You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [16]
He struts back and takes her elbow. Looks hard for the compliment implied in these questions, then shares it with his wife: “You know you’re foxy!”
She is immovable. Her face suffering and wondering. “But look,” she says, pointing. Four large plastic dolls—one a skinny Farrah Fawcett (or so the doll looks to her) posed for anal inspection; one, an oriental, with her eyes, strangely, closed, but her mouth, a pouting red suction cup, open; an enormous eskimo woman, with fur around her neck and ankles, and vagina; and a black woman dressed entirely in a leopard skin, complete with tail. The dolls are all life-size, and the efficiency of their rubber genitals is explained in detail on a card visible through the plate glass.
For her this is the stuff of nightmares—possibly because all the dolls are smiling. She will see them for the rest of her life. For him the sight is also shocking, but arouses a prurient curiosity. He will return, another time, alone. Meanwhile, he must prevent her from seeing such things, he resolves, whisking her briskly off the street.
Later, in their hotel room, she watches TV as two black women sing their latest hits: the first woman, dressed in a gold dress (because her song is now “solid gold!”) is nonetheless wearing a chain around her ankle—the wife imagines she sees a chain—because the woman is singing: “Free me from my freedom, chain me to a tree!”
“What do you think of that?” she asks her husband.
“She’s a fool,” says he.
But when the second woman sings: “Ready, aim, fire, my name is desire,” with guns and rockets going off all around her, he thinks the line “Shoot me with your love!” explains everything.
She is despondent.
She looks in a mirror at her plump brown and black body, crinkly hair and black eyes and decides, foolishly, that she is not beautiful. And that she is not hip, either. Among her other problems is the fact that she does not like the word “nigger” used by anyone at all, and is afraid of marijuana. These restraints, she feels, make her old, too much like her own mother, who loves sex (she has lately learned) but is highly religious and, for example, thinks cardplaying wicked and alcohol deadly. Her husband would not consider her mother sexy, she thinks. Since she herself is aging, this thought frightens her. But, surprisingly, while watching herself become her mother in the mirror, she discovers that she considers her mother—who carefully braids her average-length, average-grade, graying hair every night before going to bed; the braids her father still manages to fray during the night—very sexy.
At once she feels restored.
Resolves to fight
“You’re the only black woman in the world that worries about any of this stuff,” he tells her, unaware of her resolve, and moody at her months of silent studiousness.
She says, “Here, Colored Person, read this essay by Audre Lorde.”
He hedges. She insists.
He comes to the line about Lorde “moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love,” and bridles. “Wait a minute,” he says, “what kind of a name is ‘Audre’ for a man? They must have meant ‘André.’”
“It is the name of a woman,” she says. “Read the rest of that page.”
“No dyke can tell me anything,” he says, flinging down the pages.
She has been calmly waiting for this. She brings in Jiveboy and Jivers. In both, there are women eating women they don’t even know. She takes up the essay and reads:
This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use Kleenex. And when we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.
He looks at her with resentment,