Skin, Where She Touches Me

Skin, the surface of skin, the outer layer protecting the vulnerable inside, the boundary between the world and the soul, what is seen from the outside and hides all the secrets. My skin, my mama’s skin, my sisters’ skin. Our outer layer hides our inner hopes. White girls, tough-skinned and stubborn, born to a family that never valued girls. I am my mama’s daughter, one with my tribe, taught to believe myself of not much value, to take damage and ignore it, to take damage and be proud of it. We were taught to be proud that we were not Black, and ashamed that we were poor, taught to reject everything people believed about us—drunken, no-count, lazy, whorish, stupid—and still some of it was just the way we were. The lies went to the bone, and digging them out has been the work of a lifetime.

Death changes everything. The death of someone you love alters even the boundaries of the imagination. The dead become fiction, myth, and legend. The two most important women in my life—my mother and my first lover—are dead. Because I cannot stop talking about them, retelling their stories and making them mine, turning their jokes to parables and their stubborn endurance to legend, I can feel them changing, in my own mind and in the imaginations of those who know them only through me. Writing about them, I have been holding on to them, even as I was when they were alive. Telling stories about people very like them, but not really them, has been a way to save what they and I have lost. But death is more than the closing of a life. Death is the point at which people begin to sum up, to say what things meant, what the life was about, what was accomplished and what was not. Death is the point at which, if it has not already been claimed, vindication becomes possible. Death changes everything.

No matter what I say about my mother or my first lover, you cannot know if it is true. You cannot go and see them, hear their versions of my stories. You cannot watch my mama laugh with her hand drawn up before her mouth to hide her loose teeth. You cannot look into her eyes and see what half a century of shame and grief did to her. You cannot ask Cathy what she meant when she told everyone that it was I who was the lesbian, not her.

Two women, as complicated and astonishing as any women can be, have shaped who I have become. I can look down at my hands and see their hands touching mine, imagine their voices, things they said or might have said, things they wanted to do but never got a chance to. I think sometimes that I have been driven to write fiction because of those I have lost, the first woman I ever fell passionately in love with, and my mother, the first woman I ever understood to be deeply hurt and just as deeply heroic. I have written stories about people like them out of my need to understand them and reimagine their lives. Better to mythologize them, I have told myself, than to leave them with their fractured lives cut off too soon.

My mother died of cancer, twenty minutes before I could reach her bedside, just before midnight on November 11, 1990. She was fifty-six years old and had had cancer for thirty of them—a hysterectomy when I was a child, two mastectomies five years apart, and finally the tumors in her lung, brain, and liver that she could not survive. For half my life I had been separated from her, unable to be in her home while she lived with my stepfather, but talking to her every few weeks, sending her copies of everything I wrote, and always knowing that whatever else was uncertain in our lives, her love for me was like mine for her—unquestioning, absolute, and painful.

When I was in my twenties, my mother and I had come to an exacting agreement: I would come home very rarely, but not talk about why that was so. The promise I made her was that I would not cause trouble, would not fight with my stepfather or even be cold to him on the phone, that I would cooperate in the family effort to keep the peace. She would not demand more of me. Through all the years, we rarely talked about my stepfather and the violence Mama always believed to have been her responsibility. She had never been able to stop it, and she had never left him. Only toward the end of her life did she begin to ask me to forgive her, and no matter how much I assured her that I loved her and understood what she had done, she never forgave herself.

On the afternoon my mama was buried, my sisters and I went through her photographs with our aunt Nuell, who came the morning after Mama died and stayed with us for the next three days—through the first grief and the awful funeral. We let her take over caring for our stepfather, feeling only a moment’s hesitation because we knew her so slightly. She was not one of the Gibson sisters, only our aunt by marriage. She had married Mama’s little brother, Tommy, and moved with him to Alabama in the late 1950s. All our lives we had been hearing stories about her but had seen her only a few times. Still, when she got the call about Mama, she drove through the night to be with us for the funeral, and her presence made things easier. It was as if she had taken on the mantle of our legendary aunts, hugging us like we were children, telling us what to do, making it easier to do as she wanted than to argue. She sat down with us to go through the torn and faded pictures as if that were just one more part of being the oldest living woman in the family. Some of the vaguely recognizable faces she knew instantly.

“Your great-aunt,” she said, pointing to an almost washed-out image of a woman standing in front of a gas station storefront. “Don’t think I ever knew her name, but she was the one moved off to Oklahoma before your mama married your daddy. And oh, this one, this one is Tommy and Jack when they were boys, that’s David and Dan, and those—those look like some boys from the air base. Don’t know if you’re related or not.”

My sister Barbara rolled her eyes over to my sister June. June looked at me. I tried politely to interrupt Aunt Nuell, to ask if she could maybe write down the names she remembered on the photos themselves.

“Oh, I suppose,” she murmured, bending over the big pile and pulling out one picture after another. Her eyes were soft and wet. Though she could only remember a few names, and fewer incidents, the impact of the features was unmistakable. “All these people are gone,” she said once, in a voice so taut and pained I didn’t dare ask more of her.

