Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [78]
“Taste it,” I hissed at her. “Swallow it.” I ran my hands over her body. My skin burned. She licked my face, growling deep in her throat. I pushed both hands between her legs, my fingertips opened her and my thumbs caught her clit under the soft sheath of its hood.
“Go on, go on,” I insisted. Tears were running down her face. I licked them. Her mouth was at my ear, her tongue trailing through the sweat at my hairline. When she came her teeth clamped down on my earlobe. I pulled but could not free myself. She was a thousand miles away, rocking back and forth on my hand, and the stink of her all over us both. When her teeth freed my ear, I slumped. It felt as if I had come with her. My thighs shook and my teeth ached. She was mumbling with her eyes closed.
“Gonna bathe you,” she whispered, “put you in a tub of hot lemonade. Drink it off you. Eat you for dinner.” Her hands dug into my shoulders, rolled me onto my back. She drew a long, deep breath with her head back and then looked down at me, put one hand into my cunt, and brought it up slick with my juice.
“Swallow it,” Jay said. “Swallow it.”
The year we held the great Southeastern Feminist Conference, I was still following around behind Lee. She volunteered us to handle the food for the two hundred women that were expected. Lee wanted us to serve “healthy food”—her vegetarian spaghetti sauce, whole-wheat pasta, and salad with cold fresh vegetables. Snacks would be granola, fresh fruit, and peanut butter on seven-grain bread. For breakfast she wanted me to cook grits in a twenty-quart pan, though she wasn’t sure margarine wouldn’t be healthier than butter, and maybe most people would just like granola anyway.
“They’ll want doughnuts and coffee,” I told her matter-of-factly. I had a vision of myself standing in front of a hundred angry lesbians crying out for coffee and white sugar. Lee soothed me with kisses and poppy-seed cake made with gluten flour, assured me that it would be fun to run the kitchen with her.
The week before the conference, Lee went from church to campus borrowing enormous pots, colanders, and baking trays. Ten flat baking trays convinced her that the second dinner we had to cook could be tofu lasagna with skim-milk mozzarella and lots of chopped carrots. I spent the week sitting in front of the pool table in Jay’s apartment, peeling and slicing carrots, potatoes, onions, green and red peppers, leeks, tomatoes, and squash. The slices were dumped in ten-gallon garbage bags and stored in Jay’s handy floor-model freezer. I put a tablecloth down on the pool table to protect the green felt and made mounds of vegetables over each pocket corner. Every mound cut down and transferred to a garbage bag was a victory. I was winning the war on vegetables until the committee Lee had scared up delivered another load.
I drank coffee and chopped carrots, ate a chicken pot pie and peeled potatoes, drank iced tea and sliced peppers. I peeled the onions but didn’t slice them, dropped them into a big vat of cold water to keep. I found a meat cleaver on the back porch and used it to chop the zucchini and squash, pretending I was doing karate and breaking boards.
“Bite-sized,” Lee told me as she ran through, “it should all be bite-sized.” I wanted to bite her. I drank cold coffee and dropped tomatoes one at a time into boiling water to loosen their skins. There were supposed to be other women helping me, but only one showed up, and she went home after she got a rash from the tomatoes. I got out a beer, put the radio on loud, switching it back and forth from rock and roll to the country-and-western station and sang along as I chopped.
I kept working. The only food left in the apartment was vegetables. I wanted to have a pizza delivered but had no money. When I got hungry, I ate carrots on white bread with mayonnaise, slices of tomatoes between slices of raw squash,