Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison Page B

would start pounding him, throwing real punches, which her parents would ignore. This was the opposite of our house, where my parents often corrected school papers during dinner. My wayward sister later said, “They were always out to lunch.” This wasn’t quite a fair assessment because Polly is one of those overconscientious people, a dawn-to-midnight worker. My father, however, in his vain attempt to create what he thought was a normal life after Vietnam, simply excluded what most of us think of as reality. Years later in my mid-teens, when Polly thought that I was old enough, she told me that she had felt “sucker punched” by my father, and that after being married to David she had craved an ordinary, nonneurotic man only to gradually learn that my father had “painted himself by numbers.” He was a highly intelligent man who utterly rejected his intelligence, just wanting to be a regular guy. His father taught economics at the University of Chicago andhis mother translated from central European languages. They were austere and fustian academic people and I only saw them a few times when I was little. I thought they smelled strange, an odor I found out later was sherry. They moved to London before my dad was killed in the motorcycle accident and didn’t come back for the funeral. When I was in London on a college trip Polly made me look them up and they were cool and formal. The older woman that I thought was wonderful was David’s mother, Marjorie. She and Polly were friends despite the divorce from David. She gave me and my sister a charge account at Kroch’s & Brentano’s so we could have all of the books we wanted. She would take us to the Cape Cod Room at the Drake, where we would eat lobster. Naturally my dad didn’t like her—it was a matter of wavelength, his desire to keep everything in the discreet middle.
    When Clare and I first spent any time around each other I was twelve and she was eleven. She was taller than me and wore blue-and-white bib overalls. Within minutes of a silent walk down to the St. Marys River with her dogs she said, “You’re an odd duck.” Polly had taken me and my sister over to Sugar Island, near the Soo, to visit Donald and Cynthia, Herald and Clare, and also to see a Chippewa powwow the next day. We were fairly fresh out of Chicago and the powwow was what the kids nowadays call a mind-fuck. It wasn’t because I was small but these Indians looked real big because they were real big. Some of them rode up in Harleys, went into the school locker room with satchels, and then came out in full regalia. There were drum groups and several hundredIndians dancing in a hot dusty circle. I didn’t know what to think. My sister, who was ten, started to cry and Polly took her back to the car to explain things. Some people danced in street clothes, including Donald and Clare. Herald worked at a stand making hamburgers and hot dogs, which didn’t taste good like they did in Chicago. Cynthia was taking care of a bunch of babies and young kids so their mothers could dance. My sister calmed down and Cynthia asked us to help her out. I held two babies at once, small brown babies. I thought Cynthia was beautiful. She had given birth to both Herald and Clare by the time she was twenty and at the time was only in her early thirties. Late in the afternoon when it was still hot I went down to the river with Herald and Clare and a few other young people and went skinny-dipping. They all teased me because I wouldn’t take off my underpants. I was in a different world. Everyone seemed poor but more vivid than my life in Chicago except for my dad’s Italian friends. At the time I actually wondered if Indians and Italians might be related.
    Clare fed our leftover sandwiches to a stray mutt, who didn’t chew the proper thirty-two times. I half lifted Donald into the car, where he promptly fell back to sleep. Clare told me I looked