Trash (14 page)

“No.”

“That monkey left her mark on you, didn’t she?”

“Only one that ever did.” I looked into her eyes when I said it, knowing what I was saying as much as she did.

“Only one, huh? You think that’s just?”

I shrugged, my eyes never leaving hers.

“There is no justice,” I told her, meaning it, meaning it absolutely.

Toni sighed and rolled over. She took a long pull from the half-empty glass of beer she’d left on the floor, and then looked up at me from under her eyebrows.

“Tell you what,” she whispered. “I want you to put me in one of your stories sometime.”

I took the glass away from her, took a drink myself. “What in the world for?”

She took the glass back and turned away from me. “I want to be there,” she said over her shoulder. “I just want to be there, right in there with the monkeys. Me, you understand—raw and drunk and hairy. Me, the way I am. You put me in there, huh? You just put me in there.”

 

 

 

 

I
came out of the bathroom with my hair down wet on my shoulders. My Aunt Alma, my mama’s oldest sister, was standing in the middle of Casey’s dusty hooked rug looking like she had just flown in on it, her gray hair straggling out of its misshapen bun. For a moment I was so startled I couldn’t move. Aunt Alma just stood there looking around at the big bare room with its two church pews bracketing the only other furniture—a massive pool table. I froze while the water ran down from my hair to dampen the collar of the oversized tuxedo shirt I used for a bathrobe.

“Aunt Alma,” I stammered. “Well . . . welcome . . .”

“You really live here?” she let out a loud breath as if, even for me, such a situation was quite past her ability to believe. “Like this?”

I looked around as if I were seeing it for the first time myself, shrugged and tried to grin. “It’s big,” I offered. “Lots of space, four porches, all these windows. We get along well here, might not in a smaller place.” I looked back through the kitchen to Terry’s room with its thick dark curtains covering a wall of windows. Empty. So was Casey’s room on the other side of the kitchen. It was quiet and still, with no one even walking through the rooms overhead.

“Thank God,” I whispered to myself. Nobody else was home.

Aunt Alma turned around slowly and stepped over to the mantel with the old fly-spotted mirror over it. She pushed a few of her loose hairs back and then laid her big rattan purse up by a stack of flyers Terry had left there, brushing some of the dust away first.

“My God,” she echoed. “Dirtier than we ever lived. Didn’t think you’d turn out like this.”

I shrugged again, embarrassed and angry and trying not to show it. Well hell, what could I do? I hadn’t seen her in so long. She hadn’t even been around that last year I’d lived with Mama, and I wasn’t sure I particularly wanted to see her now. But why was she here, anyway? How had she found me?

I closed the last two buttons on my shirt and tried to shake some of the water out of my hair. Aunt Alma watched me through the dark spots of the mirror, her mouth set in an old familiar line. “Well,” I said, “I didn’t expect to see you.” I reached up to push hair back out of my eyes. “You want to sit down?”

Aunt Alma turned around and bumped her hip against the pool table. “Where?” One disdainful glance rendered the pews for what they were—exquisitely uncomfortable even for my hips. Her expression reminded me of my Uncle Jack’s jokes about her, about how she refused to go back to church till they put in rocking chairs.

“No rocking chairs here,” I laughed, hoping she’d laugh with me. Aunt Alma just leaned forward and rocked one of the balls on the table against another. Her mouth kept its flat, impartial expression. I tried gesturing across the pool table to my room and the big water bed outlined in sunlight and tree shade from the three windows overlooking it.

“It’s cleaner in there,” I offered, “it’s my room. This is our collective space.” I gestured around.

“Collective,” my aunt echoed me again, but the way she said the word expressed clearly her opinion of such arrangements. She looked toward my room with its narrow cluttered desk and stacks of books, then turned back to the pool table as by far the more interesting view. She rocked the balls again so that the hollow noise of the thump resounded against the high, dim ceiling.

“Pitiful,” she sighed, and gave me a sharp look, her washed-out blue eyes almost angry. Two balls broke loose from the others and rolled idly across the matted green surface of the table. The sunlight reflecting through the oak leaves outside made Aunt Alma’s face seem younger than I remembered it, some of the hard edge eased off the square jaw.

