Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 34 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Trash (1988)

  For breakfast she wanted me to cook grits in a twenty-quart pan, though she wasn’t sure margarine wouldn’t be healthier than butter, and maybe most people would just like granola anyway. “They’ll want doughnuts and coffee,” I told her matter-of-factly. I had a vision of myself standing in front of a hundred angry lesbians crying out for coffee and white sugar. Lee soothed me with kisses and poppy-seed cake made with gluten flour, assured me that it would be fun to run the kitchen with her. The week before the conference, Lee went from church to campus borrowing enormous pots, colanders, and baking trays. Ten flat baking trays convinced her that the second dinner we had to cook could be tofu lasagna with skim-milk mozzarella and lots of chopped carrots. I spent the week sitting in front of the pool table in Jay’s apartment, peeling and slicing carrots, potatoes, onions, green and red peppers, leeks, tomatoes, and squash. The slices were dumped in ten-gallon garbage bags and stored in Jay’s handy floor-model freezer. I put a tablecloth down on the pool table to protect the green felt and made mounds of vegetables over each pocket corner. Every mound cut down and transferred to a garbage bag was a victory. I was winning the war on vegetables until the committee Lee had scared up delivered another load. I drank coffee and chopped carrots, ate a chicken pot pie and peeled potatoes, drank iced tea and sliced peppers. I peeled the onions but didn’t slice them, dropped them into a big vat of cold water to keep. I found a meat cleaver on the back porch and used it to chop the zucchini and squash, pretending I was doing karate and breaking boards. “Bite-sized,” Lee told me as she ran through, “it should all be bite-sized.” I wanted to bite her. I drank cold coffee and dropped tomatoes one at a time into boiling water to loosen their skins. There were supposed to be other women helping me, but only one showed up, and she went home after she got a rash from the tomatoes. I got out a beer, put the radio on loud, switching it back and forth from rock and roll to the country-and-western station and sang along as I chopped. I kept working. The only food left in the apartment was vegetables. I wanted to have a pizza delivered but had no money. When I got hungry, I ate carrots on white bread with mayonnaise, slices of tomatoes between slices of raw squash, and leeks I dipped in a jar of low-sodium peanut butter. I threw up three times but kept working. Four hours before the first women were to arrive I took the last bushel basket of carrots out in the backyard and hid it under a tarp with the lawn mower. I laughed to myself as I did, swaying on rubbery legs.

• From Trash (1988)

  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.

• From Trash (1988)

  I put my own hand on hers and gave one short squeeze. She started but didn’t back away, and I found myself giggling at her attempts to tell us all a funny story. She flushed and told us how happy she was to have us in her home. I smiled and told her how happy I was to have come, my jacket draped loosely over the wineglasses I had hooked in my belt. Walking back to the dorm, I slipped one hand into my pocket, carefully fingering two delicate little knives. Junior year my scholarship was cut yet again, and I became nervous that working in the mailroom wouldn’t pay for all I needed. St. Vincent de Paul offered me a ransom, paying a dime apiece for plates and trays carted off from the cafeteria. Glasses were only good for three cents and hard to carry down on the bus without breaking, but sheets from the alumni guest room provided the necessary padding. My roommate complained that I made her nervous, always carrying boxes in and out. She moved out shortly after Christmas, and I chewed my nails trying to figure out how to carry her mattress down to St. Vincent de Paul. I finally decided it was hopeless, and spent the rest of the holidays reading Jean Genet and walking through the art department hallways. They had hardwood stools in the studios, and stacking file boxes no one had opened in years. I wore a cloth cap when I took them, and my no-nonsense expression. I was so calm that one of the professors helped me clear paper off the third one. He was distracted, discussing Jackson Pollock with a very pale woman whose hands were marked with tusche. “Glad they finally decided to get these out of here” was all he said to me, never once looking up into my face. My anger came up from my stomach with an acid taste. I went back for his clipboard and papers, but his desk was locked and my file broke on the rim. In compensation I took the silk lining out of the pockets of the corduroy coat he’d left thrown over a stool. The silk made a lemongrass sachet I gave my mother for her birthday, and every time I saw him in that jacket I smiled. My sociology professor had red hair, forty shelves of books, four children, and an entirely cordial relationship with her ex-husband. When she invited me to dinner, I did not understand what she wanted with me. I watched her closely and kept my hands in my pockets. She talked about her divorce and the politics in the department, how she had worked for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and demonstrated for civil rights in Little Rock in ’65. There were lots of books she could lend me, she insisted, but didn’t say exactly which ones. She poured me Harveys Bristol Cream, trailing her fingers across my wrist when I took the glass.

