You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [61]
“The good of life is indifference?”
“They released me into Source’s care. They help support him, financially. It works out.”
The baby, hungry, was crying and crawling over the floor. Irene walked over to him and picked him up. His mother flew into the room and snatched him from her arms.
“We try to protect him from bad vibes,” she said.
“Bitch,” said Irene, under her breath, then she turned again to Anastasia, who was trembling from the righteousness of her stand.
“Anastasia,” Irene said, “I didn’t come all this way to criticize your life. I came all this way because mine is lying kaput all around me, remember?” She knew she wasn’t wrong about Source, but what did he matter? she thought. “Perhaps I was wrong about Source. Perhaps you are right to defend him. This is a bad time in my life to have someone like that sprung on me, actually. I was predisposed not to like him; maybe he sensed this.…” She rambled on, but Anastasia was not listening. She imagined Anastasia, Peace and Calm meeting in the dead of night to plan just this scene between them. It seemed to her that only the baby, Bliss, had welcomed her, from the start.
“Your life is what you make it,” Anastasia said, stonily.
“But that’s absurd. Not everyone’s life is what they make it. Some people’s life is what other people make it. I would say this is true of the majority of the people in the world. The women I teach didn’t choose to be illiterate, didn’t choose to be poor.”
“But you chose to teach that kind of people. Why complain?”
“That kind of people?”
“Miserable. Hopeless in this incarnation.”
Irene laughed. “You make me think of Kissinger, who said, ‘This is not Africa’s century.’”
Anastasia did not smile.
“I didn’t mean to complain,” Irene said, humiliated at the thought.
“If you suffer in a place, leave,” Anastasia said with conviction, and, Irene thought, a great deal of smugness.
“If you suffer in a condition?”
Anastasia lifted her spoon.
It was now years later for almost everyone. It was certainly years later for Irene, who was astounded one day to find herself discussing teaching methods with a group of Native American and white women educators in Alaska.
“As soon as I heard you were coming,” said Anastasia, who now lived near Anchorage, “I told my man, ‘I have to go see her; she’s an old friend!’”
They were sitting in a bar that on clear days boasted a perfect view of Mt. McKinley, a hundred miles away. Alas, clear days were apparently rare, and Irene had seen nothing of Alaska’s legendary mountains but their feet. But even these were impressive.
“You’ve forgiven me, I hope, for throwing you out,” said Anastasia.
“Oh, sure,” said Irene. She was looking at the other people in the bar. She liked Alaska. She liked the way the people looked as if they had come, that very month, from someplace else. The damp weather, however, though not cold—as she had expected it to be—made her long for the sun, for fireplaces, for a less penetrable selection of clothing than she’d brought.
Anastasia had snared her directly from the stage, where Irene had sat beside a Native Alaskan woman who talked of the failing eyesight of Alaskans, who were reading print, over long periods, for the first time.
“Native Alaskans always took perfect vision for granted,” the woman had said. “Then comes this reading. This television. This shopping where everything is labeled with words for more reading. Everybody needs glasses now to see anything at all.” She was wearing huge aviator glasses with purple lenses. She yanked them off and blinked at the audience. It was a long pause, during which she dropped the assertive stance of her statement and seemed, somewhere inside herself, to fold. “There’s a basic distrust maybe,” she continued softly, “about acquiring knowledge in a way that can make you blind. This has to be behind many of our older people