“Your mama is worried about you.”

“I don’t know why.” I turned my jaw to her, knowing it would remind her of how much alike we had always been, the people who had said I was more her child than my mama’s. “I’m fine. Mama should know that. I spoke to her not too long ago.”

“How long ago?”

I frowned, mopped at my head some more. Two months, three, last month? “I’m not sure . . . Reese’s birthday. I think it was Reese’s birthday.”

“Three months.” My aunt rocked one ball back and forth across her palm, a yellow nine ball. The light filtering into the room went a shade darker. The -9- gleamed pale through her fingers. I looked more closely at her. She looked just as she had when I was thirteen, her hair gray in that loose bun, her hands large and swollen, and her body straining the seams of the faded print dress. She’d worn her hair short for a while, but it was grown long again now, and the print dress under her coat could have been any dress she’d worn in the last twenty years. She’d gotten old suddenly after the birth of her eighth child, but since then she seemed not to change at all. She looked now as if she would go on forever—a worn stubborn woman who didn’t care what you saw when you looked at her.

I drew breath in slowly, carefully. I knew from old experience to use caution in dealing with any of my aunts, and this was the oldest and most formidable. I’d seen grown men break down and cry when she’d kept that look on them too long; little children repent and swear to change their ways. But I’d also seen my other aunts stare her right back, and like them I was a grown woman minding my own business. I had a right to look her in the eye, I told myself. I was no wayward child, no half-drunk, silly man. I was her namesake, my mama’s daughter. I had to be able to look her in the eye. If I couldn’t, I was in trouble and I didn’t want that kind of trouble, here five hundred miles and half a lifetime away from my aunts and the power of their eyes.

Slow, slow, the balls rocked one against the other. Aunt Alma looked over at me levelly. I let the water run down between my breasts, looked back at her. My mama’s sister. I could feel the tears pushing behind my eyes. It had been so long since I’d seen her or any of them! The last time I’d been to Old Henderson Road had been years back. Aunt Alma had stood on that sagging porch and looked at me, memorizing me, both of us knowing we might not see each other again. She’d moved her mouth and I’d seen the pain there, the shadow of the nephew behind her—yet another one she was raising since her youngest son, another cousin of mine, had run off and left the girl who’d birthed that boy. The pain in her eyes was achingly clear to me, the certain awful knowledge that measured all her children and wrenched her heart.

Something wrong with that boy, my uncles had laughed.

Yeah, something. Dropped on his head one too many times, you think?

I think.

My aunt, like my mama, understood everything, expected nothing, and watched her own life like a terrible fable from a Sunday-morning sermon. It was the perspective that all those women shared, the view that I could not, for my life, accept. I believed, I believed with all my soul that death was behind it, that death was the seed and the fruit of that numbed and numbing attitude. More than anything else, it was my anger that had driven me away from them, driven them away from me—my unpredictable, automatic anger. Their anger, their hatred, always seemed shielded, banked and secret, and because of that—shameful. My uncles were sudden, violent, and daunting. My aunts wore you down without ever seeming to fight at all. It was my anger that my aunts thought queer, my wild raging temper they respected in a boy and discouraged in a girl. That I slept with girls was curious, but not dangerous. That I slept with a knife under my pillow and refused to step aside for my uncles was more than queer. It was crazy.

Aunt Alma’s left eye twitched, and I swallowed my tears, straightened my head, and looked her full in the face. I could barely hold myself still, barely return her look. Again those twin emotions, the love and the outrage that I’d always felt for my aunt, warred in me. I wanted to put out my hand and close my fingers on her hunched, stubborn shoulder. I wanted to lay my head there and pull tight to her, but I also wanted to hit her, to scream and kick and make her ashamed of herself. Nothing was clean between us, especially not our love.

Between my mama and Aunt Alma there were five other sisters. The most terrible and loved was Bess, the one they swore had always been so smart. From the time I was eight Aunt Bess had a dent in the left side of her head—a shadowed dent that emphasized the twitch of that eye, just like the twitch Aunt Alma has, just like the twitch I sometimes get, the one they tell me is nerves. But Aunt Bess wasn’t born with that twitch as we were, just as she wasn’t born with that dent.

