Ten Little Indians

The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above

DURING THE SUMMER OF 1976, the city of Seattle was beginning to change from the barbarous seaport of loggers, sailors, and Indians it had always been into the progressive, computerized, and sanitized capital of all things Caucasian it would become. I was thirteen and pretty-skinny-beautiful, with eyelashes so black, long, and curly that grown women lost their minds and manners over me:

“Oh, why do boys always get the gorgeous eyelashes?”

“I’ll give you a million dollars for those eyelashes!”

“Hey, Sexy Eyes, why don’t you give me a call when you get legal.”

“Hello, Benjamin, my name is Mrs. Robinson.”

“Hey, let’s play Tonto and the Lone Ranger.”

My crazy aunt Bettina thought all of the female attention was going to make me gay, and though I loved a homoerotic circle jerk as much as the next curious teenage boy, I dreamed almost exclusively about girls and women.

Rules for Homoerotic Circle Jerks

Keep your hands to yourself.

You must open your eyes at least every thirty seconds, and you must keep them open at least thirty seconds at a time.

No making fun of larger or smaller penises.

Bring your own tissues for cleanup.

If you bring pornography, then you must share it.

You cannot fantasize about the girlfriends of the boys standing next to you, but you can fantasize about the girlfriends of every other boy in the circle.

You can fantasize about any of the boys in the circle jerk, but not if they are standing next to you.

An official circle jerk contains seven boys.

If fewer than seven boys want to jerk off together, they must stand in single file, and it shall be known as a firing line.

If more than seven boys want to jerk off together, it shall be called a Joint Session of Congress.

My head was filled with a disassociated and constantly running montage of vaginas and breasts; I was the Andy Warhol of self-imagined adolescent porn. And yes, even at thirteen years of age, I knew about Andy Warhol’s work and found it so completely of its time that I guessed his deconstructive painting of Campbell’s soup cans would eventually be used as a paid advertisement for Campbell’s soup.

NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: It was my mother who first advanced that particular anti-Warholian theory, and she might have read it first somewhere else. But she is a powerful Indian who reads art-theory books, so I listen to her, and I often agree with her criticism.

My mother was super smart, and I was smart by osmosis. But she was born smart on the Spokane Indian Reservation and studied her way into the University of Washington during a time when she was pretty much the only Indian on campus, aside from two Snohomish janitors and a Yakama cook at one of the dorms. It’s tough to be a smart girl anywhere, but it’s way tough on the rez.

Q: What’s the difference between an Indian reservation and a racist, sexist, homophobic, white-trash logging town populated entirely with the mutated children of married second cousins?

A: The Indians have braids.

If you think about it, my mother was as heroic as Thor Heyerdahl, Sir Edmund Hillary, John Glenn, or any of those white-boy explorers. My mother broke speed limits, climbed mountains, and sailed oceans nobody else had dreamed up. And she did it all by herself, with one hand holding a textbook and the other hand holding a squealing baby (me!) to her breast. Maybe I’m smart because my mother’s breast milk had little pieces of Albert Einstein and Madame Curie floating around in it. As for my father, he was so long gone that my mother and I called him Long Gone and told each other bedtime stories that always ended with him getting eaten by wild dogs.

NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: I greatly missed my father and only pretended to hate him as much as my mother did.

My mother and I lived in a two-bedroom rental house in Ballard, the Scandinavian neighborhood of Seattle. We were poor, but anybody can afford fruits and vegetables, and that’s what we ate. I wasn’t a vegetarian by choice; I was a vegetarian by economic circumstance.

On July 5 (I remember the exact day because I remember the acrid smell of leftover fireworks smoke), my mother and I were shopping in the local free-range, whole-wheat, lactose-intolerant co-op when she picked up a hand-stapled magazine and self-administered a parenting quiz:

Do you know the names of all of your child’s friends?

Do you give your child gender-neutral gifts?

When your child cries, what color are you thinking of?

Are you fully clothed, partially clothed, or nude when you breast-feed your baby?

What are you teaching your child about peace and justice?

Have you taught your child to play a musical instrument?

Do you heart-listen to your child?

Despite her roving and restless intelligence, my mother was the kind of person who believed the garbage she read in magazines. We all have our blind spots, I suppose. She was distrustful enough to write a master’s thesis titled “John F. Kennedy’s Murder: How Rich Men Tell One Lie for Each Dollar They’re Worth,” but she still believed in astrology. She was genuinely shocked and hurt when she caught another human being lying to her, which meant she lived in a constant state of painful surprise, but oh, she would violently punish those liars by screaming surrealistic curses:

“Your great-grandfather starred in silent porno movies!”

