Biography

Dorothy Allison (born April 11, 1949) is an American writer from South Carolina whose writing focuses on class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. Allison has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards. In 2014, Allison was elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

I’m Working on My Charm

I’m Working on My Charm

I’m working on my charm.

It was one of those parties where everyone pretends to know everyone else. My borrowed silk blouse kept pulling out of my skirt, so I tried to stay with my back to the buffet and ignore the bartender, who had a clear view of my problem. The woman who brushed my arm was a friend of the director of the organization where I worked; a woman who was known for her wardrobe and sudden acts of well-publicized generosity. She tossed her hair back when she saw me and laughed like an old familiar friend. “Southerners are so charming, I always say, giving their children such clever names.”

She had a wineglass in one hand and a cherry tomato in the other, and she gestured with that tomato—a wide, witty, “charmed” gesture I do not ever remember seeing in the South. “I just love yours. There was a girl at school had a name like yours, two names said as one actually. Barbara-Jean, I think, or Ruth-Anne. I can’t remember anymore, but she was the sweetest, most soft-spoken girl. I just loved her.”

She smiled again, her eyes looking over my head at someone else. She leaned in close to me. “It’s so wonderful that you can be with us, you know. Some of the people who have worked here, well . . . you know, well, we have so much to learn from you—gentility, you know, courtesy, manners, charm, all of that.”

For a moment I was dizzy, overcome with the curious sensation of floating out of the top of my head. It was as if I looked down on all the other people in that crowded room, all of them sipping their wine and half of them eating cherry tomatoes. I watched the woman beside me click her teeth against the beveled edge of her wineglass and heard the sound of my mother’s voice hissing in my left ear, Yankeeeeeees! It was all I could do not to nod.

When I was sixteen I worked counter with my mama back of a Moses Drugstore planted in the middle of a Highway 50 shopping mall. I was trying to save money to go to college, and ritually, every night, I’d pour my tips into a can on the back of my dresser. Sometimes my mama would throw in a share of hers to encourage me, but mostly hers was spent even before we got home—at the Winn Dixie at the far end of the mall or the Maryland Fried Chicken right next to it.

Mama taught me the real skills of being a waitress—how to get an order right, get the drinks there first and the food as fast as possible so it would still be hot, and to do it all with an expression of relaxed good humor. “You don’t have to smile,” she explained, “but it does help. Of course,” she had to add, “don’t go ’round like a grinning fool. Just smile like you know what you’re doing, and never look like you’re in a hurry.” I found it difficult to keep from looking like I was in a hurry, especially when I got out of breath running from steam table to counter. Worse, moving at the speed I did, I tended to sway a little and occasionally lost control of a plate.

“Never,” my mama told me, “serve food someone has seen fall to the floor. It’s not only bad manners, it’ll get us all in trouble. Take it in the back, clean it off, and return it to the steam table.” After a while I decided I could just run to the back, count to ten, and take it back out to the customer with an apology. Since I usually just dropped biscuits, cornbread, and baked potatoes—the kind of stuff that would roll on a plate—I figured brushing it off was sufficient. But once, in a real rush to an impatient customer, I watched a ten-ounce T-bone slip right off the plate, flip in the air, and smack the rubber floor mat. The customer’s mouth flew open, and I saw my mama’s eyes shoot fire. Hurriedly I picked it up by the bone and ran to the back with it. I was running water on it when Mama came in the back room.

“All right,” she snapped, “you are not to run, you are not even to walk fast. And,” she added, taking the meat out of my fingers and dropping it into the open waste can, “you are not, not ever to drop anything as expensive as that again.” I watched smoky frost from the leaky cooler float up toward her blond curls, and I promised her tearfully that I wouldn’t.

The greater skills Mama taught me were less tangible than rules about speed and smiling. What I needed most from her had a lot to do with being as young as I was, as naive, and quick to believe the stories put across the counter by all those travelers heading north. Mama always said I was the smartest of her daughters and the most foolish. I believed everything I read in books, and most of the stuff I heard on the TV, and all of Mama’s carefully framed warnings never seemed to quite slow down my capacity to take people as who they wanted me to think they were. I tried hard to be like my mama, but, as she kept complaining, I was just too quick to trust—badly in need of a little practical experience.

My practical education began the day I started work. The first comment by the manager was cryptic but to the point. “Well, sixteen.” Harriet smiled, looking me up and down. “At least you’ll up the ante.” Mama’s friend Mabel came over and squeezed my arm. “Don’t get nervous, young one. We’ll keep moving you around. 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. But then they turned over the butter bowl and divided it evenly between everyone but me. I stared and Mama explained. “Another week and you can start adding to the pot. Then you’ll get a share. For now just write down two dollars on Mr. Aubrey’s form.”

“But I made a lot more than that,” I told her.

“Honey, the tax people don’t need to know that.” Her voice was patient. “Then when you’re in the pot, just report your share. That way we all report the same amount. They expect that.”

“Yeah, they don’t know nothing about initiative,” Mabel added, rolling her hips in illustration of her point. It made her heavy bosom move dramatically, and I remembered times I’d seen her do that at the counter. It made me feel even more embarrassed and angry.

When we were alone I asked Mama if she didn’t think Mr. Aubrey knew that everyone’s reports on their tips were faked.

“He doesn’t say what he knows,” she replied, “and I don’t imagine he’s got a reason to care.”

I dropped the subject and started the next week guessing on my tips.

Salesmen and truckers were always a high guess. Women who came with a group were low, while women alone were usually a fair twenty-five cents on a light lunch—if you were polite and brought them their coffee first. It was 1966, after all, and a hamburger was sixty-five cents. Tourists were more difficult. I learned that noisy kids meant a small tip, which seemed the highest injustice. Maybe it was a kind of defensive arrogance that made the parents of those kids leave so little, as if they were saying, “Just because little Kevin gave you a headache and poured ketchup on the floor doesn’t mean I owe you anything.”

