“I thought boys would be different,” she told me. “But he smells like my girls.” She grinned and licked his cheek. “Tastes like them, too.” Wolf giggled and I laughed with him, and only then saw that there were tears on Wanda’s eyelashes.
“Babies!” she teased. “Get you every time.”
Later she told me she’d only come to save herself another pregnancy. “Got to where I’d started dreaming about having another one, breathing in that talcum smell, feeling those little arms hanging on my neck.” She sipped at a beer and grinned at me over Wolf’s extended fingers.
I waved a diaper at her and laughed. “Wasn’t it you that told me mamas go crazy from sleep deprivation?”
“Oh yeah. Sleep deprivation, sex deprivation, and the simple lack of adult conversation. Drive you out of your head in a matter of weeks. Make you act silly when it an’t making you think you dreaming all the time.” She cradled Wolf’s bare feet in one hand as if she wanted to lick them the way she’d licked his cheek.
“Used to think people were talking to me when there was nobody else there.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “The other night I even thought I heard Mama, just outside the window, talking to someone else.”
Wanda’s eyes turned up from Wolf’s toes to my face. “Might have been, you know.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Just the same. Might have been. Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been. You the mama now, you’re gonna think different. Hell, you’ll be different after a while, all the time more than what you thought you were. Or maybe a little less.”
I gave her a careful look. Asked, “You get religion again when I wasn’t looking?” And waited to see if she’d joke her way out of saying more.
For a moment she was quiet, her fingers gently stroking my boy’s feet, her eyes still looking into mine.
“Nothing’s different and everything’s changed. That’s all. You’ve moved to California and got yourself a baby. I’m an old married woman with two half-grown girls of my own. When did we think this was gonna happen to either of us, huh? When did we believe we were gonna live this long?”
“Two or three things and nothing for sure, huh?”
“Yeah.” And she kissed Wolf’s head.
More than a decade ago I had to quit karate. My body broke in a way that stubbornness could not heal. The notched indexes of my vertebrae, separated only by the thinnest cushioned lining, met and grated loud enough to echo in my nervous system.
These days I go to strange places, cities I’ve never been, stand up in public, in front of strangers, assume the position, open my mouth, and tell stories.
It is not an act of war.
Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.
OTHER NIGHT I WENT over to Providence to read in a line, a marathon of poets and fiction writers.
Afterwards, as I was sipping a Coke, a young man came up to me, fierce and tall and skinny, his wrists sticking out of his sleeves.
He said, “Hypertext. I’ve been wanting to tell you about it.”
“Hypertext?”
“Your work. I’ve read everything you’ve ever published three or four times—at least. I know your work. I could put you in hypertext.”
There was a girl behind him. She reached past his sleeve, put her hand on mine, said, “Oh yes, we could do it. We could put you in hypertext.” She spoke the word with conviction, passion, almost love.
“Hypertext?” I spoke it through a blur of bewilderment.
“CD-ROM, computers, disks or files, it doesn’t matter,” the boy said in a rush of intensity. “It’s the latest thing. We take one of your stories, and we put you in. I know just the story. It goes all the way through from beginning to end. But all the way through, people can reach in and touch a word. Mouse or keyboard or a touchable screen. Every time you touch a word, a window opens. Behind that word is another story. You touch the word and the story opens. We put one of your stories behind that story. And then maybe, maybe you could write some more and we could put in other things. Every word the reader touches, it opens again.”
The girl tugged my arm urgently. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “After a while it’s like a skin of oil on the water. If you look at it from above it’s just one thing, water and oil in a spreading shape. But if you looked at it from the side, it would go down and down, layers and layers. All the stories you’ve ever told. All the pictures you’ve ever seen. We can put in everything. Hypertext.”
The boy nodded.
I reached for a glass of wine. I took a long drink, rubbed my aching back, said, “Yeah, right, I’ll think about it.”
That night I had a dream.
I was walking in a museum, and I was old. I was on that cane I had to use the whole length of 1987. My right eye had finally gone completely blind. My left eye was tearing steadily. I saw everything through a scrim of water, oily water. Way way down three or four corridors, around a turn, I hit a wall.
