Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [66]
Amazingly, yes, he said, feeling her head settle on his chest. The world has never been in worse shape: global warming, animal extinctions, people fucked up and crazy, war. And then there are us, harmless little humans who somehow get to nibble at the root of things . . .
Did you meet any cute women? she abruptly asked. Or cute men?
It was hard for Kate to believe other people were completely straight, but Yolo was. He loved other men as brothers but why he’d want to sleep with a man when there were women around he could not fathom.
I actually remet someone, he said. An old lover.
Kate lifted her head so she could see him better.
And he began to tell her about Alma.
Her mother died when she was three, he said slowly, and she had breast-fed Alma from birth. When she died of influenza Alma was devastated. I can’t even imagine how bad it must have felt. Suddenly to lose someone who loved you, held you, fed you from her own warm body. Her mother had been friends with an older woman who taught an ancient system of body purification. In fact, she had been one of Aunty Alma’s students, and that was who Alma was named after. Aunty Alma is well-known today as a kahuna, or healer; the foundation of her healing is a cleanse. You fast for many days and among other things you do, you drink a lot of seawater. Alma, my friend, had never given her, or her gift to Hawaiian culture, a second thought. Well, said Yolo, when I got there, by some strange fate, I was asked to sit on a rocky beach beside the body of Alma’s son. He’d died of an overdose of a drug they call ice.
Kate sat straight up in bed. No, she said, her eyes wide.
Kate, said Yolo, he was so beautiful. And he described the cutoff jeans, the beads around his neck, the earring. His name was Marshall. I asked Alma why he was named Marshall and she said it was because of the islands, the Marshall Islands, where he was conceived when she and his father had gone down there to try to halt the dropping of bombs the U.S. military was testing. Children there were being born without eyes or spinal columns. They were sometimes just blobs of tissue.
Kate was by now hugging her knees.
Yolo paused.
I’m going to save the rest for other times, he said, smiling into her stricken eyes. There’s actually some good news. He kissed her forehead. Now you tell me something your crowd did.
And she, after a few moments of thought, began to tell him about the amazing plant, Bobinsana, that grew beside the river, whose roots, dissolved in water, she had drunk morning and night, and how she had begun to have dreams that diagnosed the illnesses of others.
It was funny to find myself coolly examining the innards of a bunch of people I had barely met; what wasn’t funny was trying to tell them what I’d seen. She laughed. They didn’t want to hear it. Fortunately nothing I saw was very serious. A hernia; a blood clot—well, I guess that could become serious, later on. A fractured clavicle that had healed wrong. I asked Armando the shaman: Should I tell or what? He thought it was up to me to decide, since I had been given the dreams. Anyway, she continued, the ones I told were only mad at me for a little while; then they forgot.
Forgot? asked Yolo.
You’d have to have been there, Kate said, and laughed. Try to imagine a bunch of middle-aged people sitting in a circle in the middle of the jungle, green with nausea, vomiting our guts out.
Do I have to? he said, laughing with her, and drawing her closer to him.
Neither of them said anything about sex, nor was there any movement that suggested making love. They kissed each other with their eyes open, before settling thankfully into the rich comfort of Kate’s bed.
Sleeping with Yolo was always wonderful. He was warm and he smelled great. There was even something soothing about his snoring, which in the beginning had kept her wakeful and unamused. Her back curled into his, his arm curved under her breasts, there was a feeling of being snug and out of winter’s way, even in summer.
They woke up the next morning talking.