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 More fiction from The Atlantic Monthly. |
Destiny - Page 2 1 | 2 
or the next several days of our visit Adele continues to elude us, while Norris is always late to get somewhere. We find evidence of Adele in fresh coffee, sweet buns, and little notes pinned or taped on various items in the house."Don't touch the color tuner" is taped to the front of their television. "I'm saving the lemon bars for tonight" is taped on the refrigerator door. "Use the striped towels" is pinned to the correct towels in the bathroom. Celestine laughs harshly every time she comes across another bold printed order from Adele. "Out-and-out gall," she says, crumpling the bits of paper. I get to wishing that the two of them would settle their account. It would make things much nicer for Norris, myself, and Wallacette. Only those two, Celestine and Adele, halfway enjoy their mortal combat. When the morning of the play dawns, we are anxious and excited. Even Norris has heightened color. Wallacette's hair is curled with an electric iron, though it will be covered with a wig. She bundles up in a green pile coat and barges down the road. Norris and Adele drive off, leaving us alone in the house. "There's a potluck dinner after the play," Celestine tells me. "I'm going to make a special secret dish." Then she whisks herself off into the kitchen and hands me a cup of coffee and a bun through a crack in the door. I feel like a fifth wheel going downstairs to sit alone, first thing in the morning. I switch on the television, but the face of The Morning Hostess is pulsating blue, and I do not dare disobey Adele's note and adjust the dial. 
he Gymnasium that night is alive and noisy. The lights blaze in their steel-mesh covers. Folding chairs are lifted from a cart by dads with rolled-up sleeves and are added to the back rows. Mink-collared grandmothers are settled in firmly, ready to enjoy the pageant. The nuns are whispering together in their navy-blue veils. The run-down parish gym is also used as a dining hall and for bingo and budget meetings. The purple velveteen curtain is shabby, a castoff from the public school. Celestine insists that we sit far up front. In elbowing through the nuns we lose Adele and Norris."Accidentally on purpose," Celestine sniffs. We sit. She has already delivered her secret recipe, a long foil-covered pan, to the school kitchen. During the potluck dinner this dish will be unveiled. Celestine has taped Adele's name where it cannot be missed; she will be known as the author of the great work. For some reason I am uneasy that she has done this. Generosity is not her style. The noise all around us mounts, and then suddenly it hushes. The lights go down. There is the sound of programs rustling. We have already found and admired the printed presence of Wallacette's name. When the curtains open, the spotlight shows a boy wearing a knit poncho and a huge sombrero, of the kind that people who have been to Mexico hang on their walls. This boy makes a long sad speech about his friend the donkey, whom he must sell to the glue factory in order to buy food. On a darkened set of bleachers behind him a vague chorus laments the donkey's fate. The boy pulls the rope he has been twisting in his hands, and the donkey bumbles out of the wings. It is, of course, a makeshift donkey. It is wearing gray pants and tennis shoes. The body is barrel-shaped and lopsided, and the papier-mâché head lolls as if the donkey were drunk. The mouth, painted open in a grin, and the slanted, black-rimmed eyes give it a strange expression of cruelty. Parents ooh and ahh, but some look startled. The donkey is an unpleasant creature. Its dyed burlap hide looks motheaten. One ear is long and one is short. Celestine must be the only person in the crowd who thinks the donkey is cute. "Oh, look at it prance,"she whispers. Her long yellow Tartar eyes gleam softly beneath the flashing buckle of her turban. Her gloves are in a tight ball, like socks. She smiles as the boy and his donkey start out on the long road to the glue factory. Tragedy, her favorite element, is in the air. Her eyes blaze when the chorus wails. "Amigos! We are amigos!" the boy shouts from beneath the sombrero. Then they slowly begin to walk across the stage. They are weeping. But before they reach the glue factory, Saint Joseph appears. Saint Joseph has a long beard of spray-painted cotton, and an old piece of upholstery fabric is tied to her head. She wears a long brown terry-cloth bathrobe that might belong to Norris. Her feet are bare. As in my vision of her, she is carrying a wooden maul. She looks grimmer than the mild church statues, and more powerful. I believe in her. The donkey sidles up to her with its evil, silly grin. She stands before it with her legs spread wide, balancing on the balls of her feet. All I can see of the boy whom, according to Celestine, she loves is a pair of gray corduroy knees and frayed black tennis shoes. Wallacette grabs the donkey around the neck and the gray legs twitch for a moment in the air. Then she sets the donkey down and says her lines to the donkey's amigo. "Young man, where are you going with this donkey?" "I must sell it to the glue factory, for my family is hungry," the boy says sadly. "Perhaps I can help you out," Wallacette says. "My wife, Mary, myself, and our little boy, Baby Jesus, want to flee King Herod. My wife could ride this donkey if you would sell it." "I will sell my donkey to help you," the boy shouts. "He will not be killed!" "Of course not," Wallacette says. "We will only ride him across the desert to Egypt." She takes some large coins made of crushed aluminum