Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [20]
She looked at me, then away. “But I never really knew what he was doing,” she whispered. “I thought you were so strong. Not like me. I knew I wasn’t strong at all. I thought you were like Mama, that you could handle him. I thought you could handle anything. Every time he’d grab hold of me and hang on too long, he’d make me feel so bad and frightened and unable to imagine what he wanted, but afraid, so afraid. I didn’t think you felt like that. I didn’t think it was the same for you.”
We were quiet for a while, and then my sister leaned over and pressed her forehead to my cheek.
“It wasn’t fair, was it?” she whispered.
“None of it was,” I whispered back, and put my arms around her.
“Goddamn!” she cursed. “Goddamn!” And started to cry. Just that fast, I was crying with her.
“But Mama really loved you, you know,” Anne said.
“But you were beautiful.”
She put her hands up to her cheeks, to the fine webs of wrinkles under her eyes, the bruised shadows beneath the lines. The skin of her upper arms hung loose and pale. Her makeup ended in a ragged line at her neck, and below it, the skin was puckered, freckled, and sallow.
I put my hand on her head, on the full blond mane that had been her glory when she was twelve. Now she was thirty-two, and the black roots showing at her scalp were sprinkled with gray. I pulled her to me, hugged her, and kissed her neck. Slowly we quieted our crying, holding on to each other. Past my sister’s shoulder, I saw her girl coming toward us, a chubby dark child with nervous eyes.
“Mama. Mama, y’all all right?”
My sister turned to her daughter. For a moment I thought she was going to start crying again, but instead she sighed. “Baby,” she called, and she put her hands out to touch those little-girl porcelain cheeks. “Oh baby, you know how your mama gets.”
“You know how your mama gets.” The words echoed in me. If I closed my eyes, I could see again the yellow kitchens of our childhood, where Mama hung her flowered curtains every time we moved, as if they were not cotton but spirit. It was as if every move were another chance to begin again, to claim some safe and clean space for herself and her girls. Every time, we watched her, thinking this time maybe it would be different. And when different did not come, when, every time, the same nightmarish scenes unfolded—shouting and crying and Mama sitting hopelessly at her kitchen table—she spoke those words.
“Oh, girls, you know how your mama gets.”
I clenched my hands on my thighs, seeing my niece’s mouth go hard. She clamped her teeth as I remembered clamping mine, looked away as I would have done, not wanting to see two tired, half-drunk women looking back at her with her own features. I shook my head once and caught her glance, the wise and sullen look of a not quite adolescent girl who knew too much.
“Pretty girl,” I said. “Don’t look so hard.”
Her mouth softened slightly. She liked being told she was pretty. At eleven so had I. waved her to my hip, and when she came, I pushed her hair back off her face, using the gestures my mama had used on me. “Oh, you’re going to be something special,” I told her. Something special.
“My baby’s so pretty,” Anne said. “Look at her. My baby’s just the most beautiful thing in the whole wide world.” She grinned, and shook her head. “Just like her mama, huh?” Her voice was only a little bitter, only a little cruel. Just like her mama.
I looked into my niece’s sunburned frightened face. Like her mama, like her grandmama, like her aunts—she had that hungry desperate look that trusts nothing and wants everything. She didn’t think she was pretty. She didn’t think she was worth anything at all.
“Let me tell you a story,” I whispered. “Let me tell you a story you haven’t heard yet.” Oh, I wanted to take her, steal her, run with her a thousand miles away from the daddy who barely noticed her, the men who had tried to do to her what my stepfather had done to me. I wanted to pick her up and cradle her. I wanted to save her.
My niece turned