The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart

by Alice Walker

  That’s the great thing about Jason, said Suni, remembering her marriage. You could finish your stuff with him.

  It is a good thing, isn’t it? I have had lovers and friends you couldn’t finish anything with. Old shit just kept hanging and hanging. She made a wry face at this repugnant description.

  Suni made a disgusted sound.

  The first time I saw Gurumayi I fell in love with her, she said. She was so beautiful, and so young! She looked like a girl.

  I never knew there were women gurus, said Anne.

  Neither did I, said Suni. But when I saw her, I thought: Of course. How natural. For sure I wouldn’t have been as interested in listening to a man. And she’s teaching me so much about what’s important. Happiness. Compassion. Ecology of the soul. How meditation is as necessary as changing your bed linen and flossing.

  I can’t believe how life keeps pulling back the veil! said Anne.

  What’s his name? asked Suni.

  Adam, of course, said Anne, laughing.

  What’s so funny? asked Suni.

  It’s just perfect, that after all these years Life sends me a man to love who doesn’t seem to have any kind of baggage. It isn’t sexual between us, it isn’t romantic, he doesn’t need me to provide housing. He rides a bicycle everywhere. In a way, he feels like my first man.

  Is he gay? asked Suni.

  I’ve no idea, said Anne. He’s certainly fun. I’ve danced more with Adam than I’ve danced with anyone in my whole life. Listened to more music. Gone on more bike rides. Sometimes I feel so happy with him I have to ask myself: How did this happen? What does it mean?

  You should see a psychic, said Suni.

  There was a long pause while both women concentrated on the traffic that swirled around them and the cozily lit shops lining San Pablo Avenue.

  It wasn’t as mysterious as I’d thought, said Anne, almost under her breath. She wasn’t sure she should say this to Suni, who, in the old days, according anyway to Jason, had taken a dim view of things supernatural. No. I believe Adam and I have known each other a long time. Maybe always. That he is my soul’s recognition of a child I aborted twenty-five years ago.

  Really, said Suni, interested.

  Yes, said Anne. I had the longest talk with the spirit of that child, after I let it go. I didn’t know enough and was too scared and desperate anyway to talk to it before I let it go. I was barely out of my teens. Quite ignorant. But over the years, as I’ve understood more, I’ve wanted to connect with it. Not so much to apologize, but to explain my terrified and impoverished circumstances, the fact that I was abandoned by his father, who was also young and scared, and to express my grief and love. He had a beautiful little spirit. I have imagined him in every stage as he was growing, or would have been growing, up. He would have been named Adam, too.

  Something serious is going on in the Universe, said Suni, thoughtfully.

  Yes, said Anne. And one of the most serious things for me has been the understanding that the Universe is not that interested in punishing us. Every move we make is simply part of its reflection.

  I’d always heard “You must be careful what you ask for,” said Suni. But I didn’t understand it, except, maybe, negatively. But really, Life is definitely open to giving you whatever you sincerely ask for. Though maybe not in a form you can immediately recognize it in.

  You know, she said, how I am always collecting things that I find on the ground?

  Yes, said Anne. That’s an image of you that stays with anyone who’s known you for long.

  Ah, yes, said Suni. Jason used to make me put shells back in the ocean, after I’d collected so many you could barely find a spot to put your coffee cup in our house. He said it was very white. Collecting. Grabbing. Hoarding. Leaving the earth bare. She shuddered. It was a hard thing to have a black man say to me, even if he was my husband.

  Anne was quiet. It had started to rain. The swish of the wipers seemed sudden and loud. She was glad she’d gotten up the nerve to call Suni, after all these years, and pleased that Suni had agreed to see her. She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was an incomparable richness in it.

  So I started to think about it, and to limit my grabbing. I learned to find things, beautiful things, and not need to take them home. And then, recently, I’ve wanted to find a shark’s tooth. And every day on my walk along the beach I’ve looked for one. Now mind you, the shark’s tooth I had in mind was perfect: big, yellow, sharp. A majestic shark’s tooth.

