Trash: Stories

by Dorothy Allison

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Deciding to Live - Preface to the First Edition

  River of Names

  Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee

  Mama

  Gospel Song

  I’m Working on My Charm

  Steal Away

  Monkeybites

  Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know

  Demon Lover

  Her Thighs

  Muscles of the Mind

  Violence Against Women Begins at Home

  A Lesbian Appetite

  Lupus

  Compassion

  Critical acclaim for Dorothy Allison

  “Simply stunning . . . The special qualities of her style include a perfect ear for speech and its natural rhythms; an unassertive cumulative lyricism; an intensely imagined and presented sensory world; and above all, a language for the direct articulation of deep and complex feelings.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Allison uses strong, direct language to explore the fragile and tangled emotions between love and hate. It is what makes her characters live on the page and beyond.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Compulsively readable . . . Allison can make an ordinary moment transcendent with her sensuous mix of kitchen-sink realism and down-home drawl.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Allison is abundantly gifted . . . She has a superb ear for the specific dialogue of her characters.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A hell of a writer—tough and loose, clear and compassionate.”

  —The Village Voice

  “Dorothy Allison writes straight from the gut, the brain, and the heart.”

  —Associated Press

  “Spectacular . . . sensual . . . Allison has a spare gospel-tinged lyricism that few can match.”

  —Newsday

  “Sensational.”

  —Esquire

  “Powerful.”

  —People

  DOROTHY ALLISON is the bestselling author of Bastard Out of Carolina, Cavedweller, and a memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (all available from Plume). Born in Greenville, South Carolina, she currently lives with her partner and her son in Northern California.

  Also by Dorothy Allison

  The Women Who Hate Me

  Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature

  Bastard Out of Carolina

  Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

  Cavedweller

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Original edition published by Firebrand Books.

  First Plume Printing, October 2002

  Copyright © Dorothy Allison, 1988, 2002

  All rights reserved

  Versions of some of these stories have appeared in Conditions, The Lesbian Fiction Anthology edited by Elly Bulkin (Gay Presses of New York), Off Our Backs, On Our Backs, and Out/Look. Page 221 constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Allison, Dorothy.

  Trash : stories / by Dorothy Allison.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-11781-1

  1. Southern states—Social life and customs—Fiction. 2. Working-class women—Fiction. 3. Women, poor—Fiction. 4. Lesbians—Fiction. I. Title. PS3551.L453 T7 2002

  813’.54—dc21 2002066243

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

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  INTRODUCTION

  Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories

  The central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress, and was just a month past fifteen when she birthed me. That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow oddly deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it. My family’s lives were not on television, not in books, not even comic books. There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it did not include us, no matter how I tried to squeeze us in. There was this concept of the “good” poor, and that fantasy had little to do with the everyday lives my family had survived. The good poor were hardworking, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. We were the bad poor. We were men who drank and couldn’t keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. My cousins quit school, stole cars, used drugs, and took dead-end jobs pumping gas or waiting tables. I worked after school in a job provided by Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, stole books I could not afford. We were not noble, not grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. What was there to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed.

  Everything I write comes out of that very ordinary American history. There is no story in which my family is not background, even as I have moved very far from both Greenville, South Carolina, and the poverty to which I was born. I remain my mother’s bastard girl, a woman who treasures her handmade family, my own adopted bastard child and the lover/partner who has nurtured and provoked me for more than fifteen years. We become what we did not intend, and still the one thing I know for sure is that only my sense of humor will sustain me.

  Stories I began as a girl seem different to me when I read them now. It is almost as if I did not write them, as if that writer were another person—which of course she is. Twenty and twenty-five years ago when I first began to publish stories, I was a different person—not just younger but more girlish than it is easy for me to admit today. I grew up writing these stories. I made peace with my family. I forgave myself and some of the people I had held in such contempt—most of all those I loved. That forgiveness took place in large part through the writing of these stories, in a process of making peace with the violence of my childhood, in owning up to it and finding a way to talk about it that did not make me more ashamed of myself or those I loved.

  When I was considering
the question of the new edition of the stories, I worried that the conversation in which they had originated was specific to its time. There is a way in which that is exactly so—though much less so and in different ways than I had imagined. I thought they would have grown boring to me, but they have not. Rereading them, I find myself once more sitting forward and grinding my teeth, or putting the book down and pacing a bit, or sometimes just laughing out loud. Yes, it is true that I wrote many of these stories out of my own need, satisfying myself rather than some editor or university professor. I did not at first expect to publish anywhere except in the small literary magazines where I worked as a volunteer editor, which is not a bad way to begin.

  Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people just as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read—sometimes most important what I should not try to write. I began in the tradition of Muriel Rukeyser, aching to break the world open with what I had to say on the page. There were specific feelings I wanted the stories to create, realizations I wanted people to experience. Sometimes it was grief I wanted to provoke, sometimes anger, almost always a spur to action, to change. I wanted the world to be different in my lifetime, and I truly believed that stories were one way to help that happen. I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft. I wanted to be good and I wanted to be effective, and these are not always the same thing. Sometimes I was trying to write a poem, but the thing would not pare down enough to anything less than narrative. Sometimes I was so angry, I wrote to stop my own rage. Mostly I was angry, and drunk on words, the sound of words more than the way they looked on the page. It is quite literally the case that I wrote out loud, reading the stories out loud over and over until they were closer to what I wanted.

  “If I die tomorrow, I want to have gotten this down.”

  That is how many of these stories started. Once in a while, I had read someone else’s story and put it down in rage, beginning my own to refuse the one that had so confounded me. Going back into these stories, I remember those moments even when I no longer remember the actual stories I was refuting. Taylor Caldwell stories, I called them in an early journal—stories in which poor southern characters were framed as if they were brain-damaged, or morally insufficient, or just damn stupid.

  “We are not stupid. We do pretty well with what we have.” I’d set out to put that on the page—but often I would go south. By that I mean I would not wind up where I intended. I started “Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee” to work out in my own mind what it must have been like to have been my grandmother—and her mother, my great-grandma about whom I knew almost nothing, except that her children hated her and that she had lived a long time. How’d that work? I wondered, and made up a fictional Mattie Lee, a pretend Shirley. I gave the children names that actually figured in my grandmother’s conversations—names of cousins, second cousins, and lost uncles. I worked it out as if it were a movie, or the kind of story people in my family simply would not tell. Contrary to the myth of southern families passing stories along on the porch, people in my family kept secrets and only hinted at what might have happened. Some days I think the way to make a storyteller is to refuse to tell her what happened—as my mama and aunts did with me. I had to make up my great-grandmother, and I did it in a story that was originally to be about her daughter—a story I started when I was still in college, and my mother told me my grandmother had died—but three months after the funeral was past, and long past any hope I might have had of going to Greenville, attending the funeral or learning anything about how she had died.

  “In a ditch,” my Uncle Jack told me a decade later. “Had a stroke halfway between our house and your Uncle Bo’s. Just lay down and died.”

  “Oh.” I just stood there.

  “Oh.” I was living in Tallahassee then, in a feminist collective household, and fiercely determined to learn more about my grandmother, my aunts, even legendary Great-grandma Shirley. But my uncle’s brutal comment was all I gathered in that visit, and almost as soon as I asked about it, one of my aunts denied that was how it happened.

  “She didn’t die down there. She died in the hospital two whole days later. She just fell in that ditch and lay there awhile before we went out and found her.”

  Maybe that was the story I should have written, but it was not. By the time I got back to my big complicated household, I was working on the story of what Grandma Mattie Lee might have been like as a girl. What if? And I was in it, watching Shirley beat on the steps with that broom handle. Would I have made Mattie Lee so heroic if my own mother had not hidden her death from me, if my uncle had not spoken so brutally? Maybe. Still, what I wrote felt right on the page, and from this distance that seems the primary fact. I did a lot of things because it felt right on the page, or sounded right when read out loud in an empty room. I did not finish that story in Tallahassee. I did not finish that story till Brooklyn, fully fifteen years after my grandmother’s death. Even then, I think I finished it because I fell in love with that teenage girl, her mouth full of white and her eyes full of fire. It worked well enough that it was another of the stories my mama would never talk to me about. “Now that’s mean,” my mama said about one of the stories I sent her. She smiled and gave a little shudder when she said it. That is what I intended, I told her. I want it mean. I did not say that I also wanted the story to be about love and compassion. For that sometimes I had to dig deeper, into the muscle of character. Still, I think you can tell that I loved my impossible grandmother with my whole heart, her black brows and wide face, her bulldog glare and frank inclination to tell me things my mother never intended me to learn. I knew she worked her children the way her mother had worked her, putting them out to pick strawberries for neighboring farmers and pocketing the money to buy snuff. I knew she was quick to slap and full of desperation, but I knew also that in the context of how she had been raised and what she had survived, she was almost gentle, almost sweet-tempered. But not quite. I had sweet-tempered cousins and I saw them get ground down. I had gentle aunts and it seemed they almost disappeared out of their own lives. Is it any wonder that when I set out to write stories, I made up women like my grandmother, like my great-grandmother? Troublesome, angry, complicated women with secretive, unpredictable natures—that is who you will find in my stories—and little girls who were not me. What are these stories about? Shame and outrage, pride and stubbornness, and the vital necessity of a sense of humor. I wrote to release indignation and refuse humiliation, to admit fault and to glorify the people I loved who were never celebrated. I wrote to celebrate. I wrote to take a little revenge, and sometimes to make clear that revenge was not what I was doing. Always, I tried not to use the flat metallic language of politics and preaching, but sometimes I knew no other way to frame what I had to say.

