Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [7]
Three bouts of cancer and half a dozen other serious illnesses—not to mention three daughters and four grandchildren who courted trouble with every turn of the moon—but few of Mama’s customers knew how stubbornly she had to put on that smile for them. She was an actress in the theater of true life, so good that no one suspected what was hidden behind the artfully applied makeup and carefully pinned hairnet.
“You should have been in the movies, like Barbara Stanwyck or Susan Hayward,” I told her once as we looked at those pictures of her as a girl.
She just shook her head. “Life an’t the movies,” she told me.
Mama always said I was tenderhearted, I trusted too easily and would have to learn things the hard way. She was right, of course, and the thing I learned was the thing she knew intuitively: the use of charm, the art of acting, the way to turn misery into something people find understandable or sympathetic. Theater was what Mama knew and I learned.
Theater is standing up terrified and convincing people you know what you’re doing—eating oysters with a smile when the only fish you’ve known has been canned tuna or catfish fried in cornmeal. Theater is going to bars with strangers whose incomes are four times your own; it’s wearing denim when everyone around you is in silk, or silk when they’re all wearing leather. Theater is talking about sex with enormous enthusiasm when nobody’s ever let you in their pants. Theater is pretending you know what you’re doing when you don’t know anything for certain and what you do know seems to be changing all the time.
Six days out of seven I am a creation, someone who relies on luck, lust, and determination. The problem is that I know sometimes luck doesn’t hold. That’s when I become my mama—a woman who could charm time out of bill collectors, sympathy out of sheriffs, and love out of a man who had no heart to share.
The tragedy of the men in my family was silence, a silence veiled by boasting and jokes. If you didn’t look close you might miss the sharp glint of pain in their eyes, the restless angry way they gave themselves up to fate.
My uncles went to jail like other boys go to high school. They took up girls like other people choose a craft. In my mama’s photos they stare out directly, uncompromising, arms crossed or braced on their knees. I thought them beautiful and frightening, as dangerous for those quick endearing grins as for those fast muscled arms, too tall, too angry, and grown up way too soon. I remember my cousins as boys who seemed in a matter of weeks to become hard-faced men. Their eyes pulled in and closed over. Their smiles became sharp, their hands always open and ready to fight. They boasted of girls they’d had and men they’d get, ass they’d kick and trouble they’d make, talked so big and mean it was impossible to know what they meant and what they didn’t. They wanted legend and adventure, wanted the stories told about the uncles to be put aside for stories about them.
“Just boys,” Mattie Lee said of them. And so they remained all their lives.
Mama always loved the pictures of her mama and the twins, grandsons who towered over Mattie Lee. In one snapshot they were braced elbow to elbow, each cradling a newborn baby girl, and in their outside arms, held as tenderly as the infants, rifles extending up into the sky.
Sitting in a honky-tonk, in a clean white shirt and polished boots, hair slicked back and teeth shining white in a dark tanned face, my uncle is the same man who leans on his knee in another photo, bare arms streaked with dirt, and a cloth cap covering his sweatgrimed brow.
“An’t he a sexy man?” my cousin Billie teased. “Kind of evil-minded and quick to please. All them girlfriends half his age, and that reputation of his, like no woman ever turned him down. Wouldn’t think he’d wind up living in a one-room trailer in his sister’s backyard. Where’d they go, all them girlfriends and good times? What happened, you think, to that man everyone wanted to bed or marry?”
I fingered