Early-morning tourists who asked first for tomato juice, lemon, and coffee were a bonus. They were almost surely leaving the Jamaica Inn just up the road, which had a terrible restaurant but served the strongest drinks in the county. If you talked softly you never got less than a dollar, and sometimes for nothing more than juice, coffee, and aspirin.

I picked it up. In three weeks I started to really catch on and started making sucker bets like the old man who ordered egg salad. Before I even carried the water glass over, I snapped out my counter rag, turned all the way around, and said, “Five.” Then as I turned to the stove and the rack of menus, I mouthed, “Dollars.”

Mama frowned while Mabel rolled her shoulders and said, “An’t we growing up fast!”

I just smiled my heartbreaker’s smile and got the man his sandwich. When he left I snapped that five-dollar bill loudly five times before I put it in my apron pocket. “My mama didn’t raise no fool,” I told the other women, who laughed and slapped my behind like they were glad to see me cutting up.

But Mama took me with her on her break. We walked up toward the Winn Dixie where she could get her cigarettes cheaper than in the drugstore.

“How’d you know?” she asked.

“ ’Cause that’s what he always leaves,” I told her.

“What do you mean, always?”

“Every Thursday evening when I close up.” I said it knowing she was going to be angry.

“He leaves you a five-dollar bill every Thursday night?” Her voice sounded strange, not angry exactly but not at all pleased either.

“Always,” I said, and I added, “And he pretty much always has egg salad.”

Mama stopped to light her last cigarette. Then she just stood there for a moment, breathing deeply around the Pall Mall, and watching me while my face got redder and redder.

“You think you can get along without it?” she asked finally.

“Why?” I asked her. “I don’t think he’s going to stop.”

“Because,” she said, dropping the cigarette and walking on, “you’re not working any more Thursday nights.”

On Sundays the counter didn’t open until after church at one o’clock. But at one sharp, we started serving those big gravy lunches and went right on till four. People would come in prepared to sit and eat big—coffee, salad, country-fried steak with potatoes and gravy, or ham with red-eye gravy and carrots and peas. You’d also get a side of hogshead biscuits and a choice of three pies for dessert.

Tips were as choice as the pies, but Sunday had its trials. Too often, some tight-browed couple would come in at two o’clock and order breakfast—fried eggs and hash browns. When you told them we didn’t serve breakfast on Sundays, they’d get angry.

“Look, girl,” they might say, “just bring me some of that ham you’re serving those people, only bring me eggs with it. You can do that,” and the contempt in their voices clearly added, “Even you.”

It would make me mad as sin. “Sir, we don’t cook on the grill on Sundays. We only have what’s on the Sunday menu. When you make up your mind, let me know.”

“Tourists,” I’d mutter to Mama.

“No, Yankees,” she’d say, and Mabel would nod.

Then she might go over with an offer of boiled eggs, that ham, and a biscuit. She’d talk nice, drawling like she never did with friends or me, while she moved slower than you’d think a wide-awake person could. “Uh huh,” she’d say, and “Shore-nuf,” and offer them honey for their biscuits or tell them how red-eye gravy is made, or talk about how sorry it is that we don’t serve grits on Sunday. That couple would grin wide and start slowing their words down, while the regulars would choke on their coffee. Mama never bet on the tip, just put it all into the pot, and it was usually enough to provoke a round of applause after the couple was safely out the door.

Mama said nothing about it except the first time when she told me, “Yankees eat boiled eggs for breakfast,” which may not sound like much, but had the force of a powerful insult. It was a fact that the only people we knew who ate boiled eggs in the morning were those stray tourists and people on the TV set who we therefore assumed had to be Yankees.

Yankees ate boiled eggs, laughed at grits but ate them in big helpings, and had plenty of money to leave outrageous tips but might leave nothing for no reason that I could figure out. It wasn’t the accent that marked Yankees. They talked different, but all kinds of different. There seemed to be a great many varieties of them, not just northerners, but westerners, Canadians, black people who talked oddly enough to show they were foreign, and occasionally strangers who didn’t even speak English. Some were friendly, some deliberately nasty. All of them were Yankees, strangers, unpredictable people with an enraging attitude of superiority who would say the rudest things as if they didn’t know what an insult was.

“They’re the ones the world was made for,” Harriet told me late one night. “You and me, your mama, all of us, we just hold a place in the landscape for them. Far as they’re concerned, once we’re out of sight we just disappear.”

Mabel plain hated them. Yankees didn’t even look when she rolled her soft wide hips. “Son of a bitch,” she’d say when some fish-eyed, clipped-tongue stranger would look right through her and leave her less than fifteen cents. “He must think we get fat on the honey of his smile.” Which was even funnier when you’d seen that the man hadn’t smiled at all.

“But give me an inch of edge and I can handle them,” she’d tell me. “Sweets, you just stretch that drawl. Talk like you’re from Mississippi, and they’ll eat it up. For some reason, Yankees got strange sentimental notions about Mississippi.”

“They’re strange about other things, too,” Mama would throw in. “They think they can ask you personal questions just ’cause you served them a cup of coffee.” Some salesman once asked her where she got her hose with the black thread sewed up the back and Mama hadn’t forgiven him yet.

But the thing everyone told me and told me again was that you just couldn’t trust yourself with them. Nobody bet on Yankee tips, they might leave anything. Once someone even left a New York City subway token. Mama thought it a curiosity but not the equivalent of real money. Another one ordered one cup of coffee to go and twenty packs of sugar.

