Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [43]
“Think about it. We’d have a door we could lock against the world.”
I thought about it. I thought about never being alone when I wanted to be, about Toni keeping track of where I went and what I did, of her sudden angers and drunken tirades. But I also thought about all those Sunday mornings lying against Toni’s thigh out in front of the dormitory, reading the paper and swapping nasty stories until we were both squirming in our jeans with nowhere to go to have sex. Then I thought about making love anytime I wanted until I would get to needing it, having to have it, and only Toni to provide it. I thought about getting to where I trusted her and what she might do then. A kind of terror came up from my belly and strangled me. I’d never trusted anybody in my life. How could I trust Toni?
“No,” I told her. “I don’t want to move in with you.”
Toni’s black eyes narrowed, and her left hand slapped the monkey cage, sending its captive into shrieking hysterics. “Shit, bitch. You just want your stuff taken care of and never having to trade nothing for it. You tell yourself it’s just sex, and sex an’t nothing but itch-scratching. You tell yourself lies, girl. You live your life on lies.”
She grabbed my wrists and pulled me close to her. I pulled back, and we both almost fell. For a moment we stood close, trembling, then she threw my hands down.
“Even monkeys take mating seriously.” Her anger and hurt and outrage seemed to vibrate right through me. My own anger came rolling back.
“What do you know about monkeys? What do you know about anything?”
“More than your stories, girl. More than your stories tell anyone. I know who I am. I know what I want. And I know what an’t worth my trouble, what an’t worth another minute of my time.”
I thought she was going to slap me. I wanted her to slap me. If she slapped me, she would be the bad guy. I would be the heroine, the victim. I’d be able to stare her down and hate her forever. But she didn’t touch me. She shook her hands like she was throwing off dust, turned around and walked away. It was a good move. It was the perfect dismissive bar dyke move.
I worked in the labs over the holidays, slept on a lab table, and went back to the nearly empty dorm only to shower and change my clothes. I lived on peanut butter sandwiches and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer from the cases the other lab assistants had hidden behind the furnace. The warm beer gave me gas, and I’d sit up on one of the tables and entertain the monkeys with rock and roll punctuated with burps. I sang the love songs the loudest, emphasizing the female pronouns by slapping the table.
The monkeys were remarkably quiet, only getting noisy if I beat the table too long. They stared at me out of infinitely wise and patient faces. I poured them all a little beer and smeared peanut butter on their feed trays. They loved the peanut butter and chewed with great wide-smacking sounds. I knew I could trust them. They wouldn’t tell my secrets to anybody.
“The problem is . . .” I told them, checking first to be sure the door was locked. “The problem is I don’t love her. I want to love her. I want to love somebody. I want to go crazy with love, eat myself up with love. Starve myself, strangle and die with love, like everybody else. Like the rest of the whole goddamned world. I want to be like the rest of the world.”
I went up and put my hands flat against one of the cages. The monkey inside, old and hunched and gray, watched me with eyes that seemed to be all whites.
“But I’m not,” I whispered. I was drunk, but I was telling the truth. “I’m not like anyone else in the whole wide world. And all I want of Toni is just a little piece now and then. A little controlled piece that she won’t mind giving me, that she wants to give me. You understand? I don’t want nothing too serious. I don’t want to need her too much. I don’t want