Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [87]
Mavis came in then, sniffed loudly, and shook her head at us. “You know you can’t do that.”
“Do what?” Jo had disappeared the smoke as if it had never been.
Mavis crossed her arms. Jo shrugged and leaned over to pull the thin blanket further up Mama’s bruised shoulders. In her sleep Mama said softly, “Please.” Then in a murmur so soft it could have been a blessing, “Goddamn, goddamn.”
I reached past Jo and took Mama’s free hand in mine. “It’s OK. It’s OK,” I said. Mama’s face smoothed. Her mouth went soft, but her fingers in mine clutched tightly.
“That window isn’t supposed to be open,” Mavis said suddenly. “You get it shut.”
Jo and I just looked at her.
Mama’s first diagnosis came when I was seventeen. Back then, I couldn’t even say the word, “cancer.” Mama said it and so did Jo, but I did not. “This thing,” I said. “This damn thing.” Twenty-five years later, I still called it that, though there was not much else I hesitated to say. That was my role. I did the talking and carried all the insurance records. Jack blinked. Jo argued. Arlene showed up late, got a sick headache, and left. In the early years it was Jack who argued and that just made things harder. Now he never said much at all. For that I was deeply grateful. It let us seem like all the other families in the hospital corridors—only occasionally louder and a little more careful of each other than anyone at MacArthur Hospital could understand.
“Who do they think we are?” Jo asked me once.
“They don’t care who we are.” What I did not say is that was right. Mama was the one the medical folk were supposed to watch. The rest of us were incidental, annoying, and, whenever possible, meant to be ignored.
“I like your mama,” Mavis told me the first week Mama was on the ward. “But your daddy makes me nervous.”
“It’s a talent he has,” I said.
“Uh huh.” Mavis looked a little confused, but I didn’t want to explain.
The fact is he never hit her. In the thirty years since they married, Jack never once laid a hand on her. His trick was to threaten. He screamed and cursed and cried into his fists. He would come right up on Mama, close enough to spray spittle on her cheeks. Pounding his hands together, he would shout, “Motherfuckers, ass-holes, sonsabitches.” All the while, Mama’s face remained expressionless. Her eyes stared right back into his. Only her hands trembled, the yellow-stained fingertips vibrating incessantly.
Gently, I covered the bruises on Mama’s arm with my fingers. Jo scowled and turned away.
“They should be here.”
“Better they’re not.”
Jo shoved until the window was again closed. When she turned back to me, her face was the mask Mama wore most of our childhood. She gestured at Mama’s bruises. “Look at that. You see what he did.”
“He didn’t mean to,” I said.
“Didn’t mean to? Didn’t care. Didn’t notice. Man’s the same he always was.”
“He never hit her.”
“He never had to hit her. She beat herself up enough. And every time the son of a bitch hit us, he was hitting her. He beat us like we were dogs. He treated her like her ass was gold. And she always talked about leaving him, you know. She never did, did she?”
“What do you want?”
“I want somebody to do something.” Jo slammed her fist into the window frame. “I want somebody to finally goddamn do something.”
I shook my head, gently stroking Mama’s cool clammy skin. There was nothing I could say to Jo. We always wanted somebody to do something and no one ever did, but what had we ever asked anyone to do? I watched Jo rub her neck and thought about the pins that held her elbow and shoulder together. There was my shattered coccyx and broken collarbones, and Arlene’s insomnia. At thirty, Arlene had a little girl’s shadowed frightened face and the omnipresent stink of whiskey on her skin. I had been eight when Mama married Jack, Jo five, but Arlene had been still a baby, less than a year old and fragile as a sparrow in the air.
“What is it you want to do? Talk? Huh?” Jo rolled her shoulders back and rubbed her upper arms. “Want to talk about what a tower of strength