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By Root 486 0

was almost at the point of forgetting what a fine time people can have helping one another. That people like to work together and to kick back after work and share their expansiveness. What would happen if our foreign policy centered on the cultivation of joy rather than pain? she thought. She knew the answer; America would be the true leader of the world, not its biggest bully. So much of the world had thought America had a heart of joy, and had followed what they assumed was a lighthearted friendliness that made Americans envied and unique. Now they were seeing the other side. Well, as an African-Amerindian woman from the South she was intimate from birth with America’s mean-spiritedness. The people who had lynched and charbroiled black people and cut open black women’s bellies for sport had not died out and disappeared; they’d morphed into people who worked for the Pentagon and could do this sort of thing from the air.

You’re dreaming, Yolo said as Kate talked about dropping bicycles and short skirts and jeans to women in Muslim countries.

Yes, she replied. As a woman, I have to. And she remembered a quote by the now thoroughly, in some quarters, discredited Winnie Mandela, “So far there’s no law against dreaming.” And of what had Mandela dreamed? Freedom from Nazi-Fascist oppression, labeled “racism” to make the native Africans somehow at fault. Freedom for her husband who had been in prison longer than they’d been married. And there had not been a glimmer of hope that anything would change in her land; and yet, because she dreamed, and because she encouraged everyone she met to dream, she had found her voice and so had they. And one morning her husband walked out of the prison beside her and became the country’s president.

What happened to Winnie? Kate mused. Now everything one heard was negative; that she embezzled money, passed bad checks. Before that she had been accused of helping to murder someone. In photographs she seemed to be desperately clinging to youth, and to material wealth. Her dyed hair looked limp and lifeless, her eyes evasive behind expensive designer glasses, her fingers and arms and neck swathed in gold jewelry. The whole look of her was of someone lost. It made Kate weep, she had admired her so much. And yet, suppose the dream, the ability to dream, and to pass that ability on was all Winnie had to give them. It had been enough to see them, as a race, through many a dark and hopeless hour. It had brought to them collectively, the day her husband was freed, one bright and shining day. Medicina for a belief in a future. Thank you, Winnie, she said under her breath, and turned her eyes to fully appraise and appreciate her partner as they drove home.

Yolo was much slimmer too! He seemed more grave. His hair was longer and he wore it in one long plait down his back. A string of tiny flowers had been braided through it, but these had dried. Around his neck was a fat plumeria lei, a match for the one he’d pulled from a plastic bag and placed over her head when they met in the airport. Their car was perfumed, transformed into a magic carriage in which they sat like a king and a queen. Or like best friends. When he bent to kiss her as they stopped at a red light, she thought he tasted different. When she glanced at his hand on the steering wheel she noticed a new tattoo.

What’s that? she asked, looking closely and lightly touching his hand. The tattoo was a short row of slightly curving blue lines, four of them, almost overlapping, and it was on the last digit of his pointing finger.

I got it last night, he said.

Did it hurt? she asked.

It sure did, he said.

They drove in silence for a while. Both of them happy to be homeward bound, happy to be safe and together. Looking forward to the night.

Later, in bed, he said to her: I loved eating supper with you (they had stopped to pick up the yummy Chinese vegetarian take-out they both craved); I loved being in the bath with you (she had emptied half a bottle of L’Occitane Ambre bubble bath into the tub); loved smelling and stroking you.

She grinned.