“Gravity was invented to keep you from realizing your dreams!”

“Every time you masturbate, you give birth to ten thousand mosquitoes!”

“I hope Hitler eats your dog in hell!”

So my mother was naive and vengeful, just like Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, and about 99 percent of all the other famous world leaders you ever heard about. But she wasn’t famous; she was only my mother, and she so miserably failed the parenting quiz that she decided to become my best friend. She never asked my opinion of her parenting skills, but I would have told her this: “Dear Ma; you forgot my ninth birthday, and still to this day have not remembered you forgot it. I’ll probably be presented with a ninth-birthday card on my elderly and senile deathbed. But you’re also the woman who drove me to school during my entire scholastic career, all the way from White Rabbit’s Wonderful Preschool until I graduated from Garfield High School, because it’s pretty darn cute to ride the bus when you’re six years old, but you’re on the Loser Cruiser once you enter the teen years. As a mother, you suffered from a soap-opera style of amnesia (Let’s deal with stressful events by pretending they never happened!) but were critically aware of the Jane Austen-Dinner-Party-meets-Cannibal-Zombies-on-the-Moon social structures of public schools. I truly hated the goofy clothes you wore, which were all sorts of white-hippie-chick-porn-star-Jane-Fonda-in-The Electric Horseman trendy, but you did frame three of my baby outfits and hang them in the front hallway. So I guess you were hopelessly romantic and easily distracted, a B-plus mother, certainly good enough to get into Matriarchal State University but not quite good enough for St. Mary’s College of the Blessed Womb Warriors.”

But my mother never asked me what I thought of her, and she went crazy after she failed that parenting quiz, and attempted to spend every moment of her waking life with me. She took me to seven baseball games and fourteen poetry readings, and I found both pastimes remarkably similar:

Am I supposed to clap now?

Was that a strike?

Why is he scratching his nuts?

She took me to folk-music concerts and ballets. Once, during Swan Lake, a secondary ballerina took a wrong turn onstage and smashed into the prima ballerina, sending them both sprawling to the ground. Undaunted, the women jumped back up and resumed dancing, eliciting tremendous applause from the previously sedate crowd (as if they’d only then realized these women were serious athletes and had made a highlight-worthy recovery), but my mother wept.

“What’s wrong, Ma?” I asked.

“That poor woman,” she said. “Her career is over.”

“No, they’re okay, they’re both okay, look at them dance.”

“But the young one,” said my mother, weeping so profusely that people around us were getting uncomfortable. “She will never get to dance with the prima again. They’ll punish her. I know it. They’ll make fun of her. They’ll fire her, and she’ll quit dancing and regret it for the rest of her life.”

“I think you’re overreacting, Ma.”

“No, no,” she said, so loudly I’m sure the ballerinas heard her. “Don’t you see? Your whole life can be determined by one moment. You make one choice, one mistake, and that’s it. You’ve made the map you’ve got to follow for the rest of your life.”

“Ma, you’re making a scene.”

She was always making scenes. She yelled at mothers and fathers who publicly spanked their children (Hey, Mussolini, how would you like me to do that to you?), and commented loudly at any display of public rudeness:

“Oh, look at Prince Pushy of Monaco, cutting in line. Hey, Prince, do you keep your crown in your ass?”

“Oh, excuse me, excuse me, Ms. Moneybags, but I see that your party of eight left only a dollar tip for the waitress. I assume that was an honest mistake.”

“Okay, okay, everybody, listen up, we’re all waiting in line to get our driver’s licenses, but this man here, he’s cursing a lot, so he obviously needs his license more than anybody else in the history of the world. Can somebody please get him a special driver’s license, please, hurry.”

If she’d been a man and talked like that to strangers, she would have been punched four times a week. How does a self-proclaimed pacifist get herself into so many confrontations? I don’t know; I don’t understand her, not then or now. She’s a contradiction. She has always contained multitudes. But no matter how unpredictable she can be, she fought plenty of justified battles as well. When my elementary school principal, a ROTC pack leader named Wolff (not his real name!), wanted to control my exuberant nature by shoving sedatives down my throat on a highly regular basis, my mother stormed into his office with a bottle of lithium. She poured the pills onto Wolff’s desk, swallowed one dry, and then told Wolff it was his turn.

“I figure if we’re going to give my kid a narcotic,” she said, “then we both should know how it will make him feel.”

The Wolff-Man never mentioned pills again. And my mother never told anybody (not even me) her lithium pills were only aspirin. I discovered it only when I took one of the pills and expected to see a life-altering vision but felt nothing except pain relief.

