Naomi

Lying in the sun with her eyes closed, Naomi let herself melt layer by layer. Everything seems in wondrous motion, ripple and smooth, folding unfolding, glistening and shifting like water. Then in the middle of it all, there was a helicopter, pounding and growling. Instantly Naomi remembered that she was naked in a green weed field, and wondered if she should put on her clothes.

The helicopter was silver with no markings, letters or numbers which she couldn’t make out. It circled, disappearing over the trees at the top of the hill; then reappearing to her right, it passed over very low.

The third time it cam grinding down - so close that the sound of it vibrated in her belly —-Naomi realized, with surprise and disgust, that she was being harassed. She scooped up her clothes, made a sweeping obscene hand gesture, and with as much dignity as possible, went into the house.

After the brilliance of the field the rooms were cold and dim, filled with coleus and fern, Ira’s odds and ends of refinished furniture, Elizabeth’s tapestries, Jason’s Tiffany lamp, Rainbow’s Boston Rocker, her own piano. Even through her anger she noticed each room. They were nourishing, like bowls of fruit, magical int heir variety of textures, colors, shapes.

In the kitchen, Ira was pouring hot water into a teapot with one hand, holding a large piece of bread in the other. “He tore it off the loaf instead of cutting it,” Naomi thought, watching from the doorway.

“Ira Davidson, you ain’t got no couth.” She walked over, took the bread out of his hand and stuffed as much as was possible into her mouth.

“You are absolutely correct.” He took back the bread looking at her directly, without smiling, then bent and kissed her left breast.

Naomi went into the bedroom and dropped the clothes she was carrying onto the bed. Just now, the room reminded her of a church, quiet, smelling slightly of incense. Light came muffled through the blues, reds, and golds of the closed curtains.

Pulling on a pair of jeans, she thought about the helicopter. Sometimes she hated being a woman. She would like to be like Ira, for one day, tall, large boned, looking down of the balding heads of men in elevators - men who drink cocktails for lunch, stare at her breasts and make insinuating remarks. She would stand there in her great, black man’s body, and they would avert their eyes and remain silent.

Naomi smiled as she caught herself thinking “black.” Ira had once said that black is an Anglo-Saxon nightmare fantasy. He had thrown back the covers so that she could see his body from the knees up.

“You look and tell me, what color am I?”

Naomi raised herself on one elbow.

“Well, you are Hershey chocolate brown here —“ she patted his thigh — “a little rose here—-“ she touched his penis lightly with one finger. “You have a honey brown belly—“ leaning over, she stuck her tongue in his belly button. He jumped and held her away.

“You see?” he said.

“Well, in that case, I’m not white.” She got out of bed and looked at herself in the mirror.

Of course you’re not.”

“I know, but I can’t quite see what color I am.”

“You are yellow,” he chuckled, “with polka dots.”

She had sat on his stomach, grabbed his hair with both hands and pretended to be outraged.

She knew that Ira loved her, even when he said she was ridiculous, which usually happened when he caught her with a peanut butter and pickle sandwich or reading Richard Brautigan.

He loved the way she said things straight out. He told her that what he disliked most about white culture, especially around middle class women, was the way most of them minced around and acted shocked if you came out and said what you knew damn well they were thinking.

He loved her long blond hair and her long legs, the way that she could stride along beside him.

She remembered Ira’s cousin Jouline asking him angrily, “You like long blonde hair better than black kinky?” They were both washing his car at the time.

“I like both,” he told her.

Naomi had crouched down by the back bumper and was dabbing at it with a sponge. She could see her face reflected in the chrome, fat and bent. Then Ira was saying, “Don’t go trying to make yourself look like some magazine picture or television commercial. How many white women do you know who look like that.? They feel bad because they don’t look that way either. Advertisers think if they can make you feel bad enough about how you look you’ll run out and buy what they’re selling.” Naomi was still rubbing the same section of bumper. Then Jouline had turned the hose on Ira, and the three of them threw sponges, laughing and sliding on the wet driveway.

Naomi had finished dressing, and —no longer thinking about the helicopter — propped herself up on the bed with a manuscript she was supposed to edit over the weekend. The piece was technical, full of long repetitive sentences and poorly organized. She worked through several pages before noticing that it was too dark in the room to read comfortably without opening the curtains or turning on a light. Instead she let the paper slide onto the bed, and closed her eyes.

She was floating in some bright place, but there was that noise, rhythmic, pounding, something she had to get away from. When she tried to move everything around her was solid. Then someone was talking to her in a loud voice. With an effort, she managed to open her eyes. Ira was standing at the foot of the bed.

“Were you asleep?”

“I guess so.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t notice. I just came in through the back porch, and it’s full of garbage. Rainbow still hasn’t taken it to the dump.”
“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think she came in last night.”

“Well, if she doesn’t get home soon, I’ll take it when I go to the flea market.”

Rainbow wasn’t very dependable, neither were Elizabeth or Jason. When it came right down to it, she and Ira were responsible for the house.