• From Trash (1988)

  I stop and look at her. Her face is pale and her fingers are curled tightly on the table. I sigh and push my beer glass forward until it clicks against Paula’s wineglass. “All right. All right. What do you think we should do?” I ask her. “How do we get Fawn and Pris off her back and put her back together now that she’s decided she’s some kind of erotic criminal?” “Neither Fawn nor Pris is going to do anything more to Jackie.” “Nothing justifies what they already did to Jackie’s apartment. She’s gonna be months replacing all her dishes.” Margaret’s features have the pained indignation of a woman who’s had to replace her mama’s glassware too often in the last year. “And to spray-paint that slogan on the walls. That was the worst. ‘Violence against women begins at home!’ That’s outrageous!” “But think about what they meant by it.” Paula is trying to look patient and understanding, but sweat is starting to show on her upper lip. I feel nauseous. “It seems to me you could make a political comment short of breaking somebody’s dishes and trashing their apartment.” “Well, the thing is I’ve agreed to take part in the arbitration.” Paula has the grace to look momentarily uncomfortable. “As an old friend of Jackie’s I didn’t think I should before, but Fawn and Pris have asked me, too, and I think I can get some things worked out between them all.” Margaret looks stunned. So do I probably, but my voice is calm when I speak. “You gonna get them to work out paying for Jackie’s apartment?” “That may be a problem. Neither of them has any money. Pris is only working part-time and Fawn is still volunteering at the coffeehouse while she finishes her studies. It’s Jackie who has a full-time job.” Paula sips her wine and looks toward the clock over the bar. She wipes her mouth with her napkin and carefully avoids my eyes. “I’m gonna be late, you know.” “Oh?” Margaret looks up to the clock on the wall and jumps in her seat. “Oh, yeah. I’ve got to get home, too.” She finishes her margarita in a gulp but doesn’t move. “Look, do you think maybe we could hold a rent party for Jackie, get her some money to fix her place back up?” Paula looks impatient and starts gathering up her stuff. “Oh, I don’t think we should do that. Not while they’re still in arbitration. And anyway, we have so many important things we have to raise money for this spring—community things.” “Jackie’s a part of the community,” I hear myself say. “Well, of course.” Paula stands up. “We all are.” The look she gives me makes me wonder if she really believes that, but she’s gone before I can say anything else. “I want to do something,” Margaret tells me.

• From Trash (1988)

  She did break his nose, and chipped two teeth that belonged to the rent-a-cop who came over to play hero. The nurses fared better, getting away with only a few scratches and one moderately unpleasant bite mark. “I’ll kill you,” Arlene kept screaming. “I’ll fucking kill you all!” Then after a while, “You’re killing me. You’re killing me!” It was Jo who had found Arlene. Baby sister had barely been breathing, her face and hair sour with vomit. Jo called the ambulance, and then poured cold water all over Arlene’s head and shoulders until she became conscious enough to scream. For a day and a half, Jo told me, Arlene was finally who she should have been from the beginning. She cursed with outrage and flailed with wild conviction. “You should have seen it,” Jo told me. By the time I got there, Arlene was going in and out—one minute sobbing and weak and the next minute rearing up to shout. The conviction was just about gone. When she was quiet for a little while, I looked in at her, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak. Every breath Arlene drew seemed to suck oxygen out of the room. Then Jack came in the door and it was as if she caught fire at the sight of him. For the first and only time in her life she called him a son of a bitch to his face. “You, you,” she screamed. “You are killing me! Get out. Get out. I’ll rip your dick off if you don’t get the hell out of here.” “She’s gone completely crazy,” Jack told everyone, but it sounded like sanity to me. The psychiatric nurse kept pushing for sedation, but Jo and I fought them on that. Let her scream it out, we insisted. By some miracle they listened to us, and left her alone. We stayed in the hall outside the room, listening to Arlene as she slowly wound herself down. “I did the best I could,” Jack kept saying to the doctor. “You can see what it was like. I just never knew what to do.” Jo and I kept our distance. Neither of us said a word. By the third morning, Arlene was gray-faced and repentant. When we went in to check on her, her eyes would not rise to meet ours. “I’m all right,” she said in a thick hoarse whisper. “And I won’t ever let that happen again.” “Damn pity,” Jo told me later. “That was just about the only time I’ve ever really liked her. Crazy out of her mind, she made sense.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  I must tell you, then, that there was once in Florence a man whom all called Ciacco,[435] as great a glutton as ever lived. His means sufficing him not to support the expense that his gluttony required and he being, for the rest, a very well-mannered man and full of goodly and pleasant sayings, he addressed himself to be, not altogether a buffoon, but a spunger[436] and to company with those who were rich and delighted to eat of good things; and with these he went often to dine and sup, albeit he was not always bidden. There was likewise at Florence, in those days, a man called Biondello, a little dapper fellow of his person, very quaint of his dress and sprucer than a fly, with his coif on his head and his yellow periwig still drest to a nicety, without a hair awry, who plied the same trade as Ciacco. Going one morning in Lent whereas they sell the fish and cheapening two very fine lampreys for Messer Vieri de' Cerchj, he was seen by Ciacco, who accosted him and said, 'What meaneth this?' Whereto Biondello made answer, 'Yestereve there were sent unto Messer Corso Donati three lampreys, much finer than these, and a sturgeon; to which sufficing him not for a dinner he is minded to give certain gentlemen, he would have me buy these other two. Wilt thou not come thither, thou?' Quoth Ciacco, 'Thou knowest well that I shall be there.' [Footnote 435: _i.e._ hog.] [Footnote 436: Lit. a backbiter (_morditore_).] Accordingly, whenas it seemed to him time, he betook himself to Messer Corso's house, where he found him with sundry neighbours of his, not yet gone to dinner, and being asked of him what he went doing, answered, 'Sir, I am come to dine with you and your company.' Quoth Messer Corso, 'Thou art welcome; and as it is time, let us to table.' Thereupon they seated themselves at table and had, to begin with, chickpease and pickled tunny, and after a dish of fried fish from the Arno, and no more, Ciacco, perceiving the cheat that Biondello had put upon him, was inwardly no little angered thereat and resolved to pay him for it; nor had many days passed ere he again encountered the other, who had by this time made many folk merry with the trick he had played him. Biondello, seeing him, saluted him and asked him, laughing, how he had found Messer Corso's lampreys; to which Ciacco answered, 'That shalt thou know much better than I, ere eight days be past.'

