Trash (7 page)

When my mama was twenty-five she already had an old woman’s hands, and I feared them. I did not know then what it was that scared me so. I’ve come to understand since that it was the thought of her growing old, of her dying and leaving me alone. I feared those brown spots, those wrinkles and cracks that lined her wrists, ankles, and the soft shadowed sides of her eyes. I was too young to imagine my own death with anything but an adolescent’s high romantic enjoyment; I pretended often enough that I was dying of a wasting disease that would give lots of time for my aunts, uncles, and stepfather to mourn me. But the idea that anything could touch my mother, that anything would dare to hurt her, was impossible to bear, and I woke up screaming the one night I dreamed of her death—a dream in which I tried bodily to climb to the throne of a Baptist god and demand her return to me. I thought of my mama like a mountain or a cave, a force of nature, a woman who had saved her own life and mine, and would surely save us both over and over again. The wrinkles in her hands made me think of earthquakes and the lines under her eyes hummed of tidal waves in the night. If she was fragile, if she was human, then so was I, and anything might happen. If she were not the backbone of creation itself, then fear would overtake me. I could not allow that, would not. My child’s solution was to try to cure my mother of wrinkles in the hope of saving her from death itself.

Once, when I was about eight and there was no Jergens lotion to be had, I spooned some mayonnaise out to use instead. Mama leaned forward, sniffed, lay back, and laughed into her hand.

“If that worked,” she told me, still grinning, “I wouldn’t have dried up to begin with—all the mayonnaise I’ve eaten in my life.”

“All the mayonnaise you’ve spread—like the butter of your smile, out there for everybody,” my stepfather grumbled. He wanted his evening glass of tea, wanted his feet put up, and maybe his neck rubbed. At a look from Mama, I’d run one errand after another until he was settled with nothing left to complain about. Then I’d go back to Mama. But by that time we’d have to start on dinner, and I wouldn’t have any more quiet time with her till a day or two later when I’d rub her feet again.

 

I never hated my stepfather half as much for the beatings he gave me as for those stolen moments when I could have been holding Mama’s feet in my hands. Pulled away from Mama’s side to run get him a pillow or change the television channel and forced to stand and wait until he was sure there was nothing else he wanted me to do, I entertained myself with visions of his sudden death. Motorcycle outlaws would come to the door, mistaking him for a Drug Enforcement Officer, and blow his head off with a sawed-off shotgun just like the one my Uncle Bo kept under the front seat in his truck. The lawn mower would explode, cutting him into scattered separate pieces the emergency squad would have to collect in plastic bags. Standing and waiting for his orders while staring at the thin black hairs on his balding head, I would imagine his scalp seen through bloodstained plastic, and smile wide and happy while I thought out how I would tell that one to my sister in our dark room at night, when she would whisper back to me her own version of our private morality play.

When my stepfather beat me I did not think, did not imagine stories of either escape or revenge. When my stepfather beat me I pulled so deeply into myself I lived only in my eyes, my eyes that watched the shower sweat on the bathroom walls, the pipes under the sink, my blood on the porcelain toilet seat, and the buckle of his belt as it moved through the air. My ears were disconnected so I could understand nothing—neither his shouts, my own hoarse shameful strangled pleas, nor my mother’s screams from the other side of the door he locked. I would not come back to myself until the beating was ended and the door was opened and I saw my mother’s face, her hands shaking as she reached for me. Even then, I would not be able to understand what she was yelling at him, or he was yelling at both of us. Mama would take me into the bedroom and wash my face with a cold rag, wipe my legs and, using the same lotion I had rubbed into her feet, try to soothe my pain. Only when she had stopped crying would my hearing come back, and I would lie still and listen to her voice saying my name—soft and tender, like her hand on my back. There were no stories in my head then, no hatred, only an enormous gratitude to be lying still with her hand on me and, for once, the door locked against him.

 

Push it down. Don’t show it. Don’t tell anyone what is really going on. We are not safe, I learned from my mama. There are people in the world who are, but they are not us. Don’t show your stuff to anyone. Tell no one that your stepfather beats you. The things that would happen are too terrible to name.

 

Mama quit working honkytonks to try the mill as soon as she could after her marriage. But a year in the mill was all she could take; the dust in the air got to her too fast. After that there was no choice but to find work in a diner. The tips made all the difference, though she could have made more money if she’d stayed with the honkytonks or managed a slot as a cocktail waitress. There was always more money serving people beer and wine, more still in hard liquor, but she’d have had to go outside Greenville County to do that. Neither she nor her new husband could imagine going that far.

The diner was a good choice anyway, one of the few respectable ones downtown, a place where men took their families on Sunday afternoon. The work left her tired, but not sick to death like the mill, and she liked the people she met there, the tips and the conversation.

“You got a way about you,” the manager told her.

“Oh yeah, I’m known for my ways,” she laughed, and no one would have known she didn’t mean it. Truckers or judges, they all liked my mama. And when they weren’t slipping quarters in her pocket, they were bringing her things, souvenirs or friendship cards, once or twice a ring. Mama smiled, joked, slapped ass, and firmly passed back anything that looked like a down payment on something she didn’t want to sell. She started taking me to work with her when I was still too short to see over the counter, letting me sit up there to watch her some, and tucking me away in the car when I got cold or sleepy.

“That’s my girl,” she’d brag. “Four years old and reads the funny papers to me every Sunday morning. She’s something, an’t she?”

“Something.” The men would nod, mostly not even looking at me, but agreeing with anything just to win Mama’s smile. I’d watch them closely, the wallets they pulled out of their back pockets, the rough patches on their forearms and scratches on their chins. Poor men, they didn’t have much more than we did, but they could buy my mama’s time with a cup of coffee and a nickel slipped under the saucer. I hated them, each and every one.

