In the Night of Memory, page 10
We sat Barbie between our toothbrush boxes on the dresser, clothed in a washcloth with some bias tape from Dolly’s sewing box wrapped around the waist and tied in a bow. Dolly thought having Barbie sit around bare-naked would be vulgar and said she would help us sew something for her to wear later on, after things got settled a little more.
Midafternoons we watched General Hospital with Dolly, and by Wednesday I felt easy enough around her, once the program was over, to ask her about people in the framed pictures on the walls and on top of the bookshelf next to the television. She placed each in our hands as she told us about them, replacing each one carefully after we had had time to look at them.
The snapshot in the cardboard frame on the bookshelf of a serious-looking blonde teenage Dolly had been taken by her mother after church one day in Minneapolis; sixteen-year-old Dolly squinted, her glasses held in her hand and half-hidden against the side of her skirt.
In the small silver frame a woman in a flowered hat held a frilly, lacy bundle of blanket and baptism dress; a baby’s surprised-looking face peeked out of the mass of ruffles at the woman, whose large lipsticked mouth was puckered in a kissing shape. Next to her a wrinkled, bald man grinned happily at the camera. “Vernon Junior with his godparents,” Dolly explained. “Winnie and Ingrum, such nice people. A long time ago, I guess.” She dusted the glass, lightly, with her sweatshirt sleeve.
Above the bookshelf hung Junior’s high school graduation picture and next to it his Army picture, taken before he went overseas. Between them in an 8x10 with a scrolled brass frame was a blurry enlargement of a snapshot, a small boy in coveralls seated on porch steps next to a woman in a floral-patterned housedress. Her face, in profile, looked down tenderly at the little boy whose head rested lovingly against her elbow, oblivious to the camera. “That’s Junior with his grandma, Maggie; she is your grandma, too—your great-grandmother. She died when he was little, not long after this picture.”
“Would you like to see a picture of Vernon Senior?” Dolly asked. “Azure, if you’ll go into my bedroom, you’ll see it’s on the table next to my bed. Bring it out here, would you?”
Winnie and Ingrum again, this time flanking a skinny, happy teenage boy wearing baggy, high-waisted pants and a ribbed undershirt—Winnie on one side with an arm around the boy’s neck, Ingrum on the other with an arm around the boy’s waist. “I took this one,” Dolly said. “Just before he went in the Army. He went missing overseas; we never saw him again. Vernon Junior never saw his father at all.” She lay the picture on her lap. “This was at the bowling alley, the Palace Bowl; that’s where Vernon and his cousin Sam were working.” She took in a deep breath; I waited for her to expel it in a sigh, but instead she coughed into her sweater sleeve and swiped at her nose with her shirttail.
“And now here we are, here we are—be careful putting the picture back on the bedside table, will you? And I have another picture to show you; I was going to get it enlarged and framed before you got here, but we were so excited about fixing up your room that I forgot.” Dolly walked back to Junior’s room, where we heard her open and close a cupboard door. When she came back into the front room she was carrying a small clear plastic envelope.
“Your auntie Artense gave this to Junior when he was looking for you. It’s a picture of her and your mother, Loretta, when they were about five years old; Artense says it’s from the photo booth in the old Woolworth’s downtown.”
The wallet-sized black-and-white photograph was of two girls, each with an arm around the other’s shoulders. Both were wearing kerchiefs tied under the chin; both had short, thick bangs; one girl smiled open-mouthed, innocently unaware of her pointy eye teeth; the other looked solemnly into the camera lens.
“That’s Loretta, the smiley girl; the other is her cousin, your auntie Artense.”
Rain and I looked closely at the photo.
“She’s excited,” said Rain, touching the plastic over our mother’s little-girl face with her fingertips.
“Yes, she was always an excited, active little girl whenever I saw her,” Dolly answered. “They had a lot of fun together, Artense and Loretta; Artense says this picture was from when Loretta was visiting and Patsy took them downtown. There would be three more of these; you went in this little booth and put in a quarter, and the camera flashed four times, then a couple of minutes later it spit out a strip of four pictures. People cut them apart, see? This one is cut crooked at the bottom, looks like somebody used nail scissors.”