• From Trash (1988)

  The woman hesitated, and then nodded, “Yes. God has a plan for us all.” “Yes.” Mama nodded. “Yes.” She reached over and put both hands on the woman’s clasped palms. “Bless you.” Mama beamed. This time the woman did frown. She didn’t know whether Mama was making fun of her, but she knew something was wrong. Her friend looked nervous. “Just let me ask you something.” Mama pulled the woman’s hands toward her own midriff, drawing the woman slightly off balance and making her reach across the pile of underpants. “Have you had cancer yet?” The words were spoken in the softest matron’s drawl but they cut the air like a razor. “Oh!” the woman said. Mama smiled. Her smile relaxed, full of enjoyment. “It an’t good news. But it is definite. You know something after, how everything can change in an instant.” The woman’s eyes were fixed and dilated. “Oh! God is a rock,” she whispered. “Yes.” Mama’s smile was too wide. “And Demerol.” She paused while the woman’s mouth worked as if she were going to protest, but could not. “And sleep,” Mama added that as it had just occurred to her. She nodded again. “Yes. God is Demerol and sleep and not vomiting when that’s all you’ve done for days. Oh, yes. God is more than I think you have yet imagined. It’s not like we get to choose what comes, after all.” “Mama,” I said. “Please, Mama.” Mama leaned over so that her face was close to the woman’s chin and spoke in a tightly parsed whisper. “God is your daughter holding your hand when you can’t stand the smell of your own body. God is your husband not yelling, your insurance check coming when they said it would.” She leaned so close to the woman’s face, it looked as if she were about to kiss her, still holding on to both the woman’s hands. “God is any minute pain is not eating you up alive, any breath that doesn’t come out in a wheeze.” The woman’s eyes were wide, still unblinking; the determined mouth clamped shut. “I know God.” Mama assumed her old soft drawl. “I know God and the devil and everything in between. Oh yes. Yes.” The last word was fierce, not angry but final. When she let go, I watched the woman fall back against her friend. The two of them turned to walk fast and straight away from us, leaving their selections on the table. I felt almost sorry for them. Then Mama sighed and settled back. With an easy motion, she snatched up a set of blue nylon briefs, size five. She turned her face to me with a wide happy smile. “God! I do love shopping.”

• From Trash (1988)

