Chapter One
The Gift of Gab
Michael Jennings has four bars of soap stacked up on his coral colored bathroom countertop. They are in white wrappings. They are Jergens brand. There is grit in his counter between the stained sink and toothbrush cup. His toothbrush is blue. His toothpaste is Colgate.
My head is rushing and my mind spins. All the emotion in the world is coming through my feet, up to my head and back down again. My fingernails clench into my skin and I gasp. I feel frantic.
I pick up the Colgate and hold it between my hands. The light overhead is orange. My fingernails are chipped. Slowly, I squeeze the toothpaste from the tube, onto the counter. It swirls in haphazard circles like pasty ice cream. I smile even as my eyes water and my face crumples up. I want to cry.
Standing on my tiptoes, I pull open his medical cupboard. He’s got prissy purple hair gel, shaving cream, and adderall stacked neatly on the shelves.
I take the hair gel down first and squeeze some into my hands. I’m still swaying, unbalanced. I feel sick.
I slick my black hair back with the gel, close my eyes, feel the tangles forming. Smiling to myself, I squeeze the rest of it into the toilet. Some of it floats.
My skin is pricking and I’m shaking. My head aches and spins so that the room is white as the moon, light that boils and prickles on the edges of my skin, and then it is so black that I am like the blind man who sat on the side of the road in Bible times. Slowly, my senses clear, the pain ebbing away like liquid through my toes and seeping into the floor.
Michael’s shaving cream is blue, but it turns white and foamy on the throw-rug when I stomp on it. I’m stomping on it hard, like an enormous bug I cannot smash. I begin to dance there, in Michael Jennings’ bathroom, spraying the foam into the air and circling, then going limp at the waist, stomping, circling, like the men who dance in the Pow Wows with eagle feather headdresses and beadwork regalia.
It makes me feel better, sickly alive. My frock is white and I lift my hands to the ceiling like a swaying angel and spin. My forefinger is pressed to the shaving cream and as I spin it spins with me, in circles, so that it’s criss-crossed across my dress and the white walls and on my bare feet.
I walk, leaving blue foam footprints on the white carpet in the hall. I’m in his kitchen and emptying the refrigerator of its contents, clenching my teeth down hard, spraying ketchup on the walls. Boys never think to stock actual food in their fridges.
He has vodka and whiskey and rum in their respective cases, and I dump them all onto the linoleum and then open each individual can of beer and soon my feet are a half inch deep in the alcohol that’s keeping Michael in his stupor right now. His roommate was also very drunk when we went to bed. I wonder if they would wake up if I broke a dish?
I walk through the sticky liquid. It’s slippery and I fall onto my knees. I start laughing again, crying a little too. My father used to call me Crying Rain because I was so blubbery as a child. He called me his little angel, his little Gabriel. The gift of Gab.
My laughter becomes more and more high-pitched, and again my vision wanes. When it returns, I am lying on my elbows and lapping the liquids off of the floor like a dog. Like Michael Jennings.
Swaying, I stand myself up. I fear I will knock my head. The house has an island in the center of the kitchen and cupboards above the wrap around counter. The cupboards are really nice, wood. I start pulling porcelain plates from the nearest. We didn’t have porcelain plates like this in our house on the reservation. They were plastic or paper and the cups were children’s cups with cartoon characters and sippy straws.
But Michael and Chris live in a nice house. Chris’s parents are rich and they made Chris’s house for him. It’s true that technically Michael only lives here, and it’s not his things I’m destroying. I don’t even care. I honestly don’t care. Lifting it high above my head, I smash the plate against the countertop. The jolt of it makes me laugh, sends tremors through my body.
It splits into four pieces. I frown. It hasn’t got nearly the effect I had wanted. I smash another. I smash a whole stack of them. I smash the cups and the bowls and the delicate china. Glass shards mix with the drink on the floor and my feet are bleeding but I don’t care, it doesn’t even hurt at all compared to the hurt in my heart.
I start to cry again. It’s so sudden that I can hardly stand it, the
pain is so gut-wrenching I worry I’ll wake the boys. My body racks and I clutch myself around my stomach and shake there, in the middle of the kitchen. It’s not productive, though, this crying.
