Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [33]
6
Hunger makes you restless. You dream about food—not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother’s milk singing to your bloodstream. When I got hungry my hands would not stay still. I would pick at the edges of scabs, scratch at chigger bites and old scars, and tug at loose strands of my black hair. I’d rock a penny in my palm, trying to learn to roll it one-handed up and around each finger without dropping it, the way my cousin Grey could. I’d chew my fingernails or suck on toothpicks and read everything I hadn’t read more than twice already. But when Reese got hungry and there was nothing to eat, she would just sob, shiny fat tears running down her pink cheeks. Nothing would distract her.
We weren’t hungry too often. There was always something that could be done. Reese and I walked the side of the highway, picking up return deposit bottles to cash in and buy Mama’s cigarettes while she gave home permanents to the old ladies she knew from the lunch counter. Reese would wrinkle her nose and giggle as she slipped the pack of Pall Malls into Mama’s pocket, while I ran to get us a couple of biscuits out of the towel-wrapped dish on the stove.
“Such fine little ladies,” the women would tell her, and Mama would pat her pocket and agree.
Mama knew how to make a meal of biscuits and gravy, flour-and-water biscuits with bacon-fat gravy to pour over them. By the time I started the fourth grade, we were eating biscuit dinners more often than not. Sometimes with the biscuits Mama would serve a bowl of tomato soup or cold pork and beans. We joked about liking it right out of the can, but it was cold because the power company had turned the house off—no money in the mail, no electricity. That was hunger wrapped around a starch belly.
One afternoon there was not even flour to make up the pretense of a meal. We sat at the kitchen table, Reese and I grumbling over our rumbling bellies. Mama laughed but kept her face turned away from us. “Making so much noise over so little. You’d think you girls hadn’t been fed in a week.”
She got out soda crackers and began to spread them with a layer of dark red ketchup spotted with salt and pepper. She poured us glasses of cold tea and told us stories about real hunger, hunger of days with no expectation that there would ever be biscuits again, how when she was a kid she’d wrestled her sisters for the last bacon rind.
“We used to pass the plates around the table, eight plates for eight kids, pretending there was food gonna come off the stove to fill those plates, talking about food we’d never seen, just heard about or imagined, making up stories about what we’d cook if we could. Earle liked the idea of parboiled puppies. Your aunt Ruth always talked about frogs’ tongues with dew-berries. Beau wanted fried rutabagas, and Nevil cried for steamed daffodils. But Raylene won the prize with her recipe for sugar-glazed turtle meat with poison greens and hot piss dressing. ”
After a while Reese and I started making up our own pretend meals. “Peanut butter and Jell-O. Mashed bug meat with pickles.” Mama made us laugh with her imitations of her brothers and sisters fighting over the most disgusting meals they could dream up. She filled our stomachs with soda crackers and ketchup, soda crackers and mayonnaise, and more big glasses of tea, all the time laughing and teasing and tickling our shoulders with her long nails as she walked back