“Why am I hurting like this?” I asked my wife later.
And she said, “Um, your mother, who was wicked Most of the time and good some of the time— She just died. And you’ve only begun to reconcile The two mothers who lived inside your one mother.”
“Oh,” I said, amused at my emotional blindness.
“My mom wasn’t even that sick when I bought
The tickets,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking about her then.”
“We’re always thinking about our mothers,” my wife said, “Because, when it comes to death, you and I are up next.”
63.
Performance
ONSTAGE, IN BELLINGHAM, Washington, during a fund-raiser for salmon restoration, I pointed out to an audience of eight hundred that salmon go on their epic journey from the ocean into the insane mouths of rivers and up those rivers against the current, over dams, dodging bears and fishermen—and a lot of those fishermen are Indians, by the way—and then through and over and around trees and rocks and pollution and garbage—swimming hundreds, even thousands of miles—in order to fuck.
“Salmon,” I said, “are the most epic fuckers in the animal kingdom.”
The audience, crunchy-assed liberals one and all, laughed but not with the abandon I wanted to hear. Maybe they were socially and politically progressive, but I could feel their sexual repression, too. I could sense that shitloads of them were offended. I was being inappropriate. After all, man, we had gathered to save the salmon, not to talk about sex.
“So, honestly,” I said, unafraid of being even more inappropriate. “When we celebrate salmon, we are celebrating fucking. And I don’t think we celebrate fucking enough. In fact, forget salmon for a minute. Let’s talk about our mothers and fathers. I mean—have any of you ever thanked your parents for fucking and conceiving you? And I don’t mean thank them all cute and poetic like, ‘Oh, I light this ancestral fire in tribute to you for my human creation.’ No, I mean have you ever looked your mother and father in the eye and said, ‘Thank you for fucking me into existence.’”
The audience laughed louder. I knew I’d won over a few more of them. But I wanted to win all of them. So I went stuntman.
“In fact,” I said as I pulled out my cell phone and held it close to the microphone. “My father is dead. But I’m going to call my mother right now.”
I heard gasps in the audience. Some woman shouted, “No!” The moment was hugely uncomfortable, very funny, and comedically dangerous. It was dangerous because I didn’t know if my mother was home to answer the phone.
One ring.
Please be home, Mom.
Two rings.
Please don’t be the machine.
Three rings.
What am I going to do if it’s the machine? If I leave a message, will it be funny?
“Hello,” my mother answered.
Thank God.
“Hey, Mom,” I said. “I’m onstage in front of about eight hundred people in Bellingham, and we’re trying to save the salmon, and I just wanted to thank you for fucking Dad and conceiving me.”
The audience laughed.
My mother laughed.
“So what do you think about that?” I asked her.
She said, “I think you sound like you’re drunk. Have you been going to your AA meetings?”
The audience laughed and laughed. I held the cell phone in the air as they laughed. That laughter was a celebration of my mother. She had won everybody in the room.
64.
Electrolux
FOUR IN THE morning and our mother was vacuuming. That was one of her ceremonies. She often stayed awake all night to make quilts or to bead powwow regalia or just to watch TV. On those sleepless nights, she was usually content to be alone. To keep the peace. But on other nights, she needed to disturb all of us. So she’d plug in that old wheezing vacuum and slam and clunk around the living room. We lived in a small house, so there was no escape from the goddamn racket of her loneliness.
Whir, whir, whir, whir.
Fuck you, vacuum.
Whir, whir, whir, whir.
Fuck you, Mom.
She knew my siblings and our father would stay in bed and pretend to be asleep. Maybe they’d even learned how to sleep through all of the forms of our mother’s mania. Most of the time they passively accepted our mother’s contempt. They rarely confronted her about any of her bullshit. But she knew that I would stand up to her. She knew that I would storm up the stairs to curse at her. Once, I unplugged the vacuum, opened the door, and threw it as far as I could into the dark. It smashed to the ground. I hoped I’d broken it. But I’d only knocked loose a rib or something structural because the vacuum kept working but thereafter rattled like a snake made out of tin cans.
Whir, whir, whir, whir.
Don’t take the fucking bait.
Whir, whir, whir, whir.
She wins if you engage with her madness.
How many times had she woken us that way? Thirty or forty times over twenty years? Not nearly enough for it to be predictable. No, she always surprised us with that shit. And I would furiously react.
But, one night, I didn’t react. I covered my head with my pillows and tried to fall back asleep. She kept vacuuming. I refused to fight; she refused to turn off the vacuum. A stalemate that lasted until dawn.
Later that morning, as we all ate breakfast, dark-eyed from lack of sleep, we all joked around as if it were another normal day in the Alexie household. But we didn’t make jokes about our mother’s vacuuming. We didn’t address that at all.
Whir, whir, whir, whir.
Don’t talk about the shit that is troubling you.
Whir, whir, whir, whir.
Swallow every indignity, small and large, without editorial comment.
I don’t know what happened to that vacuum. I imagine it finally broke for good. It’s probably buried deep in the reservation landfill. Maybe some twenty-seventh-century archaeologists will find it. They’ll think it was just a primitive cleaning device. They won’t know it was a nonlethal weapon in a domestic war.
65.
Love Parade
My mother married a war Orphan. For the ceremony,
He sported a three-piece Grief. She was lovely
In a white dress—a former child Bride now marrying again
As a woman. They wed On impulse in City Hall
After being witnesses To their friends’ equally
Impulsive marriage
That only lasted months.
But my mother and her war Orphan were married
For nearly four decades, Conceived four children
Together, raised another Only biologically hers,
Sheltered a dozen cousins For days and weeks
And sometimes years, And officially adopted
One cousin and raised him As their son. All of us—
We brothers and sisters And cousins—were parented,
Well and not well,
By my mother
And her war orphan.
We were raised by two kinds
Of loneliness: One was silent And solitary and depressed
While the other rehearsed lines, Sought out the crowd,
And confessed to everything.
So, yes, I am the child
Of those two opposing forces.
I am the one
Who is half monk
And half clown.
Look at me pray!
Look at me pratfall!