Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [88]
“Everybody says Temple takes after Alma, but I can’t see it,” Mama said. “I’d swear the girl was never easy in her body. Never gave a hoot about nobody or nothing, except her pride.”
Aunt Raylene started giggling over the lip of her tea glass. “You know, she was standing in the yard that time the sheriff came and all the yelling started. Stood out there and tried to pretend wasn’t nothing going on, wasn’t no sheriffs in the yard with a warrant, no beating on the door, nobody throwing clothes out the window. The girl’s purely amazing.”
“What’d she do, offer him a glass of water?”
“Hell no, she tried to get Alma out of the house so she could give up the furniture quietly. She didn’t care what happened, didn’t care that the furniture-store man really was trying to rob her mama, just didn’t want the neighbors to think they couldn’t keep up the payments.”
“As if everybody didn’t know it already. You can’t keep secrets like that.”
“Well, you and I don’t even try. And certainly Alma don’t. She knows who she is. But it’s different for the kids. Seems like they’re all the time wanting just what they can’t have, and they’ve got such a funny dose of pride.”
“No pride at all or too much, I can’t tell sometimes.”
“Different from us is all, maybe.” Aunt Raylene’s face went slack and her voice dropped. “Look at your girls too, Anney. I’ve seen it in them. Not like Temple. No. But something. Something hard and angry that only shows now and again.”
They went quiet and looked over at me. I tried to pretend I hadn’t been listening, concentrating on waving the steam away so that I could see down into the pot. But if I slanted my eyes sideways, I could still see them clear. Through the steam they both looked older—two worn, tired women repeating old stories to each other and trying not to worry too much about things they couldn’t change anyway. It struck me then how young they both were to be looking so old, neither of them as old as Madeline, Mama not yet twenty-six and Aunt Raylene less than ten years older. Still, they seemed so different from me, almost as if they had come out of another century. I wished then that I could be more like them, easier in my body and not so angry all the time. Too much pride or too little? What was wrong with me? I wondered.
After all the peaches had been canned, the tomatoes and the snap peas, Aunt Raylene did the rest of the fruit, the plums and the apples and the blackberries. The days were full of sweat and steam and boiling pots. I spent every minute I was not in school planted on a stool in her kitchen, peeling or scrubbing or watching pots while Aunt Raylene told me stories and my neck cramped with worry. I was afraid somebody would find my hook under her porch, but I couldn’t get it out of there until the canning was done. If one of the uncles found that hook, I knew Aunt Raylene would figure out that it was me who had brought it up out of the cellar.
One early evening when we were almost finished putting up the canned fruit racks, Grey came into the kitchen, his face so bright it jumped out at me. His grin was spread so wide I gave him a shove before Aunt Raylene could see.
“You found it!” I hissed at him.
He stared at me for a long minute and then grinned wider. “You, huh, Bone? You the one been going in and out the cellar all this time, huh? Slick, girl, slick.”
“Just keep your mouth shut or Aunt Raylene will hide it where we’ll never find it.”
“I an’t gonna tell nobody.”
“You looking like that, she’ll know something is going on.”
Grey laughed and twirled a finger in a smear of blackberry juice I hadn’t had time to clean up. “You talk any louder and she’ll hear it from you.”
I looked down the center hall into the room at the end. Aunt Raylene was folding towels and humming to herself. I pushed Grey back out onto the porch and looped my arm around his neck. I knew that if I got