My uncle Jack arrived the night before the funeral. When I saw him in the morning, his face was awestruck, horrible. He couldn’t smile at me, only grimaced, his mouth pulled back and the loose skin of his face falling into folds. The creases running down from his cheeks were gullies, his eyes were peach-pit hollows, black seeds unable to face the morning sun. He stayed out on the grass, refusing to go inside the funeral home or come to the grave site. When I walked over to put some flowers on the casket, I looked back and saw him standing rigid and tall on a little rise near the memorial to the veterans of American wars. The sun glinted off the wet on his face, the face itself so anguished I could not stand to look at him.

He was the last, though one of Mama’s sisters was hanging on—Maudy with the colostomy bag hidden under her housedress, her raging temper still flaring at the nieces and nephews who prowled her porch. She had sent a message, a spray of flowers Cousin Bobby had probably arranged.

“Bobby’s the one gets things done,” everyone told me the last time I visited Greenville. Aunt Dot was still alive then, playing the role my grandmother Mattie Lee had played before her death—telling everyone’s secrets and coaxing you out of yours so she could say she knew everything first. Dot said it was Bobby who got her sister to check into a motel when she was dying of breast cancer, this after some of her children had been caught stealing her painkillers for their own use.

“Little sons-a-bitches,” Aunt Dot had mouthed around her false teeth. “Should have drowned those little bastards while they were still small enough for us to get away with it.” I had never had a chance to ask Bobby if the story was true, and Mama wouldn’t talk about it, just told me that, yes, my cousin had spent the weeks before she died in a motel out on the edge of Greenville where the Highway 85 overpass cut south of the city.

“Now that’s a mean story,” I had said to Mama. “Worse than anything I’ve even thought of writing.”

“That imply you an’t gonna think about it now?” Mama had looked at me with a patient, almost martyred expression. I had flushed with embarrassment, nodding reluctantly, agreeing that I might write about it someday. There were many things we did not talk about, but we both tried never to lie to each other knowingly. Some of what I wrote had been painful for my mama to read, but she had never suggested I should not write those stories and publish them. “I’ve never been afraid of the truth,” she told me after my book of short stories came out. She spoke in the blunt, stubborn tone that meant she was saying something she wanted to be true.

My mama had been ashamed too often in her life, ashamed of things she could not have managed differently, and more ashamed of being ashamed than of the original sins. Shame was one of the things my mama hated, one of the things she tried to root out of herself and us. And shame was the constant theme of my childhood.

“Never back down,” my mama taught me. “Never drop your eyes. People look at you like a dog, you dog them.” I had laughed and tried to emulate her, to stare back at hatred and stare down contempt. Like Mama, I learned to stand tall when confronted by my sins, to say, All right, so what? Like Mama, I learned to gaze at the world with my scars and outrage plainly revealed, determined not to hide, not to drop my head or admit defeat. It was good training for a child of the Southern working poor, better training for an adolescent lesbian terrified of what her desires might mean, who she might become and what she might learn about herself.

“The truth won’t kill me,” Mama said, but I wasn’t sure I believed her. Truth seemed to me a very dangerous, tricky concept. Was truth only what we agreed it to be, or was there a book somewhere that would show me the real truth, the rules of right and wrong? A complicated system of vindication and judgment hid behind the small truths everyone presented as Truth. “What’s going on here?” my stepfather would shout at us some evenings, and we would all freeze and drop our heads, knowing that he did not really want to know, knowing that to tell him the truth about what we were thinking or feeling or planning was the most foolish choice we could make. No, the truth was something to keep to ourselves and protect—when we knew what it was, when we could be sure of anything.

Skin fear, pulling back, flinching before the blow lands. Anticipating the burn of shame and the shiver of despair. Conditioned to contempt and reflexive rage, I am pinned beneath a lattice, iron-hard and locked down. Believing myself inhuman, mutant, too calloused to ever love deeply or well.

My first lover had been beaten by her father. Everybody who knew Cathy had heard how her daddy caught her at sixteen with her blouse open and her hands in her boyfriend’s jeans. He called her a whore and threw her out on the street. She repaid him by going back a few nights later to smash the windows in his truck and smear shit on his radiator coils. When she told me that story I smiled, admiring wholeheartedly any woman strong enough to have taken that particular revenge on a truck-loving Southern man. But by the time I met her, Cathy was three years past her revenge, three years of living hand to mouth with one boyfriend after the other, doing heroin when she could get it and shivering sick when she could not. She wasn’t charming. She was so deeply scored by anger that there was no measuring where the anger left off and a woman you could love might begin. Most people were afraid of her, and so was I, some, especially when she looked at me and laughed, knowing at a glance what none of the other would-be hippies in our little community had figured out—that I was a lesbian, and the flush on my face was not only self-consciousness but lust.

Why does anyone fall passionately in love? Does the beloved have to know something, have something, be something you do not know, or have, or cannot be yourself? I had no idea. But from the moment Cathy put her palm flat on my breast and her teeth close to my ear, I knew that I could go mad with love for her. She smelled strong and dangerous and marvelous. When she crawled naked into the bed where I had been lying, hoping she would come to find me, her skin was burning hot, scorching mine at every surface. Still, instead of flinching away I pushed up into her, wanting that heat, wanting her more than I had ever wanted anything.

