You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [25]
But Clarence was dedicated to the mayor, and believed his success would ultimately mean security and advancement for them all.
On the morning she left to have the abortion, the mayor and Clarence were to have a working lunch, and they drove her to the airport deep in conversation about municipal funds, racist cops, and the facilities for teaching at the chaotic, newly integrated schools. Clarence had time for the briefest kiss and hug at the airport ramp.
“Take care of yourself,” he whispered lovingly as she walked away. He was needed, while she was gone, to draft the city’s new charter. She had agreed this was important; the mayor was already being called incompetent by local businessmen and the chamber of commerce, and one inferred from television that no black person alive even knew what a city charter was.
“Take care of myself.” Yes, she thought. I see that is what I have to do. But she thought this self-pityingly, which invalidated it. She had expected him to take care of her, and she blamed him for not doing so now.
Well, she was a fraud, anyway. She had known after a year of marriage that it bored her. “The Experience of Having a Child” was to distract her from this fact. Still, she expected him to “take care of her.” She was lucky he didn’t pack up and leave. But he seemed to know, as she did, that if anyone packed and left, it would be her. Precisely because she was a fraud and because in the end he would settle for fraud and she could not.
On the plane to New York her teeth ached and she vomited bile—bitter, yellowish stuff she hadn’t even been aware her body produced. She resented and appreciated the crisp help of the stewardess, who asked if she needed anything, then stood chatting with the cigarette-smoking white man next to her, whose fat hairy wrist, like a large worm, was all Imani could bear to see out of the corner of her eye.
Her first abortion, when she was still in college, she frequently remembered as wonderful, bearing as it had all the marks of a supreme coming of age and a seizing of the direction of her own life, as well as a comprehension of existence that never left her: that life—what one saw about one and called Life—was not a facade. There was nothing behind it which used “Life” as its manifestation. Life was itself. Period. At the time, and afterwards, and even now, this seemed a marvelous thing to know.
The abortionist had been a delightful Italian doctor on the Upper East Side in New York, and before he put her under he told her about his own daughter who was just her age, and a junior at Vassar. He babbled on and on until she was out, but not before Imani had thought how her thousand dollars, for which she would be in debt for years, would go to keep her there.
When she woke up it was all over. She lay on a brown Naugahyde sofa in the doctor’s outer office. And she heard, over her somewhere in the air, the sound of a woman’s voice. It was a Saturday, no nurses in attendance, and she presumed it was the doctor’s wife. She was pulled gently to her feet by this voice and encouraged to walk.
“And when you leave, be sure to walk as if nothing is wrong,” the voice said.
Imani did not feel any pain. This surprised her. Perhaps he didn’t do anything, she thought. Perhaps he took my thousand dollars and put me to sleep with two dollars’ worth of ether. Perhaps this is a racket.
But he was so kind, and he was smiling benignly, almost fatherly, at her