Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [39]
He thought he needed a perpetual victim, said Kate, in order to feel like a winner. He thought he was incapable of being himself on equal terms with a person of color. He thought he would be lost. What he had is by definition an inferiority complex.
They’d sat on a mat outside Lalika’s hut. Lalika had brought with her to the Amazon a tiny piece of crocheting, creamy white and dainty. As she talked, she worked steadily, her needle smooth and silent. If I survive this journey, she told Kate, I will shave my head. Then, until I’m used to being bald, I will wear this little crocheted cap. It has many tears woven in, Lalika said thoughtfully, but if I live, the sun will dry them.
Kate had smiled, though tears came to her eyes.
It was so like women to create their own rituals, she thought, their own little markers of transition, their own ephemeral celebrations. Catching a tear as it slid down her own cheek Kate leaned forward and pressed it into Lalika’s design.
There will be the tears of two of us, then, she said.
Lalika burst into tears.
Why does the thought that two of us will always be present make you cry? she asked.
Because it reminds me of Saartjie, said Lalika.
The Mourners Outside the Church
The mourners outside the church seemed to be waiting for something. Yolo thought perhaps they waited for the priest, whose pickup truck was parked behind him. Yolo, regretting the brazen red of his car, watched as the priest, a middle-aged white man with salt-and-pepper hair, climbed down from his truck, carefully holding his skirt to avoid tripping over it. He watched as he walked heavily into the churchyard, greeting those assembled and stopping briefly to chat with several of them. Yolo watched as something was explained to him and he, like everyone, turned to look down the road.
As they all looked, Yolo heard a distant buzzing. Soon he saw someone approaching on a motorcycle. Though it was a warm, breezy day, this person was wearing a brown leather bomber jacket, black trousers, and black leather boots. Her billowing hair was pressed back from her face by the wind. Yolo rubbed his eyes.
He watched as his old girlfriend Alma, considerably heavier than when he’d last seen her twenty years before, alighted from the motorcycle, unzipped her jacket, reached inside, and brought forth a small silver urn. Holding the urn in front of her, as if it were a candle, she led the procession into the church.
Yolo could remain no longer on the postcard that had been his vacation. Wishing he’d worn something more suitable than shorts and a lighthearted shirt, he stumbled from his car, still astonished to see Alma in this setting, and made his way into the tiny church.
Inside, he sat at the very back. Alma was being greeted very warmly by everyone she passed. Many people embraced her. She seemed much older, ravaged by the years since he’d last seen her. There was a stoniness that surprised him. She moved jerkily, carefully raising a foot, carefully putting it down. Yolo watched as she placed the urn on the altar. He wondered if the young man who’d died was her son.
It was an overdose, of course, she told him later as they sat on her lanai sipping beers. She lived in a rambling house that had a wide corridor down the center of it, a breezeway, that opened out toward the ocean. And indeed, the breeze that traversed the island constantly moved through it. It was a breeze that lifted Alma’s jet-black hair, in which not a thread of gray was seen, and covered them with the scent of flowers and fallen, overripe, mangoes.
I’m still astonished that I should be sitting here with you, said Yolo. And that I was one of the last people to sit with your son. He was very good-looking, he added.
Alma drew in a breath and followed it with a drag on her cigarette. She’d taken off the jacket and slacks and was now wearing a pareo and tank top. Her dark eyes were swollen from crying. Her hand shook as she removed