Within our family it was astonishingly difficult to sort out the truth from the lies. If you did not think about things—and there were so many things all of us tried not to think about—you tended to lose track of what you really thought or felt. We had been raised on public contempt and private outrage, been told every day of our lives that there was something intrinsically wrong with us. Our stepfather shouted it at us, the Baptist ministers said it in soft, sad voices, and the girls at school made it plain with their laughter and comments on how we dressed. Mama’s response to that chorus was rage and stubborn insistence that we act as if we didn’t believe any of it. But we knew that the power of public opinion wounded her too. She was never as confident as she tried to pretend. I could look into my mama’s exhausted grey features and see just how painful, how dangerous the truth could be. The truth might vindicate us, but then again it might destroy us. We might as easily find that all those hateful faces turned to us were right and we were damned from birth, helpless to escape the trap that had ground down our mama. It was never simple. It was never easy to know what was true.

I found ever more complicated truths as I grew up. There was, for example, the fact that Mama told me to my face that she was proud of my writing and “didn’t give a rat’s ass if I married puppy dogs so long as I was happy.” But even as I let her hold me close and say it, I knew that the magazines and stories I sent her disappeared into one box or another, that she never showed what I wrote to anyone, not even my sisters, and certainly never talked about it.

Aunt Dot told me once that the thing Mama regretted most about my life was that I had not had a child. “She don’t mind you keeping company with women,” Aunt Dot said. “She just wishes you would marry some man long enough to make a couple of babies.” I had never discussed with my aunt or my mama the fact that I couldn’t have children, and even at twenty-five did not feel capable of talking about why that was so, anymore than I had been able, at the age of eleven, to tell them how badly I hurt “down there,” or what had really happened to me. Would it have been “the truth” to hold my aunts and my mama responsible for the venereal infection that was never treated when I knew how hard I had tried to hide my pain from them at the time? Before I could be angry at them, I had to get past being angry at myself and dig my way down to who really hurt me, and why we had worked so hard to pretend nothing was happening. No, it was not the truth to say my mama was at fault, not the truth to blame the child I had been, not even the whole truth to blame my stepfather.

I worried it out over years and years, and finally, I broke the silence, not by going home to hold a massive family confrontation, but by writing a story in which I told everything that had happened to that child and the cost of it, the children that child would never have, the break in the family that could never be fully mended. Some days still, I think about how I wrote that story and gave it to my mama to read, and I know that doing that says more about truth and the depth of my own sense of shame than I could ever say in an explicit conversation.

Before Cathy I had thought myself a kind of chrome nun, armored and dispassionate. I had known myself a lesbian, had loved or thought I loved, but I had always felt an icy distance from the emotional excesses and vulnerabilities all around me. I considered myself cynical, wise beyond my years, knowledgeable about the world’s cruelties, and a connoisseur of the risks of any kind of physical or sexual contact. I didn’t need that, I told myself. I was different. Perhaps I wasn’t a real woman, but some kind of alien mutant creature crafted by sexual abuse and natural resilience—a monster.

Cathy was the first woman with whom I fell in love. Every crush, every close friendship, every momentary rush of desire or fear that came before or after was made understandable by what I felt for her, simply because nothing else was as intense and overpowering. Lying in her arms, I felt crazy and willingly so, eager to give my life to make her happy, to suffer if suffering would ease her misery, to shame myself or look silly if that would make her smile. Breathing in the aura of her, that salty smoky taste of soapy skin and bitter cigarettes, made my heart swell and tightened my throat until it ached. Dreaming about her woke me up. Cathy proved to me that I was my mother’s daughter, my sisters’ equal.

It was Aunt Dot who told me that Aunt Maudy and Uncle Jack didn’t speak, that after years of arguing and cursing, pot throwing and blue streaks, Jack had sworn she could die on her own, that he’d “never darken her door again.”

“He said that?” I was amused that he’d use that particular phrase, so melodramatic and emphatic.

“Oh, he cursed her to her face same as she cursed him. They’ve been going on since they were kids. Never could stand each other.” Aunt Dot had smiled then in pleasure, her face wrinkling up like damp laundry pulled out of the bottom of the refrigerator. “Jack’s always been a pisser, you know.”

I knew. I had always loved that in him, the way he would come in and do anything he pleased, never mind what anybody thought. And I loved the way he moved that long, lanky body, as if there was music playing in his head, blues or rock ‘n’ roll, his hips jiggling gently or gliding as smoothly as butter melting. My uncle Jack was the man who made it possible for me to understand how women fell in love with men.

That day at the funeral, Mama’s loss ached in me as if a central part of my body had been stolen. I had wanted Jack to comfort me, wanted his smile and his charm, his loose way of reaching around and pulling you up into his big, wide shoulders, the spread of his love and confidence. But he looked as if he, too, had been robbed, as if the meat of his confidence, the deepest, richest part of his life was gone, the sweet stuff of him evaporated in the Florida heat.

“Lord,” he said once, and I knew all he meant—the curse and the prayer.

“Who are all those people in Mama’s photos?” I asked him just before he left my sister’s house.

He barely glanced at the pile on the dining room table. “Family,” he grunted, “all kinds of family. Flesh and blood sons-a-bitches.” His hands were shaking. He fought with Aunt Nuell and my stepfather, refused to sleep in Mama’s house another night, even on the floor as he had the night before. The shadows under his eyes were more cruel than the grey in his hair. “There’s lots of dead people in there,” he said, pointing at the pictures, “people you girls should have known but didn’t. And damn it, it’s too late now.”

