Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [15]
All day in the little dorie Kate thought about the dream. For that one enigmatic moment with her mother, she would have made the river journey. Though she had brought nothing to write on, she knew she must begin a story about a mother and a daughter. Borrowing a tiny Post-it pad from Avoa, who loved dreams, both having them herself and hearing and interpreting those of other people, she began.
It was a sultry summer day, the day we buried my mother. The night before, at the wake, I stood over her body and tried to peer straight into her brain. She was shrunken from the cancer she’d battled the last years of her life; her mouth was twisted from the suffering she had endured. The flowers arrayed around her coffin smelled heavy and wet. I felt desperate for fresh air. Why were you so dissatisfied with me? I asked her.
In the kitchen my younger sister embraced me. We had not seen each other in nearly a decade. Unlike me, she was slender and dark. Her hair now streaked with silver. My older sister, her hair a russet that matched her dress, and her shoes, was busy making potato salad, her specialty. My father sat at the kitchen table nursing a cup of chamomile tea.
“Daddy, you must eat something.” It seemed to me Tonya was always saying something like this. She was a natural-born comforter. I couldn’t have imagined a wake without her in charge of it.
Now she stood over our father, as our mother might have; her arm around his shoulders. They looked very much alike. Firm-fleshed (even though Dad looked really old) and dark, with eyes that lit up their faces. They shared an easily aroused animation and love of good times.
He nodded at his cup.
“That’s nothing,” she said. “Tea. Have some chicken. Potato salad.”
“I can’t eat,” he said. He tilted his head in the direction of the living room.
“She would want you to,” said Tonya.
Harriet gave me an absentminded shove toward the food.
“You eat something too, Roberta.”
I was named for my father.
“Daddy,” I said, taking the hand that now clung to the teacup, “you and I are going to have some dinner.” He grunted.
“No refusals and no hesitation allowed.”
“Oh, well,” he said, looking up.
My father adored me. He thought I was just right. Though named for him, I didn’t look like him at all.
I took two plates from the pile on the table, and moved toward the pots on the stove. I sensed rather than saw the dejection in the faces of both my sisters. I had always been able to wrap our father around my finger. He’d always listened to me.
“Um,” I said, forking up collard greens.
“I knew Roberta would get you to eat,” said Tonya, who’d cooked all the food.
Harriet said nothing. The hug between us now felt forgotten.
This was as much as Kate could write on the Post-its. She stuffed the story in her duffel along with her hiking boots and toiletries, and settled herself comfortably in the boat. Overhead there were vultures and crows, black and graceful against the terra cotta canyon walls. She daydreamed about the drift of her life; the lover in her house, in her bed. The recurring dream of the dry river. Her therapist’s skepticism that she knew what she was doing, going out to run a live river in her waking life.
She felt no stirring within. Though perhaps her mother’s visit had been one. It had been a very long time since she’d dreamed of her. After the crash, after identifying the bodies, she’d feared nightmares, but she’d been spared those. Her poor father’s body had been crushed like an accordion. She shuddered now to remember it. And yet, she felt she must remember it, linger over her response to it, there under the open protection of the sky, in the middle of charging waters, vulnerable to being dashed against rocks herself. She had longed to touch some whole part of him. And found that whole part in one of his feet. She’d grasped his toes, so long and hairy on their tops, and she’d caressed them until she felt satisfied. They never warmed from her hands, not the slightest bit. That was what being dead meant, she thought.
Now