Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [82]
“What would anyone say about Raylene?”
Mama let go of my arm.
“Never mind asking questions. Just don’t you go making things up, little girl. You’re not too big to have your britches warmed.”
“I’m sorry. But you never sent me out to Raylene’s before.”
“Well, maybe I didn’t think you were old enough to be staying out on the river before.” Mama was exasperated and impatient. She pushed her hair back with both hands and wiped her lips. “Garvey’s doing some work for Mr. Berdforth’s service station these afternoons after he gets out of school. He can give you a ride, and I should hope I can trust you not to get in any trouble while you’re there.”
Garvey was happy to give me a lift to Aunt Raylene’s place, particularly after Mama gave him a dollar for gas money. “I an’t making no real money cleaning up for Mr. Berdforth,” he told me. “Man’s as cheap as they come. But at least I’m learning something. Daddy says a mechanic can always find a job.”
“Yeah.”
I was restless and uninterested in Garvey’s troubles. Aunt Alma joked that the twins were too lazy to fart on their own, and sometimes I thought she was right. They were certainly dumb enough. Neither of them ever read a book or talked about anything but how rich they were gonna be “someday.” Mama said you could tell they were starting to grow up by how silly they had become, that teenagers always got stupid before they got smart. I wondered if that was what was happening to me, if I had already started to get stupid and just didn’t know it. Not that it mattered. Stupid or smart, there wasn’t much choice about what was going to happen to me, or to Grey and Garvey, or to any of us. Growing up was like falling into a hole. The boys would quit school and sooner or later go to jail for something silly. I might not quit school, not while Mama had any say in the matter, but what difference would that make? What was I going to do in five years? Work in the textile mill? Join Mama at the diner? It all looked bleak to me. No wonder people got crazy as they grew up.
No matter what Mama said, I knew that it wasn’t just because of where she lived that I had never spent much time with Aunt Raylene. For all she was a Boatwright woman, there were ways Raylene had always been different from her sisters. She was quieter, more private, living alone with her dogs and fishing lines, and seemingly happy that way. She had always lived out past the city limits, and her house was where the older boy cousins tended to go. Out at Raylene’s they could smoke and curse and roughhouse without interference. She let kids do pretty much anything they wanted. With none of her own, Raylene was convinced that the best way to raise children was to give them their head.
“There’s no evil in them,” she’d always say. “They’re just like puppies. They need to wear themselves out now and then.”
Raylene’s place was easy to get to on the Eustis Highway but set off by itself on a little rise of land. The Greenville River curved around the outcropping where her weathered old shotgun house stood, and from the porch that went around three sides, you could watch the river and the highway that skirted it. Raylene kept the trees cut back and the shrubs low to the ground. “I don’t like surprises,” she always said. “I like to see who’s coming up on me.”
When Raylene was young, Uncle Earle told me, she had been kind of wild. At seventeen she had run off with a guy who drove for the carnival, but she never married him. She came home two years later to take a job in the textile mill and rent the house where she still lived. Before he went off to Oklahoma, Butch told me that Raylene had worked for the carnival like a man, cutting off her hair and dressing in overalls. She’d called herself Ray, and with her short, stocky build, big shoulders, and small breasts, I could easily see how no one had questioned her. It was astonishing to imagine running off like that, and I would think about it with wistful longing. Grey or Garvey would talk about how they intended to go traveling