Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [45]
“You do, don’tcha, honey?” He looked like he was swallowing an urge to laugh at us. I was suddenly so angry at him my stomach seemed to curl up inside me. I shoved the bag at him, the pennies.
“I stole it. I’m sorry. I stole it.”
Mama’s hand squeezed my shoulder, and I heard the breath come out of her in a sigh. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying hard not to get as mad at her as I was at that man.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “I see.” I looked up at him again. He was rummaging in the bag, counting the Tootsie Rolls and nodding. “It’s a good thing, ma’am,” he said, still talking loudly, “that you caught this when you did.” He nodded at me. “You’re a fortunate little girl, truly fortunate. Your mama loves you. She doesn’t want you to grow up to be a thief.”
He stood back up and passed the pennies to the salesgirl. He stretched a hand out like he was going to put it on my head, but I stepped back so that he would have had to bend forward to reach me. “Son of a bitch,” Grey would have called him, “slimy son of a bitch probably eats Tootsie Rolls all day long.” If he reached for me again, I decided, I’d bite him, but he just looked at me long and carefully. I knew I was supposed to feel ashamed, but I didn’t anymore. I felt outraged. I wanted to kick him or throw up on him or scream his name on the street. The longer he looked at me, the more I hated him. If I could have killed him with my stare, I would have. The look in his eyes told me that he knew what I was thinking.
“I’m gonna do your mama a favor.” He smiled. “Help her to teach you the seriousness of what you’ve done.” Mama’s hand tightened on my shoulder, but she didn’t speak.
“What we’re gonna do,” he announced, “is say you can’t come back in here for a while. We’ll say that when your mama thinks you’ve learned your lesson, she can come back and talk to me. But till then, we’re gonna remember your name, what you look like.” He leaned down again. “You understand me, honey?”
I understood. I understood that I was barred from the Woolworth’s counters. I could feel the heat from my mama’s hand through my blouse, and I knew she was never going to come near this place again, was never going to let herself stand in the same room with that honey-greased bastard. I looked around at the bright hairbrushes, ribbons, trays of panties and socks, notebooks, dolls, and balloons. It was hunger I felt then, raw and terrible, a shaking deep down inside me, as if my rage had used up everything I had ever eaten.
After that, when I passed the Woolworth’s windows, it would come back—that dizzy desperate hunger edged with hatred and an aching lust to hurt somebody back. I wondered if that kind of hunger and rage was what Tommy Lee felt when he went through his mama’s pocketbook. It was a hunger in the back of the throat, not the belly, an echoing emptiness that ached for the release of screaming. Whenever we went to visit Daddy Glen’s people, that hunger would throb and swell behind my tongue until I found myself standing silent and hungry in the middle of a family gathering full of noise and food.
It was not only Daddy Glen’s brothers being lawyers and dentists instead of mechanics and roofers that made them so different from Boatwrights. In Daddy Glen’s family the women stayed at home. His own mama had never held a job in her life, and Daryl and James both spoke badly of women who would leave their children to “work outside the home.” His father, Bodine Waddell, owned the Sunshine Dairy and regularly hired and fired men like my mother’s brothers, something he never let us forget.
“Awful proud for a man runs cows,” Beau said of him once, and Glen was immediately indignant.
“Daddy don’t have to handle the cows,” he told Earle. “Farmers all over the county bring him their milk, or he has it picked up. Daddy just processes the milk, bottles