Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [119]
I didn’t either.
It felt as if the world was falling apart in slow motion. Two days after I came back, Aunt Alma’s baby girl finally died, her heart stopping the way everyone had been expecting since she was born. Fay called Mama to tell her, and Raylene came to stay with Reese and me while Mama went out to see Alma. “You’ve always been the one closest to her,” Raylene told Mama, “and she’s not handling this very well at all. You’d think we hadn’t all known it was coming.”
“You know how Alma loved Annie,” Mama said. “Maybe she knew Annie was gonna die, and maybe she didn’t, but she wanted her baby girl to live.” I heard her from inside the apartment even though she was already out on the landing.
Her voice was pitched low, but the words sounded so intense I came to the door.
I watched Mama go down the stairs while Reese led Raylene inside to see how well she’d done her paint-by-numbers clown face. Once Granny had told me how Mama carried me down to the courthouse after I was born and fought with the man there about the way they had made out my birth certificate. Telling me that story, Granny’s eyes had glittered and her mouth had turned up in a fierce smile. “You don’t know how your mama loves you,” she had said. “You can’t even imagine.”
Like Alma loved Annie, maybe, like Ruth loved her sons D.W. and Dwight and Tommy Lee, so much that she made Travis swear not to bury her until they got home. I chewed on a fingernail and watched Mama walk away, wondering if she still loved me and what I would do when we went back to Daddy Glen.
Raylene had brought some of her home-canned blackberries with her. She and Reese made a skillet cobbler the way Raylene said she had learned when she was with the carnival. She dropped lots of little butter slices on the bottom of the skillet, sprinkled brown sugar over that, then poured her blackberries, more butter, and a handful of white sugar over everything. Unsweetened biscuit dough made the top crust, and the cobbler was ready to eat in half an hour. It wasn’t as good as Aunt Fay’s pies, but Reese gorged on it, eating almost half the pan by herself. Afterwards, she leaned forward lazily on the table, almost asleep, her blue-stained lips slightly parted.
Aunt Raylene looked through the paintings and picked up the Japanese mountain scene I had not bothered to finish. She waved it at me. “Reese tells me you won’t give this to her, even though you don’t want to finish it.”
“It’s mine. I might finish it sometime.”
“Uh-huh.” Raylene put the cardboard drawing back. I waited for her to say something more, but she turned away and started cleaning up the kitchen.
It was still early. I went out on the landing to watch the cars pass by, people from the nearby housing development on their way out to the new discount grocery, a few trucks with men coming home late from work, a bus from Bushy Creek Baptist with flat-faced children pressed against the windows staring at me hatefully. I glared back at them. Anger was like a steady drip of poison into my soul, teaching me to hate the ones that hated me. Who do they think they are? I whispered to myself. They piss honey? Shit morning-glory blossoms? Sit on their porches every Sunday morning and look down on the world with contempt?
“I hate them,” I told Aunt Raylene when she came up behind me, waving at the bus as it passed. “Looking at us like we’re something nasty.”
Aunt Raylene was picking blackberry seeds out of her teeth, looking off into the distance, and she surprised me when she reached over and slapped my shoulder. “They look at you the way you look at them,” she told me bluntly. “You don’t know who those children are. Maybe they’re nasty and silly and hateful. Maybe not. You don’t know what happens to them