappeared into the frozen foods aisle, laughing. Claudia wanted to follow, gladdened, but she never allowed herself near breakfast waffles and ice cream.
This Christmas was the latest in a long line of holidays she filled with work, goaded by her father’s derision of vacation. Even as he grew old, her father treated visiting family as though they weren’t there, locking himself in the study to make calls, coming down to dinner when the day was heavy upon him. She, too, was proud of her ability to insulate her focus against the presence of loved ones, saying “no” to people who cared about her and “yes” to those who didn’t. Perhaps she was sick, but she liked it that way. She would make it in this country.
Last Christmas, their father had prevailed upon dinner with lengthy discourses about world politics and the economy. Claudia relied on Maria to bring cheer, stockpiling energy for later, when she could think.
“Thanks for showing Andrew around today.” She raised her wine in salute. Two glasses, max, she’d vowed, but here she was at three. It wasn’t yet time for dessert. She had to work later. Maybe tomorrow.
Stop drinking, she thought, and took another sip.
“Please don’t thank me. It was fun!” Maria leafed through her salad. “You should get out more. It would be good for you.” Her sunglasses had left a pale stripe on either side of her wide eyes. “I make so much art after I’ve been in nature. I love cross country skiing. It’s so mellow. You can take in the scenery, you know?”
Maria still spoke like a Mexican, which meant she said “love” like “lowve.”
“I had a great time.” Andrew smiled at Maria and reached for Claudia’s hand. “We should go up there tomorrow, Claudia.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” She gave him a rueful squeeze. “My proposal is due.”
Thomas chuckled. “I thought you’d written the keynote by now.” With a stiff cough and the wet clatter of ice, her father regarded his crystal tumbler with displaced contempt. She knew the reason. In his cosmology, she was too clumsy to make it on her own. She eroded his dynasty. Before him was the errant branch of a family that roared westward, chewing up trees and men and sky, and never retreated. A wasted generation, which future historians would skip.
Claudia let go of Andrew’s hand and took another sip. “It’s complicated.”
Andrew sawed his steak with unnecessary vigor. “No problem.” Blood oozed into his mashed potatoes. “I’ll go up to the hill, get a few turns in.”
“Great.” Claudia speared a green bean. “I’ll finish by dinnertime. We’ll have a nice evening together.”
The next afternoon, when she came down to the kitchen for a snack, she heard Maria speaking Spanish with the maids in the other kitchen, refusing as always to comply with their father’s edict to “maintain the proper distance.” Claudia couldn’t make out the words from the lilt of female voices. A rumble of laughter. She knit her brow and checked her watch. Had Andrew come back? Still on deadline, she went upstairs and closed the door.
At her prodding, when she began her PhD, he launched a boutique architecture firm. Life was busy for them both. She taught classes and worked on her dissertation, analyzing gendered notions of love in Mexican border songs, thrilled to see her name in journals. Ethnomusicology, American Anthropologist, Ethnography. He saved copies for display on their coffee table.
But when he began delegating to employees, she was just getting started on her true task. Tenure. She was in the very infancy of her career. Between committees and conferences, she sought solitude whenever possible, excluding herself from vacations and weekends only to be tormented by procrastination, the sound of her keyboard a fickle companion, dipping into and out of a smoking habit that made her a liar a thousand times.
She kept at it, her writing disrupted by distant bellows as Thomas argued points on a call. They worshipped success together. Mostly, the halls held nothing but shadows and silence, blessed silence, and the words flowed. Work felt holy.
And so it would seem she had missed the glances unfurling between Andrew and Maria.
Claudia wheeled over to the produce aisle, trying not to ruin her makeup with tears. Right. Something for breakfast. Onward.
A young couple—pimples and hoodies, flip flops peeking below wet jeans—herded a small child past Claudia. The boy spun in circles between them, arms outstretched. The father’s sweatshirt was printed with AMERICA: LOVE IT OR GIVE IT BACK. The mother put down her basket—milk, apples, Cheerios, cans of alphabet soup—and stooped to pick up the boy.
Claudia scanned the bananas—too green, too ripe, well, this splotchy bunch could do—and eavesdropped on a conversation in the deli corner.
“Oh, that must be nice for you.” A girl wiped down the metal counter in front of an old woman and fiddled with rows of fried chicken wings. “How long is he staying?”
“He just got here. You two should meet.”
That voice, like beach stones tumbling under surf. Claudia peered around a shelving unit stacked with shrink-wrapped bell peppers. A grizzled halo, pants ending two inches above the socks. It must be. Pull youself together and get to work, Claudia thought. Now’s your chance.
“Maggie?”
Maggie turned and waved, albeit vaguely. Claudia put the bananas in the child seat and pushed her cart over.
“It’s Claudia! Good to see you again!”
“You, too.”
She remembers me! Claudia stepped from behind her cart, making it official—we are going to chat. But why was Maggie staring like that? She seemed perturbed, anxious, her eyes clouding and refocusing.
