Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure by Dorothy Allison

Book: Two or Three Things I Know for Sure by Dorothy Allison Read Free Book Online
Authors: Dorothy Allison
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sister two decades to tell me what it was really like being beautiful, about the hatred that trailed over her skin like honey melting on warm bread.
    My beautiful sister had been dogged by contempt just like her less beautiful sisters—more, for she dared to be different yet again, to hope when she was supposed to have given up hope, to dream when she was not the one they saved dreams for. Her days were full of boys sneaking over to pinch her breasts and whisper threats into her ears, of girls who warned her away from their brothers, of thin-lipped adults who lost no opportunity to tell her she really didn’t know how to dress.
    “You think you pretty, girl? Ha! You an’t nothing but another piece of dirt masquerading as better.”
    “You think you something? What you thinking, you silly bitch?”
    I think she was beautiful. I think she still is.
    My little sister learned the worth of beauty. She dropped out of high school and fell in love with a boy who got a bunch of his friends to swear that the baby she was carrying could just as easily have been theirs as his. By eighteen she was no longer beautiful, she was ashamed: staying up nights with her bastard son, living in my stepfather’s house, a dispatcher for a rug company, unable to afford her own place, desperate to give her life to the first man who would treat her gently.
    “Sex ruined that girl,” I heard a neighbor tell my mama. “Shoulda kept her legs closed, shoulda known what would happen to her.”
    “You weren’t stupid,” I said, my hand on Anne’s arm, my words just slightly slurred.
    “Uh-huh. Well, you weren’t ugly.”
    We popped open more cans and sat back in our chairs. She talked about her babies. I told her about my lovers. She cursed the men who had hurt her. I told her terrible stories about all the mean women who had lured me into their beds when it wasn’t me they really wanted. She told me she had always hated the sight of her husband’s cock. I told her that sometimes, all these years later, I still wake up crying, not sure what I have dreamed about, but remembering something bad and crying like a child in great pain. She got a funny look on her face.
    “I made sure you were the one,” she said. “The one who had to take him his glasses of tea, anything at all he wanted. And I hated myself for it. I knew every time, when you didn’t come right back—I knew he was keeping you in there, next to him, where you didn’t want to be any more than I did.”
    She looked at me, then away. “But I never really knew what he was doing,” she whispered. “I thought you were so strong. Not like me. I knew I wasn’t strong at all. I thought you were like Mama, that you could handle him. I thought you could handle anything. Every time he’d grab hold of me and hang on too long, he’d make me feel so bad and frightened and unable to imagine what he wanted, but afraid, so afraid. I didn’t think you felt like that. I didn’t think it was the same for you.”
    We were quiet for a while, and then my sister leaned over and pressed her forehead to my cheek.
    “It wasn’t fair, was it?” she whispered.
    “None of it was,” I whispered back, and put my arms around her.
    “Goddamn!” she cursed. “Goddamn!” And started to cry. Just that fast, I was crying with her.
    “But Mama really loved you, you know,” Anne said.
    “But you were beautiful.”
    She put her hands up to her cheeks, to the fine webs of wrinkles under her eyes, the bruised shadows beneath the lines. The skin of her upper arms hung loose and pale. Her makeup ended in a ragged line at her neck, and below it, the skin was puckered, freckled, and sallow.
    I put my hand on her head, on the full blond mane that had been her glory when she was twelve. Now she was thirty-two, and the black roots showing at her scalp were sprinkled with gray. I pulled her to me, hugged her, and kissed her neck. Slowly we quieted our crying, holding on to each other. Past my sister’s

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