It amused Naomi to remember how naive she had been when she and Ira had decided to rent a house on the coast, and to find some people to live with them. She had imagined them all together, playfully painting rooms, preparing meals, planting and harvesting vegetables.

The spirit of play lasted until about half of the furniture was moved in. After that it was a matter of picking something up, doggedly wrestling and balancing it up the front steps, and putting it down wherever there was an open space, then turning around and doing it all over again.

Four out of nine rooms were eventually painted.

Interest in the vegetable garden was fleeting. Ira did help Naomi work some ground and plant it. Jason occasionally watered it, and frequently sat among the pea vines eating the peas raw. In a few months it was weeds and dry, the snails moved to the flowers Elizabeth had planted by the front walk.

When dishes began to pile up in the sink and there were hot arguments over whose turn it was to cook which meals, they established the weekly house meetings. Every Sunday night they decided on what seemed to be a reasonable division of labor; and every week that Rainbow was suppose to help with dinner, she managed to have meetings and emergencies which kept her out several evenings. If it was Jason’s turn to mop the floors, he would explain in great detail how he just hadn’t had time to get around to it. After all, he was working on a methane digester which, in the long run, would save them a lot of money. Jason’s digester ended up in a corner of the back lot, hidden by mustard which grew up around it.

Elizabeth usually did her assigned jobs, but she had a way of leaving things around: socks under the kitchen table, a bowl half full of soup by the fireplace, underwear in both bathrooms, and books and papers one very table and counter in the house.

At first Naomi and Ira had been angry. They had yelled, and left sarcastic notes on doors and walls. Once when Rainbow hadn’t taken out the garbage, they put the pails and sacks on her bed. One of the cats got in through an open window and knocked them over. That night when Rainbow came home, she took the garbage out, put her bedding in her car, and didn’t come back for a week.

Somehow it didn’t seem all that important to Naomi anymore. Elizabeth would come in with great arm loads of heather from the fields. Jason always knew where to find wood for the fireplace. Rainbow would curl up with Naomi on the waterbed, and they would smoke dope and make profound discoveries, like cats are never bored, or how they had expected life to be one big orgasm, and how relieved they were to find that God had more imagination than that, even if it was a bit morbid at times.

One night Rainbow had called out to Naomi from the bathroom.

“Now I know how people put up with getting old . . . They don’t have any choice.” She was looking in the mirror over the sink.

When she came back into the bedroom, Naomi asked, “Don’t you ever wonder what this whole show is all about?”

“Yes, but it seems to keep on happening whether I wonder about it or not, so most of the time I don’t bother.” They got under the covers and turned off the light.

Ira come to the doorway.

“Can I come in too?”

“Sure.” They giggled and made room for him.

They talked quietly. To Naomi, they were three voices moving gracefully in the dark, three beings, essential, undisguised, choosing to be together now, and now, and now.

Elizabeth and Jason were the first to leave. They took the tapestries and the Tiffany lamp, and moved to a farm in Oregon.

When Rainbow left, she did not take the Boston rocker, she gave it to Naomi. They wrote several letters to each other, then stopped writing. Rainbow called once from New York to say that she was getting married, and that she missed the beach, and she missed Naomi.

When Ira fell from the scaffolding of a building he was painting and died, Naomi bought the coast side house. She would go on living there, at least that wouldn’t change.

But for months the house remained apart form her, as did the fields and coarse sand, the sweep of surf below the cliffs, cars and people clustered in narrow streets.

At staff luncheons, she ate lifting the fork to her mouth, chewing the food, swallowing —-watching other forks being raised, mouths chewing, throats swallowing.

Her parents came to be with her for awhile, all the way from Indiana. They stayed upstairs where Elizabeth and Jason had lived. After dinner, she played cards with them at the kitchen table, and they talked about what it was like at home before the children grew up and went away.

Her father did not mention that he felt sick to his stomach when he thought about Naomi “having sex” with Ira. It wasn’t that he hadn’t liked Ira. Ira had been smart, had made good money, and it was clear that he had really cared about Naomi. But his stomach went right on feeling sick. Maybe he would feel that way about Naomi “having sex” with any man. Maybe it wasn’t just because Ira was black. That was something to think about.

Naomi’s mother didn’t say— even to herself — that she had been afraid of Ira. It was something she knew with her body, a painful shyness, a sharp pulling inward. She had felt it as a child, sitting in a train station on the way to visit her grandmother, when she had seen black people for the first time. She was embarrassed and confused over the relief she had experienced since Ira’s death.

When her parents left, the ache of Ira’s absence opened in Naomi unexpectedly: late afternoons with a certain slant of sunlight on the dining room floor, mornings when the tea kettle was screeching and she was putting on a blouse.

Then one day, walking from the office to her car, there was a moment of stillness in her, a listening. All her sense told her this is breakable, this delicacy of color and motion, of breathing and passing people on the street.

There was an old woman with a cart full of laundry, a narrow man in a dirty raincoat, a young woman with a carefully arranged face and hair, standing there waiting for the light to change.

The part of Naomi which she held aloof gave way, so that she was with them softly, shivering a little in the wind. The light changed and they crossed the street.