You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [66]
She realized that something was shifting, in her talk with Irene. They were still linked together, but it was not, now, the link of race, which had been tenuous in any case, and had not held up. They were simply two women, choosing to live as they liked in the world. She wondered if Irene felt this.
“You were my objective correlative,” said Irene. She struggled over each word, as if she would unmask her own confusion in this matter, or else. “You see, my great fear in college was that I could hardly avoid becoming an ordinary bourgeois success. I was bright, energetic, attractive, with never a thought of failure, no matter what sociologists say. Those students who were destined, within ten years, to know the names of the designers of their shoes and luggage, to vacation in Europe once a year and read two best sellers every five—while doing a piss-poor job of teaching our children—scared the hell out of me. That life, and not the proverbial ‘getting pregnant and dropping out of school,’ represented ‘the fate worse than death.’
“Your dilemma was obvious. You, even objectively speaking, didn’t know who you were. What you were going to do next; which ‘you’ would be the one to survive. At the same time that I condemned you for your lack of commitment to anything I considered useful, I used you as the objectification of my own internal dilemma. In the weirdest way, your confusion made mine seem minor by comparison. For example, I understood that the episode with Source was a short cut, for you, to the kind of harmonious, multiracial community that you could be happy in, and which I also believed possible to create in America. But politically this is a shaky vision. It was, in a way, convenient for me to think how much more shaky your ‘dope & guru’ program was. I was looking toward ‘government’ for help; you were looking to Source. In both cases, it was the wrong direction—any direction that is away from ourselves is the wrong direction.”
“Ah, ah,” said Anastasia, shaking her head from side to side, though the “ah, ah” was affirmative. “I was attracted to you because your destiny seemed so stable. Whatever else, you would remain a black woman. Black women, even the bourgeois successes, don’t desert.”
“Can’t desert. Some of them certainly would if they could.”
Anastasia laughed, as did Irene.
Anastasia now felt smug. Whatever she was, she thought, her child, which she hoped to have someday, would be a Native American, once more and at last at the beginning of things.
“You know,” she said thoughtfully, rising and collecting her things, because although it was still disconcertingly bright outside, it was after midnight, “Source made us use his name as our mantra during meditation, so there’d be no part of our consciousness he was excluded from. But you know how mantras are: at first they sound like someone’s name and you keep getting that person in your mind. But soon the name becomes just a sound. For me, the sound became a longing and then a direction for my life.” She shrugged. “I knew I had to merge this self with something really elemental and stable, or it would shatter and fly away.” She smiled, thinking of the man she loved.
“You’re happy to be going home to him, eh?” said Irene.
“Positively ecstatic,” said Anastasia, beaming.
“Write,” said Irene. “I’ve missed you.”
“You have?” asked Anastasia.
Irene hushed her with a hug that was not an embrace of shoulders; she hugged her whole body, feeling knee against knee, thigh against thigh, breast against breast, neck nestled against neck. She listened to their hearts beating, strong and full of blood.
As they left the bar they passed a group of tourists who were pointing off merrily into the distance. Irene and Anastasia looked in the direction they were pointing and began to smile. They thought they were finally seeing the great elusive