Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [84]
“Temple’s nothing but trouble,” the cousins claim. They complain of her life, her girls. “Hard-assed, cold-hearted woman.” Everybody agrees. “Thinks more of that ratty-walled house than her family, thinks more of herself than a woman should.”
Off Old Henderson Road, the porches tilt. The paint chips off. Temple’s bathroom is still out back of the pines. She has the cousins come over to prop the windows, wire back the roof where the slats are sliding down. Where the paint has gone the wood stays bare and rain-marked. She won’t paint again, says it will just flake off in the heat.
Kids come over from West Greenville, drive their pickups right up on the grass, hide behind the dead vines that shield the shed out back; stare in where Temple stores broken chairs, empty boxes, an extra bed. They giggle a lot, smoke dope, and occasionally fall through the rotten boards.
“You gonna pay for that, you white-eyed son of a bitch!”
Temple threatens to pen that shed for chickens, set traps, loose the dogs. All she really does is talk to the uncles real loud on the phone.
“Come up here and shoot me a few of these bastards!”
Sometimes she doesn’t bother to dial. Sometimes she doesn’t bother to roll over or get up, lies in bed for a day, her face set and angry so the girls know to stay away. Gets up thinner but quiet. Goes back to work as the crossing guard at Greenville South-East, the only work she’s had since Robert died.
“You ever read that Flannery O’Connor? I got the book from Macon a few years back. Heard she’d had the lupus, thought it might be in there, but God knows it an’t. You read that crazy woman? Made me think people’re worse than I thought, and I thought bad enough. But the worst was some of it made me laugh and then made me ’shamed. Thinking, what kind of woman laughs at such troubles? Babies drowning themselves for Jesus, preachers and old ladies that get their whole families shot dead ’cause they forgot the right highway.”
Flat, flat, her hand, her face, the sunlight on the porch. Temple’s memory of a boy dead now twenty-five years. “I’d hate to think it was the lupus.”
“Get her to think of something else,” Mama asked me. “People say she’s going crazy out on that old porch all the time.”
Nobody really knows Temple. The women smile about her, say, “Lord God, but she loved that man.” Everybody says it’s a pity, how she sits, how she doesn’t get on with her life, take another husband, have another child, plant zinnias or baby’s breath and go on. Go on.
I sit on Temple’s porch and drink coffee, drink tea when the morning heats up, talk to her of New York and California, of cities she’s never seen. I watch how she laughs, her red hair swinging from side to side, bringing the gray and white to the surface, bringing out the shadows and wrinkles under her eyes.
“How can you live in a city? All those pictures like to make my heart hurt. I could smell it—hot concrete, tar, and piss. No green for miles. No color a’tall. Lord, where’s the life in it?”
I tell her about the color of night, the lights on the bridges, the hot shine in the women’s eyes, the cold glare of metal moving fast. I tell her about the cold winter light shining on flat stacks of slate, hanging over the New Jersey highways, the cars growling rock music out their vents—how tight the people wear their clothes, how tall the buildings, how sweet the dawn after you do not sleep for days.
The silence answers me. I wipe my fingertips on the porch, smell myrtle and crushed onion through the dust of passing trucks, watch Claire cross the yard, how she swings her arms and throws back her head, her white face with the black eyebrows etched as high and fierce as crows across the highway. I have not been this still in years, have not heard my own heart when I was not shadowed by full dark and bourbon, not looked into a face that mirrored mine as Temple’s does—bone to bone, ancient grief to daily