Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [91]
“We’ll never see your ass again,” Jo had said. Her mouth pulled down in a mock frown, then crooked up into a grin.
“Not in this lifetime.”
All these years later I could look back and it was exactly as if I were watching a movie of it, a scene that closed in on Jo’s black eyes and the bitter pleasure she took in saying “your ass.” I know my mouth had twisted to match hers. We had thought ourselves free, finally away and gone. But none of it had come out the way we had thought it would. I hadn’t lasted two years in Louisville, and Arlene had never gotten more than three miles from the Frito Lay plant. Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.
“Take me shopping,” Mama begged me every afternoon, as if no time at all had passed. I had looked at her neck and seen how gray and sweaty the skin had gone and known in that moment that the chemo had not worked out as we hoped.
“Tomorrow,” I had promised Mama, and talked her into lying down early. Then gone back to curl up in bed and pretend to read so that I could be left alone. Every night for the two weeks I stayed there I would listen to Jack’s hacking through the bedroom wall. Every time he coughed, my back pulled tight. I tried to shut him out, listening past him for Mama lying on the couch in the living room. She talked to herself once she thought we were asleep. It sounded as if she were retelling stories. Little snatches would drift down the hall. “Oh James, God that James . . .” Her voice went soft. I listened to unintelligible whispers till she said, “When Arlene was born . . .” Then she faded out again. In the background, Jack’s snoring grated low and steady. I curled my fists under the sheets until I fell asleep.
When she took me shopping, Mama bought me things she said I needed. She made me go to Jordan Marsh to buy Estée Lauder skin potions. “It’s time,” she said. Her tone implied it was the last possible day I could put off buying moisturizer. I submitted. It was easier to let her tell me what to buy than to argue, and kind of fun to let her boss around the salesladies. I even found myself telling an insistent young woman that, no, we would not try the Clinique, we were there for Estée Lauder. Afterward, we went upstairs to do what we both enjoyed the most—rummage through the sale bins.
“I need new underwear,” Mama said. “Briefs. Let’s find me some briefs. No bikinis, can’t wear those anymore. They irritate my scar.” She gestured to her belly, not specifying if she meant the old zipper from her navel to pubis, or the more recent horizontal patches to either side. I sorted the more garish patterns out of the way, turning up a few baby-blue briefs in size seven.
“Five now,” Mama muttered. “Find me some fives, and none of those all-cotton ones. I want the nylon. Nylon hugs me right, and I hate the way cotton looks after a while. Dirty, you know?”
Sevens and eights and sixes. I kept digging.
“Excuse me.” The two women at Mama’s sleeve looked familiar.
“Mam,” the first one said, pushing into the bin. “Excuse me.” She reached around Mama’s elbow to snag a pair of blue-green briefs. “Excuse me,” she said again.
The accent was even more familiar than her flat grayish features and tight blond cap of hair. Her drawl was more pronounced than Mama’s, more honeyed than the usual Orlando matrons. It was a Carolina accent, and a Carolina polite hesitation, too. The other woman reached for a pair of yellow cotton panties, size seven. Mama moved aside.
“So I told him what he was going to have to do,” the first woman said to her friend, continuing what was obviously an ongoing conversation. “No standing between me and the Lord, I told him. We’ve all got a role in God’s plan. You know?”
Her friend nodded. Mama looked to the side, her eyes drifting over the woman’s figure, the pale white hands sorting underwear, the dull gold jewelry and the loose shirtwaist