Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [29]
Walking through the rainforest on her way to the waterfall where they bathed, she recalled one of her “marriages”; a short one, that was particularly embarrassing to remember. She’d fallen in love with a woman whom she’d mistaken for someone else; in fact, the woman had resembled an older relative who’d died, a cousin who had loved Kate and someone who, just by being, had made Kate laugh with delight. Lolly, the woman who resembled her cousin—twinkling eyes, lovely smile—turned out to be a hustler, someone who wheedled and cajoled until she got whatever it was she wanted. For the longest time Kate had been oblivious to this. Then fascinated and unbelieving. Sure her golden earrings and diamond necklace left to her by a great-aunt soon found their way onto Lolly’s ears and around her neck. Soon enough they’d bought Lolly a new car while Kate made do with the jalopy. Still she couldn’t quite believe none of her cousin’s qualities of generosity and thoughtfulness existed in her. She realized much later, after they’d parted, that the experience with Lolly had been an attempt to deal with her considerable and inadequately expressed grief over her cousin’s dying, far from her, and without leaving for her heart alone any special word.
They had married each other in a ceremony they designed at a friend’s house on an island off the coast of the Carolinas. There beneath giant oak trees dripping moss they’d laughed to think they were expressing a freedom their forebears, who so desperately yearned for freedom from the lash, had not even imagined. And might well have been outraged by, though she doubted the more radical ones would have been anything but secretly amused. Kate was always willing to go far enough back in her ancestry to find the ones who resembled her; she knew they had to be there because look what they’d spawned. To honor the enslaved ancestors who had had to create their own wedding ceremonies, they’d jumped the broom, the only nuptials slave owners had permitted their African captives. Lolly was swathed in Kente cloth from head to toe. Kate had worn a white linen suit and a wide-brimmed white straw hat. And suede fawn-colored cowboy boots. Friends joked that they looked like Africa and Colonial America finally doing the right thing.
Their friends, Lolly’s old girlfriends, her children, the odd relative, cheered when they kissed. There was a feeling of liberation that carried them for quite a number of months. Until Kate had begun to wonder whether Lolly ever intended to work. And whether she would ever get in the habit of rising before noon.
Kate was an early riser and worked steadily at her desk until noon, when she broke for lunch. Early in the marriage she’d hurry to the kitchen, make a light lunch, and carry it, on a tray, to the bedroom. Lolly always wanted freshly squeezed orange juice the moment she opened her eyes, and Kate always prepared it for her. They might cuddle for a bit, eat their lunch, looking out the sunny open bedroom door into the sun-splashed garden, and talk about what they’d like to do in the evening. A movie, the theater, a video, maybe dinner at someplace new? It was a way of life for which Kate had yearned. The children were grown up and away at school, her work supported her very nicely, her health was good, and none of her innate curiosity about and interest in life had ebbed. She also in no way subscribed to the rules and regulations of a society that suppressed almost all spontaneous signs of joy, and whose insistence on conformity, she had noticed, made life so lacking in vibrancy for all concerned. At the moment she realized any human being might die for almost any reason at any given instant, she also understood that, accepting this fact, she could be free.
She