Sissy ~ 1960s
It’s the spring of 1969 here in Chicago, and Mama says Old Mayor Daley has his big fists wrapped around our necks. She says he doesn’t care about brown people like us. “If this city had a proper name, it would be ‘Prejudiced, Illinois,’” Mama tells me while she braids my hair. I’m in the second grade at school, so I know what that word is all about. It’s a mean word that says we can’t eat in just any restaurant, even if my parents have enough money, and we can’t move to just any neighborhood. If I got to name our city, I’d call it “Sweetland,” because sometimes you have to be nice to people and places and dolls if you want them to be nice back. Though it doesn’t always work.
I almost forget what my real name is. I have so many names. When Mama’s in a good mood, she calls me Sissy or Prunella—after one of Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters. I think she’s the sister whose knee cracks. Mine doesn’t. They play the Cinderella show on TV every year, and one year Mama promised we were gonna watch it together. “It’s a big musical,” she said. “You’ll love it!” She forgot I’d already seen it and knew all the songs by heart. But when I spilled a glass of milk at the dinner table—my hand knocked it over since I can be clumsy like that—Mama said, “No TV!” She said I had to learn to be more careful but changed her mind later when Dad asked her to let me watch. I only missed a little bit, the opening number.
I feel funny when I hear new songs, almost like I forget to breathe. Can you walk inside a song? I think I do.
Mama says I have a “Christian name,” though we left the church in a huff a few months back, when Mama shared in confession that she never felt the presence of anything sacred except at the Sun Dance we go to in North Dakota at summer solstice—the one Mama says is “private” because it’s illegal. Dad said she was looking for trouble to say such things to old Father Weasel (his name isn’t really Weasel). Mama gave him a look, and he went quiet. I know what he was trying to say. Sometimes Mama’s in a mood she can’t keep all to herself; she has to spread it around. She’ll pick a fight with anyone, and it’s no use tiptoeing, being sweet and well-behaved, because she’ll get you on that, ask why everyone walks on eggshells near her like she’s a crazy person. Then you’re in the doghouse.
She spread her mood on Father Weasel during her last confession. She even pushed up the sleeve of her nice gray going-to-church dress to show the priest her scars from a flesh sacrifice, though he probably couldn’t see much through the screen that separates him from us. And when Father Weasel told her the Sun Dance is Devil’s work, she said if Jesus had made his own Sun Dance at the end, maybe we’d be in better shape. Father Weasel lost his head and told Mama she was beyond penance. I heard him, since I was in a nearby pew saying five Hail Marys and two Our Fathers for confessing that I was sometimes angry with Mama in my thoughts. Mama grabbed my arm and dragged me out of church, and I never finished saying penance, so I guess I’m still carrying around that sin of anger inside me, with nowhere to let it out.
Mama reminds me that I have a Dakhóta name, too, on top of the Christian one. She says Grandma gave it to me in a ceremony the year she lived with us. I wish she was still here, with her soft hands and smiles and nice back rubs when I couldn’t fall asleep right away at bedtime. I miss her stories about the day Sitting Bull was killed, how she was three years old, yet she remembered everything. But Grandma didn’t like it in Chicago; she said all that noise hurt her head. So she went back to North Dakota, back to what she calls “buffalo country,” though I’ve never seen any buffalo there. Only one I ever saw is stuffed and dead at the Field Museum. He doesn’t look so happy. I should give him a name the next time I see him.
As much as I love Grandma, I’m different from her when it comes to how I see our city. I like falling asleep to the noise of honking cars and sirens, grown-ups laughing as they walk down the street. Noise makes me feel safe, reminds me that there are people all around and I’m not alone. North Dakota scares me at night when the indoor lights go out and the stars switch on—a million more of them than I ever see in Chicago. The hills and towns where my relatives live get quiet, so quiet all you hear is your breath as you try to sleep. I start to imagine there’s nothing outside but ghosts watching my every move. Even by day North Dakota feels strange to me because there aren’t as many people, and all the ones I’ve seen are either white or Indian. If they’re white, they’ll most likely stare at you as you walk into a store or a diner, as if you’re part bug. I begin to miss our neighborhood in Old Town Gardens, where we have friends who are Black, white, and Indian, or have family from Japan or the Philippines or Mexico. They have names I’ve never heard before that take practice before I can say them right. Mama says it’s important to “pronounce them correctly” because we don’t want to be like the ones who change people’s names when they think they’re too hard.