 

My stepfather was a truck driver—a little man with a big rig and a bigger rage. He kept losing jobs when he lost his temper. Somebody would say something, some joke, some little thing, and my little stepfather would pick up something half again his weight and try to murder whoever had dared to say that thing. “Don’t make him angry,” people always said about him. “Don’t make him angry,” my mama was always saying to us.

I tried not to make him angry. I ran his errands. I listened to him talk, standing still on one leg and then the other, keeping my face empty, impartial. He always wanted me to wait on him. When we heard him yell, my sister’s face would break like a pool of water struck with a handful of stones. Her glance would fly to mine. I would stare at her, hate her, hate myself. She would stare at me, hate me, and hate herself. After a moment, I would sigh—five, six, seven, eight years old, sighing like an old old lady—tell her to stay there, get up and go to him. Go to stand still for him, his hands, his big hands on his little body. I would imagine those hands cut off by marauders sweeping down on great black horses, swords like lightning bolts in the hands of armored women who wouldn’t even know my name but would kill him anyway. Imagine boils and blisters and wasting diseases; sudden overturned cars and spreading gasoline. Imagine vengeance. Imagine justice. What is the difference anyway when both are only stories in your head? In the everyday reality you stand still. I stood still. Bent over. Lay down.

“Yes, Daddy.”

“No, Daddy.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy.”

“Don’t do that, Daddy.”

“Please, Daddy.”

 

Push it down. Don’t show it. Don’t tell anyone what is really going on. We are not safe. There are people in the world who are, but they are not us. Don’t show your fear to anyone. The things that would happen are too terrible to name.

 

Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night to the call of my name shouted in my mama’s voice, rising from silence like an echo caught in the folds of my brain. It is her hard voice I hear, not the soft one she used when she held me tight, the hard voice she used on bill collectors and process servers. Sometimes her laugh comes too, that sad laugh, thin and foreshadowing a cough, with her angry laugh following. I hate that laugh; hate the sound of it in the night following on my name like shame. When I hear myself laugh like that, I always start to curse; to echo what I know was the stronger force in my mama’s life.

 

As I grew up my teachers warned me to clean up my language, and my lovers became impatient with the things I said. Sugar and honey, my teachers reminded me when I sprinkled my sentences with the vinegar of my mama’s rage—as if I was supposed to want to draw flies. And, “Oh honey,” my girlfriends would whisper, “do you have to talk that way?” I did, I did indeed. I smiled them my mama’s smile and played for them my mama’s words while they tightened up and pulled back, seeing me for someone they had not imagined before. They didn’t shout, they hissed; and even when they got angry, their language never quite rose up out of them the way my mama’s rage would fly.

“Must you? Must you?” They begged me. And then, “For God’s sake!”

“Sweet Jesus!” I’d shout back but they didn’t know enough to laugh.

“Must you? Must you?”

Hiss, hiss.

“For God’s sake, do you have to end everything with ass? An anal obsession, that’s what you’ve got, a goddamn anal obsession!”

“I do, I do,” I told them, “and you don’t even know how to say Goddamn. A woman who says Goddamn as soft as you do isn’t worth the price of a meal of shit!”

 

Coarse, crude, rude words, and ruder gestures—Mama knew them all. You Assfucker, Get out of my Yard, to the cop who came to take the furniture. Shitsucking Bastard! To the man who put his hand under her skirt. Jesus shit a brick, every day of her life. Though she slapped me when I used them, my mama taught me the power of nasty words. Say Goddamn. Say anything but begin it with Jesus and end it with shit. Add that laugh, the one that disguises your broken heart. Oh, never show your broken heart! Make them think you don’t have one instead.

“If people are going to kick you, don’t just lie there. Shout back at them.”

“Yes, Mama.”

 

Language then, and tone, and cadence. Make me mad, and I’ll curse you to the seventh generation in my mama’s voice. But you have to work to get me mad. I measure my anger against my mama’s rages and her insistence that most people aren’t even worth your time. “We are another people. Our like isn’t seen on the earth that often,” my mama told me, and I knew what she meant. I know the value of the hard asses of this world. And I am my mama’s daughter—tougher than kudzu, meaner than all the ass-kicking, bad-assed, cold-assed, saggy-assed fuckers I have ever known. But it’s true that sometimes I talk that way just to remember my mother, the survivor, the endurer, but the one who could not always keep quiet about it.

 

We are just like her, my sister and I. That March when my sister called, I thought for a moment it was my mama’s voice. The accent was right, and the language—the slow drag of matter-of-fact words and thoughts, but the beaten-down quality wasn’t Mama, couldn’t have been. For a moment I felt as if my hands were gripping old and tender flesh, the skin gone thin from age and wear, my granny’s hands, perhaps, on the day she had stared out at her grandsons and laughed lightly, insisting I take a good look at them. “See, see how the blood thins out.” She spit to the side and clamped a hand down on my shoulder. I turned and looked at her hand, that hand as strong as heavy cord rolled back on itself, my bare shoulder under her hand and the muscles there rising like bubbles in cold milk. I had felt thick and strong beside her, thick and strong and sure of myself in a way I have not felt since. That March when my sister called I felt old; my hands felt wiry and worn, and my blood seemed hot and thin as it rushed through my veins.

My sister’s voice sounded hollow; her words vibrated over the phone as if they had iron edges. My tongue locked to my teeth, and I tasted the fear I thought I had put far behind me.

“They’re doing everything they can—surgery again this morning and chemotherapy and radiation. He’s a doctor, so he knows, but Jesus ...”