Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [72]
Six inches shorter than me, Shannon had the white skin, white hair, and pale pink eyes of an albino, though her mama insisted Shannon was no such thing. “My own precious angel is just a miracle child,” Mrs. Pearl declared. “Born too soon, you know. Why, she was so frail at birth we never thought the Lord would let her stay with us. But now look at her. In my Shannon, you can just see how God touches us all.”
Shannon’s fine blue blood vessels shone against the ivory of her scalp. Blue threads under the linen, her mama was always saying. Sometimes, Shannon seemed strangely beautiful to me, as she surely was to her mother. Sometimes, but not often. Not often at all. Every chance she could get, Mrs. Pearl would sit her daughter between her knees and purr over that gossamer hair and puffy pale skin. “My little angel,” she would croon, and my stomach would push up against my heart.
It was a lesson in the power of love. Looking back at me from between her mother’s legs, Shannon was wholly monstrous, a lurching hunched creature shining with sweat and smug satisfaction. There had to be something wrong with me, I was sure, the way I went from awe to disgust where Shannon was concerned. When Shannon sat between her mama’s legs or chewed licorice strings her daddy held out for her, I purely hated her. But when other people would look at her scornfully or the boys up at Lee Highway would call her Lard Eyes, I felt a fierce and protective love, as if she were more my sister than Reese. I felt as if I belonged to her in a funny kind of way, as if her “affliction” put me deeply in her debt. It was a mystery, I guessed, a sign of grace like Aunt Maybelle was always talking about. Magic.
Christian charity, I knew, would have had me smile at Shannon but avoid her like everyone else. It wasn’t Christian charity that made me give her a seat on the bus, trade my fifth-grade picture for hers, sit at her kitchen table while her mama tried another experiment on her wispy hair—“Egg and cornmeal, that’ll do the trick. We gonna put curls in this hair, darling, or my name an’t Roseanne Pearl”—or follow her to the Bushy Creek Highway store and share the blue popsicle she bought us. My fascination with her felt more like the restlessness that made me worry the scabs on my ankles. As disgusting as it seemed, I couldn’t put away the need to scratch my ankles or hang around what Granny called “that strange and ugly child.”
Other people had no such confusion about Shannon. Besides her mother and me, no one could stand her. No amount of Jesus’ grace would make her even marginally acceptable, and people had been known to suddenly lose their lunch from the sight of the clammy sheen of her skin, her skull showing blue-white through the thin, colorless hair, and those watery pink eyes flicking back and forth, drifting in and out of focus.
“Lord! But that child is ugly!”
“It’s a trial, Jesus knows, a trial for her poor parents.”
“They should keep her home.”
“Now, honey. That’s not like you. Remember, the Lord loves a charitable heart.”
“I don’t care. The Lord didn’t intend me to get nauseous in the middle of Sunday services. That child is a shock to the disgestion.”
I had the idea that because she was so ugly on the outside, it was only reasonable that Shannon would turn out to be saintlike when you got to know her. That was the way it would have been in any storybook the local ladies’ society would let me borrow. I thought of Little Women, The Bobbsey Twins, and all those novels about poor British families at Christmas. Tiny Tim, for Christ’s sake! Shannon, I was sure, would be like that. A patient and gentle soul had to be hidden behind