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Dancing for My
   Mother

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It wouldn’t have lasted long, anyway. Grandma Inez loses her job and moves back into the house. One day you come home from school and hear a noise in Carol Marie’s bedroom. You open the door and see Grandma Inez naked with a naked man on top of her. She throws him off, jumps up and puts on a robe. Takes you by the hand. Walks you to the front door. Tells you not to tell anyone what you saw. Solemnly you promise you won’t. She gives you a quarter and says, Go buy some candy. Then she locks you out. Later, you see the man and Grandma Inez walking down the street smoking cigarettes and talking. You follow them to the Zanzibar on the corner of Ironton and East Colfax. The Zanzibar becomes Grandma Inez’s favorite hangout.

          She knows Chippewa and how to dance like an Indian. Sometimes she comes home happy from the Zanzibar and dances, going in circles and chanting Hiya! Hiya! She’ll grab you and swing you round and round. Both of you singing Hiya! Hiya! She’ll talk Chippewa, but no one knows what she’s saying. Now and then she translates. A plane will fly over and she’ll point to the sky and say, Bemi-se-gak: thing that flies! She’ll pour coffee and say Maka-de-mash-kiki-waa-boo. The chair she sits on is desabi-win.  She’ll rattle off sentences that make no sense at all and then laugh at your baffled faces. She says the name of God is Gichi Manidoo, that’s who she prays to every morning and night. She says, When we pray we should wear bright clothes, so Gichi Manidoo can spot us. It’s important to smoke when we pray. Smoke carries prayers up to Gichi Manidoo. It’s true! Listen, why do you think India burns their dead? They send em up in smoke. Booz-hoo ahnee, she says when she sees you. It means Greetings, or Hello, or something like that. Or maybe it means nothing. She rattles off strings of Indian words that sound like twisted forms of pig Latin. She swears they are potent prayers to Giche Manidoo. Holy Rollers might say she is talking in tongues.

April 12, 1951, when you are nine years old, Michele Renee Pappas is born at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Aurora. When your mom brings her home, she wants you to sit nice and hold the little inert lump. Carol Marie jumps right in, a natural mother. You stare into Michele Renee’s face and are not impressed. She is ugly, a squinty puss poking out looking like a pissed off Apache, like Geronimo in that picture where he is squatting with a rifle and hating the world. His face saying he would kill all whites if he could.

          Pappas doesn’t care much for his daughter. Not once do you ever see him hold her. Not once do you see him feed her or even chuck her chin or test her hand to see how well it can grip his finger. You’re not that standoffish. Eventually you do hold her on your lap and feed her and hug her and kiss her forehead and play with her toes. As the months go by she morphs into an acceptable specimen of her species. You like tickling her, making her giggle and coo. You let her suck your finger. You dance with her. Carol Marie dances with her too. Your mom says that if you dance with the baby now it will instill rhythm in her bones and she’ll be a good dancer when she grows up. Your mom is a fabulous dancer. Could have been professional, she says time and time again.

          Grandma Inez is a tough, hard drinking, chain-smoking woman who has had two husbands and will never have another. She doesn’t trust men as far as she can throw them. In her cups she will tell you how her first husband abandoned her and their two kids, Janice and Dean, in Pierre, North Dakota. Their father drove off like he was going to work one morning and never returned. Your mother remembers it, remembers standing on the porch at the end of the day and for many days after, waiting for her daddy and saying, When’s my daddy coming home? He disappeared into the unknown and your mother never got over it. A drink or two and she will tell the story again. Standing on the porch, searching the road, waiting, saying, When’s my daddy coming home?

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