Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [120]
She reached down and pulled her string bag from her pocket and began to roll a cigarette. “You’re making up stories about those people. Make up a story where you have to live in their house, be one of their family, and pass by this road. Look at it from the other side for a while. Maybe you won’t be glaring at people so much.”
I looked up at her sourly. “People say you ran off to the carnival with a man, but you never say nothing about him. How come he didn’t marry you?”
The paper in Aunt Raylene’s hands shook. “People say? People will say anything. I ran off to the carnival, yeah, but not for no man. For myself. And I an’t never wanted to marry nobody. I like my life the way it is, little girl. I made my life, the same way it looks like you’re gonna make yours-out of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you’re mad at. You better think hard.”
She licked the cigarette paper and smoothed it closed. She lit it and tucked the dead match back in her pocket. She smoked carefully, watching me as if she expected me to talk back to her, but I held still. When she finally spoke again, her voice shook a little. “It’s not so cold tonight, not so cold. Smell of spring in the air.”
I turned my face away and said nothing. After a minute Raylene shrugged and went back inside. I squatted down and hugged myself until I was as small as I could get, watching the cars pass and listening to Reese fuss as Aunt Raylene took her off to bed. I closed my eyes and tried to make up a story for myself. I pretended we were back in that house over in West Greenville that Mama had loved so, pretended that Daddy Glen had joined the Pentecostal Church and gotten a cross-country trucking job that would pay him lots of money but keep him away from home. I imagined Mama getting a job where she could sit down all she wanted, where the money was good and she never got any burns or had to pull her hair back so tight off her face that she got headaches. Maybe she could be a teacher? Or one of those women behind the makeup counter at the Jordan Marsh? I bit my lips and let it all play out under my eyelids—Reese in a new dress for Easter, me with all the books I wanted to read, Mama sitting in the sun with her feet up, Daddy Glen far away and coming home only often enough to make Mama smile. I fell asleep there dreaming, loving the dream.
19
That spring the storms were astonishing, torrents of water that sheeted down and flooded everything from the sagging old houses on Old Henderson Road to the warehouses and cafes out on White Horse Road, but the day Aunt Alma went crazy it was perfectly clear, hot and dry with the mud standing up in stiff peaks, and ruts off every driveway. It was Monday, the day Reese had gone over to Fay and Nevil’s when she got out of school, to go shopping with their girls.
“She’s almost nine,” Fay had told Mama. “She’s old enough. Can’t be too protective, you know.” After Reese drove her crazy begging, Mama agreed reluctantly.
I was walking home slowly, trying to keep my skirt from blowing up in the wind and thinking about the luxury of an hour or two before Reese would get home, a solid piece of time when I would be able to lie around on the couch, listen to the radio, drink Coca-Cola, and read the paperback of The Group I had finally managed to sneak out of the library. Walking up past Woolworth’s in the fresh spring breeze, I was carrying my shoes and tugging at my hem when I saw Mama running down the stairs from the apartment. She was still wearing her hair net