3
It was toward the end of the semester. We were rushing toward winter break, zooming around the hallways. Outside, the city looked as if it had been tacked up and smudged with a thumb. It was the days of early darkness, a few sprigs of tinsel. No snow but somehow we had slush or something slushish and damp on the streets.
“How would you like to go to an Indian dance?” the office assistant said to me.
“What kind of an Indian are you supposed to be?” I said.
—
On Saturday morning I drove to her neighborhood. It was the first clear bright day we’d had in weeks. Her neighborhood consisted of a set of small streets squeezed between two enormous bridges. She lived at one end of a long brick street that started out luminous, with shiny storefronts and upscale groceries, and smoothed out into pretty little residential three-flats, painted matte colors or made of brown stones. As I drove down it, I could see glimpses of the river between buildings. I pulled up and waited.
—
I had known my brother would die young and he did. I had known my neighbor would die. I had known about a high school friend and about another friend who became a lover and then went back to being a friend and then was dead.
This was the kind of neighborhood where people live long lives.
—
The office assistant came out of the building. She was carrying a large black case, like for an awkwardly shaped instrument. “What is that?” I said.
“Our costumes,” she said.
—
The dance turned out to be incredibly far. It took hours to get there. We drove on roads leading out of the city and into the vast land of America. It was a hell of a lot of highway out there unreeling beside the median strip, dry fields behind chain-link fences, antennae towers, toll booths, flagpoles, sky. It was the kind of drive where you pass a series of billboards and road signs that promise there will be snow cones, there will be rest in forty-eight miles, God is on the way. There was a sudden insane rainstorm, clear out of a drained day. The rain drummed down so hard on the car it drowned out our voices. All we could see were stars of water on the windshield. We were driving through outer space, through a comet.
“I’m going to pull over,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Go.”
—
After a while the rain dried up, and we were once again going over the empty land, passing an occasional spray of houses, the lost communities of our citizenry. A line of fat white birds flew by overhead, making it look like real work to get where they were going.
—
“Is the dance on a reservation?”
No, what did I think, the assistant wondered, that the reservations were just there for anyone to go in and steal out of their wigwams?
“Where then?”
Well, I’d see, for God’s sake. Now would I quit asking questions and listen to the story the assistant was trying to tell about her mother, something about the costumes, how her mother had sewed them with her own fingers based on a Native American costume description. Her mother had supported her through everything. When she drew comic books her mother had always been the first to read them. When she had love problems she could always bring them home. She’d had drug troubles, she’d suffered rejection from her father, but her mother had always been there.
I still hadn’t told her that no matter how great her mother was I wasn’t wearing any fucking Indian costume.
—
Another note about the movie. The office assistant had not been comparing me to George, the lead, who at the end of the movie cries out that he is grateful for his bad life and enjoins his daughter to get over to that piano and play them all a song. I was being compared to Mary, his wife, who if she were not around, nothing would be much different — George would have married a different lady, that’s all — and I have to say I do see the connection. Nothing would be different if I weren’t around. I haven’t caused anything, good or bad. Even if I have done something inadvertently, as, say, in the movies where a man moves a cup and a thousand years later all of humanity explodes, it’s likely that if I hadn’t been born, my mother would have had a different baby around the same time and that baby would have been somewhat like me or mostly like me and would have made similar choices, probably the very same ones, and she would be here right now instead of me, feeling the things that I feel in my stead. And any ill or beneficial effects that I may have caused would be caused by her, not me. She’d take care of moving or not moving any cup that I would have or not.
—
“You should quit that job,” said the office assistant. “You’re no good at it.”
“I do all right,” I said. “You might let me help you out with those essays.”
“What essays?”
“99.”
“Not this again.”
“Did we talk about this?”
“What makes you think you have any reason to ask me for a favor?”
“Not a favor. I’m doing you a turn. A friendly turn, friend to friend.”
“You think we’re friends? Why do you think I asked you? You have a car. I asked five other people before you.”
“I’ll pay you a hundred dollars,” I said.
This made her laugh. “You think I’m going to risk my job for a hundred bucks?”
“A thousand.”
She looked over at me then, and I could see she knew I had my secret reasons for wanting to do this, reasons that were in some way shameful. And she knew it because she had her own dark shameful secrets, all you had to do was look at her to see them, lurking behind her face, old pains, secrets having to do with the ancient beginnings of her life — with the end of it too.
—
“Pull over,” she said.
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
“No way,” she said. “I just have to pee.”
We were on the blankest, bleakest stretch of road of the whole trip so far. I don’t know why she chose that moment and not twenty minutes back at the gas station and not twenty ahead into whatever was up there waiting.
“All right, all right,” I said. I eased to the side of the road. “Hurry.” She got out and ran over the brown earth.
I stared out the windshield at the flat land. Bits of rain and mud were still coming down. I waited. I considered dumping the costumes on the side of the road where she wouldn’t see.
—
The thing about the kid’s music was that you didn’t know what was going to happen next. You’d think you knew where it was going but you were wrong. There are very few parts of life like that.
—
What was she taking so long for? I stretched my neck around, saw nothing. The land around me seemed pressed into the ground, the blades of grass crushed, the few trees bent and barren. I noted the time on the dashboard. She’d been gone twenty minutes. I turned off the engine, put on the flashers. Got out. It was damn cold. Was she playing a trick on me? Had someone picked her up out there? Was I supposed to wait here for hours and then, after dark, drive back lost, run out of gas, wander around on these roads with a gas can, which I didn’t even have, only to be made fun of on Monday? I knew there was a game that went something like that, but in the version I knew the person in the field was the one left behind. The one in the car was the one who laughed.
—
I called to her. I locked the car, took a few steps in the direction I thought she’d gone. I called to her again. It was early afternoon by this time but the sky had turned to a heavy dark gray. I stepped into the field and looked back at my car to be sure she wasn’t springing out, breaking a window, hot-wiring the car, and speeding away without me. The wind swayed the antennae. I walked farther into the field. It was when I came to a little block of cement, no higher than my knee, that I finally heard her.