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Scales

Summary: Scales

Narrated by twenty-two-year-old Albertine Johnson in 1980, this story describes the triangle of Albertine, Gerry Nanapush, and Gerry’s wife, Dot Adare. The three sit at a bar together when a police officer enters, and Gerry quickly leaves. Gerry has been in prison for half of his thirty-five years. Albertine recalls recently meeting Dot. Dot was pregnant with Gerry’s child, who was conceived in prison, and walked in on Gerry putting his arm around Albertine, resulting in Albertine on the floor, laughing, and Gerry carrying Dot out of the bar screaming. Albertine gets a job at a weighing station and Dot is her co-worker. At first, Dot draws a knife on her and Albertine throws coffee in her face, so they are even. When Albertine is promoted to work alongside Dot, they become friends.

Dot spends her time at work ferociously knitting baby clothes. Gerry, a large Chippewa, is back in prison again for escaping. His first arrest was after a fight with a cowboy. It was at this time that Gerry discovers that white people make better witnesses as they have names, addresses, social security numbers, and work phones. However, he also learned that Native American witnesses, even those who were his friends, won’t help as they don’t have faith in the system, won’t look the judge or jury in the eyes, and as such, seem unreliable in the court’s eyes. Gerry went to prison for the scuffle and so began a lifelong pattern of in and out and in again. At one point, Dot tries to hide him in her trailer, but he is arrested again.

Dot is angry about delivering the baby alone. Her restless unborn child, like its father, wanted badly to escape its prison. One morning, Albertine realizes that someone has slept in the weigh station because of the cigarette butts left behind. When a truck pulls in to be weighed, it is overweight and no one knows why until Gerry appears, having been hiding in the truck. Gerry takes Dot’s knitting from her, tenderly, and they leave in Dot’s car. Albertine picks up the needles and knits until the baby suit is finished.

Albertine is bored, alone in the station without Dot. She imagines Dot and Gerry in their trailer, foraging for food and having sex. One day, Gerry appears on an old motorcycle saying that Dot wants Albertine at her birthing. In the hospital waiting room, Gerry is agitated and anxious, sweating and pacing. He goes out for cigars, he says, and just before he leaves, two officers appear to arrest him. Gerry jumps out a window, lands on the roof of the officer’s car, mounts his motorcycle, and rides away. The officers shoot at him but miss.

Dot has a baby girl and names her Shawn. Dot brings Shawn to the station and nurses her with tremendous full breasts. They hear that Gerry is arrested again, but this time, he shoots and kills a state trooper, so he is sent to a maximum-security prison where no touching is allowed. One day, Dot and Albertine try to weigh Shawn on the scales, but despite her dense physicality, she is too light to register at all. 

Analysis: Scales

In “Scales,” the narrative returns to Albertine Johnson—featured in “The World’s Greatest Fishermen” a year later and the teenage girl in “The Bridge”—as the novel continues to weave in and out of the five families. Gerry is one of Lulu’s sons, and Dot is a new character in the novel. 

The story is an indictment of the American penal system. For Gerry, a Native American, courts and prisons work against him. After Gerry’s first arrest, the Native American witnesses were reluctant and unimpressive, while the white witnesses appeared credible and comfortable in front of the judge. Gerry “believed in justice, not laws,” so he considers his returns to prison unnecessarily repetitive. He calls prison “the hate factory” and wants to lead an honest life with his wife and child, but he is stuck in an unbreakable cycle every time he breaks out. A tender and gentle man despite his size, Gerry is the victim of a culture of injustice and prejudice that he cannot control.

As in other stories, the women are the strong characters. Dot is aggressive and tough, willing to fight in a bar even when pregnant. Albertine, likewise, throws coffee in a pregnant woman’s face when she is confronted with a knife. Like the Greek Fates, the two women knit with a vengeance, and the clothes they make represent their tough, sinewy strength. Each thread is pulled so tightly that “the little garments she finished stood up by themselves like miniature suits of mail.” Sadly, Shawn may never know her father who likely will spend the rest of his life in prison, and she may turn out all the stronger for it, like a knight in a suit of armor, the next in a line of resilient women.

Thematically, this story is about weight. Literally, much of it takes place in a truck weighing station and Erdrich includes many details about how it all works. Although she has small hands, Dot is a short, stocky woman whose weight is only increased by being pregnant. Gerry is a six-foot-plus, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man which makes him difficult if not impossible to hide. Most significantly, baby Shawn is too lightweight to register on the truck scale although her presence in the world gives her parents, and Albertine, hope. Weight in the story is also figurative. It is the weight of incarceration, the weight of responsibility, the weight of racial injustice, the weight of judgment, and the weight of the past that affects the characters so deeply. Throughout Love Medicine, characters carry psychic weight along with physical weight, but it is the emotional weight that is much more difficult to lose.  

Despite their troubles and their weaknesses, Dot and Gerry love each other deeply. Their love endures many incarcerations, and it likely will endure through this one, too. The power of their love, their “love medicine,” is another thread that weaves through the novel’s tapestry. Albertine describes the couple as “suave, grand, [and] gigantic” as they walk to Dot’s car, a testimony to their greatness despite their humble surroundings and lives.

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