Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [38]
“Things are gonna be different here,” he’d tell Mama. Reese and I would keep our faces expressionless and stay out of his way. Neither of us believed things would ever change, but we knew better than to say so. Sometimes it seemed Daddy Glen could almost read the thoughts we were trying to hide, catch us with his eyes thinking that nothing he did was going to make any difference.
“It eats a man’s heart out,” he told Mama one time, “knowing no one trusts him.” It seemed our unbelief was what made him fail. Our lack of faith made him the man he was, made him go out to work unable to avoid getting in a fight, made him sarcastic to his bosses and nasty to the shop owners he was supposed to be persuading to take his accounts. Money would get tighter and Daddy Glen would stare at us like we cost him cash with every breath we took.
The rent would be late one month, impossible the next, and late again after that. Daddy Glen started going for long drives in the evening, and people started coming to the door during the day. They’d bang on the jamb after ringing the bell. If Mama was home, she would sit at the kitchen table with a cigarette between her fingers, staring off into space and saying nothing.
Reese or I would go to the door and yell out, “Mama’s not to home. I can’t let you in, my mama’s not to home.”
The men and women who came to our door would wheedle and threaten, cajole and rage. They’d call Mama’s name so loud all the neighbors could hear. Mama would push her hair straight back from her face, light another cigarette, and hug us. Reese and I would grin and look carefully out from under the curtains to be sure the landlord or the bill collector had gone, and then run back to tell her.
“My smart girls,” Mama would praise us. “My strong, smart girls.” Her face would relax then, the sharp lines of her eyebrows would soften, and she would pull us up close to her one more time, every time.
“We’re not bad people,” Mama told us. “We’re not even really poor. Anybody says something to you, you keep that in mind. We’re not bad people. And we pay our way. We just can’t always pay when people want.”
Reese and I nodded earnestly, agreeing wordlessly, but we didn’t believe her. We knew what the neighbors called us, what Mama wanted to protect us from. We knew who we were.
Uncle Nevil and Aunt Fay got a place on such a steep hill that we could play in the dirt under the front porch with the dogs. When we stood on tiptoe, we could barely reach the floorboards above us. The house was set so deep in the hill that the dogs could not dig out from under it, and the back rooms were always cool and shadowy. I loved that house, the cool dimness under the porch ripe with the smell of dogs and red dirt, but Daddy Glen hated it.
“It’s a goddam nigger shanty! Don’t they care how they’re living?” He wouldn’t put us in such a house, he insisted. He moved us instead to a cinder-block house where the tile floors were always peeling up in the damp and where we didn’t stay very long anyway. “But a decent neighborhood,” he told Mama, who said nothing, just unpacked the dishes one more time.
My aunt Alma earned Daddy Glen’s undying contempt the year I was nine and she moved out on my uncle Wade. Uncle Earle joked that Alma had finally caught Wade doing just what he’d been doing for years.
“Messing around,” Cousin Deedee said. “If he was my husband, I’d shoot his dick off.”
“Might be a factor in why you don’t have one—a husband, that is,” Aunt Alma told her, and then laughed at the idea of shooting Uncle Wade in his private parts. “It’d get his attention anyway,” she told Mama. “But hell, the man’s a dog. Don’t care where he sticks it. Don’t know the value of what he had. Might as well take myself out of reach of his dirty ways.”
She moved her brood of kids into an apartment building downtown, a second-floor frame walk-up with a shaky wide porch hanging off one side. No matter where she lived, Alma always had a porch.
Nobody else we knew had ever lived in an apartment.