My aunt
Nonie keeps a framed picture of herself and my mother on our kitchen
wall, near the clock. The circular fan on the windowsill turns its grilled
face back and forth, back and forth, and the frame stirs a little on
its wire hanger, settles, stirs. The chrome of the fan shows a curved
reflection of the stacked plastic glasses on the shelf above, and the
arms and hands of the girls in the picture. The girls are playing dress-ups
and my mother always got to be the bride. Because she was youngest, Nonie
says, she took unfair advantage. My mother's name is Lola. We seldom
talk about her and we almost never say her name.
promotion
To think her name feels
like breaking the rules, but they were Lola and Noreen, those sisters.
They're both swathed in filmy white that was probably window curtains,
but over that my mother wears a crocheted jacket they must have thought
looked lacy, and it covers her to her hips. She's maybe eight or nine
in her crown of braided flowers, weeds, long stalks of delphinium that
are already falling apart, but she looks eerily grown up in the lipstick,
which is way too dark for a bride. She stands there like she knows it,
guarded and defiant, the shapes of her coltish legs dark in the sheer
fabric, but she clasps her hands uncertainly and looks up into the camera.
She's of two minds. The picture is the only reason I forgive her at all.
If she were pulling a face or acting cocky, I think I might hate her.
Nonie has an arm around her. She's much taller, being seven years older,
so she's the boy, with a penciled mustache and her long hair plaited
back. Their father was a Jehovah's Witness preacher and they weren't
allowed to cut their hair or drink cola or celebrate holidays. I don't
know who allowed them to dress up or what cola has to do with religion.
My mother's hair was wavy and red and such an eyeful they made her keep
it in braids. The day after my grandfather's funeral she cut it into
a Rita Hayworth swoop. Their mother was too sick to stop Lola making
up for lost time, Nonie says. She died before long and Lola finished
high school, then went to live with Nonie. That didn't last long. Nonie
was in what she calls her respectable phase then, having left Charlie
when he wouldn't marry her. She went off to Atlanta and met her first
husband. She left him pretty soon and married her second one. He was
quite a bit older and she spent a few years a safe, kept woman down there
where it was nearly always warm. Building up steam: she says that about
herself. She says she was shameless. She'd never had anything, then she
got it all. One day she walked off. But she left things, not kids. She
says she wants me to be able to take care of myself, without cleaning
up other people's dishes, doing other people's work. She says we have
Termite, and we have to take care of him too. When a woman wants things
she can't get for herself, Nonie says, a man can smell it. She says never
let a man inside you unless you want him around forever, because you
can't get rid of him after that, no matter how many times he leaves you
or you leave him. Nonie was telling me that before I even knew what it
meant: inside you. When I was younger I would see a heart scrawled on
a sidewalk or a bathroom stall, on the wall near the pay phone at Mini-Mart
where Nonie's friend Elsie works, and I would think: inside you. Like
it was feelings, romance, Elsie's cheap mystery novels with women on
the covers. No, Nonie told me, it's when a man puts his body into your
body. Then he's inside you, and your body remembers each time, every
man, even if you try to forget. You came back and worked for Charlie,
I said. Is that why? He's inside you? Now you get it, Nonie said. But
why him, I said, and not someone else, another one? Because I was so
young then, Nonie said, when we started there were so many times. You've
got to be careful when you're young. You'll be fifteen soon, listen to
what I'm telling you.
She got me thinking about a boy I knew when I was a little kid, then not so little. He'd be all over me but I wouldn't let him inside. I was already too full of Nonie's words. A man can smell it. Forever. Inside you. Even if you try to forget.
n°
From the forthcoming novel Termite. Printed
by permission of the author.
Jayne
Anne Phillips is the author of two widely anthologized collections of stories, Fast Lanes and Black Tickets, and three novels, Motherkind, Shelter and Machine Dreams. Her works have been published in nine languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. Her work has appeared most recently in Harper’s, Granta, Doubletake, and the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. She is currently Writer In Residence at Brandeis University.
