You Don't Have to Say You Love Me Read online

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  Cover design by Julianna Lee; photograph (frame) by Slaven Gabric/Millennium Images, UK

  Author photograph by Lee Towndrow

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  ISBN 978-0-316-27076-2

  E3-20170503_DA_NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. Forty Knives

  2. Sacred Heart

  3. The Call

  4. Good Hair

  5. Soda Can

  6. Prayer Animals

  7. Benediction

  8. My Sister’s Waltz

  9. End of Life

  10. Valediction

  11. Some Prophecies Are More Obvious than Others

  12. Terminal Velocity

  13. Who Died on the First of July?

  14. Drive, She Said

  15. The Viewing

  16. Everything Costs

  17. Reviewing

  18. Scatological

  19. The Procession

  20. Nonfiction

  21. Blood

  22. Needle & Thread

  23. How to Be an Atheist at a Spokane Indian Christian Funeral

  24. Brother Man

  25. Silence

  26. Your Multiverse or Mine?

  27. Clotheshorse

  28. Eulogize Rhymes with Disguise

  29. The Undertaking

  30. The Urban Indian Boy Sings a Death Song

  31. Downtown

  32. Dear Dylan Thomas, Dear Dr. Extreme, Dear Rage

  33. Lasting Rites

  34. Equine

  35. Feast

  36. Utensil

  37. Sibling Rivalry

  38. Eulogy

  39. Drum

  40. Rebel Without a Clause

  41. Unsaved

  42. God Damn, God Dam

  43. I Turn My Mother Into a Salmon, I Turn Salmon Into My Mother

  44. Communion

  45. Storm

  46. C Is for Clan

  47. Apocalypse

  48. Creation Story

  49. The Loss Extends in All Directions

  50. Revision

  51. Bullet Point

  52. The Quilting

  53. Three Days

  54. Navigation

  55. Sedated

  56. At the Diabetic River

  57. Reunion

  58. The Spokane Indian Manual of Style

  59. Testimony

  60. Pack Behavior

  61. Prophecy

  62. Welcome to the Middle-Aged Orphans Club

  63. Performance

  64. Electrolux

  65. Love Parade

  66. The Urban Indian Boy Enjoys Good Health Insurance

  67. The Raid

  68. Ursine

  69. Persistence

  70. Ode in Reverse

  71. Construction

  72. Freedom

  73. Chronology

  74. Unsaved

  75. Skin

  76. Missionary Position

  77. Shush

  78. Harvest

  79. The Game

  80. I Am My Own Parasite

  81. Tribal Ties

  82. Want List

  83. The Staging

  84. Assimilation

  85. Litmus Test

  86. Standardized Achievement

  87. Everything You Need to Know About Being Indigenous in America

  88. Fire

  89. Love Story

  90. Genocide

  91. Greek Chorus

  92. Roller Ball

  93. Law & Order

  94. The Lillian Alexie Review of Books

  95. Painkiller

  96. Cultural Identity

  97. Motherland

  98. Glacial Pace

  99. Next Door to Near-Death

  100. The Only Time

  101. Scanned

  102. Brain Surgery Ping-Pong

  103. Clarification

  104. Words

  105. Therapy

  106. How Does My Highly Indigenous Family Relate to My Literary Fame?

  107. Will the Big Seattle Earthquake Trigger a Tsunami the Size of God?

  108. How Are You?

  109. Where the Creek Becomes River

  110. Kind

  111. Tribalism

  112. Security Clearance

  113. Ode to Gray

  114. Tyrannosaurus Rez

  115. Objectify

  116. My Mother as Wolf

  117. All My Relations

  118. How to Argue with a Colonialist

  119. Dear Native Critics, Dear Native Detractors

  120. Slight

  121. Psalm of Myself

  122. Hunger Games

  123. Communal

  124. Your Theology or Mine?

  125. Review, Reprise, Revision

  126. The Widow’s Son’s Lament

  127. Physics

  128. Spring Cleaning

  129. Discourse

  130. Self-Exam

  131. The No

  132. Jungian

  133. Side Effects

  134. Hydrotherapy

  135. My Food Channel

  136. Triangle of Needs

  137. Artist Statement

  138. Sonnet, with Fabric Softener

  139. Complications

  140. Photograph

  141. Dear Mother

  142. The Urban Indian Boy Dreams of the Hunt

  143. Dialogue

  144. Tantrums

  145. The End of a Half-Assed Basketball Career

  146. When I Die

  147. Filtered Ways

  148. Epigraphs for My Tombstone

  149. After Brain Surgery

  150. Fluent

  151. Thursday Is a Good Day to Find an Empty Church Where You Can Be Alone

  152. Pine

  153. Ancestry

  154. Things I Never Said to My Mother

  155. Tattoo

  156. Scrabble

  157. Public Art

  158. What I Have Learned

  159. Like a Bird

  160. Flight Hours

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Sherman Alexie

  Newsletter

  For Arnold, Kim, Arlene, and James

  1.

