Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [77]
I stood in the back of the room, my fingers wrapping my skull in horror. I imagined my soft brain slipping loosely in its cranial cavity shrunk by a lack of the necessary vitamins. How could I know if it wasn’t too late? Mama always said that smart was the only way out. I thought of my cousins, bigheaded, watery-eyed and stupid. Vitamin D! I became a compulsive consumer of vitamin D. Is it milk? We will drink milk, steal it if we must. Mama, make salmon stew. It’s cheap and full of vitamin D. If we can’t afford cream, then evaporated milk will do. One is as thick as the other. Sweet is expensive, but thick builds muscles in the brain. Feed me milk, feed me cream, feed me what I need to fight them.
Twenty years later the doctor sat me down to tell me the secrets of my body. He had, oddly, that identical gesture, one finger on the ear and the others curled to the cheek as if he were thinking all the time.
“Milk,” he announced, “that’s the problem, a mild allergy. Nothing to worry about. You’ll take calcium and vitamin D supplements and stay away from milk products. No cream, no butterfat, stay away from cheese.”
I started to grin, but he didn’t notice. The finger on his ear was pointing to the brain. He had no sense of irony, and I didn’t tell him why I laughed so much. I should have known. Milk or cornbread or black-eyed peas, there had to be a secret, something we would never understand until it was too late. My brain is fat and strong, ripe with years of vitamin D, but my belly is tender and hurts me in the night. I grinned into his confusion and chewed the pink-and-gray pills he gave me to help me recover from the damage milk had done me. What would I have to do, I wondered, to be able to eat pan gravy again?
When my stomach began to turn on me the last time, I made desperate attempts to compromise—wheat germ, brown rice, fresh vegetables and tamari. Whole wheat became a symbol for purity of intent, but hard brown bread does not pass easily. It sat in my stomach and clung to the honey deposits that seemed to be collecting between my tongue and breastbone. Lee told me I could be healthy if I drank a glass of hot water and lemon juice every morning. She chewed sunflower seeds and sesame-seed candy made with molasses. I drank the hot water, but then I went up on the roof of the apartment building to read Carson Mc-Cullers, to eat Snickers bars and drink Dr Pepper, imagining myself back in Uncle Lucius’s Pontiac inhaling Moon Pies and RC cola.
“Swallow it,” Jay said. Her fingers were in my mouth, thick with the juice from between her legs. She was leaning forward, her full weight pressing me down. I swallowed, sucked between each knuckle, and swallowed again. Her other hand worked between us, pinching me but forcing the thick cream out of my cunt. She brought it up and pushed it into my mouth, took the hand I’d cleaned and smeared it again with her own musky gravy.
“Swallow it,” she kept saying. “Swallow it all, suck my fingers, lick my palm.” Her hips ground into me. She smeared it on my face until I closed my eyes under the sticky, strong-smelling mixture of her juice and mine. With my eyes closed, I licked and sucked until I was drunk on it, gasping until my lungs hurt with my hands digging into the muscles of her back. I was moaning and whining, shaking like a newborn puppy trying to get to its mama’s tit.
Jay lifted a little off me. I opened stinging eyes to see her face, her intent and startling expression. I held my breath, waiting. I felt it before I understood it, and when I did understand I went on lying still under her, barely breathing. It burned me, ran all over my belly and legs. She put both hands down, brought them up, poured bitter yellow piss into my eyes, my ears, my shuddering mouth.
“Swallow it,” she said again, but I held it in my mouth, pushed up against her and clawed her back with my nails. She whistled between her teeth. My hips jerked and rocked against her, making a wet sucking sound. I pushed my face to hers, my lips to hers, and