My uncle, her husband, had come up from the deep dust on the road, his boots damp from the river, picking up clumps of dust and making mud, knocking it off on her steps, her screen door, her rug, the back rung of a kitchen chair. She’d shouted at him, “Not on my clean floor!” and he’d swung the bucket, river-stained and heavy with crawfish. He’d hit her in the side of the head—dented her into a lifetime of stupidity and half-blindness. Son of a bitch never even said he was sorry, and all my childhood he’d laughed at her, the way she’d sometimes stop in the middle of a sentence and grope painfully for a word.

None of them had told me that story. I had been grown and out of the house before one of the Greenwood cousins had told it so I understood, and as much as I’d hated him then, I’d raged at them more.

“You let him live?” I’d screamed at them. “He did that to her and you did nothing! You did nothing to him, nothing for her.”

“What’d you want us to do?”

My Aunt Grace had laughed at me. “You want us to cut him up and feed him to the river? What good would that have done her or her children?”

She’d shaken her head, and they had all stared at me as if I were still a child and didn’t understand the way the world was. The cold had gone through me then, as if the river were running up from my bowels. I’d felt my hands curl up and reach, but there was nothing to reach for. I’d taken hold of myself, my insides, and tried desperately to voice the terror that was tearing at me.

“But to leave her with him after he did that, to just let it stand, to let him get away with it.” I’d reached and reached, trying to get to them, to make them feel the wave moving up and through me. “It’s like all of it, all you let them get away with.”

“Them?” My mama had watched my face as if afraid of what she might find there. “Who do you mean? And what do you think we could do?”

I couldn’t say it. I’d stared into Mama’s face, and looked from her to all of them, to those wide, sturdy cheekbones, those high, proud eyebrows, those set and terrible mouths. I had always thought of them as mountains, mountains that everything conspired to grind but never actually broke. The women of my family were all I had ever believed in. What was I if they were not what I had shaped them in my own mind? All I had known was that I had to get away from them—all of them—the men who could do those terrible things and the women who would let it happen to you. I’d never forgiven any of them.

It might have been more than three months since I had talked to Mama on the telephone. It had been far longer than that since I had been able to really talk to any of them. The deepest part of me didn’t believe that I would ever be able to do so. I dropped my eyes and pulled myself away from Aunt Alma’s steady gaze. I wanted to reach for her, touch her, maybe cry with her, if she’d let me.

“People will hurt you more with pity than with hate,” she’d always told me. “I can hate back, or laugh at them, but goddamn the son of a bitch that hands me pity.”

No pity. Not allowed. I reached to rock a ball myself.

“Want to play?” I tried looking up into her eyes again. It was too close. Both of us looked away.

“I’ll play myself.” She set about racking up the balls. Her mouth was still set in that tight line. I dragged a kitchen stool in and sat in the doorway out of her way, telling myself I had to play this casually, play this as family, and wait and see what the point was.

“Where’s Uncle Bill?” I was rubbing my head again and trying to make conversation.

“What do you care? I don’t think Bill said ten words to you in your whole life.” She rolled the rack forward and back, positioning it perfectly for the break. “ ’Course he didn’t say many more to anybody else either.” She grinned, not looking at me, talking as if she were pouring tea at her own kitchen table. “Nobody can say I married that man for his conversation.”

She leaned into her opening shot, and I leaned forward in appreciation. She had a great stance, her weight centered over her massive thighs. My family runs to heavy women, gravy-fed workingwomen, the kind usually seen in pictures taken at mining disasters. Big women, all of my aunts move under their own power and stalk around telling everybody else what to do. But Aunt Alma was the prototype, the one I had loved most, starting back when she had given us free meals in the roadhouse she’d run for a while. It had been one of those bad times when my stepfather had been out of work and he and Mama were always fighting. Mama would load us all in the Pontiac and crank it up on seventy-five cents’ worth of gas, just enough to get to Aunt Alma’s place on the Eustis Highway. Once there, we’d be fed on chicken gravy and biscuits, and Mama would be fed from the well of her sister’s love and outrage.