Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [18]
“Nothing.” Mattie filled her mouth with rice so she wouldn’t have to talk.
“You got a lot in that face for nothing to say. Mabel Moseley told me she saw you out behind the mill talking to that Gibson boy day before yesterday. She said you were shaking your ass and swinging your hair like some kind of harlot.”
Mattie scooped up more rice and stuffed her mouth so that her cheeks bulged out. She looked at her mother steadily, seeing for the first time not only the thin lips but also the corded neck muscles, and the high red spots on the cheeks. She is ugly, Mattie thought. Seriously ugly.
Shirley frowned. Something was going on, and she did not understand it.
Mattie let her eyes wander up to her mother’s pupils, the hard hazel color that reflected her own. You are ugly and old, she thought to herself. Her teeth went on chewing steadily. Her eyes did not blink.
“Now, now.” Tucker pushed his plate forward out of his way. “You know Mabel Moseley an’t quite right in her head. Mattie Lee’s a good girl.”
“She’s trash. She’s nothing but trash, and you know it.” Calmly, Shirley set the full plate in front of her youngest and started to fill another for herself. “Don’t matter what I do. I can’t make nothing out of these brats. Seems like they’re all bound to grow up to be trash.”
Tucker closed his eyes and sighed. “I’m tired,” he whispered. “I’m gonna lay me down for a while.”
“An’t no food gonna be kept warm for you.”
“Don’t want it no way.”
Mattie spooned more rice, and chewed slowly. She watched her mother watch her father as he walked away, shuffling his feet on the floorboards. There were wide gaps between most of the floorboards, and Shirley was always stuffing them with one thing or another. What would it be like, Mattie wondered, to live in a house with dirt floors?
“You know that union man?” she heard herself say, and her heart seemed to pause briefly in shock.
Her mama was looking at her again. Shirley’s mouth was hanging open. Past her shoulder, Bo had stopped in the doorway, wiping his hands on his shirtfront.
“Union?”
“Trade union.” Mattie filled her fork again and then looked right past her mama to Bo. “You think we ought to sign up?”
“You’ve gone crazy.” Shirley dropped the spoon into the beans. “You’ve gone absolutely white-eyed crazy. There an’t no union in the mill. There an’t gonna be no union in the mill. And I wouldn’t let you join one if some fool was to bring one in.”
“You couldn’t stop me.”
It felt to Mattie as if all the rice she had eaten was swelling inside her. There was a kind of heat in her belly that was spreading down her legs and tingling as it went. Once she had sipped at her daddy’s tea glass and felt the same thing. “You’re drunk, little girl.” Tucker had laughed at her, but she had kind of liked the feeling. This was like that, and she liked it even more now.
She watched Shirley’s hands flatten on the table. She watched the red spots on her mama’s face get bigger and hotter. She watched Bo’s eyes widen and a little gleam of light come on in them. There was a kind of laughter in her belly that wanted to roll out her mouth, but she held it inside. She imagined Bo’s chorus of when we grow up, and found herself thinking that when she had kids, she’d sit them all down on the dirt floor and tell ’em to sign with the union. Shirley’s chair made a hollow sound on the bare floor.
Now, Mattie thought. Now, she will get up and come over there, and she will slap me. What will I do then? She took another bite of rice and smiled.
What will I do then?
Granny Mattie always said Great-grandma Shirley lived too long. “One hundred and fourteen when she died, and didn’t nobody want to wash her body for the burying. Had to hire an undertaker’s assistant to pick something to bury her in. She’d left instructions, but didn’t nobody want to read them. Bo had always sworn he would throw a party when she died, but shit, he didn’t live to see it. And his sons didn’t have the guts to do it for him. Only thing Bo ever managed to do to her