Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [113]
“Mama,” I whimpered, and tried to push up to her. “I made him mad. I did.”
“Bone.” Raylene reached for me.
“No!” I jerked away and pressed my face against Mama’s arm.
“Hush. Hush.” Mama breathed. I held still and heard Raylene’s hand drop.
We listened to the noises from the porch. Those thuds were Daddy Glen hitting the wall. Those grunts were his. Those curses were my uncles’. I put my fingers in my mouth and bit down. I looked up. Above me Mama’s face and Raylene’s were almost touching, both of them trembling and holding on as if their lives depended on each other.
18
Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies. It was that way with Mama and Daddy Glen. Aunt Raylene offered to let us all come stay with her, but Mama wouldn’t consider it. The one day Daddy Glen spent in the hospital, she moved us into an apartment over the Fish Market just a few blocks from the boarded-up windows of Woolworth’s. Every morning, I had to walk past those windows to get to the intersection where the bus picked us up for school. I saw the workmen replacing the shattered display windows with new plate glass panels, and one day I saw a very harassed-looking Tyler Highgarden supervising while box after box of dimestore notions was carried through the repaired doors. He never even looked in my direction, but I still felt the hair on the back of my neck rise up stiff and electrical. If everything hadn’t been so confused, I might have told Mama what I’d done. But Mama and I did not talk at all.
It was a two-room apartment, one bedroom and a larger room that served for everything else. The kitchen was a stove, icebox, and sink in a little alcove to the side of the bedroom door. The bathroom smelled of damp, mildew, and fish, the latter seeping up from the shop below. It was dark, with dirty windows we had to scrub repeatedly to get clean. The only cheerful thing in the whole place was the blue-flowered wallpaper that set the kitchen area off from the rest of the front room. When I sat at the table to do my homework I always faced that wallpaper. I didn’t want to look at Reese, camped out in the bedroom with her coloring books and angry scowls, or at Mama, sitting wordless over on the couch, smoking, wiping her eyes, and listening to the radio.
Mama had left the television set behind, left her washer, most of her furniture and dishes, and all of her knickknacks and good silverware. She had brought the sewing machine, the ironing board, our clothes, and most of hers. Since we hadn’t been there to help her pack, it was hard to figure out how she had decided what to take and what to leave, and since she clearly didn’t want to talk, it was impossible to ask. Reese complained about the television and her bicycle, but Mama just said she’d get us new ones in time. I didn’t question her, didn’t complain, barely spoke.
It was my fault, everything, Mama’s silence and Reese’s rage. I lay in the bed with my hands clutched under my chin and my knees drawn up to my breasts. I kept remembering those last few days like a hurried, confusing dream, not Daddy Glen beating me but the morning Mama told me about Aunt Ruth, not the Woolworth’s robbery but talking to Butch, and not the noise and uproar when Benny, Aunt Fay, and Aunt Carr drove off to the hospital with Daddy Glen but those brief horrible moments when Aunt Raylene showed my thighs to Uncle Earle. I kept trying to figure out how I could have prevented it all from happening, not drunk that beer, not let anyone see, gone to Mama and made sure she knew that I had deserved that beating—kept everything smooth and quiet.
That night at Ruth’s, Aunt Raylene had told me not to brood, that it would take time for Mama to forgive herself. For what? I wondered. Mama hadn’t done anything wrong. I was the one who had made Daddy Glen mad. I was the one who made everybody crazy. No, Raylene told me. I wasn’t to think that way. She had whispered in a rough, strained voice that Mama loved me, that she loved me, that Earle and my uncles loved me. She was insistent, holding me tight to