Trash by Dorothy Allison

liked the feeling. This was like that, and she liked it even more now.
    She watched Shirley’s hands flatten on the table. She watched the red spots on her mama’s face get bigger and hotter. She watched Bo’s eyes widen and a little gleam of light come on in them. There was a kind of laughter in her belly that wanted to roll out her mouth, but she held it inside. She imagined Bo’s chorus of when we grow up, and found herself thinking that when she had kids, she’d sit them all down on the dirt floor and tell ’em to sign with the union. Shirley’s chair made a hollow sound on the bare floor.
    Now, Mattie thought. Now, she will get up and come over there, and she will slap me. What will I do then? She took another bite of rice and smiled.
    What will I do then?
     
    Granny Mattie always said Great-grandma Shirley lived too long. “One hundred and fourteen when she died, and didn’t nobody want to wash her body for the burying. Had to hire an undertaker’s assistant to pick something to bury her in. She’d left instructions, but didn’t nobody want to read them. Bo had always sworn he would throw a party when she died, but shit, he didn’t live to see it. And his sons didn’t have the guts to do it for him. Only thing Bo ever managed to do to her was go piss on her porch steps the year before he died. The whole time, she sat up there staring over his head, pretending she didn’t see his dick or nothing. She lived too long, too long. She should have died when Bo was alive to throw his party. Every damn child out of her body would have come to party with him. Anybody ever tells you I’m mean, you tell them about your Great-grandma Shirley, the meanest woman ever left Tennessee.”

Mama
     
     
     
     
    A bove her left ankle my mother has an odd star-shaped scar. It blossoms like a violet above the arch, a purple pucker riding the muscle. When she was a little girl in South Carolina they still bled people in sickness, and they bled her there. I thought she was just telling a story, when she first told me, teasing me or covering up some embarrassing accident she didn’t want me to know about. But my aunt supported her.
    “It’s a miracle she’s alive, girl. She was such a sickly child, still a child when she had you, and then there was the way you were born.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Assbackwards,” Aunt Alma was proud to be the first to tell me, and it showed in the excitement in her voice. “Your mama was unconscious for three days after you were born. She’d been fast asleep in the back of your Uncle Lucius’s car when they hit that Pontiac right outside the airbase. Your mama went right through the windshield and bounced off the other car. When she woke up three days later, you were already out and named, and all she had was a little scar on her forehead to show what had happened. It was a miracle like they talk about in Bible school, and I know there’s something your mama’s meant to do because of it.”
    “Oh yeah.” Mama shrugged when I asked her about it. “An’t no doubt I’m meant for greater things—bigger biscuits, thicker gravy. What else could God want for someone like me, huh?” She pulled her mouth so tight I could see her teeth pushing her upper lip, but then she looked into my face and let her air out slowly.
    “Your aunt is always laying things to God’s hand that he wouldn’t have interest in doing anyway. What’s true is that there was a car accident and you got named before I could say much about it. Ask your aunt why you’re named after her, why don’t you?”
     
    On my stepfather’s birthday I always think of my mother. She sits with her coffee and cigarettes, watches the sun come up before she must leave for work. My mama lives with my stepfather still, though she spent most of my childhood swearing that as soon as she had us up and grown, she’d leave him flat. Instead, we left, my sister and I, and on my stepfather’s birthday we neither send presents nor