That was my mother: fierce and protective, open and permissive (No, don’t call it your wang-doodle, it’s your penis), and a total embarrassment.

“Ma,” I yelled at her. “Why can’t you ignore me sometimes, like all of the other moms and dads? Why can’t you just give me a pair of scissors and tell me to run, boy, run?”

She sat me down once a week and gave me sex advice:

“Condoms make you less sensitive, and you’ll last much longer, thereby giving your partner a much more pleasurable experience.”

“If you spend an hour kissing every part of your lover’s body while purposefully ignoring her orifices, then she will feel more like a holy woman and less like a pincushion.”

“Make her laugh while making love, and she will love you forever.”

Yes, I admit my mother’s sexual advice was outstanding, but what son wants to hear these things from his mother?

“Ma, you’re going to kill me,” I shouted.

“I understand your anger,” she said.

She “understood” everything because she bought self-help books that taught her how to understand the teenage male ego. She understood my rage, my volcanic need to kick holes in every interior door of the house.

“I understand your need to physically express yourself,” she said, “so I won’t fix these doors until you find an alternative means of communicating.”

Man oh man, she talked exactly like that. She negotiated with me as if I were holding twelve hostages at gunpoint.

But she really started to fall apart when she decided to become a “progressive and whole woman.” I have nothing against progressive and whole women—

Q: What kinds of men could resent those kinds of women?

A: Almost all of them.

— but I was a reflexive and cracked teenage boy. If Estelle had pursued her wholeness by herself, I would have supported her gladly: “Go get whole, Ma, rah, rah, rah, sis, boom, bah, go get whole, Ma!” But since she was my new best friend, I was forced to attend every single one of her wholeness seminars, consciousness-raising workshops, and spiritual discussion groups. Don’t misunderstand me. Even at thirteen years of age, I knew I was a liberal with socialistic leanings and would vote for socialistic liberals my entire adult life (my spouse, Mary, is the information officer for the local chapter of the Green Party), but there’s no boy or man alive who could have survived that summer without serious emotional repercussions.

At first, the women who pursued wholeness alongside my mother would be uncomfortable with my maleness, even though I was only a boy (nits make lice). But eventually they would forget I was there. My penis and scrotum would become irrelevant (a redundancy?), and I’d listen to women tell their stories for hours; I’d hear their secrets. I was afraid of female secrets then, and I’m even more afraid of them now.

“Ma, those woman secrets are killing me,” I said.

“You’re a good listener,” she said, a compliment meant to distract me from the real issue; my mother was a politician; politicians love secrets!

“But Ma, listen to me,” I said. “I heard this woman today, the one with the bad perm, she said she thinks about sex as often as any guy does.”

“That was a very honest thing for Betty to say. The whole woman embraces and celebrates her sexuality.”

“But Ma, what am I supposed to do with that information? If Betty thinks about sex that much, and you think about sex that much, and all women think about sex that much, then girls my age must think about sex a whole bunch, right?”

“I certainly did when I was your age.”

“Okay, I’m going to be walking around school looking at all these girls, and I’m going to be thinking about having sex with them. And trust me, Ma, I think about sex all the time. I’m always beating off; I’m like the Denny’s of masturbation, Ma. I’m open twenty-four hours a day, and I can get the Grand Slam special anytime I want. I got bruises on it; I got calluses. And now, when I’m thinking about sex with those girls, when I’m running off to the bathroom to do my business, you’re telling me they’re all thinking about sex with me?”

“Well, not all of them, son. You’re not that cute. But I would imagine a very healthy percentage of your female peers think about sex with you.”

“Ma, I’m not supposed to know that! Do you have any idea how dangerous that is to know right now? When I’m thirty years old, I’m supposed to look back at the teen years and say, ‘Man, if I only knew then what I know now.’ Ma, because of you, I know all of it now, so what am I supposed to do with the rest of my life?”

NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: My early sexual education did not turn me into a sexually precocious teen or promiscuous man. I have slept with seven women, a shockingly average number of lovers.

