My Chiziiness

The way my mom restuccoed the house the color of the rosy pink mesas where she was born. The way she kept a wire fence when everyone else was putting up privacy walls because it reminded her of the corral back home. The way the doorbell chime reminded her of the sheep returning before dusk, before the bats came out, when she could still run from those bats to the outhouse, shawl over her head and a broom to shoo them. She and Sisters running hand-in-hand, laughter and screams. When she knew her beauty and thought us beautiful, too. Before winter came and my hands turned white, and she said, “Oh my children,” sounding just like a wise elder, “you’re so white.”

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In my defense it was the middle of winter at the height of my “whitest” time of year, and I left early to take her to a doctor’s appointment. I didn’t put lotion on, so I had a high degree of chiziiness. Not at all the smooth beauty of her hands. All my freckles combined would never make that color. Only the one cinnamon freckle, here. This one on my left hand. See.

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But I forgave her for not recognizing me that morning or many mornings, because the grief of the hollow promises of this America had dried up her lungs. I forgive her and I hold to the words of Luci Tapahonso, “It’s so hard to remember that all the time.”

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I took a bottle of dirt from her front yard when we had to sell the house. I took some of the sagebrush out front, too. The bush we tried to burn because we thought it was a weed. That’s how separate we were from the sacred. It wasn’t a tumbleweed. The ones brought in for Hollywood John Wayne movies. The movies my dad loves. He recited the bio of John Wayne to me off his phone when I visited recently to help take care of him. I forgive him for forgetting who I am while I watch his sacred weed roll along the prairie with John Wayne shooting at the indians or criminals.

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The deities forgave me for trying to burn the sacred with a blow torch and catching the fence post on fire. I know this because the house I moved into has twin juniper trees at the front door. The Twins drop ghost beads because it’s so hard to remember all the time.

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I learned enough Navajo to know who I am, when to come and eat, and when someone is insulting me. I am not chizii all the time. I know what a tsk means. I know when I’m at the family reunion and the smoke follows me it is not a good sign. It doesn’t help that I’m not married to a man. That I have no children. That I have short hair. I wonder if they make a tsiiyééł that I could bobby pin on my hair for family reunions or to go to the Navajo Nation Fair.

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Kaye Burton had something similar in the first grade. She was already a complete package: pink dress, white socks, and black patent leather shoes. She called me fat, so I chased her scrawny ass up the tether ball pole and pulled her hair. It was a wiglet! All I remember is holding the ball of “hair” in my palm as we stood in front of our teacher, Miss Thompson, who I adored and who looked like a young Mrs. Beasley. Then it all fades to black like at the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon. The aperture closes.

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And maybe at the reunion I shouldn’t say things to my cousin brother when he directs me to go help my auntie butcher, asks me if I know how, and I say something like, or exactly like, “I don’t know. Is it anything like people?” Because I’ve done that in cadaver lab as a required course for my chosen medical profession. I was quite good at it because I had watched my auntie butcher the sheep, slicing through the fascia to remove the skin. When my professor asked me how come I was so good at dissection, I told him. He looked at me the same way my cousin brother did. These remarks do not help my case around the campfire at the family reunion.

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My auntie, like me, lived out here much of her life. She told me don’t tell people you’re Navajo. She told me to burn juniper because I am around death too much like she was as a nurse. She wondered if that’s why her left hand shakes. See.

I watch my hands.

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I get the best greasy lotion I can find and apply regularly.

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I shop for a tsiiyééł online.

 

I stay away from the family campfire at reunions.