  “Nothing justifies what they already did to Jackie’s apartment. She’s gonna be months replacing all her dishes.” Margaret’s features have the pained indignation of a woman who’s had to replace her mama’s glassware too often in the last year. “And to spray-paint that slogan on the walls. That was the worst. ‘Violence against women begins at home!’ That’s outrageous!” “But think about what they meant by it.” Paula is trying to look patient and understanding, but sweat is starting to show on her upper lip. I feel nauseous. “It seems to me you could make a political comment short of breaking somebody’s dishes and trashing their apartment.” “Well, the thing is I’ve agreed to take part in the arbitration.” Paula has the grace to look momentarily uncomfortable. “As an old friend of Jackie’s I didn’t think I should before, but Fawn and Pris have asked me, too, and I think I can get some things worked out between them all.” Margaret looks stunned. So do I probably, but my voice is calm when I speak. “You gonna get them to work out paying for Jackie’s apartment?” “That may be a problem. Neither of them has any money. Pris is only working part-time and Fawn is still volunteering at the coffeehouse while she finishes her studies. It’s Jackie who has a full-time job.” Paula sips her wine and looks toward the clock over the bar. She wipes her mouth with her napkin and carefully avoids my eyes. “I’m gonna be late, you know.” “Oh?” Margaret looks up to the clock on the wall and jumps in her seat. “Oh, yeah. I’ve got to get home, too.” She finishes her margarita in a gulp but doesn’t move. “Look, do you think maybe we could hold a rent party for Jackie, get her some money to fix her place back up?” Paula looks impatient and starts gathering up her stuff. “Oh, I don’t think we should do that. Not while they’re still in arbitration. And anyway, we have so many important things we have to raise money for this spring—community things.” “Jackie’s a part of the community,” I hear myself say. “Well, of course.” Paula stands up. “We all are.” The look she gives me makes me wonder if she really believes that, but she’s gone before I can say anything else. “I want to do something,” Margaret tells me. It looks like there are tears in her eyes. “I’m tired of not doing anything when these things happen, just talking about how horrible it all is and then going on with our lives. I want to call Jackie, or maybe even Fawn and Pris.” “No, not them.” I get a cold chill down my back, imagining Fawn and Pris walking in on Margaret’s mama some day. “That rent party idea is a good notion. I’ll give Jackie a call, and you and I can set it up. It’ll be like old times.”

• From Trash (1988)

  I stare at Margaret in surprise. I’ve been thinking the same thing for weeks. Certainly if two women had broken into my apartment and trashed it, I’d have had them in court before they’d known what was happening, but Margaret is the last one of us I’d ever expect to advocate using what she has always called “the patriarchal legal system.” “You don’t mean that.” Paula is as surprised as I am. The waiter slips Margaret’s drink around Paula’s shoulder and passes me my beer with a lazy grin. I’m tempted to grin back, but only nod. Margaret wets a forefinger and takes another taste of salt. “I do. Arbitration isn’t gonna get Jackie anywhere. Look, she didn’t even get her broken glass paid for, and now she’s been talked into ‘accepting her responsibility’ for what happened. That’s crazy. She didn’t do anything, and I don’t think her paintings are pornographic. She’s always worked on nudes, for Christ’s sake! And besides, she told me she did those paintings for the study of the light and shade and the texture . . .” “Oh, give me a break!” It’s all I can do to keep from hissing in rage. “You know Jackie as well as I do. She’s got boxes of drawings and paintings like the ones Fawn and Pris decided were so terrible. She’s been doing them forever—women with knives, women with swords, in leather clothing, on motorcycles, wrestling, running naked down city streets, fucking. You’ve seen them. I’ve seen them—the ones she keeps locked up in boxes in her closet or under her bed, the ones she doesn’t burn when she gets all panicky about why she does them in the first place. I just wish she’d pull them all out and plaster them over the walls of the women’s bookstore, not start pretending she didn’t mean to do them in the first place.” “Jackie’s an artist,” Paula interrupts me. “She has to work her stuff out in her own way.” “With Fawn and Pris’s help she’ll get it all worked out, destroy all the work she’s ever done, and never do any more. Oh well, maybe they’ll let her do some posters for the Take Back the Night Campaign, maybe some illustrations for the editorial page of that paper you do your column for, huh Paula? Or damn, maybe even a comic strip, if she doesn’t make it too explicit . . .” “You’re yelling.” Margaret’s voice is very quiet. I stop and look at her. Her face is pale and her fingers are curled tightly on the table. I sigh and push my beer glass forward until it clicks against Paula’s wineglass. “All right. All right. What do you think we should do?” I ask her. “How do we get Fawn and Pris off her back and put her back together now that she’s decided she’s some kind of erotic criminal?” “Neither Fawn nor Pris is going to do anything more to Jackie.”

• From Trash (1988)