Now, I’m no Oedipus, at least not Oedipal enough to warrant an epic poem, but I have to admit that my mother was pretty dang sexy herself (so maybe I could write an Oedipal haiku). She was Spokane Indian and looked the part: cheekbones stretching from there to here, big black hair hanging halfway down her back, a big brown face with spelunkable eyes, a big bosom, wide hips, and a flat ass. I looked exactly like her, except for the big bosom. If we lived on the reservation, we’d be only two more Indians. But we lived in the city, so naturally, we had a lot of white friends. Most of our friends were white, in fact, but it wasn’t like I spent much time worrying about it. Who cares, right? But my mother started hanging around these white women who were so white I could see through them. They weren’t literally translucent, but they engaged in activities that were so damn foreign to me (so dang Caucasian) that it made me feel lonely as hell. The Title IX legislation was beginning to gain real momentum, and these women knew it, so they were voracious, ambitious, and ready to beat the crap out of the patriarchy. They were in training for the upcoming war! Good for them! I love and respect women! Given the chance, I’ll vote for the Equal Rights Amendment! I’ll be in the Gentlemen’s Auxiliary! If asked, I’ll donate 30 percent of my income to NOW to make up for the 30 percent difference in salary between men and women working the same jobs:

Community-college history teacher’s salary = $32,525

$32,525 × 30 % = $9,757.50

Amount of charitable contribution to NOW = $9,758

My mother’s friends were religious fundamentalists that summer. As women, they’d been “saved” by other women, and now they were preaching and witnessing: “Hear me roar, I am woman!”

To this day, I rarely look in the mirror and think, I’m an Indian. I don’t necessarily know what an Indian is supposed to be. After all, I don’t speak my tribal language, and I’m allergic to the earth. If it grows, it makes me sneeze. In Salish, “Spokane” means “Children of the Sun,” but I’m slightly allergic to the sun. If I spend too much time outside, I get a nasty rash. I doubt Crazy Horse needed talcum powder to get through a hot summer day. Can you imagine Sacajawea sniffling her way across the Continental Divide? I’m hardly the poster boy for aboriginal pride. I don’t even think about my tribal heritage until some white person reminds me of it:

Q: Hey, man, you’re an Indian, right?

A: Uh, yeah.

Don’t get me wrong; I like being Indian. I love the way Indian men often wear their hair long, cry too easily, wear florid clothes — all reds and pinks and lavenders and turquoises — and sing and dance most every day of their lives. If you think about it, Indian men are probably the most feminized males on the planet (and I mean that as a compliment), despite how ridiculously macho we pretend to be: “I am an Indian man, with your prior approval, hear me roar!”

Yes, I’m an Indian man trying to hold on to the best of Indian:

The cheerful acceptance of eccentricity

The loving embrace of artistic expression

The communistic sense of community

I’m also an Indian man trying to let go of the worst of Indian:

Low self-esteem

Alcoholism

Misogyny

Lateral violence

So, okay, in the end, maybe I am proud to be an Indian. But I don’t want to wear a T-shirt with my tribal enrollment number printed on the front and a photograph of Sitting Bull ironed on the back. On the long list of things that I am, I’d put Indian at number three, behind “bitterly funny” at number two and “horny bastard” at number one for the last twenty-seven years running.

But oh, my mother’s whole white friends loved how Indian we were, and my mother became more Indian in their presence. My mother’s name became more Indian.

“Oh, Estelle Walks Above,” said Ginger, the militant vegan. “That’s such a beautiful Indian name. What does it mean?”

“Oh, well,” my mother said, “I guess it means I walk above … stuff.”

She didn’t have the guts to tell her that Walks Above wasn’t her real name. Her real last name was Miller, but that wasn’t so romantic.

“Oh, Estelle Miller, that’s such a beautiful Indian name. What does it mean?”

“Oh, well, I guess it means I mill … stuff.”

Growing up on the reservation, my mother was cousin to Indians who had authentic Indian names, like Builds-the-Fire, FallsApart, Morning Owl, and Black Bird. She was jealous of those poetic names and felt shortchanged by her own colonized moniker, so she simply changed her name when she left the reservation. Like many of the other immigrants into the United States (and leaving the rez for Seattle is immigration), my mother reinvented herself when she landed on these democratic shores.

On the rez, she was that smart and strange girl who was always preparing to leave, and was loved by many and respected by most (and hated by a few), but she became a wise woman in the presence of her white friends. They asked her for advice about their love lives, spiritual directions, political positions, and fashion styles. Her white friends wanted to be my mother, so they started to dress and talk like her. Imagine a dozen white women running around Seattle, speaking with singsong reservation accents. How confusing! Homeless Indians had no idea what to make of these blondes who sounded like they’d just gotten off a bus from Crow Agency, Montana.

“Are you Indian?” asked the homeless men.

“No,” said my mother’s disciples. “But we know an amazing Indian woman named Estelle. Do you know her?”

“Where I come from, every Indian woman is named Estelle.”

Ha, ha! How can Indians laugh so much? How can they make so many jokes? I don’t know. Ask my mother!

My mother both loved and resented the attention she received from her white-women friends.

“How can these women become whole if they’re trying so hard to be wholly like me?” she asked me.

“I don’t know, Ma, I’m just a manual laborer.”

