Free The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart by Alice Walker Page B

sister’s face. She didn’t need to speak. And it was a lonely feeling that she had. For Barbara was right. Aunt Lily too. And she could no more stop the meter running than she could stop her breath. An odd look across the room fifteen years ago still held the power to make her wonder about it, try to “decipher” or at least understand it. This was her curse: never to be able to forget, truly, but only to appear to forget. And then to record what she could not forget.
    Suddenly, in her loneliness, she laughed.
    “He was a recorder with his eyes,” she said, under her breath. For it seemed to her she’d penetrated her grandfather’s serenity, his frequent silences. The meter had ticked in him too; he too was all attentiveness. But for him that had had to be enough;she’d rarely seen him with a pencil in his hand; she thought he’d only had one or two years of school. She imagined him “writing” stories during his long silences merely by thinking them, not embarrassing other people with them, as she did.
    She had been obsessed by this old man whom she so definitely resembled. And now, perhaps, she knew why.
    We were kindred spirits, she thought, as she sat, one old dusty fedora on her head, the other in her lap, on the plane home. But in a lot of ways, before I knew him, he was a jerk.
    She thought of Ivan. For it was something both of them had said often about their relationship: that though he was white and she was black they were in fact kindred spirits. And she had thought so, until the divorce, after which his spirit became as unfathomable to her as her grandfather’s would have been before she knew him. But perhaps Ivan, too, was simply acting like a jerk?
    She felt, as she munched dry crackers and cheese the pert stewardess brought, in the very wreckage of her life. She had not really looked at Barbara since that moment in the toilet, when it became clear to her how her sister really perceived her. She knew she would not see Aunt Lily again and that if Aunt Lily died before she herself did she would not go to her funeral. Nor would she ever, ever write about her. She took a huge swallow of ginger ale and tried to drown out the incessant ticking.…
    She stroked the soft felt of her grandfather’s hat, thought of how peculiarly the human brain grows from an almost invisible seed, and how, in this respect, it was rather similar to understanding, a process it engendered. She looked into the shaving mirror and her eyes told her she could bear very little more. Shefelt herself begin to slide into the long silence in which such thoughts would be her sole companions. Maybe she would even find happiness in it.
    But then, just when she was almost gone, Barbara put on their grandfather’s other hat, and reached for her hand.

ORELIA AND JOHN

Olive Oil

    She was busy cooking dinner, a nice ratatouille, chopping and slicing eggplant, zucchini and garlic. George Winston was on the box and the fire crackled in the stove. As she dripped olive oil into a pan a bit of it stuck to her thumb and she absentmindedly used her rather rough forefinger to rub it into the cuticle, which she noticed was also cracked. In fact, she had worked a lot over the last month putting in a winter garden; the weather most days had been mild, but it was also dry and occasionally there had been wind. Hence the extreme dryness of the skin on her hands.
    Thinking of this, puttering about, putting a log on the fire and a pot of water for noodles on the stove, she touched her face, which, along her cheekbones, seemed to rustle it was so dry. Massaging the painfully dry cuticle, she swooped up the bottle of olive oil, sniffed it for freshness, and poured a tablespoonful into her hand. Rubbing her hands together she rubbed the oil allover her neck and face. Then she rubbed it into wrists, arms and legs as well.
    When John came in from splitting wood he sniffed the air hopefully, wanting to enjoy the smell of the ratatouille, one of his favorite