Trash

by Dorothy Allison

  Aunt Alma laughed out loud, delighted. “Never lost it,” she crowed. “Four years in the roadhouse with that table set up in the back. Every one of them sons of mine thought he was going to make money on it. Lord, those boys! Never made a cent.” She swallowed the rest of her glass of water.

  “But me,” she wiped the sweat away again. “I never would have done it for money. I just loved it. Never went home without playing myself three or four games. Sometimes I’d set Annie up on the side and we’d pretend we were playing. I’d tell her when I was taking her shots. And she’d shout when I’d sink ’em. I let her win most every time.”

  She stopped, put both hands on the table, and closed her eyes.

  “ ’Course, just after we lost her, we lost the roadhouse.” She shook her head, eyes still closed. “Never did have anything fine that I didn’t lose.”

  The room was still, dust glinted in the sunlight past her ears. She opened her eyes and looked directly at me.

  “I don’t care,” she began slowly, softly. “I don’t care if you’re queer or not. I don’t care if you take puppy dogs to bed, for that matter, but your mother was all my heart for twenty years when nobody else cared what happened to me. She stood by me. I’ve stood by her and I always thought to do the same for you and yours. But she’s sitting there, did you know that? She’s sitting there like nothing’s left of her life, like . . . like she hates her life and won’t say shit to nobody about it. She wouldn’t tell me. She won’t tell me what it is, what has happened.”

  I sat the can down on the stool, closed my own eyes, and dropped my head. I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want her to be there. I wanted her to go away, disappear out of my life the way I’d run out of hers. Go away, old woman. Leave me alone. Don’t talk to me. Don’t tell me your stories. I an’t a baby in a basket, and I can’t lie still for it.

  “You know. You know what it is. The way she is about you. I know it has to be you—something about you. I want to know what it is, and you’re going to tell me. Then you’re going to come home with me and straighten this out. There’s a lot I an’t never been able to fix, but this time, this thing, I’m going to see it out. I’m going to see it fixed.”

  I opened my eyes and she was still standing there, the cue stick shiny in her hand, her face all flushed and tight.

  “Go,” I said and heard my voice, a scratchy, strangling cry in the big room. “Get out of here.”

  “What did you tell her? What did you say to your mama?”

  “Ask her. Don’t ask me. I don’t have nothing to say to you.”

  The pool cue rose slowly, slowly till it touched the right cheek, the fine lines of broken blood vessels, freckles, and patchy skin. She shook her head slowly. My throat pulled tighter and tighter until it drew my mouth down and open. Like a shot the cue swung. The table vibrated with the blow. Her cheeks pulled tight, the teeth all a grimace. The cue split and broke. White dust rose in a cloud. The echo hurt my ears while her hands rose up as fists, the broken cue in her right hand as jagged as the pain in her face.

  “Don’t you say that to me. Don’t you treat me like that. Don’t you know who I am, what I am to you? I didn’t have to come up here after you. I could have let it run itself out, let it rest on your head the rest of your life, just let you carry it—your mama’s life. YOUR MAMA’S LIFE, GIRL. Don’t you understand me? I’m talking about your mama’s life.”

  She threw the stick down, turned away from me, her shoulders heaving and shaking, her hands clutching nothing. “I an’t talking about your stepfather. I an’t talking about no man at all. I’m talking about your mama sitting at her kitchen table, won’t talk to nobody, won’t eat, and won’t listen to nothing. What’d she ever ask from you? Nothing. Just gave you your life and everything she had. Worked herself ugly for you and your sister. Only thing she ever hoped for was to do the same for your children, someday to sit herself back and hold her grandchildren on her lap. . . .”

  It was too much. I couldn’t stand it.

  “GODDAMN YOU!” I was shaking all over. “CHILDREN! All you ever talk about—you and her and all of you. Like that was the end-all and be-all of everything. Never mind what happens to them once they’re made. That don’t matter. It’s only the getting of them. Like some goddamned crazy religion. Get your mother a grandchild and solve all her problems. Get yourself a baby and forget everything else. It’s what you were born for, the one thing you can do with no thinking about it at all. Only I can’t. To get her a grandchild, I’d have to steal one!”

