By the Light of My Father's Smile by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

been fucked so hard I intended to stay in bed forever?
    Grinning, she kissed me on the forehead, grimaced at the smell of my hair, and dusted toast crumbs from my chin. Commented on the good fortune we enjoyed in my being someone who only needed to work on Sundays, and then headed, her body fluid as grace, to the door.
    Nothing’s wrong with Daddy, I heard her, through a fog, tell the girls two days later. He’s in bed, reading the Bible.

Inches
    By the time I really looked at the girls again, it seemed they had grown inches in all directions. As though harking back to some unknown ancestral Amazon, both girls were tall enough now to look down on both our heads. It was an unexpected state of affairs that at times puzzled and unnerved me. June especially seemed to take perverse pleasue in gobbling food and, over my protest, being able to hold whatever she was enjoying well above my reach.

Twenty Kisses
    The Greek is wondering what happened to his marriage. He wonders it because he can hear Whitney Houston singing. She is promising to love someone always. Yes, but not that guy, Susannah had said. He is on a boat in the Ionian Sea near the island of Skidiza, where he was born. The sea is, as the brochures say, impossibly blue. Although today it looks green. In a certain light it is turquoise. He remembers my daughter for the oddest reasons. One is that she taught him so much about himself; his history, culture, heritage. Taught him to look at it, in fact. He’d thought it something to dump. To shed like excess baggage in the New World. He’d get ready to heave something overboard—brocaded pillowcases with tassels handmade by a remote grandma, or a faded, tarnished, bent silver spoon he’d eaten from as a baby, and she’d say: No, wait. Let me feel it. Let me have a look at it. He had a trunk of old junk from when he was a boy. Even the trunk looked grotesque in America. Heavy, wooden, obviously made by a clumsy hand. She saw its beauty. To keep him from throwing it out, she bought it from him. Paid a dollar and twenty kisses. Kisses carefully doled out after any disagreement, any quarrel.
    It was she who said the Ancients. Who? he’d asked. And she had laughed, tugging a handful of his wiry locks. The Ancients had no word for blue—which made them stupid, in his opinion—and so they described the Aegean and perhaps the Ionian too as being maroon. Purple. Red, like dark blood.
    And so he thought of her, as the boat headed into the sunset and the water turned to wine, and as he rubbed oil into the back of the starlet he’d pursued since spotting her slinging tofu burgers in a restaurant in Brentwood, on the very far side of North America.
    Susannah had longed to visit Greece, and Skidiza. They’d left New York on a Friday and arrived in his village on Sunday, just as his parents were coming home from church. It was as if they’d changed worlds.
    He was self-conscious about the backwardness of his parents’ home. The gullies in the road leading up to it, the dust in the courtyard, the cracked mud of its whitewashed walls. The humanlike bellowing of the goats, the bray of the ancient (a true Ancient, he joked) donkey. His father’s rough hands, his mother’s fat. Susannah did not seem to notice any of these things, but commented instead on the warmth of his mother’s smile, his father’s tender embrace of his long-wandering son. The way the white walls complemented the golden grass, the rows of olive trees.
    The food was delicious, as it had always been. Grilled lamb. A salad of tomatoes, garlic, cucumbers, olives. The fresh bread melted in their mouths. Petros translated for them. They wanted to know Susannah’s age. A woman in her forties, and looking so young! That was America! Her family background. Whether she had siblings. Whether they all lived. What were the diseases that took the lives of babies in America? Petros was surprised to hearthis