Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [71]
“I only hope you know what you’re doing.” Paula slaps her glass down and glares at Margaret and me.
For a moment I’ve lost the thread of the conversation, something I’ve been doing a lot lately. The fact is I have been drinking too much, and not sleeping and not eating, and half the time I can’t quite keep up with what’s going on around me. It’s as if I wander away in my mind. Everything someone says reminds me of something someone else said, and I never get around to paying attention to the here and now. I’ve even gotten lost on the way to work, missed my subway stop, and took the whole day off as a result. This time I decide to pull myself together. Paula is looking angry, and Margaret is looking confused. I shrug in Paula’s direction and fish a piece of ice out of my water glass to rub across the back of my neck.
“Come on, Paula.” I drop the half-melted ice back into my glass and wipe my hands on a napkin. “You lecture your friends, Margaret works too hard, Jackie lets herself be pushed around, and I flirt. It’s our natures. In all the time we’ve known each other, none of us has changed a bit.”
Paula’s face freezes for a moment, then loosens, and her lips pull up slightly as if she would smile but can’t quite. Instead she reaches across the table and puts her hand on mine. “We’ve changed. We’ve all changed. I can remember when you would never talk back to anybody, when Margaret was on unemployment more than she worked, and Jackie would have bounced Fawn’s head off Pris’s backside before she would have let them fuck with her.”
She’s right, but it’s a shock to hear her say it. It’s a shock to remember her as she used to be, the blunt and perceptive Paula who used to make me laugh all night with her caustic dissections of our neighbors. I loved her for it once, and stopped loving her when she got too careful to say those things anymore. It’s amazing what we have put up with from each other over the years, what we have seen each other go through, and what we have put each other through. Whenever I wonder why people hang on to old friends so desperately, I remember Jackie telling me she felt like her friends were the only record she had of what had happened in her life. “You still keep a journal?” she asked me. “I’ve always imagined that someday I might sit down and read all those journals you kept, see what happened that I wasn’t keeping track of.”
“It’s Jackie we ought to be talking about. She needs our help.” Margaret puts both hands back on the table and looks at Paula and me expectantly.
“What about Fawn and Pris?” I ask her. “I’ve got a few things to say about them.”
“I think they need someone to really confront them with what they did.” Paula’s voice has gone flat again, her face become impassive. “That kind of thing doesn’t come out of nowhere.”
“Confront,” I mouth back to her, wondering if all the women who use that word so easily know what they mean by it. I know what Paula’s gonna say now before she says it. She’s never seemed to notice how predictably her judgments peel off when she’s acting like the feminist therapist, like so many layers of toasted onion, each clinging delicately to the lower layers.
“Jackie should have taken them to court,” Margaret announces.
I stare at Margaret in surprise. I’ve been thinking the same thing for weeks. Certainly if two women had broken into my apartment and trashed it, I’d have had them in court before they’d known what was happening, but Margaret is the last