Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [42]
Toni loved my story of the fishing camp, said it made her southern literature class come alive when she reread the books in my drawl. “Trailer parks and fishing camps—that’s where we growing our storytellers these days. You got possibilities, girl, as a true storyteller. Put a little work into it and you could be famous.”
“Right, make a living at it, no doubt.”
“Of a kind. Make some people happy anyway. You think about what a queer sort you are, girl, you and your finger-eating monkey. You southern dirt-country types are all alike. Faulkner would have put that stuff to use, made it a literary detail. Faulkner would have had you in here spouting soliloquies to the monkeys.”
Toni pulled a library book out of her backpack and tossed it in my direction. “Or Flannery O’Connor. This one’s just like you, honey. She’d’ve given you a vision of Jesus with monkey’s blood. She’d have had you chop off your own fingers and feed them to the monkeys.” Toni hugged her pack to her ribs and rocked with giggles.
“Shit, girl, it’s just too much, too Southern Gothic—catfish and monkeys and chewed-off fingers. Throw in a little red dirt and chicken feathers, a little incest and shotgun shells, and you could join the literary tradition.”
I caught her shoulder with my hand and shook her, suddenly outrageously angry. “Shit and nonsense!” I cursed, but Toni just rolled in my grip and went on laughing.
“Goddamn, honey. It’s all nonsense, like sexual obsession—nothing to do with reality nohow.” She pushed my hands away and pulled her pack on.
“Remember, I’m the literature major around here. You just the anthropologist.”
“Biologist. I told you I’m gonna switch over and become a biologist.”
Toni shook her head indulgently. “Sure, then you’re gonna settle down, marry some sweet boy, and raise mean-assed daughters to please your mama. I’ll believe that when I see it.”
When I didn’t say anything, Toni’s face took on a mock-serious expression. She reached out to the rack of cages against the wall and put her fingers to the trembling crossed wrists of a scared young monkey.
“You know,” she began, “if you were to work your stories well enough, someone would be sure to conclude they had something to do with your inverted proclivities, your les-bi-an-ism. Something like you constantly reenacting the rescue of your little sister. Hell, you could make some psychiatrist just piss his britches with excitement.”
I felt my lips pull tight with anger. The monkeys chittered in their cages. “But what about you, huh? What do you believe, Miss Literary Analyst?”
“Oh, honey,” she stretched her drawl, almost laughing at me. “It’s got nothing to do with what I believe. I’m talking about the world, everyone outside the circle of you and me—all those professors you tell your cute little stories to and the women who come ’round to hear your lies—all those lies you don’t have to tell me.”
“I don’t lie to you.”
“Don’t you?” Her laugh this time wasn’t funny. “Well, never mind then. Tell me the story ’bout the fishing camp again. Tell me about that poor sad monkey you got so fond of.”
Toni scratched the fur on the soft-eyed monkey in her cage, tracing a line above red-lined patient eyes. “How ’bout this one over here? Your monkey look like this one?”
“I don’t remember. That was a long time ago.”
“Only a moment in the mind, girl. Think about it. All those details you produce on prompting, the feel of the mesh, and the stink of the fish, all that story stuff that rolls out of you so easily when you got an audience around. Bet you got that monkey in your mind all the time.”
“You jealous?”
“More like you’re guilty? Guilty ’bout how you play up to any and everybody, but got so little time for the folks who really care about you?”
“You, huh? You want me to believe you just live for me, huh?”
“Hell, me and the monkeys, girl.