“Better watch out for me,” Cathy was always saying. “I’m Fedayeen.” And then she would toss her dark hair and bare her teeth in a fierce almost-angry smile.

“You’re Arab?” I asked her once, naively.

Her answer was sudden and harsh. “No, I’m a Nigger. Can’t you tell?”

The people standing around us laughed, and I quickly backed away in confusion. At the time, I had no idea if Cathy was Black, Arab, Cuban, or just another mean white girl making fun of me. No one I knew made jokes about color. No one talked about it, except to announce occasionally that they were not racist crackers like their parents, and to insist somewhat nervously that they got along fine with all the Cubans who had moved into Central Florida.

“Yeah, right!” Cathy would bark, laughing.

“Liars and cowards,” she would sneer at half the people we knew. She had an unfailing instinct for people who could be teased into betraying their prejudices, girls who would back up and withdraw if they thought she wasn’t just like them, boys who were reduced to tears when she would not tell them if she was really a colored girl.

“Look at me,” she insisted once when we sat up talking into the early dawn. I smiled and told her she was pretty, but she held my hands and insisted. “No, really look at me.”

So I did. I looked close, very close—at the dark mass of hair that sprang out from her head like a great cloud of electrically charged wool, the smooth tanned skin only a few shades darker than my own, the fine scar at the outside of her left eye, the mouth that was always pulled back as if she were about to sneer or curse. Her eyes were black and angry, but as I looked closely I realized that she might have been afraid.

“You see?” she demanded. But I shook my head, not knowing what she wanted me to see, not knowing what I was willing to admit I did see.

“They all think it. They look at me and wonder if I’m not some Black bitch from the projects getting over on them. So I say it before they can whisper it to each other. I say it so they have to think about how they’re gonna talk to me, how they’re gonna behave. I say it so they can’t pretend nothing. I make them think about who they are.”

“But what about who you are?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

I looked at her hands, the fingers curled into the palms, the knotted fists pressing down on her thighs so hard the knuckles stood out pale and sharp. My words surprised me. “You’re just about the scariest person I’ve ever met,” I told Cathy, and waited for her anger to flare. Instead she looked almost pleased.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Damn right.”

“The way you talk about your mama is extraordinary,” women would tell me, and I would blush, knowing that sometimes they meant not “extraordinary” but “strange,” that I talked about my mama with the passion of a lover, obsessively, proudly, angrily, tenderly, insistently. I knew, too, that what it sounded like was not what it was, that I did not want to possess her but to free her. The touch of my mother was always a reminder that she was caught in a trap I could not have survived one day more than I did.

Write me a love story, my girlfriends asked. Write a political story, the women in my consciousness-raising group told me, and I wondered what that would be. Should I use words like patriarchy and male madness and class oppression? I tried. But every time, I found myself stopped, the words sour and mean.

What I began with was the story of my mother’s life, my mother as a girl of fourteen, dropping out of school and pregnant with me, proud and stubborn and ashamed. I began with my mother’s family—my family—the Gibsons and Yearwoods and Campbells and Hendersons. “Poor white trash,” we had been called when I was a girl back in Greenville, “dirty fucking trash.” When they were saying it to our faces there was no need for anything but the curse.

As I began to show people what I was writing, I kept the stories about my family back. It was too complicated to explain the mix of pride and shame, easier to write about being a lesbian and figuring that out, about falling in love or not, or about politics, the simple politics of having grown up female in the South. I hadn’t a clue how to write the complicated story, the story of growing up female in our particular family, the daughter of the youngest of the Gibson girls, that trashy family where the boys all went to jail and the women all made babies when they were still girls themselves. My mama was one month past fifteen when I was born, her attempt at marriage annulled by my grandmother before anyone knew I was on the way. I worked my way back to that story, knowing it was the one I needed to tell to be able to write. I had to believe in the use of writing, and the primary use was to reject hatred, simple categories, shame. The first rule I learned in writing was to love the people I wrote about—and loving my mama, loving myself, was not simple in any sense. We had not been raised to love ourselves, only to refuse to admit how much we might hate ourselves.

Skin hunger. Sometimes it seemed that my skin ached like an empty belly. The fine hairs below my navel seemed to reach up, wanting to touch something. My mouth would open when I slept and my tongue would push at the air, reaching, reaching. I would wake from dreams of rising like yeast into an embrace that welcomed and satisfied that hunger, an embrace I wanted desperately.

When Cathy called me a dyke, she made it sound like something to be proud of. She was gripping my fingers tight and laughing into my neck. Her whole body was stretched along mine, open and easy and warm against me. “You’re such a tough dyke,” she growled, and heat went all through me. “So tough,” she repeated, in a softer, breathier voice, and in that moment I understood all the teenage boys I had seen blush and preen under a girl’s teasing. I felt for all the world like a teenage boy, proud and nervous and anxious to please. I wanted to make her smile. I wanted to make her proud of me. I wanted to lie forever with her strong hand cupping my shoulder and her whisper against my neck.

“I love you,” I said. But she only shook her head.

