Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [67]
“Hurts like a motherfucker,” she says. But she won’t stop drinking. “Got to drink to ease the pain,” she laughs. I don’t argue with her, not about her drinking anyway. We got enough to argue about without that.
“You been seeing Cass awhile,” Anna said to me the other night.
“Must be time she got fed up with me, then.” I kept my face turned away, picked up Ghost Dance and hugged her to my neck.
“Well, if you going to go on the way you been, I expect it is.” Anna’s voice was low and sad. I watched her eyes track over to the pictures on her wall—old lovers and lost friends, she’d called it one night, her wall of grief. “I expect it is.”
On the hill above the science building, the dogwood trees are in bloom. My legs shake when I stop and bend over. I hold my balance and stretch out slowly, feeling the sweat running down my back. My thighs tremble and my throat still aches. When I look over at the science building’s huge mirrored front, I can see myself reflected in the glass, my hair swinging in the sunlight, the wet grass shining under my shoes. I look tiny and hard, like a nail sticking up out of the ground.
“Tena-kata-sho,” I say out loud and face punch up into my reflected image. The adrenaline comes even though all I have to trigger it is my own frustration. The sensei at the school I’ve been going to these past few months is a returned vet and a part-time cop who keeps switching back and forth, talking now in fortune-cookie Confucianism and then with macho insistence. Once every few weeks he loses control and really pops one of the boys. He doesn’t know how to deal with the women at all, and we all know he’d be happier if we weren’t in the class. The six of us who have remained ignore everything except the skills he has to teach us. For all of us, it is the discipline that matters, making ourselves over into what we most want to be, becoming strong for ourselves. We strip off our sex with our jewelry, sometimes so thoroughly that he forgets to treat us like the fragile incompetents he believes us to be. Last week he lost patience with me the way he does with the boys, grabbed me by the arm and shook me.
“You’re behaving like a passenger here, going through the motions. You’re not thinking about what you’re doing. You’re not in control. Come on. Get into your body. Feel it, feel what you’re doing. Push those muscles, feel ’em.”
The muscles of the mind, I’d thought. I’m just a passenger in here. I got to do something about the muscles of the mind.
I watch myself in the wall of glass above me, watch my back as I turn and lift my arms. I make my trembling muscles coil and reach, hoping desperately that the magic will come, that the kata will become sex for me the way it sometimes does. I slip into stance, determinedly loose, trying to thoughtlessly snap out the tension, to turn and jerk crisply, sharply, my shadow under me a pinpoint like the light in the pupils of Liz’s eyes. I push and sweat but my mind won’t let go. My feet keep slipping in the grass. The sun slanting up through the dogwood trees stabs my eyes. I lose my place in the kata and can’t remember the next sequence of moves.
“Goddamn it!” I shout, and my voice echoes back to me off the building. I see myself again, my mouth open like any screaming woman, the dizzy images of window after window reflecting figure after figure. I watch myself, the way I saw myself last night in the bathroom at the Overpass, reflected in the ammonia-stained tiles in the bathroom, my wrists coming up to face-punch the mirror. The morning sunlight was brighter than the fluorescent lights in the bathroom had been. I had been wavy and indistinct in the tiles. Now I was crisp and sharp in the mirrored windows. There were dozens of me up there, all open-mouthed and sunlit, bleached nails in the ground, not rising up, being