“They made road liquor out of it,” Mabel said. “Just add an ounce of vodka and set it down by the engine exhaust for a month or so. It’ll cook up into a bitter poison that’ll knock you cross-eyed.”

It sounded dangerous to me, but Mabel didn’t think so. “Not that I would drink it,” she’d say, “but I wouldn’t fault a man who did.”

They stole napkins, not one or two but a boxful at a time. Before we switched to sugar packets, they’d come in, unfold two or three napkins, open them like diapers, and fill them up with sugar before they left. Then they might take the knife and spoon to go with it. Once I watched a man take out a stack of napkins I was sure he was going to walk off with. But instead he sat there for thirty minutes making notes on them, then balled them all up and threw them away when he left.

My mama was scandalized by that. “And right over there on the shelf is a notebook selling for ten cents. What’s wrong with these people?”

“They’re living in the movies,” Mabel whispered, looking back toward the counter.

“Yeah, Bette Davis movies,” I added.

“I don’t know about the movies.” Harriet put her hand on Mama’s shoulder. “But they don’t live in the real world with the rest of us.”

“No,” Mama said, “they don’t.”

I take a bite of cherry tomato and hear Mama’s voice again. No, she says.

“No,” I say. I tuck my blouse into my skirt and shift in my shoes. If I close my eyes, I can see Mabel’s brightly rouged cheekbones, Harriet’s pitted skin, and my mama’s shadowed brown eyes. When I go home tonight I’ll write her about this party and imagine how she’ll laugh about it all. The woman who was talking to me has gone off across the room to the other bar. People are giving up nibbling and going on to more serious eating. One of the men I work with every day comes over with a full plate and a wide grin.

“Boy,” he drawls around a bite of the cornbread I contributed to the buffet. “I bet you sure can cook.”

“Bet on it,” I say with my Mississippi accent. I swallow the rest of a cherry tomato and give him my heartbreaker’s smile.

Monkeybites

Monkeybites

In college I contemplated a career in biology for one long year, and rats—fat gray ones with minuscule wires in their skulls or slender white ones trailing colored threads to mark the buried electrodes. The animal labs were in a cinder-block building set away from the campus. I went there like a pilgrim to stare into the cages and finger the plush on a monkey’s neck, the monkey bent to a frame that kept his razor teeth from my flesh. After a while the teeth were gone with the larynx, and he only spat when I came to see him.

It hurt me that he could not bite; the rats at least kept their teeth. I told myself that the security of a career in science demanded sacrifice. I would have to get used to rats with wires and monkeys without teeth. But it was hard, hard. I hated the whitewashed walls and the raw, shrinking creatures under my hands as much as the implacable mechanical motions of the professors in rubber gloves. After I got the job of cleaning up the lab, my dreams were full of monkeys’ teeth and the sibilant scratches of rats’ nails on Formica counters. On those rare nights when Toni and I could sleep over at a friend’s house in the city, I would wake shuddering, feeling her arms around me like the wires that trussed the monkeys.

“You are one restless woman,” Toni would tell me in the morning, showing me the scratches I’d made on her arms and back. “Can’t lie still to save your life.” More out of guilt than desire, I’d kiss her shoulders and slide down between her legs to ease with my tongue what I could not cure with words. I felt about oral sex with Toni the way my roommate in the dorm felt about transcendental meditation. At the point at which my neck began to ache and my fingers spasm on her thighs, I would begin to feel righteous. The longer it took to get her off, and the greater the ache in my neck and back, the farther away I would go in my mind until finally it was as if I were not making love to Toni but to myself. I became a point of concentration, icy and hot at the same time. When she began to babble those love words that meant she was just about to come, my own thighs would shake sympathetically. I rarely came making love to Toni, but nothing made me feel so balanced as an hour or two pushing my tongue between her swollen labia. It was expiation and penance. It was redemption.

But for Toni, sex was a matter of commitment; making love was a bond itself. She had her own cage, her own need for expiation, and she hated the way I could go away into my own head, the distance between us that she could not cross. She wanted a bridge across my nerves, a connection I could not break at will. Hanging out in the lab with me, she’d tease and flirt, laughing at the other lab assistants and the carefully serious expressions with which they’d clean rat shit off their fingers. The truth was Toni loved the lab, the perfectly square cinder-block rooms, the walls of cages, and the irritable way I’d stalk around with my broom and dustpan. She loved to follow me over in the evening to watch me sweep up the little gray turds and chopped-up computer printouts that lined the bottoms of the cages. Sipping from her omnipresent thermos of vodka and orange juice, she’d throw cashews at the bald-headed monkeys and tease me about how my ass moved when I bent over with my pan.

Once I’d gotten so angry I’d grabbed her thermos and threatened to kick her out of “my” lab.

“Oh sweetheart, you don’t want me to go,” she’d told me, and tried to coax me up on one of the big empty lab tables beside her.

“Have a sip. Have a little smoke. Tell me how you always wanted to find somebody like me to tease you, and love you, and suck on your nipples till you’re howling at the moon.”

“Oh yeah. Uh huh. I just always knew some black-eyed woman was gonna come along dying to fuck me silly in front of a bunch of toothless monkeys.”

“Prescient. That’s what you were.”

“Desperate, maybe. That’s what I was when I let you talk me into bringing you over here.”

“Oh, girl.” She held a joint in her left hand and using her right hand only, she pulled out a match, struck it against the pack, lit the joint, took a puff, and then held it out to me.

“Have a smoke and lighten up. I’m the one on your side, you know.”

