Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [30]
Glen brought both his fists down hard on his thighs, pounding them half a dozen times before he lifted his hands and held them in front of him, open and extended. “I’m sorry, Anney. God, I’m so sorry.” Tears pooled in his eyes and slid down his cheeks. His hands began to shake. “But it an’t just hard. It’s impossible. I can’t ask James for nothing. I can’t ask none of them for shit. It would kill me.”
Mama sighed and looked away. “Well ...” She hesitated and then reached out to take the hands that still hung in the air. “Well, we’ll just see, then. There’s other jobs, other things we can do. We can get Earle’s help to move, maybe stay with Alma. Something.” She looked into Glen’s face, but whatever she hoped to see there didn’t come, her eyes kept shifting away, then back.
“Oh, Glen. Baby, it’ll be all right. We’ll do what we have to do. Don’t you worry.”
After that things seemed to move irreversibly forward. We moved and then moved again. We lived in no one house more than eight months. Rented houses; houses leased with an option to buy; shared houses on the city limits; brick and stucco and a promise to buy; friends of friends who knew somebody had a place standing empty; houses where the owner lived downstairs, next door, next block over, or was a friend of a man had an eye on Mama, or knew somebody who knew Daddy Glen’s daddy, or had hired one of the uncles for a short piece of work; or twice—Jesus, twice—brand-new houses clean and bought on time we didn’t have.
Moving had no season, was all seasons, crossed time like a train with no schedule. We moved so often our mail. never caught up with us, moved sometimes before we’d even gotten properly unpacked or I’d learned the names of all the teachers at my new school. Moving gave me a sense of time passing and everything sliding, as if nothing could be held on to anyway. It made me feel ghostly, unreal and unimportant, like a box that goes missing and then turns up but you realize you never needed anything in it anyway. We moved so often Mama learned to keep the newspapers in the cardboard dish barrels, the pads and cords and sturdy boxes.
“Don’t throw that away. I’ll need that again before long.”
The lines in Mama’s face sank deeper with every move, every failed chance, every “make do” and “try again.” It got to where I hated moving worse than anything, and one hot summer day I took a butcher knife and chopped holes in Mama’s dish barrels, though all that came of it was a swat across the seat and the same old line.
“Don’t you know how much that cost?”
I knew to the penny what everything cost. Late on Sunday afternoons, Mama always sat at the kitchen table counting change out of her pocketbook and juggling bills, deciding which could not be paid, not yet, anyway. Rent was eighty dollars a month, too much by far when Daddy Glen had been bringing home only sixty dollars a week. Groceries ran as much as the rent, and that was only because we got vegetables from my aunts’ gardens and discount meat from the man who sold ground beef and chicken to the diner. Then there were the clothes Reese and I were always needing, uniforms for Mama and Daddy Glen, and shoes. Shoes were the worst. Dresses could be passed on from cousins or picked up now and then at church rummage sales. But shoes wore out or were outgrown at a frightening rate. Until the ringworm got so dangerous, we went barefoot all summer long.
Though I had never complained before, suddenly I wanted new shoes, patent-leather Mary Janes—not the cheap blue canvas sneakers I was always getting at $1.98 every seven months or so. I wasn’t a baby anymore, I was eight, then nine years old, growing up. In one year I went from compliant and quiet to loud and insistent, demanding shoes like the kids at school wore. I wanted the ones with little tassels