Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [3]
Well, said the old woman, think about the weather. It was still real cold. That snake, he was gonna freeze again. Once he froze again, he’d be helpless again. No kind of protection for a snake too froze to bite.
So? asked the same person.
So, said the old woman, this is an endless kind of a thing. Do we kill it or do we let it live? Do we ever believe its true nature and does that true nature ever change? And does ours?
She had given them some grapes that grew out behind her house. And some water from her spring. Bye, she’d waved to them, as contented as a girl.
Change
She had dismantled her altar. the candles, plentiful and varied, honoring deities from the Virgen de Guadalupe to Che, Jesus to her friend Sarah Jane, who’d been shot to death by death squads in Honduras, rested now in a large box beside the door. Her imposing poster of the languid and regal Quan Yin was rolled up and secured with a blue string, her classical Buddha who had begun to look like Ram Dass on acid she had draped with a purple cloth.
Her life was changing. She had felt it begin to shift beneath her feet. Or above her feet, because the change had started in her knees. In her fifty-seventh year they had, both of them, mysteriously, out of the blue, begun to creak.
At first she thought it was her shoes, an ancient pair of running shoes, noiseless as morning until then. Perhaps it was an article of clothing closer to her ear. But no, it was her knees. They creaked like unoiled door hinges. No bird, flying beside her as she ran, could make such a squawk. It seemed terrible to her. A failing of her always so quiet and unobtrusive body. The body of a farm girl—sturdy, peasant dependable—but also the body of a dancer—ever graceful, gliding through her days. But no more.
To her ears now every move was announced. She was unnerved.
She went, as soon as she could fathom where to go, to visit a knee specialist. To a woman who worked on the joints of athletes. This woman manipulated her knees, her legs, frowned, and ended the session by telling her to stretch every morning. To bring her calves to rest on the countertop in her kitchen while the coffee perked. Furthermore, said this woman, it would probably be useful if you invested in orthotics.
She did. And soon felt balanced, for the first time, perhaps, in her life. Until the constant change of shoes, the need to wear sandals in summer, the urge to walk barefoot on the beach, and in her own yard, stopped her. After this, wrenching pain in her hips, as her body sought to realign itself in patterns it had always known.
Her lover was still supple enough never to have experienced an ache in any part of his body except his head. He’d never experienced a creak anywhere. He was so inexperienced he could not hear her creakiness. He failed to grasp why such a small thing unsettled her. She, surely one of the people born “a big strong woman,” such as Holly Near sang about. She wanted kisses on her knees that he could not remember to offer; nor could he understand, exactly, why kisses should be needed. It boded ill for them.
The lover before him would have understood perfectly. A woman closer to her own age, this lover had been capable of endlessly babying her, of kissing any bruise or pain, no matter how slight. Alas, she had soon enough felt smothered, and flown the too cozy nest. Still, at times like this, she missed having a lover who could feel, empathize with, her aging body.
She had dismantled her altar. Even the photographs of her parents—her mother radiant as a sun, her father glowing as a moon—she had taken down. They now were on the floor, facing the mud-colored wall. For hours she had sat gazing into their beloved faces; all criticism of them forgotten; all complaints exhausted. Nothing remained but love. Not even desire to see them again remained; and she had been disconsolate when they had both died suddenly, when a train rammed their car, and she’d spent years thinking she might turn a corner somewhere