Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [29]
“Man’s got a horse dick,” Butch boasted to other boys, and that I understood. But it wasn’t Daddy Glen’s sex that made me nervous. It was those hands, the restless way the fingers would flex and curl while he watched me lean close to Mama. He was always watching me, it seemed, calling me to him whenever Mama and I would start talking, sending me to get him a glass of ice tea or a fresh pack of cigarettes out of the freezer, where he kept his cartons so they wouldn’t go stale in the summer heat. Mama told me I should show him that I loved him, but no matter how hard I tried, I never moved fast enough for him.
“That child an’t never gonna love me,” he complained tearfully to Mama one afternoon.
“Oh, Glen, don’t say that.” Mama’s voice was thin and shaky, as if she were afraid he was right. “Bone loves you, honey.” She kissed his cheek, put her hands on either side of his face, and kissed his lips. “She loves you. We all love you.” Daddy Glen pulled her down to him and sighed softly as she kissed his eyelids and then rubbed her cheeks against his.
I ran outside. Dinner would be late, or we’d wind up going out for hamburgers. Whenever they started kissing on the couch, they’d go in the bedroom and shut the door for an hour at least. When they came out Daddy Glen would be smiling and easy in his body. Mama would be sleepy-eyed and soft all over, the pink in her face fresh and delicate.
“They sure like to do it a lot,” Reese told Alma disgustedly. But Alma just laughed.
“Everybody does, girl, everybody does.” She swatted lightly at the seat of Reese’s jeans and hugged me to her side. “Don’t make no mistake about that. Love is just about the best thing we’ve got that don’t cost money or make you sick to your stomach. You’ll see. Wait till you get a little bigger. You’ll see.”
Reese grimaced and wiggled uncomfortably. “Mushy stuff,” she yelled as she ran off. “All that mushy stuff. I an’t gonna have none of it.”
Aunt Alma laughed carelessly. I pulled away from her and went after Reese. It was mushy. Mama and Daddy Glen always hugging and rubbing on each other, but it was powerful too. Sex. Was that what Daddy Glen had been doing to me in the parking lot? Was it what I had started doing to myself whenever I was alone in the afternoons? I would imagine being tied up and put in a haystack while someone set the dry stale straw ablaze. I would picture it perfectly while rocking on my hand. The daydream was about struggling to get free while the fire burned hotter and closer. I am not sure if I came when the fire reached me or after I had imagined escaping it. But I came. I orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire.
Daddy Glen didn’t do too well at RC Cola. He kept getting transferred to different routes or having to pay for breakage, and no matter how hard he and Mama worked, there never seemed to be enough money to pay the bills. He kept telling Mama that sooner or later his brother would pay him for all the work he’d done, but even after the offices of James Waddell, D.D.S., were open and busy, James never mentioned it.
“Maybe you better ask James for that money he was gonna give you,” Mama finally suggested the day Daddy Glen came home to say he’d been laid off.
“I can’t do that.” Glen’s face seemed to squeeze in on itself as he ran his hands down from his hairline to his neck, wiping sweat off the shadowy stubble on his cheeks and then resting his chin on his fingertips as if he were praying. “Oh, Lord God, no, I can’t do that. I’d rather starve.” His eyes looked shrunken and his chin stuck out. He looked everywhere but over at Mama where she sat. Instinctively I put down the glass I’d been rinsing and stepped out of the kitchen into the hall where he couldn’t see me without turning around.
“Glen, honey.” Mama leaned forward. “I know it’s hard, but James is your brother, and baby, we’re just about broke. We’re not gonna have the rent if you don’t get it from him.”
“Anney, you don’t understand.” Daddy Glen