Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [5]
It was the ones no one remembered who pulled at me. Two women with bright-faced toddlers on their laps bracketed a sullen adolescent girl. Her hair pinned up on the crown of her head. Theirs was long and loose. All had the same eyes, the same eyebrows.
“Didn’t she marry Bo?” Mama’s finger traced the smile of the woman on the left. “This is her girl beside her, and the babies they both had the same year.” Mama flattened her lips and touched the face of the girl on the side where it was obscured by a flaw in the print.
“Don’t think I ever knew the other daughter.” Her lips parted as if she were about to say something, but she stopped and gave a slight shake of her head.
“Were they the ones who died in the bridge accident?” I reached for the photograph, but Mama pulled it away.
“What accident?”
“The one Granny told me about.”
“Oh, you know your granny.”
“Then what did happen?”
Mama’s grip on the photograph tightened, the tips of her fingers going white while her mouth set in a thin hard line. “Nothing happened to them,” she said. “Nothing at all.”
Mama would touch the pictures tentatively, as if her memories were more real than the images, as if she did not want to look too hard at the reality of all those people lost and gone. Every time I asked, she promised that as soon as she found a spare moment, she would go through the box, sort through the photos, and write it all down, each name, each fate she could remember. Every time, seeing the way her hands moved on those snapshots, I knew it wasn’t likely that she would keep her promise.
Now spread across Wanda’s coffee table, they were as anonymous as they had been all my life. My aunt Bodine went through them, but she seemed to know as little as I. “Never met her; don’t think I knew him.”
There were a few she did know. “Oh, that’s your aunt Dot, your granny, and the boys, David and Dan. Your cousins Billie and Bobbie. Your uncle Brice, the handsome one, and this one’s him with his best friend died in the Korean War. Your mama at fifteen, I think, and this one at sixteen.”
My mother was beautiful, that hard thing, beautiful. Men wanted my mama, wanted her before she knew what it meant, when she was twelve, thirteen, still a child. She showed me once that snapshot of herself at fifteen; white socks and A-line skirt, hair in a Kitty Wells cloud, schoolgirl blouse, Peter Pan collar, and the most hesitant smile.
“Just a girl,” Mama said, shrugging. “I was just a girl.”
“Pregnant,” my aunt Dot told me, “carrying you then. That was taken just before she ran off with that silly boy.”
That beautiful boy my mama loved, as skinny as her, as ignorant and hungry, as proud as he could be to have that beautiful girl, her skin full of heat, her eyes full of hope. And when he ran away, left her to raise me alone, she never trusted any man again—but wanted to, wanted to so badly it ate the heart out of her.
“WE COULD BE RELATED,” Lucy told me. She’d been living in Monte Rio a little longer than I had, and we’d see each other mornings when I walked down to the post office. I would sit with her on the bench under the post office window and watch the way she used her hands. She kept pushing her hair back, dark brown hair in a thick dry mass covering her neck and shoulders.
“I’m a Campbell on my granddaddy’s side,” Lucy told me proudly. “And a Gibson, I’m pretty sure, from a great-aunt I never actually met. My real name is Lillian, though people around here don’t know that. I don’t think anybody in the world knows anymore.” She stopped and stared off into the distance, as if she were looking for someone who remembered her from when she was Lillian.
“My people moved to Arkansas,” Lucy said. “I changed my name when I married P.J. He didn’t like Lillian.” And then she told the rest of it, how she left Arkansas at twenty-two, running away from P.J. and a load of debt. As she spoke, Lucy’s face changed, seemed to become painfully flat and hard, as if the morning sun had shifted in the sky, throwing no shadows to soften the line of brow or chin.
“Got