“You crazy. You just plain crazy.” My voice was shaking. The way Shannon said “nigger” tore at me, the tone pitched exactly like the echoing sound of Aunt Madeline sneering “trash” when she thought I wasn’t close enough to hear. I wondered what Shannon heard in my voice that made her as angry as I was. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the shame we both were feeling, or maybe it was simply that Shannon Pearl and I were righteously tired of each other.
Shannon threw another handful of flowers at me. “I’m crazy? Me? What do you think you are? You and your mama and your whole family. Everybody knows you’re all a bunch of drunks and thieves and bastards. Everybody knows you just come round so you can eat off my mama’s table and beg scraps we don’t want no more. Everybody knows who you are ... ”
I was moving before I could stop myself, my hands flying up to slap together right in front of her face—a last-minute attempt not to hit her. “You bitch, you white-assed bitch.” I wrung my hands, trying to keep myself from slapping her pasty face. “Don’t you never hit anybody in the face,” Mama always said.
“You little shit, you fuck off.” I put the words out as slick and fast as any of my uncles. Shannon’s mouth fell open. “You just fuck off!” I kicked red dirt up onto her gingham skirt.
Shannon’s face twisted. “You an’t never gonna go to another gospel show with us again! I’m gonna tell my mama what you called me, and she an’t ever gonna let you come near me again. ”
“Your mama, your mama. You’d piss in a Pepsi bottle if your mama told you to.”
“Listen to you. You ... you trash. You nothing but trash. Your mama’s trash, and your grandma, and your whole dirty family ...”
I swung at her then with my hand wide open, right at her face, but I was too angry. I was crazy angry and I tripped, falling onto the red dirt on my spread hands. My right hand came down on a broken clay pot, hurting me so bad I could barely see Shannon’s dripping, flushed cheeks.
“Oh ... shit. You ... shit.” If I could have jumped up and caught her, I would have ripped out handfuls of that cotton-candy hair.
Shannon stood still and watched as I pushed myself up and grabbed my right hand with my left. I was crying, I realized, the tears running down my face while behind us the choir had never stopped singing. That woman’s voice still rolled over the cottonwoods.
Was blind but now I see
...
“You’re ugly.” I swallowed my tears and made myself speak very quietly. “You’re God’s own ugly child and you’re gonna be an ugly woman. A lonely, ugly old woman.”
Shannon’s lips started to tremble, poking out of her face so that she was uglier than I’d ever seen her, a doll carved out of cold grease melting in the heat.
“You ugly thing,” I went on. “You monster, you greasy cross-eyed stinking sweaty-faced ugly thing!” I pointed all my fingers at her and spit at her patent-leather shoes. “You so ugly your own mama don’t even love you.” Shannon backed off, turned around, and started running.
“Mamaaaaa!” she wailed as she ran. I kept yelling after her, more to keep myself from crying now than to hurt her.
“Ugly ... ugly ... ugly.”
12
T
here was no way on God’s green earth that I was ever going to speak to Shannon Pearl again. I didn’t even want to go to church. “Damn Bushy Creek anyway,” I told Reese. “An’t nobody there can sing worth a damn, and that preacher’s so full of himself he crowds out all the air—what air there is, all those old biddies sweating talcum powder and perfume.”
“Listen to you!” Reese rapped my belt buckle with her knuckles and then reached past me for the little bit of Coke left in the bottle I’d just set down. “Sounds like you done lost your religion.”
Reese and I had turned from absolute allies into competitors overnight, arguing all the time and fighting over everything from who got the chicken gizzard to who was the toughest. After years of wearing finger curls and ruffled dresses, Reese had turned tomboy with a vengeance, wrestling and spitting with the boys and refusing to wear anything Mama bought her. She’d begged a couple of pairs of Butch’s old coveralls from Deedee and wore them all the time, but what she really wanted was a pair of blue jeans like the ones I’d bought myself with my dishwashing money. She was also fiercely jealous of the braided leather belt Uncle Earle had sent me, with its brightly polished buckle shaped like a horseshoe, and was constantly trying to get her hands on it. I had to keep my eye on her or she would have “borrowed” it every chance she got.
