Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [72]
“You don’t mean that.” Paula is as surprised as I am. The waiter slips Margaret’s drink around Paula’s shoulder and passes me my beer with a lazy grin. I’m tempted to grin back, but only nod. Margaret wets a forefinger and takes another taste of salt.
“I do. Arbitration isn’t gonna get Jackie anywhere. Look, she didn’t even get her broken glass paid for, and now she’s been talked into ‘accepting her responsibility’ for what happened. That’s crazy. She didn’t do anything, and I don’t think her paintings are pornographic. She’s always worked on nudes, for Christ’s sake! And besides, she told me she did those paintings for the study of the light and shade and the texture . . .”
“Oh, give me a break!” It’s all I can do to keep from hissing in rage. “You know Jackie as well as I do. She’s got boxes of drawings and paintings like the ones Fawn and Pris decided were so terrible. She’s been doing them forever—women with knives, women with swords, in leather clothing, on motorcycles, wrestling, running naked down city streets, fucking. You’ve seen them. I’ve seen them—the ones she keeps locked up in boxes in her closet or under her bed, the ones she doesn’t burn when she gets all panicky about why she does them in the first place. I just wish she’d pull them all out and plaster them over the walls of the women’s bookstore, not start pretending she didn’t mean to do them in the first place.”
“Jackie’s an artist,” Paula interrupts me. “She has to work her stuff out in her own way.”
“With Fawn and Pris’s help she’ll get it all worked out, destroy all the work she’s ever done, and never do any more. Oh well, maybe they’ll let her do some posters for the Take Back the Night Campaign, maybe some illustrations for the editorial page of that paper you do your column for, huh Paula? Or damn, maybe even a comic strip, if she doesn’t make it too explicit . . .”
“You’re yelling.” Margaret’s voice is very quiet.
I stop and look at her. Her face is pale and her fingers are curled tightly on the table. I sigh and push my beer glass forward until it clicks against Paula’s wineglass. “All right. All right. What do you think we should do?” I ask her. “How do we get Fawn and Pris off her back and put her back together now that she’s decided she’s some kind of erotic criminal?”
“Neither Fawn nor Pris is going to do anything more to Jackie.”
“Nothing justifies what they already did to Jackie’s apartment. She’s gonna be months replacing all her dishes.” Margaret’s features have the pained indignation of a woman who’s had to replace her mama’s glassware too often in the last year. “And to spray-paint that slogan on the walls. That was the worst. ‘Violence against women begins at home!’ That’s outrageous!”
“But think about what they meant by it.” Paula is trying to look patient and understanding, but sweat is starting to show on her upper lip.
I feel nauseous. “It seems to me you could make a political comment short of breaking somebody’s dishes and trashing their apartment.”
“Well, the thing is I’ve agreed to take part in the arbitration.” Paula has the grace to look momentarily uncomfortable. “As an old friend of Jackie’s I didn’t think I should before, but Fawn and Pris have asked me, too, and I think I can get some things worked out between them all.”
Margaret looks stunned. So do I probably, but my voice is calm when I speak. “You gonna get them to work out paying for Jackie’s apartment?”
“That may be a problem. Neither of them has any money. Pris is only working part-time and Fawn is still volunteering at the coffeehouse while she finishes her studies. It’s Jackie who has a full-time job.” Paula sips her wine and looks toward the clock over the bar. She wipes her mouth with her napkin and carefully avoids my eyes. “I’m gonna be late, you know.”
“Oh?” Margaret looks up to the clock on the wall and jumps in her seat. “Oh, yeah. I’ve got to get home, too.” She finishes her margarita in a gulp but doesn’t move. “Look, do you think maybe