Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [39]
“Sure went on forever,” Mama whispered, as we walked toward the exit.
The statistics professor was standing near the door telling a tall black woman, “Quite something, your son. We’re expecting great things of him.”
I laughed and tucked my diploma in Mama’s bag for the walk back to the dormitory. People were packing station wagons, U-haul trailers, and bulging little sedans. Our Pontiac was almost full and my face was starting to ache from smiling, but I made a quick trip down into the dormitory basement anyway. There was a vacuum cleaner and two wooden picture frames I’d stashed behind the laundry-room doors that I knew would fit perfectly in the Pontiac’s trunk. Mama watched me carry them up but said nothing. Daddy only laughed and revved the engine while we swung past the auditorium. At the entrance to the campus I got them to pull over and look back at the scattered buildings. It was a rare moment, and for a change my hunger wasn’t bothering me at all. But while my parents waited, I climbed out and pulled the commemorative roses off the welcome sign. I got back in the car and piled them into my mama’s lap.
“Quite something, my daughter,” she laughed, and hugged the flowers to her breast. She rocked in her seat as my stepfather gunned the engine and spun the tires pulling out. I grinned while she laughed.
“Quite something.”
It was the best moment I’d had in four years.
Monkeybites
In college I contemplated a career in biology for one long year, and rats—fat gray ones with minuscule wires in their skulls or slender white ones trailing colored threads to mark the buried electrodes. The animal labs were in a cinder-block building set away from the campus. I went there like a pilgrim to stare into the cages and finger the plush on a monkey’s neck, the monkey bent to a frame that kept his razor teeth from my flesh. After a while the teeth were gone with the larynx, and he only spat when I came to see him.
It hurt me that he could not bite; the rats at least kept their teeth. I told myself that the security of a career in science demanded sacrifice. I would have to get used to rats with wires and monkeys without teeth. But it was hard, hard. I hated the whitewashed walls and the raw, shrinking creatures under my hands as much as the implacable mechanical motions of the professors in rubber gloves. After I got the job of cleaning up the lab, my dreams were full of monkeys’ teeth and the sibilant scratches of rats’ nails on Formica counters. On those rare nights when Toni and I could sleep over at a friend’s house in the city, I would wake shuddering, feeling her arms around me like the wires that trussed the monkeys.
“You are one restless woman,” Toni would tell me in the morning, showing me the scratches I’d made on her arms and back. “Can’t lie still to save your life.” More out of guilt than desire, I’d kiss her shoulders and slide down between her legs to ease with my tongue what I could not cure with words. I felt about oral sex with Toni the way my roommate in the dorm felt about transcendental meditation. At the point at which my neck began to ache and my fingers spasm on her thighs, I would begin to feel righteous. The longer it took to get her off, and the greater the ache in my neck and back, the farther away I would go in my mind until finally it was as if I were not making love to Toni but to myself. I became a point of concentration, icy and hot at the same time. When she began to babble those love words that meant she was just about to come, my own thighs would shake sympathetically. I rarely came making love to Toni, but nothing made me feel so balanced as an hour or two pushing my tongue between her swollen labia. It was expiation and penance. It was redemption.
But for Toni, sex was a matter of commitment; making love was a bond itself. She had her own cage, her own need for expiation, and she hated the way I could go away into my own head, the distance between us that she could not