  I know what Paula’s gonna say now before she says it. She’s never seemed to notice how predictably her judgments peel off when she’s acting like the feminist therapist, like so many layers of toasted onion, each clinging delicately to the lower layers. “Jackie should have taken them to court,” Margaret announces. I stare at Margaret in surprise. I’ve been thinking the same thing for weeks. Certainly if two women had broken into my apartment and trashed it, I’d have had them in court before they’d known what was happening, but Margaret is the last one of us I’d ever expect to advocate using what she has always called “the patriarchal legal system.” “You don’t mean that.” Paula is as surprised as I am. The waiter slips Margaret’s drink around Paula’s shoulder and passes me my beer with a lazy grin. I’m tempted to grin back, but only nod. Margaret wets a forefinger and takes another taste of salt. “I do. Arbitration isn’t gonna get Jackie anywhere. Look, she didn’t even get her broken glass paid for, and now she’s been talked into ‘accepting her responsibility’ for what happened. That’s crazy. She didn’t do anything, and I don’t think her paintings are pornographic. She’s always worked on nudes, for Christ’s sake! And besides, she told me she did those paintings for the study of the light and shade and the texture . . .” “Oh, give me a break!” It’s all I can do to keep from hissing in rage. “You know Jackie as well as I do. She’s got boxes of drawings and paintings like the ones Fawn and Pris decided were so terrible. She’s been doing them forever—women with knives, women with swords, in leather clothing, on motorcycles, wrestling, running naked down city streets, fucking. You’ve seen them. I’ve seen them—the ones she keeps locked up in boxes in her closet or under her bed, the ones she doesn’t burn when she gets all panicky about why she does them in the first place. I just wish she’d pull them all out and plaster them over the walls of the women’s bookstore, not start pretending she didn’t mean to do them in the first place.” “Jackie’s an artist,” Paula interrupts me. “She has to work her stuff out in her own way.” “With Fawn and Pris’s help she’ll get it all worked out, destroy all the work she’s ever done, and never do any more. Oh well, maybe they’ll let her do some posters for the Take Back the Night Campaign, maybe some illustrations for the editorial page of that paper you do your column for, huh Paula? Or damn, maybe even a comic strip, if she doesn’t make it too explicit . . .” “You’re yelling.” Margaret’s voice is very quiet.

• From Trash (1988)

  It wasn’t until I watched her sitting on Anna’s bed, waving the smoke out of her face and going on and on, that I realized I had been mad at Judy, was still mad at her, and that actually she was probably mad at me. I hadn’t really spoken much to her since we’d climbed out of bed that next morning. Watching her talking, not letting anyone say more than a sentence or two before starting to talk again, I realized her manners were like her lovemaking—imperious, self-centered, and oblivious. I preferred the women I brought home from the pool hall, the ones who liked me biting them, liked biting me, liked whispering dirty words, wrestling, and shoving their calloused fingers between my labia until I bit them harder and harder, my mouth full of the taste of them, the texture of their skin, their smoky, powerful smell, soaking them up, swallowing and swallowing. Making love with them I rise right up out of myself. I’m happy then in a way I never seem to be otherwise, sure of myself and not afraid. I lose all my self-consciousness, my fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. Their strength becomes my strength, and I love them for it. I hate the men who hassle me on the sidewalk outside the pool hall, the scary threats and the all-too-serious screams in the parking lot, but I love the hall itself, the women in there, the way they make me feel when they stand in that yellow light and rub their fingers together, looking me up and down. In Consciousness Raising meetings, one after the other, everyone insisted they did not fantasize. I looked over at Lenore guiltily, afraid to risk saying anything. There are days I am not here at all. Two cups of coffee and I run away in my mind to eerie dreams of lovemaking, the dance, the swirling turn of bodies catching the slow glint of firelight. In the mountain clearing with the women’s army, I give up hatred in the arms of a demon who knows no rhetoric. If I turn my head I can see her, the Black Queen, the one with the knives, razor blade under her tongue, and a smile like the one on Cass’s face as she lifts her stick to clean out some redneck boy thinks he’s as fast as she is. The gloves on her hands are spiked. She teaches me to use them. She uses them on me, makes tattoos up my thighs for anyone to read. Under my clothes always, the feel of her hands on me, where no one can see. Men and women, women and men, the unguarded, the unsuspecting. Is she a man? Am I a woman?

• From Trash (1988)

  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 ...” “Jesus shit.” “Yeah.” Mama woke up alone with her rage, her grief. “Just what I’d always expected,” she told me later. “You think you know what’s going on, what to expect. You relax a minute and that’s when it happens. Life turns around and kicks you in the butt.” Lying there, she knew they had finally gotten her, the they that had been dogging her all her life, waiting for the chance to rob her of all her tomorrows. Now they had her, her body pinned down under bandages and tubes and sheets that felt like molten lead. She had not really believed it possible. She tried to pull her hands up to her neck, but she couldn’t move her arms. “I was so mad I wanted to kick holes in the sheets, but there wasn’t no use in that.” When my stepfather came in to sit and whistle his sobs beside the bed, she took long breaths and held her face tight and still. She became all eyes, watching everything from a place far off inside herself.

• From Trash (1988)

  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.

