The Sentence

by Louise Erdrich

Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.

Also, as I was finding, this dimming season sharpens one. The trees are bare. Spirits stir in the stripped branches. November supposedly renders thin the veil.

Teen Girl: Are you still open? Oh, thank god. I ran here. I promised myself. Me: Promised yourself what? Teen Girl: This book. It is my birthday and this is my present to myself. She holds up Joan Didion’s biography. For the rest of the week I enjoy this moment.

Sometimes I think our state’s beginning years haunt everything: the city’s attempts to graft progressive ideas onto its racist origins, the fact that we can’t undo history but are forced to either confront or repeat it.

I could also feel how my heart had cracked like a windshield, the minute split traveling slowly through the glass. I should do something. I should get it repaired, I thought. The crevice was edging deeper. Everything seemed to be cracking: windows, windshields, hearts, lungs, skulls.

She started in again, crying. I begged her to try and calm down so I could figure out what was going on. I reared up out of the covers, in my dizziness saw sparks and lights, for I was used to being horizontal. I tried again and managed to crawl over and sit beside her in my bed-lump hair and my baggy, ripped, cheap Target trauma pants. I was reporting for duty.

I put her ashes in the Mississippi River not because she ever noticed the river or gave the slightest indication she wanted that, but because it was a way to think of her as she’d always been, wordless and inert, pulled along by a strong, hidden current.

What comes next? I want to know, so I manage to drag the dictionary to my side. I need a word, a sentence. The door is open. Go.