Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [76]
I picked up an unsalted wedge of eggplant and sniffed it, rubbing the spongy mass between my thumbs. “Makes me think of what breadfruit must be like.” I squeezed it down, and the flesh slowly shaped up again. “Smells like bread and feels like it’s been baked. But after you salt it down, it’s more like fried okra, all soft and sharp-smelling.”
“Well, you like okra, don’t you?” Lee wiped her grill with peanut oil and started dusting the drained eggplant slices with flour. Sweat shone on her neck under the scarf that tied up her hair in back.
“Oh yeah. You put enough cornmeal on it and fry it in bacon fat and I’ll probably like most anything.” I took the wedge of eggplant and rubbed it on the back of her neck.
“What are you doing?”
“Salting the eggplant.” I followed the eggplant with my tongue, pulled up her T-shirt, and slowly ran the tough purple rind up to her small bare breasts. Lee started giggling, wiggling her ass, but not taking her hands out of the flour to stop me. I pulled down her shorts, picked up another dry slice and planted it against her navel, pressed with my fingers and slipped it down toward her pubic mound.
“Oh! Don’t do that. Don’t do that.” She was breathing through her open mouth and her right hand was a knotted fist in the flour bowl. I laughed softly into her ear, and rocked her back so that she was leaning against me, her ass pressing into my cunt.
“Oh. Oh!” Lee shuddered and reached with her right hand to turn off the grill. With her left she reached behind her and pulled up on my shirt. Flour smeared over my sweaty midriff and sifted down on the floor. “You. You!” She was tugging at my jeans, a couple of slices of eggplant in one hand.
“I’ll show you. Oh you!” We wrestled, eggplant breaking up between our navels. I got her shorts off. She got my jeans down. I dumped a whole plate of eggplant on her belly.
“You are just running salt, girl,” I teased, and pushed slices up between her legs, while I licked one of her nipples and pinched the other between a folded slice of eggplant. She was laughing, her belly bouncing under me.
“I’m gonna make you eat all this,” she yelled.
“Of course.” I pushed eggplant out of the way and slipped two fingers between her labia. She was slicker than peanut oil. “But first we got to get the poison out.”
“Oh you!” Her hips rose up into my hand. All her hair had come loose and was trailing in the flour. She wrapped one hand in my hair, the other around my left breast. “I’ll cook you . . . just you wait. I’ll cook you a meal to drive you crazy.”
“Oh, honey.” She tasted like fry bread—thick, smoked, and fat-rich on my tongue. We ran sweat in puddles, while above us the salted eggplant pearled up in great clear drops of poison. When we finished, we gathered up all the eggplant on the floor and fried it in flour and crushed garlic. Lee poured canned tomatoes with basil and lemon on the hot slices and then pushed big bites onto my tongue with her fingers. It was delicious. I licked her fingers and fed her with my own hands. We never did get our clothes back on.
In South Carolina, in the seventh grade, we had studied nutrition. “Vitamin D,” the teacher told us, “is paramount. Deny it to a young child and the result is the brain never develops properly.” She had a twangy midwestern accent, gray hair, and a small brown mole on her left cheek. Everybody knew she hated teaching, hated her students, especially those of us in badly fitting worn-out dresses sucking bacon rinds and cutting our names in the desks with our uncle’s old pocketknives. She would stand with a fingertip on her left ear, her thumb stroking that mole, while she looked at us with disgust she didn’t bother to conceal.
“The children of the poor,” she told us, “the children of the poor have a lack of brain tissue simply because they don’t get the necessary vitamins at the proper age. It is a deficiency that cannot be made up when they are older.