  Forty Knives

  IN 1972 OR 1973, or maybe in 1974, my mother and father hos
ted a dangerous New Year’s Eve party at our home in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

  We lived in a two-story house—the first floor was a doorless daylight basement while the elevated second floor had front and back doors accessible by fourteen-step staircases. The house was constructed by our tribe using grant money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, more tersely known as HUD. Our family HUD house was new but only half finished when we moved in and remains unfinished, and illogically designed, over forty years later. It was worth $25,000 when it was built, and I think it’s probably worth about the same now. I don’t speak my tribal language, but I’m positive there are no Spokane Indian words for real estate appreciation.

  The top floor of our HUD house contains a tiny bathroom with an unusually narrow door and a small windowless kitchen, both included as afterthoughts in deadline sketches hurriedly drawn by a tribal secretary who had no architectural education.

  I didn’t grow up in a dream house. I lived in a wooden improvisation.

  On the top floor with the kitchen and bathroom, there is also a minuscule bedroom that was shared by my little sisters, identical twins, during childhood. My sisters, Kim and Arlene, never married and nearly fifty years old now, have never lived more than one mile apart, so perhaps they cannot escape their twinly proximity.

  Also on the top floor of our HUD house is the master bedroom, where my late father slept alone, and a disproportionately large living room, where my late mother slept on a couch.

  My late father, Sherman Alexie, Sr., was a Coeur d’Alene Indian. He was physically graceful and strong, adept at ballroom waltzes, powwow dancing, and basketball. And always smelled of the smoke of one good cigar intermingled with dozens of cheap stogies. As a teenager, he began to resemble the actor Charles Bronson, and that resemblance only increased with age. Introverted, depressed, he spent most of his time solving crossword puzzles while watching TV.

  My late mother, Lillian Alexie, crafted legendary quilts and was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language. She was small, just under five feet tall when she died. And she was so beautiful and verbose and brilliant she could have played a fictional version of herself in a screwball Hollywood comedy if Hollywood had ever bothered to cast real Indians as fictional Indians.

  I don’t know if my parents romantically loved each other. I am positive they platonically loved each other very much.

  My mother and father slept separately from the time we moved into that HUD house in the early 1970s until his death from alcoholic kidney failure, in 2003. And then my mother continued to sleep alone on a living room couch—on a series of living room couches—until her death, in 2015. My parents were not a physically affectionate couple. I never saw, heard, or sensed any evidence—other than the existence of us children—that my mother and father had sex at any point during their marriage. If forced to guess at the number of times my parents had been naked and damp together, I would probably say, “Well, they conceived four children together, so let’s say they had sex three times for keeps—the twins only count for one—and four times for kicks.”

  My big brother, Arnold, and I each had our own mostly finished basement bedrooms. But he spent much of his time living and traveling with a family of cousins like they were surrogates for his parents and siblings. I love my brother, but he sometimes felt like a stranger in those early years, and I imagine he might say the same about me in our later years. Never married, but in a decade-long relationship with a white woman, he is loud and hilarious and universally beloved in our tribe.

  The furnace and laundry rooms, also in the basement, are cement-floored with bare wood stud walls. Dug five feet into the ground, our basement flooded with every serious rainstorm and has smelled of mold, and subsequent disinfectant fluids, from the beginning of time.

  My little brother, James, who is also our second cousin, was adopted by my parents when he was a toddler. Fifteen years younger than me, he would eventually take over my bedroom after I went away to college. He was so starved when we got him that he would devour any food or drink in his vicinity, including other people’s meals. While we were distracted, he once drank my father’s sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp of Diet Pepsi in one long pull. He was only three years old. We thought it was funny. We didn’t ponder why a kid would come to us so very thirsty.

  James was only five years old when I moved away from the reservation. So I think I have been more like his absent uncle than his big brother.

  Smart and handsome and thin and also married to a white woman, James has a master’s degree in business.

  Ah, my little brother is my favorite capitalist.

  But that inexpertly constructed HUD house was still a spectacular and vital mansion compared to the nineteenth-century one-bedroom house where I spent most of the first seven years of my life. That ancient reservation house didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity when my parents, siblings, and I first moved in, along with an ever-changing group of friends, cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles.

