Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [21]
Push it down. Don’t show it. Don’t tell anyone what is really going on. We are not safe, I learned from my mama. There are people in the world who are, but they are not us. Don’t show your stuff to anyone. Tell no one that your stepfather beats you. The things that would happen are too terrible to name.
Mama quit working honkytonks to try the mill as soon as she could after her marriage. But a year in the mill was all she could take; the dust in the air got to her too fast. After that there was no choice but to find work in a diner. The tips made all the difference, though she could have made more money if she’d stayed with the honkytonks or managed a slot as a cocktail waitress. There was always more money serving people beer and wine, more still in hard liquor, but she’d have had to go outside Greenville County to do that. Neither she nor her new husband could imagine going that far.
The diner was a good choice anyway, one of the few respectable ones downtown, a place where men took their families on Sunday afternoon. The work left her tired, but not sick to death like the mill, and she liked the people she met there, the tips and the conversation.
“You got a way about you,” the manager told her.
“Oh yeah, I’m known for my ways,” she laughed, and no one would have known she didn’t mean it. Truckers or judges, they all liked my mama. And when they weren’t slipping quarters in her pocket, they were bringing her things, souvenirs or friendship cards, once or twice a ring. Mama smiled, joked, slapped ass, and firmly passed back anything that looked like a down payment on something she didn’t want to sell. She started taking me to work with her when I was still too short to see over the counter, letting me sit up there to watch her some, and tucking me away in the car when I got cold or sleepy.
“That’s my girl,” she’d brag. “Four years old and reads the funny papers to me every Sunday morning. She’s something, an’t she?”
“Something.” The men would nod, mostly not even looking at me, but agreeing with anything just to win Mama’s smile. I’d watch them closely, the wallets they pulled out of their back pockets, the rough patches on their forearms and scratches on their chins. Poor men, they didn’t have much more than we did, but they could buy my mama’s time with a cup of coffee and a nickel slipped under the saucer. I hated them, each and every one.
My stepfather was a truck driver—a little man with a big rig and a bigger rage. He kept losing jobs when he lost his temper. Somebody would say something, some joke, some little thing, and my little stepfather would pick up something half again his weight and try to murder whoever had dared to say that thing. “Don’t make him angry,” people always said about him. “Don’t make him angry,” my mama was always saying to us.
I tried not to make him angry. I ran his errands. I listened to him talk, standing still on one leg and then the other, keeping my face empty, impartial. He always wanted me to wait on him. When we heard him yell, my sister’s face would break like a pool of water struck with a handful of stones. Her glance would fly to mine. I would stare at her, hate her, hate myself. She would stare at me, hate me, and hate herself. After a moment, I would sigh—five, six, seven, eight years old, sighing like an old