“You should talk,” I snapped, wishing she would just go away and leave me alone. “You just go to church so you can beg Kool-Aid and cookies after Sunday school.”
“I an’t ashamed of that. I don’t see you turning down nothing people are giving away for free. Besides, you’re just jealous ’cause everybody’s always petting on me at Sunday school, and it used to be you getting all the attention.”
I snorted contemptuously but said nothing. You couldn’t argue with Reese, she liked it too much. I hooked my thumbs behind my belt buckle and leaned back to stare at her, refusing to speak. Silence was the only way to get to Reese. She couldn’t stand it if you wouldn’t talk to her.
“Oh, don’t you start that, you mean old thing.” Reese stamped her bare feet in the dirt and pointed the Coke bottle at me. “I’m on to you, Bone. I know all your tricks, and I an’t gonna play no more. You just sit on your damn old belt. I hope it strangles you. I an’t gonna be there to see it.”
It was around then that I discovered that Reese was masturbating almost as often as I was. In the middle of the night, I woke up to feel the bed shaking slightly. Instead of sprawling across the bottom of the bed as she usually did, her legs and arms thrown wide, Reese was at the far edge of the mattress, her body taut and curved away from me. I could hear the sound of her breathing, fast and shallow. I knew immediately what she was doing. I kept still, my own breathing quiet and steady. After a while there was a moment when she held her breath, and then the shaking stopped. Very quietly then I slipped my right hand down between my legs and held myself. I wanted to do it too, but I couldn’t stand the thought that she might hear. But what if she did? I felt Reese relax and sprawl wide again. I held my breath, I moved my hand, I almost did not shake the bed at all.
Reese would go back to our bedroom alone every day when we got home from school. When she came out, I would go in. Sometimes I even imagined I could smell what she had been doing, but that could not have been so. She was a little girl and smelled like a little girl. Neither of us smelled like Mama, the ripe fleshy scent of a woman grown. I pulled my shorts down and made sure of it, carefully washing between my legs with warm soap and water every time I did that thing I knew my sister was doing too.
One afternoon, I went outside and stood listening for the sound of Reese alone in the bedroom. She was quiet, very quiet, but I could hear the rhythm of her breathing as it gradually picked up speed, and the soft little grunts she made before it began to slow down again. I liked those grunts. When Reese did it in the middle of the night, she never made any sound at all. But then, I was just as careful myself even when I was safely alone. I wondered if Reese did it differently in the daytime. I wondered if she lay on her back with her legs wide, the way I liked to when I was alone, rather than on her stomach with both hands under her the way she did at night. There was no way to spy on her, no way to know. But I imagined Reese sometimes while I did it myself, seeing her sprawled across our big Hollywood bed, rocking only slightly, showing by nothing but her breathing that she was committing a sin.
I walked in on Reese one afternoon while she was lying on the bed with a pair of mama’s panties over her face. All her features were outlined under the sheer material, but her breath puffed the silk out over her lips. Frantically, she snatched them off and shoved them behind her on the bed. I grabbed a book I had been reading off the dresser and pretended I hadn’t seen anything.
Reese played out her own stories in the woods behind the house. I watched her one afternoon from the top of the tree Mama hung her birdfeeder on. She hadn’t seen me climb up there and didn’t know I had a clear view of her as she ran around in an old sheet tied to her neck like a cape. She seemed to be pretending to fight off imaginary attackers. Then she dropped to the ground and pretended to be wrestling. Rolling around in the grass and wet leaves she kept shouting “No! No!” The haughty expression on her face was replaced by mock terror as she threw her head back and forth wildly like the heroine in an adventure movie.
I hugged myself tightly to the tree and rocked my hips against the indifferent trunk. I imagined I was tied to the branches above and below me. Someone had beaten me with dry sticks and put their hands in my clothes. Someone, someone, I imagined. Someone had tied me high up in the tree, gagged me and left me to starve to death while the blackbirds pecked at my ears. I rocked and rocked, pushing my thighs into the rough bark. Below me, Reese pushed her hips into the leaves and made grunting noises. Someone, someone, she imagined, was doing terrible exciting things to her.
