Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [15]
Her five sons and three daughters dreamed often of their mother, dreamed she came in to wash their faces with lye, to cut off the places where their ears stuck out, to tie down their wagging tongues, and plane down their purplish genitals.
“You won’t need this,” they dreamed she told them, as she pulled off one piece or another of their flesh. “Or this, or this.” They dreamed and screamed and woke each other in terror. Sometimes Shirley beat on the stairs with a broom handle to remind them how much she and Tucker needed their sleep. She hated the way they cringed away from her. After all, she never hit them. A pinch was enough, if you knew how it should be done. But more than their shameful fear of her, she hated the way Mattie would stare back at her and refuse to drop her eyes.
“You think you’re something, don’t you?” Shirley would push her face right up to her daughter’s flushed and sweating cheekbones.
“You think God’s got his eye on you?” She would pinch the inside of Mattie’s arm and twist her mouth at the girl’s stubborn expression. “Wouldn’t nobody take an interest in you if you were to birth puppy dogs and turtles—which you might. You might any day now.”
She sent them all to bed early and came up to beat the foot of each bed with her broomstick until the children squeezed up near the top. “Boatwrights, you’re all purely bred Boatwrights. My side of the family don’t even want to know you’re alive. I look at you and I swear you an’t no kin to me at all.”
It was true that Shirley’s family took no interest in her children. Once a year Shirley would go alone to visit her mother, but neither her parents nor her brothers ever visited her. The only thing the children knew about their grandparents was Shirley’s stories about their house, how big and clean it was, how the porch shone with soapstoned wood and baskets of sweet herbs that Grandma Wilmer used in her cooking, how the neighbors admired her mother and looked up to her daddy. By contrast, their father’s father, a widower, was nothing but a drunk.
“Vegetables . . . hell!” That man sells whiskey out of that roadside stand, whiskey I tell you, not tomatoes and squash. He just has those runty old tomatoes there to keep the law off.”
“Now Shirley, you know that an’t true,” Tucker always protested.
“I know what’s true, Tucker Boatwright, and I won’t have these children spared the truth. You want them to grow up like their grandfather? Like those lazy sisters of yours in their dirt-floor cabins? I surely don’t. They grow up to live in dirt and I’ll renounce them.”
“That woman hates her children,” the neighbors all said. They did not say that the children hated her. It was not possible to know what those children thought, so quiet and still they were. They all had the same face, the same pinched features, colorless hair, and nervous hands. Only their eyes varied in shade, from Bo’s seawater blue to Mattie’s grapeskin hazel. In the warmer weather, they all took on the same shade of deep red-brown tan, a tan acquired from staying away from the house as much as they could, and from long hours spent weeding and picking at their mama’s direction in a half a dozen farmers’ fields.
“Money is hard come by,” Shirley told them, pocketing eight cents a week on the boys, and three on the girls. “Dreams are all that come free, dreams and talk. And that’s all lazy people know about. You should see those bent-necks down at the mill, trying to pretend they’re working when they’re dreaming or talking. Talk about how badly they’re used. Trash don’t know the meaning of use. Just like you kids.”
She tucked the pennies in her kerchief and that in her apron. “The way you eat, you’d think you didn’t know the cost of boiled rice.”
“Two cents a pound.”
When Mattie spoke, all the other children dropped their heads, though Bo and Tucker Junior always turned their faces so they could look up from the side. They knew Mattie was crazy, but they worshiped her craziness and suspected that without her they might have all curled up and died.
“You little whore!” Shirley