Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

by Dorothy Allison

  I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means. I knew that as a child. It was one of the reasons not to tell. When I finally got away, left home and looked back, I thought it was like that story in the Bible, that incest is a coat of many colors, some of them not visible to the human eye, but so vibrant, so powerful, people looking at you wearing it see only the coat. I did not want to wear that coat, to be told what it meant, to be told how it had changed the flesh beneath it, to let myself be made over into my rapist’s creation. I will not wear that coat, not even if it is recut to a feminist pattern, a postmodern analysis.

  Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

  WHAT IS THE STORY I WILL NOT TELL? The story I do not tell is the only one that is a lie. It is the story of the life I do not lead, without complication, mystery, courage, or the transfiguration of the flesh. Yes, somewhere inside me there is a child always eleven years old, a girlchild who holds the world responsible for all the things that terrify and call to me. But inside me too is the teenager who armed herself and fought back, the dyke who did what she had to, the woman who learned to love without giving in to fear. The stories other people would tell about my life, my mother’s life, my sisters‘, uncles’, cousins‘, and lost girlfriends’—those are the stories that could destroy me, erase me, mock and deny me. I tell my stories louder all the time: mean and ugly stories; funny, almost bitter stories; passionate, desperate stories—all of them have to be told in order not to tell the one the world wants, the story of us broken, the story of us never laughing out loud, never learning to enjoy sex, never being able to love or trust love again, the story in which all that survives is the flesh. That is not my story. I tell all the others so as not to have to tell that one.

  Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.

  I HAD THIS GIRLFRIEND once scared all my other girlfriends off. Big, blond, shy, and butch, just out of the army, drove a two-door Chevy with a reinforced trunk and wouldn’t say why.

  “What you carry in that thing, girl? You moving contraband state to state?” I was joking, teasing, putting my hand on her butt, grinning at her scowl, touching her in places she couldn’t quite admit she liked.

  “I an’t moving nothing,” she told me.

  “Uh-huh. Right. So how come I feel so moved?”

  She blushed. I love it when women blush, especially those big butch girls who know you want them. And I wanted her. I did. I wanted her. But she was a difficult woman, wouldn’t let me give her a backrub, read her palm, or sew up the tear in her jeans—all those ritual techniques Southern femmes have employed in the seduction of innocent butch girls. A basic error, this one was not from the South. Born in Chicago, she was a Yankee runaway raised in Barbados by a daddy who worked as a Mafia bagman and was never really sure if he was bringing up a boy or a girl. He’d bought her her first three-piece suit, then cursed at how good it looked on her and signed the permission form that let her join the army at seventeen.

  “My daddy loves me, he just don’t understand me. Don’t know how to talk to me when I go back.” She told me that after I’d helped her move furniture for two hours and we were relaxing over a shared can of beer and stories of how she’d gotten to Tallahassee. I just nodded, pretty sure her daddy understood her as much as he could stand.

  I seduced her in the shower. It was all that furniture-moving, I told her, and insisted I couldn’t go out in the condition I was in. Simple courtesy. I sent her in the shower first, came in after, and then soaped her back in businesslike fashion so she’d relax a little more. I kept chatting—about the women’s center, books I’d read, music, and oh! how long and thick her toenails were. I got down on my knees to examine her toenails.

  “Woman,” I said, “you have the most beautiful feet.”

  I let the water pour down over both of us. It was a silly thing, to talk that way in that situation, but sex is like that. There I was, kneeling for her, naked, my hands on her legs, my mouth just where I wanted it to be. I smiled before I leaned forward. She clenched her fists in my hair, moaned when my tongue touched her. The muscles in her thighs began to jump. We nearly drowned in that shower.

  “Don’t laugh at me,” she said later when we were lying limp on wet sheets, and I promised. No.

  “Whiskey and cigarettes,” she mumbled. “I move whiskey and cigarettes without tax stamps, for the money, that’s what I move.”

  I smiled and raked my teeth across her throat. “Uh-huh.”

  “And ...” She paused. I put one leg between her thighs and slid myself up and down until we fit tight, the bone of my hip resting against the arch of her pubic mound, the tangle of her blond curls wiry on my belly. I pushed up off her throat and waited. She looked up at me. Her cheeks were bright red, her eyes almost closed, pearly tears showing at the corners.

  “Shaklee! Shaklee products. Oh God! I sell cleaning supplies door to door.”

  I bit her shoulder, didn’t laugh. I rocked her on my leg until she relaxed and laughed herself I rocked her until she could forgive me for asking. Then she took hold of me and rolled me over and showed me that she wanted me as much as I had wanted her.

  “You’re quite a story,” I whispered to her after.

  “Don’t tell,” she begged.

  “Who would I tell?”

  Who needs to know?

  Not until I was thirty-four did my sister Anne and I sit down together to talk about our lives. She came out on the porch, put a six-pack on my lap, and gave me a wary careful grin.

  “All right,” Anne said. “You drink half the six-pack and then we’ll talk.”

  “I can’t drink,” I said.

  “I know.” She grinned at me.

