My name is Jasmine, but I’m no sweet-smelling flower. Names are just parents’ dreams, after all. I’m thirty pounds too big and even more dull-faced than my mother, since I make no effort to camouflage it with powder and lipstick. My cousin Ruby is pretty, but it’s not the kind of pretty boys see. She’s thin and clothes hang on her just so, like her mom, my Auntie Faye.
Us Indians are full of evil, Auntie Faye said. She told lots of stories about curses and poison. We call it poison. Not that we’re bad people. Not like regular thieves and murderers. We inherit it. Something our ancestors did, maybe, or something we did to bring it on ourselves. Something we didn’t realize—like having talked about somebody in a way they didn’t like, so they got mad and poisoned you.
She knew a lot about poison. She said she had an instinct for it. She’d nod with her chin to a grove of trees. “Don’t walk there,” she’d say. Her eyes looked dark and motionless, like she was seeing something she didn’t want to see and couldn’t look away from. She traced poison in a family. Take the receptionist at Indian Health, who has a black birthmark the size of a quarter on her cheek. Faye said the woman’s mother stole something from someone, so the woman was marked from birth. It happens like that. It can circle around and get someone in your family. It’s everywhere, Faye said.
Which is why she painted a forest on the front room wall and painted crosses over it with pink fingernail polish, to keep poison away. She wanted us to touch one of the crosses every day. “You’ll be safe,” she said.
I knew she was half cracked. I never believed any of her nonsense. I knew what Mom and my other aunts said was true: Faye had lost it. She was plumb nuts. And Ruby, who was fourteen, my age, wasn’t far behind her. Ruby talked to extraterrestrials who landed on the street outside. She’d read books in the library and come out acting like some character in the book: Helen Keller or Joan of Arc or some proper English girl. She made no sense. Nothing about Ruby or Faye made sense, but I lived with them anyway.
I wasn’t normal either.
I wanted to hear Auntie Faye’s weird stories. I wanted to know what the extraterrestrials told Ruby. I wanted to sit at the kitchen table that Faye set each day with place mats and clean silverware and fresh flowers and hear nothing but their voices in the cool, quiet air of the room. I begged my mother. “Auntie Faye said I could live there,” I told her. She looked at me as if I told her I had an extra eye on the back of my head. She knew me and Ruby were friendly, but she didn’t think I’d go so far as wanting to live there. Seeing how shocked she was, I begged her that much harder. I cried, threatened to run away. What could she say? She didn’t have a place for us, not really. We lived with Grandma Zelda. Like all of my aunts and their kids when they get bounced out of their apartments for not paying the rent or something. Only Mom seemed permanent at Grandma Zelda’s. She could never keep a place of her own for long.
Grandma Zelda’s apartment is like the others, a no-color brown refurbished army barracks at the end of Grand Avenue. Grandma Zelda, Faye, my other aunts—all of us lived there. It was like our own reservation in Santa Rosa, just for our clan. Each apartment was full of the same stuff: dirty-diaper-smelling kids, hollering, and fighting. But Grandma’s place was the worst. It stunk twenty-four hours a day, and you never knew where you were going to sleep: on the floor, on the couch, in a chair. Babies slept in drawers. And then all the sounds in the dark. The crap with Mom and her men. And my aunts, too. All their moaning and stuff. All the time hoping none of it got close to you.•
Excerpted from Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories ©1994 by Greg Sarris. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, University of Oklahoma Press. All rights reserved.
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