Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [24]
It’s something. Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me. After the hysterectomy, the first mastectomy, another five years later, her teeth that were easier to give up than to keep, the little toes that calcified from too many years working waitress in bad shoes, hair and fingernails that drop off after every bout of chemotherapy, my mama is less and less the mountain, more and more the cave—the empty place from which things have been removed.
“With what they’ve taken off me, off Granny, and your Aunt Grace—shit, you could almost make another person.”
A woman, a garbage creation, an assembly of parts. When I drink I see her rising like bats out of deep caverns, a gossamer woman—all black edges, with a chrome uterus and molded glass fingers, plastic wire rib cage and red unblinking eyes. My mama, my grandmother, my aunts, my sister, and me—every part of us that can be taken has been.
“Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood,” my mama sang for me once, and laughing added, “But we don’t need as much of it as we used to, huh?”
When Mama talked, I listened. I believed it was the truth she was telling me. I watched her face as much as I listened to her words. She had a way of dropping her head and covering her bad teeth with her palm. I’d say, “Don’t do that.” And she’d laugh at how serious I was. When she laughed with me, that shadow, so gray under her eyes, lightened, and I felt for a moment—powerful, important, never so important as when I could make her laugh.
I wanted to grow up to do the poor-kid-done-good thing, the Elvis Presley/Ritchie Valens movie, to buy my mama her own house, put a key in her hand and say, “It’s yours—from here to there and everything in between, these walls, that door, that gate, these locks. You don’t ever have to let anyone in that you don’t want. You can lay in the sun if you want to or walk out naked in the moonlight if you take the mood. And if you want to go into town to mess around, we can go do it together.”
I did not want to be my mother’s lover; I wanted more than that. I wanted to rescue her the way we had both wanted her to rescue me. Do not want what you cannot have, she told me. But I was not as good as she was. I wanted that dream. I’ve never stopped wanting it.
The day I left home my stepfather disappeared. I scoured him out of my life, exorcising every movement or phrase in which I recognized his touch. All he left behind was a voice on a telephone line, a voice that sometimes answered when I called home. But Mama grew into my body like an extra layer of warm protective fat, closing me around. My muscles hug my bones in just the way hers do, and when I turn my face, I have that same bulldog angry glare I was always ashamed to see on her. But my legs are strong, and I do not stoop the way she does; I did not work waitress for thirty years, and my first lover taught me the importance of buying good shoes. I’ve got Mama’s habit of dropping my head, her quick angers, and that same belly-gutted scar she was so careful to hide. But nothing marks me so much her daughter as my hands—the way they are aging, the veins coming up through skin already thin. I tell myself they are beautiful as they recreate my mama’s flesh in mine.
My lovers laugh at me and say, “Every tenth word with you is Mama. Mama said. Mama used to say. My mama didn’t raise no fool.”
I widen my mouth around my drawl and show my mama’s lost teeth in my smile.
Watching my mama I learned some lessons too well. Never show that you care, Mama taught me, and never want something you cannot have. Never give anyone the satisfaction of denying you something you need, and for that, what you have to do is learn to need nothing. Starve the