“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?”
&
nbsp; “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.”
Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know
I came out of the bathroom with my hair down wet on my shoulders. My Aunt Alma, my mama’s oldest sister, was standing in the middle of Casey’s dusty hooked rug looking like she had just flown in on it, her gray hair straggling out of its misshapen bun. For a moment I was so startled I couldn’t move. Aunt Alma just stood there looking around at the big bare room with its two church pews bracketing the only other furniture—a massive pool table. I froze while the water ran down from my hair to dampen the collar of the oversized tuxedo shirt I used for a bathrobe.
“Aunt Alma,” I stammered. “Well . . . welcome . . .”
“You really live here?” she let out a loud breath as if, even for me, such a situation was quite past her ability to believe. “Like this?”
I looked around as if I were seeing it for the first time myself, shrugged and tried to grin. “It’s big,” I offered. “Lots of space, four porches, all these windows. We get along well here, might not in a smaller place.” I looked back through the kitchen to Terry’s room with its thick dark curtains covering a wall of windows. Empty. So was Casey’s room on the other side of the kitchen. It was quiet and still, with no one even walking through the rooms overhead.