Rain pointed at Artense. “Was she mad?”
“Nooooo . . . That’s just the way Artense is; kind of a worrier, I guess.”
“They look like sisters, like us,” I said, wondering if my words had any truth to them.
Dolly tucked the plastic-sleeved photo into the corner of Junior’s baptism picture. “We’ll take it to First Photo this week and get it enlarged, and we’ll get a nice frame and put it above the bookshelf right next to the picture of Junior and Maggie.”
On Friday of the week we had off to get ready for school, Dolly took us to the Academy of Hair Design for haircuts and perms. My beauty-school girl fixed mine just like the social worker’s: it looked like shiny ribbons curling in spirals almost all the way down to my shoulder blades. I loved it.
Rainy’s hairdo took a lot longer. Dolly and I read magazines—Dolly going outside twice for a cigarette—until Rain came out with shining eyes and a permanent that wasn’t like mine at all. A two-inch-high oval of tightly curled, somewhat frizzy hair covered the crown of her head, joined at the back to a second oval that extended to the nape of her neck; the sides were plastered upwards with hair gel that had been sprinkled with silver glitter. It was called a Mohawk, Rain told us excitedly, and was the newest style. Her beauty-school girl smiled proudly.
Holy cow, Dolly whispered to herself, but “My, how fancy!” she said aloud.
Our beauty-school students beamed. “We have to get the manager here to check the cuts and the perms,” my student said.
“Miss Donna! We’re ready for a check!” called Rain’s student.
The manager, who inspected and measured the cut and perm, pronounced both to be perfect. “Excellent work, both of you.”
Dolly cleared her throat. “Are you girls going to show them how they get their hair this way when they’re getting ready for school?” They were. “Well, why don’t you do that while I talk to your teacher, here.”
Dolly whispered to the beauty-school manager that she was going to have to do something else with Rainy’s head. She couldn’t let her out of the house with a hairdo that not only made her look like a chippie, but how in the world would she ever get a hairbrush through it? She’d spent all that money so we’d look nice for school, not so Rainy would stand out like a wild . . . wild . . . Dolly searching for the right word.
“Well, the cut is called a Mohawk; that’s the style.”
“See, what I am saying here is that she doesn’t have it easy, because she’s a little slow,” she explained in a more urgent whisper almost directly into the manager’s ear. “We’re trying to make her look like she’ll fit in.”
“She needs to be able to fix her hair, herself, for school in the morning,” she said loudly to the eavesdropping beauty-school student, who had become tearful. “It’s not that you didn’t do a good job; it just needs to be a little easier to fix for every day. She can wear it this fancy way for church, maybe.”
Which is how Rain ended up with this hairdo that could be plaited right down to her scalp and down the back of her skull into a French braid. Gently, Rain’s student coaxed the ovals of curls into a thick herringbone shape that she secured at the bottom with a silver elastic band.
“Very nice, Caroline,” said the manager. “Let her see the back.”
Caroline spun Rain’s chair around and gave her a mirror, helping her to position it. “Do you like it?” She smiled nervously.
“It’s so pretty,” said Rain. “And I look so tall.”
I could tell that Rain’s hairdo was still a little untamed for Dolly’s taste, but the manager said that Rain’s hair would train itself and calm down before too long. In the meantime, Caroline would show Dolly and me how to fix a French braid at home. We watched her take the plait apart and section her hair with a wide-toothed comb, then with her fingers weave Rain’s hair down the back of her head from the crown to the bottom, past the nape of her neck, securing the end again with a silver elastic band.
“Want to try it?” Miss Donna asked Dolly, who after two tries that only tangled Rain’s hair into knots that had to be combed out by the manager, gave up.
“Ow,” said Rainy, rubbing her head.
“How about your other girl? Want to give it a try, honey?”
I was so afraid of getting my hands stuck in Rain’s perm and hurting her that my braid came out loose and sloppy, but the manager said that I had the hang of it.
