You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [62]
Irene didn’t doubt it for a moment.
Anastasia had taken Irene’s arm and stood close beside her while Native Alaskan educators pressed her hand warmly. “So good to see you!” they said, as if they had been waiting for her. “So happy you could come all this way up from the Lower 48!”
“When I heard you were coming, and that it would be a conference about Natives, I thought I’d be the only white chick around. But I see I’m not.”
Irene did not blink at this.
And now they sat at the bar, with its famous absent view of Mt. McKinley. Irene felt drained from the panel discussion. Thinking of the woman in the aviator glasses, she was also depressed. She finished her first Irish whiskey and ordered another. When she looked at Anastasia, whose hair was now in braids and held by leather thongs with feathers, and whose eyes literally danced, it was as if Anastasia were receding, receding, receding, into the blurred landscape. But this was a momentary and maudlin vision, which Irene had another gulp of her drink to squelch.
“So,” she said, “nobody’s anything.”
“I heard you were happily married,” said Anastasia, ignoring Irene’s remark.
“We were happy. I’m almost sure we were happy. You know happiness is being able to assume you are happy. Anyway, he left me.”
“I love being white,” Anastasia said, plunging in and screwing up her face in a mock excess of delight. “Ask me why.”
“Why?” said Irene.
“Because as a black person I had no sense of humor!” She laughed, and her funny face and her laughter meshed.
“I can’t deny that,” said Irene. “Besides, passing for white is so—so—colorful.” She meant, really, that it was passé.
“No, no,” said Anastasia. “That’s Imitation of Life—and what was that other tacky movie? Pinky? Not even a Jessie Fauset or a Nella Larsen novel, where being white is such a to-do about what colors now look good against your skin. There were shades of Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man in the beginning—you know, could a potentially great black woman find happiness as a mediocre white one?—but that passed.” She laughed. “Anyway, I’m not passing; I’m just through trying to correct other people’s opinion.”
Irene, staring directly into Anastasia’s eyes, felt the strangest sensation. Those eyes now looked out of a white person. What did that mean?
“I loved being married,” said Irene, lowering her gaze to her glass. “I was finally calm enough to look about me without panic.” She shrugged. For years of her marriage there had been so little panic she’d fallen asleep. So that if you asked her what she did between 1965 and 1968, she would probably recall only that those three years amounted to one day, really, and that on that day one of her neighbors had invited her to go fishing, and she had declined.
“That’s it,” said Anastasia, “sort of. When you’re not living with someone it’s like all sides of you are exposed at once. Right? But when you are living with someone at least one side of you is covered. Panic can still strike, but not on that one side.” She wanted to emphasize how this was especially true in the case of race. That, having put race aside as a cause of concern, she could now concentrate on whatever assaults were in store for the other facets of herself. But of course Irene would say she had not put aside race, only chosen a different side of it to live on. Blacks who had not had her experience were rarely inclined to appreciate her point of view; though she understood this, she still thought it spoke of limitation on their part.
“What happened to Source, Peace and Calm, Bliss and Co.—South America? Do you have the baby here with you?” Irene asked, looking about the bar as if she expected to see Bliss crawling under the tables in their direction.
Anastasia looked glum. Her cheeks, Irene noticed, sagged when she wasn’t smiling. But this was no worse than what the years had done to Irene’s own face.
Anastasia had switched to Mai Tais; in her mind, Alaska and Hawaii were very close—they were so distant from the other forty-eight states. She said, sullenly, taking a sip from her small,