Free Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie Page A

fork, and yes, here it is, I have my cancer fork.”
    They laughed, entertained by their collective wit.
    “Hey,” I said to the single white woman. “What’s your name?”
    “Teresa.”
    “I’m Richard,” I said and offered my hand.
    “I know,” she said and took my hand. “You already said that.”
    We held hands a moment longer than necessary. It was no longer a polite greeting; it had become a tactile series of questions. Are we gonna? Do you wanna? Will it be juicy and joyous? I wanted to impress her: I wanted to be a member of her tribe.
    “You know, I agree with Teresa,” I said to the others. “I’ve always suspected that in mixed marriages, one of the partners is lying about his or her politics.”
    “Are you calling me a liar?” asked the Republican husband. He’d switched on his lobbyist voice, loud, clear, and resonant. I’d bet a million dollars he soaked in his bathtub at night and pretended he was a guest on Crossfire or Hannity & Colmes or Meet the Press. Hey, little Tucker, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be a bow-tied talking head.
    “I’m not calling anybody a liar, I’m just talking theory here,” I said. “Hypothesis. I’m not talking about your marriage in particular. I don’t know you folks at all. I’m talking about politically mixed marriages in general.”
    Jesus, what the hell was I doing? How impolitic could I be? But Teresa seemed to be enjoying it. I wondered how soon I would see her naked.
    “The thing is,” I said, “maybe both partners in those marriages are lying. When it counts most—at its most intimate, when two lovers are beneath the sheets—I figure Matalin and Carville are moderates who believe in truth, justice, and multiple orgasms.”
    “Well, hell, yes!” shouted the Democrat wife. “Now, that’s a subject we can all agree on!”
    Okay, I was clumsy and obvious in introducing sex as a topic of conversation. But Teresa already knew sex was on my mind, and I wanted her to wonder about the quality and quantity of the sex. I looked at her. I regarded her. She smiled, and only the poets know what bright shapes a bright container can contain.
    “We all want to be special,” I said. “We all want to be the last surviving member of our species. A right-wing woman like Matalin is the only woolly mammoth, and Carville is the most singular white donkey ever born in the state of Louisiana. So maybe Matalin and Carville wear public masks over private faces.”
    “Or maybe they’re like house cats,” Teresa said.
    “What?” I asked, puzzled by her analogy.
    “No, really,” she said. “We didn’t domesticate cats. They domesticated themselves. But not totally, you know? You take a good look at any house cat, and you can tell there’s eventually going to be a day when it goes back wild, you know? When it reverts to its true nature. You fall over and die in a house with your dog, and your dog will lie down beside your dead body, maybe right on top of it, and starve to death. But a house cat will feast on your eyes as soon as its stomach starts growling.”
    “So what are you?” I asked. “A cat or a dog?”
    “Depends on the situation,” she said.
    I stayed too long after dinner because she stayed too long after dinner. We wanted to be left alone together, but we didn’t want to leave together while everybody was watching. We stood at the bar and talked for a few hours about the usual things, but she was unusually smart and funny and tender. I thought about marriage. God, I felt like a sixteen-year-old girl eagerly reading Bride’s magazine. And then I saw our reflections in the mirror behind the bar. She was short, blond, blue-eyed, and white-skinned. I was tall, black-haired, brown-eyed, and brown-skinned, the love child of Crazy Horse and Josephine Baker, of Sacajawea and Julius Erving, of Zora Neale Hurston and Geronimo, of Pocahontas and Malcolm X. I thought about genetics. What kind of kids would Teresa and I produce?