The wind awakens me an hour or so before dawn. I get out of my hammock and go outside to the landing at the head of the stairs. Luz is in her new room, so I no longer have to be so careful when I leave. It’s not a hurricane, I know; it’s impossible to live in Miami and ignore the hectic preparations that surround hurricanes. But it’s a strong wind all the same, making the neighboring palms and cycads rattle and clatter, and bringing from the stiff-leaved figs and crotons a continuous slithering sound, like brushes on snare drums. It’s blowing thirty knots, I estimate, and from the distant harbor I can hear the rigging of the boats complaining with insane jangles. A warm wind, gritty, the kind that generates static electricity and causes the ionic composition of the body to change subtly, encouraging madness. Not a typical Miami wind. A wind from somewhere else, like the harmattan, the wind from the Sahara, although it’s way too early for the harmattan.
In the morning, when Luz and I go out, there’s a flat calm. The car and all the foliage around it are covered with flour-fine red-ocher dust. I run my finger across the roof of the Buick and place it in my mouth. Mali on my tongue. Yes, I say in my head, yes, yes, all right, I get the message. Go to the ile, make the sacrifice. Thank you. Luz draws a big heart in the dust on the car door.
At work, I give Mrs. Waley notice that I am retiring from the profession of medical data clerk. She asks suspiciously whether I have been offered a job in budget or admin, and I am glad to tell her, no, I’m leaving the health services field entirely. I say that I have a medical problem that precludes regular hours. I can see that she’s fainting to ask me what my problem is, but she doesn’t. Instead she tells me, conferring upon me her first smile ever, that I’ve been a good worker and that it’s been a pleasure to have me in her department.
In the hallways, the hospital’s cleaning crews are working hard to get rid of last night’s dust, which defeats even the high-technology filters that feed air into these buildings. They push hair brooms and sprinkle green fluffy stuff to soak up the pale, gritty powder. I remember trying to do it with a twig broom. You could never get the floor actually looking clean, but in the harmattan season you had to do it every day or it would be up to your ankles before you knew it.
We went to Africa because of Lou Nearing and Captain Dinwiddie, an odd combination, but typical of Ifa’s web. Lou had come to town the previous winter for the American Anthro Society meeting, bringing his wife along, and he called Witt and we took them to dinner at Balthazar, to show continuing friendship on our part, and, I suppose, for Lou to show off his wife and to show her me, the old flame. Witt was his usual charming self, the Nearings were in fact charmed, and a dinner fraught with awkward possibilities went off fairly well. They wanted to see White History Month, too, and over dessert Lou said that he had been talking about me just the other day with Desmond Greer, who had just taken over the Yoruba archive at Chicago. It seemed he had a grant to travel over to Yorubaland to, among other things, trace the origins and distribution of Yoruba traditional magic, and Lou had brought up my name. Greer, whom I knew slightly, was one of the few admirers Marcel retained in American academia, not of the crazy stuff, of course, but of the solid ethnographic part of his work, and according to Lou, he was interested in the possibility, especially if I’d pick up my own expenses. I said I didn’t know anything about Africa, and Lou said that Greer didn’t care about that, he wanted a Vierchau-style take on the origins and changes in the tradition, someone who had the skills to get inside it and see what made it real to the people who used it. Good old Lou! He always thought I was better than I thought I was, always pushing at me not to drop out of the field.
I said, “Gosh, Lou, a year in Africa? I don’t know. I’m rusty. I don’t know the background or the languages …” Lou said, “Hell, Janey, you got nine months to pick that up. You wouldn’t be leaving until September.” Witt said, “Africa? Hey, let’s go! I need to go there anyway for the Captain, and we could do stuff together. It’ll be a blast.” Cindy Nearing asked who the Captain was and Witt slid away from the question as he always did, with “just some stuff I’m playing with.”
After that night, he wouldn’t let it go, us doing it together. I listened, it sounded reasonable, it was as far as you could get from Siberia and the Chenka, and so I called Greer and flew out to Chicago and met him in his office in Haskell. He showed me around the Yoruba Ethnographic Archive and talked about what the team he was taking over hoped to accomplish. He assumed I was more like Marcel than I was at the time, but perhaps he was more percipient than I gave him credit for being, given how things turned out. When I told him about my husband’s wish to come along, he said he admired Witt’s work and would be glad to meet him and have him tacked on to the expedition. My own race did not come up as an issue, which was fine with me.