Write funny stories, my mama told me. That’s what people need and want to hear. Mama told funny stories all her life, charming strangers out of quarters across a diner counter, teasing a little more time out of bill collectors, coaxing a discount out of repairmen or car salesmen, and always, and most important, distracting my stepfather out of his rages so that his hands would fall less heavily on her daughters. My mama used charm, funny stories, and that seemingly easy confidence to fight off a world of hurt and deprivation. It dismayed her that her daughters grew up angry, that all of us grimaced when she would have smiled, that none of us had her way with a funny story—and even more terrible was that we did not want it. Of all the things about our mama that we were supposed to find shameful—the poverty, lack of education or steady work—the only thing we hesitated to admire was the ingratiating, desperate charm that had eased her life.

“Mama’s something, an’t she?” my little sister would say, tempering admiration with uncertainty. I would agree, knowing that this was not a simple statement but a host of contradictory ones. Write mean stories, my sister dared me one night. “Go ahead and tell the world what really happened,” she taunted, then just as fast as she had spoken the words, she withdrew them. “No, better not.” I knew what she was thinking. I too have that voice inside me, the one that murmurs continually. Maybe we shouldn’t say anything, it whispers. Maybe if we are real quiet, the world will leave us alone. If I told as much of the truth as I knew, what would happen? The world would know what he had done, who we had become to survive him. People would think I was a lesbian because he raped me, a pervert because he beat me, a coward because I had not killed him, and worse: I still went home like a well-trained puppy dog keeping my head down and never challenging him.

Sometimes I look into my little sister’s eyes and I see those warring demands: the one that wants to take somebody by the throat and choke out answers for all the grief she has survived, and the other, that wounded figure, still a child wanting only to be left alone. Sometimes I don’t have to look at my sisters to see that expression. It is in the mirror surface of my own pupils.

We had been brutal with each other. Smart-mouthed sluts, whores, bitches. He had called us those names so often, we used the same words on each other. But it is his voice I hear in my dreams, like a wave of burning liquid breaking over me. “Think you’re so good, think you’re so special, you’re nothing, nothing.” Dark, dark wave of curse and contempt. “Stupid bitch.”

He never called me a dyke, but my sisters did, and from them it was unbearable. They seemed to believe that my being a lesbian meant I was not sexual at all. Like everyone else, they thought that lesbians were women who were afraid of sex, which was something that only happened with men. Only in the last few years have my sisters begun to see me as both a lesbian and sexual in the same way they are—complicated and romantic and prone to entangled, difficult relationships. I have lived with the same woman for six years now, introduced her as my partner, had a child with her, adopted that child, and loved her more than I can sometimes understand. It is this relationship, so like their marriages, this woman, so like their husbands, that has begun to be real to my sisters. Only recently have I glimpsed how important it is for me to have that shared sense of the quality of daily life, the same sense of meaning in what we do sexually. More than just tolerance.

The worst thing either of my sisters ever said to me was spoken one evening on a wave of fury and whiskey, resentment and jealousy, all of it peaking a few hours after he had raged and screamed what a slut she was. “He don’t have to worry about some man stealing you away from him, and it an’t as if he gave a shit about women.” I wanted to kill her for saying it, even while I knew she had it right. My stepfather, who considered women dogs, probably thought about it just that way—that I was his meat, and as long as no other man had me, I still belonged to him. When I had finally straddled a man’s hips and settled myself down on a man’s cock, I realized it was only partly an experiment to prove to myself I could do it if I wanted to. I never imagined telling my stepfather, who got no access to any of my life, but I made a point of letting my sisters know.

What Mama taught us was to keep our heads up and refuse to act ashamed. She could not teach us how not to feel ashamed. She didn’t know how to do that herself. No one in our family did. What they knew most deeply was the power of rage and silence. Don’t tell nobody nothing, my aunts would have insisted if they had lived. Telling the truth is too dangerous, too expensive. I know I am the child of my family on the days when I hear their voices echoing inside me, telling me to keep my mouth shut and give no one a weapon to use against us, those days when I cannot help but think that they were right.

“You’re the real thing,” Cathy told me once, though I hadn’t a clue what she meant. I did not know enough to realize how rare it was for one woman to pursue another unafraid. I could only imagine the kind of romance I had read in paperbacks. Before Cathy, I thought I was the only woman in the world who so desperately wanted sex with another woman. But Cathy’s desires were so sudden, so explicit and so powerful, I would flush every time I imagined her skin touching mine. I would go home from Cathy to my mama’s house, drunk with pleasure.

“I’m in love,” I wanted to say to my mama, but I would see something, some tremor in her hands, and I would stop. It was not the fact that I was in love with a woman; it was my mama’s life, the madness that love had thrown at her, the violence, the grief, and the shame.

“Goddamn, your mama must have been crazy about your stepfather!” my friend Marge told me after reading some of the stories in Trash. Oddly, that was the first time I really thought about it. Had Mama ever been genuinely happy with my stepfather? Way back, had she loved him with a girl’s love, full of hope and faith? Before he started storming through the house breaking doors and waving his fists in the air, before he began to beat us, before we grew into teenagers and he cursed us with every breath, before he started acting like a crazy man all the time, sitting in the living room with his hands moving rhythmically inside his loose shorts, or going for weeks not speaking to anyone, and when he did, talking only about how we were driving him crazy, how it would be our fault when he killed us all, killed us in the night after we’d pushed him too far, the way he was always threatening? Had there been a time when my mama had been safe to feel love for that man?

