There There - Tommy Orange Page 0,50
guess is a better way to put it, I looked up tall white guys in the desert in Arizona, and it’s a thing. They’re called the Tall Whites. Aliens. No joke. You can look it up,” Harvey says.
Jacquie’s phone vibrates in her pocket. She gets it out knowing Harvey will think it’s to look up these Tall Whites. It’s an unusually long text message from Opal.
I already assumed you would have told me if you found spider legs in your leg, either when we were younger or when I told you about Orvil’s, but that assumption doesn’t make sense because I found spider legs in my leg right before everything happened with Ronald. And I never told you I found those legs, I mean until right now. I need to know if it happened to you. I feel like it has something to do with Mom.
“I read one website that said the Tall Whites are controlling America now, d’you see that?” Harvey says. And Jacquie feels sad for Harvey. And for Opal. And about these spider legs. If she’d ever found spider legs in her leg, she probably would have ended it right there and then. She suddenly feels so overwhelmed by all of it that she gets tired. This sometimes happens to Jacquie, and she feels grateful when it does, because most of the time her thoughts keep her up.
“I’m gonna get some sleep,” Jacquie says.
“Oh. Okay,” Harvey says.
Jacquie leans her head against the window. She watches the white highway line stream and waver. She watches the lines of telephone wires rise and fall in waves. Her thoughts wander, loosen, reach out aimlessly. She thinks about her back teeth, her molars, how they hurt every time she bites into something too cold or hot. She thinks about how long it’s been since she’s been to the dentist. She wonders about her mom’s teeth. She thinks about genetics and blood and veins and why a heart keeps beating. She looks at her head leaned against her head’s dark reflection in the window. She blinks an erratic pattern of blinks, which ends with her eyes closed. She falls asleep to the low drone of the road and the engine’s steady hum.
PART III
Return
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
—JAMES BALDWIN
Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield
EVERY TIME she gets into her mail truck Opal does the same thing. She looks into the rearview and finds her gaze looking back at her through the years. She doesn’t like to think of the number of years she’s been working as a mail carrier for the USPS. Not that she doesn’t like the work. It’s that it’s hard to see the years on her face, the lines and wrinkles that surround her eyes, branch out like cracks in the concrete. But even though she hates to see her face, she’s never been able to stop the habit of looking at it when she finds a mirror there in front of her, where she catches one of the only versions of her face she’ll ever see—on top of glass.
* * *
—
Opal thinks as she drives of the first time she took the Red Feather boys in for a weekend at the beginning of the adoption process. They were at a Mervyn’s in Alameda for new clothes. Opal looked at Orvil in the mirror, at an outfit she’d picked out for him.
“You like it?” she said.
“What about them?” Orvil said, pointing at himself and Opal’s reflection in the mirror. “How do we know it’s not one of them doing it and not us copying?”
“Because look, I’m deciding to wave my hand in front of it right now,” Opal said, and waved. It was a three-panel mirror outside the dressing room. Loother and Lony were hiding inside a clothes rack nearby.
“She could have waved first, then you couldn’t help but copy. But look at this,” he said, and then he broke out into a wild dance. Arms flailing, he jumped and spun. It looked to Opal like he was powwow dancing. But he couldn’t have been. He was just trying to act crazy in front of the mirror to prove no one else was in control but him, the Orvil on this side of the mirror.
* * *
—
Opal is on her route. Same old same old one. But she’s paying attention to where she steps. Opal doesn’t step on cracks when she walks. She walks carefully because she’s always had the sense