Fay Weldon - Novel 23 by Rhode Island Blues (v1.1) Read Free Book Online

something about to happen,
something just happened. Vacations can be so dull.
                 Good vibes! Maybe it was in Felicity’s
nature forever to be moving on, in search of a landscape innocent of earlier
crimes. If so she would be better advised to go West than East, where there wasn’t so much history. Joy was by nature a stayer in
one place, Felicity a mover on. Felicity would always listen and learn and be enriched, Joy would shut her mind to new truths. Felicity
was inquisitive and never averse to a little trouble and discomfiture, Joy
never wanted to stir anything up. Therein lay the difference between them,
though God knows both ended up in much the same condition in life, living in
the same kind of clapboard house, in the same kind of widowhood, albeit Joy
today in startling yellow velour, and Miss Felicity in a floating cream and
green dress bought at great expense at Bergdorf Goodman, and an embroidered
jacket of vaguely ethnic but tasteful origin, cut so as to hide any thickening
of the waist or stooping of the shoulders. She held herself erect. From the
back she could have been any age: except perhaps her ankles were too thin to
belong to a truly youthful person.
                 We
took the coast road out of Mystic to historic Stonington , the Rhode Island side of the river from Mystic, where
there’s a statue of a Pequot Indian with a large stone fish under each arm. Old
people tottered around it, relatives holding dependent arms: a group whizzed
about it in mechanized wheelchairs, never too old to be a danger to others.
They came, in whatever state, to contemplate the past, since there was so
little future to contemplate: they invaded the nearby souvenir shops by the
busload, while old limbs still had the strength. We all want to think of our
nation’s past as wondrous and charming, as we would want to think of our own.
But Joy declined to get out of the car.
                 ‘I’m
no tourist,’ she said. ‘I live round here. As for those Red Indians, they take
everything and give nothing back. If China invaded they wouldn’t object to being
defended, I can tell you that.’
                Felicity slammed the door as she got
out of the car. But Joy lowered the window.
                 ‘Scarcely
a pureblooded Pequot left,’ she shouted after us. ‘They’ve all intermarried
with the blacks anyway. Now they run their casinos tax-free on Reservation
land. They rake in millions and are let off taxes, just because their ancestors
had a hard time. Poor Mr Trump, they say he’s having a real bad time in Atlantic City , because of Indians.’
                 ‘Hush!’
begged Felicity.
                 ‘You’re
so English, Felicity! If the old can’t speak the truth who can?’ Calm, quiet people turned to stare at Joy. Her white- powdered,
hollow-eyed face stared out of the darkness of the car, her chin resting on the
ledge of the lowered window, which I thought was rather dangerous. Supposing it
suddenly shot up? I couldn’t think who she reminded me of and then I realized
it was Boris Karloff in The Mummy. Some people, as they get older,
simply lose their gender.
                 ‘I’ve
nothing against them personally,’ she shrieked. ‘But if I was one of them I
wouldn’t want to be called a Native American. The way I was brought up, a
native is a savage.’ Felicity and I, realizing there was no other way of
silencing her, simply gave up our exploration of the town and got back into the
car. Joy smiled in triumph.
                 We
saw a couple of what were called congregated communities, but they were built
around golf courses. Those who lived there looked as if they had stepped
straight out of the advertisements: the strong, well-polished, smiling elderly,
their hair wet-combed if they still had any - and there were some amazing heads
of hair, not necessarily natural, to be seen, in both sexes. The men