  I most vividly remember my half sister, Mary. She was thirteen years older than me and seemed more like a maternal figure than a sibling. Even more beautiful than our gorgeous mother, Mary was a charming and random presence in my life. She was profane and silly and dressed like a hippie white girl mimicking a radical Indian. In later years, I would learn that Mary’s randomness and charm—and her eventual death in a house fire—were fueled by her drug and alcohol addictions. I didn’t yet know that romantic heroes—famous and not—are usually aimless nomads in disguise. Mary’s father lived in Montana, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, so she sometimes lived with him and sometimes lived with us and sometimes shacked up with Indian men who reeked of marijuana and beer or with white men who looked like roadies for Led Zeppelin. A mother at fifteen, Mary gave her baby, my niece, to our aunt Inez to raise. My niece is only a few years younger than me, and I still don’t understand why my mother didn’t take her into our home. My parents raised one of our cousins as a son, and my sisters would eventually raise another cousin as a daughter. So why didn’t our niece become our sister? I never asked my parents those questions. But, in writing the first draft of this very paragraph, I realized for the first time that my father, so passive in nearly all ways, might have said no to raising a granddaughter who was not his biological relative. I feel terrible for considering this possibility. Could my father have done such a thing? Could he have been such an alpha lion? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hope not. So why didn’t my mother raise her granddaughter? I doubt that I’ll ever be able to answer that question. There are family mysteries I cannot solve. There are family mysteries I am unwilling to solve.

  Before her death, my mother told me that she liked to sleep alone on a couch in her later years because she’d only slept in crowded beds and bedrooms for most of her younger life. I never would have thought of a lumpy couch as a luxury, but my mother certainly did. Sometimes, when I was little and afraid and screaming from yet another nightmare, I would fitfully sleep on a smaller couch in the HUD house living room near my mother’s larger couch.

  Born hydrocephalic, with abnormal amounts of cerebral spinal fluid crushing my brain, I had surgery at five months to insert a shunt and then had it removed when I was two. I suffered seizures until I was seven years old, so I was a kindergartner on phenobarbital. I have alternated between insomnia and hypersomnia my whole life. I begin dreaming immediately upon falling asleep, a condition called shortened REM latency that can be a precursor, indicator, cause, and result of depression. I have always been haunted by nightmares. By ghosts, real or imagined. I have always heard voices, familiar and strange. I was officially diagnosed as bipolar in 2010, but I think my first symptoms appeared when I was a child.

  For Christmas in 1976, when I was ten, I received a plastic Guns of Navarone battle play set with Allied and Nazi soldiers, cannon, tanks, and planes. I added my own Indian and U.S. Cavalry toy soldiers and manically played war fo
r twenty-two hours straight. My parents didn’t stop me. They didn’t tell me to go to bed. My mania was accepted. In the context of my family, I wasn’t being odd. Rather, I was behaving like my mother, who would often work on her quilts for even longer sleepless stretches.

  I often stayed awake all night reading books and writing stories and playing the board games I invented. If I was especially agitated and lucky, I would have a new graph-paper notebook and I would carefully color in thousands of squares, one by one, until I was calm enough to sleep.

  I think I inherited my bipolar disorder from my mother. I believe she was haunted by ghosts, too. I also believe she has become a ghost, either as a supernatural being or as a hallucination caused by my various mental illnesses and medications or as the most current and vivid product of my imagination.

  Thing is, I don’t believe in ghosts. But I see them all the time.

  “You slept on that living room couch for years,” my mother’s ghost said to me while I was writing this memoir. “You never used your basement bedroom until you were eleven or twelve. I had you sleep close to me because you had those seizures. And I had to keep you safe. And I had to give you medicine in the middle of the night. And because you were always scared.”

  “That’s not how I remember sleeping,” I said. “I remember moving into the basement bedroom on my first night.”

  “You used to wet your bed,” my mother’s ghost said. “You wet the couch until you were thirteen, I think.”

  “I stopped wetting the bed long before that,” I said.

  “Do you remember that I would lay down a shower curtain on the couch and then lay down your sheets and blanket?” my mother’s ghost asked.

  “That was only in the old house,” I said. “Never in the HUD house.”

  “It was in both places,” she said. “You had bladder issues even when you were awake. Do you remember when you drove to Spokane with your cousins for a birthday party? But you were too nervous to go into a house filled with city Indians you didn’t know? So you stayed outside in the car and peed your pants because you were too scared to go to the bathroom in a stranger’s house?”

  I lied and said, “I don’t remember that happening.”

  “I think you forget things on purpose,” my mother’s ghost said.

  I do remember when the white men in gray overalls installed the first indoor toilet in our ancient nineteenth-century house, but I can’t recall when the place was wired for electricity and the first lightbulb was switched on.