Summary

As Terese walks across the stage at her M.F.A. graduation, she remembers when Isaiah had lice some years ago. The doctors and nurses did not believe her even when she showed them the eggs. People did not seem "to care or see" until she "started to pick his scalp with [her] fingers" on a plane (121). Terese remembers "being ashamed to have groomed [her] baby like an animal on a flight filled with white people" (122). She feels that "motherhood is mostly bearing shame to dress my children, to feed them, and to spare them the things I wasn't spared" (122). When Sherman Alexie read Terese's work he said, "It's no wonder that this narrator is crazy. She's Indian, and she's smart. Who could survive that?" (122).

Now that she has graduated and become an editor and a fellow, Terese is more "than a drunken...