  And what did you find? asked Anne, laughing.

  The most gnarly, rat’s ass of a shark’s tooth one could imagine. She laughed. But it was a shark’s tooth.

  And what did you do with it? asked Anne. Fling it back?

  Not on your life, said Suni, bringing the blunted, dark old thing from under her jacket, where it hung around her neck from a golden chain. If this is the shark’s tooth Life wants me to have, then by golly, this is the shark’s tooth I bloody well want!

  Anne felt very close to Suni in this moment. She reached over and clasped her hand. Suni squeezed her fingers absentmindedly, but warmly, still laughing.

  Some people nowadays try to make women feel guilty for having had abortions, Anne said finally. They claim the aborted fetuses are wrathful and want to harm the women who aborted them. The spirit of my child has felt just the opposite. I’ve felt his yearning to comfort me, to love and cherish me. To make me smile.

  You think Adam sent Adam! said Suni.

  I do, said Anne. Or rather, I think Life sent Adam. And why would Life do that? Send me a delightful young male spirit that I instantly recognized? Because Life was out there preparing such a Being for Its own purpose. But because I can appreciate what Life created, and sincerely grieved its absence in my life, I get to enjoy it when Life, drylongso, just doing Its Thang, shoots it my way.

  What has Grandma had to say about it? asked Suni.

  Grandma is thrilled, she said, as they parked in the ashram parking lot. Grandma and I both love to dance.

  THIS IS HOW

  IT HAPPENED

  This Is How It Happened

  This is how it happened. After many years of being happier than anyone we knew, which worried me, my partner of a dozen years and I broke up. I still loved him, in a deeply familial way, but the moments of palpable deadness occurring with ever greater frequency in our relationship warned me we’d reached the end of our mutual growth. How to end it? How to get away?

  My old friend Marissa, with whom I’d been infatuated years ago in Brooklyn, came to San Francisco for a visit. She was a dyke, pure and strange, and I could never see her without a certain amount of awe. She was the most beautiful of women, shapely and brown, but she could also wire houses and fix cars. All the while speaking in the softest of voices and never showing any of her innate wildness until left alone on the dance floor. She immediately caused the other dancers to disappear and the dance floor itself to retreat until it seemed to be in a forest somewhere and the five thousand or so years of a lackluster patriarchy fairly forgotten.

  We had met while I was in a marriage with a decent, honorable man who had not danced in six or seven years, and she was living with a woman who told her what to eat, think and wear. I didn’t know this when we met, of course. Because she was an electrician and earned her own living I found her strong, independent, free. In retrospect we decided, once we’d been separated for some years from our earlier partners, we’d been infatuated with the image of each other that we needed to help us flee.

  “I thought you always knew exactly what you were doing,” she said. “To have married someone nice to support you while you perfected your craft as an artist. To have had children with someone who supported you and them. Oh,” she continued, “the list was long.”

  I was amazed. “It was all instinct,” I said. “I had seen so many women married to men who squashed their development. Any hint of such a personality turned me off. And of course,” I said,
“I never seriously considered women.” Nor had I understood I could.

  “Well,” she said, “you wouldn’t have done any better with the one I found. Libby is just the man her father was. Domineering, bossy, a real pain in the neck.” She sighed. “And after the first couple of years, no sex.”

  “No sex?” How could sexy Marissa not be having sex?

  Marissa shrugged. “It’s a curious thing to encounter the father of your woman leering out at you. Which is what happened when Libby drank. She’d forget we’d argued and that I’d been humiliated over some outrageous behavior of hers. She’d get sentimental in her drunkenness and want to make love. By force if necessary. I was repelled.”