That was the Lou Nearing part. The Captain Dinwiddie part was that since he was about nineteen my husband had been laboring intermittently on a long poem about America, seen, of course, from its black bottom. It was called Captain Dinwiddie. He regarded it as his real life’s work.
I am, I admit it, a prosey person. Aside from one comp lit course at Barnard, I got all my poetry through Witt. I therefore have no idea whether Captain Dinwiddie is one of the supreme works of American literature or a pretentious farrago. It’s certainly an interesting story. The eponymous hero’s a slave in the antebellum South; he escapes, lands in New York, is adopted by a rich abolitionist, is given an education, and takes the name Dinwiddie. In the Civil War he leads a regiment of dragoons, ends up occupying the very same ole plantation, and turns it into a kind of Heart of Darkness in reverse, with him in the big house and the white folks chopping cotton, him screwing Miss Ann of course. He ends up fleeing back to Mother Africa, where he learns via juju how to travel through time, to view the sad future history of his people, descending in the flesh one day a year, to perform some expiatory good deed. But Witt knew nothing of Africa, less about African religion or magic. He said he was blocked as a result, and the invitation from Greer at just this time seemed to him a good omen. Synchronicity.
Reading the journals again, in the hot kitchen of my place; Luz is playing with Jake and Shari out in the yard. They have the hose out and a plastic splash pool. I always meant to take her to Venetian Pool in Coral Gables and teach her how to swim, but just now I have given up on plans. Except that I have arranged for Shari to baby-sit Luz tonight, because I am going to Pedro Ortiz’s ile, to make ebo, as Ifa has told me to do. I feel myself dropping back into belief, as I was toward the end there in Africa, slipping into the whole thing, as into dark, blood-warm water, although I know it is absurd, spells and spirits and curses and witches, but … Thomas Merton once said that there comes a point where your religion seems ridiculous, and then you discover to your surprise that you are still religious.
When it gets dark, in the usual instant collapse of day that tells you “tropics,” I say good-bye to Luz and Shari and go. On the way there, I stop at a botanica and purchase thirty-two small cowrie shells. Although I have never been to a Santeria ritual before, I find I am succeeding in keeping my anthropological curiosity under control. My knees are shaking. I am wearing a yellowish cotton dress with a green patent leather belt on it. Ifa likes these colors.
Ortiz’s ile is lodged in a small salmon-colored house, concrete-block stucco with white hurricane shutters and a gray cement tile roof, on NW Seventeenth off Flagler. As in many of the neighboring houses, what was once a front lawn has been paved over, to serve as a mini-parking lot. It is full of cars both old and new, as are the curbs nearby. I park at the end of the block and walk down.
A woman admits me when I ring. She is the woman from pets, but she looks different tonight, straighter, not as worn. She smells of roses and wears a white dress embroidered with gold around the yoke. The room she takes me into, the living room, is dim, and lit by dozens of candles. The candles stand on wide shelves running around two sides of the room, and illuminate hundreds of Santeria ritual objects arranged in shrines: the two-headed axes of Shango, his mortar stool, his sopera, the tureen holding his sacred stones, his fundamentos. Other soperas, too, each decorated in the orisha ‘s symbolic colors, yellow for Oshun, with her peacock fan, white for Obalala, with his fly whisk, black and light blue for Babaluaye, with his crutches, cowries, and reeds, a red-and-white coconut for Oshosi, the hunter, with an iron cauldron containing deer antlers, bow and arrows, and a plastic toy rifle. There are statues in each shrine, too, some of them life size, of the santos, the orishas, Catholic saints melded with Yoruba demigods, all with brown skins, large eyes, and blank expressions. Placed high, wired to the ceiling, is Osun, the herbal messenger, bird staff in hand, who protects the life of the devotees on their journeys to God.
There are people in the room, a half-dozen women in white dresses and four men in guayabera shirts, unpacking large black boxes. I see they are removing drums. There is to be a bembe, then, a celebration of the anniversary of the descent of one of the orishas onto a member of Ortiz’s ile. This is not good. I had thought, in and out, pay the money, get the sacrifice, Ifa satisfied, only a brief appearance in the m’doli, maybe I won’t be noticed.