Her mouth was wide and soft, the right side turned up a little in that way made my hips feel loose. Above that mouth her black eyes were shining and bright. Sometimes when I wanted to make her feel good, I would make my own eyes widen, intensify my gaze, and give her the look of love she was giving me at that moment. For me it was lust; only in her eyes did it become love. But she was on my side, I knew that. Toni was old-school. For all that she was my age and just another scholarship student in a blue-jean jacket, she was and knew herself to be a bar dyke with a bar dyke’s studied moves, the low and sauntering strut of a great fighter and a better lover. She had, too, a bar dyke’s rough and ready talent for getting me angry and then charming me out of it. Every time she played that game and made those moves, all the anger went out of me.

“Yeah,” I told her, looking into her soft eyes. “You’re on my side.”

She drew the smoke deep into her lungs and smiled drunkenly. “Girl, girl. You act like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. Keeping your eyes down and your voice so soft. Wearing those silly-assed sandals and damn fool embroidered denim blouses. Always telling those drawling lies about all your cousins, and grand-daddies, and uncles . . .”

“They an’t lies.”

“Then they should be.”

“And you.” She was making me angry again. “Who do you think you are?”

She pulled her legs up, ran one hand down her heavily muscled thigh, arched her back to stretch, and gave me another of her slow wandering looks, her eyes sliding up from my crotch to my face, heating my skin as she went.

“Me?” she drawled. “Me? Why, I’m just the daughter of the man with the smallest used car lot in Pinellas County and a mama who an’t been sober since the day I was conceived. They wanted me to go to college and make something of myself, so here I am. Trouble is they an’t got the first notion that all I really want is to be the sun and the moon and the stars to some butter-tongued girl in silly-assed sandals and an embroidered denim blouse.”

“You say.”

“I do indeed.”

I’d laughed, not believing her, but enjoying her anyway—maybe because I didn’t believe her. It was so much easier if she was not too serious, if I didn’t have to think about what might happen if what was going on between us was love—love the way people talked about it, real love, dangerous and scary and not to be trusted at all. I pulled open the top snap on my blouse and trailed my fingernails up from my breasts to my throat.

“You the butter-tongued one it seems to me.”

I leaned forward until my face was close to hers. She turned the joint around, tucked the lit end in her mouth, and kissed me so that the smoke shotgunned into my lungs. I melted into her ribs, pushing my hips against her thighs. She kept pushing smoke into me until the room seemed to rock unsteadily and my hands started to roam over her bunched and shaking shoulders.

Toni hadn’t seemed to draw a breath through all that long speech, but when I slid into her arms she was breathless, and so was I.

“Do me.” The words came out in a grating whisper. “Do me right.”

“Oh, girl!” Her voice was hoarse. Her teeth raked my neck, and her fingernails tore at my ribs. My hands started shaking so bad I couldn’t get my jeans unzipped. She grabbed my wrists and pulled my hands behind my back, holding them there with one hand while she used the other to rip the snaps of my blouse open and unzip my jeans slowly. I wanted to scream, “Hurry,” but clamped my teeth instead. If I said a word, she would just slow down and tease me more ruthlessly. I heard my sobs like they were echoes in a wind tunnel. She inched my jeans down over my butt until I was whining like a monkey strapped to a metal table.

“Oh, fuck me. Goddamn it! Fuck me!” I begged. Toni slid me to the edge of the table until my head hung off and my hair swept the floor. When her fingers opened my cunt and her teeth found my breast, I started to scream and the monkeys in the wall cages screamed with me. I jerked and pushed against her, wanting to fight, wanting to give in, wanting the world to stop and wait while I did it all. When I finally started to come, I swung my head until the cages blurred and the monkeys became red and brown shimmering cartoons. Toni climbed over me and put her naked belly against mine, and I began to cry the deepest aching sobs. It felt as if my skin itself were trying to absorb her, soak up the peace and silence inside her. I wanted to stuff myself with her until I was all cotton-battened, dark and still.

“Love,” Toni whispered.

“Sex,” I told myself, inside my vast quiet open body. “Sex, sex, just sex.”

I was bitten as a child by a monkey—a dirty-furred, gray-faced creature kept caged by the lake where my stepfather would go on Sunday to try for a catfish dinner. That monkey was so mean she was famous for it. She had an old red collar with a bell on it, and I always wondered how anyone got close enough to her to put it on. When we’d tried to feed her sugar water from my sister’s baby bottle, she’d jumped for the wire mesh walls of her cage and shrieked into my sister’s terrified face. Then she’d grabbed the nipple off the bottle before any of us could pull it away, chewed it into little pieces and spit them out, swung down and grabbed handfuls of sand and fish scales from the bottom of the cage and thrown them at us. In stunned slow motion, my little sister started to blink and cry, and the monkey came up like an avenging angel to catch her long blond hair and try to pull her through the wire mesh.

It happened so fast, I couldn’t think. I put one hand flat against the cage, grabbed my sister’s hair close to her scalp, and set myself to fight the monkey for her. But the monkey was faster—faster and smarter. She dropped the hair and sprang against the mesh, curled little monkey claws around my wrist, and began to happily chew off my little finger while grinning up into my eyes. The man who managed the fishing camp ran over with a string of dead fish and used them to beat the monkey off. I got my hand back with a web of fine toothy slices ridging my knuckles and wrist.

The curious thing was that after that, I loved that monkey. When we’d go back to the fishing camp, I’d show off my gouged and dented fingers to the other kids and boast.

“See. She ate a piece of me.”

All the kids in the camp would come to see, then go over to toss fish heads and stones into her cage. They were awed and fascinated, and more than a little scared, too. The monkey, with her gnat-eaten neck and mad red eyes, shrieked and shrieked. Eventually, too many parents complained about the noise and the stink. They dropped the monkey, cage and all, into the center of the lake.

