Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [86]
Every year I do not go home, it hurts me. I think of Temple, the year I was seven and she was eighteen; the year I was eleven and she lost her lover; the year she lost her teeth and her baby girl; the years I realized she would never be mine.
“Do you hear from Temple?” my mama, my cousins, my aunts always ask. I am the one she writes to, and if I have not heard from her then no one has. Sometimes I do not answer, I fall into Temple’s white-eyed memories, the silence of her flushed cheeks, her thin face and hot eyes. The wolf in my neck bares his teeth, stretches, lays one paw on the other, dreaming of fire and sparks raining down, myrtle leaves blackening in the heat.
I fight the wolf, fight him with my love for Temple. I hug to myself the warmth and stillness of her porch, the certainty that she does not fear the wolf as I do, the wolf in her, the wolf who hides his teeth but watches, watches out of her eyes.
Notes: Lupus: Any of various skin diseases; especially a chronic tuberculosis disease of the skin or mucous membranes; a particularly dangerous disease of metabolic origin—incurable but sometimes controlled by steroid drugs—which exhausts the energies of its victims and necessitates an extremely careful restricted life.
Lupus: A wolf, from “eating into the substance of”; cancer.
Compassion
In the last days Mama’s mouth cracked and bled. Pearly blisters spread down her chin to her throat. The nurses moved her to a room with a sink by the bed and a stern command to wash up every time you touched her.
“Herpes,” Mavis, the floor nurse, told me. “Contagious at this stage.”
I held Mama’s free hand anyway, stepping away every time the doctor came in to wash with the soap the hospital provided. Mavis let me have a bottle of her own lotion when my fingers began to dry and the skin along my thumbs split.
“Aloe vera and olive oil,” she told me. “Use it on your mama, too.”
I took the bottle over to rub it into the paper-thin skin on the backs of Mama’s hands. She barely seemed to notice, though a couple of her veins had leaked enough to make swollen, blue-black blotches. Mama’s eyes tracked past me and even as I rubbed one hand, the fingers of the other reached for the morphine pump. That drip, that precious drip. Mama no longer hissed and gasped with every breath. Now she murmured and whispered, sang a little, even said recognizable names sometimes—my sisters, her sisters, and people long dead. Every once in a while, her voice would startle, the words suddenly clear and outraged. “Goddamn!” loud in the room. Then, “Get me a cigarette, get me a cigarette,” as she came awake. Angry and begging at the same time, she cursed, “Goddamn it, just one,” before the morphine swept in and took her down again.
That was not our mama. Our mama never begged, never backed up, never whined, moaned, and thrashed in her sheets. My sister Jo and I stared at her. This mama was eating us alive. Every time she started it again, that litany of curses and pleas, I hunkered down further in my seat. Jo rocked in her chair, arms hugging her shoulders and head down. Arlene, the youngest of us, had wrung her hands and wiped her eyes, and finally, deciding she was no use, headed on home. Jo and I had stayed, unspeaking, miserable, and desperate.
On the third night after they gave her the pump, Mama hit some limit the nurses seemed determined to ignore. Her thumb beat time, but the pump lagged behind and the curses returned. The pleas became so heartbroken I expected the paint to start peeling off the walls. The curses became mewling growls. Finally, Jo gave me a sharp look and we stood up as one. She went over to try to force the window open, pounding the window frame till it came loose. I dug around in Jo’s purse, found her Marlboros, lit one, and held it to Mama’s lips. Jo went and stood guard at the door.
Mama coughed, sucked, and smiled gratefully. “Baby,” she whispered. “Baby,” and fell asleep with ashes on her neck.
Jo walked over and took the cigarette I still held. “Stupid