Ortiz is waiting in one of the house’s small bedrooms, which he has turned into a shrine to Ifa, or Orula, as he’s known among the Santeria people. He’s got yellow and green silk bunting draped on the walls and ceiling, a life-size statue of Orula in his guise as Saint Francis. Before this, draped in green-and-gold brocade heavy with elaborate beadwork, is the yard-high cylinder containing Ifa-Orula’s fundamentos. There are flickering candles in green glass tumblers, bouquets of gladiolas, frangipani, oleander, and jasmine, and piles of coconuts and yams, dozens and dozens of yams. I can smell the earth stink of them, mixed with the heavy odor of the flowers and the burning wax. One wall is nearly filled with a massive black wood cabinet, heavily carved: the canastillero, which contains shelves full of sacred objects. On the other wall there is a small table and two chairs for divinations.
He’s sitting in one of the chairs, looking like an ordinary black Cuban, no masklike visage, no strangely luminous eyes, just a guy in a white guayabera and white slacks. But spontaneously I dip my knee and touch my mouth and forehead, the way I used to greet Ulune. You see Olo kids do this, whenever an elder walks by; they’ll stop what they’re doing and make the gesture, and maybe get a pat on the head, and go right back to what they were doing before. I know that santeros get a different kind of obeisance, but Ortiz seems to accept mine.
I take the chair opposite. Ortiz smiles and takes my hand. He strokes it gently, in circles, with his thumb. No adult has touched me other than formally for nearly three years. He says, a statement not a question, “You are very frightened.”
“Yes. I thought you would be alone. I didn’t expect these others, or the bembe. I just wanted the sacrifice …”
“Yes, like McDonald’s,” he says, and his smile briefly grows into a grin, showing gold. “We could have a drive-through window?two pigeons and a rooster, please.” And more seriously: “Look, chica, you are safe here, as safe as you can be anywhere. We are under the protection of the santos in this house. You’ll come to the bembe, maybe the orishas will come down and tell you something you need to know.”
He has the animals ready. I give him my cowries. The four little lives depart, with brief flutters, to Orun. He grasps my hand. I want to leave, but there is no strength in the desire. I am on the line, well hooked.
From the other room comes the sound of someone tuning a fucking drum. After a long moment, I bow my head, submitting. I want to throw up, but I swallow thick, ropy saliva, and keep it down.
He rises, still holding my hand. Hand in hand, his warm, mine feeling like film-wrapped supermarket chopped chuck, we go back to the living room. Here the scent of flowers, too, and sacrificial rum, and the harsh sweet smell of the vapor from the holy spray cans they sell in the botanicas. People come up to Ortiz and pay him homage, a bow, the murmured moforabile, the acknowledgment of Ifa living in him; he embraces each and murmurs a blessing in Yoruba. We stand around while the drummers set up. They are all thin black men in white clothes. They have African names: Lokuya, Aliletepowo, Iwalewa, Oribeji. Their drums are familiar to me: the big bata; the iya, shaped like an unequal hourglass, the bell-hung, goatskin-headed mother drum, which talks and sets the changes; the midrange itotele; and the small, sharp-tongued okokolo. The Olo have these, or ones like these, and they also have the immense heartbeat ojana, which shakes the ground, and which you hear with your whole body, not just the ears. The drum does stuff to you in the hands of an expert, whether you want to have stuff done to you or not, which is why, since my return from Drum Central until tonight, I have avoided their beat.
More people come in and honor Ortiz and the orishas. Ortiz introduces me to each. They all have African names too. Ositola, Omolokuna, Mandebe. They seem like ordinary, hardworking, lower-middle-class black people, the kind you see in the hallways at Jackson, pushing waxers, carrying sterile packs and boxes of tools. They are shy when they meet me. We make small talk. I chat briefly with a woman called Teresa Solares, stocky, moon-faced, around thirty, I judge, worn-looking, wearing a tight yellow dress. She is a home health aide on the Beach. We have something in common, then, both of us health professionals, but our conversation does not flourish. I meet some others, Margarita and Dolores (oh, we have the same name! a smile exchanged) and Angela and Celia. They think I am an alien here. I wish that I were. The room is crowded now and hot.