  I wrote to give back to others who had given to me—sometimes reflexively. I would write particular stories in response to those I read. I began to write about incest only after reading Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. That book felt like a slap on the back from my mother’s hand, as if a trusted, powerful voice were telling me, You know something about incest—something you fear, but had best start figuring out. I began to figure things out in story.

  I wrote “Mama” to talk about how deeply intertwined love and resentment can be in a family in which violence and sexual abuse are the norm. “River of Names” was an attempt to stop being ashamed of running away from the lives my cousins were living—and, bluntly, it was a slap in the face of all the women I knew who seemed unable to imagine lives different from their own.

  Some stories I wrote in apology, but I cannot say the writing was ever simple or straightforward. Even as I tried to apologize on the page I was aiming at an audience who I imagined recoiling at the facts and people I portrayed. I published “Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know” before I told my mother I would be unable to have children, though that is the subject of the story. Only
much later did I begin to think about what it would have felt like for her to read that story, my heartbroken mother who wanted nothing so much as the grandchildren I could not give her.

  Some stories were about trying to figure things out, to understand what had happened and why. “Mama,” “Gospel Song,” “Lupus,” “A Lesbian Appetite,” and “I’m Working on My Charm”—all those began with a mystery. Sometimes the mystery was simply how to tell the story at all. How do you write about lust with a sense of humor? Shame? Lesbian desire?

  Some of these stories are easily ascribed to rage. “Monkeybites,” “River of Names,” “Her Thighs,” “Muscles of the Mind,” “Demon Lover,” “Steal Away,” “Violence Against Women Begins at Home”—all of them began with me walking back and forth in front of my desk in the dark of night. Sometimes it was a person that had filled me with outrage, but sometimes it was someone else’s story. I had to figure it out. I did it on the page. Reading these stories again, I go back to the time in which they were written. The early women’s movement was a genuinely remarkable moment in history, perhaps most of all because we were all so sure that we were going to change the world. Talking to twenty-year-olds these days, I find it difficult to get them to understand what it was like being part of the early liberation movements that so impacted this country in the sixties and seventies. We were fighting for our lives, I say, and I mean it literally. The life I was meant to have is what I was fighting. I did not want to be a waitress my whole life, to be poor or to come to accept being treated with contempt. I did not want to be ashamed of my family, my sexuality, or myself. I did not want to despair or commit suicide out of hopelessness. One generation back, I can name people who did just that—who despaired and died. They were no fiction. When I talk to young people, I find myself telling very specific stories. I tell them about my first decent job, the one with the Social Security Administration, where I was put on probation and almost fired for wearing pantsuits to the office—tasteful, respectable outfits with high-buttoned white blouses, paired with low heels and nylons, even in that Tallahassee humidity. A shinyhaired eighteen-year-old boy at Stanford laughs and says, “What were they thinking?” What indeed? I tell how when, at twenty-three with my respectable government job, I tried to get a credit card, I was asked to have my stepfather cosign the application. We were never quite adults, I explain, we women. You have no idea how different was the world we set out to change. That was the world in which I began to write these stories. That was the context. Reading them over, I fall back in time and remember the writing of them. I remember working long hours, hurrying home, and napping briefly in order to have the ability to spend more long hours at my desk in the night. I never went after a grant, never believed I could get one. I took it as a given that a woman like me would have to do it the hard way, steal time from my day job, work without an editor or ready reader, and never have any confidence that what I was writing would be anything anyone would want to read. But I never imagined not writing.