You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir

381 Pages·2017·1.22 MB·English

by  Sherman Alexie

Copyright © 2017 by FallsApart Productions, Inc.
Cover design by Julianna Lee; photograph (frame) by Slaven Gabric/Millennium Images, UK
Author photograph by Lee Towndrow
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ISBN 978-0-31627076-2
E3-20170503_DA_NF
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1. Forty Knives
2. Sacred Heart
3. The Call
4. Good Hair
5. Soda Can
6. Prayer Animals
7. Benediction
8. My Sister’s Waltz
9. End of Life
10. Valediction
11. Some Prophecies Are More Obvious than Others
12. Terminal Velocity
13. Who Died on the First of July?
14. Drive, She Said
15. The Viewing
16. Everything Costs
17. Reviewing
18. Scatological
19. The Procession
20. Nonfiction
21. Blood
22. Needle & Thread
23. How to Be an Atheist at a Spokane Indian Christian Funeral
24. Brother Man
25. Silence
26. Your Multiverse or Mine?
27. Clotheshorse
28. Eulogize Rhymes with Disguise
29. The Undertaking
30. The Urban Indian Boy Sings a Death Song
31. Downtown
32. Dear Dylan Thomas, Dear Dr. Extreme, Dear Rage
33. Lasting Rites
34. Equine
35. Feast
36. Utensil
37. Sibling Rivalry
38. Eulogy
39. Drum
40. Rebel Without a Clause
41. Unsaved
42. God Damn, God Dam
43. I Turn My Mother Into a Salmon, I Turn Salmon Into My Mother
44. Communion
45. Storm
46. C Is for Clan
47. Apocalypse
48. Creation Story
49. The Loss Extends in All Directions
50. Revision
51. Bullet Point
52. The Quilting
53. Three Days
54. Navigation
55. Sedated
56. At the Diabetic River
57. Reunion
58. The Spokane Indian Manual of Style
59. Testimony
60. Pack Behavior
61. Prophecy
62. Welcome to the Middle-Aged Orphans Club
63. Performance
64. Electrolux
65. Love Parade
66. The Urban Indian Boy Enjoys Good Health Insurance
67. The Raid
68. Ursine
69. Persistence
70. Ode in Reverse
71. Construction
72. Freedom
73. Chronology
74. Unsaved
75. Skin
76. Missionary Position
77. Shush
78. Harvest
79. The Game
80. I Am My Own Parasite
81. Tribal Ties
82. Want List
83. The Staging
84. Assimilation
85. Litmus Test
86. Standardized Achievement
87. Everything You Need to Know About Being Indigenous in America
88. Fire
89. Love Story
90. Genocide
91. Greek Chorus
92. Roller Ball
93. Law & Order
94. The Lillian Alexie Review of Books
95. Painkiller
96. Cultural Identity
97. Motherland
98. Glacial Pace
99. Next Door to Near-Death
100. The Only Time
101. Scanned
102. Brain Surgery Ping-Pong
103. Clarification
104. Words
105. Therapy
106. How Does My Highly Indigenous Family Relate to My Literary
Fame?
107. Will the Big Seattle Earthquake Trigger a Tsunami the Size of God?
108. How Are You?
109. Where the Creek Becomes River
110. Kind
111. Tribalism
112. Security Clearance
113. Ode to Gray
114. Tyrannosaurus Rez
115. Objectify
116. My Mother as Wolf
117. All My Relations
118. How to Argue with a Colonialist
119. Dear Native Critics, Dear Native Detractors
120. Slight
121. Psalm of Myself
122. Hunger Games
123. Communal
124. Your Theology or Mine?
125. Review, Reprise, Revision
126. The Widow’s Son’s Lament
127. Physics
128. Spring Cleaning
129. Discourse
130. Self-Exam
131. The No
132. Jungian
133. Side Effects
134. Hydrotherapy
135. My Food Channel
136. Triangle of Needs
137. Artist Statement
138. Sonnet, with Fabric Softener
139. Complications
140. Photograph
141. Dear Mother
142. The Urban Indian Boy Dreams of the Hunt
143. Dialogue
144. Tantrums
145. The End of a Half-Assed Basketball Career
146. When I Die
147. Filtered Ways
148. Epigraphs for My Tombstone
149. After Brain Surgery
150. Fluent
151. Thursday Is a Good Day to Find an Empty Church Where You Can Be
Alone
152. Pine
153. Ancestry
154. Things I Never Said to My Mother
155. Tattoo
156. Scrabble
157. Public Art
158. What I Have Learned
159. Like a Bird
160. Flight Hours
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Sherman Alexie
For Arnold, Kim, Arlene, and James
1.
Forty Knives
I
N 1972 OR 1973, or maybe in 1974, my mother and father hosted a dangerous
New Year’s Eve party at our home in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane
Indian Reservation.
We lived in a two-story house—the first floor was a doorless daylight
basement while the elevated second floor had front and back doors accessible by
fourteen-step staircases. The house was constructed by our tribe using grant
money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, more
tersely known as HUD. Our family HUD house was new but only half finished
when we moved in and remains unfinished, and illogically designed, over forty
years later. It was worth $25,000 when it was built, and I think it’s probably
worth about the same now. I don’t speak my tribal language, but I’m positive
there are no Spokane Indian words for real estate appreciation.
The top floor of our HUD house contains a tiny bathroom with an unusually
narrow door and a small windowless kitchen, both included as afterthoughts in
deadline sketches hurriedly drawn by a tribal secretary who had no architectural
education.
I didn’t grow up in a dream house. I lived in a wooden improvisation.
On the top floor with the kitchen and bathroom, there is also a minuscule
bedroom that was shared by my little sisters, identical twins, during childhood.
My sisters, Kim and Arlene, never married and nearly fifty years old now, have
never lived more than one mile apart, so perhaps they cannot escape their twinly
proximity.
Also on the top floor of our HUD house is the master bedroom, where my late
father slept alone, and a disproportionately large living room, where my late