You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [23]
It was probably with the patchouli that she had caught William Litz White, her husband. He’d never smelled anything like it—successful doctor, intense billiards player that he was—and had never intended to. Bohemian. Bohemian Belle, he had called her. She had wanted to be bohemian: to write on a kitchen table perhaps; but not among her children’s unwashed cereal bowls. Patchouli was as close as she got.
The hen was still nesting on Mrs. Hyde’s lap. Like most people who are not famous a small thing like getting a Rock Cornish hen out of her lap and back on the table paralyzed her. How could she be so indecorous as to plop the bird back into Andrea Clement White’s plate? That famous and fastidious lady (she had read interviews to the effect that she was fastidious; this was not necessarily her own opinion). She began to sweat.
“He’s a bore,” said Andrea Clement White, audibly and viciously (she had discovered viciousness amused)—but then, she was forgiven everything because of her fame, her use as a fund raiser, and age—and began to feel around Mrs. Hyde’s broad knees for the tiny chicken. Dragging it up stuck to Mrs. Hyde’s dress—Mrs. Hyde meanwhile going gray with embarrassment—Mrs. Clement White raised it to her lips—and took a bite.
Five hundred in the audience did the same.
Was there a point, she wondered, chewing, in thinking about what one ate at functions like this? The rocklike hen, the red ring of spicy, soggy apple. The broccoli that no one in the South had learned to cook, only to boil? She thought not, and ate it all without thinking beyond the fact that she was hungry, had to pee, was bored to tears, and her bra strap was biting into the radical edges of her latest mastectomy.
A slow, aged string of tipsy wasps (he who owned the newspaper that said Negroes had no use for higher education, though perhaps the trades; she who told far and wide the remarkable insights of her grandmother’s enslaved cook; he who…) now rose to drone her praises. She munched her chicken and five hundred others munched along with her, their chewing a noisy, incessant and exuberant ignoring. She was suddenly back at the plantation. But where? Mississippi? Too hot, and already a cliché. Ditto Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana. She picked Virginia, where there were cool mountains and where it was not too severe a stretch of the imagination to match five hundred and one chickens to that many hungry slaves. Crunch. She was smiling and chewing but without any intention of listening. She nodded—still grinning and chewing as each person sat down. “In spite of you I’m sitting here,” she thought, and reached over for the apple ring from Mrs. Hyde’s plate. This second apple ring was always saved for her to eat at the end of the meal. It was her mouthwash.
She projected herself ahead a few minutes to being presented to the audience by Tedious Taylor, the president: she was battling him with her eyes. DON’T YOU DARE KISS ME! But he closed his froglike eyes, descended his head, his pendulous lips, and kissed the most prominent of her liver spots. Yuck. So many Yucks. Because then there would creep up behind her Dean Cooke (whom she would have kept tabs on until now), who would glue his mouth to her neck in an attitude of falling.
She saw herself hit him in the groin with her award, a sharp-beaked silver goose. But was it a silver goose? It would be duck, swan or goose. (Bird awards were lately “in.”) Perhaps all three, and it would be not silver but silver plate, and there would be eggs. (She was a woman, after all!) Golden.
She felt briefly terrific, imagining Cooke’s piglike squeal, and gnawed her chicken savagely, her eyes quite glazed over, in abstracted glee.
But now there came in front of the audience—with a slight bow to Mrs. Clement White—a small girl the color of chocolate.