• From Trash (1988)

  You’ll never be left alone.” Mabel’s voice was reassuring even if her words weren’t, and I worked her station first. A family of four children, parents, and a grandmother took her biggest table. She took their order with a wide smile, but as she passed me going down to the ice drawer, her teeth were point on point. “Fifty cents,” she snapped, and went on. Helping her clean the table thirty-five minutes later I watched her pick up two lone quarters and repeat, “Fifty cents,” this time in a mournfully conclusive tone. It was a game all the waitresses played. There was a butter bowl on the back counter where the difference was kept, the difference between what you guessed and what you got. No one had to play, but most of the women did. The rules were simple. You had to make your guess at the tip before the order was taken. Some of the women would cheat a little, bringing the menus with the water glasses and saying, “I want ya’ll to just look this over carefully. We’re serving one fine lunch today.” Two lines of conversation and most of them could walk away with a guess within five cents. However much the guess was off went into the bowl. If you said fifty cents and got seventy-five cents, then twenty-five cents to the bowl. Even if you said seventy-five cents and got fifty cents you had to throw in that quarter—guessing high was as bad as guessing short. “We used to just count the short guesses,” Mabel explained, “but this makes it more interesting.” Once Mabel was sure she’d get a dollar and got stiffed instead. She was so mad she counted out that dollar in nickels and pennies, and poured it into the bowl from a foot in the air. It made a very satisfying angry noise, and when those people came back a few weeks later no one wanted to serve them. Mama stood back by the pharmacy sign smoking her Pall Mall cigarette and whispered in my direction, “Yankees.” I was sure I knew just what she meant. At the end of each week, the women playing split the butter bowl evenly. Mama said I wasn’t that good a waitress, but I made up for it in eagerness. Mabel said I made up for it in “tail.” “Those salesmen sure do like how you run back to that steam table,” she said with a laugh, but she didn’t say it where Mama could hear. Mama said it was how I smiled. “You got a heartbreaker’s smile,” she told me. “You make them think of when they were young.” Behind her back, Mabel gave me her own smile, and a long slow shake of her head. Whatever it was, by the end of the first week I’d earned four dollars more in tips than my mama. It was almost embarrassing.

• From Trash (1988)

  Lee drove up in a borrowed pickup truck with two women who’d come in from Atlanta and volunteered to help. One of them kept talking about the no-mucus diet as she loaded the truck. I went in the bathroom, threw up again, and then just sat on the tailgate in the sun while they finished up. “You getting lazy, girl?” Lee teased me. “Better rev it up, we got cooking to do.” I wiped my mouth and imagined burying her under a truckload of carrots. I felt like I had been drinking whiskey, but my stomach was empty and flat. The blacktop on the way out to the Girl Scout camp seemed to ripple and sway in the sunlight. Lee kept talking about the camp kitchen, the big black gas stove and the walk-in freezer. “This is going to be fun.” I didn’t think so. The onions still had to be sliced. I got hysterical when someone picked up my knife. Lee was giggling with a woman I’d never seen before, the two of them talking about macrobiotic cooking while rinsing brown noodles. I got the meat cleaver and started chopping onions in big raw chunks. “Bite-sized,” Lee called to me, in a cheerful voice. “You want ’em bite-sized, you cut them,” I told her, and went on chopping furiously. It was late when we finally cleaned up. I hadn’t been able to eat anything. The smell of the sauce had made me dizzy, and the scum that rinsed off the noodles looked iridescent and dangerous. My stomach curled up into a knot inside me, and I glowered at the women who came in and wanted hot water for tea. There were women sitting on the steps out on the deck, women around a campfire over near the water pump, naked women swimming out to the raft in the lake, and skinny, muscled women dancing continuously in the rec room. Lee had gone off with her new friend, the macrobiotic cook. I found a loaf of Wonder Bread someone had left on the snack table, pulled out a slice, and ate it in tiny bites. “Want some?” It was one of the women from Atlanta. She held out a brown bag from which a bottle top protruded. “It would make me sick.” “Naw,” she grinned. “It’s just a Yoo-Hoo. I got a stash of them in a cooler. Got a bad stomach myself. Only thing it likes is chocolate soda and barbecue.” “Barbecue,” I sighed. My mouth flooded with saliva. “I haven’t made barbecue in years. ” “You make beef ribs?” She sipped at her Yoo-Hoo and sat down beside me. “I have, but if you got the time to do slow pit cooking, pork’s better.” My stomach suddenly growled loudly, a grating, angry noise in the night. “Girl,” she laughed. “You still hungry?” “Well, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t eat any of that stuff.”

