Free Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker

yearn for was sleep.
    On the other hand, there had been an occasional weak moment, which is, after all, all one needs.
    You won’t have it, of course, I said.
    Lisette’s neck, which I referred to sometimes in jest as her thick French neck, grew visibly enlarged. It was the clearest sign of her rage, which she went to great intellectual pains to disguise. It was a stubborn neck, the kind Joan of Arc must have had, and now, looking at me but at the same time rather to one side of me, I saw it and her whole upper body, beneath the sheerness of her white summer dress, flush crimson.
    It is not your affair, she said, knitting furiously, a bead of sweat running toward the corner of her limpid brown eye. In her anger, she looked a bit as I imagined Madame Defarge would have, had someone sat in front of her and blocked her view of the guillotine.
    Not my… I couldn’t finish. I looked at her, speechless.
    Perhaps it isn’t even yours, she said. Perhaps I have a lover, or several, during the months we are apart and you are with your crazy wife in America.
    This was not her usual way of referring to Evelyn. I was hurt by it.
    The silence that fell between us was rendered somehow ridiculous by the energetic droning of her neighbor’s bees, passing in and out of their wooden hives; they made the honey that sweetened our coffee and tea; our empty cups exuded the odor of their work. It was a sound that said so clearly: Life goes on. The pain of it so sure. The sweetness of it so mysterious. It is irrelevant to us that you fight. You might both turn to stone there, and it would only mean our liberation into your garden as well as into our own.
    It is mine, I said at last.
    Yes, she said, putting down her knitting. But it is more mine than yours.
    When? I asked. Unfortunately I remembered no moment between us of special tenderness. On the other hand, generally speaking, tenderness permeated our friendship.
    She shrugged.
    When you were here before, of course. In April. When you came to tell me Tashi had run away from you. Even from your kisses.

LISETTE
    I HAD PETIT P IERRE at home in my grandmother’s bed. My grandmother, Beatrice, who spent her life fighting for the right of French women to vote. The low wooden bed that was built for the house in the century before the last and has never left it. The bed in which my mother was conceived and into which I myself was born. I ate well throughout my pregnancy, and went on long walks all over Paris nearly every day. My father and mother, after overcoming, to a remarkable degree, their normal outrage, racism and shock, showered me with advice and affection. It was recognized, in almost a formal way—“ Alors, nothing can be done!” said my mother, shrugging at last after a bitter bout of tears—that I had inherited the genes of my mother’s mother, who had had affairs, but no children, with Gypsies and Turks and the occasional Palestinian Jew, and, even worse, with penniless artists who could be found living in the literal garret of her tiny house and subsisting, again literally, on jars of jam and crusts of bread.
    I had the most sought-after midwife in France—my competent and funny aunt Marie-Therese, whose radical idea it was that childbirth above all should feel sexy. I listened to nothing but gospel music during my pregnancy, a music quite new to me, and to France, and “It’s a High Way to Heaven” (“…nothing can walk up there, but the pure in heart…”) was playing on the stereo during the birth; the warmth of the singers’ voices a perfect accompaniment to the lively fire in the fireplace. My vulva oiled and massaged to keep my hips open and my vagina fluid, I was orgasmic at the end. Petit Pierre practically slid into the world at the height of my amazement, smiling serenely even before he opened his eyes.
    My aunt placed him on my stomach the moment she lifted him from between my legs, waiting to sever the umbilical cord until he could breathe on his own; and so,