Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [26]
Will we be forgetful as all that? asked Kate, worried.
We’ll be right with you, said Enoba, whether you forget or not. One of us will walk with you, just like now, and will stand outside until you come out again.
When was the last time someone had stood outside the toilet waiting for her? Kate asked herself. Her mother, maybe, when she was a child. Or perhaps a nurse, when she’d been in the hospital having her children.
She liked it. Oh, she thought to herself, I am someone who enjoys being pampered! Usually, raising her children, she’d received no such pampering, though always giving it to others. She had forgotten her own need. And, she thought, I am wearing Pampers! She was having fun even before the journey.
Yolo Had Read
Yolo had read all about Hawaii, the Hawaii of surfing and volcanoes, before coming. He’d once even had a Hawaiian girlfriend. She was a gifted hula dancer and he’d met her at a party. She was with a very average sort of white guy and this white guy, looking ill at ease in so large and diversified a gathering, wanted her to dance.
I don’t really want to, she said. She was smoking a cigarette and looking rather bored.
Ah, come on, he said.
I’m not dressed for it, she said. She was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, black woolen trousers, and a big brown leather bomber jacket. She shrugged out of the jacket and let it slide to the floor. Yolo had picked it up and flung it on a chair.
Ta da! the white guy said, pulling a bag from behind the sofa.
The woman looked at him and made a face.
They were all artists of one sort or another. Writers, painters, poets, musicians. All tipsy by now and easily entertained.
Yolo was hoping the sister would just say no to the idea of performing. After all, it was a party thrown by the people whose home it was. She was a guest. Why couldn’t she sit and chat and while away the time any way she felt like it?
The guy was persistent.
You’re so great, he was whining. You ought to give these people a treat.
Yolo wondered if he should speak up. Then he found himself doing so.
They were standing close to the clam-dip tray, which was on a tall wooden table by the window. She wore her hair loose and billowing as Hawaiian women started to do again after the sixties. They’d been much influenced by Kathleen Cleaver of the Black Panthers and Angela Davis of the Black Liberation Movement, both women with exceedingly big hair. She seemed willowy and light beneath it.
You don’t have to dance, he said, looking down at her. Ignoring the white guy, whose hand was on her arm. A hand that looked too white, really, to be there. But Yolo squelched that thought.
But by now the party had roused itself and become a single consciousness, as tipsy parties sometimes will, and that consciousness had heard the word Hawaii and that consciousness knew only one thing for sure about that place: There were beautiful brown women there, dancing.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce my date, Leilani. The white guy was clearly trying to introduce himself.
Yaay! yelled a very drunk man who had seated himself close to the vodka end of the tiny, well-stocked bar across the room.
Hardly seeming to move, the young woman tied a scarf around her head to resemble a haku lei and wriggled herself out of her sweater and trousers and into a pareo and bikini top. Her boyfriend had put on some Hawaiian music that sounded like warm syrup and she began to dance.
It looked like every hula Yolo had ever seen on TV. It also seemed really long. Her hands waved this way and then the other. Her hips swiveled. He thought that at one time, under the proper moon and palm trees, this dance had embodied both enchantment and desire. Now it seemed rote. Yolo wondered how she could keep the same smile plastered