Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [37]
My aunts were always moving too—all of them but Aunt Raylene, who had rented the same house for most of her adult life. No one else seemed to stay any one place very long, but the houses they chose were older ones that tended to resemble each other, not like the ones Daddy Glen wanted, with the jalousie windows, carports, and garbage disposals that never worked. Alma always lived in big old rickety houses with wide porches and dogs lying out flat in the sun. Aunt Ruth liked the ones that had black walnut trees to spread shade over my uncles’ pickup trucks.
Daddy Glen sneered at my aunts’ houses with their coal-grate fireplaces and chicken coops in the backyard. “I wouldn’t live in your place if you paid me,” he swore to Travis one Sunday. But Travis just grinned and gave him a shove. “The problem is, Glen boy, you got to pay them landlords, and hell, they don’t care what we think about nothing, what kind of place we think we want to rent. Shit! We all do what we can, you know?”
I loved it when Alma and Wade moved out to the country next to wide flat fields of peanuts and strawberries. It was just past the edge of town, near the West Greenville truck routes, where everything was run-down and cheap and nobody minded if you parked your car on the grass. There were always kids on the porch, cousins going in and out of screen doors, laundry hanging out back, and chickens running around, and no matter which aunt we visited there was always something to do.
“Catch me that hen,” Aunt Alma would tell me. “Then pick over these beans and wash those tomatoes.” Reese would help, we would sit out on the porch together, blending in with the cousins and their friends so completely that sometimes Aunt Alma or Aunt Ruth would forget we were there until Mama called looking for us. It didn’t matter where we were living so long as we could go stay with one of our aunts.
Over at Aunt Alma’s we could listen to Garvey and Grey fight, to Little Earle giggle and squeak, to Uncle Wade drink and cuss, to the radio playing and the chickens clucking outside the windows. Over there we got to slide around on a big tarp with the sprinkler shooting cold water up in a shower. At Aunt Ruth’s we could watch Uncle Travis cut up potatoes for her, a beer at his side and a cigarette dangling from one side of his mouth, ashes occasionally dropping into the peels. Aunt Ruth even let us play in just our panties, though after Reese got ringworm Mama insisted we keep our clothes on, and after we got chiggers she made us scrub down as soon as we came home. Reese and I didn’t mind. We still wanted to go visiting at every chance. It was alive over at the aunts’ houses, warm, always humming with voices and laughter and children running around. The quiet in our own house was cold, no matter that we had a better furnace and didn’t leave our doors open for the wind to blow through. There was something icy in Daddy Glen’s houses that melted out of us when we were over at our aunts’.
Daddy Glen’s brothers lived in big houses they owned, with fenced-in yards and flowering bushes. “This is how people ought to live,” he told us when he drove us over to visit his brothers. More than anything Daddy Glen wanted a house like Daryl and James had—a new house with a nice lawn and picture windows framed in lined curtains. The houses he chose for us were always shabby imitations. Mama sewed curtains, washed windows, and polished floors. Daddy Glen mowed the grass and sent us out with scissors to dig up the weeds along the driveway. He yelled at Earle and Beau if they drove up on the grass, and he chased the dogs that came and knocked over our garbage cans in the night.
“Nobody wants me to have nothing nice,” he’d complain, and then get in one of his dangerously quiet moods and refuse to talk to anybody. He brooded so much Reese and I patrolled the yard, picking up windblown trash and dog turds—anything that would make him mad. Every new house made him happy for a little while, and we tried to extend that period of relative