Heart Berries: A Memoir(27)

“I need to see someone about this,” I said.

The therapist tapped my kneecaps, one and then the other. I closed my eyes.

“What’s your safe space?” she asked.

Her office was small. She was licensed, just enough to deal with my trauma, but not educated beyond my comprehension. She was not so smart that I would worry what she was writing in her notebook. Her hair was short. She scared me, with her aura, as someone who believed in God and would have me believe too if I wasn’t mindful.

“My safe space is outside my childhood home.” Outside in the yard, overlooking forty acres of corn. I liked the whistle of the stalks and loneliness. There were only coyotes in the field, and crows, and wild things—weaving through dry stalks.

My eyes moved back and forth as she tapped me, left and right. I felt like a pendulum, or something open, steady and drawing to a time. Ready to greet some horrible memory beneath the safety of my space.

“How is your stress?” she said.

Her name was Adrienne, like a poet I loved. A woman of exclusion, who loved women enough to give her work solely to them. Adrienne was part of a continuum working against erasure. I think my counselor was too, by letting me remember. I believe Indian women remember often, like me, but mostly it is while their hands are wrist deep in the dishes. There is always something on the floor to pick up with a rag—always a counter.

“Get a teddy bear,” she said. “You’ll want to let her pick it out.” She pointed to my heart, indicating the child within me. “Hold it like you would hold yourself. Comfort yourself.”

At Walgreens, the only one that struck me was a light brown bear who reminded me of honey. It had a bowtie. His head was bigger than my inner child’s head. He reminded me of a bear my mother brought home from the Nechi Institute, a place where she studied to become a counselor.

During that time, she was very experimental. She’d test our tongues for candida, observing how white they were. She made us eat wild rice but never learned to cook it properly. She made us beat pillows, stuffed animals, and rugs when we misbehaved, because she wanted us to release our tensions. My brother and I could only laugh at her parental antics, unable to combat her theory, only able to see its silliness. It was all a response to Grandma dying, and my father leaving, and my tuberculosis.

She brought me a bear like the new one I found at Walgreens, and she told me she loved me. I might be misremembering the words, but I know that she meant to say she loved me. She loved dearly, and often gave me things to nurture. I received so many dolls, bears, and small animals before I became a woman.

The first time I held Honey Bear I was alone in my bedroom. I told him it was okay. I was here, and he was safe. I was part of a continuum against erasure, I told myself. My body felt stronger when I embraced it. I felt connected to a lineage of women who had illustrated their bodies and felt liberated by them. Thunder might have been within me the day I had coffee, freeing the memory of my father, revealing some chaos to me too quickly to comprehend.

“He’s a good-looking bear,” Casey said, observing it.

“It feels good to hold it.”

When I was a little girl I had a dog named Buddy. His fur stood up in thunderstorms. His coat was all antennae. He used to fall asleep with his nose against my skin. I never let him sleep alone in storms. He was mauled by coyotes and survived.

After he recovered, he kept running away, and I felt like he was running away from me. There was a blue house down my street, where a German shepherd was chained up in the front. Buddy was cuddled up to that big dog. He was so small next to her. I pulled his body away from her by the collar, and he started to piss on me. I felt so betrayed. He was my only friend. It wasn’t long after that—he ran away for good. The dog was something good and small and the first thing in my life I could hold. I remember that I confided in him that I had been hurt. I think he was the only one I told. I thought the burden of knowing was too much, and that’s why he ran away. I’m still somehow convinced.

After I was gifted with approximate memory—after crying a few hundred times, Casey squeezed my hand, and we kissed each other. I felt the sticky notes of my lips pull apart from his. The right love is an adhesive. I realized that I had a singular mind with Casey. Even with my duplicity and my rambling. I felt unworthy of that kind of love and ready for it.

“My father,” I said.

Just saying the two words cracked my voice. It was enough for him to know.

“I remember my father.”

Just the three words were too many and enough for me to know.

“He hurt me,” I said.

The rest of the year was a practice in language. Every new word became more horrific. I can say full sentences. In the shower, before I knew how to be scared or protect myself, I disappeared. Ten minutes of my life were enough to kill me. Every day I negotiate the minutes of my life, remembering that I can’t remember enough. I spend hours convincing myself that no child is ruined—and the one inside of me is worth remembering fondly. My mother’s looming spirit guides me some days, telling me that nothing is too ugly for this world. I am not too ugly for this world.





10


indian condition



My education was a renaissance, and I know what comes after discovery. I graduated in a woven cedar cap and blue shawl. I was given a sovereign land to write every transgression.