Heart Berries Read online

He took my picture, and I asked to see it.

  “Another,” I said.

  He had forgotten how sure of myself I could sound. He took another, and told me I could have smiled. He escorted me up two floors to the women’s ward. It was late, so the workers showed me to my room and gave me a paper cone of water and two pills—I don’t know what. I had to change into a hospital gown so they could examine what I wore. They said they would give it back to me soon.

  I am familiar with death, and I remembered it was heavy to hold. My mother’s death was violent, internally. I remember once an elder skinned a rabbit in our yard. He wanted to teach me how to do it. He said so many times that a body is a universe. He slit the rabbit open and pointed with his knife to the thick parts of it. He said the word entropy. I remembered that when my mother died, a tube had stretched open the dry corners of her mouth. She was not given grace into the next world. When they pulled the tube from her throat, her lips were dry, and her mouth fell open.

  Nothing is too ugly for this world, I think. It’s just that people pretend not to see.

  I fell asleep trying to remember the composition of a tooth. Gum and bone support the softer things. The raw nerve in my tooth tingled under the weight of my tongue. I don’t want my mouth to be obscene when I die.

  I was finally beneath myself at a new low.

  In the morning, I was the only one dressed in my hospital gown for breakfast. The nurses walked me back to my room and explained I should wear my clothes, which were put away in my dresser.

  I asked the women if there was a scale to weigh myself. I weighed a hundred and twenty-two pounds the day before. They pointed to my dresser and left the room. There’s no right way to dress in the hospital. Some women were dressed provocatively. I put on my cotton shirt and leggings, thinking of what threads weighed the least.

  In line, a stringy-blond woman who looked ill talked about meth, and everything she said seemed like a small lie. I stood behind her and just let her lead the way. Her feet and mouth seemed so urgent and dangerous.

  The cafeteria was coed, and the men looked violent. I didn’t eat because I considered the pills I had taken might have been the type that made me hungry—the type that allowed me to eat until I’d realize I was full. It feels like a skill to refrain. The benefit in this place is that I must refrain from you. I can’t physically see you or know what you’re doing.

  The nurses escorted us back to the ward, and then they pulled me aside for a full tour. The brunette nurse asked me if I believed in God, and the smart one said I looked heartbroken.

  “Is this about a man?” she said.

  I felt breathless, like every question was a step up a stairway.

  Casey, it was more than surreal. I needed a drink, but I reminded myself not to say that out loud, even in jest. The women walked me to the reading room.

  “Nobody reads in here,” the smart one said. “It’s quiet.”

  The nurses smelled good because everything in there, including us, was sterilized and without distinction. They smelled like their homes and lunches and living.

  “You’re welcome to read so long as it doesn’t take away from your healing,” the brunette said. “We have romance novels in stock and some books from the Oprah Book Club.”

  I did enjoy Oprah.

  The art room was all colored paper, glue, and glitter. The pool was stagnant. The birds outside offended me—domestic but free. All the rooms were stark white, but the lighting was dim so everyone looked bleaker. A dull blue stripe ran along every room for the invalids to follow. They gave me an Ambien, and I walked the line, stopping at every barred window. I wanted to hear the world, but the glass was too thick.

  It was funny and hurtful to see the women walking past my room to glimpse at me and assess what type of crazy I was. Every few minutes I saw a new girl who looked sad or angry. We mirrored each other’s blank stares. It was nice to feel at home in that odd place. I tidied my room like I never do at home.

  You said you love to failure. I made you full and flushed. You loved me until your body failed your will. You said making love was kissing my eyelids. I kept them open once and saw you differently. You rooted against me and forced my eyes closed like little coffins. I wondered how many bitter ghosts it took to create a cold feeling in a room. My face was covered in your sweat. I was all points and sharp corners before I loved you.

  You don’t appreciate that you’ve broken me. Lovers want to undo their partners. I feel unveiled and more work than you had bargained for. I was unsure of the currency of men and unaware that losing myself would feel so physical.

  I remember when I spent the night with you once: In the morning I wanted to order a proper breakfast with potatoes and an egg, with toast, and another breakfast of French toast and maple syrup, and butter. You tell me it’s too much. You don’t think I’m gracious. I ordered the proper breakfast, and the server didn’t bring me toast. I complained, and then she brought cold toast, and then I complained again, and then my food went cold. My eyes welled, and you looked disgusted. I usually don’t care about that look. What right does a man have to look at me like that? I think it’s justifiable to hurt someone when they look at me like that.

  We fought for hours, and I didn’t say that my mother had spent her life waiting for service. I waited with her in cafés for an order of french fries or something small we could afford. White women didn’t greet her or consider our time. We walked into places and sometimes men heckled me. I said I was twelve, and they often didn’t believe me. My mother and I found solace, driving hours out of our neighborhood, where being Indian was not much of a crime. If I told you that, I would also need to stop and note the significance of so many other things.