  I was wringing my own hands, twisting them together and pulling them apart. Now I swung them open and slapped down at my belly, making my own hollow noise in the room.

  “No babies in there, aunt of mine, and never going to be. I’m sterile as a clean tin can. That’s what I told Mama, and not to hurt her. I told her because she wouldn’t leave me alone about it. Like you, like all of you, always talking about children, never able to leave it alone.” I was walking back and forth now, unable to stop myself from talking. “Never able to hear me when I warned her to leave it be. Going on and on till I thought I’d lose my mind.”

  I looked her in the eye, loving her and hating her, and not wanting to speak, but hearing the words come out anyway. “Some people never do have babies, you know. Some people get raped at eleven by a stepfather their mama half hates but can’t afford to leave. Some people then have to lie and hide it ’cause it would make so much trouble. So nobody will know, not the law and not the rest of the family. Nobody but the women supposed to be the ones who take care of everything, who know what to do and how to do it, the women who make children who believe in them and trust in them, and sometimes die for it. Some people never go to a doctor and don’t find out for ten years that the son of a bitch gave them some goddamned disease.”

  I looked away, unable to stand how gray her face had gone.

  “You know what it does to you when the people you love most in the world, the people you believe in—cannot survive without believing in—when those people do nothing, don’t even know something needs to be done? When you cannot hate them but cannot help yourself? The hatred grows. It just takes over everything, eats you up and makes you somebody full of hate.”

  I stopped. The roar that had been all around me stopped, too. The cold was all through me now. I felt like it would never leave me. I heard her move. I heard her hip bump the pool table and make the balls rock. I heard her turn and gather up her purse. I opened my eyes to see her moving toward the front door. That cold cut me then like a knife in fresh slaughter. I knew certainly that she’d go back and take care of Mama, that she’d never say a word, probably never tell anybody she’d been here. ’Cause then she’d have to talk about the other thing, and I knew as well as she that however much she tried to forget it, she’d really always known. She’d done nothing then. She’d do nothing now. There was no justice. There was no justice in the world.

  When I started to cry it wasn’t because of that. It wasn’t because of babies or no babies, or pain that was so far past I’d made it a source of strength. It wasn’t even that I’d hurt her so bad, hurt Mama when I didn’t want to. I cried because of the things I hadn’t said, didn’t know how to say, and cried most of all because behind everything else there was no justice for my aunts or my mama. Because each of them to save their lives had tried to be strong, had become, in fact, as strong and determined as life would let them. I and all their children had believed in that strength, had believed in them and their ability to do anything, fix anything, survive anything. None of us had ever been able to forgive ourselves that we and they were not strong enough, that strength itself was not enough.

  Who can say where that strength ended, where the world took over and rolled us all around like balls on a pool table? None of us ever would. I brought my hands up to my neck and pulled my hair around until I clenched it in my fists, remembering how my aunt used to pick up Annie to rub that baby’s belly beneath her chin—Annie bouncing against
her in perfect trust. Annie had never had to forgive her mama anything.

  “Aunt Alma, wait. Wait!”

  She stopped in the doorway, her back trembling, her hands gripping the doorposts. I could see the veins raised over her knuckles, the cords that stood out in her neck, the flesh as translucent as butter beans cooked until the skins come loose. Talking to my mama over the phone, I had not been able to see her face, her skin, and her stunned and haunted eyes. If I had been able to see her, would I have ever said those things to her?

  “I’m sorry.”

  She did not look back. I let my head fall back, rolled my shoulders to ease the painful clutch of my own muscles. My teeth hurt. My ears stung. My breasts felt hot and swollen. I watched the light as it moved on her hair.

  “I’m sorry. I would . . . I would . . . anything. If I could change things, if I could help . . .”

  I stopped. Tears were running down my face. My aunt turned to me, her wide pale face as wet as mine. “Just come home with me. Come home for a little while. Be with your mama a little while. You don’t have to forgive her. You don’t have to forgive anybody. You just have to love her the way she loves you. Like I love you. Oh girl, don’t you know how we love you!”

