Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [47]
“But to leave her with him after he did that, to just let it stand, to let him get away with it.” I’d reached and reached, trying to get to them, to make them feel the wave moving up and through me. “It’s like all of it, all you let them get away with.”
“Them?” My mama had watched my face as if afraid of what she might find there. “Who do you mean? And what do you think we could do?”
I couldn’t say it. I’d stared into Mama’s face, and looked from her to all of them, to those wide, sturdy cheekbones, those high, proud eyebrows, those set and terrible mouths. I had always thought of them as mountains, mountains that everything conspired to grind but never actually broke. The women of my family were all I had ever believed in. What was I if they were not what I had shaped them in my own mind? All I had known was that I had to get away from them—all of them—the men who could do those terrible things and the women who would let it happen to you. I’d never forgiven any of them.
It might have been more than three months since I had talked to Mama on the telephone. It had been far longer than that since I had been able to really talk to any of them. The deepest part of me didn’t believe that I would ever be able to do so. I dropped my eyes and pulled myself away from Aunt Alma’s steady gaze. I wanted to reach for her, touch her, maybe cry with her, if she’d let me.
“People will hurt you more with pity than with hate,” she’d always told me. “I can hate back, or laugh at them, but goddamn the son of a bitch that hands me pity.”
No pity. Not allowed. I reached to rock a ball myself.
“Want to play?” I tried looking up into her eyes again. It was too close. Both of us looked away.
“I’ll play myself.” She set about racking up the balls. Her mouth was still set in that tight line. I dragged a kitchen stool in and sat in the doorway out of her way, telling myself I had to play this casually, play this as family, and wait and see what the point was.
“Where’s Uncle Bill?” I was rubbing my head again and trying to make conversation.
“What do you care? I don’t think Bill said ten words to you in your whole life.” She rolled the rack forward and back, positioning it perfectly for the break. “ ’Course he didn’t say many more to anybody else either.” She grinned, not looking at me, talking as if she were pouring tea at her own kitchen table. “Nobody can say I married that man for his conversation.”
She leaned into her opening shot, and I leaned forward in appreciation. She had a great stance, her weight centered over her massive thighs. My family runs to heavy women, gravy-fed workingwomen, the kind usually seen in pictures taken at mining disasters. Big women, all of my aunts move under their own power and stalk around telling everybody else what to do. But Aunt Alma was the prototype, the one I had loved most, starting back when she had given us free meals in the roadhouse she’d run for a while. It had been one of those bad times when my stepfather had been out of work and he and Mama were always fighting. Mama would load us all in the Pontiac and crank it up on seventy-five cents’ worth of gas, just enough to get to Aunt Alma’s place on the Eustis Highway. Once there, we’d be fed on chicken gravy and biscuits, and Mama would be fed from the well of her sister’s love and outrage.
You tell that bastard to get his ass out on the street. Whining don’t make money. Cursing don’t get a job. . . .
Bitching don’t make the beds and screaming don’t get the tomatoes planted. They had laughed together then, speaking a language of old stories and older jokes.
You tell him.
I said.
Now girl, you listen to me.
The power in them, the strength and the heat! How could anybody not