Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [17]
Kate was silent, thinking of how she’d begun missing having a boyfriend long before having one. A boyfriend had seemed inevitable. The older girls at school talked about boys all the time, and had boyfriends. Her parents were there in front of her every single day; her mother cherishing, her father positively doting. It had seemed so natural. The only way to go. Her girl friends at school had certainly never appealed to her. They seemed too much like her, always worrying about how they looked, what to wear, how their hair was doing. She liked to go shopping with them, liked to eat and study with them. The thought of kissing one of them had never crossed her mind. In fact, even now, the thought of kissing one of them made her queasy.
Boys never interested me, said Sue. I always got along well with them, but nary a romantic thought had I. Now, though, I’m celibate.
Really, said Kate. Her hand rested near a carving of a large sunburst. A tiny figure that looked like a goat raised its head as if enjoying the radiance. She had never expected to find signs of human life in the canyons that radiated out from the main one. At a place far from the river that was reached after a long climb that began behind a waterfall they’d come to the place the Hopi claimed as the spot they’d emerged into the present world. The fourth world. The worlds before that had been destroyed. And at that spot, there had been a human handprint. She had felt the impact of that small handprint as if it were a handshake. Someone from centuries, perhaps thousands of years, past, reaching out to her. It was in a very awkward place, impossible to touch, and so she had blown a kiss of thanks. And bowed deeply. Thank you, artist, she had said. You are our help when we can receive no other.
At first, said Sue, I thought I was different because my mother did not love me. Was I always looking for a loving mother? This was the question put to me by countless shrinks. I kinda didn’t think so. She grinned. After all, I found so many of them. You’d think I’d eventually have had enough.
Enough? asked Kate.
Loving mothers, said Sue.
I find I don’t really have a preference, said Kate.
Really, said Sue.
People are remarkably similar, said Kate, when you relate to individuals. What do I like, she mused, as they sat on a boulder in the sun. Well, passion and gentleness and good humor and . . .
I suppose some men have that, said Sue. I’m still not interested.
Kate laughed.
What a time they lived in, she thought. At least those of us living in the West, in the present century, instead of in the Middle East or other parts of the world where time, for women, had stopped in the Middle Ages. There were women on the planet who were not allowed to show their faces. Not permitted to smile at a man who was not a relative without the possibility of being beaten. There were women being stoned, for showing legs or hair. And yet, the carvings all around them spoke of another time before the present and before, even, the recorded past. A time when women were joyous about their naked bodies. Free.
She thought of the bumper sticker that some wily feminist had created: DON’T DIE WONDERING. And she wouldn’t. She’d found pleasure eventually in relating to women as lovers. But she couldn’t claim she thought they were better, as lovers, or as partners, than men. And this was, actually, a great comfort to her; she felt, finally, in emotional and erotic balance. Having parents whom she loved fairly equally, she’d been puzzled on some level that she must, as an adult, choose to relate primarily to one or the other sex. Whose idea was this, really? she wondered. Freud’s? And what a lot of lies he’d told trying to avoid facing his own childhood sex abuse. Because of him generations of people had believed three-year-olds knowingly seduced their grandfathers! She had accepted the adventures before her, and had, so far, survived them. And now, like the artists of old, carving their knowledge of ecstasy and power on rocks, she