Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [91]
“You could ask your mama if you could come.” Shannon’s voice sounded breathless and desperate, almost squeaky. “If you wanted to,” she added. I wondered what she had said in order to get her mama to agree I could come over. Out on the porch Reese had started shouting at Patsy Ruth.
“You don’t even know how to play this game!”
Why should I go to the Pearls’ house and watch her fat relatives eat themselves sick?
“Mama gave me a record player,” Shannon said suddenly. “I got a bunch of records for it.”
“Yeah?”
“Lots of ’em.” I heard her mother saying something in the background. “I got to go. Are you gonna come?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ll think about it.” I hung up the phone and saw Mama was watching me from the kitchen. “Shannon wants me to come over to her house this Sunday. They’re having a barbecue.”
“You want to go?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Mama nodded and handed me a towel. “Well, come help me. And you be sure and tell me if you’re going before Sunday. I an’t gonna want no surprises on Sunday morning. I might want to spend the whole day in bed, you never can tell.” She smiled, and I hugged her. I loved it when she looked like that. It made the whole house feel warm and safe.
“I might want to go on a trip myself.” Mama slapped my behind lightly. “But I an’t going nowhere till we get these dishes done, girl, and it’s your turn to dry.”
“Yes ma’am.”
I didn’t plan to go. I really didn’t. I certainly didn’t call Shannon back, and I didn’t say anything to Mama either. But Sunday afternoon I started walking toward Shannon’s house, carrying Reese’s tin bucket as if I was going hunting for late muscadines. Along the way I shook the wilting gray-green vines that would die off as soon as the first good freeze came. In the movies. people were alwavs swinging from vines like those, but every time Reese or I tried it, we wound up falling on our behinds. Maybe they had a different kind of vines in the forests where they made movies, but then they probably didn’t grow muscadines there.
I hummed as I walked, snatches of Mama’s favorite hymns and mine, alternating between “Somebody Touched Me” and “Oh Sinner Man.” Reese always sang it as “Whoa Sinner Man,” which made Uncle Earle bark out his donkey’s-bray laugh. I missed Earle. We weren’t going to see him until spring. He’d been sent to the county farm for busting a man’s jaw and breaking a window down at the Cracker Blue Cafe. Aunt Alma said he’d gotten into more fights at the farm and a bunch of men had held him down and shaved off all his black hair. I tried to imagine him baldheaded.
“That’ll slow down his womanizing.” Aunt Alma had sounded almost pleased.
“What’s womanizing?” Reese hadn’t learned yet that asking questions when the aunts were talking just got you pushed outside. I’d tried to tell her that if she ever wanted to learn anything, she should just shut up and listen and try to figure it out later.
“What are you doing listening to other people’s business?” Mama had been really angry. “You get out of here, all of you.”
“See what you did.” I’d been righteously indignant. I wasn’t used to being put out with the little kids. “Now we’ll never know why they shaved his head.”
“Oh, I know that already.” Reese smirked and put her arm around Patsy Ruth. “Granny said he tried to cut some fellow’s dick off.”
I’d never come up to the Pearls’ house from the back before. I usually came down the road from the Sears Tire Center, but that Sunday I cut through the backyards of the big houses on Tyson Circle and through the parking lot of the Roberts Dairy Drive-In. There were magnolia and flowers all along the back of their property so no one could see that parking lot, and I had to wiggle past the mums that were planted close to their fence.
There were a lot of people there, and they all looked like Pearls. Short, puffy, overdressed men stood around holding massive glasses of tea and grinning at skinny, pale women with pink lipstick and flyaway hair. Little kids were running around over near the driveway, where some big boys were taking turns cranking