Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [88]
My shrug was automatic, inconsequential.
A flush spread up from Jo’s cleavage. It made the skin of her neck look rough and pebbly. Deep lines scored the corners of her eyes and curved back from her mouth. In the last few years, Jo had become scary thin. The skin that always pulled tight on her bones seemed to have grown loose. Now it wrinkled and hung. I looked away, surprised and angry. Neither of us had expected to live long enough to get old.
For all that we fight, Jo is the one I get along with, and I always try to stay with her when I visit. Arlene and I barely speak, though we talk to each other more easily than she and Jo. There have been years I don’t think the two of them have spoken half a dozen words. In the ten weeks since Mama’s collapse, their conversations have been hurt-filled bursts of whispered recrimination. At first, I stayed with Arlene and that seemed to help, but when Jo and I insisted that Mama had to check in to MacArthur, Arlene blew up and told me to go ahead and move over to Jo’s place.
“You and Jo—you think you know it all,” Arlene said when she was dropping me off at Jo’s. “But she’s my mama too, and I know something. I know she’s not ready to give up and die.”
“We’re not giving up. We’re putting Mama where she can get the best care.”
“Two miles from Jo’s place and forty from mine.” Arlene had shaken her head. “All the way across town from Jack and her stuff. I know what you are doing.”
“Arlene . . .”
“Don’t. Just don’t.” She popped the clutch on her VW bug and backed up before I could get the door closed. “Someday you’re gonna be sorry. That’s the one thing I am sure of, you’re gonna be sorry for all you’ve done.” She swung the car sharply to the side, making the door swing shut. If it would have helped, I would have told her I was sorry already.
Jo put me in the room where her daughter, Pammy, stashes all the gear she will not let Jo give away or destroy—shelves of books, racks of dusty music tapes, and mounted posters on the wall over the daybed. I fell asleep under posters of prepubescent boy bands and woke up dry-mouthed and headachy.
Jo laughed when I asked about the bands. “Don’t ask me,” she said. “Some maudlin shit no one could dance to—whey-faced girls and anorexic boys. All of it sounds alike, whiny voices all scratchy and droning. Girl has no ear, no ear at all.”
Pammy had been picking out chords on the old piano Jo took in trade for her wrecked Chevy. She spoke without looking up. “You know what Mama does?” she asked in her peculiar Florida twang. “Mama sits up late smoking dope and listening to Black Sabbath on the headphones. Acts like she’s seventeen and nothing’s changed in the world at all.”
Jo snorted, though I saw the quick grin she suppressed. She kicked her boot heels together, knocking dried mud on the Astroturf carpet. That carpet was her prize. She’d had her boyfriend Jaybird install it throughout the house. “She’s eleven now,” she said, nodding in Pammy’s direction. “What you think? Should I shoot her or just cut my own throat?”
I shook my head, looking back and forth from one of them to the other. They were so alike it startled me, thick brown hair, black eyes, and the exact same way of sneering so that the right side of the mouth drew up and back.
“Hang on,” I told Jo. “She gets to be thirty or so, you might like her.”
“Ha!” Jo slapped her hands together. “If I live that long.”
Pammy banged the piano closed and swept out of the room. My sister and I grinned at each other. Pammy we both believed would redeem us all. The child was fearless.
“We need to talk,” I told Arlene when she came to the hospital the day after I moved in with Jo. Arlene was standing just inside the smoking lounge off the side of the cafeteria, waiting for Jack to arrive.
“She’s looking better, don’t you think?” Arlene popped a Tic Tac in her mouth.
“No, she an’t.” I tried to catch Arlene’s hand, but she hugged her elbows in tight and just looked at me. “Arlene, she’s not going to get any better. She’s going to get worse. If the tumor