The four drummers sit and face one of the shrines. It is the one to Eleggua-Eshu, always the first to be honored at these affairs, because you have to ask him to open the way between Orun and Aye. Orun, in both Santeria and Yoruba cosmology, is the spirit world, the world of the ancestors and the gods, which the Olo call m’arun. Aye is the m’fa. The Yoruba say, Aye l’oja, orun n’ile: the world is a marketplace where we visit, heaven is our home.
The drums start. My stomach rolls over. They are good, almost Olo standard. The oriate, the special devotee of Eleggua-Eshu, turns out to be the woman from PETS; she takes up a gourd rattle and begins her praise song. The ile chants along: Ago ago ago ago. Open open. She is dancing before the shrine of Eleggua, and everyone else is swaying, too. Something changes in the room; a different, more energetic air seems to circulate now. It’s happening.
The man on the iya does a frantic run and the drumming stops. The room sighs. The colors are starting to go funny. Now the drums start up again, and the praise song rises to Shango, orisha of force and war. The oriates of Shango whirl and stomp, but Shango does not come. The drums call the others in turn, Yemaya, orisha of the seas, Oshosi, orisha of the hunt, Inle, orisha of medicine, Oshun, orisha of love. Now something is happening within the group of dancers; the circle of moving flesh draws back, hollowing its center. In the ring thus made Teresa Solares is spinning, eyes shut, arms waving like water weeds, swaying her hips. Sweat flies off her, making red sparks where the candles catch the flying droplets. Everyone is chanting eshu eshu?hold hold. The beat quickens, impossibly fast; Teresa spins around three times on one heel, rolls her eyes up, and crashes to the floor. The drums stop instantly. The silence is astounding.
Several of the santerias help her to her feet and attempt to lead her away, but she shrugs them off and stands erect. She seems to have gained eight inches in height. Her face is utterly transformed, the eyes huge and bright, the features more defined. She rips off the clip that holds her hair, which swings out, as if electrified, like a lion’s mane. She is now Oshun. The drums take up a complex rhythm and Oshun dances. It is erotic beyond sex, beyond belief, Life Herself, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, and we all like flowers lean forward swaying, as if toward a dancing sun. Oshun dances around the circle, feet hardly touching the ground, an ordinary woman with no training, dancing intricate steps, graceful as a puma. She kisses the devotees, she whispers to them, they stick currency to the sweat of her body, little sacrifices, and now she is before me. I fumble a dollar out of my bag and stick it below her neck.
She speaks to me in a deep contralto voice, sweet and thick as molasses, nothing like Teresa’s voice: “Child of Ifa, listen! Ifa says, go by water. Ifa says, before you close the gate, it must first be opened. Ifa says, the yellow bird will save you. Ifa says bring the yellow bird to the father. Ifa says, go by water, only by water.”
Oshun whirls away. I realize she has been speaking Yoruba, which Ms. Solares does not speak, as far as I know. I recall now that Ifa does not dance himself, he always dances through Oshun. The orisha finishes her dance and goes off with a few of the women who want a private consultation. The drums take up the beat again. The orishas start to come more easily, the excitement is palpable now, the whole house seems to be shaking, this is becoming a good, a really remarkable bembe. Ogun arrives, the angry smith, his voice booms bass notes from the throat of Julia, a dark woman of only moderate size. Obatala comes into Mercedes, spreading calm and clarity, and Margarita becomes Yemaya, capricious and powerful, the sea-mistress.
Then Shango comes, mounting a mild-looking middle-aged man named Honorio Lopez. When the orisha rises from Honorio’s faint, the devotees dress him in a red-and-white satin tunic, a red sash and a red headdress. The drums take up a staccato, violent beat, and he dances, crouched, then leaping impossibly high, then stamping his feet. He circles the ile, conversing with the devotees in a loud, harsh voice, making crude jokes and uttering threats. Then he stands before me, scowling, giving off an aura of violent energy, like a guy coming into a bar, looking for a fight. I can see him draw breath to shout at me, and without warning he changes again. That breath whooshes out of him; he appears stunned. He sags.