“They can practice this at home,” she said to Dolly. “They can play beauty salon with each other’s hair. Here,” she said to me, “try it one more time. I’ll watch.”
“I can do it,” said Rainy, loosening her braid. Holding the silver elastic band in her teeth she wide-combed the curls and put down the comb, then touched her head with her fingertips, each an inch apart, one hand above each ear. Without looking at the mirror and without the comb, she French-braided her own hair by feel, walking her fingers down the back of her head and lifting each section that she had tapped with her fingertips, winding the few inches of hair left at the bottom with the silver elastic band into a figure-eight.
“Well,” said Dolly, “how in the world did you do that?”
“I don’t know, I just did.”
At the cash register Dolly picked up bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and detangler and a wide-toothed comb, and she let us each choose a little jar of lip gloss from a bowl on the counter. “Give both of those beauty students a nice tip, will you,” she said to the manager as she wrote a check. Then Dolly stepped back and looked us up and down.
“You are the most beautiful girls I ever saw,” she said.
3
The Saturday before we started school, Junior took us to a sobriety powwow. I didn’t think we’d ever gone to a powwow before and asked Dolly if we had to go—she told us we had been to powwows when we were little and might remember about them once we got there. We would probably even see people we knew.
I swallowed, then cleared my throat. “I can’t think of anybody we would know?” I put it as a meek-sounding question, but it was taking a chance: Mrs. Kukonen would have cracked me across the ear, but in the week and a half we had been at Dolly’s she hadn’t shown any sign of hitting us.
This was Dolly’s opportunity to tell us that our mother would be there, if she was going to be anywhere, but she didn’t say anything about Loretta at all.
“Well, they know you,” was all she said.
“Can’t we stay here with you?” This from Rainy.
“Can you come with?” Me.
“I’m going with my friend Rose first; you haven’t met her yet, but we do daywork together—we have a job today at the American Legion, but if we don’t get out of there too late, I hope I can make it there in time for the feast. Sis tries to get up to Chris Jensen, the nursing home, to visit her mother’s friend Lisette on Saturdays, and she’ll drop me off at the Coppertop when we get the job finished.” This was the First Methodist Church at the top of the hill, with the copper roof.
“Do you know what time?”
“I don’t know—just don’t worry; it will be fine. You’ll have fun. Do it for Junior.”
She fussed a little as we got dressed, had me take off my blouse so that she could iron the front and put a crease into the sleeves, and then changed the ribbon at the bottom of Rainy’s braid to a new one, green to match her eyes. She shot one short burst of hairspray onto the top of Rain’s head and lightly smoothed any bits of permed curls sticking out from the braid.
“You look nice,” she said, circling to look us over from all sides. “Prettiest girls there.”
Outside, a car honked twice, lightly. Dolly waved out the door, “Coming, Sis!” and picked up a plastic laundry basket of cleaning supplies. “Will you carry the bag of dust rags?” she asked. I handed the rags to Rainy and lifted one side of the laundry basket.
As we placed the laundry basket and bag of rags into the back seat of the car, Sis—who evidently was also Rose and had watched us as we walked from the porch and all the way down to the curb—looked closely at our faces.
“Azure Sky and Rainfall Dawn,” she said. “How do you like it at your new house?”
“Good.”
“Nice.”
Her smile was a cheery mouthful of crooked teeth. “I bet you do; I saw your room when Dolly and Junior were fixing it up, all that pink and purple. Have fun at the powwow!”
They drove off, Dolly waving, and Rainy and I went back into the house to wait for Junior, me trying but unable to remember anything at all about powwows.
