Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [16]
I picked up speed and closed in on the boys ahead of me, Flo there among them like a female gazelle. I saw her head turn and discover me running just behind her. She ignored my wet face and produced a welcoming grin, then stepped aside so that we were running together, elbow to elbow, her legs setting a pace for mine. I breathed deep and felt the muscles in my neck open, something strong getting stronger. If there was love in the world, I thought, then there was no reason I should not have it in my life. I matched Flo’s pace and kept running.
I fell in love with karate though I remained a white belt, year after year of white belts—a legendary white belt, in fact. I was so bad, people would come to watch. Inflexible, nearsighted, without talent or aptitude, falling down, sweaty and miserable—sometimes I would even pass out halfway through the class. I learned to take a glass of bouillon like medicine before I put on my gi. But I kept going back, careless of injury or laughter. What I wanted from karate was some echo of love for my body and the spirit it houses—meat and bone and the liquid song of my own gasps, the liquor stink of stubborn sweat, the sweet burn of sinew, muscle, and lust.
I studied karate for eight years, going from school to school, city to city, always starting over. My first sensei was the best I ever found. That moment of perfect physical consciousness was more often memory than reality. I did not become suddenly coordinated, develop perfect vision in my near-blind right eye, or turn jock and take up half a dozen sports. All I gained was a sense of what I might do, could do if I worked at it, a sense of my body as my own. And that was miracle enough.
She kissed me gentle, kissed me slow, kissed me like Grace Kelly, a porcelair princess, a lace-curtain lesbian.
I told her, Don’t touch me that way. Don’t come at me with that sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life—the life we make together. Take me like a turtle whose shell must be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.
I am the woman who lost herself but now is found, the lesbian, outside the law of church and man, the one who has to love herself or die. If you are not as strong as I am, what will we make together? I am all muscle and wounded desire, and I need to know how strong we both can be.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is how long it takes to learn to love yourself, how long it took me, how much love I need now.
THE LAST TIME MY STEPFATHER BEAT ME, I was sixteen years old. It was my birthday, and he got away with it because he pretended that what he was doing was giving me a birthday spanking, a tradition in our family as in so many others. But two of my girlfriends were standing there, and even they could see he was hitting me harder than any birthday ritual could justify. I saw their faces go pink with embarrassment. I knew mine was hot with shame, but I could not stop him or pull free of him. The moment stretched out while his hand crashed down, counting off each year of my life. At sixteen, I jumped free and turned to face him.
“You can’t break me,” I told him. “And you’re never going to touch me again.”
It was a story to tell myself, a promise. Saying out loud, “You’re never going to touch me again”—that was a piece of magic, magic in the belly, the domed kingdom of sex, the terror place inside where rage and power live. Whiskey rush without whiskey, bravado and determination,