Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [48]
I breathed deep, watching my aunt rock on her stance, settling her eye on the balls, while I smelled chicken gravy and hot grease, the close thick scent of love and understanding. I used to love to eat at Aunt Alma’s house, all those home-cooked dinners at the roadhouse; pinto beans with peppers for fifteen, nine of them hers. Chowchow on a clean white plate passed around the table while the biscuits passed the other way. My aunt always made biscuits. What else stretched so well? Now those starch meals shadowed her loose shoulders and dimpled her fat white elbows.
She gave me one quick glance and loosed her stroke. The white ball punched the center of the table. The balls flew to the edges. My sixty-year-old aunt gave a grin that would have scared piss out of my Uncle Bill, a grin of pure, fierce enjoyment. She rolled the stick in fingers loose as butter on a biscuit, laughed again, and slid her palms down the sides of polished wood, while the anger in her face melted into skill and concentration.
I rocked back on my stool and covered my smile with my wet hair. Goddamn! Aunt Alma pushed back on one ankle, swung the stick to follow one ball, another, dropping them as easily as peas on potatoes. Goddamn! She went after those balls like kids on a dirt yard, catching each lightly and dropping them lovingly. Into the holes, move it! Turning and bracing on ankles thickened with too many years of flour and babies, Aunt Alma blitzed that table like a twenty-year-old hustler, not sparing me another glance.
Not till the eighth stroke did she pause and stop to catch her breath.
“You living like this—not for a man, huh?” she asked, one eyebrow arched and curious.
“No.” I shrugged, feeling more friendly and relaxed. Moving like that, aunt of mine I wanted to say, don’t tell me you don’t understand.
“Your mama said you were working in some photo shop, doing shit work for shit money. Not much to show for that college degree, is that?”
“Work is work. It pays the rent.”
“Which ought not to be much here.”
“No,” I agreed, “not much. I know,” I waved my hands lightly, “it’s a wreck of a place, but it’s home. I’m happy here. Terry, Casey and everybody—they’re family.”
“Family.” Her mouth hardened again. “You have a family, don’t you remember? These girls might be close, might be important to you, but they’re not family. You know that.” Her eyes said more, much more. Her eyes threw the word “family” at me like a spear. All her longing, all her resentment of my abandonment, was in that word, and not only hers, but also Mama’s and my sisters’ and all the cousins’ I had carefully not given my new address.
“How about a beer?” I asked. I wanted one myself. “I’ve got a can of Pabst in the icebox.”
“A glass of water,” she said. She leaned over the table to line up her closing shots.
I brought her a glass of water. “You’re good,” I told her, wanting her to talk to me about how she had learned to play pool, anything but family and all this stuff I so much did not want to think about.
“Children.” She stared at me again. “What about children?” There was something in her face then that waited, as if no question were more important, as if she knew the only answer I could give.
Enough, I told myself, and got up without a word to get myself that can of Pabst. I did not look in her eyes. I walked into the kitchen on feet that felt suddenly unsteady and tender. Behind me, I heard her slide the cue stick along the rim of the table and then draw it back to set up another shot.
Play it out, I cursed to myself, just play it out and leave me alone. Everything is so simple for you, so settled. Make babies. Grow a garden. Handle some man like he’s just another child. Let everything come that comes, die that dies; let everything go where it goes. I drank straight from the can and watched her through the doorway. All my uncles were drunks, and I was more like them than I had ever been like my aunts.
Aunt Alma