Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [57]
“Bone?”
“Auntie, don’t ask me.” I looked up. Lord, she was so thin!
“Well, can we talk to each other or not?” Her voice sounded tired. She closed her eyes and brought one hand up to rub the soft skin at her right temple. It looked slightly bruised, a blue shadow on the parchment gray.
“I don’t know.” I took the skin of my forearm between my teeth and sucked at it. I didn’t know what to say to her at all.
“Well.” She was quiet for a moment, then dropped her hand and kind of pushed herself up a little.
“I think we can. I think we have to. There’s a lot of things I can’t do anymore, but hell....” She reached out to me, her fingers beckoning. “You slide over here.”
I hesitated and then moved down until I could fit my hip between her legs. My back was against one thigh, and I draped my knees over the other. She put her arm around me and pulled me to her breast. “Honey,” she whispered, and just held me for a moment.
“You’re right, girl. Glen don’t like you much. He’s jealous, I think.” She ran her fingers over my face, flicking away the tears and stroking my cheeks. “There’s a way he’s just a little boy himself, wanting more of your mama than you, wanting to be her baby more than her husband. And that an’t so rare, I’ll tell you.”
I looked up at her. Her mouth was drawn into an awkward grin.
“Men,” she said solemnly, “are just little boys climbing up on titty whenever they can. Your mama knows it as well as I do. We all do. And Glen ...”
She was still for a minute, her eyes moving around the room as if she were looking for something. They came back to me. She pulled me tighter.
“Bone, has Daddy Glen ever ... well ... touched you?” Her gray cheeks developed matching streaks of pink. “Has he ever hurt you, messed with you?” Her hand dropped down, patted between my legs.
“Down here, honey. Has he ever hurt you down there?”
I searched Aunt Ruth’s face carefully. I knew what she meant, the thing men did to women. I knew what the act was supposed to be, I’d read about it, heard the joke. “What’s a South Carolina virgin? ’At’s a ten-year-old can run fast.” He hadn’t done that. Had he? I felt my tongue pushing against the back of my teeth. Aunt Ruth’s cheeks got a brighter pink, almost red. I dropped my head.
“No,” I whispered. I remembered his hands sliding over my body, under my blouse, down my shorts, across my backside, the calluses scratching my skin, his breath fast and hard above me as he pulled me tighter and tighter against him, the sound of his belt pulling through the loops of his pants in the damp stillness of the bathroom. I shuddered.
“No.” I said it louder. “He just looks at me hard. Grabs me sometimes. Shakes me.” I hesitated, looking up at her flushed, sunken cheeks. “You know, when I’m bad.” Tell her, I thought. Tell her all of it. Tell her. “But the way he looks at me, the way he twists his hands when he looks at me, it scares me, Auntie. He scares me.”
Aunt Ruth rocked me against her breast.
“Oh, honey,” she breathed. “What we gonna do with you?”
Afternoons, while Aunt Ruth slept in snatches, I scraped at the old paint on her front porch, keeping an eye on her through the screen door in case she needed me. Uncle Earle had promised to repaint the porch and the front of the house, and said he’d pay for my school clothes in the fall if I would get the wood all clean and scraped down for him. Every few days he’d stop by at lunchtime to talk quietly with Aunt Ruth and check on my progress. Half the time, Aunt Ruth would be asleep when he came, and he would sit out on the porch with me, smoking Uncle Travis’s tobacco and telling me stories while I worked. It seemed to me that Aunt Ruth’s illness was making him remember her when she was young and well, when they had all been kids together living out in the country north of Greenville, and when the two of them had first married and started their families—Aunt Ruth with Uncle Travis, and Earle with Teresa. He talked like Aunt Ruth did, as if he were continuing a conversation