Free Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart by Alice Walker Page B

sofa.
    The woman looked at him and made a face.
    They were all artists of one sort or another. Writers, painters, poets, musicians. All tipsy by now and easily entertained.
    Yolo was hoping the sister would just say no to the idea of performing. After all, it was a party thrown by the people whose home it was. She was a guest. Why couldn’t she sit and chat and while away the time any way she felt like it?
    The guy was persistent.
    You’re so great, he was whining. You ought to give these people a treat.
    Yolo wondered if he should speak up. Then he found himself doing so.
    They were standing close to the clam-dip tray, which was on a tall wooden table by the window. She wore her hair loose and billowing as Hawaiian women started to do again after the sixties. They’d been much influenced by Kathleen Cleaver of the Black Panthers and Angela Davis of the Black Liberation Movement, both women with exceedingly big hair. She seemed willowy and light beneath it.
    You don’t have to dance, he said, looking down at her. Ignoring the white guy, whose hand was on her arm. A hand that looked too white, really, to be there. But Yolo squelched that thought.
    But by now the party had roused itself and become a single consciousness, as tipsy parties sometimes will, and that consciousness had heard the word Hawaii and that consciousness knew only one thing for sure about that place: There were beautiful brown women there, dancing.
    It gives me great pleasure to introduce my date, Leilani. The white guy was clearly trying to introduce himself.
    Yaay! yelled a very drunk man who had seated himself close to the vodka end of the tiny, well-stocked bar across the room.
    Hardly seeming to move, the young woman tied a scarf around her head to resemble a haku lei and wriggled herself out of her sweater and trousers and into a pareo and bikini top. Her boyfriend had put on some Hawaiian music that sounded like warm syrup and she began to dance.
    It looked like every hula Yolo had ever seen on TV. It also seemed really long. Her hands waved this way and then the other. Her hips swiveled. He thought that at one time, under the proper moon and palm trees, this dance had embodied both enchantment and desire. Now it seemed rote. Yolo wondered how she could keep the same smile plastered on her face the whole time.
    There was no way to tell, from her smiling, complaisant mien, that she was angry.
    He would never have guessed. Except that later, leaving the party, he heard an argument, a heated argument, going on as a couple approached their car down the street. He drew abreast of them just in time to see Leilani hit the white guy over the head with the bag that had held her dancing clothes, and to see him draw back and punch her. Yolo of course grabbed the guy, who immediately began to cry and to say how sorry he was.
    Oh God, Leilani sneered, wiping a trickle of blood from her nose, a crier.
    She was wearing highly polished black leather boots that glistened against the snow.
    She unlocked the door of her car, a silver-colored SAAB, and prepared to slide in.
    Wait, said the guy. I don’t have a way home.
    Tough, she said, spitting in the gutter near his feet. Take a fucking boat.
    This seemed incredibly funny to Yolo, who began to laugh.
    Soon they were all laughing.
    I’m sorry, said the white guy, who introduced himself as Saul.
    I’m not, said Leilani.
    Yolo and Saul watched as she made a tight bun of her billowing hair, started her car, and almost ran over them driving away.
    A Hawaiian in New England! said Saul, stamping his foot in the snow.
    That would make a good title for a book, said Yolo.
             
    He’d met her again several weeks later. On a street downtown. This time kicking a parking meter.
    Is anything wrong? he’d asked.
    She looked at him as if to say: Let me count the ways.
    She had found a parking place, after driving around for half an hour, gratefully put her money in the slot, but now it would not go down. The big