Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [99]
“Jo talked to me.” Arlene’s voice was low. Without mascara she seemed young again, her cheeks pearly in the frosty light that outlined the bed. Behind me, Jo positioned the chair and sat down heavily. There was a pause while the two of them looked at each other. Then Mama opened her eyes, and we all turned to her. The white of her left eye was bloody and the pupil an enormous black hole.
“Baby?” Mama whispered. I reached for her free hand. “Baby?” she kept whispering. “Baby?” Her voice was thin and raspy. Her thumb was working the pump, but it seemed to have lost its ability to help. Her good eye was wide and terrified. Arlene made a sound in her throat. Jo stood up. None of us said a thing. The door opened behind me. Jack’s face was pale and too close. His left hand clutched a big greasy bag.
“Honey?” Jack said. “Honey?”
I looked away, my throat closing up. Jo’s hands clamped down on the foot of the bed. Arlene’s hands curled into fists at her waist. I looked at her. She looked at me and then over to Jo.
“Honey?” Jack said again. His voice sounded high and cracked, like a young boy too scared to believe what he was seeing. Arlene’s pupils were almost as big as Mama’s. I saw her tongue pressing her teeth, her lips pulled thin with strain. She saw me looking at her, shook her head, and stepped back from the bed.
“Daddy,” she said softly. “Daddy, we have to talk.”
Arlene took Jack’s arm and led him to the door. He let her take him out of the room.
I looked over at Jo. Her hands were wringing the bar at the foot of the bed like a wet towel. She continued to do it as the door swung closed behind Arlene and Jack. She continued even as Mama’s mouth opened and closed and opened again.
Mama was whimpering. “Ba . . . ba . . . ba . . . ba . . . ba . . . ba.”
I took Mama’s hand and held it tight, then stood there watching Jo doing the only thing she could do, blistering the skin off her palms.
When Arlene came back, her face was gray, but her mouth had smoothed out.
“He signed it,” she said.
She stepped around me and took her place on the other side of the bed. Jo dropped her head forward. I let my breath out slowly. Mama’s hand in mine was loose. Her mouth had gone slack, though it seemed to quiver now and then, and when it did I felt the movement in her fingers.
Across from me Arlene put her right hand on Mama’s shoulder. She didn’t flinch when Mama’s bloody left eye rolled to the side. The good eye stared straight up, wide with profound terror. Arlene began a soft humming then, as if she were starting some lullaby. Mama’s terrified eye blinked and then blinked again. In the depths of that pupil I seemed to see little starbursts, tiny desperate explosions of light.
Arlene’s hum never paused. She ran her hand down and took Mama’s fingers into her own. Slowly, some of the terror in Mama’s face eased. The straining muscles of her neck softened. Arlene’s hum dropped to a lower register. It resounded off the top of her hollow throat like an oboe or a French horn shaped entirely of flesh. No, I thought. Arlene is what she has always wanted to be, the one we dare not hate. I wanted Arlene’s song to go on forever. I wanted to be part of it. I leaned forward and opened my mouth, but the sound that came out of me was ugly and fell back into my throat. Arlene never even looked over at me. She kept her eyes on Mama’s bloody pupil.
I knew then. Arlene would go on as long as it took, making that sound in her throat like some bird creature, the one that comes to sing hope when there is no hope left. Strength was in Arlene’s song, peace its meter, love the bass note. Mama’s eye swung in lazy accompaniment to that song—from me to Jo, and around again to Arlene. Her hands gripped ours, while her mouth hung open. From the base of the bed, Jo reached up and laid her hands on Mama’s legs. Mama looked down once, then