I tried to remember when our home had not been a madhouse, when my stepfather had not been that scary, scary man who careened through my childhood. It seemed to me things had deteriorated slowly over the years. In the beginning the beatings had been spankings that went on just a little too long or were a little too harsh. Always there had been a reason, one he would force Mama to admit. I broke a glass and hid the evidence. One of my sisters stole change left on the dresser. Another lied about where she had been playing. Little things became enormous, evidence that we were bad, like his beatings were evidence that he loved us. Everyone spanked their kids, everyone had to if they wanted them to grow up right. When was a spanking too much? When did it become a beating? How could you know? How could my mama know? She couldn’t even ask anyone. How was she supposed to be able to tell? How were we?

Hadn’t he loved her? Hadn’t there been a time when everyone knew that he loved her? For my own life, I tried to remember and understand if that had been so.

I had never really believed my mama would die.

That had been the worst nightmare of my childhood, an omnipresent fear that Mama would disappear, and with her the shelter and protection she gave us. I lived in terror not only of our stepfather’s rages, but of being left to face the world’s contempt without my mama. The fear was not fantasy. Death stalked the women of my family. My granny died just after turning fifty-nine, and only one of my aunts lived long enough to qualify for social security—Aunt Dot, who still managed to die at sixty-three. Cancer went through us like a fire leaping from one to the next, my mama, my aunts, my cousins.

I have been a student of cancer for half my life. I lost friends to it a half dozen times over, and I was the one Mama talked to at the first mastectomy. I was the one who persuaded her to continue the chemotherapy after the second mastectomy and the recurrence that followed. I brought her books, articles clipped out of magazines, pages of testimonies from other survivors. I even went back with her to Greenville to visit her sisters, reading her a prose poem I called “Deciding to Live” on the way. Mama and all of us, we practiced positive thinking, living our lives as if cancer were not something we all dreamed about, nightmares in which people disappeared before you could get home to see them again.

When the call came and my sister Barbara told me that no, it wasn’t that viral infection, this time the cancer was really back—for a moment I prayed it was just another terrible dream. But I was staying in a cabin up in Vermont, and to take the call I had to walk a quarter of a mile to the phone. I did it at a run, my nervous system flaring the whole way.

Barbara cried and asked me please could I get home quickly.

I sat down in the dirt, cradled the phone between my shoulder and my ear, clenched my hands together, and said to my sister, “It’s all right. Just tell me everything.” When I hung up, I found I had rubbed a blister under the ring on my left hand. I took off my ring and called my lover. Alix was waiting for me. Her voice was deep and reassuring. She said, “It’s all right. Just tell me everything.” All around me the ashy scent of a New England fall drifted through the trees. My mama was dying. I was a thousand miles away. After a few minutes I stopped crying and we started to make plans.

Alix took a leave from her job, and in two days we were both in Orlando sitting at my mama’s kitchen table eating biscuits she had insisted on baking. She had a few days free before she had to check into the hospital and start chemotherapy, or decide not to do it at all and get ready to die.

“There’s a tumor on my lung,” she said, a cigarette in the ashtray in front of her. I let her explain everything Barbara had already told me, watching her face tighten and then relax as she talked. “It’s going to be all right, baby,” she said, laying her hand on mine. “I’ll go in, they’ll make these tests. Ten days from now we’ll know a lot more. It’s going to be all right.”

Mama kept smiling at Alix, flirting lightly the way she had done with every woman I ever brought home. Mama looked good, a little thin and tired, but better than I expected. She would start chemo on Thursday and radiation soon after, and maybe it wasn’t as bad as they said. Maybe she could fight it off again. She certainly didn’t look like a woman about to die as she smiled at me, hugged Alix, and went to pull another tray out of the oven. I took a deep breath and held on to Alix’s hand.

Mama was, at that moment, less than a month from her death.

There is delight in this. The skin flushes and shines. Heat rises and the fine skim of curls beneath my navel lifts. When I laugh, my skin sings, a music of blood and bone in perfect meter, a body that has learned the worth of endurance, passion, and release. Put your hand here. Hear the echo of my mama’s pulse, her laugh, her songs. While I live and sing she does not die.

It got so bad so fast. I was never sure of all the ways that my love for Cathy had begun to break down. I told myself it was mostly about drugs.

“Don’t start telling no lies about me,” Cathy complained once when I was talking about applying for a job with the Social Security Administration, talking about how Cathy, too, could get better work, how I would help her pass the exams offered now and then for county jobs. Cathy was having none of it, but she was stoned on something, as she was almost all the time then. I looked at her, not knowing what she had taken, only knowing that it was no use to talk at all when she was in that condition, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“Why?” I demanded. “Why do you do it?”

“’Cause I have to,” she told me. “’Cause it stops the noise in my head, and it’s the only damn thing that does.”

I stood there, not moving, while she walked away. I knew what she meant. I knew that noise. It was in my head too, that constant dragging fearful chorus of uncertainty and confusion. But I had never used drugs to stop it. The only time that noise in my head had ceased was when I lay spent in Cathy’s arms.

We stayed for three weeks. We went with Mama to schedule the radiation and afterward to look at the free wigs they offered cancer patients. Mama teased about shaving her head, but blushed when the woman helping her commented on the ink stains the doctors had left on her neck.

“Be careful not to wash those off,” the woman said.

“What does she think? I’ve got cancer, I’m not stupid,” Mama whispered at me when the woman stepped away. Both of us grinned then, united as we always had been in dealing with the world of bureaucratic strangers.

