SHARON AND I were college sweethearts at St. Jerome II University in Seattle, or as it is affectionately known, St. Junior's. We met at the first mixer dance of our freshman year and soon discovered we were the only confirmed Native American Roman Catholics within a three-mile radius of campus, so we slept together that inaugural night, in open defiance of Pope Whomever, and kept sleeping together for the next three years. It was primary love: red girl and red boy on white sheets.
Robin Laananen
Sharon was Apache and I was Spokane, but we practiced our tribal religions like we practiced Catholicism: We loved all of the ceremonies but thought they were pitiful cries to a disinterested God.
My white mother, Mary, bless her soul, raised me all by herself in Seattle because my Indian daddy, Marvin, had died of stomach cancer when I was a baby. I never knew him, but I spent half of every summer on the Spokane Reservation with his mother and father, my grandparents. My mother wanted me to keep in touch with my tribal heritage, but mostly I read spy novels to my grandfather and shopped garage sales and second-hand stores with my grandmother. The reservation felt ordinary and magical at the same time. In Seattle, my mother was a corporate lawyer for old money companies and sent me to Lakeside School where I was a classmate of Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who have become the new money kings of the world.
Sharon went to St. Therese's School for Girls. Her parents, Wilson and Pauline, were both architects; they helped build three of the tallest skyscrapers in downtown Seattle. If Zeus ate a few million pounds of glass, steel, and concrete, his offal would look something like those buildings. However fecal, those monstrosities won awards and made Wilson and Pauline very popular and wealthy. They lived in a self-designed home on Lake Washington that was lovely and tasteful in all ways except for its ridiculously turquoise exterior. I don't know whether they painted the house turquoise to honor the sacred stone of the Southwest or if they were being ironic: Ha! We're Apache Indians from the desert and this is our big blue house on the water! Deal with it!
Sharon and I were Native American royalty, the aboriginal prince and princess of Western Washington. Sure, we'd been thoroughly defeated by white culture, but dang it, we were conquered and assimilated National Merit Scholars in St. Junior's English Honors Department.
Sharon and I were in love and happy and young and skinny and beautiful and hyperliterate. We recited Shakespeare monologues as foreplay: To be or not to be, take off your panties, oh, Horatio, I knew him well, a fellow of infinite jest, I'm going to wear your panties now. All over campus, we were known as Sharon-and-David-the-Bohemian-Indians. We were inseparable. We ate our meals together and fed each other. Risking expulsion for moral violations, we sneaked into each other's dorm rooms at night and made love while our respective roommates covered their heads with pillows. Sharon and I always tried to take the same classes and mourned the other's absence whenever we couldn't. We read the same books and discussed them while we were naked and intertwined. Oh, Lord, we were twins conjoined at the brain, heart, and crotch.
I proposed to Sharon on the first day of our senior year, and she accepted, and we planned to secretly elope on the day after our graduation.
IN JUNE, THE DAY before graduation, Sharon and I were taking one last walk along the path beside the anonymous creek that ran through the middle of campus. We were saying good-bye to a good place. Overgrown with fern and blackberry thickets, the creek had been left wild and wet.
"Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet," I said.
"Gerald Manley Hopkins is the gent," said Sharon. We were playing "Name the Poet," a game of our own invention.
"Yet and gent," I said. "A clumsy rhyme, don't you think?"
"You stink," she said and laughed too loudly. Her joy was always rowdy, rude, and pervasive. I laughed with her and pulled her close to me and pressed my face into her hair and breathed in her scent. After the first time we'd made love, she'd said, Now I know what you smell like, and no matter what else happens to us, I'm always going to know what you smell like.
"Hey," I said as we walked the creek. "How about we climb into the bushes and I get you a little wild and wet?"
We kissed and kissed until she pulled away.
"Do you hear that?" she said.
"What?"
"I think it's a cat. Can you hear it meowing?"
I listened and heard nothing.
"You're imagining things," I said.
"No, it's a cat. I can hear it. It sounds pitiful."
"There must be a hundred cats around here. City cats. They're tough."
"No, it sounds hurt. Listen."
I listened and finally heard the faint feline cry.
"It's down there in the creek somewhere," she said.
