Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [8]
All the words from decades of her life filled her throat. Words she had said or had imagined saying or had swallowed before saying to her father, dead these many years. All the words to her mother. To her husbands. Children. Lovers. The words shouted back at the television set, spreading its virus of mental confusion.
Once begun, the retching went on and on. She would stop, gasping for breath, rest a minute, and be off again. Draining her body of precious fluid, alarming Avoa and the oarswomen. Soon, exhausted, she was done.
No, she had said weakly, I don’t want to go home. I’ll be all right now.
Avoa’s eyes were huge. Kate realized she must look a fright. She took the electrolyted water offered her, and later on, a tepid broth.
Really, she said, attempting to smile. I’ll be fine.
All the women looked skeptical, but helped Avoa set up a proper camp.
He Wondered
He wondered, wandering about the house, how she knew what to throw out and what to keep. Her house had a bare look. There was nothing extra. Yet she was one of those people who seemed to attract gifts and to buy them for herself. Nothing, however, stuck for long.
The rug rolled up by the door, for instance. A rug given her by a friend from Yugoslavia, when the people still had a country and enough of their wits about them to make traditional handmade rugs. A rug she’d loved for years. But now did not.
How did this happen?
He was the kind of person who kept things forever. His smaller house, a few blocks from hers, was filled with clutter. Each year for Kwanza she’d given him the same present: a book called Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui. Each year he read it from start to finish. Each year he agreed with everything its author said—from the necessity of clearing one’s front entrance, in order that a cleaner, more brisk energy might sweep through one’s life—to the need to completely void and scrub out the colon, so that fresh life could sweep through the body. Think of all the old shit everyone’s carrying around! she might say, raising her eyebrows in concern.
They might lie on the sofa—a large, overstuffed one built for two, their feet touching. Each reading silently. He might feel her eyes on him as he read, sometimes marking a page by turning back a corner. She might smile knowingly, hopefully. He might feel a surge of determination. Indeed, reading of all the ill effects of clutter—procrastination, lost items, fuzzy thinking—he might imagine his house already clutter-free.
And then he would return to his house and freshly see his clutter. The exercise bike that was covered in dust, the back issues of Prevention and Utne Reader resting beside the door. Bundles of clothes almost on their way to Goodwill. Chipped dishes. He did not use these things anymore, and yet, the thought of letting them go made him sad. He felt they represented times in his life he could not recall without their presence. They represented stories.
For had he not bought the exercise bike when he was in love with a leggy Swede and wanted to impress her with his fitness? Without the dusty machine to remind him, these days he’d never think of her. And that time too had been a real and vivid part of his life. At least at the time. And when he’d suddenly realized his body was changing. Aging. Perhaps needing supplements and vitamins, and he’d subscribed to Prevention. And then not long after had felt his disconnection from “the news” and the voices of “the media,” and he’d subscribed to Utne Reader. And for a time had read it cover to cover every month. He was the only man he knew who owned a twelve-year-tall stack of Ms. magazine. The very first issue, in the early seventies, with a bluish painting