  My mind is overwhelmed with breakfast alone. I don’t eat for days so you can run your hands over my ribcage. You told me that you always want to eat ribs afterward. I don’t eat for days because I can’t afford it. The meal I order after being fucked, by you, or anyone, is something earned. Men objectify me, to such a degree that they forget I eat. You feed your dog more kindly than you feed me. That’s men.

  That was also my problem: an inability to distinguish you from other men when I am angry. I’m sorry. If only you could see how little I need in this hospital.

  I have been vulnerable, but I have never felt this threatened before. I thought I knew what the worst outcomes could be, until I ended up here. I didn’t know not being enough, or being so wrong about someone, would feel this way.

  You got the message I asked my friend to relay. You left me a message, and the nurses said you sounded concerned. I called you from the community phone, but you were not available. I don’t even know what to say, so I ask you to visit me. I hope that when you get my message you are alone. Nobody would advise you seeing me. You are capable of a finality I can’t exact.

  I sat in the reading room for five hours watching women color. The women in here take coloring seriously. They’re territorial over the colors.

  “That’s an earthy green,” Patricia said to me. “You should use something brighter.”

  Patricia looked bothered by my work. She was an apple-faced older woman, with white hair and a soft voice. She was taken here against her will, so she had no clothes of her own. Her breasts hung low in her gown.

  “I don’t know, Patricia,” Laurie said. “It’s kind of like a rich, lustery green. That’s how green stems are.”

  Patricia smiled and passed me the right color.

  Laurie told me that I should color and speak to the other women and never watch the TV because they write that stuff down. She doesn’t want to be released because she is homeless. She tried to kill herself with pills, and by some magic, she was discovered on the floor in her own vomit. She was living in transitional housing, and the suicide attempt wasn’t an issue, but when the emergency responders searched her room, they found pills, which had been prescribed, alon
g with two beer cans. They had a strict rule about alcohol. She was notified with a little sticky note from the nurses that she could no longer live in her home, and that someone else would inhabit her studio by the time she got out.

  “Tallboys?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “It was two small cans.”

  Patricia hovered over her own flower to disengage from our talk.

  “I didn’t try anything,” I said. “I usually do try something when I get this bad. I usually take pills and vomit or something.”

  Laurie’s hair made me nostalgic for my childhood. It was auburn and permed and gelled into a crunchy lion’s mane.

  What I color is inside the lines and cute. A teacher’s assistant in grade one asked me to draw a spoon. I took my time and drew an elaborate rainbow in its silhouette. I gave it a mouth and legs. She told me that passing relied on my ability to just draw a spoon, then she handed me another paper. I used to forgetfully bring things home from school to show my father, years after he left.

  I have some memories of him painting. He held me tight in the cold of the basement. I used to sit on his lap for hours while he worked.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to one of his birds. “What do you see?”

  “Eagle,” I said.

  “Mother,” he said.

  He looked a lot like Jim from Taxi. He had long, coarse hair, and he always wore light blue denim with an old baseball tee. He was lean, and my mother had a thing for tall, lean men.

  I feel like I don’t belong here, Casey. I feel like nothing here has helped. The psychiatrist advised against me leaving and threatened to get the courts involved. So I tried to engage myself with every material and exercise. They give each woman a large pink book that asks numerous questions to help parse out all the things that led up to their unraveling. The latter half of the book tries to wind the reader back together, asking them to find better ways to cope: Stop and think before you do something you regret. I don’t like neat narratives or formulas.

  I go to group therapy. It is quite intense, because holy shit there are a lot of women in the group who can articulate why they are here.

  “It’s been forty years of silence for me,” said Laurie. “My father raped me from age six to ten.”

  The group counselor said that one must forgive for one’s self and not for the perpetrator. This made little-to-no sense in my mind. We’re all on meds here, most of us are half zombie and half antsy: a weird mix. In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don’t even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I’m not sure that their dichotomies apply to me.

  I found myself staring off during group, which made the counselor, Terri, prompt me for my story.

  “I look for external validations of worth, and I always end up crazy over it,” I said.

  “It’s good you can acknowledge that,” Terri said. “How long have you been doing that?”

  “My whole life. Isn’t that what we learn as children? To look for affirmation in the external? Our fathers and mothers?” I said.

  “Some children are taught self-esteem from a young age,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  There’s a girl with tight braids who posts up against the wall at group therapy. When Terri asks her to sit down, she says she doesn’t want to. She says that she has to be here for seven full days, no matter if she behaves or not.

  Terri explained self-esteem and its function, and I blame my mother for not saying these things. My mother wasn’t big on esteem for herself, let alone trying to foster that in me. I think self-esteem is a white invention to further separate one person from another. It asks people to assess their values and implies people have worth. It seems like identity capitalism.

