In Anchorage, Where Panhandling Is Illegal, by Tara Goedjen

I didn’t have to give tennis lessons until the afternoon, so I went to a coffee shop to write for the morning. Not soon after I had sat down with a cuppa, a man staggered over to my table. Lurching with unsteady steps and hunched shoulders. I wondered if he was drunk, since he smelled like alcohol. Not fresh, though—a stale smell of booze. It was early in the morning. He said, “I could barely walk here.” He glanced toward the woman he was with and gestured at my table and at the door. “Just from there to here!” They both laughed. When the morning was over, and after I had listened to their stories, I wondered how they could laugh at all.

I am a quarter white, but I can still speak Yup’ik.
My grandmother was worried about me when I was a child, because I wasn’t fluent.
Instead of going to classes, I got a release to work as a secretary, writing up documents and receipts.

The man had a tan face, with thick dark hair sprung across his scalp. Hair that stayed glossy without water and soap. His eyes were slanted slightly, and when he smiled his face grew older, more wrinkled, but it was a sturdy face, one that wouldn’t flinch in a cold gust of wind. The woman’s face was rounder, and paler. Though she was young her eyes were rimmed underneath with a dull ochre—that color of sickness. Her teeth were yellow, stained from coffee and cigarettes.

Eskimo ice cream?
Crisco and berries and fish.
And sugar.
And sugar, yes.
You smoke the fish. Cut it into slices and hang it to be smoked. Or you could chop off old fish heads.
King salmon.
You won’t like it! I’m a quarter white. Take it from me, you won’t like it.
It’s good, maybe she’ll like it. You ferment the fish. You can ferment bear meat, too.
You won’t like it.
The fish is good for you. Very good.

Our conversation that morning started with a question. “Could you buy my wife coffee? She’s so cold.” He’d already asked the man behind me, who had waved him off.

“Coffee?” I asked. How could I not spare change for a coffee? “Okay.”

“We will sit here. Can we sit here with you?” My table was big enough, but I wanted space to write.

“I’ll bring it to you over there,” I said.

“We will sit here, okay?” It wasn’t really a question. He pretended, I think, not to hear me. His wife sat down. She was a little better kempt than him, but (I began to realize) probably less healthy.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said. “I’ll take cream.”

“I’ll take cream and sugar, please,” she said, smiling.

“Cream and sugar,” he said.

I went to the register and ordered three coffees. “Milk and sugar is by the door,” they told me. I hesitated. Should I fill their coffees, or let them decide how much they want?

“Here,” I said, repeating what the girl behind the counter had said to me. At first the man tried to hand back his coffee to me to fill it for him, but the woman intervened.

“Let’s go get our sugar and cream,” she said, smiling.

“We’ll be right back,” he said.

The woman told me later that she was not his wife. That she was his neice. Her name was Eadie.

I use to run inside the house. Mother! I’d call.
Aye, she’d say.
Aye means “what.” Aye.
It’s time to empty the freezers, we’re going to go hunting, I’d say.
I had to clean the seals. I hated cleaning the seals.
It’s hard work, you have to slice the fat off under the skin.
I feel sorry for you, then.

Since they had sat down they hadn’t stopped talking, but I didn’t want them to stop. “I had to clean the seals, too!” Eadie said, laughing. “I was the oldest girl. My brother Kelly Kelly was the first born. My parents wanted to name him after my grandfather but there were already too many Anthonys and Antionettes. So instead, they named their first born son Kelly Kelly after my other grandfather, although he was really called Anthony.

“We gave my youngest brother, Dennis, to my uncle and aunt, because they only have one son. They were worried at first because Dennis kept coming back to our house. Of course we still treated him like a brother. My mother said to my aunt, don’t worry. If he wants to come back, then he will come back. After that he didn’t come around our house much any more.”

I have four nieces. All of them are beautiful.
It comes from the heart, though, not the mind.
The mind is only psychology. The heart is where the beauty is.

Eadie and her uncle went outside to smoke twice. The first time he took a small plastic bag from his pocket and began to roll the smoke.

“I’m going to smoke, beautiful,” he said.

“I’m going, too,” Eadie said.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

“I want to smoke, too,” Eadie said again. When they were gone, a clerk in a green apron came up to me.