  I too had enjoyed making love with Tripper for many years. Then it seemed to me my sexual rhythm was broken. I no longer experienced any periods of horniness, as I had earlier in my life. Eventually I realized it was because over time Tripper’s sexual needs set the times of love’s occasions. I was never able to say no, but my body did. It withheld its pleasure, since its own desire was not permitted to set the pattern of celebration and release.

  Why didn’t either of us speak up? Marissa and I often asked each other. We agreed that we’d tried, but habits, once formed, had proved hard to break, and retreat and silence had offered a spuriously virtuous comfort. Our mothers’ behavior, probably, copied while we were very young, too early to recognize it for the depression it was.

  The week I left Tripper he was still interested in making love to me, and suggested a “good-bye fuck” even though my body had not for many months expressed the slightest desire. In fact, it had expressed just the opposite, with its pancake-flat nipples and a vulva so dry I’d thought I’d prematurely entered “the change.”

  When Marissa came to pick me up Chung was in the kitchen attempting to repair the toaster. His straight black hair, with the dapper streak of gray on the left side, hung in his eyes, and his somewhat paunchy torso, sans shirt, glistened with sweat. When we’d met I’d practically drooled over his body. I still admired it, but in a more critical way. I loved the fact that he was short, and that when we kissed, we could look squarely into each other’s eyes. Also that my arms reached easily around him—Tripper had been both large and tall—and I could grab a nice handful of his butt. Marissa took a beer from the fridge and sat gap-legged at the table sipping it and watching him struggle with the toaster as long as she could stand it. By the time I was ready to go she’d ripped it from his fingers and declared it dead and therefore inefficient. Chung, who has a sense of humor if not much vitality at this stage in his life, grabbed a beer for himself and was still laughing as we went out of the house.

  I backed my battered pea-green Karman Ghia out of the driveway and then stopped to put down the top. Marissa and I flew down the streets giddy as teenagers, serene as the old friends we were.

  At the dance, as I suspected, Marissa was queen. The best dancers sought her out and she outdanced all of them. It was the kind of dykey joint that still intimidated me. The kind with lots of women in all manner of dress and an obligatory three or four men. I was always wondering about the men. Who were they? Why were they there? Were they bouncers? Were they brothers of some of the women? Lovers of some of the women? Straight? Bisexual? Gay?

  What men? was always Marissa’s response when I asked her about them.

  Tonight as always I sat quietly in a corner hoping not to be approached. Unless it was by a particular woman across the room who attracted me by the sexiness of her dress—I’d discovered I liked femme-looking women, with their low-cut dresses and light, pinky-plum colors. But butches too—like Marissa, who wore tight jeans, a leather jacket and a scarf around her neck—could be almost unbelievably alluring. Marissa would dance with me until my lack of wildness bored her. Then she’d whirl out on the dance floor dancing only with partners who, in their abandon, reminded her of herself. Or, she’d dance alone, a voluptuous brown-skinned woman with dreadlocks to her ass, and everyone watching her imagined her dancing just for them, in silvery moonlight beneath a canopy of ancient trees, naked.

  After sleeping together once or twice why hadn’t we become lovers? I often asked myself. Perhaps because you can’t recall whether it was once or twice, said Marissa, when I queried her. I certainly loved and admired her. Yet she seemed somehow beyond me, freer. I felt I’d never catch up. Her “way” seemed natural to her. I would have to learn it. This frightened, irritated and depressed me. I tried to imagine Marissa in a heterosexual relationship and it made me laugh. I tried to imagine the two of us as a couple and it made me uneasy.

