Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [81]
One afternoon, I went outside and stood listening for the sound of Reese alone in the bedroom. She was quiet, very quiet, but I could hear the rhythm of her breathing as it gradually picked up speed, and the soft little grunts she made before it began to slow down again. I liked those grunts. When Reese did it in the middle of the night, she never made any sound at all. But then, I was just as careful myself even when I was safely alone. I wondered if Reese did it differently in the daytime. I wondered if she lay on her back with her legs wide, the way I liked to when I was alone, rather than on her stomach with both hands under her the way she did at night. There was no way to spy on her, no way to know. But I imagined Reese sometimes while I did it myself, seeing her sprawled across our big Hollywood bed, rocking only slightly, showing by nothing but her breathing that she was committing a sin.
I walked in on Reese one afternoon while she was lying on the bed with a pair of mama’s panties over her face. All her features were outlined under the sheer material, but her breath puffed the silk out over her lips. Frantically, she snatched them off and shoved them behind her on the bed. I grabbed a book I had been reading off the dresser and pretended I hadn’t seen anything.
Reese played out her own stories in the woods behind the house. I watched her one afternoon from the top of the tree Mama hung her birdfeeder on. She hadn’t seen me climb up there and didn’t know I had a clear view of her as she ran around in an old sheet tied to her neck like a cape. She seemed to be pretending to fight off imaginary attackers. Then she dropped to the ground and pretended to be wrestling. Rolling around in the grass and wet leaves she kept shouting “No! No!” The haughty expression on her face was replaced by mock terror as she threw her head back and forth wildly like the heroine in an adventure movie.
I hugged myself tightly to the tree and rocked my hips against the indifferent trunk. I imagined I was tied to the branches above and below me. Someone had beaten me with dry sticks and put their hands in my clothes. Someone, someone, I imagined. Someone had tied me high up in the tree, gagged me and left me to starve to death while the blackbirds pecked at my ears. I rocked and rocked, pushing my thighs into the rough bark. Below me, Reese pushed her hips into the leaves and made grunting noises. Someone, someone, she imagined, was doing terrible exciting things to her.
Reese and I never talked about our private games, our separate hours alone in the bedroom. These days we barely talked at all. But we made sure no one else ever went in the bedroom when one of us was there alone.
It was the worst time for Reese and me to be fighting. Neither of us was ever supposed to be home in the afternoon without the other, but I couldn’t tell when she might blow up at me and run off somewhere. Daddy Glen had gotten his dairy routes changed and no longer had a full schedule. He’d been coming home a lot in the afternoons and had gone back to looking worried all the time. He’d yell at me one day that I was getting too big to run around in a T-shirt with no bra, and the next accuse me of pretending to be grown-up. Mama said he was fighting with his daddy and we were to stay out of his way until things settled down. But Aunt Alma and Uncle Wade were fighting again too, so I couldn’t hang around over there, and Aunt Ruth was really sick now.
“You go out to Raylene’s,” she told me finally.
“You never sent me to Raylene’s before,” I complained. “I thought you didn’t want me going out to her place.” I was hoping she’d let me come to the diner again and work in the kitchen. I liked it down there. I liked listening to the waitresses tell jokes and watching the truckers flirt with Mama like she was still the prettiest woman in the county.
“I never said that. I an’t never said nothing to you about Raylene.” I could tell Mama was angry from the high pitch of her voice. “Did somebody say something to you about Raylene?”
“No, Mama.”
“You sure?” Mama took