The front drawer under the telephone has a sharpie pen in it. Before the boys left, they were writing on a passed out Chris’s head. They wrote on it “this is not a henna tattoo,” and “DOUCHE!” with an arrow that pointed down his nose. I take that pen out and sit down on the barstool at the island, swinging my legs.
Gabriel Whitefeather, I write. Gabriel Whitefeather, Gabriel Whitefeather, Gabriel Whitefeather, Gabriel Whitefeather, Gabby.
I write my name in rows and rows, first in tiny, condensed letters, then larger and larger, more slapdash, chaotic, frantic. I write my name so small that it looks like print from a distance, so large you can see it from across the room. I write my name on every bare surface on the countertop and then I start writing Rapist down the wooden chair legs, my bottom getting soggy and alcohol-soaked from sitting on the linoleum. I’m still crying.
“It’s kind of funny,” I say out loud, pressing the pen close to my nose and sniffing. “It’s kind of funny. It’s kind of funny.”
I start singing as I walk across the kitchen floor. Lyrics.
“Oh you are the roots that sleep beneath my feet and hold the earth in place.” I sing that line over and over. It never sounds right. I can’t get it to sound right.
There are two gallons of milk still in the fridge. Dropping the pen at my feet, I lug the milk out. It’s whole milk. I never drink whole milk, I drink rice milk and soy milk because I’m lactose intolerant and milk makes me sick, the very sight of it makes me sick, the very smell of it. So sick that holding it in my hands and feeling droplets of moisture and cold coming into my dark fingers that I drop the milk and fall on my hands and knees again and I vomit into the floor, now a cesspool of liquid and sick. I laugh a little, shaking, even as the food I ate lurches from my stomach. I only ate a little, chips and salsa, party-fare, whiskey and coke, but it doesn’t’ matter, it still hurts.
I wipe my mouth off and see blood on my hand. It’s dripping from my nose. The contrast of blood and skin shocks me I can’t believe all that blood is under my skin. I can’t believe it.
I stay very still while a drop comes down from my nose, across my lips, down my chin. It sails down to the floor into the ocean of liquids.
I pick up the milk and walk into the open living room. The carpet is soft. My feet bleed into it.
There is a coat closet in the back of the room. I pull it open. The doorknob is gold. There are no coats hanging. These are early-twenties men, they do not hang up their coats, why would they? It makes no difference. The first gallon of milk is opened and half drunk. I take of the red lid and place it in the center of the closet.
“Red lid, you are always overlooked,” I hear my lips murmuring, feel them move. “Red lid, don’t you want to be a sailboat for a day? Don’t you?”
I seek to make waves with the milk, to lift the lid. I dump the whole first gallon in an attempt to make a wave, but it just seeps into the carpet. I peel open the second, twist its lid, toss it aside and make patterns on the floor with it. I make sure to get every corner, spreading it evenly.
I pick up both lids and the jugs and put them in the garbage, wiping my hands off.
“Michael Jennings, when are you going to wake up?” I whisper. My fingers are tapping out my words as though I were typing on my sides. I say it again to get the pattern right.
Next to the sharpie in the drawer, there’s a pocket knife. It makes sense to me that I should cut open the new couch with it and pull the stuffing out. Michael had no problem stuffing me today. It occurs to me that I could plunge the knife into myself and see what kind of stuffing came out. I would explode into a mess of blood and butterflies. Half of me would be sailing out the window, while the other half merged with cocoons and guts on the floor.
I knife open the couch with a vengeance.
I knife open bits of carpet, too. I put a piece of it in my mouth, and my teeth clench down hard as emotion boils to the top of me. I spit it out and start laughing again. It hurts so much.
“Rapist, rapist, rapist,” I chant. It’s so easy to say. It’s so fun. It makes such sense to me. “Rapist. Tstipar. Tstipar! Rapist tstipar.”
I like saying things backwards, it makes everything sound Russian.
I wonder if I might be out of my mind with grief. It’s such a physical pain. My bones ache. I’ve been torn open.
The blood from my nose has dripped onto my dress. Blood runs down the insides of my thighs, onto sliced feet. I’m dripping on the nice white carpet.
This makes me laugh, then bawl.
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