Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [133]
HE DIDN’T COME IN FOR A SHAVE, the headline reads under the picture of the car on the stool.
BOATWRIGHT captions the close-up of Earle’s numb face.
In those pictures, Uncle Earle looks scary, like a thief or a murderer, the kind of gaunt, poorly shaven face sketched on a post office wall. In that washed-out gray print, he looks like a figure from a horror show, an animated corpse. Granny, my mama, uncles, aunts, cousins—all of us look dead on the black-and-white page.
“We look worse than other people ever seem to look,” I once complained to Aunt Alma.
“Oh, piss,” she said. “Watery ink and gray paper makes everybody look a little crazy.” I think she was annoyed that I didn’t take more pride in her scrapbook, but it seemed to me nobody looked quite like my family. Worse than crazy; we looked moon-eyed, rigid, openmouthed, and stupid. Even our wedding announcement pictures were bad. Aunt Alma insisted it had nothing to do with us, that Boatwrights weren’t bad-looking seen head on.
“We just make bad pictures,” she said. “The difference is money. It takes a lot of money to make someone look alive on newsprint,” she told me, “to keep some piece of the soul behind the eyes.”
I’m in Aunt Alma’s book now.
As soon as I saw the picture of me on the front page of the News, I knew it would wind up in her scrapbook, and I hated it. In it, I was leaning against Raylene’s shoulder, my face all pale and long, my chin sticking out too far, my eyes sunk into shadows. I was a Boatwright there for sure, as ugly as anything. I was a freshly gutted fish, my mouth gaping open above my bandaged shoulder and arm, my neck still streaked dark with blood. Like a Boatwright all right—it wasn’t all my blood.
Coming back to myself at Greenville General, I kept my teeth clamped together, not even screaming when the doctor rotated my arm in the bruised shoulder socket, put a cast on my wrist, washed out the cuts, and then wrapped the whole tight to my midriff. Mama had been there, had carried me in from the car and made the doctor look at me right away. The nurse took me out of her arms, and Mama stepped back, her bloody knuckles still outstretched, touching my cheek lightly. I looked into the nurse’s face and then looked back for Mama, but she was gone. Before she could give her name or mine, she had disappeared.
“Come on, honey.” The soft-voiced nurse ran her fingers through my hair, then stroked lightly all over my head. I looked for her nametag but saw none. “Don’t jump, now. You’ll hurt yourself.” Her fingers smelled of alcohol and talcum powder. She seemed kind. I wondered if she had children.
“Feeling for bumps or cuts,” she told me while the doctor was still busy with my wrist. There was just the scrape on my temple and the cut along my ear, but those had bled all down my neck and shoulder. It was hard to believe all that blood had come from so few cuts. The nurse was gentle and slow. I let her touch me as she pleased, turning my head to follow her smile like an infant watching the nipple. I watched, but didn’t speak. I didn’t tell her how much I hurt. I figured she could see the bruises on my throat and my torn lips. She could certainly see the look in my eyes. The one glance I’d got at my face in the mirror-black pane of the examining-room door scared me. I was a stranger with eyes