Comfortably Numb
An excerpt from
The Half-White Album
University of New Mexico Press
2023
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She walked slowly and softly around the sturdy oak table in the formal dining room. The claw-foot pedestal legs seemed particularly vicious this time of the month. A delicate lace tablecloth was barely visible beneath a pile of bills slit open at their sides with the precision of a butcher and situated on the table in a constellation that made sense only to her, as the Pythagorean theorem or the law of relativity does to some, as a recipe for pineapple upside-down cake does to others. Something can be made of it, but only by certain people.
A letter opener her brother-in-law brought back from Korea lay next to the freshest bill. The long red tassel had faded over the past forty years, but not the hand-painted picture of a little man who stood in his boat never losing his balance, still hoping for a lucky fishing day.
She took a deep breath, left the dining room, rummaged through the desk in the kitchen. The lamp above the desk had lost its fluted cover and a single bulb burned brightly, exposing a few cobwebs that hung loosely to and from the phone like a flimsy hammock. She opened the drawer and pulled out a pen she already knew didn’t work. The ink had dried up years ago: thirty-nine to be exact, if she counted backward from today, past her divorce, through the years. Back when there was a roast beef cooking in that oven that hadn’t worked in five years. When her children were outside running in a sky turning pink. Snotty nosed and red cheeked, they’d burst in with her husband returning from work with a similar charcoal-black pen with “U.S. Government” stamped on the side sticking out of his front shirt pocket. If she closed her eyes, she could still smell the Avon aftershave on it. But she simply turned it over in her hand, the same way she turned over the past, never looking at it directly but out of her peripheral vision. She placed it back in the desk drawer along with nubby crayons, rubber bands, paperclips, a watch that hadn’t worked in at least two years, a key chain from the Golden Gate Casino, and a small plastic pink high-heel shoe from her daughter’s Barbie doll. She’d sold the doll along with Barbie’s brunette cousin, Francie, the red-headed Stacey, and Barbie’s beach house for ninety-nine dollars to an obese woman whose number she had found in the Thrifty Nickel.
She swiped half-heartedly at the cobwebs that blew in front of her, over the 2007 Elvis calendar. The picture was one of her favorites from the “Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite Concert” he’d recorded before that unfortunate heart attack. It really was a better time to clean than to make out bills. It was getting late, and her eyes burned even during the day over the small numbers.
The ancient furnace in the garage kicked on, blowing its warm, dusty breath through the vents in the kitchen. The rumble of it sounded like her son’s two-stroke minibike on its way home. Foolish; her children were grown now.
Her stomach drew inward, as it often did this time of the day, when the light faded and the bills began to disappear, devoured by the benevolent lion of a table in the dimming light.
She clutched her stomach unconsciously. Nobody knew what this was like, the feeling in her stomach, not even the doctors who examined her with scopes and radiographs. Maybe the security guard at the entrance to the casino knew, or the server who brought her coffee at her favorite machine, “The Wheel of Fortune,” at two in the morning. Maybe they understood that she could feel the subtle temperature change in the machine that was ready to pay. Maybe they had seen her move along them with the deft fingertips of a blind person or a TV evangelist touching the foreheads of the sick. Maybe they knew that tonight could be her lucky night. She had the faith of the little fisherman on the letter opener. She believed that the night swallowed the day, and then there was no past, just a single moment when all was new.
Her car keys hung on the cork message board that said “Welcome.” They winked at her as she reached for them and switched off the light. The constellation of bills shifted in the dark of the dining room as she put on her coat.
Outside the evening star twinkled. The neighbor’s dog barked as she walked to the gate. Smiling, she said to the dog, “Oh, Maii, you coyote,” even though the dog looked to be half-Chihuahua and half-beagle. “You don’t like to stay home either.” She opened the gate and pulled her car out. She told her own dogs to stay there and watch the place. But as she drove away, Maii slipped through an opening in his fence, and her dogs followed. They all chased her down the road, barking.
Across the river, her daughter sat bundled up at her weakening fire. The propane tank that fueled it was nearly empty. She held a beer in her gloved hands, watching the evening star get brighter and brighter. She had stared at that star, which wasn’t really a star, her whole life. It, in turn, stared back at her, seeming to know her better than she knew herself. At times she felt tethered to it, tied too tightly perhaps. It tugged at a place deep inside her. She tried to bend her ear toward that place, near her navel where she’d been experiencing discomfort.
If only she had done more yoga, Janu Sirsasana pose, and drank less of these—she looked at the Tecate and finished it—she could get to that place more easily. “Try meditation,” her therapist had suggested. “Fast,” a curanderahad advised, after a treatment with a raw egg. The fragrance of roses had wafted through the small apartment as the woman rubbed the egg over her naked body. She had sat wrapped in a towel as the curandera cracked the egg open. Its contents slid into a bowl that could just as easily have held Captain Crunch cereal. They had peered at the egg. The curandera looked up at her warily. “You’re holding on too tightly.” She peered into the same bowl and only saw the beginnings of an omelet.
She fasted, and still her stomach continued to call to her with sharp pains. Not appendicitis, not gallstones, not a heart attack. “You’re fine,” her doctor had told her, adding kindly, “maybe lose a little weight, and lay off the beer and spicy food.” What else was there, she wanted to ask. The doctor gave her a prescription for Prilosec that she never filled.
Fasting, meditating, more Janu Sirsasana, and no red or green chile, but it didn’t help. Tears formed in her eyes as she stared at the star, joined now by its relations. They whispered to one another and sizzled in the night sky. She stayed looking until the fire died and the cold drove her in.