  Sitting in my corner drinking a margarita I was for a moment unaware I’d been watching a woman standing by the door holding a baby in her arms. This was so incongruous—the loud music, the energetic dancing, the drinking and smoking—that I immediately rose and walked over to her, offering her the seat next to mine. She could not come over just yet, she explained, because she was selling some articles of apparel from Guatemala which I now noticed she carried in a large denim bag at her feet. I was shocked by this, I don’t know why. But within minutes I was holding the baby, a fitfully dozing black-eyed boy, who was not an infant but a two-year-old, and she was squatting beside her merchandise where much to my surprise she seemed to make sales by simply rummaging for a particular item in her bag and then briefly flinging it over a cleared spot on the floor. Money changed hands rapidly and soon she’d sold enough colorfully striped cotton trousers, headbands and vests to satisfy her for the evening. Dragging what was left in her bag she hurried over to us. The baby strained against my arms as she approached, and resolutely wriggled off my lap and toddled up to her. When they met, on the fringe of the whirling dancers, who any minute I expected to stomp on him, she smiled down at him and stopped to swing him up in her arms. At that moment the Drifters or some other old group was singing the golden oldie “With Every Beat of My Heart,” and the two of them danced a moment cheek to cheek. Her hair was in short, thick, warrior erect dreadlocks. She was wearing pants that looked like a skirt, and a light blue denim shirt with an open collar. Beneath the shirt was a peach-colored tank. She wore earrings. Bracelets. And on her feet, sturdy brown boots.

  It happened in the moment they were dancing, the child closing his eyes in a swoon of delight. The woman a being I’d never seen before.

  The Brotherhood

  of the Saved

  I did not know what the Brotherhood of the Saved had told her, but I knew they had told her something. She was sitting very straight in the green porch swing, as if prepared to do battle. I suddenly noticed that her eyes, which looked at me shrewdly, were old, and that the light in them was half of what it used to be. She was, otherwise, her usual stout and jaunty self, wearing a neatly ironed housedress and a pair of faded green flip-flops.

  Hello Mama, I said.

  Is that my daughter? she replied, her usual response. Except that now it seemed more of a legitimate question. As if she really wondered.

  It’s me, I said, moving toward her and leaning down to kiss her forehead.

  There were deep wrinkles across her brow. In a moment of vanity I wondered if I would have them when I reached her age. If I ever, in fact, did so.

  We have great genes, she used to say, before mine began to be expressed in a problematic way. We don’t show our age until we die.

  This always made me laugh, though she swore it was true.

  That was before the ozone layer began to disappear, of course. Now we seemed to wrinkle at the same rate as everyone else.

  Pretty hot, isn’t it, I said, taking a seat in the swing beside her.

  It sure is, she said, in the way that Southerners comment on hot weather as if its hotness is a daily surprise.

  How’s the patient? I asked, taking her left arm and beginning to gently manipulate it at the elbow.

  You know, she said, I never would have believed it possible, but every bit of the pain and swelling was gone by the time you left the driveway yesterday.

/>   I smiled, and asked her to make a fist.

  Around here people think a chiropractor is just some kind of quack, she said. Out to get people’s money without doing them any good.

  It works, I said.

  How did you say you found out about it? she asked.

  She always forgot this, no matter how many times I told her.

  I learned the hard way, I said. I was always getting sports injuries.

  Oh, that’s right, she said. Even as a little child you were the one to be falling out of trees.

  That’s how I broke my arm, remember?

  Oh, I remember, all right. She thought about it for a minute. That didn’t stop you from climbing trees, though. It sure didn’t.

  Sitting there beside her, forty-five years old and ready to begin the second half of my life, I wondered why it hadn’t.

  You were willful and stubborn, my mother said, reading my mind.

  I shrugged. I loved trees and I loved a good high view, I said. Still do.

  Um-hum, she said.

  In high school I got banged up a lot, but in college is where I really got creamed.

  They didn’t want girls playing; and especially not playing like a boy.

  I wasn’t playing like a boy. I was playing like myself.

  Too good, she said, grunting.

  So what is the Brotherhood of the Saved saying about me now? I asked.

  She paused. The foot that kept the swing moving was still.

  You really want to know? she asked.

  Yep, I said.

  That you’re a sinner and bound for hell, she said, with a sigh.

  They’ve been saying that for a while, I said. Nothing new they got? I asked.

  They also say that what you do with women is a crime.