Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [24]
If I want to talk to her or to my father about anything, I have to write notes about the subject to myself. I have to practice what I want to say and how I want to say it. As others might prepare for an exam whose subject matter is unknown to them, so I must study, cram, for every conversation with my folks.
ADAM
IT WAS SUMMER, and we sat on chaises longues under the linden trees in the garden behind Lisette’s house. Lisette was knitting gossamer blue wool in the heat, and I made the comment that changed my life forever.
It is so hot, I said, to be knitting wool. Unless, I added, smiling at her, you are expecting to have very cold feet this winter.
Very cold petits feet, she said, without looking up.
And that is how I learned of petit Pierre.
I had always been careful with Lisette. More often than not, when we were making love, I did not penetrate her. Ours was a friendship of shared sadness as well as passion, but a friendship first of all, and I spent many nights in her fluffy white bed, holding her in my arms, but so distraught about my own life with Evelyn, all I could yearn for was sleep.
On the other hand, there had been an occasional weak moment, which is, after all, all one needs.
You won’t have it, of course, I said.
Lisette’s neck, which I referred to sometimes in jest as her thick French neck, grew visibly enlarged. It was the clearest sign of her rage, which she went to great intellectual pains to disguise. It was a stubborn neck, the kind Joan of Arc must have had, and now, looking at me but at the same time rather to one side of me, I saw it and her whole upper body, beneath the sheerness of her white summer dress, flush crimson.
It is not your affair, she said, knitting furiously, a bead of sweat running toward the corner of her limpid brown eye. In her anger, she looked a bit as I imagined Madame Defarge would have, had someone sat in front of her and blocked her view of the guillotine.
Not my… I couldn’t finish. I looked at her, speechless.
Perhaps it isn’t even yours, she said. Perhaps I have a lover, or several, during the months we are apart and you are with your crazy wife in America.
This was not her usual way of referring to Evelyn. I was hurt by it.
The silence that fell between us was rendered somehow ridiculous by the energetic droning of her neighbor’s bees, passing in and out of their wooden hives; they made the honey that sweetened our coffee and tea; our empty cups exuded the odor of their work. It was a sound that said so clearly: Life goes on. The pain of it so sure. The sweetness of it so mysterious. It is irrelevant to us that you fight. You might both turn to stone there, and it would only mean our liberation into your garden as well as into our own.
It is mine, I said at last.
Yes, she said, putting down her knitting. But it is more mine than yours.
When? I asked. Unfortunately I remembered no moment between us of special tenderness. On the other hand, generally speaking, tenderness permeated our friendship.
She shrugged.
When you were here before, of course. In April. When you came to tell me Tashi had run away from you. Even from your kisses.
LISETTE
I HAD PETIT PIERRE at home in my grandmother’s bed. My grandmother, Beatrice, who spent her life fighting for the right of French women to vote. The low wooden bed that was built for the house in the century before the last and has never left it. The bed in which my mother was conceived and into which I myself was born. I ate well throughout my pregnancy, and went on long walks all over Paris nearly every day. My father and mother, after overcoming, to a remarkable degree, their normal outrage, racism and shock, showered me with advice and affection. It was recognized, in almost a