"The Reptile Garden"

"The Reptile Garden"
by Louise Erdrich

Rating: 8.3



Short story about Evelina, a half-Chippewa college student in North Dakota who works in a psychiatric hospital. The narrator describes her parents taking her to the University of North Dakota in 1972, for the start of her freshman year. She spends most of her freshman year reading poetry.

“Hey,” Corwin said after a while, “you don’t have to go anywhere with this thing just yet. Take it easy.”
I didn’t answer, but after a while I felt happier, thinking that he was right.
As we passed onto the reservation, I saw that the ditches were burning. Fires had been set to clear the spring stubble, and a thin glaze of smoke hung over the road in a steady cloud. After Corwin dropped me off, I sat outside with my grandfather Mooshum, drinking cool water from tall galvanized water cans. It occurred to me that I’d be all right. I didn’t have to do anything, not right away. I didn’t even have to record my sensations in a diary. I could just sit with Mooshum, drinking water. As the sun went down, light shot through the smoke and turned the air around us a dark gold that cast an unsettling radiance on the trees and houses. Mooshum and I watched as the light began to recede. It was very cold, but still we sat until the darkness had a brown edge to it, and my mother came to the door, expressing no surprise at seeing me there.
“Come in here, you two,” she said, her voice gentle. ♦