Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [19]
“I noticed.” I looked at her, remembering her at thirteen—the first time she had accused me of being weird, making fun of me for not wearing makeup or even knowing what kind of clothes I should have been begging Mama to buy me. “You don’t do nothing but read, do you?” Her words put her in the hated camp of my stepfather, who was always snatching books out of my hands and running me out of the house.
“We didn’t like each other much,” Anne said.
“We didn’t know each other.”
“Yeah? Well, Mama always thought you peed rose water.”
“But you were beautiful. Hell, you didn’t even have to pee, you were so pretty. People probably offered to pee for you.”
“Oh, they offered to do something, right enough.” She gave me a bitter smile.
“You made me feel so ugly.”
“You made me feel so stupid.”
I couldn’t make a joke out of that. Instead, I tried to get her to look at me. I reached over and put my hand on her arm.
When we were girls, my little sister Anne had light shiny hair, fine skin, and guileless eyes. She was a girl whose walk at twelve made men stop to watch her pass, a woman at thirteen who made grown men murderous and teenage boys sweaty with hunger. My mother watched her with the fear of a woman who had been a beautiful girl. I watched her with painful jealousy. Why was she so pretty when I was so plain? When strangers in the grocery store smiled at her and complimented Mama on “that lovely child,” I glared and turned away. I wanted to be what my little sister was. I wanted all the things that appeared to be possible for her.
It took me years to learn the truth behind that lie. It took my sister two decades to tell me what it was really like being beautiful, about the hatred that trailed over her skin like honey melting on warm bread.
My beautiful sister had been dogged by contempt just like her less beautiful sisters—more, for she dared to be different yet again, to hope when she was supposed to have given up hope, to dream when she was not the one they saved dreams for. Her days were full of boys sneaking over to pinch her breasts and whisper threats into her ears, of girls who warned her away from their brothers, of thin-lipped adults who lost no opportunity to tell her she really didn’t know how to dress.
“You think you pretty, girl? Ha! You an’t nothing but another piece of dirt masquerading as better.”
“You think you something? What you thinking, you silly bitch?”
I think she was beautiful. I think she still is.
My little sister learned the worth of beauty. She dropped out of high school and fell in love with a boy who got a bunch of his friends to swear that the baby she was carrying could just as easily have been theirs as his. By eighteen she was no longer beautiful, she was ashamed: staying up nights with her bastard son, living in my stepfather’s house, a dispatcher for a rug company, unable to afford her own place, desperate to give her life to the first man who would treat her gently.
“Sex ruined that girl,” I heard a neighbor tell my mama. “Shoulda kept her legs closed, shoulda known what would happen to her.”
“You weren’t stupid,” I said, my hand on Anne’s arm, my words just slightly slurred.
“Uh-huh. Well, you weren’t ugly.”
We popped open more cans and sat back in our chairs. She talked about her babies. I told her about my lovers. She cursed the men who had hurt her. I told her terrible stories about all the mean women who had lured me into their beds when it wasn’t me they really wanted. She told me she had always hated the sight of her husband’s cock. I told her that sometimes, all these years later, I still wake up crying, not sure what I have dreamed about, but remembering something bad and crying like a child in great pain. She got a funny look on her face.
“I made sure you were the one,” she said. “The one who had to take him his glasses of tea, anything at all he wanted. And I hated myself for it. I knew every time, when you didn’t come right back—I knew he was keeping you