Reese and I never talked about our private games, our separate hours alone in the bedroom. These days we barely talked at all. But we made sure no one else ever went in the bedroom when one of us was there alone.
It was the worst time for Reese and me to be fighting. Neither of us was ever supposed to be home in the afternoon without the other, but I couldn’t tell when she might blow up at me and run off somewhere. Daddy Glen had gotten his dairy routes changed and no longer had a full schedule. He’d been coming home a lot in the afternoons and had gone back to looking worried all the time. He’d yell at me one day that I was getting too big to run around in a T-shirt with no bra, and the next accuse me of pretending to be grown-up. Mama said he was fighting with his daddy and we were to stay out of his way until things settled down. But Aunt Alma and Uncle Wade were fighting again too, so I couldn’t hang around over there, and Aunt Ruth was really sick now.
“You go out to Raylene’s,” she told me finally.
“You never sent me to Raylene’s before,” I complained. “I thought you didn’t want me going out to her place.” I was hoping she’d let me come to the diner again and work in the kitchen. I liked it down there. I liked listening to the waitresses tell jokes and watching the truckers flirt with Mama like she was still the prettiest woman in the county.
“I never said that. I an’t never said nothing to you about Raylene.” I could tell Mama was angry from the high pitch of her voice. “Did somebody say something to you about Raylene?”
“No, Mama.”
“You sure?” Mama took hold of my wrist so hard my skin burned. “You sure?”
“What would anyone say about Raylene?”
Mama let go of my arm.
“Never mind asking questions. Just don’t you go making things up, little girl. You’re not too big to have your britches warmed.”
“I’m sorry. But you never sent me out to Raylene’s before.”
“Well, maybe I didn’t think you were old enough to be staying out on the river before.” Mama was exasperated and impatient. She pushed her hair back with both hands and wiped her lips. “Garvey’s doing some work for Mr. Berdforth’s service station these afternoons after he gets out of school. He can give you a ride, and I should hope I can trust you not to get in any trouble while you’re there.”
Garvey was happy to give me a lift to Aunt Raylene’s place, particularly after Mama gave him a dollar for gas money. “I an’t making no real money cleaning up for Mr. Berdforth,” he told me. “Man’s as cheap as they come. But at least I’m learning something. Daddy says a mechanic can always find a job.”
“Yeah.”
I was restless and uninterested in Garvey’s troubles. Aunt Alma joked that the twins were too lazy to fart on their own, and sometimes I thought she was right. They were certainly dumb enough. Neither of them ever read a book or talked about anything but how rich they were gonna be “someday.” Mama said you could tell they were starting to grow up by how silly they had become, that teenagers always got stupid before they got smart. I wondered if that was what was happening to me, if I had already started to get stupid and just didn’t know it. Not that it mattered. Stupid or smart, there wasn’t much choice about what was going to happen to me, or to Grey and Garvey, or to any of us. Growing up was like falling into a hole. The boys would quit school and sooner or later go to jail for something silly. I might not quit school, not while Mama had any say in the matter, but what difference would that make? What was I going to do in five years? Work in the textile mill? Join Mama at the diner? It all looked bleak to me. No wonder people got crazy as they grew up.
No matter what Mama said, I knew that it wasn’t just because of where she lived that I had never spent much time with Aunt Raylene. For all she was a Boatwright woman, there were ways Raylene had always been different from her sisters. She was quieter, more private, living alone with her dogs and fishing lines, and seemingly happy that way. She had always lived out past the city limits, and her house was where the older boy cousins tended to go. Out at Raylene’s they could smoke and curse and roughhouse without interference. She let kids do pretty much anything they wanted. With none of her own, Raylene was convinced that the best way to raise children was to give them their head.
“There’s no evil in them,” she’d always say. “They’re just like puppies. They need to wear themselves out now and then.”
Raylene’s place was easy to get to on the Eustis Highway but set off by itself on a little rise of land. The Greenville River curved around the outcropping where her weathered old shotgun house stood, and from the porch that went around three sides, you could watch the river and the highway that skirted it. Raylene kept the trees cut back and the shrubs low to the ground. “I don’t like surprises,” she always said. “I like to see who’s coming up on me.”