  I frowned. Then, very deliberately, I pulled one of the cans free from the plastic loop, popped it open, and drank deeply. The beer wasn’t as cold as it should have been, but the taste was sweet and familiar.

  “Not bad,” I complimented Anne.

  “Yeah, I gave up on those fifty-nine-cent bargains. These days I spend three dollars or I don’t buy.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Oh, don’t start. You’ve never been impressed with anything I’ve done or said or thought of doing. You were so stuck up you never noticed me at all.”

  “I noticed.” I looked at her, remembering her at thirteen—the first time she had accused me of being weird, making fun of me for not wearing makeup or even knowing what kind of clothes I should have been begging Mama to buy me. “You don’t do nothing but read, do you?” Her words put her in the hated camp of my stepfather, who was always snatching books out of my hands and running me out of the house.

  “We didn’t like each other much,” Anne said.

  “We didn’t know each other.”

  “Yeah? Well, Mama always thought you peed rose water.”

  “But you were beautiful. Hell, you didn’t even have to pee, you were so pretty. People probably offered to pee for you.”

  “Oh, they offered to do something, right enough.” She gave me a bitter smile.

  “You made me feel so ugly.”

  “You made me feel so stupid.”

  I couldn’t make a joke out of that. Instead, I tried to get her to look at me. I reached over and put my hand on her arm.

  When we were girls, my little sister Anne had light shiny hair, fine skin, and guileless eyes. She was a girl whose walk at twelve made men stop to watch her pass, a woman at thirteen who made grown men murderous and teenage boys sweaty with hunger. My mother watched her with the fear of a woman who had been a beautiful girl. I watched her with painful jealousy. Why was she so pretty when I was so plain? When strangers in the grocery store smiled at her and complimented Mama on “that lovely child,” I glared and turned away. I wanted to be what my li
ttle sister was. I wanted all the things that appeared to be possible for her.

  It took me years to learn the truth behind that lie. It took my sister two decades to tell me what it was really like being beautiful, about the hatred that trailed over her skin like honey melting on warm bread.

  My beautiful sister had been dogged by contempt just like her less beautiful sisters—more, for she dared to be different yet again, to hope when she was supposed to have given up hope, to dream when she was not the one they saved dreams for. Her days were full of boys sneaking over to pinch her breasts and whisper threats into her ears, of girls who warned her away from their brothers, of thin-lipped adults who lost no opportunity to tell her she really didn’t know how to dress.

  “You think you pretty, girl? Ha! You an’t nothing but another piece of dirt masquerading as better.”

  “You think you something? What you thinking, you silly bitch?”

  I think she was beautiful. I think she still is.

  My little sister learned the worth of beauty. She dropped out of high school and fell in love with a boy who got a bunch of his friends to swear that the baby she was carrying could just as easily have been theirs as his. By eighteen she was no longer beautiful, she was ashamed: staying up nights with her bastard son, living in my stepfather’s house, a dispatcher for a rug company, unable to afford her own place, desperate to give her life to the first man who would treat her gently.

  “Sex ruined that girl,” I heard a neighbor tell my mama. “Shoulda kept her legs closed, shoulda known what would happen to her.”

  “You weren’t stupid,” I said, my hand on Anne’s arm, my words just slightly slurred.

  “Uh-huh. Well, you weren’t ugly.”

  We popped open more cans and sat back in our chairs. She talked about her babies. I told her about my lovers. She cursed the men who had hurt her. I told her terrible stories about all the mean women who had lured me into their beds when it wasn’t me they really wanted. She told me she had always hated the sight of her husband’s cock. I told her that sometimes, all these years later, I still wake up crying, not sure what I have dreamed about, but remembering something bad and crying like a child in great pain. She got a funny look on her face.

  “I made sure you were the one,” she said. “The one who had to take him his glasses of tea, anything at all he wanted. And I hated myself for it. I knew every time, when you didn’t come right back—I knew he was keeping you in there, next to him, where you didn’t want to be any more than I did.”

  She looked at me, then away. “But I never really knew what he was doing,” she whispered. “I thought you were so strong. Not like me. I knew I wasn’t strong at all. I thought you were like Mama, that you could handle him. I thought you could handle anything. Every time he’d grab hold of me and hang on too long, he’d make me feel so bad and frightened and unable to imagine what he wanted, but afraid, so afraid. I didn’t think you felt like that. I didn’t think it was the same for you.”

  We were quiet for a while, and then my sister leaned over and pressed her forehead to my cheek.

  “It wasn’t fair, was it?” she whispered.

  “None of it was,” I whispered back, and put my arms around her.

  “Goddamn!” she cursed. “Goddamn!” And started to cry. Just that fast, I was crying with her.

  “But Mama really loved you, you know,” Anne said.

  “But you were beautiful.”

  She put her hands up to her cheeks, to the fine webs of wrinkles under her eyes, the bruised shadows beneath the lines. The skin of her upper arms hung loose and pale. Her makeup ended in a ragged line at her neck, and below it, the skin was puckered, freckled, and sallow.