  Mom did teach me story, though, along with Grampa Crow. She knew that was my power, and she knew women need their power honed early, before it’s beaten out of them by the world. I know what you’re thinking, Casey, again with my mother? Yes, unfortunately that’s the biggest part of my work in this place. The therapists seem to think she’s a link to my betterment. I think she did the best she could with the tools she had. The therapist said that’s making excuses. Sometimes she had to lock herself away from the world, that’s all. I have fond and bitter memories of her. I can’t imagine what she’d think of me being here. My mother would have laughed at me. She’d have rolled in laughter and thrown her head back at my misery.

  She believed in subversion and turning things upside down. She mocked everything. My desire to be normal or sincere made her laugh.

  “Men will never love you,” she said once. “They’ll use you up, and, when you’re bone dry and it’s your time to write, you’ll be alone without a goddamn typewriter to your name.”

  She had a lot taken from her. False starts took something out of her, and then having children and getting married, and then divorced. All the jobs she had—and then there was the work at her desk, and the several books she wrote.

  I feel like my body is being drawn through a syringe. Sometimes walking is hard. The gravity of Indian women’s situations, and the weight of our bodies, are too much.

  Even Mom’s cynicism was subversive. She often said nothing would work out. She often said that trying was futile and still dedicated her life to other people through social work. When she was unemployed, she rallied for social justice. She did things that required hopefulness. She made a name as an angry Indian woman who could consent and disallow things. Indian women are usually discouraged from that basic agency. Not to say that she wasn’t betrayed and hurt.

  I remember well that I had to take care of myself. When I was a child, and I was as restless as I am now, I walked along the walls of our home, waiting for someone to come home and feed me or bathe me or take me outside. The phone rang once, and it was the unemployment office. I told the woman that my mother was at work. I thought lies were good when they made someone seem good. The strange thing about poverty is that maintaining a level of desperation and lack of integrity keeps the checks rolling in.

  Days after I picked up the phone, my mother lost her unemployment. She screamed until she cried, and then said that if we didn’t eat it was my fault. I know, just like I know with my own child, she was sorry the moment the words escaped her mouth. The difference between her and I, as mothers, is that I don’t have a sense of pride with my son. He is a small king. Still, he is as unfortunate as me, but at least he hasn’t had to be home alone or starve. I have fostered love with compliments and carrying him, even when he grew to be half my size. I prepared meals and spoon-fed him. Children are teachers in a way.

  My mother’s burning ceremony was irreverent like her. We had plates of smoked salmon and the things our grandparents liked to eat, ready for the fire to take, and I heard someone joke they would put some wine in for Karen. The fire exploded across the lawn, and people said that it was Mom. It was that night I felt compelled to resist all the traditionalism of my mother, because I’m not sure how it served her children.

  She hated alcohol and stopped drinking before I was born. She was a pipe carrier and fasted alone in the mountains anytime she had to. She built a sweat lodge by herself. She taught my brothers how to keep a fire and taught me how to prepare a feast. She spent years of my life waking up with the day to give thanks to the river.

  I never understood her commitment to living well. It seems innate that I am fucked up. I think I have the blood memory of my neurotic ancestors and their vices. Her work seems as important as my work, to acknowledge that some of my people slept in, and wasted their lives, and were gluttonous.

  For her burial, my brothers and I walked her ashes in a cedar box from the church to the grave. Dogs lingered behind the party. My aunt says at every funeral, there are some culture
s where women are paid to wail—are revered for wailing better than others. There is a culture that makes crying a virtue and a gift.

  It felt like Mom’s funeral lasted a year. It felt like one long winter, where my family told every story of hers by memory, as if we were being interrogated. My mother’s spirit loomed over us, imploring us to avenge her death, but there were too many culprits: from the government, to the reservation, to her own family, to whoever hurt her the very first time. I saw in pictures that between thirteen and fourteen my mother changed. That culprit, and then all our fathers, and the men who said they were down for the cause and then abandoned it, like they did their children—those men killed my mother. Even the sweet lovers who gave her hope are the culprits of her pain.

  It’s strange that my grandmother and my mother and my aunts died from blood clots or cancer. I think again of entropy and of the body.

  When my mother had her first aneurism, I received a call from my siblings. I swear two of them held the receiver. They said, maybe in unison, “Mom misses you. She isn’t speaking.”

  I don’t like to say I am the sensible one in my family, because we all are dependent on each other. Maybe I am the logical mechanism in the family, and I shudder to think that, with me here in a crazy house. They told me she was walking into walls. I called emergency and booked a flight home.

  I ran away from her as a girl, and a blood clot called me back.

  The first thing she did when she saw me was laugh. She didn’t have the capacity to speak. They said she hadn’t made any noises until I arrived.

  I touched her foot first and started a routine of questions to make her happy: Is there cable here? My show is on. I don’t trust the white women with the IV—they’ll do you like they do in the soaps. We’re going to need a sign language for all the insults you can’t call us. How will we know when you want to hit us?

  She was so small that her snarling was endearing. I always made her laugh.

  What little I have told you in the past seemed problematic. You seemed engaged by my dysfunction because you are a writer and not because I had experienced it. It is odd that I went to foster care while my mother worked in a group home. But it was not odd to me.