I don’t understand why Mama can be superpolite to friends, only using the name they want, while she has all kinds of bad names for Dad. Some of them I can’t say because they’re not nice and I’d get punished. When she calls him those names, her eyes are so red it looks like the whites are bleeding. She stomps around and throws things. One time she cracked the wall with a heavy pot. Another time she cracked my father’s head, and he had to go to the hospital. I helped her clean the mess. I almost threw up. But when you’re real scared, sometimes you can control that.
Now, when Mama’s eyes get bright red, I crawl under my bed, a trick I learned when I was small. Dad and Mama were watching the news, and I could hear it, though I was playing with the Black doll I begged Dad to get me for Christmas since she looks more like us—closer to Indian than white dolls. She wriggles just the same as them when you pull the string on her back, and wears the same clothes. But I can tell the difference. I call her Ethel, after one of Mama’s friends I think is nice. I was brushing Ethel’s hair the way she likes when my parents went super quiet. Dad put down the book he’s always reading and leaned in as if he couldn’t believe his ears. My dad’s favorite anchorman, the one who puts his glasses on when things get serious, was talking about a guy named Speck. Which is one of Mama’s choice words when she’s cleaning the floors, going to war against those specks. Every time they mentioned his name, I saw a black spot in my mind, a dark smudge on the wall there. He’d killed eight student nurses right here in our city, but another survived because she made herself real small under the bed.
Dad noticed I was listening and motioned to me. But Mama said, “She’s only four. She won’t remember any of this.” So they kept watching the news and I kept brushing Ethel’s slick hair, thinking all the time about smudges on the wall and hiding somewhere so death can’t find you.
Dad has a long name I didn’t used to say right: Cornelius. If someone asked me, “Who is your father?” I’d have said, “Corny,” because the rest was too big to get past baby teeth. For as long as I can remember, I’ve gotten strange ideas in my head. One of my strange ideas is to picture Dad’s name backward, as Kneeling Corn. Sometimes I see it as the corn kneeling, yellow cob almost cracked in half as it bows to itself. Other times I see my dad kneeling on corn, which must be painful. But he stays down there because it’s safer than standing up and facing Mama.
Both my parents are tall, my father Lakȟóta tall from South Dakota, my mother Dakhóta tall from North Dakota. Dad was in the Korean War, fought near a place called the Yalu River. Mama wrote the name down for me, along with the name of Dad’s medals and his marine unit. She said I should be proud of him, as if I wasn’t. She said he was so tough, being an Indian from the Dakotas, that he could stand the cold better than most troops, and he wasn’t too fussy to eat anything. No one thought he’d come home alive, but he did. His older brother died over there, the one Mama was supposed to marry. The one she said should have been my father. She said it real quiet when she thought I was asleep. But I heard her. I wonder who I would be if my uncle had been my dad. Maybe I wouldn’t be Sissy, who dreams herself into songs, who spills her milk at dinner, who makes Mama so angry. I have a bunch of secret thoughts, and one of them is that I’m glad Dad is my father, even if it means I have to be Sissy and not the better version Mama wishes I’d be.
Dad lets me sit on his lap sometimes when he’s reading, and now I can read along, but he used to let me pretend, when I was too little to figure out the words. He doesn’t mind when I latch an arm around his neck and rest on him like he’s my pillow. I like to look over at Mama, sitting on the couch. She’s reading, too. And I pretend she’s the one I’m hugging. I try to love them both the same. But with Mama, I have to picture what it looks like in my head because it’s the only place she lets me show her. She doesn’t like to be touched.
