Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [63]
Yolo chuckled. He knew from the very beginning, he said. What was good for him. What was his.
They both did. They took to the land as if they’d always lived on it, and of course they had, but modern folks don’t think like that. I was modern. Every time I sold a “property” they wanted to strangle me. And I was always selling to haoles too, which made it worse.
Alma, he said, reaching out to touch her shoulder, I’m so sorry.
So I play a lot of solitaire, she said. And I smoke and drink a lot. If I’m drunk none of it matters very much.
It matters to your namesake.
She doesn’t even remember me, said Alma. She knew my mother, not the tiny baby my mother was carrying.
She doesn’t have to remember you, in particular; she remembers the children of Hawaii, and you are one of them. She wants you to be healthy and happy.
I’m happy, said Alma, squinting through tears and drawing on a fresh cigarette.
On the Plane Home
On the plane home Kate wanted to chew gum. She thought she might have some in her mauve backpack, which she’d stashed under her seat. As she rummaged through it looking for the gum, which she found squashed and linty, and which she carefully unwrapped and chewed anyway, she noticed part of a Post-it pad near the bottom of the pack. Taking it out she saw it was the beginning of the story about a father and a daughter she’d begun what felt like a century ago. When she was running the Colorado. She began to read her scribbled dialogue. There they were, the characters in her story, trying to get the father to eat after the death of the mother, his beloved wife. Roberta, Kate’s character, was finally able to get the old man to eat. This had annoyed and saddened her sisters who had been trying to get him to eat all afternoon.
Why had she written that? wondered Kate.
After eating the rice and vegetables she was served for lunch, she sat gazing out the window of the plane, musing on the mysterious nature of writing. All of it that had life was anchored in the dreamworld, she thought, but what had she dreamed about? She suddenly recalled that this story had been inspired by a dream of her mother after her death, who, in the dream, had only one hand and with that one hand was untangling and then mending a net. Her mother’s missing hand had grown back and she’d flung the net into the sea. We do not need a boat for this, she had said.
Kate remembered her fascination with the fact that her mother had regrown her hand.
As the plane carried her closer to her final destination, as flight attendants liked to say, Kate began to see all the pieces of the dream and the story clearly, as if a veil were being removed from her eyes. It came to her with certainty that she was not her father’s biological child. That naming herself Roberta, after him, in the story was designed to reveal and to hide this fact. As was his way (to some extent in real life) of doting on her to the slighting of his own biological daughters, who were hurt by his attempt to make sure Kate felt like his child. Perhaps they knew! she suddenly thought; and experienced a wave of embarrassment that was like a hot flash. But then she thought that they probably did not, and that not knowing was even more cruel. For they would have believed he loved her more than them, and this they would never have understood.
That she was not her father’s biological child was the reason her mother was always dissatisfied with her. Why part of her motherness was missing. It grew back only as She, the Daughter, resolved to look into Life for herself: We do not need a boat [a mother] for this, she had said, and: The secret is, you do not have to be told.
That explained why Kate looked so different from her sisters, so unlike her father. She didn’t look like her mother, either. Maybe she was adopted? But no, she