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Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
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do is let me be with you. You don’t have to change yourself for me. I know who you are.”
“Yeah, I do need to change. I have this new idea I got from yoga. It’s about the anahata, the heart chakra, this imaginary place in your chest that you open up so you can let people in and love them.”
“Could we go to bed now?” he answered. “I got up at dawn and couldn’t find a thing to do except go look at a project we’ve got going on Webber Street. I didn’t even call my dad and step-mom until right before I went out to the movie.”
“Let’s stop acting so goddamn pitiful,” I said, giggling. “Let’s go to bed and see if you can still make me come.”
4
A F AITHFUL L IFE
S O, FOR A LOT of mysterious and not-so-mysterious reasons, Bobby Tree and I made up for good. We didn’t talk about it much. We just decided to go on and try to be happy. Who knows, maybe having the world seem like it’s coming apart draws people to the things they really love. Maybe it’s fear. Anyway, Bobby Tree and I settled down to make a new start. We’d been loving each other since we were fifteen years old, and we knew each other’s past. “Look at it this way, baby,” he told me. “Sooner or later we’d get back together. Why wait till we’re old and gray?” And he pulled me close to him until I could feel his body taut and fine against mine, and the same old music started playing. “Dance with me. I want to be your partner. …” It has been our song since the first time I heard it on the radio, riding in Bobby’s old red pickup toward the river to take the canoe from Pinewood down to Five Feathers on the east fork of the Big Black. I hadn’t been going out with him more than a week and already we were getting in trouble.
“I’m going to Fayetteville to a cheerleading camp,” I’d told my grandparents. “I’m driving over with Bobby Tree because I don’t want to go on the bus. Why—why are you looking like that?”
“Where you going to stay over there?”
“At the university, in their dormitories. I did it last year. Don’t you remember?”
“You didn’t go riding there in a car with a boy,” my grandmother said, and my grandfather was about to get into it too when Bobby drove up in the yard and got out of the truck, came up on the porch, shook my grandfather’s hand, and started talking to him about fishing.
So we got away okay, but I forgot to take my cheerleading costume, so when I got back, there was hell to pay. Except by then Bobby and I had been down the Big Black from Pinewood to Five Feathers and on down to Reserve and spent two nights in the woods in sleeping bags, and I could see how good he was at everything in the world, from making a fire without looking like he was doing a thing but breathing, to holding me against him like there wasn’t even air between our hearts, and it was done. Not that we hadn’t already loved each other for weeks before going off to be alone with the earth and make our bond.
Except all that was twenty years ago, and now he was making a living building houses around Tulsa and I was the first woman editor of the
Tulsa World
and our lives had moved further apart—but not really, not in the place where the life of the heart and soul is lived.
“I WANT TO DO it right this time,” he said. “I want your grandfather to do a blessing for us in Tahlequah, and have the dances and the fertility rites and wear the deerskin robes. I have a headdress that was my uncle’s. He gave it to me right before he died.”
“Granddaddy’s too old to do a blessing ceremony. We’ll go to him and ask him who to get to do it.”
“And we’ll have children. I want a child, maybe more than one.” He was so proud, sitting beside me at the kitchen table with his shoulders back and his head lifted. He was a grown man in his prime and it was time for me to be a woman, and I had already made up my mind that that was what I wanted to be. I wanted it because I wanted him, and
“Yeah, I do need to change. I have this new idea I got from yoga. It’s about the anahata, the heart chakra, this imaginary place in your chest that you open up so you can let people in and love them.”
“Could we go to bed now?” he answered. “I got up at dawn and couldn’t find a thing to do except go look at a project we’ve got going on Webber Street. I didn’t even call my dad and step-mom until right before I went out to the movie.”
“Let’s stop acting so goddamn pitiful,” I said, giggling. “Let’s go to bed and see if you can still make me come.”
4
A F AITHFUL L IFE
S O, FOR A LOT of mysterious and not-so-mysterious reasons, Bobby Tree and I made up for good. We didn’t talk about it much. We just decided to go on and try to be happy. Who knows, maybe having the world seem like it’s coming apart draws people to the things they really love. Maybe it’s fear. Anyway, Bobby Tree and I settled down to make a new start. We’d been loving each other since we were fifteen years old, and we knew each other’s past. “Look at it this way, baby,” he told me. “Sooner or later we’d get back together. Why wait till we’re old and gray?” And he pulled me close to him until I could feel his body taut and fine against mine, and the same old music started playing. “Dance with me. I want to be your partner. …” It has been our song since the first time I heard it on the radio, riding in Bobby’s old red pickup toward the river to take the canoe from Pinewood down to Five Feathers on the east fork of the Big Black. I hadn’t been going out with him more than a week and already we were getting in trouble.
“I’m going to Fayetteville to a cheerleading camp,” I’d told my grandparents. “I’m driving over with Bobby Tree because I don’t want to go on the bus. Why—why are you looking like that?”
“Where you going to stay over there?”
“At the university, in their dormitories. I did it last year. Don’t you remember?”
“You didn’t go riding there in a car with a boy,” my grandmother said, and my grandfather was about to get into it too when Bobby drove up in the yard and got out of the truck, came up on the porch, shook my grandfather’s hand, and started talking to him about fishing.
So we got away okay, but I forgot to take my cheerleading costume, so when I got back, there was hell to pay. Except by then Bobby and I had been down the Big Black from Pinewood to Five Feathers and on down to Reserve and spent two nights in the woods in sleeping bags, and I could see how good he was at everything in the world, from making a fire without looking like he was doing a thing but breathing, to holding me against him like there wasn’t even air between our hearts, and it was done. Not that we hadn’t already loved each other for weeks before going off to be alone with the earth and make our bond.
Except all that was twenty years ago, and now he was making a living building houses around Tulsa and I was the first woman editor of the
Tulsa World
and our lives had moved further apart—but not really, not in the place where the life of the heart and soul is lived.
“I WANT TO DO it right this time,” he said. “I want your grandfather to do a blessing for us in Tahlequah, and have the dances and the fertility rites and wear the deerskin robes. I have a headdress that was my uncle’s. He gave it to me right before he died.”
“Granddaddy’s too old to do a blessing ceremony. We’ll go to him and ask him who to get to do it.”
“And we’ll have children. I want a child, maybe more than one.” He was so proud, sitting beside me at the kitchen table with his shoulders back and his head lifted. He was a grown man in his prime and it was time for me to be a woman, and I had already made up my mind that that was what I wanted to be. I wanted it because I wanted him, and
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