foil from her bathrobe pocket and gives them to the boy. And so the transaction is accomplished. The Donkey of Destiny now belongs to Wallacette, who tries to pat its snarling papier-mâché muzzle. But then the episode occurs that we hope will not mar the mind of our favorite granddaughter for life. The donkey balks. Is this in the script? I glance at Celestine, wondering, but her look has narrowed to a flashlight focus of premonitions. "Come along, little donkey," Saint Joseph says, through gritted teeth. She pulls, perhaps a bit roughly, at the rope on its neck. Suddenly a hand snakes from the front of the donkey's neck flap and rips the rope out of the grasp of a surprised Saint Joseph. "Give it back!" she shouts in quick rage. "You're mine! " The audience twitters; a few loud male guffaws are heard. Saint Joseph hears the audience—laughing at her! Fury tightens in her arms and she raises the maul high. I know what will happen. The audience gapes. Then she brings it down clean, like swift judgment, on the cardboard skull of the beast. The front of the donkey drops. The head flies off, smashed. The last of that scene that we see is Saint Joseph standing in criminal shock, maul gripped tight, over the motionless body of a towheaded boy. The curtain has closed and the audience is in a rumble of consternation. A fat, blonde, hysterical woman, the mother of the donkey's felled front end, flies down the aisle. Adele and Norris are nowhere to be seen. "Come!" Celestine says, hoisting her handbag on her elbow. "Or the nuns will take it out of her hide!" We leave the chairs, find the side stage door, and slip behind the curtains. Angels and shepherds are standing in dismayed clumps. The painted wood silhouettes of sheep and cattle look stupidly baffled. We see Adele, wide and flat-rumped in a red suit, and Norris, with his bald man's ring of hair, standing with the principal nun, gesturing and gabbling excitedly. The wounded boy is nowhere to be seen. Wallacette is gone too. Adele sees us in the wings and strides over to Celestine. "Mother," she says, "go home." "Where's Wallacette?" Celestine asks, ignoring her daughter-in-law's order. "She ran out the back door of the gym," Norris says bleakly, "and that's the last anyone has seen of her." "Get out a search party, then!" Celestine says. "She's barefoot in the snow!" But no search party forms at her words. As it turns out, Wallacette was headed home. When we arrive there, she is sitting on the living room coffee table with her feet by the heat ducts. "Young lady!" Adele cries out, marching toward her, but Norris gets there first. "Wait," he says, "I think she's hurt." Sure enough, the rare tear is in her eye. She sits in a lump, clutching her play beard, shaking with inner sobs. In Norris's bathrobe she looks, oddly, like an ordinary, middle-aged man. Her face is pale, streaked with misery, and her small blue eyes are dull and still. Adele and Norris look awed, watching her, and do not approach and hug her or pat her, as normal parents might. Perhaps they have never seen her cry before. Celestine, however, kneels down next to her, and then suddenly, fiercely, she lunges and catches the girl full across the chest and neck with a stranglehold. I expect this to be the moment Wallacette breaks down. It will be good for the girl to shed real tears, I think sympathetically. But instead of melting and crying, Wallacette charges suddenly from the room like a bull, running right over her grandmother. Celestine goes tumbling in a black heap on the carpet, and a door down the hall slams. Adele follows, to pound on the door and reason with her daughter. Norris stays, bending apologetically over his mother, who looks perversely delighted with what has happened. She pushes Norris away and lifts herself up. "Grandma's girl" is all she says, adjusting her turban.
hat night, as we are lying side by side on the fold-out couch downstairs, I realize that something still bothers me, something that I wonder about. So I ask Celestine about the special secret dish that was to be placed among the others at the potluck dinner after the Christmas play."What was it?" I ask. "Was it your special chocolate bran cake?" "It was not," Celestine says, waking quickly at my question. The sound of joy lights her voice. She crows. "What?" "The Jell-O. My special secret dish." Of course I ask her what it was that made the Jell-O so special. Bold as a weasel, she turns in the dark and fixes me with her proud, gleaming stare. She stares a long time, to let my anticipation sink in. "Nuts and bolts," she finally says. "Washers of all types. I raided Norris's toolbox for the special ingredients." Then she turns on her back to gloat up into the dark. I turn away from her, pretending to sleep. But from my side of the bed I cannot escape the changing scenery of the beer lamp, still lit. I am forced to watch it revolve. So I watch, and after a while it isn't irritating anymore. In fact, it is almost as soothing as any real scenery you might find, and has the added advantage that you can relax and watch it in a dark room. Again and again I see the canoe leave the Minnesota lakeshore and venture through the water. The pines along the lake stand green-black and crisp. The water shimmers, lit within. The boat travels. I can almost see the fish rise, curious, beneath its shadow.
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What do you think? Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.
Copyright © 1985 by Louise Erdrich. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; January 1985; Destiny - 85.01; Volume 255, No. 1; page 64-68. |
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