Toni loved my story of the fishing camp, said it made her southern literature class come alive when she reread the books in my drawl. “Trailer parks and fishing camps—that’s where we growing our storytellers these days. You got possibilities, girl, as a true storyteller. Put a little work into it and you could be famous.”

“Right, make a living at it, no doubt.”

“Of a kind. Make some people happy anyway. You think about what a queer sort you are, girl, you and your finger-eating monkey. You southern dirt-country types are all alike. Faulkner would have put that stuff to use, made it a literary detail. Faulkner would have had you in here spouting soliloquies to the monkeys.”

Toni pulled a library book out of her backpack and tossed it in my direction. “Or Flannery O’Connor. This one’s just like you, honey. She’d’ve given you a vision of Jesus with monkey’s blood. She’d have had you chop off your own fingers and feed them to the monkeys.” Toni hugged her pack to her ribs and rocked with giggles.

“Shit, girl, it’s just too much, too Southern Gothic—catfish and monkeys and chewed-off fingers. Throw in a little red dirt and chicken feathers, a little incest and shotgun shells, and you could join the literary tradition.”

I caught her shoulder with my hand and shook her, suddenly outrageously angry. “Shit and nonsense!” I cursed, but Toni just rolled in my grip and went on laughing.

“Goddamn, honey. It’s all nonsense, like sexual obsession—nothing to do with reality nohow.” She pushed my hands away and pulled her pack on.

“Remember, I’m the literature major around here. You just the anthropologist.”

“Biologist. I told you I’m gonna switch over and become a biologist.”

Toni shook her head indulgently. “Sure, then you’re gonna settle down, marry some sweet boy, and raise mean-assed daughters to please your mama. I’ll believe that when I see it.”

When I didn’t say anything, Toni’s face took on a mock-serious expression. She reached out to the rack of cages against the wall and put her fingers to the trembling crossed wrists of a scared young monkey.

“You know,” she began, “if you were to work your stories well enough, someone would be sure to conclude they had something to do with your inverted proclivities, your les-bi-an-ism. Something like you constantly reenacting the rescue of your little sister. Hell, you could make some psychiatrist just piss his britches with excitement.”

I felt my lips pull tight with anger. The monkeys chittered in their cages. “But what about you, huh? What do you believe, Miss Literary Analyst?”

“Oh, honey,” she stretched her drawl, almost laughing at me. “It’s got nothing to do with what I believe. I’m talking about the world, everyone outside the circle of you and me—all those professors you tell your cute little stories to and the women who come ’round to hear your lies—all those lies you don’t have to tell me.”

“I don’t lie to you.”

“Don’t you?” Her laugh this time wasn’t funny. “Well, never mind then. Tell me the story ’bout the fishing camp again. Tell me about that poor sad monkey you got so fond of.”

Toni scratched the fur on the soft-eyed monkey in her cage, tracing a line above red-lined patient eyes. “How ’bout this one over here? Your monkey look like this one?”

“I don’t remember. That was a long time ago.”

“Only a moment in the mind, girl. Think about it. All those details you produce on prompting, the feel of the mesh, and the stink of the fish, all that story stuff that rolls out of you so easily when you got an audience around. Bet you got that monkey in your mind all the time.”

“You jealous?”

“More like you’re guilty? Guilty ’bout how you play up to any and everybody, but got so little time for the folks who really care about you?”

“You, huh? You want me to believe you just live for me, huh?”

“Hell, me and the monkeys, girl. Me and the monkeys.” She was teasing and she wasn’t. It was the end of the semester, and for weeks she’d been trying to talk me into moving out of the dorm and into an apartment with her for the beginning of the next term.

“Think about it. We’d have a door we could lock against the world.”

I thought about it. I thought about never being alone when I wanted to be, about Toni keeping track of where I went and what I did, of her sudden angers and drunken tirades. But I also thought about all those Sunday mornings lying against Toni’s thigh out in front of the dormitory, reading the paper and swapping nasty stories until we were both squirming in our jeans with nowhere to go to have sex. Then I thought about making love anytime I wanted until I would get to needing it, having to have it, and only Toni to provide it. I thought about getting to where I trusted her and what she might do then. A kind of terror came up from my belly and strangled me. I’d never trusted anybody in my life. How could I trust Toni?

“No,” I told her. “I don’t want to move in with you.”

Toni’s black eyes narrowed, and her left hand slapped the monkey cage, sending its captive into shrieking hysterics. “Shit, bitch. You just want your stuff taken care of and never having to trade nothing for it. You tell yourself it’s just sex, and sex an’t nothing but itch-scratching. You tell yourself lies, girl. You live your life on lies.”

She grabbed my wrists and pulled me close to her. I pulled back, and we both almost fell. For a moment we stood close, trembling, then she threw my hands down.

“Even monkeys take mating seriously.” Her anger and hurt and outrage seemed to vibrate right through me. My own anger came rolling back.

“What do you know about monkeys? What do you know about anything?”

“More than your stories, girl. More than your stories tell anyone. I know who I am. I know what I want. And I know what an’t worth my trouble, what an’t worth another minute of my time.”

I thought she was going to slap me. I wanted her to slap me. If she slapped me, she would be the bad guy. I would be the heroine, the victim. I’d be able to stare her down and hate her forever. But she didn’t touch me. She shook her hands like she was throwing off dust, turned around and walked away. It was a good move. It was the perfect dismissive bar dyke move.

I worked in the labs over the holidays, slept on a lab table, and went back to the nearly empty dorm only to shower and change my clothes. I lived on peanut butter sandwiches and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer from the cases the other lab assistants had hidden behind the furnace. The warm beer gave me gas, and I’d sit up on one of the tables and entertain the monkeys with rock and roll punctuated with burps. I sang the love songs the loudest, emphasizing the female pronouns by slapping the table.