“Here are two coffee certificates,” she told me. “If I had known, I wouldn’t have made you pay.”

“But I don’t mind,” I said.

“Here,” she said, smiling. “Are they bothering you?”

“It’s fine,” I said. I felt awkward. Felt even worse when I took the cards from her, which were bright orange. I tucked them away in my bag. Couldn’t bear to look at them.

My grandfather used to bring food to the schoolteachers. To the white people, so they could survive.
He taught my father, and my father taught me.
Yes, he used to bring food to the white people. Caribou meat. Sorry, moose meat. Moose meat. It was before the caribou came.
We would empty out the freezers. We would give the food to those less fortunate.
Because it would only go to waste. It wasn’t spoiled or anything.
This is what my grandfather taught my father. And my father taught me.
We’d give it away.

Eadie and her uncle came back. “Do you know this Sarah Palin?” they asked. “Do you like her?” Her uncle’s voice seemed clearer, sharper. Earlier, I couldn’t understand some of the things that he told me, because of the way he sometimes mumbled, so I watched his gestures instead. Now he seemed so coherent.

“I told the village boys they must help the community,” he said. “I told them to feed the teachers. I told them, we could get more money for our school. From the government. We wrote up a proposal. I wrote: May this proposal stand as a request for funds forever and ever and ever. I signed it. We all signed it. We got the superintendent of the school to sign it. He sent it off for us. And then we got money. Thousands of dollars. They all looked at me. ‘It wasn’t me,’ I told them. It was all of you. They asked me, would I run for office? There was enough money to buy snowmachines for the children. I said, no, not now. Maybe when I’m older.”

I wondered if he’d ever gotten the chance to run for office. If he had, would I be having this conversation with him? Would he be here in Anchorage now? Would he have asked me for coffee?

I don’t like village life. It’s the same thing over and over again, day after day. We have one restaurant.
I went home this summer, but I only stayed a couple of weeks. I went back to Anchorage early.
My mother was sad.
She spoils me while I’m there. Lets me play Bingo everyday.

Towards the end of our conversation, Eadie’s uncle wanted to come with me to wherever I was going. He wanted two dollars.

“Two dollars?”

“I’m so hungry. I want to buy some food.”

I had food with me, so I gave it to him. He said, “What’s this?”

“You said you were hungry.”

“Okay, I’ll save it for later,” he said. Then, again, he asked me for money, this time when Eadie was back at the table.

“She’s going to give me two dollars. Will you give me two dollars?”

I looked at him for a moment and then at Eadie. She shook her head—really quick, really short. No.

“Come on,” she said to him. “We’re going to the native church. They feed us after the service.”

“That’s good,” I said. “When?”

“The church starts at ten, but they feed everyone at noon,” she said. “Some people only go to eat. I pray a little before I eat,” she laughed. “They bless us there. But it’s not like the Catholic church where they throw water. Instead they wrap us in blankets.”

She laughed again. I felt compelled to laugh with her. I found out then that the man wasn’t her uncle, but her boyfriend’s uncle.

This girl is nice to us to buy us coffee.
Yes, I was cold.
I mean it though, she has a good heart.

I’m not the first person to buy someone coffee, and I know I fall short with niceties. I also know that I don’t have the callousness of a typical New Yorker accustomed to begging. So why does it feel so different, I wondered, to buy a stranger a coffee instead of a friend? Why does it feel different to buy someone coffee who can afford to pay for it than to buy coffee for someone who can’t? In the latter situation, there is a slight edge to the transaction. People worry about boundaries. We are reasonably assured that if we buy our friend coffee that they won’t ask for lunch, or for cash. We don’t know this with strangers. We don’t know what their limits are, or our own.

When my mother was pregnant with my sister, my grandmother was on her deathbed.
‘Name your daughter after me,’ she told my mother.
My mother didn’t even know it was going to be a girl.
Around the time she was pregnant, there had been a little girl in the village who had drowned. Slipped under the ice.
Soon after, her parents came to my pregnant mother. They embraced her and said, ‘Thank you, thank you. Thank you for bringing our daughter back.’
Like I said before, my mother didn’t even know whether or not she would have a girl.
She did.

