Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [44]
Those wide blank eyes looked back at me. I could see myself in the black centers, my hair wild and uncombed around my face, my own eyes as wide as the monkey’s, as blank, the pupils as black and empty as night. My mouth worked, and in the blackness I saw my own teeth—clenching, shining, grinding. My teeth scared me right down into my soul. I stole all the dimes from the petty cash drawer and called Toni from the pay phone in the dorm. She listened to me babble and made soft soothing noises into my ears.
“It’s all right, baby. I understand. Don’t none of us want to be too alone if we can help it, now and then.”
I put the phone tight to my teeth and sobbed until she yelled to make me stop.
“If now and then is all you got to offer, then we’ll see about now and then.”
The last Sunday before we all went away for the summer, Toni borrowed a few hours’ time from a friend with an apartment in town. I’d quit my job in the lab and taken another in the post office, signed up for computer class, and was trying to stop dreaming about plush-faced monkeys and wild red rats. Toni and I made love until we were too sore to move and then lay naked, sweating into each other’s hips. Toni held my hands, fingering the two scars that remained on my right little finger. After a few minutes she sucked my fingers into her mouth and bit down gently.
“Tell me about that fishing camp again.” I could barely understand her, and didn’t want to talk anyway.
“No.”
“That monkey left her mark on you, didn’t she?”
“Only one that ever did.” I looked into her eyes when I said it, knowing what I was saying as much as she did.
“Only one, huh? You think that’s just?”
I shrugged, my eyes never leaving hers.
“There is no justice,” I told her, meaning it, meaning it absolutely.
Toni sighed and rolled over. She took a long pull from the half-empty glass of beer she’d left on the floor, and then looked up at me from under her eyebrows.
“Tell you what,” she whispered. “I want you to put me in one of your stories sometime.”
I took the glass away from her, took a drink myself. “What in the world for?”
She took the glass back and turned away from me. “I want to be there,” she said over her shoulder. “I just want to be there, right in there with the monkeys. Me, you understand—raw and drunk and hairy. Me, the way I am. You put me in there, huh? You just put me in there.”
Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know
I came out of the bathroom with my hair down wet on my shoulders. My Aunt Alma, my mama’s oldest sister, was standing in the middle of Casey’s dusty hooked rug looking like she had just flown in on it, her gray hair straggling out of its misshapen bun. For a moment I was so startled I couldn’t move. Aunt Alma just stood there looking around at the big bare room with its two church pews bracketing the only other furniture—a massive pool table. I froze while the water ran down from my hair to dampen the collar of the oversized tuxedo shirt I used for a bathrobe.
“Aunt Alma,” I stammered. “Well . . . welcome . . .”
“You really live here?” she let out a loud breath as if, even for me, such a situation was quite past her ability to believe. “Like this?”
I looked around as if I were seeing it for the first time myself, shrugged and tried to grin. “It’s big,” I offered. “Lots of space, four porches, all these windows. We get along well here, might not in a smaller place.” I looked back through the kitchen to Terry’s room with its thick dark curtains covering a wall of windows. Empty. So was Casey’s room on the other side of the kitchen. It was quiet and still, with no one even walking through the rooms overhead.
“Thank God,” I whispered to myself. Nobody else was home.
Aunt Alma turned around slowly and stepped over to the mantel with the old fly-spotted mirror over it. She pushed a few of her loose hairs back and then laid her big rattan purse up by a stack of flyers Terry had left there, brushing some of the dust away first.
“My God,” she echoed. “Dirtier than we ever lived. Didn’t think you’d turn out like this.”
I shrugged