The monkeys were remarkably quiet, only getting noisy if I beat the table too long. They stared at me out of infinitely wise and patient faces. I poured them all a little beer and smeared peanut butter on their feed trays. They loved the peanut butter and chewed with great wide-smacking sounds. I knew I could trust them. They wouldn’t tell my secrets to anybody.

“The problem is . . .” I told them, checking first to be sure the door was locked. “The problem is I don’t love her. I want to love her. I want to love somebody. I want to go crazy with love, eat myself up with love. Starve myself, strangle and die with love, like everybody else. Like the rest of the whole goddamned world. I want to be like the rest of the world.”

I went up and put my hands flat against one of the cages. The monkey inside, old and hunched and gray, watched me with eyes that seemed to be all whites.

“But I’m not,” I whispered. I was drunk, but I was telling the truth. “I’m not like anyone else in the whole wide world. And all I want of Toni is just a little piece now and then. A little controlled piece that she won’t mind giving me, that she wants to give me. You understand? I don’t want nothing too serious. I don’t want to need her too much. I don’t want to need her at all.”

Those wide blank eyes looked back at me. I could see myself in the black centers, my hair wild and uncombed around my face, my own eyes as wide as the monkey’s, as blank, the pupils as black and empty as night. My mouth worked, and in the blackness I saw my own teeth—clenching, shining, grinding. My teeth scared me right down into my soul. I stole all the dimes from the petty cash drawer and called Toni from the pay phone in the dorm. She listened to me babble and made soft soothing noises into my ears.

“It’s all right, baby. I understand. Don’t none of us want to be too alone if we can help it, now and then.”

I put the phone tight to my teeth and sobbed until she yelled to make me stop.

“If now and then is all you got to offer, then we’ll see about now and then.”

The last Sunday before we all went away for the summer, Toni borrowed a few hours’ time from a friend with an apartment in town. I’d quit my job in the lab and taken another in the post office, signed up for computer class, and was trying to stop dreaming about plush-faced monkeys and wild red rats. Toni and I made love until we were too sore to move and then lay naked, sweating into each other’s hips. Toni held my hands, fingering the two scars that remained on my right little finger. After a few minutes she sucked my fingers into her mouth and bit down gently.

“Tell me about that fishing camp again.” I could barely understand her, and didn’t want to talk anyway.

“No.”

“That monkey left her mark on you, didn’t she?”

“Only one that ever did.” I looked into her eyes when I said it, knowing what I was saying as much as she did.

“Only one, huh? You think that’s just?”

I shrugged, my eyes never leaving hers.

“There is no justice,” I told her, meaning it, meaning it absolutely.

Toni sighed and rolled over. She took a long pull from the half-empty glass of beer she’d left on the floor, and then looked up at me from under her eyebrows.

“Tell you what,” she whispered. “I want you to put me in one of your stories sometime.”

I took the glass away from her, took a drink myself. “What in the world for?”

She took the glass back and turned away from me. “I want to be there,” she said over her shoulder. “I just want to be there, right in there with the monkeys. Me, you understand—raw and drunk and hairy. Me, the way I am. You put me in there, huh? You just put me in there.”

Demon Lover

Demon Lover

Katy always said she wanted to be the Demon Lover, the one we desire even when we know it is not us she wants, but our souls. When she comes back to me now, she comes in that form and I never fail to think that the shadows at her shoulders could be wings.

She comes in when I am not quite asleep and brings me fully awake by laying cold fingers on my warm back. Her pale skin gleams in the moonlight, reflecting every beam like a mirror of smoked glass while her teeth and nails shine phosphorescent.

“Wake up,” Katy whispers, and leans over to bite my naked shoulder. “Wake up. Wake up!”

“No,” I say, “not you.”

But I knew she was coming. I could hear her echoes peeling back off the moments, the way Aunt Raylene always said she could hear a spell coming on. Katy’s persistent. Some of my ghosts are so faded: they only come when I reach for them. This one reaches for me.

“Sit up,” she says. “I won’t bite you.” But her teeth are sharp in the pale light, and I sit up warily. The only predictable thing about Katy was her stubborn perversity; she would mostly do whatever she swore solemnly she would not.

“Shit,” I whisper, and roll over. She laughs and passes me a joint. The smoke wreathes her like a cloak, heavy and sweet around us. I inhale deeply, grin up at her and say, “My hallucinations get me stoned.”

“Lucky you. It costs everyone else money.”

She blows smoke out her nose. Katy has a matter-of-fact manner about her tonight, very unlike herself. It’s been three years since she OD’d, and in that time she’s grown more urgent, not less. This strange air of calmness disturbs me. If the dead lose their restlessness, do they finally go away?

Something falls in the other room, wood striking wood. It’s probably Molly going to the bathroom a little drunk as usual, knocking things over. Katy slides up on one knee and clutches the edge of the waterbed frame. If she were a cat her hair would be on end. As it is, the hair above her ears seems suddenly fuller. I reach over and take the joint from her hand, moving gently, carefully soothing her with only my unspoken demand to hold her.

“You going to wake me up in the night,” I tell her, “you might as well entertain me. Tell me where you got this delicacy. Its mashed pecan, right? Tastes just like that batch we got in Atlanta that time we hitchhiked up from Daytona Beach.”

Still in her cat’s aspect, Katy looks back at me, her huge eyes cold and ruthless. Her expression makes me want to push into her breast, put my tongue to her throat, and hear her cruel, lovely laugh again. It would be easy, delicious and easy, and not at all the way it had been when she was alive. Alive, she was never easy.

“You an’t got no taste at all. It’s Panama City home-grown.” She comes back down on the bed, not disturbing the mattress. “You always talking ’bout that mashed pecan, but first time I got you really stoned on it, you got sick. Spent the night in the bathroom being the most pitiful child. I swear.”

