“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 screa
med 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.
You tell that bastard to get his ass out on the street. Whining don’t make money. Cursing don’t get a job. . . .
Bitching don’t make the beds and screaming don’t get the tomatoes planted. They had laughed together then, speaking a language of old stories and older jokes.
You tell him.
I said.
Now girl, you listen to me.
The power in them, the strength and the heat! How could anybody not love my mama, my aunts? How could my daddy, my uncles, ever stand up to them, dare to raise hand or voice to them? They were a power on the earth.
I breathed deep, watching my aunt rock on her stance, settling her eye on the balls, while I smelled chicken gravy and hot grease, the close thick scent of love and understanding. I used to love to eat at Aunt Alma’s house, all those home-cooked dinners at the roadhouse; pinto beans with peppers for fifteen, nine of them hers. Chowchow on a clean white plate passed around the table while the biscuits passed the other way. My aunt always made biscuits. What else stretched so well? Now those starch meals shadowed her loose shoulders and dimpled her fat white elbows.
She gave me one quick glance and loosed her stroke. The white ball punched the center of the table. The balls flew to the edges. My sixty-year-old aunt gave a grin that would have scared piss out of my Uncle Bill, a grin of pure, fierce enjoyment. She rolled the stick in fingers loose as butter on a biscuit, laughed again, and slid her palms down the sides of polished wood, while the anger in her face melted into skill and concentration.
I rocked back on my stool and covered my smile with my wet hair. Goddamn! Aunt Alma pushed back on one ankle, swung the stick to follow one ball, another, dropping them as easily as peas on potatoes. Goddamn! She went after those balls like kids on a dirt yard, catching each lightly and dropping them lovingly. Into the holes, move it! Turning and bracing on ankles thickened with too many years of flour and babies, Aunt Alma blitzed that table like a twenty-year-old hustler, not sparing me another glance.
Not till the eighth stroke did she pause and stop to catch her breath.
“You living like this—not for a man, huh?” she asked, one eyebrow arched and curious.
“No.” I shrugged, feeling more friendly and relaxed. Moving like that, aunt of mine I wanted to say, don’t tell me you don’t understand.
“Your mama said you were working in some photo shop, doing shit work for shit money. Not much to show for that college degree, is that?”
“Work is work. It pays the rent.”
“Which ought not to be much here.”
“No,” I agreed, “not much. I know,” I waved my hands lightly, “it’s a wreck of a place, but it’s home. I’m happy here. Terry, Casey and everybody—they’re family.”
“Family.” Her mouth hardened again. “You have a family, don’t you remember? These girls might be close, might be important to you, but they’re not family. You know that.” Her eyes said more, much more. Her eyes threw the word “family” at me like a spear. All her longing, all her resentment of my abandonment, was in that word, and not only hers, but also Mama’s and my sisters’ and all the cousins’ I had carefully not given my new address.
“How about a beer?” I asked. I wanted one myself. “I’ve got a can of Pabst in the icebox.”
“A glass of water,” she said. She leaned over the table to line up her closing shots.
I brought her a glass of water. “You’re good,” I told her, wanting her to talk to me about how she had learned to play pool, anything but family and all this stuff I so much did not want to think about.
“Children.” She stared at me again. “What about children?” There was something in her face then that waited, as if no question were more important, as if she knew the only answer I could give.
Enough, I told myself, and got up without a word to get myself that can of Pabst. I did not look in her eyes. I walked into the kitchen on feet that felt suddenly unsteady and tender. Behind me, I heard her slide the cue stick along the rim of the table and then draw it back to set up another shot.
Play it out, I cursed to myself, just play it out and leave me alone
. Everything is so simple for you, so settled. Make babies. Grow a garden. Handle some man like he’s just another child. Let everything come that comes, die that dies; let everything go where it goes. I drank straight from the can and watched her through the doorway. All my uncles were drunks, and I was more like them than I had ever been like my aunts.
Aunt Alma started talking again, walking around the table, measuring shots and not even looking in my direction. “You remember when y’all lived out on Greenlake Road? Out on that dirt road where that man kept that old egg-busting dog? Your mama couldn’t keep a hen to save her life till she emptied a shell and filled it again with chicken shit and baby piss. Took that dog right out of himself when he ate it. Took him right out of the taste for hens and eggs.” She stopped to take a deep breath, sweat glittering on her lip. With one hand she wiped it away, the other going white on the pool cue.
“I still had Annie then. Lord, I never think about her anymore.”
I remembered then the last child she had borne, a tiny girl with a heart that fluttered with every breath, a baby for whom the doctors said nothing could be done, a baby they swore wouldn’t see six months. Aunt Alma had kept her in an okra basket and carried her everywhere, talking to her one minute like a kitten or a doll and the next minute like a grown woman. Annie had lived to be four, never outgrowing the vegetable basket, never talking back, just lying there and smiling like a wise old woman, dying between a smile and a laugh while Aunt Alma never interrupted the story that had almost made Annie laugh.
I sipped my beer and watched my aunt’s unchanging face. Very slowly she swung the pool cue up and down, not quite touching the table. After a moment she stepped in again and leaned half her weight on the table. The five ball became a bird murdered in flight, dropping suddenly into the far right pocket.
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