Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [90]
“They all know who I am,” Mama told me. I nodded as if I believed her, but then a beautiful young man came up and paused by Mama’s seat to squeeze her wrist.
“Rafael,” Mama said immediately. “This is my oldest daughter.”
“Cannot be,” Rafael said. He never lifted his eyes to me, just leaned in to whisper into Mama’s ear. I was watching her neck as his lips hovered at her hairline. I almost missed the bill she pressed into his palm.
“You give him money?” I said after he had wandered back down the steeply pitched stairs.
“Nothing much.” Mama looked briefly embarrassed. She wiped her neck and turned her head away from me. “I’ve known him since he started here. He’s the whole support of his family.”
I looked down at the young men. They were like racehorses tossing their heads about, their thick hair cut short or tied back in clubs at their napes. Once the game started they were suddenly running and leaping, bouncing off the net walls and barely avoiding the fast-moving balls. All around me gray-headed women with solid bodies shrieked and jumped in excitement. They called out vaguely Spanish-sounding names, and crowed when their champions made a score. Now and again one of the young men would wave a hand in acknowledgment.
I turned to watch Mama. Her eyes were on the boys. Her face was bright with pleasure. What did I know? Where else could she spend twenty dollars and look that happy?
When later, Rafael jumped and scored, I nudged Mama’s side. “He’s the best,” I said. She blushed like a girl.
Mama was not supposed to drive, so I steered her old Lincoln town car around Orlando.
“You are terrible,” Mama said to me every time we pulled into another parking space. It was an act. She played as if I were dragging her out, but every time I suggested we go back to the house, she pouted.
“I can nap anytime. When you’ve gone, I’ll do nothing but rest. Let me do what I want while I can.”
It was part of being sick. She wasn’t sleeping, even though she was tired all the time. She’d lie on the couch awake at night with the television playing low. Every time I woke in the night I could hear it, and her, stirring restlessly out in the front room.
It was awkward sleeping in Jack’s house. The last time I had lain in that bed, I had been twenty-two and back only for a week before taking a job in Louisville. Every day of that week burned in my memory. Mama had been sick then too, recovering from a hysterectomy her doctor swore would end all her troubles. Jo was in her own place over in Kissimmee, an apartment she got as soon as she graduated from high school. Only Arlene’s stuff had remained in the stuffy bedroom; she herself was never there. At dawn, I would watch her stumble in to shower and change for school. She spent her nights baby-sitting for one of Mama’s friends from the Winn Dixie. A change-of-life baby had turned out to be triplets, and Arlene spent her nights rocking one or the other while the woman curled up in her bed and wept as if she were dying.
“They are in shock over there,” Mama had told me. “Don’t know whether to shit or go blind.”
“Blind,” Arlene said. The woman, Arlene told us, was drunk more often than sober. Still, her troubles were the making of Arlene, who not only got paid good money, she no longer had to spend her nights dodging Jack’s curses or sudden drunken slaps.
“I’m getting out of here, and I’m never coming back,” she told me the first morning of that week. By the end of the week, she had done it, though the apartment was half a mile up the highway, and even smaller than Jo’s. I saw it only once, a place devoid of furniture or grace, but built like a fortress.
“Mine,” Arlene had said, a world of rage compressed into the word.
Lying on the old narrow Hollywood bed again, I remembered the look