Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [85]
“How do you do it?” I ask her. “How do you live this far from the rest of the world?”
“What do I need the world for?” Temple laughs at me. “Besides, I got sugar, just like Granny. Came on two years ago, and ’pressure, they say, though I an’t checking. What good is it to know you gonna die sooner than later? It makes me think the world’s too damn close on me anyway.
“Claire, honey, pour me another glass of tea.”
Claire, the wire child, thin as the poplar on the corner, pale as the birch peeling in the backyard, brings the jug in two hands and smiles at me. The little reddish-brown nodules on her shoulders could be freckles but are not. The flush under Temple’s skin deepens, and her hands start to shake on the glass. She is seeing what I am watching—Claire’s smile and those deadly little warts.
“You know, a lot of famous people died of the lupus. But then people have it for years and never die, or at least don’t die of just that.” She sighs, rolls the ragged ends of her hair between fingers suddenly flushed pink.
“You know what I did?” She looks away, away from me, away from her daughter, away from the dogs who paw restlessly at the bare patches near the trees. “I let them take his body. Told them to go ahead, do anything they had to. When it came down to it, I said, just tell me what it was. The girls, of course, I was thinking of the girls. And they took him, did their stuff to him, things I can’t even imagine. I don’t think, in the end, we buried more than the frame of him.”
Temple’s hands shake, her tea spills over the splintered boards of the porch. Leaning forward makes her face go a deeper red. “Doctors, like lawyers you know, they don’t hurry.
“I thought it would be a while, weeks maybe, even months. But Lord, years! I never thought they’d take years, and then tell me nothing. Just the lupus, ’cause of the spots and the strangling. Lupus like with Claire or that cousin I don’t know that I really believe ever existed. But hell, they didn’t really know what killed him. Lupus kills slow, and Robert died fast.
“Sometimes, sometimes, I dream sometimes, oh God!” Temple rocks her head back and forth, casts a glance at her daughters and looks quickly away, speaking in a whisper that does not carry to where they sit. “I dream sometimes I lead the children out in front of a big old semi, a row of hearses following easy as you please, all their daddies nodding at me as they’re mowed down!”
She shakes her head, shakes her shoulders, her whole torso following, the pink in her cheeks going brighter than sunburn.
“But, sometimes, too, I dream I am alone, walking through Greenville as it burns, the sparks coming down on my neck but nothing burning me. No one sees me. They come out and throw water and yell. I just walk through and grin. Imagine the kind of woman I am to take pleasure in that kind of thing!”
Imagine the kind of woman she is, Temple on her porch with the paint flaking down. Temple with her hands still on her knees, ridged and knobby, the veins blue-purple and high. Her face a permanent red-tan flush. Her daughters going in and out, slowly, carefully, the deadly warts on the pale skin of their necks and calves burning her eyes.
Imagine what kind of a woman sits still, safe in her own mind, slow as myrtle leaves turning. Sugar thickening the blood in her veins, pressure pinking her skin. Wanting nothing more than new plumbing and her daughters’ slow movement forward, alive. Some man to come along now and then, never quite as real as the man who lives behind her eyes.
Temple writes me once a year, a letter that lists who’s died, who’s been born, a letter that ends with a reminder of who she is. She is my favorite cousin, after me the most remarkable, the one who lived with us the year I was seven, the year Mama almost died, the year she first had cancer and I fell in love with the very idea of redheaded women.
“Do you hear from Temple?” Mama always asks me. “She say anything about the girls? Heard from Dot that Maryat was planning on getting married