by Alice Walker
She suffered the pressure of his head as long as she could.
“Have a vasectomy,” she said, “or stay in the guest room. Nothing is going to touch me anymore that isn’t harmless.”
He smoothed her thick hair with his hand. “We’ll talk about it,” he said, as if that was not what they were doing. “We’ll see. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of things.”
She had forgotten that the third Sunday in June, the following day, was the fifth memorial observance for Holly Monroe, who had been shot down on her way home from her high-school graduation ceremony five years before. Imani always went to these memorials. She liked the reassurance that her people had long memories, and that those people who fell in struggle or innocence were not forgotten. She was, of course, too weak to go. She was dizzy and still losing blood. The white lawgivers attempted to get around assassination—which Imani considered extreme abortion—by saying the victim provoked it (there had been some difficulty saying this about Holly Monroe, but they had tried) but were antiabortionist to a man. Imani thought of this as she resolutely showered and washed her hair.
Clarence had installed central air conditioning their second year in the house. Imani had at first objected. “I want to smell the trees, the flowers, the natural air!” she cried. But the first summer of 110-degree heat had cured her of giving a damn about any of that. Now she wanted to be cool. As much as she loved trees, on a hot day she would have sawed through a forest to get to an air conditioner.
In fairness to him, she had to admit he asked her if she thought she was well enough to go. But even to be asked annoyed her. She was not one to let her own troubles prevent her from showing proper respect and remembrance toward the dead, although she understood perfectly well that once dead, the dead do not exist. So respect, remembrance was for herself, and today herself needed rest. There was something mad about her refusal to rest, and she felt it as she tottered about getting Clarice dressed. But she did not stop. She ran a bath, plopped the child in it, scrubbed her plump body on her knees, arms straining over the tub awkwardly in a way that made her stomach hurt—but not yet her uterus—dried her hair, lifted her out and dried the rest of her on the kitchen table.
“You are going to remember as long as you live what kind of people they are,” she said to the child, who, gurgling and cooing, looked into her mother’s stern face with light-hearted fixation.
“You are going to hear the music,” Imani said. “The music they’ve tried to kill. The music they try to steal.” She felt feverish and was aware she was muttering. She didn’t care.
“They think they can kill a continent—people, trees, buffalo—and then fly off to the moon and just forget about it. But you and me, we’re going to remember the people, the trees and the fucking buffalo. Goddammit.”
“Buffwoe,” said the child, hitting at her mother’s face with a spoon.
She placed the baby on a blanket in the living room and turned to see her husband’s eyes, full of pity, on her. She wore pert green velvet slippers and a lovely sea green robe. Her body was bent within it. A reluctant tear formed beneath his gaze.
“Sometimes I look at you and I wonder ‘What is this man doing in my house?’”
This had started as a joke between them. Her aim had been never to marry, but to take in lovers who could be sent home at dawn, freeing her to work and ramble.
“I’m here because you love me,” was the traditional answer. But Clarence faltered, meeting her eyes, and Imani turned away.
It was a hundred degrees by ten o’clock. By eleven, when the memorial service began, it would be ten degrees hotter. Imani staggered from the heat. When she sat in the car she had to clench her teeth against the dizziness until the motor prodded the air conditioning to envelop them in coolness. A dull ache started in her uterus.
The church was not of course air conditioned. It was authentic Primitive Baptist in every sense.
Like the four previous memorials this one was designed by Holly Monroe’s classmates. All twenty-five of whom—fat and thin—managed to look like the dead girl. Imani had never seen Holly Monroe, though there were always photographs of her dominating the pulpit of this church where she had been baptized and where she had sung in the choir—and to her, every black girl of a certain vulnerable age was Holly Monroe. And an even deeper truth was that Holly Monroe was herself. Herself shot down, aborted on the eve of becoming herself.
She was prepared to cry and to do so with abandon. But she did not. She clenched her teeth against the steadily increasing pain and her tears were instantly blotted by the heat.
Mayor Carswell had been waiting for Clarence in the vestibule of the church, mopping his plumply jowled face with a voluminous handkerchief and holding court among half a dozen young men and women who listened to him with awe. Imani exchanged greetings with the mayor, he ritualistically kissed her on the cheek, and kissed Clarice on the cheek, but his rather heat-glazed eye was already fastened on her husband. The two men huddled in a corner away from the awed young group. Away from Imani and Clarice, who passed hesitantly, waiting to be joined or to be called back, into the church.
There was a quarter hour’s worth of music.
“Holly Monroe was five feet, three inches tall, and weighed one hundred and eleven pounds,” her best friend said, not reading from notes, but talking to each person in the audience. “She was a stubborn, loyal Aries, the best kind of friend to have. She had black kinky hair that she experimented with a lot. She was exactly the color of this oak church pew in the summer; in the winter she was the color [pointing up] of this heart pine ceiling. She loved green. She did not like lavender because she said she also didn’t like pink. She had brown eyes and wore glasses, except when she was meeting someone for the first time. She had a sort of rounded nose. She had beautiful large teeth, but her lips were always chapped so she didn’t smile as much as she might have if she’d ever gotten used to carrying Chap Stick. She had elegant feet.