“That was Tampa, and that killer Jamaican.” I draw another deep lungful of the sweet smoke. “In Atlanta, you got sick and threw up on the only clean shirt I had with me.”

Katy gives her laugh finally, and predictably, I feel the goose bumps rise on my thighs. She settles herself so that her naked left hip is against my shoulder. Her skin is smooth, cool, and wonderful. I put my hand on her thigh, and she leans forward to sniff my cheek and rub her lips on my eyebrows. I cannot touch Katy without remembering making love to her on Danny’s couch with a dozen drunk and stoned people around the corner in the living room; the tickle of the feathers she wore laced into the small braids over her ears, and the cold chill of the knife she always pulled out of her boot and pushed under the pillows, the sheathed blade that always seemed to migrate down to the small of my back.

Most of all I remember the talent with which Katy would bite me just hard enough to make me gasp, her bubbling laughter as she whispered, “Don’t make no noise. They’ll hear.” Even now, after all this time, I sometimes make love holding my breath, trying to make no sound, pretending that it is the way it always was back then, with drunk and dangerous strangers around the corner and Katy playing at trying to get me to make a sound they might hear. It was the worst sex and the best, the most dangerous and absolutely the most satisfying. No one else has ever made love to me like that—as if sex were a contest on which your life depended. No one has ever scared me so much, or made me love them so much. And no one else has ever died on me the way she did, with everything between us unsettled and aching.

I slap her thigh brusquely, pushing her back. “You should have had the consideration to puke into a pot. Ruining that shirt that way. You were always careless of me and my stuff.”

Katy nods. “A little. Yeah, I was.” She settles back on the mattress, cross-legged and still just touching my shoulder. “But I always made it up to you. Remember, I stole you another shirt in Atlanta.” Her hand trading the joint is transparent. I can see right through to her smoky breasts, the nipples dark and stiff. “That cotton cowboy shirt with the yellow yoke and the green embroidery. Made you look like a toked-up Loretta Lynn.” She gives her short, barking laugh.

“You still got that one?”

“No, I lost it somewhere.”

I remember going home for the service one of the local drug counselors organized. People were standing around talking about the shame and the waste, and Katy’s mama slapped my hand when I touched her accidentally. “It should have been you,” she’d hissed. “Any one of you, it should have been. Not Katy.” Her eyes had been flat and dry. She hadn’t cried at all, and neither had I. I spent that night in my mama’s kitchen, talking long-distance to my lover up North about how everybody had looked, and the way Katy’s last boyfriend had glared at me from beside his parole officer. I’d hugged the phone to my ear, that yellow cowboy shirt between my fists, wringing it until I was shredding the yoke, pulling the snaps off, ripping the seams. I’d torn that shirt apart, talked for hours, but never gotten around to crying. I didn’t cry until months later in the Women’s Center bathroom. I’d been stone sober, but I was standing up to piss, my knees slightly bent, my jeans down around my ankles, my head turned to the side so I could see myself in the mirror. It was the way Katy had insisted we piss when we went road-tripping.

“You’re the dyke,” she’d always said. “Keep your health. Learn to piss like a boy and keep your butt dry.”

“Piss like a boy,” I’d whispered into the mirror, into Katy’s painful memory. And just that easy her face was there, her full swollen mouth mocking me, whispering back, “Like a dyke. You the dyke here, girl. I sure an’t.”

So then I’d cried, sobbed and cried, and beaten on that mirror with my fists until the women outside came to try and see what was going on. I’d shut up, washed my face, and told them nothing. What could I tell them, anyway? My ghost lover just came back and made me piss all over my jeans. My ghost lover is haunting me, and the trick is I am glad to see her.

Katy hands me the joint again, moving her small hands delicately. She smiles when she sees where my glance is trained. She flexes her fist, opens the fingers, and wags them in front of my nose. I laugh and take the joint again.

“I loved that shirt. It was the best present you ever got me.”

“You forgetting those black gloves with the rhinestones on the back I got in that shop on Peachtree Street. We always got the best stuff in Atlanta. Didn’t we?”

“You just about got us busted in Atlanta.”

“Oh hell, you were just a nervous Nellie. Thought you were the only woman capable of sleight of hand. You just never trusted me, girl.”

“You were always so stoned. You did stupid things.”

“I did wonderful things. I did amazing things, and stoned only made me better, made me smoother. Loosened me up and made me psychic. I was doing acid when I got you those gloves. That windowpane Blackie sold us.”

“Purple haze. You always talk about the windowpane, but we only did it once. You talk about the windowpane ’cause you like to scare people with the notion of you sticking it in your eyes.”

“I only did it once with you. I did it lots with Mickey. We put it in our eyes, in our noses. Son of a bitch even shoved it up my ass.”

She crushes the joint out on the bedframe. She is smiling and relaxed now, very beautiful even though I am getting angry. Mickey was the one took her to California after I ran off. Mickey was the one who got her back on junk, left her in the motel room where she overdosed. Mickey was the one threatened me at her memorial service, with his parole officer standing right there sweating in the heat. Mickey was the one I’d told to try it.

Come for me, asshole, and I’ll cut off your balls and push them up your butt. The parole officer had smiled, and my sweat had turned cold on my back. That wasn’t like me, wasn’t the kind of thing I’d say. It wasn’t even the thing I’d been thinking. It was as if Katy had pushed the words out of my mouth. It was exactly the kind of thing Katy would have said.

