Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [31]
“Who do you think we are, girl?” she said. “We an’t the people who buy things for show.”
I couldn’t help it. Just for a change, I wished we could have things like other people, wished we could complain for no reason but the pleasure of bitching and act like the trash we were supposed to be, instead of watching how we behaved all the time. But Mama’s laughter shamed me. I wore the penny loafers with only token protest.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mama’s friend Mab told her. “Children are happier with dirt between their toes.” But I noticed that her girls turned up for school in saddle oxfords, and at church in patent-leather pumps, and sniffed at Reese and me in our discount loafers. I wasn’t sure what Mama noticed, what she could afford to notice, but when I sat with her on Sunday afternoon and watched her run down her columns of figures, I suspected that she saw everything and hated it all. She’d look out at my flushed and sweating stepfather muscling the lawnmower around the edges of the yard and sigh into her coffee cup.
“We an’t gonna be able to stay here,” she’d say, and I knew it was about time to move again.
One winter we spent three months staying over with Aunt Alma, who had bought a new house on no money down. None of us expected her to keep it, and the bank filed papers on it almost as soon as we’d arrived. Something happened to me, something I had never felt before and did not know how to fight. Anger hit me like a baseball coming hard and fast off a new bat. The first day at the district school the teacher pursed her lips and asked me my name, and that anger came around and stomped on my belly and throat. I saw tired patience in her eyes, a little shine of pity, and a contempt as old as the red dust hills I could see through the windows of her classroom. I opened my lips but could not speak.
“What’s your name, now, honey?” the woman asked me again, speaking slowly, as if she suspected I was not quite bright. The anger lifted in me and became rage.
“Roseanne,” I answered as blithely as if I’d never been called anything else. I smiled at her like a Roseanne. “Roseanne Carter. My family’s from Atlanta, just moved up here.” I went on lightly, talking about the school I’d gone to in Atlanta, making it up as I went along, and smiling wider as she kept nodding at me.
It scared me that it was so easy—my records, after all, had not caught up with me—that people thought I could be a Roseanne Carter from Atlanta, a city I had never visited. Everyone believed me, and I enjoyed a brief popularity as someone from a big city who could tell big-city stories. It was astonishing, but no one in my family found out I had told such a lie. Still, it was a relief when we moved that time and I went off to a new school under my real name. For months after, though, I dreamed that someone came up to me and called me Roseanne, that the school records finally exposed me or one of those teachers turned up at my new school. “Why’d you tell such a lie?” they asked me in the dream, and I could not answer them. I didn’t know. I really didn’t know.
One month, Earle announced that he had finally sold that old wallhanger Beau had foisted off on him to some fool from Greenwood who couldn’t tell the difference between a decent shotgun and a piece of corroded junk. He insisted on loaning Mama a little money, telling her that she was better than a bank for him. “You know how I am, Anney,” he said. “If I keep cash, I’ll just throw it away on nothing at all. If I give it to you, then come the time when I really need it, I know you’ll give it to me if you got it, and if you don’t, well then, at least you’ll feed me. Won’t you, little sister?”
Daddy Glen got mad at Mama for taking the money, as if she had done it just to prove he couldn’t support us. He screamed at her that she