Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [57]
Oh, but it was control at a cost, of course, or I would be there still. I could hold her only by calculation, indirection, and distraction. It was dear, that cost, and too dangerous. I had to keep a distance in my head, an icy control on my desire to lose control. I wanted to lay the whole length of my tongue on her, to dribble over my chin, to flatten my cheeks to that fabric and shake my head on her seams like a dog on a fine white bone. But that would have been too real, too raw. Bobby would never have sat still for that. I held her by the unreality of my hunger, my slow nibbling civilized tongue.
Oh, Bobby loved that part of it, like she loved her chintz sofa, the antique armoire with the fold-down shelf she used for a desk, the carefully balanced display of appropriate liquors she never touched—unlike the bottles on the kitchen shelves she emptied and replaced weekly. Bobby loved the aura of acceptability, the possibility of finally being bourgeois, civilized, and respectable.
I was the uncivilized thing in Bobby’s life, reminding her of the taste of hunger, the remembered stink of her mother’s sweat, her own desire. I became sex for her. I held it in me, in the push of my thighs against hers when she finally grabbed me and dragged me off into the citadel of her bedroom. I held myself up, back and off her. I did what I had to do to get her, to get myself what we both wanted. But what a price we paid for what I did.
What I did.
What I was.
What I do.
What I am.
I paid a high price to become who I am. Her contempt, her terror, was the least of it. My contempt, my terror, took over my life, because they were the first things I felt when I looked at myself, until I became unable to see my true self at all. “You’re an animal,” she used to say to me, in the dark with her teeth against my thigh, and I believed her, growled back at her, and swallowed all the poison she could pour into my soul.
Now I sit and think about Bobby’s thighs, her legs opening in the dark where no one could see, certainly not herself. My own legs opening. That was so long ago and far away, but not so far as she finally ran when she could not stand it anymore, when the lust I made her feel got too wild, too uncivilized, too dangerous. Now I think about what I did.
What I did.
What I was.
What I do.
What I am.
“Sex,” I told her. “I will be sex for you.”
Never asked, “You. What will you be for me?”
Now I make sure to ask. I keep Bobby in mind when I stare at women’s thighs. I finger my seams, flash my teeth, and put it right out there.
“You. What will you let yourself be for me?”
Muscles of the Mind
I slept through one whole year of my life—the year I did not have the money to go to graduate school the way I had expected. Being awake would have meant making decisions, and I did not know what to decide. I did not know who I was supposed to be. I dreamed through that year, heavy-lidded and silent, though I went almost every day to work as a salad girl, pickle chopper, housekeeper, waitress, substitute teacher, counter girl, or line worker in a mop factory. I could do any of that again easily—make change with one hand while wiping terrazzo with another, keep grammar-school children at their desks, slice lettuce or pickles bracing the blade with the flat of my palm, rack up two hundred mops in an hour or scrub babyshit off crib slats—but I’ve lost the ability to sleep during the day. I wake at first light, even if I have blacked out every