“Her favorite church song was ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.’ Her favorite other kind of song was ‘I Can’t Help Myself—I Love You and Nobody Else.’ She was often late for choir rehearsal though she loved to sing. She made the dress she wore to her graduation in Home Ec. She hated Home Ec.…”
Imani was aware that the sound of low, murmurous voices had been the background for this statement all along. Everything was quiet around her, even Clarice sat up straight, absorbed by the simple friendliness of the young woman’s voice. All of Holly Monroe’s classmates and friends in the choir wore vivid green. Imani imagined Clarice entranced by the brilliant, swaying color as by a field of swaying corn.
Lifting the child, her uterus burning, and perspiration already a stream down her back, Imani tiptoed to the door. Clarence and the mayor were still deep in conversation. She heard “board meeting…aldermen…city council.” She beckoned to Clarence.
“Your voices are carrying!” she hissed.
She meant: How dare you not come inside.
They did not. Clarence raised his head, looked at her, and shrugged his shoulders helplessly. Then, turning, with the abstracted air of priests, the two men moved slowly toward the outer door, and into the churchyard, coming to stand some distance from the church beneath a large oak tree. There they remained throughout the service.
Two years later, Clarence was furious with her: What is the matter with you? he asked. You never want me to touch you. You told me to sleep in the guest room and I did. You told me to have a vasectomy I didn’t want and I did. (Here, there was a sob of hatred for her somewhere in the anger, the humiliation: he thought of himself as a eunuch, and blamed her.)
She was not merely frigid, she was remote.
She had been amazed after they left the church that the anger she’d felt watching Clarence and the mayor turn away from the Holly Monroe memorial did not prevent her accepting a ride home with him. A month later it did not prevent her smiling on him fondly. Did not prevent a trip to Bermuda, a few blissful days of v
ery good sex on a deserted beach screened by trees. Did not prevent her listening to his mother’s stories of Clarence’s youth as though she would treasure them forever.
And yet. From that moment in the heat at the church door, she had uncoupled herself from him, in a separation that made him, except occasionally, little more than a stranger.
And he had not felt it, had not known.
“What have I done?” he asked, all the tenderness in his voice breaking over her. She smiled a nervous smile at him, which he interpreted as derision—so far apart had they drifted.
They had discussed the episode at the church many times. Mayor Carswell—whom they never saw anymore—was now a model mayor, with wide biracial support in his campaign for the legislature. Neither could easily recall him, though television frequently brought him into the house.
“It was so important that I help the mayor!” said Clarence. “He was our first!”
Imani understood this perfectly well, but it sounded humorous to her. When she smiled, he was offended.
She had known the moment she left the marriage, the exact second. But apparently that moment had left no perceptible mark.
They argued, she smiled, they scowled, blamed and cried—as she packed.
Each of them almost recalled out loud that about this time of the year their aborted child would have been a troublesome, “terrible” two-year-old, a great burden on its mother, whose health was by now in excellent shape, each wanted to think aloud that the marriage would have deteriorated anyway, because of that.
Porn
LIKE MANY THOUGHTFUL WOMEN of the seventies, she had decided women were far more interesting than men. But, again like most thoughtful women, she rarely admitted this aloud. Besides, again like her contemporaries, she maintained a close connection with a man.
It was a sexual connection.
They had met in Tanzania when it was still Tanganyika; she was with an international group of students interested in health care in socialist African countries; he with an American group intent upon building schools. They met. Liked each other. Wrote five or six letters over the next seven years. Married other people. Had children. Lived in different cities. Divorced. Met again to discover they now shared a city and lived barely three miles apart.
A strong bond between them was that they respected their former spouses and supported their children. They had each arranged a joint custody settlement and many of their favorite outings were amid a clash of children. Still, her primary interest in him was sexual. It was not that she did not respect his mind; she did. It was a fine mind. More scientific than hers, more given to abstractions. But also a mind curious about nature and the hidden workings of things (it was probably this, she thought, that made him such a good lover) and she enjoyed following his thoughts about the distances of stars and whole galaxies from the earth, the difference between low clouds and high fog, and the complex survival mechanisms of the snail.
But sex together was incredibly good: like conversation with her women friends, who were never abstract, rarely distant enough from nature to be critical in their appraisal of it, and whose own mechanisms for survival were hauled out in discussion for all to see. The touch of his fingers—sensitive, wise, exploring the furthest reaches of sensation—were like the tongues of women, talking, questing, searching for the true place, the place which, when touched, has no choice but to respond.
She was aflame with desire for him.
On those evenings when all the children were with their other parents, he would arrive at the apartment at seven. They would walk hand in hand to a Chinese restaurant a mile away. They would laugh and drink and eat and touch hands and knees over and under the table. They would come home. Smoke a joint. He would put music on. She would run water in the tub with lots of bubbles. In the bath they would lick and suck each other, in blissful delight. They would admire the rich candle glow on their wet, delectably earth-toned skins. Sniff the incense—the odor of sandal and redwood. He would carry her in to bed.
Music. Emotion. Sensation. Presence.
