You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [55]
“It’s great to see you!” the two women said almost in unison, embracing and smiling, amid the anxious and harried looking travelers at the airport.
With Anastasia were a young man, a young woman, and their baby. The baby’s name was very long, Sanskrit-derived, and, translated into English, meant Bliss. The man’s name, arrived at in the same fashion, meant Calm, and the woman’s name, Peace. All three adults giggled easily and at everything, absent-mindedly fingering small silver spoons that hung around their necks.
Not knowing what the spoon signified, Irene was amused by it. Unisex jewelry, she thought, had finally hit the mark.
There was a van, painted all the colors of the rainbow, so that simply riding along felt vivid. The adults were soon chanting and singing; the baby was kicking and cooing. They crossed merrily over the bridge into Marin, to which Anastasia and her friends had recently moved. From there they would “strike” day trips into San Francisco.
“Source would love Irene,” said Peace or Calm.
“He sure would!” Anastasia agreed, turning to give Irene’s arm a squeeze. “I’ve told them you’re one of the least rigid people I know.”
Happy as Irene was whenever there were strange creatures to observe or meet, she did not hesitate—silently, of course—to agree. Who would not love me? was her attitude. The trauma of having lost the educational project had not damaged an essential self-saving vanity.
“Who is ‘Source’?” Irene asked languidly, because by now the van was filled with mellow sinsamilla smoke.
“Wait and see,” said Anastasia, mysteriously.
They lived in a large, rambling house on a hillside in Marin. The rooms were light and airy and filled with sunshine, Indian prints, seashells, rocks, paper mobiles, and lacy straw mats. From every window there was a view: the bay, sailboats; Tiburon, across the Bay.
“How do you manage all this?” Irene asked, glancing in a cupboard stacked high with bags of granola.
“Food stamps and relief,” said Anastasia, with a slight shrug. It was the kind of shrug Irene was seeing a lot. There was…dissatisfaction in it; there was also acceptance. Missing—and, suddenly, it seemed to Irene—was defiance.
Bliss and her parents, Calm and Peace, disappeared into a separate part of the house. Anastasia and Irene sat down at the kitchen table.
“In parts of the country,” Irene said in a voice modulated to show this meant nothing whatsoever to her, “the amount of assistance people get is less, by design, than they can live on.”
Anastasia leaned forward, and in an equally nonpartisan tone, said, “It is much better to be on welfare in a rich place than in a poor one. Not only do rich people here dress the way we do—if anything they’re more tattered and less stylish—but they are so rich it delights them to support us in our poverty.”
Irene laughed, dutifully.
“How is your teaching?” asked Anastasia. Like many of Irene’s friends, she never read the newsletter that Irene and her group published, in which they discussed in detail methods of teaching older people, under- and miseducated young people, or what they called among themselves, just as society did, “the Unteachables.” Only they said it with an informed sense of humor, not yet having encountered an absolute “unteachable.”
For a moment, Irene debated with herself whether to respond with more than “okay.” In stories, in literature, such work as she did sounds romantic, as well as idealistic. The reality, day to day, is different. In Irene’s case there was, first of all, the incredible brain-broiling heat of the Southern summer, when the majority of her students—all women in their late forties, fifties and sixties—could attend classes from one to three weeks at a time.