All that summer, I worked for my mother in the basements of Unitarian churches:

I folded and unfolded chairs and arranged them in sacred circles.

I brewed and poured coffee.

I lit cigarettes and dumped ashtrays.

I ran to the store for sandwiches and drinks.

I swept and mopped the floors.

I worked for free, but I worked for women who at first tolerated and then loved me. I was the son of their saint! In their lives away from my mother, these women were lawyers, doctors, teachers, parole officers, chefs, and social workers, but they turned into children in her presence. I resented their immaturity; I was supposed to be the immature one; I was the child!

Those women surrounded my mother and pushed me into the corners of the meeting rooms. These women competed with me for my mother’s attention, and they often won.

“What should I do, Estelle, what should I do?”

“I don’t know, Erin, what do you think you should do?”

Like any good shaman, professional baseball player, or politician, my mother always answered questions with questions.

“It makes me sound Zen,” she had said to me on the bus ride home after one of those meetings.

“How do you do it, Ma?” I asked. “These women are killing me. They want you to do everything for them.”

“No, they don’t. They just want somebody to listen.”

“Ma, they think you’re magic.”

“Don’t you think I’m magic?” she asked and laughed. Of course she wasn’t a magician. She was a mess! She failed parenting quizzes! She’d raised a son who would grow up to break the hearts of 67 percent of the women who’d loved him! How could a powerful woman raise a fragile man like that?

Q: How do you find out the true nature and character of a hero?

A: Ask his or her children.

Ask me about my mother’s relationship with her women’s group, and I’ll tell you my version of the truth. I was thirteen and should have been running the streets with other thirteen-year-old boys, not making sure there was one pitcher of ice water for Lucy and one pitcher of lukewarm water for Abigail. I was supposed to be engaged in rough play with a father. He was supposed to grab me by the hands and spin me around the room! He was supposed to be my helicopter, my dump truck, my race car, my dragon and my dragon killer! Where was my father, the bastard, and where was the good man who should have been vainly attempting to take my father’s place in my life? I was always hungry for paternity, but during the summer of 1976, a matriarchal woman starved me. With difficulty, I still loved my mother, but she found blind acceptance from her white friends.

NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: During that particular time period, I probably hated my mother more often than I loved her.

What is it about Indians that turns otherwise intelligent, interesting, and capable people into blithering idiots? I don’t think every white person I meet has the spiritual talents and service commitment of a Jesuit priest, but white folks often think we Indians are shamanic geniuses. Most Indians are only poor folks worried about paying the rent and the light bill, and they usually pray to win the damn lottery.

“White people!” my mother cursed on a daily basis, though her paternal grandfather was half white and her maternal grandmother was mostly white.

My mother went to college on scholarships funded by white people; she was a teaching assistant to a white professor; she borrowed money from white people who didn’t have much money to lend; our white landlord let us pay half rent for a whole year and never asked for the rest; my favorite baby-sitter was a white woman with red hair.

“White people!” My mother should have sung their praises; I should sing their praises! But we didn’t sing for them. Indians are not supposed to sing for white people. Does the antelope sing honor songs for the lion?

My mother the friend, benefactor, and beneficiary of white liberal women said these things about white liberals:

“Your average white liberal would die before she sat down to a raccoon and squirrel dinner with some illiterate shotgun-shack Arkansas white folks who believe the Good Lord is their one and only savior. But that same white liberal will happily eat fried SPAM and white bread with a Lakota Sioux shaman who never graduated high school, and give him a highly transcendent blow job after dinner.”

“White pacifist liberals in favor of gun control will race from their latest antiwar demonstration to rally for the American Indian Movement, a radical Indian organization that accomplished much of its mission through gunfire and threat of gunfire.”

“I’m not scared of the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons of the world. Jerry and Pat aren’t the ones crawling in and out of sweathouses and pontificating about how much they admire Indian culture. I’m scared of the white liberals who love Indians. I figure about 75 percent of white liberals who hang around Indians will eventually start believing they’re Indians, then start telling us Indians how to be Indian.”

“If you put an Indian on the poster, white liberals will flock to the meeting. For instance, I happen to believe that Leonard Peltier is a political prisoner. Leonard is in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. He didn’t shoot and kill those two FBI agents back in Pine Ridge in ’75, but some Indian did. Think about it. Some Indian, or Indians, walked up to two men, two human beings, lying defenseless on the ground, already shot and wounded numerous times during a gunfight they might have started, but still, two human beings lying on the ground, critically wounded, unable to defend themselves. And some Indian who was not Leonard Peltier but was with Leonard Peltier stood over those two FBI men lying on the ground and shot them in their faces. Leonard is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, but I happen to believe his imprisonment is the natural result of picking up a gun in the first place. Those white liberals should change the name of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee to the Free Leonard by Finding the Indigenous Bastards Who Did It Committee.”