If I was allowed, I’d run my finger across Mama’s face the way I do with Christmas bulbs to feel their shine. I bet Dad would like that, too, since he says she’s more beautiful than any actress in Hollywood. She sticks her tongue out when he says that and waves her hand like she’s shooing flies. I don’t know why she doesn’t see what we do when she looks in the mirror: how her long face Dad calls a “perfect oval” is smooth as dark cream with a dimple in her chin that gives it fight. She has black hair shiny as crow feathers, and long eyelashes that brush down her cheeks when she’s sleeping. Watching Mama makes me miserable sometimes because I don’t think I’ll ever look like her. Everyone says I’m cute, like Grandma, with a heart face and brown eyes that crinkle when I smile. People say both me and Grandma are “sincere,” even in our looks. Which I guess means we try hard.
Mama calls me her shadow, so that’s another name. She says I’m always underfoot, but I can’t help it when she takes me everywhere. She doesn’t like to be alone. She tells stories about what she was like at my age, when she was seven years old. How she went to Indian boarding school with her sisters, but they were older, so they slept on a different floor. How she cried and cried until some Ree girls almost smothered her with a pillow. She always stops the story there and says to be careful around Arikaras, the ones she calls Rees, because they used to be our enemies. I nod and tell her I’ll remember. There was a nun who was mean to her because she didn’t like that Mama was smart and that she’d taught herself to read before she ever went to school. The nun locked her up in a dark closet when she knew all the answers, because she was supposed to be dumb. She told her the Devil was in there with her, and Mama sassed back that she didn’t care.
“But I did,” she admits. “I was scared of the Devil. I held perfectly still for however many hours I was locked in there. And sometimes, I swear I could feel his hot breath going up my neck, and my skin would burn, like it touched fire.” She tells me I’m lucky to have teachers who want me to learn, instead of nuns who want to keep me down. But I can’t imagine anyone keeping Mama down, not even Dad, a marine with medals. She’s the only person I know who grows when she gets mad, gets bigger and bigger until it’s like she fills the whole room, and there’s no air left to breathe.
Mama likes spooky movies. Not Dad. He says he’s seen enough to scare him for the rest of his life. So, I watch them with her. We have an old TV that flickers and makes everyone in the film look shaky. Mama lets me hold Ethel while we watch, though I keep her turned away from the screen because I don’t want her to be scared. We see movies about ghosts and about angry men who kill people and try to get away with it. We see movies about monsters with sharp teeth, mummies wrapped in what looks like toilet paper, and creatures called zombies that are alive and dead at the same time. You don’t want them to bite you. Even though Mama doesn’t say so, I remind myself to be careful of zombies. I guess they must worry me because I had a nightmare after that show. The dream started out fine. I was walking in the park that’s hidden in the center of our building complex, and it was a shiny day, the sun nice and warm so I could wear my favorite dress that has what Mama calls “spaghetti straps” instead of sleeves. I was walking by myself, something she would never let me do when I’m awake. There weren’t any people around, but then I saw a puppy on the path ahead, a tiny, curly-haired poodle the color of Mama’s gray going-to-church dress. It had a funny fur-do on its head, a little puff like a cloud, held together with a red ribbon. I named it even though it didn’t belong to me. I called it Judy. Judy stared like she heard me think up the name for her. She grinned at me with tiny puppy teeth. She was the cutest puppy I’ve ever seen. She picked up something in her mouth and tried to run with it, but it was too big and kept tripping her. So I went over to save her all the work. When I got close, she dropped the thing in her mouth as if she was giving me a present. I started to reach for it until I saw it was a long finger still wearing a turquoise ring like the one my dad gave my mother. Judy grinned at me again, and I saw there was something wrong with her. She was a zombie poodle with bloodstained fur, and if I wasn’t careful, she would bite me! What I did surprised me, but it worked like magic. I started singing my favorite song, “Over the Rainbow.” And Judy sat as if I’d trained her and stopped chewing on the finger. When I got to the last line of the song, the one that ends with a question nobody ever answers, I woke up.