Claudia was recalculating her approach when Maggie looked up at a man coming out of the cleaning supplies aisle, a bucket of bleach dangling from his hand, forearm tensed against the weight. Dressed in jeans and a hooded jacket with pushed up sleeves, he moved rangily, like he spent his life outdoors. He slowed—in spite of himself, it seemed—approaching with a once over that was not as subtle as Claudia would have liked. His hair was long enough to tuck behind his ears. His eyes turned down at the corners. A mouth so full it was womanish. His skin stretched over the angles of his face, hollowing at the cheeks, shining along his wide brow. She couldn’t place him.
But now, she’d been caught. His eyes were big and black and looking more and more amused. She was naked, exposed. Her ears popped with a muffled ringing almost like silence.
“Hi.” He offered his free hand. “Peter.”
Claudia took his palm, her wrist torqued so their fingers could slip around each other. His skin was warm; hers, chilled.
“Claudia.” She turned to Maggie. “How have you been?”
“Fine.”
Claudia tried to emit genuine feeling, to offer Maggie the sweet comfort of shared memory—our friendship is real—but her cheerful expression was deflating. Maggie was acting like she hardly knew her. Claudia spent hours, days, weeks talking to this woman, recording her thoughts and reviewing cultural tidbits culled from prior data gathering interviews that masqueraded as conversations. Unprompted, Maggie shared secrets, the kind that weighed on whoever held them in keeping. Perhaps she was ashamed now, because here was the son, and Claudia knew things.
“Staying long?” Peter put the bleach down.
“A couple of months. I just arrived. I’m stocking up.”
Wait, she thought. I don’t mean you. I’m not stocking up on you.
Mindless chatter was where she stumbled the most. She revealed what she didn’t want to reveal, her mask no mask at all but a bullhorn for social awkwardness, solitude, self-doubt. Everything she tried to keep at bay came tumbling out of her mouth as superfluous commentary.
Relax, she told herself. Focus. We’re having an interaction. I’m lucky Natives take their time talking.
“You over at Hobuck?”
Impossible to hide where she was staying in such a small community. “It’s so beautiful on the beach.”
He seemed delighted. “What are you doing way out here?”
“Your mother’s been helping me with my research. Stories and music.”
“Whaddya know about that.”
“Not as much as I should! That’s why I’m here. To learn. Maggie, are you still volunteering at the museum?”
“Oh, here and there. Not too much these days.”
“I brought a transcript of our last chat.”
Maggie’s eyes were blank.
“We talked about how your husband was a singer, like his mother?”
“Oh, sure, sure.” Maggie drifted toward the deli. Her sneakers made small squeaks.
“I learned a lot. Should I bring it to the museum?”
Peter watched her work his mother, his smile hardening. He spoke before Maggie could reply. “Why don’t you come by the house? I’m interested in family history.”
“Oh, you live there now, too?”
And again. She’d embarrassed him. A grown man living with his mother. But here, housing was tight. Families lived together. It had been that way since the longhouses.
Peter was smiling, thank God. “Just moved back.” He picked up the bucket. “We’re on Diaht Hill, third pull out. My black truck will be parked out front. Come by Monday morning.” He guided Maggie toward the cashier before Claudia could thank him.
Lingering in produce, waiting for them to clear the checkout line, Claudia tossed a head of garlic into her cart and ducked past the meat section, grabbing a chicken for show. The deli girl was staring. She did not look amused. We weren’t flirting, Claudia wanted to say. This is work for me. She’d forgotten the gutsick social paranoia of small town life, where every relationship mattered, or at least made itself felt.
The coffee maker gurgled at her. She turned in haste, clocking the counter with the right half of her pelvis, and doubled over. Her cabin was not expansive enough for real pacing, but she tried, a small star of pain exploding in her hip as she limped down the hallway, emitting a reedy stream of air from pursed lips.
There was the small matter of what she’d seen. The owl. A harbinger of bad news. Ill spirit of a drowned soul. Siyowen.
And that mink. Kwa-Ti. A trickster. A Transformer.
His laugh had started high, a hyena-like hoot that thickened into something more human, with bass in it, like listening to a man talk with your ear on his chest. The piercing clarity of her delusion haunted her, plucking anxieties from her subconscious with the lucid cruelty of God. It was a vision. Some One was trying to tell her something. Kwa-Ti was a shapeshifter, greedy and boastful. Bound to deceive, he pretended to serve those around him, suffering the consequences only to come back for more, scaling up by orders of magnitude, always. A warning.
No. It was a hallucination, she decided. All kinds of people see things that aren’t there. Yes, but those people talk to themselves. It was a dream. I passed out at the wheel, she affirmed, desperate not to stand among the crazed. I was exhausted. It could happen to anyone. In the days since, she slept and slept and still was tired, as though she hadn’t slept at all. Waking was like drowning at the bottom of a well.
Claudia brought a mug and her bathrobe sash to the breakfast table, where she set up her laptop and printer. In the oven, the butterflied chicken was tightening, its ruddy muscles pulling away from each other without their fatty veil. She sat, passing the sash beneath her seat and over her lap, tying herself to the chair with a grim smile, and opened the first document, copying the entire transcript into a blank file she saved in a new folder, entitled Drafts.
