A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [151]
I did one hundred sit-ups and stretched my limbs on my bed, stood and touched my toes, did forty jumping jacks, jumped up and down, did an abbreviated version of a Rumanian dance I’d held on to through the years, and lay down. I suddenly felt weak with too much inactivity and self-pity and the aftershock of hatred. I remembered Howard cutting a rope that was wound around a tree, setting the strange dog free. He had made us climb a cherry tree first, in case the dog was rabid or fierce. I had loved that in him, that instinctual man-force, protecting us, taking the fire. I wondered how he was faring, what measures he was taking to feel that he was still protecting what was out of his range.
The television was on all day and into the night, and it was by osmosis that I partook of endless reruns of “Cheers,” the “Bob Newhart Show,” “M*A*S*H,” “Dobie Gillis” and “Star Trek.” The one happy constant in my life, however, was the “Oprah” show at three o’clock every weekday afternoon. Lynelle, a twenty-two-year-old hooker, used to say, “Oprah, she the fairy godmother, don’t take crap from nobody.” Although I have trouble now, remembering the sequence of my jail highlights, Lynelle must have come in during the fourth or fifth week of my stay. Ordinarily she lived on the streets of Chicago or very occasionally in the county hospital where she was treated for AIDS-related symptoms. She had somehow landed in Racine, in the company of a brother, or a pimp, who’d been up to no good and dragged her down along with him. “You real lucky to be in a place as fine as this,” she said of our jail, which had been built about ten years before. “You come to Chicago, they don’t give you no clothes to wear.”
To Lynelle the week in the lockup was a welcome respite, three square meals a day, medical care, a bed with sheets, a pillow, and a blanket. She was wise beyond her years, and I sorely regretted that whatever she’d done required only a week’s stay. “I like Oprah,” she’d say. “Much better than them others. Oprah, she could be me. I could be her. She start with nothin’ and work her way to the top. She over the top, Oprah is. She out in the atmosphere, ain’t nobody can ever reach up to touch her. She done fine for herself and I enjoy that. I look right at her, then I close my eye, and it seem like it don’t take nothin’ to be her. Poof, I be Oprah, jus’ like that. Sometimes it seem like her—success, you know what I be sayin’? Her success is my success. I tell that to anybody else they get they mouf right up to my face, open it wide, and they laugh half a day. But you know what I mean, you sure do. Oprah, she got fancy things, but I know if she could, if she could do it, she reach out her hand and pull me up too. She can’t because she ain’t God, no sir, not yet! But you know, if she could do it, jus’ reach out and pull me up, she would. She want to do that but no people is strong enough to take the weight. She want to and she would if she could, yes Ma’am, uh huh, she sure would.”
I sometimes could not keep from staring full on at Lynelle as she spoke. She was nothing but hollows and joints, her few long teeth spaced apart, looking, set in her translucent pink gums, as if they were about to fall out. The others knew that she was untouchable and wouldn’t have thought to strike up conversation or sit close. I tried to believe that it wasn’t her illness but her mantle of wisdom that made them stay away. Whenever I began to ask Lynelle about herself, her circumstances, she’d say, “What ch’you bother for? I be dead before too long. I be dead before Christmas.” She said so, not in a self-pitying way, but as a fact. If I pressed her, she’d wave her hand in front of her face, slowly. “There more to us than our bodies,” she’d say. “It just the husk for something