  I put my hands out, let them fall apart on the pool table. My aunt was suddenly across from me, reaching across the table, taking my hands, sobbing into the cold dirty stillness—an ugly sound, not softened by the least self-consciousness. When I leaned forward, she leaned to me and our heads met, her gray hair against my temple brightened by the sunlight pouring in the windows.

  “Oh, girl! Girl, you are our precious girl.”

  I cried against her cheek, and it was like being five years old again in the roadhouse, with Annie’s basket against my hip, the warmth in the room purely a product of the love that breathed out from my aunt and my mama. If they were not mine, if I was not theirs, who was I? I opened my mouth, put my tongue out, and tasted my aunt’s cheek and my own. Butter and salt, dust and beer, sweat and stink, flesh of my flesh.

  “Precious,” I breathed back to her.

  “Precious.”

  Demon Lover

  Katy always said she wanted to be the Demon Lover, the one we desire even when we know it is not us she wants, but our souls. When she comes back to me now, she comes in that form and I never fail to think that the shadows at her shoulders could be wings.

  She comes in when I am not quite asleep and brings me fully awake by laying cold fingers on my warm back. Her pale skin gleams in the moonlight, reflecting every beam like a mirror of smoked glass while her teeth and nails shine phosphorescent.

  “Wake up,” Katy whispers, and leans over to bite my naked shoulder. “Wake up. Wake up!”

  “No,” I say, “not you.”

  But I knew she was coming. I could hear her echoes peeling back off the moments, the way Aunt Raylene always said she could hear a spell coming on. Katy’s persistent. Some of my ghosts are so faded: they only come when I reach for them. This one reaches for me.

  “Sit up,” she says. “I won’t bite you.” But her teeth are sharp in the pale light, and I sit up warily. The only predictable thing about Katy was her stubborn perversity; she would mostly do whatever she swore solemnly she would not.

  “Shit,” I whisper, and roll over. She laughs and passes me a joint. The smoke wreathes her like a cloak, heavy and sweet around us. I inhale deeply, grin up at her and say, “My hallucinations get me stoned.”

  “Lucky you. It costs everyone else money.”

  She blows smoke out her nose. Katy has a matter-of-fact manner about her tonight, very unlike herself. It’s been three years since she OD’d, and in that time she’s grown more urgent, not less. This strange air of calmness disturbs me. If the dead lose their restlessness, do they finally go away?

  Something falls in the other room, wood striking wood. It’s probably Molly going to the bathroom a little drunk as usual, knocking things over. Katy slides up on one knee and clutches the edge of the waterbed frame. If she were a cat her hair would be on end. As it is, the hair above her ears seems suddenly fuller. I reach over and take the joint from her hand, moving gently, carefully soothing her with only my unspoken demand to hold her.

  “You going to wake me up in the night,” I tell her, “you might as well entertain me. Tell me where you got this delicacy. Its mashed pecan, right? Tastes just like that batch we got in Atlanta that time we hitchhiked up from Daytona Beach.”

  Still in her cat’s aspect, Katy looks back at me, her huge eyes cold and ruthless. Her expression makes me want to push into her breast, put my tongue to her throat, and hear her cruel, lovely laugh again. It would be easy, delicious and easy, and not at all the way it had been when she was alive. Alive, she was never easy.

  “You an’t got no taste at all. It’s Panama City home-grown.” She comes back down on the bed, not disturbing the mattress. “You always talking ’bout that mashed pecan, but first time I got you really stoned on it, you got sick. Spent the night in the bathroom being the most pitiful child. I swear.”

  “That was Tampa, and that killer Jamaican.” I draw another deep lungful of the sweet smoke. “In Atlanta, you got sick and threw up on the only clean shirt I had with me.”