My story was on this wall.
I stood in front of my wall. I put my hand on it. Words were peeling across the wall, and every word was a brick. I touched one.
“Bastard.”
The brick fell away and a window opened. My mother was standing in front of me. She was saying, “I’m not sick. I would tell you if I was sick, girl. I would tell you.”
I touched her face and the window opened.
She was behind it, flesh cooling, still warm. Hair gone, shadows under her eyes. I was crying. I touched her hand. It was marble, it was brick. It fell away. She was seventeen and she was standing on the porch. He was sitting on the steps. She was smiling at him. She was saying, “You won’t treat me bad, will you? You’ll love my girls, won’t you?”
I touched the brick. It fell away.
He was standing there. I was holding my arm. The doctor was saying, “What in God’s name happened to this child?”
I touched the wall and the brick fell away.
My mama had her hand on my neck. She was handing me pictures. She was saying, “I didn’t want to know who they were. I don’t know what happened. I never wanted to tell you what happened. You make it up for yourself.”
I put my hand on the photograph and the window opened onto a movie. I was eight years old. Cousins and aunts and strangers were moving across the yard. I was clinging to my mother’s neck. I was saying “Mama” in that long, low plea a frightened child makes.
She reached for me, put her arms around me. I fell away. She was holding onto her mama’s neck, saying the same thing, saying “Mama” in that same cry. My hands met the brick of her flesh. She fell away.
My son was climbing up my lap into my arms, putting his arms around my neck.
He said, “Mama.”
The last brick fell down. I was standing there looking up through tears. I was standing by myself in the rubble of my life, at the bottom of every story I had ever needed to know. I was gripping my ribs like a climber holding on to rock. I was whispering the word over and over, and it was holding me up like a loved hand.
I can tell you anything. All you have to believe is the truth.
THE PHOTOGRAPHS
PAGE 5 Ruth Gibson, 1952.
6 Dorothy and Anne, 1955.
9 (Top) Dorothy and the cousins, 1952; (lower lefl) Granny and the Twins, David and Dan, 1965; (lower right) Billie and Dorothy, 1953.
14 Ruth Gibson Allison, 1975.
16 Patsy, 1949.
17 The Twins, David and Dan, 1949.
20 Ruth Gtbson, 1950.
23 One of the lost aunts.
25 Ruth Gibson and best friend, 1952; Ruth Gibson Allison’s health card for waitress work in Florida, 1963.
29 Uncle Brice and friend, honky-tonking, 1955.
30 Uncle Brice in work clothes, 1956.
33 Ruth Gibson Allison and her sister Dorothy “Dot” Yearwood,
1981.
34 Dorothy Allison, 1958.
38 Aunt Dot as a young wife, 1952.
39 Aunt Dot at 63, a year before her death. 1981.
40 (Top left) Dorothy, 1954; (top right) Dorothy and Anne, 1954; (bottom) Dorothy and Anne. 1956.
41 (Top left) Dorothy and Anne, 1960, (top right) Dorothy, Wanda and Anne, 1963; (bottom) Dorothy in Easter outfit, 1957.
48 Dorothy with friend, 1974.
49 Dorothy, 1974. (Photo credit: Morgan Gwenwald)
53 Dorothy and friend, 1974. (Photo credit: Morgan Gwenwald)
60 Dorothy, self-portrait, 1974.
67 Dorothy and friend, New York State, 1975. (Photo credit. Morgan Gwenwald)
70 Dorothy, New York City Gay Pride March, 1982.
76 Dorothy and Anne, 1954.
87 Dorothy. Wolf and Alix with their dog, Bubba, 1994. (Photo credit. Bob Giard)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure was written for performance in the months following the completion of my novel, Bastard Out of Carolina. First performed in August 1991 at The Lab in San Francisco, the piece has been performed in a variety of cities and has changed with each production. For publication the work has been substantially revised. The names of most family members have been changed and other characters are composites—creations based on friends, family, and acquaintances.
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure Page 6