Despite my mother’s sarcasm and racism, most of her friends are liberal white women! And most of my friends are liberal white men! My mother and I are the hostages of colonial contradictions:

“Liberal white man, you can steal my land as long as you plant organic peas and carrots in the kidnapped soil!”

“Liberal white woman, you can practice my religion as long as you teach third grade at the co-op tribal school!”

I was engaged to a liberal white woman named Cynthia when I met and began the affair with the Crow Indian woman who would eventually marry me and mother our twin daughters, Charlotte and Emily (I’m a pretentious Indian who married a pretentious Indian!). How could I cheat on a woman I’d loved for years with another woman I’d fallen in love with during the course of one brief conversation? I don’t know. I made the choice to betray my girlfriend, and it turned out well (all three of us live better lives than we lived before), but I know it could have been otherwise. In our rage and pain, any one or combination of the three of us could have thrown a punch or grabbed a knife or pulled a trigger. Instead, after I’d separately cried to each woman about how much I loved the other, Cynthia and Mary went to lunch together and listened to each other’s stories. Over sandwiches and coffee, the betrayed and betrayer confessed their sins and forgave each other, or perhaps they only promised to try and forgive, and isn’t that the best we can do? But did they forgive me? I don’t know! They never told me! I never asked! How could they, the North and South Korea of my heart, conduct such a delicate negotiation without me? How could two women sign a peace treaty without me, the one-man army? I didn’t even matter; I wasn’t invited. I needed answers, so I ran to my mother.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked her. “I don’t understand how they can do such a thing. How can they eat together?”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” she said. “You’re my son, and I love you. But those women are much more ambitious than you are. You’ve always been happy with your unhappiness. But those women want their lives to be better. Frankly, I wish they’d fall in love with each other.”

My mother, my wife, and my former girlfriend have always searched for something better. Good for them, good for them! Estelle left her reservation because she wanted to live near a great library; Mary left Montana because she wanted to work for Ralph Nader; Cynthia left me because she wanted a tacit life. A defense attorney for the city, she met and married a carpenter who doesn’t believe in metaphors. They moved to “the country,” whatever that is, and they send us Christmas cards. So maybe all is forgiven, or maybe Cynthia wants to teach me something; she was always teaching me something.

“All those books in your house, and all those books in your head,” Cynthia had said to me when she left me for good. “And you don’t know a damn thing about a damn thing!”

Oh, she was right then, and she’s right now. Smart women surround me and lovingly tolerate my stupidity. My wife and daughters believe me to be a Holy Fool, a builder of nothing and a fixer of less. But damn, I make them laugh, and I do my share of the household chores!

“Son,” my mother said to me on the night of my high school graduation, “if you want your future wife to lust after you for the rest of your days, then all you have to do is complete this to-do list:

“Wash the dishes on a regular basis.”

“If you’re feeling lonely and you want her to suck on your toes or any of your other projectiles, do the laundry.”

“Do you want to keep love alive? All you have to do is vacuum. Oh, my son, vacuum in the middle of the night, and your future wife will rise naked from her bed and make love with you at three in the morning!”

“Reverse the stereotypical gender roles, my dear, dear boy, and you shall be redeemed!”

But it was my mother who first gave up on love, who, since my childhood, has lived what I assume to be a chaste life. She could not love a man who did not respect her; she could not sleep with a man who made her feel dirty. So as far as I can tell, and I believe she would tell me otherwise, she has simply gone without. She is a secular nun! My crazy aunt Bettina thinks all that whole-woman talk turned my mother into a lesbian (and what better way for a woman to show her love for women than by romantically loving women?), but I think my mother has decided that she’d rather spend more time with open books than with closed men. My mother refuses to lower her standards! She’ll read any book once but will toss it aside if it doesn’t hold up to a second reading. As for me, as crazy as it sounds, I want to become the kind of man my mother would sleep with. Ha, ha, ha, ha! I don’t want to sleep with my mother, but I want to sleep with women my mother loves. Ha, ha, ha, ha! I don’t want to be cherished by my mother (and I am beloved) as much as I want to be respected by her.

