A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [155]
“How come you always watching Oprah?” Dyshett called from her cell. “I got my eye on you.” She snapped her fingers, swaying to her own music as she moved toward me. “You always waiting for the magic hour. You put them books away and hop out here like some little ole bunny rabbit, your bushy tail all quivery.” To demonstrate, she bent her knees and wiggled her behind. “You think,” she made her voice go higher, ‘I’m not a racist, no sir, because I sure do like Oprah.’ She make you feel real tolerant, don’t she, like a do-gooder pervert. Now, Debbie, I understand her likin’ Oprah because they both the same size. What you got going wid her? Who she have on today, some queen about to die? Oh, oh, I know, you hoping Oprah announce at the end of the show, you hoping she say, ‘Any white trash out there in TV land who do the nasty wid boys behind the bushes, anyone like that want to come on my show?’ You could go on there, looking so fine, so in-tea-llectual—‘I read books, but I don’t know shit about real life.’ The psychiatrist lady on there will say, ‘How long you had this problem?’ ”
I knew all of a sudden that I wasn’t feeling right. It wasn’t anything specific, wasn’t nausea or hot flashes, wasn’t prickling skin, nothing even close to boiling anger or clutching fear. The room was closing in on me, getting smaller, all of them getting closer, everything slowly coming nearer and nearer.
“You get teary, wipe your eye on a hanky, tell her when you was a chile someone hauled you out by the braids, laid you out on the fence—”
She would go on for the rest of the afternoon by herself, and to stop that I said, “One of the reasons I like you so much, Dyshett, is the fact that you do all the talking. It’s very restful.”
Of course she wouldn’t like me saying that. I saw her and Janet coming for me, and that’s when the room got so close it started to go around and around, inch by inch at first and then faster, faster, the walls, the orange of our clothes, the table, spinning and spinning. It was like the old movie technique to take the viewer back in time, the frames whirling around into a kind of vortex before everything firms up again in the peaceful days long gone. I was trying both to think and to keep from reeling; I was saying to myself, I guess I’m going to let this girl hurt me, if that’s what she wants to do. It was the queerest thing, how I felt my head come down hard on the steel table and all I could think was this: It’s important for Dyshett to understand that it doesn’t hurt me.
When I felt the heat on my face I was sure at first that I was lying in the sun by the pond. It was summer, I knew, and so there was every reason to be stretched on the sand in the nearly fragrant warmth of the sun. I opened my eyes and I saw before me windows, and through them the golden light of the evening. Even before I realized that I was in a hospital it came to me fully, that last waking moment. I had sat on my stool at the metal table watching Dyshett rush at me with her teeth bared. She had done something to me, beaten me, maybe, cracked my head down on the table. I had let her do that, sitting serenely on my stool. As I woke I panicked right away, trying to think what it was we had fought over. Never mind the name of this new place or who had taken me away. I would have to know about the fight so that I could explain it to Howard. I had enough clarity of mind to know that the reasons were myriad, that he of all people could trace our conflict back to at least slave time, that he could speak of impersonal forces, of Manifest Destiny, the industrialization of the North, the cotton economy of the South, the balance of power, supply and demand. Theresa, on the other hand, might say simply that our struggle was as old as cats and