Then his face takes on a look of amused and curious detachment. My husband says, “Well, Jane, here you are.” I am turned to stone. He goes on, in a conversational voice, “I know you don’t believe this, but I missed you, I really did. For a while there, I really thought you were dead. And I looked for you. I mean in m’doli. Me and Orpheus. But you weren’t there. And you weren’t in m’fa either, as far as I could see. You were being quiet as a mouse, weren’t you? By the way, you look awful, Jane. What did you do to your hair?”
I say, “Please, don’t hurt anybody else.”
He grins at me. “Oh, don’t worry about this guy. Shango won’t mind me borrowing his horse for a while. But I really do need to talk to you. Gosh, we used to talk about everything, remember? I need to talk to you about my plans.”
The people have noticed what’s going on. They stare at us, confused. The Shango song on the drums falters and dies. Ortiz is shouting something in Spanish at the drummers. They start to play again, and Ortiz begins a chant to Eleggua-Eshu, asking him to open the gates to Orun again and draw the orishas back to the other world.
He says, “They’re playing my song. Catch you later, Janey.” The most hideous thing here is the perfectly rational sanity of his tone and affect. Now the man in front of me loses all expression, his eyes roll up and go white, he crumples. The other orishas are leaving, too, their mounts dropping like shot birds. I race out of the house.
By the time I crunch up on my driveway, I have almost convinced myself that the thing with Shango and my husband didn’t happen. A little hallucination there, brought on by stress, and the drums, and the setting, and cultural conditioning, and exohormones unleashed in the hot room, the same way we all hallucinated the physical changes in the mounted devotees, and their messages. That little colloquy with my husband was what I imagined he would say, and thus I heard Mr. Lopez say it. A good Jungian explanation so I can go to sleep. I am really terrific at this sort of rationalization. Marcel always commented on it.
Shari goes sleepily home with my thanks and five bucks. I take a long shower to scrub off the evening’s various effluvia, yank on my worn sleeping shirt, and heave into my hammock. I am asleep instantly.
Only to awake later. It is deep in the night and silent but for the thrum of the nearby A/Cs. Moonlight is spilling through my rattan blinds, making icy calligraphy on the wall opposite the window. This is ridiculous, I’m thinking now, being stalked by a serial killer and farting around with all this voodoo crap. I have to get small, get gone, adios Miami, do it now. I pack; there’s not much. I go up and get Luz. She is out cold, and curiously dense and heavy, like a statue in my arms. I place her on the backseat of the Buick. We take off.
I drive up Douglas to the Trail and then west. There is little traffic. Past the turnpike overpass the road is completely deserted. There is ground mist in the headlight beams, and once some beast, a dog, a possum, shines yellow eyes in my lights. The car is acting up now, I really should have fixed the trannie. I lose top gear and slow to thirty-five. We are in the Everglades, driving through a narrow hot black velvet tunnel made by the headlights. Another gear blows out, the engine wails, and we drop to an even slower speed. We will never make it to Naples.
But suddenly there is a glow ahead, which turns into lights, lots and lots of them, abolishing the blackness of the Glades. It is a huge truck stop, with a big tan building to one side. imokalee indian casino, announces a great blinking neon sign. The transmission gives out completely now. I heave my butt forward and back on the seat, like a kid in a toy car, urging the Buick to safety. We roll into the shining station. There is an Indian in the station office, huge, braid-haired, dark-faced, grave, wearing coveralls and a Dolphins hat. I ask him if he can fix my transmission and he says, Sure, we can fix anything. He cranks the Buick up on his lift. Give me an hour, he says. I am inexpressibly glad, almost in tears. I wake Luz, and together we walk into the casino.
It is very bright, and loud music is playing, Disney tunes, oddly enough, “Bippidy-Boppidy-Boo” and “When You Wish upon a Star.” There are endless rows of flashing slot machines; the ceiling is mirrored. I decide that we should play the slots while we wait; maybe we can make some money here for our trip. I get a bucket of quarters. We start feeding them into the machines. Almost immediately Luz hits a jackpot. The coins flow out over the floor, covering her feet to the ankles. We scoop them into a larger bucket. I tell Luz to keep playing out of the smaller bucket, while I go off and cash the jackpot in for chips. I am elated. I feel my luck has finally changed. For a while I play blackjack. I win and win. Then I play roulette for a while. The chips pile up.