• From Trash (1988)

  What I did not imagine was publishing. I read my stories often—at benefits and open readings, and always afterward people would come up and ask me, Didn’t I have a book yet? I was startled every time. No, I had to say. I had been writing stories, not thinking about a book. It is possible this collection would never have come about if I had not lost my temper. I read a review of a book I loved—My Mama’s Dead Squirrel by Mab Segrest, a witty, revealing collection about humor—full of stories about her family. The review was not critical, it was nasty. It made easy jokes about southerners and their “funny” families. In a rage, I called that woman who had asked me if I had a book. “I’ve got a book,” I told her. “I’ve got a book will make that reviewer’s teeth hurt.” It took me more than two years to finish the stories and let this book go. By then I had moved from New York to San Francisco, and was living month to month on what I could put together teaching and writing freelance for whoever would hire me. My temper had run its course, and my first impulse was long past. When I was correcting the galleys, I kept thinking back to that review, anticipating the criticism that would surely be directed at my stubborn girls and mean stories, regretting my temper but not the book itself. I gave the manuscript to a lover I had begun to take very seriously. All these years later she is still here, the mother of my son and the woman with whom I plan to share the rest of my life. Her review was the first. “It’s not bad,” she said. “You are the real thing.” After that, I decided to take everyone else’s opinion in stride. Why write stories? To join the conversation. Literature is a conversation—a lively enthralling exchange that constantly challenges and widens our own imaginations. A skinny guy from the Bronx told things I never imagined about growing up a Puerto Rican who has never seen the islands. A tall woman from the Midwest talked about apple farms and hiding up among the half-ripe fruit so as not to have to think about dead and lost children. God yes, I murmured. Yes. In return, I tried to reimagine the world as my great-grandmother saw it, feeling in my low back the generational impact of giving birth to eleven children in fifteen years. A little later I retold the crime I committed against a woman who loved me with her whole heart, but who, for all that love, never knew who I really was. Did she really say those things? No, but she might have. Does it feel like that? Absolutely.

• From Trash (1988)

  I wanted the world to be different in my lifetime, and I truly believed that stories were one way to help that happen. I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft. I wanted to be good and I wanted to be effective, and these are not always the same thing. Sometimes I was trying to write a poem, but the thing would not pare down enough to anything less than narrative. Sometimes I was so angry, I wrote to stop my own rage. Mostly I was angry, and drunk on words, the sound of words more than the way they looked on the page. It is quite literally the case that I wrote out loud, reading the stories out loud over and over until they were closer to what I wanted. “If I die tomorrow, I want to have gotten this down.” That is how many of these stories started. Once in a while, I had read someone else’s story and put it down in rage, beginning my own to refuse the one that had so confounded me. Going back into these stories, I remember those moments even when I no longer remember the actual stories I was refuting. Taylor Caldwell stories, I called them in an early journal—stories in which poor southern characters were framed as if they were brain-damaged, or morally insufficient, or just damn stupid. “We are not stupid. We do pretty well with what we have.” I’d set out to put that on the page—but often I would go south. By that I mean I would not wind up where I intended. I started “Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee” to work out in my own mind what it must have been like to have been my grandmother—and her mother, my great-grandma about whom I knew almost nothing, except that her children hated her and that she had lived a long time. How’d that work? I wondered, and made up a fictional Mattie Lee, a pretend Shirley. I gave the children names that actually figured in my grandmother’s conversations—names of cousins, second cousins, and lost uncles. I worked it out as if it were a movie, or the kind of story people in my family simply would not tell. Contrary to the myth of southern families passing stories along on the porch, people in my family kept secrets and only hinted at what might have happened.

• From Trash (1988)

  Jo got a suspended sentence, but only after her lawyer proved the puppy farmers had a history of citations from Animal Protection. Jo had to pay the cost of the incinerator, which was made easier when people started writing her and sending checks. The newspaper had made her a Joan of Arc of dogs. It got so bad the farm closed up the dog business and shifted over to pigs. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about pigs,” Jo promised the man when she wrote him his check. “Well, I can appreciate that.” He grinned at us. “Almost nobody does.” “How’d you get that dynamite?” I asked Jo when we were driving away in Jay’s truck. It was the one thing she had dodged throughout the trial. “Didn’t use no dynamite.” She nudged Jaybird’s shoulder. “Old Bird here gave me a grenade he’d brought back from the army. Didn’t think it would work. I just promised I’d get rid of it for him. But it was a fuck-up.” She frowned. “It just blew the back wall out of that incinerator. They got all that money off me under false pretenses.” Every time Jack came to the hospital, he brought food, greasy bags of hamburgers and fries from the Checker Inn, melted milk shakes from the diner on the highway, and half-eaten boxes of chocolate. Mama ate nothing, just watched him. The bones of her face stood out like the girders of a bridge. Jo and I went down to the coffee shop. Arlene, who had come in with Jack, stayed up with them. “He wants her to get up and come home,” she reported to us when she came down an hour later. Jo laughed and blew smoke over Arlene’s head in a long thin stream. “Right,” she barked, and offered Arlene one of her Marlboros. “I can’t smoke that shit,” Arlene said. She pulled out her alligator case and lit a Salem with a little silver lighter. When Jo said nothing, Arlene relaxed a little and opened the bag of potato chips we had saved for her. “He’s lost the checkbook again,” she said in my direction. “Says he wants to know where we put her box of Barr Dollars so he can buy gas for the Buick.” “He’s gonna lose everything as soon as she’s gone.” Jo pushed her short boots off with her toes and put her feet up on another seat. “He’s sending the bills back marked ‘deceased.’ The mortgage payment, for God’s sake.” She shook her head and took a potato chip from Arlene’s bag. “He’ll be living on the street in no time.” Her voice was awful with anticipation. Arlene turned to me. “Where are the Barr Dollars?” I shook my head. Last I knew, Mama had stashed in her wallet exactly five one-dollar bills signed by Joseph W. Barr—crisp dollar bills she was sure would be worth money someday, though I had no idea why she thought so. “Girls.”

