The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [96]
Ira laughed. “Wow.”
“You’re impressed?”
“I’m kind of scared of you.”
“Why, because my eyes bug out? Most cases like mine do not persist, but I even had surgery and they still popped out again, and the treatments haven’t worked. The doctors say I’m just stubborn. The whole thing stems out of my thyroid gland, and I know it got fucked up in Kuwait. They’re going to paralyze my eyelids with Botox and see if they drop.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’ll be young forever. I’ll have young eyes.”
Ira looked down at her hands.
“I don’t know what I’d do. I feel for you.”
“I’d rather you just feel me,” said Morris. “Up.”
“Sad.”
“I know it, I’m so out of practice.”
“Yes, you are. But that’s a plus in my mind.”
“Good.” Morris paused. “Are you used to your house being gone yet?”
“I am trying to get used to remembering that I have no house, nothing, just what I have on me.”
“Which is?”
Ira began to rummage in her purse. “A comb, a compact, a stick of gum, an extra diaper, some bills, food vouchers, old mascara, a bunch of toilet paper, photographs, which now I’m very glad I always carry, and lots of lint balls.”
“That’s in your purse.”
“Right. Oh, and I also have a beadwork clip and a bag of earrings I was hoping to sell. Here,” she handed him the clip, which was a sunburst design picked out in extra-small fancy cutbeads. “This is an example of my work. You can feel how I made it anyway.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah, I’m real careful. I do good, tight, work, me.”
Morris held the clip, running his fingers over it. “Can I keep it?”
Ira hesitated, “Well, I’d like to give it to you. But I could maybe get forty for it. I was gonna show the nurses.”
“I’ve got fifty.”
“Trying to give me money again.” Ira pushed the clip back at Morris. “Just take it. Keep it. I want you to have it.”
“No,” said Morris. He tried to give it back, but Ira had left the room. So he lay back with the beaded sunburst in the palm of his hand, running his fingers across the perfect, smooth, curved rows of beads.
“We’re none of us perfect,” said Honey. Ira’s cousin was round, cute, and full of satisfaction about her house and children and hardworking husband. She had it all. She was sitting in the girls’ room on the plastic recliner. Ira came in and sat on the end of Alice’s bed and wondered if Honey had found them a place to stay.
“You blame your mom,” said Honey to Shawnee. “But you shouldn’t. Your mother is a human being. She has her faults, as do all of us.”
Shawnee had been staring at the blank TV. Now she looked at Honey. She saw her so clearly. She saw her thin brown hair with the floss cut so it curled around her ears. She saw the heaviness in her face and neck, her strong little black eyes. She saw how Honey liked to visit them because they made her feel so much better about her own children and her situation in this life. She wondered if Honey went to school or just practiced until she got the job of nurse. Anyway, even if she’d learned all there was to know, she didn’t know her mother or have the right to tell Shawnee to blame or not to blame her. And her mother was a human being, that was true, anybody could see that. This woman had not been to the edge of life.
“I’m not stupid,” said Shawnee to her mother’s cousin.
After that, although Honey tried to talk to her, held her hands out, Shawnee did a thing she discovered she could do with her mind. She clicked the woman’s mute button. She had just learned about the mute button on the television’s remote control. So it was comical—nothing she said came through—just her mouth moving, her eyebrows wiggling up and down, her finger pointing, waving, her arms finally flapping at Shawnee’s mother, who went out the door with Honey and came back alone and said, “So much for that.”
“What?” said Shawnee.
“She hasn’t got a place for us.” Ira laughed suddenly. “You told her, I guess,” she said. “We’re not stupid. You got that right, baby girl.”
Ira sat back down on Alice’s bed.
“That woman came,” Shawnee said, “and Alice asked her how she got that scar on her face.