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

first time I found him there.
    June, June, he’d replied, with a bit of a twinkle in his sad eyes, have you no pity?
    No, I said. And have you come to teach me some?
    We did not converse, my father and I, we bantered.
    Over time I came to expect his surprise visits. He would take me out to a restaurant, any restaurant I liked, and he would order anything I wanted. Whatever I did want, I wanted lots of it. And I ate and ate and ate, as he watched the plates and platters pile up on the table in front of us in an embarrassing heap. Watching me eat always seemed to take his own appetite away. And I came to believe that each time he visited me, he actually lost weight.
    It particularly pained him to see me eat with both hands. And so I would sit before him, a drumstick in one hand, a pinch of roast pork in the other, and I would grunt responses to his inquiries of the day.

    Am I responsible for this? he asked one day. But I pretended not to know what he meant, and instead asked for the morsel I had my eye on for dessert: a chocolate eclair.
    We never talked about his distrust of me. His hawklike spying into my child’s personality. We never talked about my fascination with zippers. He had forgotten how it started, if, in fact, he’d ever given it a thought. It was such a small, insignificant thing, and yet how it impacted my life! I said to him once, though: Do you remember that once, the year or so before we went to Mexico, you gave me a little change purse?
    Oh, he said, did I? He brightened. Perhaps at my tone of civility.
    Yes, I said, you did. It was small and round and black, or maybe dark brown. I don’t remember the color, actually, I said, pausing. I was eating a banana split. Some of my students came into the ice cream parlor and I waved to them. My father looked over at them and smiled that courtly smile men of color of a certain agehave perfected. It crushed something in me sometimes to acknowledge how handsome my father was. To know that straight women adored him and gay men hopelessly drooled. From years of spying I knew he was a great lover; he had that incredibly sexy humbleness that had made my mother delight in turning him on. To change my mother’s mind, he was never embarrassed to get down on his knees. To beg. Begging, I’d once overheard him tell another man, actually lit up the attractiveness of a desperate lover’s face! For him, it worked. My parents were the kind of lovers who thought of making love in terms not of hours but of days.
    My voice became bitter. It was a small round purse, I continued, as my father frowned, trying to recall it. And at first I couldn’t figure out what it was. You laughed at the look on my face. And then I caught just a glimpse of something gold, something shiny. And I kept turning the little purse about, trying to get to the thing that glinted in the light. And at last you took it from me and you showed me that the little purse had a golden, hidden zipper!
    My father smiled.
    And you showed me how to open the little purse, and stayed with me while I introduced the wonder of the little purse to Mother and to Susannah. Who thought it was just as wonderful as I did.
    My father smiled still. He did not remember his gift, however.
    I sighed, into the last of my dessert.
    And then, I said, we were off to Mexico. Everything seemed suddenly mad. There were all those boxes to pack and then the movers came and then we were all crammed into the car, and then there was that interminable drive, with you and Mother talking about being anthropologists but having to pretend to bepreacher folk. It was all very confusing. But the point was, for me, not simply that I was losing the only home I’d ever known, but that somehow, in the turmoil of leaving, I had lost the little round purse.
    I waited to see if anything sank in. My father asked the waiter for coffee, decaffeinated. Nothing had.
    Since that time, I said, I have been fascinated with