Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [45]
I closed the last two buttons on my shirt and tried to shake some of the water out of my hair. Aunt Alma watched me through the dark spots of the mirror, her mouth set in an old familiar line. “Well,” I said, “I didn’t expect to see you.” I reached up to push hair back out of my eyes. “You want to sit down?”
Aunt Alma turned around and bumped her hip against the pool table. “Where?” One disdainful glance rendered the pews for what they were—exquisitely uncomfortable even for my hips. Her expression reminded me of my Uncle Jack’s jokes about her, about how she refused to go back to church till they put in rocking chairs.
“No rocking chairs here,” I laughed, hoping she’d laugh with me. Aunt Alma just leaned forward and rocked one of the balls on the table against another. Her mouth kept its flat, impartial expression. I tried gesturing across the pool table to my room and the big water bed outlined in sunlight and tree shade from the three windows overlooking it.
“It’s cleaner in there,” I offered, “it’s my room. This is our collective space.” I gestured around.
“Collective,” my aunt echoed me again, but the way she said the word expressed clearly her opinion of such arrangements. She looked toward my room with its narrow cluttered desk and stacks of books, then turned back to the pool table as by far the more interesting view. She rocked the balls again so that the hollow noise of the thump resounded against the high, dim ceiling.
“Pitiful,” she sighed, and gave me a sharp look, her washed-out blue eyes almost angry. Two balls broke loose from the others and rolled idly across the matted green surface of the table. The sunlight reflecting through the oak leaves outside made Aunt Alma’s face seem younger than I remembered it, some of the hard edge eased off the square jaw.
“Your mama is worried about you.”
“I don’t know why.” I turned my jaw to her, knowing it would remind her of how much alike we had always been, the people who had said I was more her child than my mama’s. “I’m fine. Mama should know that. I spoke to her not too long ago.”
“How long ago?”
I frowned, mopped at my head some more. Two months, three, last month? “I’m not sure . . . Reese’s birthday. I think it was Reese’s birthday.”
“Three months.” My aunt rocked one ball back and forth across her palm, a yellow nine ball. The light filtering into the room went a shade darker. The -9- gleamed pale through her fingers. I looked more closely at her. She looked just as she had when I was thirteen, her hair gray in that loose bun, her hands large and swollen, and her body straining the seams of the faded print dress. She’d worn her hair short for a while, but it was grown long again now, and the print dress under her coat could have been any dress she’d worn in the last twenty years. She’d gotten old suddenly after the birth of her eighth child, but since then she seemed not to change at all. She looked now as if she would go on forever—a worn stubborn woman who didn’t care what you saw when you looked at her.
I drew breath in slowly, carefully. I knew from old experience to use caution in dealing with any of my aunts, and this was the oldest and most formidable. I’d seen grown men break down and cry when she’d kept that look on them too long; little children repent and swear to change their ways. But I’d also seen my other aunts stare her right back, and like them I was a grown woman minding my own business. I had a right to look her in the eye, I told myself. I was no wayward child, no half-drunk, silly man. I was her namesake, my mama’s daughter. I had to be able to look her in the eye. If I couldn’t, I was in trouble and I didn’t want that kind of trouble, here five hundred miles and half a lifetime away from my aunts and the power of their eyes.
Slow, slow, the balls