Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

the braided rug, while my husband and two children
sleep upstairs, peacefully.
In my fantasy, my daughter awakens first, comes
drifting downstairs with her brown hair flopped to
one side, rubbing her eyes, heading for my lap. She
whispers, “Will you braid my hair for school?”
Behind her question crowd years of frustrating
tangles, slippery baby-hair fiascoes. I have never
been able to braid her hair. My fingers don’t know
the right moves, somehow; or, I tell myself, Miranda
didn’t inherit the thick Indian hair that falls to my
waist. We’ve kept her hair short for a long time. But
in my fantasy I say, “I think we can manage a little
braid today,” and that sharpness between us is gone.
What remains is like old silver, smooth and warm,
just a little bit polished by time. “Like most pure
metals,” the last sentence of this scene should say, “it
gives to the touch.”
But that’s not true. I write this story by waking up
each morning and writing until I feel myself begin to
change the truth. Then I walk away from the work
till I can face reality again.
I walk away from this story for nearly a decade;
walk away with its false ending: the warm old house,
the husband, the fiction of a healing that doesn’t