I don’t tell Mama about my nightmares. She doesn’t like to hear what bothers me. So nightmares get piled up next to my angry thoughts, which don’t get cleared away by penance anymore. I didn’t think I’d miss confession or receiving the Host on my tongue, which the big kids had scared me would taste like raw liver, though it really tasted like nothing but old crackers. I’d just had my First Holy Communion two months before we left the church in a huff, and during the time we were still there, it was a relief to share those angry thoughts with someone outside my head. I especially wish I could sort them out with Father Weasel after I see the scariest movie of all, one Mama has me stay up late to watch with her. She even makes me nap earlier in the day, so I’ll be wide awake past my bedtime. Dad is asleep when the movie starts. She has me read the title aloud, the list of actors’ names as they come on the screen, so I can practice my reading skills. Pretty soon, the names are going by too quickly and I can’t keep up, and Mama laughs and laughs because she says I sound like I’m speed-talking. But then we get quiet because the story is all about a mother and her daughter, a little girl named Rhoda. At first, I think the little girl is perfect, the kind of kid my mother wants; she never spills things or dances at the wrong time. But after a while I figure out she’s like the zombie poodle in my dream: if you get close enough you see there’s something wrong, and you’d better look out. Rhoda doesn’t think twice about hurting people to get what she wants. She’s scarier than ghosts or monsters, because at least you can see them coming. I get a new name after Mama and I watch that movie. She starts calling me “Bad Seed.” You wouldn’t think I’d like that, but she smiles when she uses the name and even swipes my nose with the end of one of my braids like we’re playing.
Mama’s teaching me to do housework because she says she kept Grandma’s cabin clean back when she was a kid. It was all on her shoulders, since her brothers and sisters didn’t want to waste the day trying to clear out the “damn flies” and keep the place free of all the dirt raining on them since they lived in the Dust Bowl. Mama does the floors, and I do the dusting with old rags that were clothes until Mama couldn’t patch them anymore. I dust everything I can reach and stand on a chair when I can’t. Mama laughs at how I look, wrapped up in one of her aprons that’s too big. She says I’m a hausfrau, like one of those German wives she saw living on her reservation, the ones who’d spent a long time living in Russia, so people got confused and called them “Rooshians.” “Hausfrau” is my cleaning name.
I’m careful when I’m dusting, try not to walk into a song in my head, try to be graceful like my favorite ballerina, Maria Tallchief, and not a clumsy mess. But I’m not perfect like Rhoda. One day I slip when I’m reaching up to replace a Hopi pottery bird Dad bought Mama at a powwow. The bird is one of my favorite things, a dark baked red with black designs on her open wings. Her back forms a dish, though we never put anything in it; that would cover the squiggles of art. Since I don’t know any Hopi names, I call the bird “Julie Andrews,” imagine her flying through that song “Climb Every Mountain,” carrying me with her. I’m probably humming that tune in my head when I fall off the chair and take the bird with me. It flies out of my hand and crashes on the hard linoleum floor that Mama keeps so shiny, without specks. Julie Andrews cracks into two big pieces. I don’t crack in half, but some part of me wishes I had. Mama comes running when she hears the noise, and now she calls me the name she never uses, the Christian one we walked away from in a huff. The name sounds angry, like it’s a pair of flying scissors that will shear off my hair or even cut my arms like a flesh sacrifice. Mama is howling over the pieces of Julie Andrews, and when she looks up at me, her eyes are red. For the first time, I put together that story about the Devil keeping her company in the school closet with the color of her eyes when she’s mad. Maybe the Devil drops in again when I make mistakes. Maybe he wants me to be perfect, the way Mama does. But I thought it was God who wanted that, not the Devil. I tell myself to shut up because Mama is moving toward me now. I run to my bedroom that is small as a dark closet and zoom under the bed, crouch in the back corner away from Mama’s hands. It’s a heavy old bed that somebody left when they moved out because it was too hard to carry away. Even Mama and the power of her red eyes can’t lift that bed, though she tries to thwack at me with a broom. I just push it away when the bristles attack. I don’t come out from under the bed until Mama gives up and has been quiet for a long time. By then she’s glued Julie Andrews back together. And every time I look at her, I feel bad for breaking her back. You can see the crack that runs straight through her.