• From Trash (1988)

  I have not been called white trash in two decades, but only a couple years ago, I heard myself referred to as “that trash” in a motel corridor in the central valley in California. In 1988, I titled this short story collection Trash to confront the term and to claim it honorific. In 2002, Trash still suits me, even though I live over here in California among people who are almost postconscious. In Sonoma County it makes more sense to call myself a Zen redneck, or just a dyke mama. What it comes down to is that I use “trash” to raise the issue of who the term glorifies as well as who it disdains. There are not simple or direct answers on any of these questions, and it is far harder to be sure your audience understands the textured lay of what you are doing—specially if you are in Northern California rather than Louisiana, and in 2002 rather than 1988. And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us—displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry. Dorothy Allison Guerneville, California, 2002 Deciding to Live Preface to the First Edition T here was a day in my life when I decided to live. After my childhood, after all that long terrible struggle to simply survive, to escape my stepfather, uncles, speeding Pontiacs, broken glass, and rotten floorboards, or that inevitable death by misadventure that claimed so many of my cousins; after watching so many die around me, I had not imagined that I would ever need to make such a choice. I had imagined the hunger for life in me insatiable, endless, and unshakable. I became an escape—one of the ones others talked about. I became the one who got away, who got glasses from the Lions Club, a job from Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and finally went away to college on scholarship. There I met the people I always read about: girls whose fathers loved them— innocently; boys who drove cars they had not stolen; whole armies of the upper and middle classes I had not truly believed to be real; the children to whom I could not help but compare myself. I matched their innocence, their confidence, their capacity to trust, to love, to be generous against the bitterness, the rage, the pure and terrible hatred that consumed me. Like so many others who had gone before me, I began to dream longingly of my own death.

• From Trash (1988)

  I an’t a baby in a basket, and I can’t lie still for it. “You know. You know what it is. The way she is about you. I know it has to be you—something about you. I want to know what it is, and you’re going to tell me. Then you’re going to come home with me and straighten this out. There’s a lot I an’t never been able to fix, but this time, this thing, I’m going to see it out. I’m going to see it fixed.” I opened my eyes and she was still standing there, the cue stick shiny in her hand, her face all flushed and tight. “Go,” I said and heard my voice, a scratchy, strangling cry in the big room. “Get out of here.” “What did you tell her? What did you say to your mama?” “Ask her. Don’t ask me. I don’t have nothing to say to you.” The pool cue rose slowly, slowly till it touched the right cheek, the fine lines of broken blood vessels, freckles, and patchy skin. She shook her head slowly. My throat pulled tighter and tighter until it drew my mouth down and open. Like a shot the cue swung. The table vibrated with the blow. Her cheeks pulled tight, the teeth all a grimace. The cue split and broke. White dust rose in a cloud. The echo hurt my ears while her hands rose up as fists, the broken cue in her right hand as jagged as the pain in her face. “Don’t you say that to me. Don’t you treat me like that. Don’t you know who I am, what I am to you? I didn’t have to come up here after you. I could have let it run itself out, let it rest on your head the rest of your life, just let you carry it—your mama’s life. YOUR MAMA’S LIFE, GIRL. Don’t you understand me? I’m talking about your mama’s life.” She threw the stick down, turned away from me, her shoulders heaving and shaking, her hands clutching nothing. “I an’t talking about your stepfather. I an’t talking about no man at all. I’m talking about your mama sitting at her kitchen table, won’t talk to nobody, won’t eat, and won’t listen to nothing. What’d she ever ask from you? Nothing. Just gave you your life and everything she had. Worked herself ugly for you and your sister. Only thing she ever hoped for was to do the same for your children, someday to sit herself back and hold her grandchildren on her lap. . . .” It was too much. I couldn’t stand it. “GODDAMN YOU!” I was shaking all over. “CHILDREN! All you ever talk about—you and her and all of you. Like that was the end-all and be-all of everything. Never mind what happens to them once they’re made. That don’t matter. It’s only the getting of them.