Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [12]
Women.
Lord God, I used to follow these girls.
They would come at me, those girls who were not really girls anymore. Grown up, wounded, hurt and terrible. Pained and desperate. Mean and angry. Hungry and unable to say just what they needed. Scared, aching, they came into my bed like I could fix it. And every time I would try. I would do anything a woman wanted as long as she didn’t want too much of me. As long as I could hide behind her need, I could make her believe anything. I would tell her stories. I would bury her in them. I have buried more women than I am willing to admit. I have told more lies than I can stand.
I never thought about what I needed, how hurt and desperate I was, how mean and angry and dangerous. When I finally saw it, the grief I had been hiding even from myself, the world seemed to stop while I looked. For a year, then another, I kept myself safe, away from anyone, any feeling that might prompt that rage, that screaming need to hurt somebody back.
When I finally let someone into my narrow bed, the first thing I told her was what I could not do. I said, “I can’t fix it, girl. I can’t fix anything. If you don’t ask me to fix it, you can ask anything else. If you can say what you need, I’ll try to give it to you.”
I remember the stories I was told as a girl, stories like soap operas, stories that went on for generations—how she loved him and left him and loved him still, how he hurt her and hurt her and never loved her at all, how that child they made told lies to get them to look at her, how no one knows the things done in that home, no one but her and she don’t tell.
Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told. Oh, I could tell you stories that would darken the sky and stop the blood. The stories I could tell no one would believe. I would have to pour blood on the floor to convince anyone that every word I say is true. And then? Whose blood would speak for me?
Let me tell you a story. I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true. My stories are no parables, no Reader’s Digest Unforgettable Characters, no women’s movement polemics, no Queer Nation broadsides. I am not here to make anyone happy. What I am here for is to claim my life, my mama’s death, our losses and our triumphs, to name them for myself I am here to claim everything I know, and there are only two or three things I know for sure.
“How’d you know you were a lesbian?”
My sister Wanda was eighteen when she finally asked me that question. We were sitting on the steps of the feminist collective where I was living in Tallahassee, Florida. It was her matter-of-fact tone that surprised me, that and the direct way she put the question. From the moment she climbed off the bus with her hair tied back in braids, I had been talking to her about feminism, the women’s center, and the child-care center where I was a volunteer every Sunday afternoon. I wondered what had prompted the question—maybe one of our posters or the way my house-mates congregated around the pool table that dominated what was supposed to be our dining room. I wondered if I should give her the stock answer, right out of the radical women’s newsletters on my nightstand: that I became a lesbian because of my commitment to a women’s revolution.
I looked into her deceptively clear brown eyes and considered the question. I pushed my hair behind my ears. “I fell in love with a woman,” I said, matching her in tone and attitude. Her mouth quirked, one side twitching as if she wanted to grin but didn’t dare.
“Well,” she drawled,