Dad shows me his name in the paper when a big article of his gets published. He writes at a newspaper for a living. Mama says I should be proud of him for being the first person in his family to go to college, the first Indian to work for a major Chicago rag. As if I’m not proud of him. He doesn’t get too many big stories in the paper, so we don’t make much money. But that never bothers me the way it does Mama. She hates living over a drugstore that has a small diner in the back. She hates the constant smell of chicken noodle soup that comes up through the floors. But I like the sound of the machine that whips up ice cream malts. It’s a friendly noise that makes my mouth water. And the druggist who owns the shop is always nice to me, gives me a gold foil–wrapped toffee when no one is looking. I keep the wrappers in my secret hiding place, and every now and then I take them out and count them. Today there are twenty-four. I pretend they’re worth a million dollars each and then fall over laughing because I can’t imagine that much money in the world when every penny in our family is so important. Mama checks on me to see what’s so funny, and I have to sit on the wrappers quick, to keep her from noticing them. I give her a polite smile and shake of the head, just like that perfect girl, Rhoda. Mama shrugs and goes back to whatever she was doing.
She must be cooking something with hamburger because I can smell the meat. I hold Ethel up to sniff the air. We’re both hungry. Mama calls me into the kitchen. Today I’m Prunella instead of Sissy.
“Prunella, you’re big enough to set the table,” she says, and she nods at a pile of dishes and silverware, and my father’s favorite coffee cup. One by one I carry each piece as carefully as I can, pretending I’m as perfect as Rhoda was before she went mean. I’m so scared of messing up, I hold my breath the way Dad taught me when he showed me how to swim. Mama says I’m too slow, but I don’t care. And when a tune goes off in my head, the sad one from Carouselabout walking through storms, I tell it to go away. Dinner is about ready by the time I finish my job, and I’ve held mybreath so hard for so long, I feel stuffed with air. I’m not hungry anymore. Ethel tells me to eat, and it’s a surprise. I’m supposed to be her mama, not the other way around.
Dad says Mama and I are glued together, but he’s teasing. Dad and I aren’t alone much, so I’m excited when Mama says we’re on our own for dinner because she’s got a meeting. We’re not really on our own, though. Mama’s got some vegetables and chipped beef for us to heat up when we’re hungry. Dad tries to hug Mama as she grabs her purse and heads out the door, but she ducks under his arm so quick he’s left standing there, holding nothing. He sees me watching and smiles.
“Your mom’s off rabble-rousing,” he says. One of his arms is still open, so I slide into it. He scoops me up. I’m so high in the air against his chest that I almost drop Ethel. Dad carries us to his reading chair, and all three of us sit down, one on top of the other. Ethel makes a face at me like she’s sick, and I make a sorry face back at her. She doesn’t like being swooped around.
“I shouldn’t have said that.” Dad pushes my hair behind my ears. “Your mama is great at fighting for us, fighting for our community. Sometimes people take their anger and use it in a good way.”
Yes, I agree with my father in my head. Mama is a good fighter. Though I don’t tell him what I’m thinking since I don’t want to bring up a subject that makes him tired. Mama wins most arguments in our family, but every now and then she battles with Dad over the one she lost when I was born. She longs to leave for work every day just like he does, and when Dad points out everything she does at home to keep us afloat, including taking in typing assignments for a friend during tax time, she makes a disgusted sound with her teeth. One of her favorite comments is: “You and your darned socks! You think they mean anything in the grand scheme of things?!” Mama isn’t cussing when she says this; she has a darning egg made of wood that she uses to mend the holes in Dad’s old socks. He wears them down from being on his feet so much, rushing after important stories.
