Future Home of the Living God(14)

“You changed your mind? Oh, wow! I know it’s a lot to ask,” she says. “But this is, like, a big statement. Really nice of you. Thanks.”

I look down. At my feet there is a box of black Hefty Steel Saks, no doubt placed there by Sweetie as a subtle hint. I bend over, put my pack and computer where I hope I’ll find them again, and pull the first plastic bag from the box.

“Let’s put all of the colored dirty clothes in this one,” I say, holding up the bag. “And the ones we need to bleach, the white stuff, in this one.” I hand Little Mary another black trash bag. Her pink bow bobs and sways again, sweet and strangely demure.

“Your look’s kind of shocking, I like it,” I tell her.

“Goth-Lolita,” she says, almost shy.

She takes the bag and looks at me with something like grateful awe. I don’t have to bend over yet. I can pick up one limp black piece of clothing, another, another, off piles at waist height, off hooks on the wall. I pray that as I do excavate ever deeper there are no used condoms or old puke or large insects in the pile I see that I will have to peel up from the floor, layer by layer.

I hear them out there, now, coming in the door, together, talking.

And now I see that my prayers about the contents of the floor piles are definitely not answered—Saint Jude, I think, who answers hopeless causes. Please send me a clean pair of rubber gloves. There are actually layers of Chinese lady beetles from last fall’s infestation, but they are dead, and crumbled to dust. There are thongs like aggregate rock, glued into patterned bricks. I just heave those into the bag. But all in all, I think, even as I use a dirty sock to pick things up I can’t believe I’m seeing, all in all, considering what things are like in the living room, I would definitely rather be in here.



Yes, the whole thing is awkward, more than that. Eventually I’m too hungry and tired to go on cleaning. As soon as I emerge from Little Mary’s room, in order not to have to make conversation, I greet all of my parents with a bright smile.

“Oh, I see you’ve met one another!”

“Yeah!” They all answer at the same time, smiles pasted on their chops. My suggestion, that we all take a sunset tour of the reservation, is greeted with such relief that I know my desperation’s mutual. So we all go out, leaving Little Mary absorbed (Whoa—forgot I bought this one!) in sorting thongs in her half-cleaned room. Riding without seat belts in Eddy’s pickup, we see the old round house, the school, the racetrack, the lake, the turtle-shaped tribal office buildings and fiberglass eagle, and the confusingly circular clinic. We get out and play a few slots at the casino. It is dark by the time we drive over to the Superpumper.

We examine the pumps, then walk into the store, up the candy and condiments aisle, down the utilities and snack foods aisle, over to the fast-food cases and the pressurized latte machine. After the entire station is admired, I watch as without a word Sweetie picks up a pair of clean plastic tongs and uses them to pluck a wiener off the hot moving bars of the countertop grill. Carefully, she puts the dog into its bun, pumps a line of ketchup and a line of mustard along its oily flank, then nestles the finished thing in a fluted paper rectangle. Sweetie then presents this hot dog to my adoptive mom.

I freeze. I watch.

Sera has often held forth on the thirty-nine different deadly carcinogens contained in cheap hot dogs such as the one she is holding now. The nitrates are implicated in esophageal and stomach cancer, the red dyes in systemic foul-ups, the binding agents are bad as warfarin, and among the preservatives there is formaldehyde. And then there is the meat itself. Animal scourings. Neural and spinal material likely to contain the prions that transmit Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Hog lips, snout, anus, penile sheaths, jowls, inner ears. I don’t know how to rescue her. For that hot dog is an innocent gesture of pride and conciliation. It says so much. Thank you for raising my daughter. Thank you for sending her back to me. I am grateful for this chance and want to be friends. That hot dog says all this, and more. Yet it is a chilling object, a powerful nexus of poisons representative of dumb, brutish animal suffering.

Sera raises the thing to her lips. I see her take a bite.

One bite, another.

She eats the whole thing, smiles, and says, “Thank you, that was good.”

Child, if ever I poke fun at or even gently deride my adoptive mom’s fierce virtues, if you ever see me roll my eyes at one of her tirades or groan yeah, yeah when she makes a point I’ve heard a thousand times before, just remind me of that gas-station hot dog. The day she ate it all. It was a magnificent thing she did. I saw her, at that moment, as a hero.

*

Sera and Glen drive back to the casino hotel where they are going to stay, Sera tells me bravely, so that I can have some time with my birth family. As I hug her good-bye I know she wants to tell me more. But she holds back. She wants to make my first visit to my biological reservation family good. She wants goodness. That is who and what she and Glen are.

So I do stay with my new family and I even, surprise shock, sleep in Little Mary’s room. On a blow-up mattress. On clean sheets. With three fans going. Before I go to bed, I have a moment with Sweetie, a kiss-good-night moment, in the living room. That’s when I tell her about the baby. When I tell her, she just hugs me. She sits on the couch next to me with her arms around me, hugging me, for about ten minutes, and it does not seem awkward at all, though I become very conscious of her breathing, of the catch in her chest from the cigarettes, and the scent of her green apple shampoo. My Potts family doesn’t seem to be the hugging sort, not like my Songmaker parents, who are always touching, always including me in a knot or a tangle of embraces, always enthusiastically twined. There is something showy about the Songmaker closeness, though it is perfectly genuine. The Potts do not seem to think of themselves as “warm.” So far they haven’t defined family characteristics and they certainly do not seem to manufacture them. But when Sweetie hugs me, it is with a gravity and composure that makes the hug into a serious blessing. While the hug is going on, our eyes are shut—that’s right. My Potts mom and I sit on the couch in front of the TV hugging with our eyes shut for about five minutes, maybe even ten. I am comforted by the hug even though I gradually sense that Sweetie actually does know about the rumors of weirdness in the childbearing universe. I feel in her body, as she holds me, a wordless physical concern.