In the years since that afternoon at the Methodist church Rain and I have been to many powwows; we have risen with the other spectators for the flag bearers and the dancers, for the entrance of the dancers into the circle, for the invocation, for the Veterans dance, and for the honoring and intertribal dances. As adults we became traditional dancers, my sister and me, plain and prayerful in the simple dresses we sewed for ourselves, and now, older, each time that we line up for Grand Entry we stand in our right and proper place according to the order of age that every year places us closer to the beginning of the lineup. In front of us are the women traditional dancers in buckskin dresses; following, we in ribbon-trimmed calico match our steps to theirs as we enter the circle, as the jingle and fancy shawl dancers do theirs to ours. Each time, whether I am dancing or watching from the side, my heart lifts with happiness and gratitude at being a part of this, but I cherish the early memory of the sobriety powwow at the Coppertop church the most dearly. It was there that Auntie Girlie told Rain and me that we look like our mother—her gift to Loretta and to us that acknowledged and clarified our right and proper place in the LaForce and Gallette families, and in the world, as surely as the order of women dancers at Grand Entry.
But on that day when I was thirteen and Rain fourteen, the two of us in the back seat of Junior’s car looking out the windows at the houses and stores lined up along the streets of Duluth, we felt out of place and afraid. And thankful for Junior, who was all we had.
At the church parking lot a man on foot approached the car, lurching heavily to the left with each step. Junior lifted one hand in greeting and opened his window; the man peered into the car. “Vernon Gallette, sir!” removing his stocking hat and bowing deeply, hat swept in a generous half-circle by one hand. “Ain’t seen you in two days—what’s the good word?” He and Junior shook hands raised palm to palm, and the man set the hat back on his head, where it perched like a raggy gray butterfly.
“Brought somebody with me.” Vernon opened the back door. “Come out, you girls, and meet a friend of mine. Howard Dulebohn, this is Rainfall and Azure.”
“Rainfall. Azure. Loretta’s daughters, hey.” Howard nodded; his hat jumped forward to just over his left eye. “Happy to meet you.”
“Hi,” Rain answered nervously.
“Happy to meet you, too,” I mumbled.
“Do you need any help carrying anything?”
Dolly had made Rice Krispie bars for the feast and had stacked them onto two doubled paper plates that she covered with plastic wrap. She told us to bring them directly to the kitchen from the car, to keep them clean, not set them on the floor of the car, not lift the plastic, and especially not let any little kids at them, because who knows when they last washed their hands. Although Howard wasn’t a little kid, his hands didn’t look too clean, and the paper plates were so white.
“No; thank you, though; we’re okay,” I answered.
We walked in a little procession toward the doors of the Coppertop church basement, Junior and Howard in front and Rainy and I in back, walking so close to one another that I bumped her shoulder with mine. “Be careful of the Rice Krispie bars,” she said.
“We’d better not walk so fast.” We slowed our steps, which was enough to delay our entrance by several seconds.
We left Junior and Howard at the sign-in table to enter all of our names for the door prize drawing and found the kitchen, crowded with cooks and helpers. From somewhere near the sink a woman called out, “What have you got there? Bars? You can put them on the counter by the window.”
Outside the kitchen we could hear drumming and singing; at the end of the wide hallway the auditorium doors were wide open, and between us and the powwow, dancers were standing in line against the wall. One of them, a woman in a fringed buckskin dress, waved a feathered fan back and forth across her face and chest. She smiled.
“Getting warm in here, huh? Are you girls looking for somebody?”
“Umm . . . the bathroom?”
“Right behind you!” And so it was, Ladies stenciled in script under the silhouette of a colonial woman in a wide-skirted dress.
She was there in the ladies’ room, the light coming in from the window she faced bright yet diffused to a glow by the white of the nylon curtains, so that she was to us a hazy figure in blue dancing with her back to us. Her shawl, pinned to her shoulders and wrists, spread as she parted the curtains and opened the window, the breeze blowing the fringe from her shawl and her smoky exhalation back towards us as we watched, riveted and breathless. She bent, leaning out the window and calling to someone outside.
My heart pounded and I couldn’t speak. Loretta. I was certain that I would recognize her anywhere, but would she recognize us? She dipped, rose, leaned on her elbows as she spoke through the window to a shadow that moved across the sunlit white curtains, oblivious to Rain and me as we went to the bathroom, flushed the toilets, washed our hands. Was she a ghost?
