Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [80]
“Got to get you to bed.” She started to pull me up. I took hold of her belt, leaned over, and kissed her. She kissed me. We sat back down and just kissed for a while. Her mouth was soft and tasted of sweet, watery chocolate.
“Uh huh,” she said a few times. “Uh huh.”
“Uh huh,” I giggled back.
“Oh yes, think we gonna have to check out this barbecue.” Her hands were as soft as her mouth, and they slipped under the waistband of my jeans and hugged my belly. “You weren’t fixed on having tofu lasagna tomorrow, were you?”
“Gonna break my heart to miss it, I can tell you.” It was hard to talk with my lips pressed to hers. She licked my lips, the sides of my mouth, my cheek, my eyelids, and then put her lips up close to my ears.
“Oh, but think . . .” Her hands didn’t stop moving, and I had to push myself back from her to keep from wetting my pants. “Think about tomorrow afternoon when we come back from our little road trip hauling in all that barbecue, coleslaw, and hush puppies. We gonna make so many friends around here.” She paused. “They do make hush puppies at this place, don’t they?”
“Of course. If we get there early enough, we might even pick up some blackberry cobbler at this truck stop I know.” My stomach rumbled again loudly.
“I don’t think you been eating right,” Marty giggled. “Gonna have to feed you some healthy food, girl, some healthy food.”
Jay does karate, does it religiously, going to class four days a week and working out at the gym every other day. Her muscles are hard and long. She is so tall people are always making jokes about “the weather up there.” I call her Shorty or Tall to tease her, and sugar hips when I want to make her mad. Her hips are wide and full, though her legs are long and stringy.
“Lucky I got big feet,” she jokes sometimes, “or I’d fall over every time I stopped to stand still.”
Jay is always hungry, always. She keeps a bag of nuts in her backpack, dried fruit sealed in cellophane in a bowl on her dresser, snack packs of crackers and cheese in her locker at the gym. When we go out to the women’s bar, she drinks one beer in three hours but eats half a dozen packages of smoked almonds. Her last girlfriend was Italian and she used to serve Jay big batches of pasta with homemade sausage marinara.
“I need carbohydrates,” Jay insists, eating slices of potato bread smeared with sweet butter. I cook grits for her, with melted butter and cheese, fry slabs of cured ham I get from a butcher who swears it has no nitrates. She won’t eat eggs, won’t eat shrimp or oysters, but she loves catfish pan-fried in a batter of cornmeal and finely chopped onions. Coffee makes her irritable. Chocolate makes her horny. When my period is coming and I get that flushed heat feeling in my insides, I bake her Toll House cookies, serve them with a cup of coffee and a blush. She looks at me over the rim of the cup, sips slowly, and eats her cookies with one hand hooked in her jeans by her thumb. A muscle jumps in her cheek, and her eyes are full of tiny lights.
“You hungry, honey?” she purrs. She stretches like a big cat, puts her bare foot up, and uses her toes to lift my blouse. “You want something sweet?” Her toes are cold. I shiver and keep my gaze on her eyes. She leans forward and cups her hands around my face. “What you hungry for, girl, huh? You tell me. You tell mama exactly what you want.”
Her name was Victoria, and she lived alone. She cut her hair into a soft cloud of curls and wore white blouses with buttoned-down collars. I saw her all the time at the bookstore, climbing out of her baby-blue VW with a big leather book bag and a cane in her left hand. There were pictures up on the wall at the back of the store. Every one of them showed her sitting on or standing by a horse, the reins loose in her hand and her eyes focused far off. The riding hat hid her curls. The jacket pushed her breasts down but emphasized her hips. She had a ribbon pinned to the coat. A little card beneath the pictures identified her as the steeplechase champion of the southern division. In