  Katy gives her laugh finally, and predictably, I feel the goose bumps rise on my thighs. She settles herself so that her naked left hip is against my shoulder. Her skin is smooth, cool, and wonderful. I put my hand on her thigh, and she leans forward to sniff my cheek and rub her lips on my eyebrows. I cannot touch Katy without remembering making love to her on Danny’s couch with a dozen drunk and stoned people around the corner in the living room; the tickle of the feathers she wore laced into the small braids over her ears, and the cold chill of the knife she always pulled out of her boot and pushed under the pillows, the sheathed blade that always seemed to migrate down to the small of my back.

  Most of all I remember the talent with which Katy would bite me just hard enough to make me gasp, her bubbling laughter as she whispered, “Don’t make no noise. They’ll hear.” Even now, after all this time, I sometimes make love holding my breath, trying to make no sound, pretending that it is the way it always was back then, with drunk and dangerous strangers around the corner and Katy playing at trying to get me to make a sound they might hear. It was the worst sex and the best, the most dangerous and absolutely the most satisfying. No one else has ever made love to me like that—as if sex were a contest on which your life depended. No one has ever scared me so much, or made me love them so much. And no one else has ever died on me the way she did, with everything between us unsettled and aching.

  I slap her thigh brusquely, pushing her back. “You should have had the consideration to puke into a pot. Ruining that shirt that way. You were always careless of me and my stuff.”

  Katy nods. “A little. Yeah, I was.” She settles back on the mattress, cross-legged and still just touching my shoulder. “But I always made it up to you. Remember, I stole you another shirt in Atlanta.” Her hand trading the joint is transparent. I can see right through to her smoky breasts, the nipples dark and stiff. “That cotton cowboy shirt with the yellow yoke and the green embroidery. Made you look like a toked-up Loretta Lynn.” She gives her short, barking laugh.

  “You still got that one?”

  “No, I lost it somewhere.”

  I remember going home for the service one of the local drug counselors organized. People were standing around talking about the shame and the waste, and Katy’s mama slapped my hand when I touched her accidentally. “It should have been you,” she’d hissed. “Any one of you, it should have been. Not Katy.” Her eyes had been flat and dry. She hadn’t cried at all, and neither had I. I spent that night in my mama’s kitchen, talking long-distance to my lover up North about how everybody had looked, and the way Katy’s last boyfriend had glared at me from beside his parole officer. I’d hugged the phone to my ear, that yellow cowboy shirt between my fists, wringing it until I was shredding the yoke,
pulling the snaps off, ripping the seams. I’d torn that shirt apart, talked for hours, but never gotten around to crying. I didn’t cry until months later in the Women’s Center bathroom. I’d been stone sober, but I was standing up to piss, my knees slightly bent, my jeans down around my ankles, my head turned to the side so I could see myself in the mirror. It was the way Katy had insisted we piss when we went road-tripping.

  “You’re the dyke,” she’d always said. “Keep your health. Learn to piss like a boy and keep your butt dry.”

  “Piss like a boy,” I’d whispered into the mirror, into Katy’s painful memory. And just that easy her face was there, her full swollen mouth mocking me, whispering back, “Like a dyke. You the dyke here, girl. I sure an’t.”

  So then I’d cried, sobbed and cried, and beaten on that mirror with my fists until the women outside came to try and see what was going on. I’d shut up, washed my face, and told them nothing. What could I tell them, anyway? My ghost lover just came back and made me piss all over my jeans. My ghost lover is haunting me, and the trick is I am glad to see her.

  Katy hands me the joint again, moving her small hands delicately. She smiles when she sees where my glance is trained. She flexes her fist, opens the fingers, and wags them in front of my nose. I laugh and take the joint again.

  “I loved that shirt. It was the best present you ever got me.”

  “You forgetting those black gloves with the rhinestones on the back I got in that shop on Peachtree Street. We always got the best stuff in Atlanta. Didn’t we?”

  “You just about got us busted in Atlanta.”

  “Oh hell, you were just a nervous Nellie. Thought you were the only woman capable of sleight of hand. You just never trusted me, girl.”

  “You were always so stoned. You did stupid things.”

  “I did wonderful things. I did amazing things, and stoned only made me better, made me smoother. Loosened me up and made me psychic. I was doing acid when I got you those gloves. That windowpane Blackie sold us.”