Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [73]
Paula looks impatient and starts gathering up her stuff. “Oh, I don’t think we should do that. Not while they’re still in arbitration. And anyway, we have so many important things we have to raise money for this spring—community things.”
“Jackie’s a part of the community,” I hear myself say.
“Well, of course.” Paula stands up. “We all are.” The look she gives me makes me wonder if she really believes that, but she’s gone before I can say anything else.
“I want to do something,” Margaret tells me. It looks like there are tears in her eyes. “I’m tired of not doing anything when these things happen, just talking about how horrible it all is and then going on with our lives. I want to call Jackie, or maybe even Fawn and Pris.”
“No, not them.” I get a cold chill down my back, imagining Fawn and Pris walking in on Margaret’s mama some day. “That rent party idea is a good notion. I’ll give Jackie a call, and you and I can set it up. It’ll be like old times.”
Margaret’s face relaxes. She stands up, but then stops and leans across the table to kiss me on the cheek. “Old times,” she laughs. “I’ve had some of my best times with you, you know.”
“I know.”
I watch Margaret walk away and shake my head. Margaret has gotten so skinny, she almost has no ass at all anymore. When I first met her she looked just like a Botticelli virgin, all lush and pink and full. I’d flirted with her for two years until she would go to bed with me, but then we’d spent the night in giggles. “Get serious,” I’d kept insisting, but neither of us could. After a while we’d given up the idea of sex and just relaxed into cuddling and telling stories. Once every few years we try it again, but with the same result.
“Maybe it’s how we smell to each other,” Margaret once suggested. “I read about that somewhere. Or maybe we just know each other too well, huh?” I’d been laughing so hard at the time, I hadn’t been able to reply. I don’t really care anymore what it is that makes us so unsuited as lovers. We’ve become the best of friends. Not like Paula and me: we’ve been snipping at each other ever since we stopped being lovers.
I wonder if Paula still drinks half a glass of vodka to put herself to sleep every night and if she’s still seeing Fawn now and then. For a moment I think about all the things we never say to each other, the things we know that we don’t admit we know. Dirt. Gossip. Simple cruelty and self-righteousness.
I remember the first time Jackie showed me her drawings, the fear and uncertainty in her face, the fierceness on the features of the women she had drawn. I had liked the drawings. I had loved the passion in Jackie when she held them, the way she ground her teeth together as I lifted one after the other. I had wanted to tell her it would be all right, that people would love her warrior women, that I loved the way they threw their heads back and stared out of the drawings. Jackie seemed so fragile with her drawings spread out before her, like those white mountain flowers that come up in the spring on sturdy stalks but lose their blossoms if the wind hits them too suddenly. That’s exactly what she’s like, tough and wiry and sure to stand up to violence, but just as much at risk. I wonder if she has burned the drawings that Fawn and Pris didn’t find.
A Lesbian Appetite
Biscuits. I dream about baking biscuits: sifting flour, baking powder, and salt together; measuring out shortening and buttermilk by eye; and rolling it all out with flour-dusted fingers. Beans. I dream about picking over beans, soaking them overnight, chopping pork fat, slicing onions, putting it all in a great iron pot to bubble for hour after hour until all the world smells of salt and heat and the sweat that used to pool on my mama’s neck. Greens. Mustard greens, collards, turnip greens, and poke—can’t find them anywhere in the shops up North. In the middle of the night I wake up desperate for the taste of greens, get up and find a twenty-four-hour deli that still has a can of spinach