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

question from his mother. She went on to tell Susannah, who leaned forward in her chair to touch his mother’s hands, that three of her own children died shortly after birth. Of a chill or of a sweat or of a cough that would not go away. His mother wiped her eyes as she recalled their deaths. His father looked sad, and exhibited as well an air of helplessness, as if the losses had occurred only yesterday. No one had told Petros of his lost siblings, or if they had he had not registered a meaning. Now his mother looked tenderly at him, a look that felt as if she were cuddling him with her eyes. Petros, and his brother Anand, who always wants to be looking after people and who should have been a priest, are all God has left to us, she said, bowing her head slightly and crossing herself.
    He was grateful to Susannah for drawing them out—two dour old Greeks dressed in black (as he assumed they must look to her, an American); he cherished her for being present, receptive. He could not quite believe his good fortune: to have gone to America poor, and to have found a well-educated, middle-class wife who loved Greece and was genuine. It did not seem, Susannah’s interest in his parents, in his culture, American. No, he thought of coolness when he thought of America, the real America. He definitely thought of blue eyes. And yet, here he sat with his brown-skinned wife, her big brown eyes as expressive as his own. The puzzle of his attraction to her, who might have been a darker sister, a slight exasperation to him.
    There was a day, perhaps it was even the evening of the day of their arrival: out in the courtyard that was slowly cooling from the day’s heat, the sunflowers nodding in the corners like drowsy old men. They sat around a wooden table, the very one into whose sides he’d carved his and Anand’s names while they were boys, the day that Anand had vowed never to abandon Greece andhe had vowed to leave it as soon as he could, and Susannah, her eyes watering, drank ouzo for the first time, and nibbled a home-preserved olive. Look! she whispered urgently to him. Look at this! She was looking down and pointing at the table. Was he to look at the brown loaves of bread, with their soft white ends; or at the dark olives in an old blue crockery dish he remembered from when he was a boy? Did she mean the two dusty green bottles of wine? The fava beans swimming in oil? Did she mean, Look at the peaches—which did, in fact, smell exactly of heaven? Did she mean, Regard the plums, luscious and dark as goddesses? But no; she meant, giving it a tug, Look at the tablecloth!
    The oilcloth with a black background and cabbage roses of white, red, and pink on which all the delicious food lay. Remember this, she whispered. This tablecloth.
It is a sign.
Then, laughing, she made the motion of zippering her lips—a movement, a signal for secrecy they shared—that made them cackle loudly, as the ouzo hit the bottom of their jet-lagged bellies, and the old ones looked on in amusement and a little alarm.
    It was the beginning of the end, even so. Even though, that very night, in the small white bedroom next to his parents’ room, the room that had been his as a boy, they, with their firmly zippered lips, moved as silently against each other as two snakes. Kissing was not speaking and was therefore exempt from the ban. Slipping to the floor, at the foot of the bed, silently thanking her for loving his parents and not considering them grotesque, as he had feared, he took her small brown foot into his large pale hand and kissed its sole. Sitting on the floor beside the bed, tired, a bit drunk, he made not a sound as he brushed both her feet, back and forth and back and forth, with his thick mustache. The bed shook with her laughter, but she also did not make a sound. She felt herself warm, beginning to tingle inside, and thought: All play leads up to this moment.
    Through the wall they heard the old ones shifting