There There - Tommy Orange Page 0,52

and out came those spider legs like splinters. Opal covered her mouth as she listened to the message, but she wasn’t surprised, not as much as she would have been had this not happened to her when she was around the same age Orvil is now.

Opal and Jacquie’s mom never let them kill a spider if they found one in the house, or anywhere for that matter. Her mom said spiders carry miles of web in their bodies, miles of story, miles of potential home and trap. She said that’s what we are. Home and trap.

When the spider legs didn’t come up at dinner last night, Opal figured Orvil was afraid to bring it up because of the powwow—even though the two things had nothing to do with each other.

A few weeks back she found a video of Orvil powwow dancing in his room. Opal regularly checks their phones while they sleep. She looks at what pictures and videos they take, their text messages, and their browser histories. None of them have shown signs of especially worrisome depravity yet. But it’s only a matter of time. Opal believes there is a dark curiosity alive in each of us. She believes we all do precisely what we think we can get away with. The way Opal sees it, privacy is for adults. You keep a close eye on your kids, you keep them in line.

In the video, Orvil was powwow dancing like he knew exactly what he was doing, which she couldn’t understand. He was dancing in the regalia she kept in her closet. The regalia was given to her by an old friend.

There were all kinds of programs and events for Native youth growing up in Oakland. Opal first met Lucas at a group home, and then again later at a foster-youth event. For a time, Opal and Lucas were model foster youth, always the first chosen for interviews and photos for flyers. They’d both learned from an elder what goes into making regalia, then helped her make it. Opal helped Lucas prepare for his first powwow as a dancer. Lucas and Opal had been in love. Their love was young and desperate. But it was love. Then one day Lucas got on a bus and moved down to Los Angeles. He’d never even talked about it. He just left. Came back almost two decades later out of nowhere wanting an interview for an Urban Indian documentary he was making and gave her the regalia. Then he died a few weeks later. Called Opal from his sister’s house to tell her his days were numbered. That’s how he put it. He didn’t even tell her why, he just said sorry, and that he wished her the very best.

* * *

—

But last night dinner was quiet. Dinner was never quiet. The boys left the table in the same suspicious silence. Opal called Lony back. She would ask him how their day went—Lony couldn’t lie. She’d ask him how he liked his new bike. Plus it was his turn to do the dishes. But Orvil and Loother did something they’d never done before. They helped their little brother dry and put away the dishes. Opal didn’t want to force the issue. She really didn’t know what to say about it. It was like something was stuck in her throat. It wouldn’t come back up and it wouldn’t go down. Actually it was like the bump in her leg the spider legs had come out of. The bump had never gone away. Were there more legs in there? Was that the spider’s body? Opal had stopped asking questions a long time ago. The bump remained.

When she went to tell the boys to go to bed, she heard one of them shush the other two.

“What’s that?” she said.

“Nothing, Grandma,” Loother said.

“Don’t ‘nothing, Grandma’ me,” she said.

“It’s nothing,” Orvil said.

“Go to sleep,” she said. The boys are afraid of Opal, like she was always afraid of her mom. Something about how brief and direct she is. Maybe hypercritical too, like her mom was hypercritical. It’s to prepare them for a world made for Native people not to live but to die in, shrink, disappear. She needs to push them harder because it will take more for them to succeed than someone who is not Native. It’s because she failed to do anything more than disappear herself. She’s no-nonsense with them because she believes life will do its best to get at you.