Now I feel a thrill of fear. How long has it been? Hours? I take my winnings and go back to the slot machine area to find Luz. There seem to be acres of aisles all alike. The flashing lights and the noise of the machines and the Disney music (“A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes”) is driving me crazy. I run up and down the aisles shouting her name. Then I see her, walking hand in hand with a large woman in a yellow dress. I shout at her. The woman turns around. I see that it is Luz’s mother, the woman I killed. I run and run now, lost in the maze and the mirrors; I run very slowly, I can hardly move my legs now?
I’m in my hammock, heart a-thump, soaked with sweat. The moonlight through the rattan blinds makes a pattern against the opposite wall. I get to my feet. My knees are trembling. I have not had a dream like that in a while. I go to the bathroom and splash some water on my face. I look at my face in the mirror. Yes, it’s me, my perm squashed by sleep into something agricultural looking. No grinning skulls or African masks. I pinch my cheek. Real.
There’s a scratching sound just above my head, tiny skittering claws. Trembling, I go outside, to see if it’s the raccoon. I don’t see her from my landing, but there is something dark and low moving across the garden, illuminated by the waning moon. Oh, it’s just Jake the dog. The hum of the A/C is calming, ordinary, familiar.
I’m just about to try to get some more sleep when there is a shriek from upstairs. I race up the ladder. Another shriek. She’s having a nightmare, too. Luz’s room is lit by moonlight through her round window and by her Kermit the Frog nightlamp, which casts a greenish-yellow glow. As I run to her, a huge cockroach crosses my path. It is so big that at first I think it is a mouse. I sidestep and crush it under my bare foot. Luz is screaming hysterically now. I race to her and sit on the bed and snatch her to me, wrapped in her pink blanket. She is struggling in my arms, and I say, Wake up, wake up, darling, it’s only a dream. Her mouth is wide open in a rictus of terror, her eyes squeezed tight shut. I feel a tickle on my arm. It is another cockroach, as big as the first. I brush it off. There is a peculiar movement under the pink blanket. I tear it away, and I see that the whole bed is a mass of cockroaches. They are all over Luz, boiling and skittering under her flowered cotton nightdress. The construction I did up here must have disturbed a whole colony of them. I leap from the bed and hold Luz at arm’s length; I shake her, hard. Showers of roaches fall around my feet. Some of them crawl up my legs. I am dancing around, crushing them underfoot, shaking the child, the carpet becoming slimy under my bare soles. A cockroach climbs over my arm and across Luz’s face and into her mouth. She starts to strangle. I reach into her mouth for the thing, but I can’t get a grip. It is disappearing down her throat. Her lips are turning blue. I can’t reach it, although my hand feels like it is halfway to her lungs.
I am in the hammock, with the moonlight making patterns on the opposite wall. The A/C across the way hums. No time appears to have passed. I understand now that I am under assault. My heart is knocking in my chest. This is bad, but not as bad as some witch-dreams I have heard of. People who don’t wake up, for example, found in the morning with the familiar eye-bulging expression, or drowned in blood or vomit.
Okay, easily fixed?no more sleep until further notice. I get up, wash my sweaty face, pull my painter’s overalls over my T-shirt, and make a big pot of coffee. I discover I am hungry, which I take for a good sign, so I make a three-egg omelette and toast to go with the coffee. I drink the whole pot; the last cup I take sitting on my landing outside, enjoying the tropical sunrise and the birdsong, trying to forget about the night. In Africa, I always used to rise with the birds. A flight of green parrots zips overhead, complaining. The palms rustle in the new sea breeze. I could be in Africa now, except for the coffee.
Luz comes downstairs and I hear the refrigerator open as she takes out the milk. I go in and supervise her pouring out over her Captain Crunch. She seems dull and irritable. I ask her whether she has had any dreams, and she says no, but that is probably not true. I get her dressed and we go off to nursery school and work. The routine calms me. I will be sorry to give it up. Last night at the ile seems like part of the dreams that came afterward.
