Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [15]
“But I don’t look like nobody,” I wailed.
Aunt Alma laughed. “Why, you look like our Bone, girl.”
“I don’t look like Mama. I don’t look like you. I don’t look like nobody.”
“You look like me,” Mama said. “You look like my own baby girl.” She put her fingers delicately on my cheeks, pressing under my eyes. “You got the look, all right. I can see it, see what it’s gonna be like when you grow bigger, these bones here.” Her fingers slipped smoothly down over my mouth and chin. “And here. You gonna look like our granddaddy, for sure. Those Cherokee cheekbones, huh, Alma?”
“Oh yes, for sure. She’s gonna be another one, another beauty to worry about.”
I smiled wide, not really believing them but wanting to. I held still then, trying not to flinch as Mama began to brush relentlessly at my knotted hair. If I got a permanent, I would lose those hours on Mama’s lap sitting in the curve of her arm while she brushed and brushed and smoothed my hair and talked soft above me. She always seemed to smell of buttery flour, salt, and fingernail polish—a delicate insinuating aroma of the familiar and the astringent. I would breathe deep and bite my lips to keep from moaning while my scalp ached and burned. I would have cut off my head before I let them cut my hair and lost the unspeakable pleasure of being drawn up onto Mama’s lap every evening.
“Do I look like my daddy?” I asked.
There was silence. Mama brushed steadily while Aunt Alma finished pulling the rags from Reese’s hair.
“Do I? Like my daddy, Mama?”
Mama gathered all my hair up in one hand and picked at the ends with the side of the brush. “Alma, get me some of that sweet oil, honey, just a little for my palm. That’s enough.”
The brush started again in long sweeping strokes. Aunt Alma started to hum. I dropped my head. It wasn’t even that I was so insistent on knowing anything about my missing father. I wouldn’t have minded a lie. I just wanted the story Mama would have told. What was the thing she wouldn’t tell me, the first thing, the place where she had made herself different from all her brothers and sisters and shut her mouth on her life?
Mama brushed so hard she pulled my head all the way back. “You just don’t know how to sit still, Bone.”
“No, Mama. ”
I closed my eyes and let her move my head, let her pull and jerk my hair until she relaxed a little. Aunt Alma was humming softly. The smell of sweet oil on Mama’s fingers hung in the air. Reese’s singsong joined Aunt Alma’s hum. I opened my eyes and looked into Mama’s. You could see Reese’s baby smile in those eyes. In the pupils gold flecks gleamed and glittered, like pieces of something bright reflecting light.
3
Love, at least love for a man not already part of the family, was something I was a little unsure about. Aunt Alma said love had more to do with how pretty a body was than anyone would ever admit, and Glen was pretty enough, she swore, with his wide shoulders and long arms, his hair combed back and his collar buttoned up tight over his skinny neck.
Sometimes after Glen had been over to visit and gone, Mama would sit on the porch and smoke a cigarette, looking off into the distance. Sometimes I’d go slide quietly under her armpit and sit with her, saying nothing. I would wonder what she was thinking, but I didn’t ask. If I had, she’d have said something about the road or the trees or the stars. She’d have talked about work or something one of my cousins had done, or one of the uncles, or she’d have swatted my butt and sent me off to bed, then gone back to sitting there with her face so serious, smoking her Pall Mall cigarette right down to the filter.
“You and Reese like Glen, don’t you?” Mama would say now and then in a worried voice. I would nod every time. Of course we liked him, I’d tell her, and watch her face relax so her smile came back.
“I do too. He’s a good man.” She’d run her hands over her thighs slow, hug her knees up close to her breasts, and nod to herself more than me. “He’s a good man.”
The nights Mama worked at the diner, she’d leave