IT WAS GOOD TO BE IN AFRICA, TO FADE INTO THE BACKGROUND AND LET THE BOUNDARIES dissolve, to be part of all that is great and pulsing.
But Naomi still came home to Rhode Island, because it was the only home she knew. Home with its racism. Home with its greed. Home with its commercialism, the bright colors dancing on billboards and across the television screens in all the living rooms in America, as people sat before them, transfixed, all day long and late into the night.
Julia came to live with Naomi in West Providence, near Broadway, where all sorts of people live, where you could hear the car radios and the boom boxes blaring late into the night. Julia stayed in the extra bedroom Naomi thought would be Carl’s. Naomi thought about it that way even though Carl had never seen this house, and she kept thinking it was Carl’s even after she knew Carl was never coming home, because even though she knew Carl was dead, a part of her never believed it.
Julia sat and stared out the window most of the day for the first few months. People came to visit—mostly friends from the hospital and Levin, who brought his political people. Sometimes Julia went out for Levin’s demonstrations or to see a movie, but her heart wasn’t in any of it. She sat and looked out the window and, like Naomi, she was waiting for Carl to come home.
Levin brought Julia’s car back, and she started to drive. One day in the early spring she said she was going to take a road trip and see family in California. Naomi knew she’d never be back.
In a sense, Naomi was now alone. Her father was still alive, still in the lockup from which he would never emerge, but then he had been dead to her from the moment they had escaped him. Carl was gone. Her mother was gone. Her grandparents were gone.
Naomi’s friends called her on the phone and stopped by the Institute, and they went for lunch, sometimes even to Sally’s. She would tell them about the trip, sometimes, and sometimes she would just listen to the stories of their lives. She talked about Carl when they asked, and she could now tell other people the truth about his strengths and weaknesses, about his brilliance and kindness and love, and also about his reckless abandon, about why he ran away, about the brave thing he tried to do and failed at, about the woman he loved who survived him, and about how strong he was to have cared for Naomi when they were children and what they endured together growing up.
These were the stories she would tell her children. Her children would live in these stories, and through those stories Naomi hoped her children might be able to see through the racism and the lust and the greed and understand that they too are part of a people and part of a place that is great and pulsing, and through the stories she would tell them and the stories they would tell one another they would discover the freedom to find what is great and pulsing within themselves and their people and their world.
America is freedom, she would tell them, despite the war and the madness. Sometimes America is the freedom to buy, the freedom to sell, and the freedom to bribe. But America is also the freedom for people to take care of one another, to listen, and the freedom to tell the difficult truth about who we have been and what we have done; about both the successes and the failures, about the strengths and the weaknesses, about the kindness and the greed. In America Naomi’s children would still perhaps have the freedom to experience the world in all its grandeur, the freedom to be together, the freedom to talk and listen, and the freedom to tell stories about who we are and who we can become.
Perhaps they will be better people than we are, Naomi thought, though probably not. Perhaps our children will find the right balance, the right combination of kindness and striving, of selfishness and selflessness, of ego and humility, of lust and love, of freedom and democracy, of justice and of peace. Perhaps they will be better than we are and will succeed where we failed and find a way to move forward in the richness and abundance of the world, without stupidity, violence, war, and greed. Probably not. They are our children, the flesh of our flesh, the bone of our bone, and they will stumble forward in time the way we do, one step at a time, one step forward and two steps back; and then, sometimes, rarely, perhaps once in a generation or two but sometimes not for a thousand years, one step forward again.
I miss him, Naomi thought. I miss Carl. I’ll always miss him.
He’s gone now, she thought. But at least he taught me how to love.