  I put my hand on her head, on the full blond mane that had been her glory when she was twelve. Now she was thirty-two, and the black roots showing at her scalp were sprinkled with gray. I pulled her to me, hugged her, and kissed her neck. Slowly we quieted our crying, holding on to each other. Past my sister’s shoulder, I saw her girl coming toward us, a chubby dark child with nervous eyes.

  “Mama. Mama, y’all all right?”

  My sister turned to her daughter. For a moment I thought she was going to start crying again, but instead she sighed. “Baby,” she called, and she put her hands out to touch those little-girl porcelain cheeks. “Oh baby, you know how your mama gets.”

  “You know how your mama gets.” The words echoed in me. If I closed my eyes, I could see again the yellow kitchens of our childhood, where Mama hung her flowered curtains every time we moved, as if they were not cotton but spirit. It was as if every move were another chance to begin again, to claim some safe and clean space for herself and her girls. Every time, we watched her, thinking this time maybe it would be different. And when different did not come, when, every time, the same nightmarish scenes unfolded—shouting and crying and Mama sitting hopelessly at her kitchen table—she spoke those words.

  “Oh, girls, you know how your mama gets.”

  I clenched my hands on my thighs, seeing my niece’s mouth go hard. She clamped her teeth as I remembered clamping mine, looked away as I would have done, not wanting to see two tired, half-drunk women looking back at her with her own features. I shook my head once and caught her glance, the wise and sullen look of a not quite adolescent girl who knew too much.

  “Pretty girl,” I said. “Don’t look so hard.”

  Her mouth softened slightly. She liked being told she was pretty. At eleven so had I. waved her to my hip, and when she came, I pushed her hair back off her face, using the gestures my mama had used on me. “Oh, you’re going to be something special,” I told her. Something special.

  “My baby’s so pretty,” Anne said. “Look at her. My baby’s just the most beautiful thing in the whole wide world.” She grinned, and shook her head. “Just like her mama, huh?” Her voice was only a little bitter, only a little cruel. Just like her mama.

  I looked into my niece’s sunburned frightened face. Like her mama, like her grandmama, like her aunts—she had that hungry desperate look that trusts nothing and wants everything. She didn’t think she was pretty. She didn’t think she was worth anything at all.

  “Let me tell you a story,” I whispered. “Let me tell you a story you haven’t heard yet.” Oh, I wanted to take her, steal her, run with her a thousand miles away from the daddy who barely noticed her, the men who had tried to do to her what my stepfather had done to me. I wanted to pick her up and cradle her. I wanted to save her.

  My niece turned her face to me, open and trusting, waiting to be taken away, to be persuaded, or healed, or simply distracted.

  All right, I thought. That will do. For one moment, this moment leading to the next, the act of storytelling connecting to the life that might be possible, I held her attention and began.

  “Let me tell you about your mama.”

  My niece looked from me to my sister, and my sister stared at me uncertainly, wondering if I was going to hurt her, her and her girl.

  “Sit down, baby. I got a story to tell you. Look at your mama. You know how she is? Well, let me tell you about the day death was calling your mama’s name, death was singing her song and luring her away. She was alone, as alone as only a woman waiting to birth a baby can be. All she saw was darkness. All she heard was her blood singing death. But in the deepest part of that night she heard something else. She heard the baby in her belly crying soft, too weak to make a big noise, too small to know it was alive at all. That’s when your mama saved her own life—by choosing it, by claiming it, alone and scared as she was. By pulling you into the world and loving you with her whole heart.”

  I watched my sister’s eyes go wide, watched her mouth work. “Now you telling stories about me?”

  I just smiled. “Oh, I got one or two.”

  That night I sat with my niece and watched my sister going in and out her back door, picking up and sweeping, scolding her dogs for jumping up on her clean work clothes. My niece was sleepy, my sister e
xhausted. Their features were puffy, pale, and too much alike. I surprised myself then, turning my niece’s face to mine and starting another story.

  “When your mama was a girl,” I told her, “she was so beautiful people said the sun shone brighter when she walked out in the day. They said the moon took on glitter when she went out in the night. But, strangest of all, people said the June bugs catching sight of her would begin to light and try to sing an almost human song. It got to the point she had to stay home and hide to keep the sun from getting too hot, the moon from burning up, the June bugs from going hoarse and dying out.”

  “Ahhh.” The two of them looked at me, almost smiling, almost laughing, waiting. I put my hand out, not quite touching my sister’s face, and drew my fingers along the line of her neck from just below her ear to the softness of her chin. With my other hand I made the same gesture along my niece’s face.

  “See here?” I whispered. “This is where you can see it. That’s the mark of the beautiful Gibson women, both of you have it.”

  My niece touched her cheek, mouth open.

  “Here?” she asked.

  Yes.

  Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.

  TEN DAYS AFTER MY SON, Wolf, was born, my sister Wanda came to stay with us. “Gonna make sure you know what you’re doing,” she’d joked before she came. “Waiting till you’re forty-two to start a family, what you think? You think it’s as easy as reading a book? You think it comes natural, raising babies and not going crazy? Lord!”

  I didn’t argue. I put Wolf in her arms and let her pull his belly up to her chin, let her tickle his ears and kiss his neck.