It was one of the last good days we had, for the chemo seemed more brutal than any she had survived before. Was she weaker than I had imagined? The doctor wouldn’t say much, and Mama couldn’t. “It’ll be all right,” she kept murmuring, even while the chemicals flowed into her arm and her skin turned yellow-pale and her cheeks sank in to leave the bones standing out plain and sharp.

I sat with her in the hospital, told her stories, and hummed old tunes whose words I no longer remembered. Mama’s hands would clench at mine occasionally while her mouth opened and closed, and her eyes moved constantly under the translucent membranes of her eyelids. With my sisters at work and Alix running interference with my stepfather, I tried to keep Mama distracted while the nausea rocked her from side to side in the bed.

“Be careful,” my mama whispered to me that last week while she was lying in her hospital bed. Her words were like an echo caught in the folds of my brain, the one phrase she had been repeating all my life. Be careful, baby. Things that might not be dangerous for other people were terribly dangerous for us. And if I knew that to be true, and I did, how could I ever be the person I wanted to be? What chance did I have to understand enough to write what I wanted to write? And whose story do I tell, hers or mine? There was no certainty, no reassurance.

“I loved it when you came up to visit me at Fire Island,” I whispered to Mama one afternoon when she seemed weaker than ever.

With her eyes closed, she smiled and whispered back, “All those beautiful boys, and that hat.”

I pulled her palm up to my mouth and kissed it. Her eyes opened then and looked at me. The pupils were dark. Her smile had disappeared.

“Baby,” she said in a voice even softer than her whisper. Moisture appeared in the fine lines at the corners of her eyes. Her pupils looked strange, the irises cloudy, her expression confused. “I never meant for you to be hurt,” she said. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”

It was as if she had hit me. I jerked back and almost dropped her hand, then grabbed it fiercely, pressing it to my neck. Ancient habit took over and my voice dropped to a husky undertone, something no one standing more than a foot or so away could hear. I said, “Mama, there is nothing to forgive. You were not the one who did anything wrong.”

“I should have left him.” Her head turned on the pillow while her mouth worked and she worried her lips with her teeth. “But every time I thought I would, something happened.” Her hand in mine shook, the fingers broke free and grabbed my wrist. “Something always happened.”

“I know.” I said it softly, looking into her eyes. I said, “I know, Mama. I know. Don’t do this. There’s no use to it. You did what you had to do.”

“All those years,” she said. “At first I just wanted to protect you, then I wanted a way to make it up to you. I wanted you to know you were never any of the things he called you.” Her face was wet, no discrete tears coursing along her cheeks, just a tide of grief slowly slipping down to her chin.

My stepfather almost always came with Mama when she visited me. Each time I just barely managed, tight-lipped and stubbornly silent, or polite and carefully noncommittal. But in 1984 when they came to New York, he put his hand on my arm and my eyesight went black. I leaned over and vomited on the sidewalk. I could not stop retching until I was in a taxi moving away from him. That time they left the next day.

The following year they came back. Mama was sick again, one of the chemo years. I took her out to Fire Island with her old friend Mab, who tried to flirt with the gay men in the Ice Palace, and kept asking me if it was really true that they were all of them homosexual.

“Such beautiful boys,” Mab said. She had mothered half a dozen sons through four marriages and never saw any of them anymore.

“Yes,” I agreed, and did not smile at the hungry, lonely way she watched those beautiful boys.

Mama lay on our rented deck in a lounge chair, face turned away from the sun. My stepfather joined us on the third day, and I walked down to the beach to throw up in the ocean. “We’ll leave,” Mama told me. I started to cry. It was like cancer, that throwing up, the body suddenly betraying me, not letting me go on pretending nothing was wrong. He would reach to touch me, and years of practice, years of hatred would keep my face still and expressionless. But now my stomach battered at the back of my throat, refusing to allow any compromise, robbing me of my last chances to see my mother. They left before sunset, Mama looking at me over the side rail of the ferry with a rigid, pained expression.

I had bought Mama a sun hat with a hot pink ribbon. She put it on at an angle, waving at me. My stepfather told her to take it off loudly, said the ribbon was a “faggy pink.” On either side of him two tall gay men stood, as muscled and powerful as football players. At his words, they reached over his head to put their arms around each other’s shoulders. Ramona laughed. Mama just looked at me. My stepfather flushed dark purple, so dark the veins on his neck stood out in pale relief. I looked down at his hands and saw they had become fists. I was thirty-six years old. The last time he beat me with those hands I was sixteen. Twenty years. I said the words, but no one could hear me over the sudden roar of the ferry engine. I looked into his face, his empty eyes. My nausea receded, and the boat pulled away from the dock.

I was never sure how Cathy died, did not know what to believe of all the stories that went around afterward. The rumors swore it was an overdose, and I could believe that easily enough. What was certain was that her family had not wanted to pay to have her body shipped back from Arizona, where she had died, but when a collection was taken up everyone insisted her mother contributed a share. There was a memorial service, one attended by a few people who had really known her—the handful who had somehow gotten clean or weren’t in jail at the time.