The chimes on the back door, the ones she’d picked up at the Goodwill, a little tinkle of bells, made her pause in the kitchen. The sound continued even though the bells weren’t moving. The tinkling, like the bells of the sheep as they were herded over the hills at the base of the red mesas where her mother was born. She thought often of her mother’s mother, whom she’d never met. She’d passed away in the Albuquerque Indian Hospital with TB before she was born. Her parents had followed the train that took her back home to the Dinétah.
Home.
To her, home smelled like dust and dogs and sweet bread and Caress soap. Like celery and onions sautéing in butter, like smoke twirling up from ashtrays as cards or stories were laid down, like exhaust from minibikes and lawn mowers pushed through weeds, not grass. It tasted like gas siphoned from that same lawn mower to put in her Ford Pinto because she’d come home on empty, again. She laughed out loud.
She’d call her mom. She wanted to tell her the Lobos were playing BYU tomorrow night. They hadn’t been to a game together in a long time, because they were both broke. Maybe they could listen to it on KKOB. Maybe they could play UNO or Rummy even though it wasn’t much fun with just two people.
The phone rang and rang in her mom’s kitchen, rang until she finally hung up. It was nine o’clock. She hoped her mom just hadn’t heard the phone because her hearing aids weren’t in. Or didn’t answer because she still wasn’t talking to her daughter, who had suggested, after shuffling through the bills on her mom’s table, maybe she should stop going to the casino. In turn, her mother had looked at her daughter’s belly and suggested maybe she should stop drinking so much beer.
She turned on the stereo. On Coyote 102.5 Sammy Hagar was singing about where eagles fly. She clicked on the desk lamp. It glowed yellow, illuminating stacks of books and papers on her desk: typed pages in manilla folders, the same stories written and rewritten, books amassed through years—The Sacred Hoop, Navajo Made Easier, Bad Indians, Spider Woman’s Granddaughters, The Second Long Walk, The Half-Blood, Almanac of the Dead, academic writings, anthologies, novels, collections of short stories and poems, and historical texts including her mom’s yearbooks with aged newspaper clippings folded inside. As a whole they had become a hazy collage of words, photos and facts, whispers and memories and dreams she was trying to piece together.
She picked a book from the top of a stack. It was published in 1902. Printed in eight-point font, she rubbed her eyes. She skipped past the captions—CEREMONY AND RITES, SEASON, EXPENSE, ORIGIN—and like a child with a picture book she looked for that one drawing she loved most. Finely detailed, probably done in pencil, it was of a man in loose-fitting pants and shirt with a blanket draped over his shoulders, standing outside a medicine lodge looking east. She knew it was east because the door to the lodge faced that direction, but also she knew that place and that the mesa was to the west.
She looked at the drawing for some time. She’d given up long ago trying to comprehend the complex ceremony described in great detail in the book. It was comprised of hundreds of songs, sacred arts and tools, and stories that took a medicine man a lifetime to learn. To fully understand the ceremony she’d need to understand the worldview, and to understand the worldview she’d need to know the language, and she only knew enough of the Diné language to say, “Pass the salt,” “Come and eat,” and to introduce herself—to say, “I was born for my mother’s, mother’s, mother’s clan, and we’re from this place.” If she had colored pencils or crayons, she could fill in the sun descending behind the red sandstone mesa, the coral- and ecru-hued hills speckled with sage and greasewood that rolled into the dunes then spilled into the flat of the wash where corn used to grow. She’d add an elm tree her grandfather planted to shade the little sandstone house. Then it would be the place her mother was born.
She put the book down and typed, “Home.”
She wrote that home smelled like dust and dogs and sweet bread and Caress soap. She wrote that it was a place that knew her better than she knew it. She wrote about the fragrance of Russian Olive trees in the spring and alfalfa in the summer, of wood smoke and coffee at dawn, about the sound of sheep bells and the barking of old dogs, about black crows and arrows and shadows, about being dead and not knowing it. Her fingers tapped on the keys like ancient dancers of an even older ceremony performed only in the winter. Moccasined feet lightly touched the ground as her fingers tapped out stories, her songs, her prayers, her offering.
For how many nights, how many years, had she sat and tapped on that keyboard? Her fingers walking a zigzagged path toward a medicine lodge at the base of the red mesas where a supine patient lay on a dry painting made from multicolored sand. The patient could be her. It could be her mom, or her grandmother, or her cousin.
She walked ahead of the medicine women and men who were arriving to administer to seen and unseen wounds, ahead of the day keepers in nurse’s scrubs, stethoscopes around their necks with which to monitor the strength of the patient’s heart during those winter nights. She walked to the doors of their many houses with her offering. She walked with the acknowledgement that parts of her were not nizhonidi, not walking in beauty, and with the parts of her that felt chindi or taboo. Tears plopped onto her desk, an offering for the parts of her that felt like they had been struck by lightning.
“This is my sand painting, this paper, black on white. These pieces, poems and stories, are my songs that I offer to the night sky with the hope that at dawn the ancient deities will see me—see us—and remember our names.
“I am Kiyaa’aanii nishłį́, Bilagáana bá shíshchíín.” Maybe she could walk between worlds, maybe she could walk where lightning had struck and find that the path between black and white and this and that was just the zigzagged path of lightning. Find that they weren’t cast out, but lead. Lead to this side of the river and born into this place called Bee’eldííldahsinil—‘where the bell sits up high.’”It is on this zigzagged path she wanders now and looks up into the black sky of her heart, into the hole, and wonders: Will their losses ever be recovered, or is this hole an opening from where the journey begins?
