Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [30]
Lolly had been born, according to her, with a slight learning disability. Very slight, she’d say, grinning. Perhaps, she thought, dyslexia. But it had made her mother leery of ever letting her out of her sight. She was never to go anywhere alone. When she was growing up she heard her mother say to other people, people outside the family: Don’t mind Lolly, she’s simple. When she asked her mother what that meant, her mother had stroked her soft, silky hair, and said, It means I have to take better care of you, and look out more for you, than for the others. This had made Lolly feel special, though she sometimes wanted to go places by herself as her siblings did.
It was while shopping with her mother that she’d discovered her gift. In place of the “smartness” her mother identified in her other children, which meant they could go about on their own, she had been given an innate shrewdness. She could drive a swifter and harder bargain at the market than her mother. She could also calculate the cost of purchases faster.
She would stand in front of the fruit counter watching her mother pick over apples. When the merchant came up she’d say, in her open-faced, simpleton’s way: Those apples are so mushy. I’m sure we could get harder ones at the market down the street. Or, she’d say, dragging out the words, and perhaps running her hands over all the apples in front of her, maybe they should be a little more cheap.
Soon it was as if her mother went to the market with her. And she shopped for the family until she left home with the teacher who had been hired to teach her remedial reading. A woman who was charmed by this small brown Venus, as she liked to call her, who seemed to ask for nothing directly but who could and did drop the most indelible hints.
At some point Kate realized the biggest hint being pitched was for her to sign over half of her house. Lolly, as if they were legally married, considered it community property. In every conversation, no matter what they talked about, even if it were about fleas on the dogs, who had to live somewhere, the subject of Lolly’s fear of homelessness arose. Kate discovered a territoriality in herself she hadn’t known was there. Half of her house, to someone who didn’t work and didn’t arise until noon? She didn’t think so.
What was horrible was the feeling of having been taken. Of having been a chump. As she began to notice how Lolly operated in the world, she could see how mistaken she’d been ever to consider her helpless, which she had done, or, Goddess forbid, simpleminded. Lolly’s mind worked like an abacus. Click-click. This is what I want and this is what I have to do to get it. Who has what I want? I’ll go stand next to her.
Kate eased herself free, after a little more than a year. She watched as Lolly looked about, spotted another hardworking woman, sidled up to her with her stories of having grown up simpleminded and shrewd. And, oh yes, the thing I’ve most wanted in the world is my own house. You have one, I see.
At the Waterfall
At the waterfall she encountered Lalika, the black woman from Mississippi who regularly broke down on her yagé journeys. Kate was now aware of everyone during the sessions because the medicine had ceased to work on her. She continued to sit with the others because Armando had asked her to; she was even able to help him, with a word, a fan, a musical instrument he wanted, from time to time. And she had become someone to whom the others turned, which surprised her.
Lalika had had her bath and was sitting by the side of the river, deep in thought. She gave a slight nod as Kate doffed her shorts and T-shirt and rushed under the falls. The water was refreshing. She tried not to think about what might be in it; after all, the fish they saw downstream would have dived over the falls, perhaps the crocodiles too. She made quick work of washing her hair, not bothering to add conditioner as she would have at home.
She spread a towel near Lalika, not so close