Mama gets wound up and argues like she’s giving a speech. I’ve learned a lot from her angry shouts about the mayor, the president, and our whole stinking government—how Indians are lured to big cities to turn us into white people and make sure we lose what’s left of our land. “That’s something worthy of my time,” she says, “striking a blow against injustice!” Sometimes Dad’s voice is so quiet it’s hard for me to hear everything he’s saying to calm her down. I only catch bits and pieces, and usually the words make me sad because Dad says I’m the reason she should stay at home, I should have the guidance and safety they never had, taken away to Indian boarding schools when they were so young. There’s a word he uses that I don’t understand because I miss too much of what he says around it: “indoctrination.” He wants Mama to keep me away from those kinds of doctors or teachers who will do worse than take my land: they’ll steal my spirit. Mama must love me very much to let Dad win this fight; she must want to protect some part of me that I can’t even see.
With all those angry memories banging around my head, I don’t feel like talking. I just listen. I lean against Dad’s chest and like how my head goes up and down with his breathing. I hold Ethel the same way. Her head goes up and down, too. Dad asks me something he never asked before: “Is Mama nice to you when I’m not around?”
His question scares me, so I close my eyes.
“You know she loves you?”
I’m a dead rock. I don’t move.
“She had it so hard growing up. Saw some awful things. A student died in that school she talks about.”
Where the Devil sat with her in the closet? I almost speak what I’m thinking but can feel Ethel pinch my hand like she’s trying to warn me. Mama might not like me telling Dad one of her stories. I didn’t know someone died there. I wonder if Sister Frances had anything to do with it. Mama still hates Sister Frances the most, even though she’s supposedly been dead a long time. That nun would sniff at Mama right after she stepped out of the shower and tell her, “You stink. Wash yourself again.” She tripped Mama once when she was going down the stairs, then looked away like it was just Mama being clumsy. Mama chipped her tooth, and she said she looked like a wolf on that side of her mouth until someone filed it down for her. Sister Frances is always the boogeyman in Mama’s school stories, which makes me wonder if some part of her is still alive, chasing old students like a monster that never gets tired. One thing I’ve learned from scary movies is that monsters might be slow, but they never give up until you kill them.
Dad asks me again, “Is Mama good to you?” And my head is filled with so many pictures. Mama brushing my hair and teaching me to bake oatmeal cookies. Mama chasing me under the bed with her red eyes, her mean words. Mama surprising me one night when I’m sick, so sick I wonder if I’m making it all up? No. I see her sitting in the dark with me, singing a song that begins, “Go to sleep, my little owlet.” I don’t know what an owlet is, but it sounds nice. Her voice is so different, my eyes are crying. But when she sees the tears, she gets mad and says, “I can’t do anythingright!” And she slams out of my room. Then I really cry because Mama took it wrong. She thought I was upset when it was just all this love for her pouring out of my eyes.
So I tell Dad, “Yes.” And I can feel Ethel nod her head yes, too, though after Dad puts us to bed, she whispers that she crossed her fingers because it was a lie.
Mama has a new friend. We visit him during the day when Dad is at work and Mama’s sick of “playing housewife.” She likes to say, “I’m not Myrtle from the suburbs,” though I can’t think of any Myrtles we know. Her friend, Ben, is a photographer who lives one entry over in our Old Town Gardens complex that covers a whole city block of connected apartment buildings. He has a daughter named Brooke who is a year older than me. She doesn’t look like she belongs to him—his hair is gray and curly while hers is long and silvery blond like a princess’s. We play in her room while Mama and Ben visit in his.
“You must be rich,” I told Brooke the first time I saw her room, filled with books in a bookcase, and a dollhouse as tall as I am.
“Nah, my parents are divorced,” she said, as if that was an answer. “All this is loot.”
I didn’t understand but let it go to be polite.
Today Mama and I go over to Ben’s place earlier than usual, ...
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