Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [19]
Mama
Above her left ankle my mother has an odd star-shaped scar. It blossoms like a violet above the arch, a purple pucker riding the muscle. When she was a little girl in South Carolina they still bled people in sickness, and they bled her there. I thought she was just telling a story, when she first told me, teasing me or covering up some embarrassing accident she didn’t want me to know about. But my aunt supported her.
“It’s a miracle she’s alive, girl. She was such a sickly child, still a child when she had you, and then there was the way you were born.”
“How’s that?”
“Assbackwards,” Aunt Alma was proud to be the first to tell me, and it showed in the excitement in her voice. “Your mama was unconscious for three days after you were born. She’d been fast asleep in the back of your Uncle Lucius’s car when they hit that Pontiac right outside the airbase. Your mama went right through the windshield and bounced off the other car. When she woke up three days later, you were already out and named, and all she had was a little scar on her forehead to show what had happened. It was a miracle like they talk about in Bible school, and I know there’s something your mama’s meant to do because of it.”
“Oh yeah.” Mama shrugged when I asked her about it. “An’t no doubt I’m meant for greater things—bigger biscuits, thicker gravy. What else could God want for someone like me, huh?” She pulled her mouth so tight I could see her teeth pushing her upper lip, but then she looked into my face and let her air out slowly.
“Your aunt is always laying things to God’s hand that he wouldn’t have interest in doing anyway. What’s true is that there was a car accident and you got named before I could say much about it. Ask your aunt why you’re named after her, why don’t you?”
On my stepfather’s birthday I always think of my mother. She sits with her coffee and cigarettes, watches the sun come up before she must leave for work. My mama lives with my stepfather still, though she spent most of my childhood swearing that as soon as she had us up and grown, she’d leave him flat. Instead, we left, my sister and I, and on my stepfather’s birthday we neither send presents nor visit. The thing we do—as my sister has told me and as I have told her—is think about Mama. At any moment of the day we know what she will be doing, where she will be, and what she will probably be talking about. We know, not only because her days are as set and predictable as the schedule by which she does the laundry, we know in our bodies. Our mother’s body is with us in its details. She is recreated in each of us; strength of bone and the skin curling over the thick flesh the women of our family have always worn.
When I visit Mama, I always look first to her hands and feet to reassure myself. The skin of her hands is transparent—large-veined, wrinkled, and bruised—while her feet are soft with the lotions I rubbed into them every other night of my childhood. That was a special thing between my mother and me, the way she’d give herself the care of my hands, lying across the daybed, telling me stories of what she’d served down at the truck stop, who had complained and who tipped specially well, and most important, who had said what and what she’d said back. I would sit at her feet, laughing and nodding and stroking away the tightness in her muscles, watching the way her mouth would pull taut while under her pale eyelids the pulse of her eyes moved like kittens behind a blanket. Sometimes my love for her would choke me, and I would ache to have her open her eyes and see me there, to see how much I loved her. But mostly I kept my eyes