But Mickey had overdosed himself at Raiford, and I’d never seen any of Katy’s boyfriends again. Just Katy, anytime she gets restless and wants to come back. I look at her now and my throat closes up. I cannot make casual conversation, cannot talk at all. I want to reach for her but I am too afraid. She is the vampire curse in my life. You have to invite them back, and part of me always wants her, even when most of me don’t. Right now all of me wants her, flesh and blood, body and soul.

Katy’s thick black eyebrows raise and lower, seeing right through me, seeing my grief and my lust. “Ahhh, bitch,” she whispers, and it sounds like lover. She slips one hand under the sheet and strokes her nails along my leg.

I catch my breath. I could cry but don’t. Will we be lovers again? Is she real enough this moment to put her filmy body along my too-tight muscles? She wants to; it shows in the unaccustomed softness in her face. I feel tears run down my cheeks.

Now she says it. “Lover.”

“Junkie.” I hiss it at her, beginning to really cry, making a hoarse ugly sound in the quiet room. “Goddamn you, you goddamned junkie!”

“Ahh well,” she drawls, her fingers still stroking my leg. “It’s not a lie.” She drags herself over, rocking the bed this time, sliding under the sheet. She arranges her body to cup my side, her toes touch my ankle and her head turns so that her mouth is close to my ear.

“Not a lie, no.” One hand caresses my stomach; the other hugs my hipbone.

“Goddamn you!” I try to lie still but start shaking.

“Don’t be boring,” she says. I feel her tongue licking my cheek, wet and almost as rough as a cat’s tongue. My whole body goes stiff, and my hands ball up into fists.

“Why do you keep coming back? Why don’t you leave me alone? You weren’t worth the trouble when you were alive and you sure aren’t doing me any good now.” I start to fight her, trying to pull away or push her away. But she is smoke only, a cloud on my skin, and I can’t escape her.

“Motherfucker . . .” I give it up to cry and turn my face into the pillow of her hair. It smells so sweet and familiar, marijuana and patchouli.

Katy’s shoulders ride up and down. She arches her back and slides her body over so that her belly is on top of mine. I almost scream from the intensity of the sensation. It feels so good. It feels so awful.

“You loved me.” She says it right into the hollow of my ear.

“You love me still. Even after you left me, you loved me. You couldn’t stand me, and you damn sure couldn’t save me. But you couldn’t stand it without me either. So here I am. Feel me.”

She drums her knuckles on my hipbone. Her teeth nip my neck. I gasp and arch up into her. “I’m part of you,” she whispers. “Right down in the core of you.”

I pull myself back down and lie still, giving it up. “I know.” I push my face up. My mouth covers her, tastes her. Her tongue is bitter honey, sliding between my lips, filling my mouth, pushing my own tongue up to the roof of my mouth, expanding until I think I will choke. But I do not fight. I take her in. I want to swallow her, all of her. If she is a ghost, then why not? She could melt into my bones. We could be the same creature.

My hips begin to rock. My fingers curl up and try to grip her waist. A heated sweat rises all over my body. I want to rise up like steam into her, pull up right off my own bones, and become something in the air, a scent of marijuana and patchouli, something sweet and nasty and impossibly sad. But I cannot get hold of her. My very movements seem to push her up and away, the cloud of her becoming mistlike, gossamer and fading.

“No!”

Her thumb is in the hollow of my throat. My own pulse roars in my ears. Her laughter is soft, too soft.

“Stop,” she says and it comes from very far away. Too far. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

“I’ll take a pill.”

“Junkie.” She laughs again. Her pleasure in being able to say that to me almost makes me laugh back. “You take too many pills.”

That is too much. I go limp again and look up into her black, black eyes. “Oh, Mama,” I giggle.

“Ooooh, Maaamaaaa.” Her mouth draws the words out delightfully, rich with lust. She rocks against me, and I can feel her, the flesh hard and cold and powerful.

“I’ll make it interesting for both of us,” she promises. Her nails rake me lightly. Goose bumps radiate from every burning pinprick. I am not afraid. I burn. I want her so badly. Like a mad-woman, I don’t care anymore what is real.

“You move,” she tells me, “and I’m gone.” The cloud of her lifts and it is all I can do to hold myself still until she comes back down.

“You must hold yourself absolutely still. Absolutely.”

Her skin burns me where it touches. I stiffen, holding myself for her. Her weight comes down until I shudder with pleasure. Instantly her body lifts, becomes again a cloud. Her phantom laughter is rich and close. I bite my lips and hold myself still again. She comes down again. So cold. So hot. I groan. She lifts, laughs, and rises again. It goes on and on.

Do you love me? Do you want me? Do you remember me? Do you hate me? Do you love me? I love you, love you, lover you, come all over you, come up into the dark of you, the pit of you. Pull me down into the pit of you. Memory and touch and taste. You are never alone, never going to be alone. If you cry, I will. If you scream, I will. If you are, I am.

“I love you,” she says.

I am drifting. I have come so much my bones have turned to concrete. Their weight immobilizes me. Katy’s hot skin presses all over me. It is so dark, so still. It is the pit of the night, and I am drifting off into sleep. I want to wrap my arms around her and pull her down with me, sleep in the luxury of her embrace. But hours of conditioning stop me, and I do not move. I just slide further down into sleep. She says it again.

“I love you.”

“You’re dead,” I mumble.

Her weight increases, presses down on me. I open my eyes.

“Doesn’t matter.” She has spread out, filled the room. She is enormous, masses of dark all around me. I am afraid. Suddenly I am deeply, deeply afraid, and when she laughs I feel the cold.

“Doesn’t matter at all.”

Text Attributions

• Biography: Dorothy Allison by Wikipedia. Adapted by Octaviano Gutierrez © Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence.
• “I’m Working on My Charm,” “Monkeybites,” and “Demon Lover” by Dorothy Allison are adapted from Book From Net.