Satisfaction like rivers
flowing and silver.
On the basis of their sexual passion they built the friendship that sustained them through the outings with their collective children, through his loss of a job (temporarily), through her writer’s block (she worked as a free-lance journalist), through her bouts of frustration and boredom when she perceived that, in conversation, he could only be scientific, only be abstract, and she was, because of her intrepid, garrulous women friends—whom she continued frequently, and often in desperation, to see—used to so much more.
In short, they had devised an almost perfect arrangement.
One morning at six o’clock they were making “morning love.” “Morning love” was relaxed, clearheaded. Fresh. No music but the birds and cars starting. No dope.
They came within seconds of each other.
This inspired him. He thought they could come together.
She was sated, indifferent, didn’t wish to think about the strain.
But then he said: “Did I ever show you [he knew he hadn’t] my porn collection?”
“What could it be?” she inevitably wondered. Hooked.
His hands are cupping her ass. His fingers like warm grass or warm and supple vines. One thumb—she fancies she feels the whorled print—makes a circle in the wetness of her anus. She shivers. His tongue gently laps her vulva as it enters her, his top lip caressing the clitoris. For five minutes she is moving along as usual. Blissed out, she thinks to herself. Then she stops.
“What have you got?” she has asked him.
“This,” he replied. “And this.”
A gorgeous black woman who looks like her friend Fannie has a good friend (white boy from her hometown down South) who is basically gay. Though—. “Fannie” and let us call him “Fred” pick up a hick tourist in a bar. They both dig him, the caption says. He is not gorgeous. He is short, pasty, dirty blond. Slightly cross-eyed. In fact, looks retarded. Fred looks very much the same. “Fannie” invites them to her place where without holding hands or eating or bathing or putting on music, they strip and begin to fondle each other. “Fannie” looks amused as they take turns licking and sucking her. She smiles benignly as they do the same things to each other.…
“And this.”
A young blonde girl from Minnesota [probably kidnapped, she thinks, reading] is far from home in New York, lonely and very horny. She is befriended by two of the blackest men on the East Coast. (They had been fighting outside a bar and she had stopped them by flinging her naive white self into the fray.) In their gratitude for her peacemaking they take her to their place and do everything they can think of to her. She grinning liberally the whole time. Finally they make a sandwich of her: one filling the anus and the other the vagina, so that all that is visible of her body between them is a sliver of white thighs. [And we see that these two pugilists have finally come together on something.]
She is sitting with her back against the headboard of the bed so that her breasts hang down. This increases sensation in her already very aroused nipples. He crawls up to her on all fours like a gentle but ravenous bear and begins to nuzzle her. He nuzzles and nuzzles until her nipples virtually aim themselves at him. He takes one into his mouth. She begins to flow.
But the flow stops.
Once he said to her: “I could be turned on by bondage.” No, he said “by ‘a little light bondage.’” She had told him of a fantasy in which she lay helpless, bound, waiting for the pleasure worse than death.
There is no plot this time. No story of an improbable friendship down South, no goldilocks from the Midwestern plains. Just page after page of women: yellow, red, white, brown, black [she had let him tie her up very loosely once; it was not like her fantasy at all. She had wanted to hold him, caress him, snuggle and cuddle] bound, often gagged. Their legs open. Forced to their knees.
He is massaging the back of her neck, her shoulders. Her buttocks
. The backs of her thighs. She has bent over a hot typewriter all day and is tired. She sinks into the feeling of being desired and pampered. Valued. Loved. Soon she is completely restored. Alert. She decides to make love to him. She turns over. She cradles his head in her arms. Kisses his forehead. His eyes. Massages his scalp with her fingers. Buries her nose in his neck. Kisses his neck. Caresses his chest. Flicks his nipples, back and forth, with her tongue. Slowly she moves down his body. His penis (which he thinks should not be called “penis”—“a white boy’s word”; he prefers “cock”) is standing. She takes it—she is on her knees—into her mouth. She gags.
The long-term accommodation that protects marriage and other such relationships is, she knows, forgetfulness. She will forget what turns him on.
“No, no,” he says, very sorry he has shown her his collection; in fact, vowing passionately to throw it away. “The point is for you to be turned on by it too!”
She thinks of the lovely black girl—whom she actually thinks of as her friend Fannie—and is horrified. What is Fannie doing in such company? she wonders. She panics as he is entering her. Wait! she says, and races to the phone.
The phone rings and rings.
Her friend Fannie is an out-of-work saleswoman. She is also a lesbian. She proceeds to write in her head a real story about Fannie based on what she knows. Her lover at work on her body the whole time.
Fannie and Laura share a tiny loft apartment. They almost never make love. Not because they are not loving—they do a lot of caressing and soothing—but they are so guilty about what they feel that sexuality has more or less dried up. [She feels her own juices drying up at this thought.]
They have both been out of work for a long time. Laura’s mother is sick. Fannie’s young brother has entered Howard University. There is only Fannie to send him money for books, clothes and entertainment. Fannie is very pretty but basically unskilled in anything but selling, and salespersons by the thousands have been laid off in the recession. Unemployment is not enough.
