By the Light of My Father's Smile by Alice Walker

Author:Alice Walker [Walker, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780613212762
Publisher: San Val
Published: 1998-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Mad Dog Behavior

When I woke up, groggy, in the hospital, I did not care about anything. I thought about my students. What sense did it make that I taught them for three or four years of their lives and they still did not know me? That I did not know them? That I might meet their parents only once or twice in my life? Perhaps at their phony-feeling graduation. How stupid this seemed to me. I helped them on their mad rush into adulthood and into a world that was steadily turning to shit. Had always been shit. Money was the god of the culture into which they were born, and would live to hustle and die; I wanted no part of it.

I thought about my mother. When she was dying I used to visit and read to her. She would doze, and then I would stop reading and stare at her face. I was trying to remember how it felt to love her. For I ceased loving her when she abandoned me. There were moments of tenderness between us, moments of affection. But I would not have taken a bullet for her, as I would have done before she fucked herself back under my daddy’s thumb. The cancer ravaged her, made her lose the luscious body she’d worn like a flag. A flag that said: Nation of Woman Representative. Kneel, Male. And yet, even as she lay dying, no body at all left to speak of, there sat my father, his hands cupping her flat breasts, his hands cupping her heels, his hands cupping her bony knees. His hands cupping her ass. It infuriated me.

How had I lost out? Was it, as Susannah had once said to me, that I had hardened my heart so successfully it no longer functioned, no matter how I might have wanted it to? And is this what happened when someone broke your heart and you insisted on leaving it that way, just to punish them?

The doctor came into the room while I was thinking of Susannah.

How are you feeling, Ms. Robinson? he asked, glancing at my chart.

He looked like a child playing doctor.

You should at least draw on a mustache, I said.

What? he asked.

You look so young, I said.

I’m thirty, he said. Old enough to know what to do.

Be serious, I said.

He looked at me quizzically.

Nobody’s ever old enough to know what to do.

He laughed.

How’s my sister? I asked.

Well, you didn’t quite bite her arm off, he said. But you reached the bone. I’ve never seen anything like it, he said.

Mad Dog behavior, I said.

The other Ms. Robinson, your sister, explained that you were under stress, that you’d just lost a loved one.

Manuelito. I had not been thinking of him. Now I thought about the way his back glistened in the water when we played in the water of our mountains’ shallow streams. The elegant neatness of his waist. His long, mostly straight, slightly wavy hair. His honest eyes. Sweet nose. White teeth. This fucking country had blown all of that up, I thought.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.