Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [80]
“Mamaaaaa!” she wailed as she ran. I kept yelling after her, more to keep myself from crying now than to hurt her.
“Ugly ... ugly ... ugly.”
12
There was no way on God’s green earth that I was ever going to speak to Shannon Pearl again. I didn’t even want to go to church. “Damn Bushy Creek anyway,” I told Reese. “An’t nobody there can sing worth a damn, and that preacher’s so full of himself he crowds out all the air—what air there is, all those old biddies sweating talcum powder and perfume.”
“Listen to you!” Reese rapped my belt buckle with her knuckles and then reached past me for the little bit of Coke left in the bottle I’d just set down. “Sounds like you done lost your religion.”
Reese and I had turned from absolute allies into competitors overnight, arguing all the time and fighting over everything from who got the chicken gizzard to who was the toughest. After years of wearing finger curls and ruffled dresses, Reese had turned tomboy with a vengeance, wrestling and spitting with the boys and refusing to wear anything Mama bought her. She’d begged a couple of pairs of Butch’s old coveralls from Deedee and wore them all the time, but what she really wanted was a pair of blue jeans like the ones I’d bought myself with my dishwashing money. She was also fiercely jealous of the braided leather belt Uncle Earle had sent me, with its brightly polished buckle shaped like a horseshoe, and was constantly trying to get her hands on it. I had to keep my eye on her or she would have “borrowed” it every chance she got.
“You should talk,” I snapped, wishing she would just go away and leave me alone. “You just go to church so you can beg Kool-Aid and cookies after Sunday school.”
“I an’t ashamed of that. I don’t see you turning down nothing people are giving away for free. Besides, you’re just jealous ’cause everybody’s always petting on me at Sunday school, and it used to be you getting all the attention.”
I snorted contemptuously but said nothing. You couldn’t argue with Reese, she liked it too much. I hooked my thumbs behind my belt buckle and leaned back to stare at her, refusing to speak. Silence was the only way to get to Reese. She couldn’t stand it if you wouldn’t talk to her.
“Oh, don’t you start that, you mean old thing.” Reese stamped her bare feet in the dirt and pointed the Coke bottle at me. “I’m on to you, Bone. I know all your tricks, and I an’t gonna play no more. You just sit on your damn old belt. I hope it strangles you. I an’t gonna be there to see it.”
It was around then that I discovered that Reese was masturbating almost as often as I was. In the middle of the night, I woke up to feel the bed shaking slightly. Instead of sprawling across the bottom of the bed as she usually did, her legs and arms thrown wide, Reese was at the far edge of the mattress, her body taut and curved away from me. I could hear the sound of her breathing, fast and shallow. I knew immediately what she was doing. I kept still, my own breathing quiet and steady. After a while there was a moment when she held her breath, and then the shaking stopped. Very quietly then I slipped my right hand down between my legs and held myself. I wanted to do it too, but I couldn’t stand the thought that she might hear. But what if she did? I felt Reese relax and sprawl wide again. I held my breath, I moved my hand, I almost did not shake the bed at all.
Reese would go back to our bedroom alone every day when we got home from school. When she came out, I would go in. Sometimes I even imagined I could smell what she had been doing, but that could not have been so. She was a little girl and smelled like a little girl. Neither of us smelled like Mama, the ripe fleshy scent of a woman grown. I pulled my shorts down and made sure of it, carefully washing between my legs with warm soap and water every time I did that thing I knew my sister was doing too.