Estelle and I both grew up to be white-collar community-college teachers. At North Seattle Community College, I teach three classes of American history (imagine that: An Indian teaches white kids about Benjamin Franklin and Susan B. Anthony, isn’t that joyous!), while Estelle teaches two art-appreciation classes and one in women’s studies at Seattle Central Community College. My mother has become a respected and well-loved academic bureaucrat (Teacher of the Year for seven years running!), but that’s hardly the stuff of New Age fantasies. This is what my mother teaches now:

A thousand years from now, the Egyptian pyramids and middle-class white American all-you-can-buffet restaurants will be viewed with equivalent awe at their majesty and disgust at their excess.

President William Jefferson Clinton is the epitome, perhaps the evolutionary apex, of white male behavior, and that’s why most white people, liberal and conservative, hate him so vehemently.

Twenty-seven-year-old white men look exactly the same as three-month-old white babies of either gender.

White men are endlessly creative because they’re so damn bored. Shakespeare and golf were invented for the same reason. Hitler and Pee-wee Herman were motivated by the same existential dread and masculine insecurity. Hugh Hefner and Napoleon should be flavors of ice cream. World domination and the complete line of Sears power tools are equally important goals.

White men are terrified of being better and kinder and more intelligent men than their fathers; therefore, they invented nostalgia and have canonized slave owners like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

The average white male working the graveyard shift at a 7-Eleven in the year 2003 is a more educated and advanced and decent human being than the average white male attending an opera in New York City in 1876.

If you want to make a white man cry, despite the amount of time it’s been since he last wept aloud, then all you have to do is employ “baseball” and “father” in three consecutive sentences.

My mother is no longer on a wholehearted journey to claim her female wholeness. I don’t ask her about it, but I’m sure she loves her life and considers it complete, as filled as it is with her students, colleagues, books, grandchildren, and the mountains that surround Seattle on all sides. Call her answering machine (she rarely picks up the phone even when she’s home), and you’ll hear: “Hi, this is Estelle, and I’m not here, so I’m probably climbing a dormant volcano. Leave me a message, and I’ll give you a call when I come back down.”

I don’t know if my mother keeps in contact with those needy white women from the summer of 1976. I read about them in the newspapers; I see them on television. Some of them have become locally famous, and one is famous everywhere. A former lawyer, she recently won an Emmy for her role as a lawyer in a TV movie.

My mother invited me over to watch the movie with her. It was bad.

“I remember when she couldn’t orgasm,” my mother said of the woman. “I wonder if she can orgasm now.”

I learned about female orgasms at a very young age. I never once in my life believed in the vaginal orgasm. I learned I’d find Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart before I found a vaginal orgasm.

My mother made me read the feminist bible titled Our Bodies, Ourselves. I read it once and gave it back to my mother and never said another word about it. But I came home early from school one afternoon and found my mother and twelve white women studying their vaginas with handheld mirrors.

“Ma!” I shouted after the women had pulled up their pants and fled into the kitchen. “I’m not supposed to see things like that! Well, maybe I’m supposed to see things like that, but only one at a time!”

“The vagina is a beautiful flower,” said my mother.

“I know it’s a beautiful flower,” I said. “I’m drowning in the garden!”

All of those flowery women now sit on the Seattle city council, anchor the local news, sell mattresses, sing in pubs, manage the money of rich men, and design computer programs. They all wanted to become better women, and they have indeed become better at what they do; I have no idea whether they’re happy. I wouldn’t know how to ask that question, and I doubt they’d know how to answer it. I don’t know if I’m happy; I know only that I’m going to work tomorrow, come home and spend the evening with my wife and daughters, and sleep well for approximately eight hours before I do it all over again. It seems to be a good enough life. But could it be better? Am I the best man I can possibly be (a slightly depressing thought, considering the extensive list of my flaws), or have I simply settled into a routine, a comfortable and lifelong ceremony that allows me to live a full life but not an expansive one?

Near the end of the summer of 1976, a few days before I went back to school, my mother decided to spend one last day with me.

“Special you-and-me time,” she said. “Before my best friend leaves me for the young women of Garfield High School.”

We woke early, ate banana and pecan pancakes at a dive on the waterfront, and shopped for new school clothes. I wanted tight jeans and T-shirts with TV stars printed on them; she bought me cords and white dress shirts.

“I’m going to get beat up,” I said.

“And all those boys who beat you up,” she said, “will be working for you when you grow up.”

She was wrong, of course; those tough boys run the trade unions and own the golf courses.

After shopping, we ate greasy hamburgers and french fries for lunch, told each other dirty jokes, and looked for the car. My mother and I have always been cursed with poor short-term memories, so we never remember where we park the car. I’ve been forced to ride the bus home from teaching because I can’t remember on which street I parked my car. I’m ashamed of my poor memory, but my mother was always amused by her eccentricities.

“I’m a kook, huh?” she said over and over while we searched for the car.

