Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [22]
“Used to think people were talking to me when there was nobody else there.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “The other night I even thought I heard Mama, just outside the window, talking to someone else.”
Wanda’s eyes turned up from Wolf’s toes to my face. “Might have been, you know.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Just the same. Might have been. Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been. You the mama now, you’re gonna think different. Hell, you’ll be different after a while, all the time more than what you thought you were. Or maybe a little less.”
I gave her a careful look. Asked, “You get religion again when I wasn’t looking?” And waited to see if she’d joke her way out of saying more.
For a moment she was quiet, her fingers gently stroking my boy’s feet, her eyes still looking into mine.
“Nothing’s different and everything’s changed. That’s all. You’ve moved to California and got yourself a baby. I’m an old married woman with two half-grown girls of my own. When did we think this was gonna happen to either of us, huh? When did we believe we were gonna live this long?”
“Two or three things and nothing for sure, huh?”
“Yeah.” And she kissed Wolf’s head.
More than a decade ago I had to quit karate. My body broke in a way that stubbornness could not heal. The notched indexes of my vertebrae, separated only by the thinnest cushioned lining, met and grated loud enough to echo in my nervous system.
These days I go to strange places, cities I’ve never been, stand up in public, in front of strangers, assume the position, open my mouth, and tell stories.
It is not an act of war.
Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.
OTHER NIGHT I WENT over to Providence to read in a line, a marathon of poets and fiction writers.
Afterwards, as I was sipping a Coke, a young man came up to me, fierce and tall and skinny, his wrists sticking out of his sleeves.
He said, “Hypertext. I’ve been wanting to tell you about it.”
“Hypertext?”
“Your work. I’ve read everything you’ve ever published three or four times—at least. I know your work. I could put you in hypertext.”
There was a girl behind him. She reached past his sleeve, put her hand on mine, said, “Oh yes, we could do it. We could put you in hypertext.” She spoke the word with conviction, passion, almost love.
“Hypertext?” I spoke it through a blur of bewilderment.
“CD-ROM, computers, disks or files, it doesn’t matter,” the boy said in a rush of intensity. “It’s the latest thing. We take one of your stories, and we put you in. I know just the story. It goes all the way through from beginning to end. But all the way through, people can reach in and touch a word. Mouse or keyboard or a touchable screen. Every time you touch a word, a window opens. Behind that word is another story. You touch the word and the story opens. We put one of your stories behind that story. And then maybe, maybe you could write some more and we could put in other things. Every word the reader touches, it opens again.”
The girl tugged my arm urgently. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “After a while it’s like a skin of oil on the water. If you look at it from above it’s just one thing, water and oil in a spreading shape. But if you looked at it from the side, it would go down and down, layers and layers. All the stories you’ve ever told. All the pictures you’ve ever seen. We can put in everything. Hypertext.”
The boy nodded.
I reached for a glass of wine. I took a long drink, rubbed my aching back, said, “Yeah, right, I’ll think about it.”
That night I had a dream.
I was walking in a museum, and I was old. I was on that cane I had to use the whole length of 1987. My right eye had finally gone completely blind. My left eye was tearing steadily. I saw everything through a scrim of water, oily water. Way way