“You should have been there,” the ones who had known us together told me when they saw me. “You could have spoken for her,” they said, and I just shook my head. For years after I would wake up thinking about it, what I would have said if I had gone back to stand up in front of those people who had seen us as friends rather than lovers. Could I have said anything equal to the grief of her loss? Had there been anything I could have done to mute the roar in her head?

My sisters and I divided Mama’s pictures among us. I took away a pile of her snapshots—faded, torn, stained sepia-toned images of her brothers, sisters, cousins, family—people whose faces we had not recognized, even those Aunt Nuell had been able to name. Strong-faced women with high cheekbones and dark eyes looked out from most of Mama’s photos, all of them clearly related. Like Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck, I thought, when I held one up to see it better in the light of the lamp my sister June set up on the dining room table. They had favored dark lipstick, thick, arched eyebrows, and engaged the camera directly. Most of the extended family pictures were from the forties or early fifties, while the mass of snapshots of us were taken before and just after 1962 when we moved to Florida. The Florida pictures all seemed to have been shot at the beach, and many featured Mama lying back like a bathing beauty with us playing at the edge of the water behind her. I could barely stand to look at those, and let my sisters take most of them.

I kept the old pictures, particularly the ones of Mama and her sisters, and in the months after Mama’s death returned to them again and again. Aunt Maudy and Aunt Dot were in most of the photos, gazing from Barbara Stanwyck’s eyes, clenching Joan Crawford’s jaw. Mama, younger and more beautiful, had Grace Kelly’s chin and eyes. Looking away and down, she seemed posed for the vulnerable line of her neck and the soft slope of her cheek, slightly mysterious but not traditionally pretty. Film noir heroines, I thought, every time I shifted through the pile. I kept fingering the snapshot that made my young Aunt Dot look like Maureen O’Hara with that full dark-red hair framing her strong features. Not tragic, though. Flirtatious. She crossed her arms below her breasts and stared at the world forthrightly and unafraid, denying my memories of a stooped, squinting woman with thin grey hair and hands that always lay loosely in her lap. I had known my aunts were strong, determined women, but I had never imagined them as burning, hopeful girls. I had always thought Aunt Dot a woman without vanity, wearing the same housedresses year after year, shunning makeup and laughing at how fat she had grown with her nine children. But the pictures proved that even she had been different as a girl, making herself up to heighten her resemblance to a movie star. Maybe it had been like that for all the sisters, for a year or two in their youth, trying to look like those strong-willed fantasy heroines, not realizing yet what real strength was, their stubborn capacity to endure all that fate would throw at them.

Cathy taught me that I was just like everyone else, capable of emotional and erotic obsessions, deeply needy and hungry for affection, and as talented as my mother and sisters at falling in love with someone who could break my heart. My love for her proved to me that I was female and feminine in the most traditional sense, foolish and damaged and hopeful. That knowledge, the human insight I gained from discovering myself passionate, capable of great joy, vulnerability, and love, had been astonishing. The outrage and despair I experienced in so desperately loving a woman who did not need me as much as she needed the needle in her arm was simply appalling. It took me years to see that falling in love with an addict who did not trust love in any way was a part of proving that I was not a monster, not the sexless creature I had imagined. Cathy showed me that I was humanly fragile. I found in myself the heroine of every heartbreak song I had ever laughed at but played again. I was not completely calloused. My skin was as thin as anyone’s.

When I was eleven years old I loved my mama more than my life. When I was twenty-six I was so angry at her I could not even speak to her on the telephone. When I was thirty-six I could no longer pretend that my stepfather, her husband, had not broken me, body and soul. Years between and after, I bargained for every quiet moment she and I could steal. I was forty-one the year Mama died, and sometimes I was angry, sometimes not. We had gone past bargains and lies, past talking about it or not, even past agreeing on what had happened and what had not. I no longer needed that, if I ever had. All I knew was that I loved my mama and that she had always loved me, and that most of what was strong and healthy and hopeful in my life was possible because of her.

Our lives are not small. Our lives are all we have, and death changes everything. The story ends, another begins. The long work of life is learning the love for the story, the novels we live out and the characters we become. In my mama’s photos is a world of stories never told: my stolid aunt a teasing girl, my sisters with their mouths open to laugh, and hidden in the pile, a snapshot of me at twenty-two, dark and furious, with Cathy’s pale face solemn over one shoulder. Disappeared, anonymous, the story we might have told then remade. She has become legend, I human in grief, and full of the need to grab what I can and hold on, to remake death and begin another tale.

I wear my skin only as thin as I have to, armor myself only as much as seems absolutely necessary. I try to live naked in the world, unashamed even under attack, unafraid even though I know how much there is to fear. What I have always feared is being what people have thought me—my stepfather’s willing toy, my mother’s betrayer, my lover’s faithless tease, my family’s ultimate shame, the slutty, racist, stupid cracker dyke who doesn’t know what she is doing. Trying always to know what I am doing and why, choosing to be known as who I am—feminist, queer, working class, and proud of the work I do—is as tricky as it ever was. I tell myself that life is the long struggle to understand and love fully. That to keep faith with those who have literally saved my life and made it possible for me to imagine more than survival, I have to try constantly to understand more, love more fully, go more naked in order to make others as safe as I myself want to be. I want to live past my own death, as my mother does, in what I have made possible for others—my sisters, my son, my lover, my community—the people I believe in absolutely, men and women whom death does not stop, who honor the truth of each other’s stories.