“Yes, you’re a kook, and I’m a kook,” I said.

“We’re a kooky couple,” she said. “We could start a cuckoo-clock company because we’re such a completely kooky couple.”

Oh, sometimes I felt like her son, and other times I felt like her boyfriend, and most times I felt like her willing audience, laughing when she wanted me to laugh.

A few minutes after five, right when the city was its busiest with rush-hour traffic and people, when so many commuters were so happy to be done with work, we found our car hidden between two delivery trucks. We’d walked past it ten or twelve times before finally spotting it. Even then, the car was wedged in too tightly to open the doors, so my mother had to climb through the open sunroof, then back the car out so I could get in.

“It’s a good thing your mother is a world-class gymnast,” she said.

“Mothers aren’t supposed to climb through sunroofs,” I said.

“Sexist fantasy,” she said and laughed and laughed.

The streets were packed with people. Five thousand, ten thousand people, more. Downtown Seattle was alive with color and noise. My mother drove the streets like she was the grand marshal of a parade. She waved and smiled. At stoplights, she poked her head out of the sunroof and praised the blue skies and the golden sun. She sang along with the radio and warbled so loudly and badly that pedestrians heard her and laughed or sang along with her for a few bars. My mother’s joy was infectious. She smiled and caused others to smile. Strangers smiling at strangers! It was no longer a city but a tribe!

And then I saw a woman cross against the light on Pike and Seventh. She wore a white dress.

She was beautiful and strong, with long blond hair hanging down past muscled and taut shoulders. A runner, maybe, a marathoner, a lovely kickboxer, I thought. She was a reader, too, swinging a book bag stuffed with paperbacks. I couldn’t see the titles, but I hoped she read an equal mixture of formal poetry and comic books. She was tall, almost six feet, I guessed, but was unashamed of her stature and walked with a graceful and perfect posture. She wore heels! I am tall with a decent and easy happiness, she seemed to say with her step, and I am getting taller and happier! Best of all, she wore that luminous white dress, lacy and conservative for the times, with the hem falling a few inches below her knees. I was in love, in love, in love, and then I saw the menstrual blood that stained the back of her dress, a line of dried blood that ran from her upper thigh down to the hem of the dress.

“Mom,” I said, but she’d already seen the blood, and we both saw the hundreds of people walking with and against this woman, and how many other hundreds of people had already walked with and against this woman and her blood?

“Mom,” I said, already crying, wanting to save this woman but unable to think how.

“I know, I know,” my mother said, but she was frozen. She slowed the car and drove close to the sidewalk, keeping pace with the woman, but that’s all she could do.

“Mom!”

“I know, I know!”

Of course other people noticed the blood. Some of the men and boys laughed and pointed. Some of the women gasped in horror and embarrassment and ran for shelter. Most people remained silent and kept walking, more interested in their own lives than in helping this woman with menstrual blood running down the back of her dress.

Oh God, I wondered if she was still bleeding and had left a trail of fresh blood behind her. Would she arrive at work in the morning and find the janitors scrubbing clean the carpet of her office? Would she have nightmares about birds swooping down to sip her blood from the sidewalk? Would she dream about hungry rats? And how long had she been bleeding? Did she start bleeding and staining her dress on her way to work? Had she been bleeding and staining her dress all day? Had she gone to lunch with her lover and stained the restaurant chair? Had she left evidence all over the city? How could she trust her friends and coworkers ever again? How could she walk through a city with so much blood staining her white dress and not be stopped by another human being? Would she lose her faith in people, in God, in goodness?

“Mom!” I cried and cried. “Mom! Mom!”

“I know! I know!” my mother screamed at me. She stopped the car but still could not find strength enough to open the door, run for the woman, and save her dignity.

“Mom!”

“I know!”

At that moment, an older woman ran a red light, steered her car across three lanes of traffic, and braked to a stop halfway onto the sidewalk. She exploded out of her car with a coat in her hands, wrapped it around the waist of the woman in the white dress, and rushed back to her car. The older woman ran another red light and drove away from the scene.

“Mom!” I shouted. I grabbed her arm, leaving a bruise that took two weeks to heal, and pulled her toward me. “Do something!” I shouted at her.

“I know!” my mother screamed and slapped me. “I know!” she screamed and slapped me once more and cut my face with her ring. She slapped me a third time, cutting me again, and she hugged me close and wept. I wept with her. We wept together while the city moved all around us, while one woman led another woman to safety.

My mother and I have loved and failed each other, and we keep on loving and failing each other, and one of us will eventually bury the other, and the survivor will burn down the church with grief’s hungry fire.