You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [54]
7
She took the train to the campus.
“My,” said one of her friends, “you look wonderful! Home sure must agree with you!”
“Sarah was home?” Someone who didn’t know asked. “Oh, great, how was it?”
“Well, how was it?” went an echo in Sarah’s head. The noise of the echo almost made her dizzy.
“How was it?” she asked aloud, searching for, and regaining, her balance.
“How was it?” She watched her reflection in a pair of smiling hazel eyes.
“It was fine,” she said slowly, returning the smile, thinking of her grandfather. “Just fine.”
The girl’s smile deepened. Sarah watched her swinging along toward the back tennis courts, hair blowing in the wind.
Stare the rat down, thought Sarah; and whether it disappears or not, I am a woman in the world. I have buried my father, and shall soon know how to make my grandpa up in stone.
Source
IT WAS DURING the year of her first depressing brush with government funding of antipoverty programs that San Francisco began to haunt Irene. An educational project into which she’d poured much of her time, energy and considerable talent was declared “superfluous and romantic” by Washington, and summarily killed; Irene began to long for every amenity the small, dusty Southern town she worked in did not offer. With several other young, idealistic people, she had taught “Advanced Reading and Writing” to a small group of older women. Their entire “school” was a secondhand trailer in back of a local black college; the books they used were written by the teachers and students themselves. The women had a desire for learning that was exciting; the town, however, was dull; its main attraction a grimy, only recently desegregated movie theater with an abandoned appreciation for Burt Reynolds. Irene daydreamed incessantly of hilly streets, cable cars, Chinatown and Rice-o-Roni. Of redwood forests and the Pacific Ocean.
She decided to visit a friend from her New York college days, Anastasia Green. Anastasia now lived in San Francisco, and frequently wrote, inviting her to visit, should she ever make it to that fabled city.
Anastasia was tall and willowy, with cautious, smoky topaz eyes, hair the color of unpolished brass, and a mouth that seemed much smaller than her teeth, so that when she smiled the planes of her face shifted radically to accommodate a sudden angularity in a face that had seemed round. This irregularity in her features was not grotesque, but charming, and gave to Anastasia’s face a humor she herself did not possess.
While Irene knew her on the East Coast, Anastasia went through two complete external changes: The first was from the “Southern Innocent” (she was from Pine Lake, Arkansas), wide-eyed, blushing, absurdly trusting—but not really—to the New York SuperVamp. Tall boots, of course, slickly bobbed blackened hair, heavily made-up eyes (brown and black make-up, a rather Egyptian effect), against skin that by contrast seemed to have been dusted with rice powder, and, in fact, had been. The second change was to a sort of Faye Dunaway, whom she—with her peculiar smile—somewhat resembled, or what she referred to as her “little English schoolboy look.” Hair lightened and cropped close to her (it was now revealed) round little head, bangs down to her eyebrows, skirts up to her ass. And always a swinging purse and absurd snub-toed shoes. In this getup she didn’t walk, she tripped along, and one was not surprised if, when she passed trippingly by, “Eleanor Rigby” popped into mind.
It was while in this disguise that she fell in love with a man named Galen, who was as addicted to the theater as Anastasia was to travel. After college, Galen left the East Coast for the West, where he hoped to become an actor. He convinced Anastasia to come along. From letters, Irene knew that Galen had dropped out of the picture, so to speak, while doing TV commercials in Los Angeles. Anastasia, already rinsing her hair in vinegar and staying out in the sun, had pressed north.
TV documentaries about the flower children of the sixties carried many shots of people who