M: Sam’s mother was a real singer. I seen her perform at potlatches when I was a girl. The men drummed in a circle, and she leaned in over their shoulders, her voice all high, cuttin’ through. Nobody could sing like her.
C: What did she sing?
M: Oh, you know, family songs.
C: Do you know them?
M: The songs belonged to her husband. He passed one on to Sam.
C: Could you sing it for me?
M: I can’t remember too good.
Her cursor paused. Grammatical errors should remain, though it filled her with shame, somehow, to leave them there, knowing that Maggie and Peter could read through the diction to the distance between the woman who was asking the questions and the woman who was answering them. They won’t notice, she thought, skeptical. Maggie shifted in her seat when she said it, aware of her error. Or maybe she used the mistake and her confusion as decoys, a bird’s broken wing trick to lure the weasel from her nest.
For all intents and purposes, Claudia’s presence was predicated on one thing. Maggie would give her what she wanted, would tell her things about spirit animals and songs that she wasn’t supposed to reveal to anyone outside her family. Maggie knew it, too, of that she was sure. The lonely, the young and the old possess emotional acuity, an astute sense of positioning born from need. Last summer, Maggie was killing time, keeping her erstwhile companion close because she needed company. Claudia’s reappearance had to be palatable to this reconfigured family, its prodigal son returned.
For all intents and purposes—Claudia used that phrase incorrectly in an article submitted to her grad school’s journal. The reviewer returned the paper, unaccepted, her error—for all intensive purposes—circled in red, marked ESL? She stared at those letters for a long time before the dimpled pages told her she was crying. She was glaring at the screen now, to no avail.
M: I can’t remember too good.
It would remain in the text, a gauntlet thrown.
C: Did you teach your son the songs?
M: I tried, but he wasn’t interested. And then he was gone.
Would Peter challenge his mother on that point? Could he make her sing?
C: Who went to the dances?
M: Everybody. I could pull out a Neah Bay telephone book and show you. I keep them, just in case. Directories, we used to call them. I’ve got stacks in my house. People keep passing on. I can’t bear to throw their names away.
C: What else do you keep?
M: Oh, everything. I’m about to run out of house!
C: What kinds of things do you keep?
M: Anything that helps me remember. I’m a saver. Like Peter’s jerseys. He started on the basketball team, took the Red Devils to state his junior year.
C: Do you have anything . . . cultural?
M: What do you mean?
C: Materials that pertain to your culture, things that make you Makah.
M: Well, jerseys fit the bill, I guess. I’m not sure what you mean.
C: I’m not explaining myself well. Do you hang onto old stuff?
M: Sure do.
C: Maybe I could come over one day, help you go through it.
M: I wouldn’t want you to go to the trouble.
Muffled thumps and flutters pulled her from the transcript. She looked at the kitchen window, and there she was, her pallid face framed in darkness, mouth speckled with the frantic bodies of moths. They hurled themselves at the light of her laptop, their futile bumps and hovers like fingertips drumming a tabletop. She was out here alone. Lashing herself to the chair was unwise. She tugged the bow; the silk sash slipped its knot, slithering to the floor.
She could not conceal her greedy nature without deleting the whole damned document. Would Maggie remember what she said? Regardless, Claudia could not advance beyond this first draft of their history, aghast at her own depravity. She was hustling a hoarder.
C: It would be no trouble at all!
M: Peter will help me, when he gets back.
Claudia left her breach of basic decency intact. It was a hook. An anchor. Peter would need an assistant. And who better than she?
C: When will that be?
M: He’ll be home soon. Any day now. I feel it.
Claudia stood and stretched, slipping on quilted oven mitts to pull out the chicken. Hot fat swished, sizzling as she scavenged juices with a spoon, trickling her meager haul over the desiccated drumsticks. Placing the mitts on a burner, she kept the oven open to warm her hands. Like a bum in front of a trashcan, she thought, examining her ragged nails. She would buy polish. Maybe she and Maggie could do their nails together. Some Makah women were into makeup and that sort of thing.
She wiggled a drumstick. The joint moved easily. She picked up the knife.
She thought Chicanas cornered the market on penciled eyebrows, but it turned out lots of brown girls had a way with brows. There was a certain kind of Native woman, just like there was a certain kind of Latina, who saw her own face as a blank canvas, or, more accurately, a map of flaws, a tenuous topography to be torn down and rebuilt in private with tweezers and a pencil. Many girls began their lives believing they’d be artists, but most only learned to draw over themselves.
She slid the blade around the chicken’s thigh, working it away from the body with small, sliding taps of the knife’s tip.
She made a career of such merciless scrutiny, which led her to this jagged point on the Pacific, the same sea she swam as a child. Peeling strings of meat from bone, Claudia worked late into the night, deleting phrases that betrayed her. Excising the errata was as fierce and satisfying as standing before the bathroom mirror, squeezing blackheads from her nose. Please get over your disgust, she told herself. Like you haven’t done that, like you’re not going to do it again.