Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [21]
All right, I thought. That will do. For one moment, this moment leading to the next, the act of storytelling connecting to the life that might be possible, I held her attention and began.
“Let me tell you about your mama.”
My niece looked from me to my sister, and my sister stared at me uncertainly, wondering if I was going to hurt her, her and her girl.
“Sit down, baby. I got a story to tell you. Look at your mama. You know how she is? Well, let me tell you about the day death was calling your mama’s name, death was singing her song and luring her away. She was alone, as alone as only a woman waiting to birth a baby can be. All she saw was darkness. All she heard was her blood singing death. But in the deepest part of that night she heard something else. She heard the baby in her belly crying soft, too weak to make a big noise, too small to know it was alive at all. That’s when your mama saved her own life—by choosing it, by claiming it, alone and scared as she was. By pulling you into the world and loving you with her whole heart.”
I watched my sister’s eyes go wide, watched her mouth work. “Now you telling stories about me?”
I just smiled. “Oh, I got one or two.”
That night I sat with my niece and watched my sister going in and out her back door, picking up and sweeping, scolding her dogs for jumping up on her clean work clothes. My niece was sleepy, my sister exhausted. Their features were puffy, pale, and too much alike. I surprised myself then, turning my niece’s face to mine and starting another story.
“When your mama was a girl,” I told her, “she was so beautiful people said the sun shone brighter when she walked out in the day. They said the moon took on glitter when she went out in the night. But, strangest of all, people said the June bugs catching sight of her would begin to light and try to sing an almost human song. It got to the point she had to stay home and hide to keep the sun from getting too hot, the moon from burning up, the June bugs from going hoarse and dying out.”
“Ahhh.” The two of them looked at me, almost smiling, almost laughing, waiting. I put my hand out, not quite touching my sister’s face, and drew my fingers along the line of her neck from just below her ear to the softness of her chin. With my other hand I made the same gesture along my niece’s face.
“See here?” I whispered. “This is where you can see it. That’s the mark of the beautiful Gibson women, both of you have it.”
My niece touched her cheek, mouth open.
“Here?” she asked.
Yes.
Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.
TEN DAYS AFTER MY SON, Wolf, was born, my sister Wanda came to stay with us. “Gonna make sure you know what you’re doing,” she’d joked before she came. “Waiting till you’re forty-two to start a family, what you think? You think it’s as easy as reading a book? You think it comes natural, raising babies and not going crazy? Lord!”
I didn’t argue. I put Wolf in her arms and let her pull his belly up to her chin, let her tickle his ears and kiss his neck.
“I thought boys would be different,” she told me. “But he smells like my girls.” She grinned and licked his cheek. “Tastes like them, too.” Wolf giggled and I laughed with him, and only then saw that there were tears on Wanda’s eyelashes.
“Babies!” she teased. “Get you every time.”
Later she told me she’d only come to save herself another pregnancy. “Got to where I’d started dreaming about having another one, breathing in that talcum smell, feeling those little arms hanging on my neck.” She sipped at a beer and grinned at me over Wolf’s extended fingers.
I waved a diaper at her and laughed. “Wasn’t it you that told me mamas go crazy from sleep deprivation?”
“Oh yeah. Sleep deprivation, sex deprivation, and the simple lack of adult conversation. Drive you out of your head in a matter of weeks. Make you act silly