It is my last day of work. I will pick up my check, deposit it at the credit union at lunchtime, and then take the car in for the work it needs. The check should be a big one, with the unspent vacation time and the rebate from the pension fund. Whatever happens next, it should be enough to keep us until I can set up in a different line of work. Or to buy a getaway. I think again of running. He knows I’m alive, but he doesn’t know where my body is … no, he doesn’t really know I’m alive, that was hallucination last night, that and the dreams. Just a bad dream. This is real. I bang the heel of my hand against the hard, old-fashioned plastic steering wheel. It stings.
I am actually glad to see Mrs. Waley. She is not glad to see me, however. I start for my desk, but she motions me over. She is in magenta this morning, a pantsuit, over a pink polyester blouse. I am thinking about the check and calculating how much it will be. At least twelve hundred. I go into her office and shut the door.
“What do you mean by coming to work dressed like that?” she says immediately. “Just because it’s your last day don’t mean I’m relaxing my standards. No ma’am. Overalls and a T-shirt? And not even clean. You should be ashamed of yourself!”
In fact, I find that I am ashamed. I murmur an apology.
“That’s not good enough,” says Mrs. Waley. “You all think you can get away with murder, but you can’t, not while I’m in charge, missy. You’re going to give me a full day’s work in proper office apparel, or I am not going to sign off on your separation check. What do you think of that?”
I don’t think anything. I absolutely have to have that check. I stand mute. Mrs. Waley goes over to her closet and comes back with a lime-green pantsuit on a hanger, wrapped in cleaner’s plastic.
She says, “Out of the goodness of my heart, I’m going to lend you an outfit. Here. Put this on!”
I take the hanger and start to leave. She stops me. “No, right here. Change right here.”
What can I do? The woman is crazy and I need my check. I take off my overalls and then my T-shirt, and stand there naked. Mrs. Waley has a triumphant expression on her face, as if she knew that I was, underneath my submissive mien, a girl who would go out of the house in the morning with no undies on. I realize then I am standing in front of Mrs. Waley’s window. There are dozens of people looking in, all my medical records colleagues, and yes, there’s Lou Nearing, too. Well, he’s seen it all before, hasn’t he? I feel okay about it, though, because it’s my last day. I press my breasts up against the glass and wave. I feel the cold glass against my nipples, and feel them get stiff.
I am in the hammock with the moonlight making patterns on the opposite wall. The A/C throbs away next door. Now I believe that I’ll stay in the hammock, and watch the moonlight fade and the sunlight arrive, and just wait for what’s next. Perhaps Luz will come down after a while, and when she can’t get any response from me, she’ll run weeping over to Polly’s and Polly will come. She won’t be able to move me either. After a while a cop and a couple of guys from Jackson will come, and they’ll take me away and some intern in neuropsych will shoot me full of Thorazine and then I’ll be fine. I’ll spend the rest of my life in and out of the nut hatch, not making any trouble, resting quietly. Perhaps I’ll even gain some weight. Luz will get a nice foster family, I hope. Then I’ll die, and wake up in this hammock with the moonlight playing on the opposite wall and the A/C humming …
Now I dream that Jake the dog starts to bark, and he doesn’t stop, a high-pitched, frantic barking. I hear Polly’s door slam and hear her tell Jake to shut up, but he doesn’t and then I hear Polly screaming, calling upon the Deity, which she rarely does in real life. A door slams again. A honeyguide darts across the yard in that dipping way they have, and I hear, or think I hear, the purr, purr WHIT of its song. Or perhaps another sort of bird. It doesn’t matter here in dreamland.
Now my back hurts, just as if this were real. I want to get up, and I do get up. I mean, why not? I dress with care, not forgetting my undies, in full Dolores rig, a long-sleeved aqua T-shirt with gay balloons in bright felt appliqued to its chest, and a midlength skirt in a bad cobalt blue: polyester, naturally. I take pains with my hair, to squeeze the last increment of ugly out of my turd-colored locks. I put on my awful glasses and step out on my landing to see what the fuss is about. Now I hear sirens.
I can see it quite clearly from here, on a big sheet of newspaper, right under our mango tree. It’s his way of telling me he knows where I am in real life. If there is such a thing as real life, I might be back in it now. Too soon to tell. How would I know?