The morning had passed. In the two hours that I sat with Eadie and her uncle, I saw his demeanor change several times. At first he was a stumbling drunk, slurring his speech, laughing at everything that was said. Then he was an elder, someone who told stories of his past, someone to be respected, someone who believed in the Yup’ik ways of sharing all possessions with those less fortunate. How could I refuse helping this man? Then he was a politician. Because, after his story about politics (during which—either because of his accent, or because of the drink—I couldn’t understand everything he said) he opened the newspaper and again started remarking on Sarah Palin. “What do you think of her?” he asked. “I think she’s beautiful,” he said, “and that she is smart and has some good ideas. But,” he said. “There is a but,” he said.

I thought he would continue, but he didn’t—that was his entire point—and, I thought, a valid one. “What do you think?” he asked me again after some time. Here, he was more engaged with the conversation. Here, there wasn’t easy laughter. His words were more sharply formed.

“I don’t know exactly…” I started.

“Well,” he said, looking at me gravely. “You should.”

My younger brother, Eadie told me, killed his first moose three years ago.
He held up the blade he killed it with.
I told his son, my nephew, who was six, Hey, call your dad a piculi.
He said, my dad isn’t a piculi! He was angry. He thought it was a bad word.
I laughed and laughed. Call your dad a hunter, then. Hey, hunter! he yelled.

This isn’t my story. It belongs to Eadie and to her uncle. And yet if I don’t write it than who will? Her uncle has asked before, “Would you read to me?” He had pointed at the newspaper on the table.

And she had said, “No, I can’t. I’m too cold.” He took it, then, after asking me if I minded.

“Not at all,” I said. Then I added: “It’s not mine.”

They both thought that was funny. “This coffee will warm me up,” Eadie said. She told me that twice.

“Money, money, money,” Eadie’s uncle said. “That’s all this newspaper talks about.” At first he laughed. Then later he seemed angry. “Money, every page. And we have none.”

Eadie coughed and coughed before she took her first sip. She warmed her hands around the paper and held it close to her face. Coughed again. Inwardly I flinched. Then flinched again, ashamed of my reaction. But I have always been afraid of germs. Perhaps that’s how they easily take hold of my body. And of Eadie’s, with her quick smile. Her uncle was older, but his cheeks had a darker, more robust color. He didn’t have Eadie’s pale-orange tint, he lacked the crescent-shaped grooves under her eyes.

Their story should have been in the paper he was reading. Where is their story?

We give away everything to the elders. That’s the tradition.
My grandfather, all he did was give and give, everything he had.
We share things. We share food.
After the grant, we were all wearing warmer clothing.
Poor people, wearing warm clothing.

Eadie’s uncle pulled at his own shabby clothes. His fingernails were black down the centers. It looked as though they were either splitting unexplainably, or that there was grime covering the centers of his nails. His fingers didn’t extend out all of the way. They reminded me of my grandmother’s fingers. “I have arthritis,” he said. “I always wanted to play tennis. But I was from the village. We couldn’t play there. I don’t think they had any courts.”

“You’re never too old to start,” I said. I knew it was a foolish thing to say, but what else could I say?

“I know,” he said. “That’s true. I’m only forty-five, but you know what the worse thing is? I have arthritis. It runs in the family.” He looked much, much older than his age.

My home was by the Yukon.
Where the Canadians make leisure trips by boat.
Right on the Bering Sea.
I am half Indian, half Yup’ik.
What kind of Indian?
Athabascan.

I saw Eadie once again, a season later, from afar. I couldn’t be sure it was her, because, as usual, I wasn’t wearing my glasses. She was walking with a group of men. I had just finished a tennis lesson on the public court in downtown Anchorage. I’d left my jacket and portable cart of tennis balls near the curb. I saw one of the men lunge for my things, like a football player going for a mock-tackle. The other men laughed. Eadie kept a straight face and kept walking, as if she was annoyed by their jokes—the implication to steal. I should have gone after her, bought her a coffee. I’m not proud of myself, I’m ashamed of my boundaries, my limitations. And as for Eadie? I found out when writing this that her name means “strife for wealth.”