Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [17]
I know. I am supposed to have shrunk down and died. I know. I am supposed to be deeply broken, incapable of love or trust or passion. But I am not, and part of why that is so is the nature of the stories I told myself to survive. Like the stories my mama told herself, and my aunt Dot and my cousin Billie, my stories shaped my life. Of all the stories I know, the meanest are the stories the women I loved told themselves in secret—the stories that sustained and broke them.
When I make love I take my whole life in my hands, the damage and the pride, the bad memories and the good, all that I am or might be, and I do indeed love myself, can indeed do any damn thing I please. I know the place where courage and desire come together, where pride and joy push lust through the bloodstream, right to the heart.
I go to bed like I used to go to karate. Want and need come together in a body that is only partly my own. Like my sisters, like my mama, I am and am not this thing the world sees—strong chin, hard eyes, a mouth too soft when it should be firm, a creature of lust who does not know how to feel what I feel. Biblical? Damned? Hopeful. What is lust when you have never known love?
I took my sex back, my body. I claimed myself and remade my life. Only when I knew I belonged to myself completely did I become capable of giving myself to another, of finding joy in desire, pleasure in our love, power in this body no one else owns.
I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means. I knew that as a child. It was one of the reasons not to tell. When I finally got away, left home and looked back, I thought it was like that story in the Bible, that incest is a coat of many colors, some of them not visible to the human eye, but so vibrant, so powerful, people looking at you wearing it see only the coat. I did not want to wear that coat, to be told what it meant, to be told how it had changed the flesh beneath it, to let myself be made over into my rapist’s creation. I will not wear that coat, not even if it is recut to a feminist pattern, a postmodern analysis.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.
WHAT IS THE STORY I WILL NOT TELL? The story I do not tell is the only one that is a lie. It is the story of the life I do not lead, without complication, mystery, courage, or the transfiguration of the flesh. Yes, somewhere inside me there is a child always eleven years old, a girlchild who holds the world responsible for all the things that terrify and call to me. But inside me too is the teenager who armed herself and fought back, the dyke who did what she had to, the woman who learned to love without giving in to fear. The stories other people would tell about my life, my mother’s life, my sisters‘, uncles’, cousins‘, and lost girlfriends’—those are the stories that could destroy me, erase me, mock and deny me. I tell my stories louder all the time: mean and ugly stories; funny, almost bitter stories; passionate, desperate stories—all of them have to be told in order not to tell the one the world wants, the story of us broken, the story of us never laughing out loud, never learning to enjoy sex, never being able to love or trust love again, the story in which all that survives is the flesh. That is not my story. I tell all the others so as not to have to tell that one.
Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.
I HAD THIS GIRLFRIEND once scared all my other girlfriends off. Big, blond, shy, and butch, just out of the army, drove a two-door Chevy with a reinforced