Two or Three Things I Know for Sure Read Online Free Page A

later.
    “I see,” I assured her, keeping my head down and away from her demanding eyes.
    What I saw was a woman who had never been beautiful and never allowed herself to care. When she found me once, red-faced and tearful, brooding over rude boys who shouted insults and ran away, she told me to wipe my face and pay no attention.
    “It never changes,” she said in her gravelly voice. “Men and boys, they all the same. Talk about us like we dogs, bitches sprung full-grown on the world, like we were never girls, never little babies in our daddy’s arms. Turn us into jokes ’cause we get worn down and ugly. Never look at themselves. Never think about what they’re doing to girls they’ve loved, girls they wore out. Their girls.”
    “You ugly old woman,” my grandfather called my grandmother.
    “You ugly old woman,” all my uncles called all my aunts.
    “You ugly bitch,” my cousins called their sisters, and my sisters called me.
    “You ugly thing!” I screamed back.
    The pretty girls in my high school had good hair, curled or straightened to fit the fashion, had slender hips in tailored skirts, wore virgin pins on the right side or knew enough not to wear such tacky things at all. My cousins and I were never virgins, even when we were. Like the stories told about Janis Joplin in Port Arthur, Texas, there were stories about us in Greenville, South Carolina. The football players behind the bleachers, boys who went on to marry and do well.
    “Hell, it wasn’t rape. She never said no. Maybe she said stop, but in that little bitty voice, so you know she wants you to love her, hell, love her for ten minutes or half an hour. Shit, who could love a girl like her?”
    Who?
    Beauty is a hard thing. Beauty is a mean story. Beauty is slender girls who die young, fine-featured delicate creatures about whom men write poems. Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time. And I loved her for that.
    We were not beautiful. We were hard and ugly and trying to be proud of it. The poor are plain, virtuous if humble and hardworking, but mostly ugly. Almost always ugly.
    “You know Dot’s husband left her,” Cousin Billie told me once. “Came back after a while, then left again. Way she talked you’d think she never noticed. Some days I don’t know whether to be proud of her or ashamed.”
    I thought about stories I’d been told, about women whose men left them or stayed to laugh out the sides of their mouths when other men mentioned other women’s names. Behind my aunt Dot was a legion of female cousins and great-aunts, unknown and nameless—snuff-sucking, empty-faced creatures changing spindles at the textile plant, chewing gum while frying potatoes at the truck
    ep exhausted, angry, and never loved enough.

    The women I loved most in the world horrified me. I did not want to grow up to be them. I made myself proud of their pride, their determination, their stubbornness, but every night I prayed a man’s prayer: Lord, save me from them. Do not let me become them.
    Let me tell you the mean story.
    For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.

    That’s the mean story. That’s the lie I told myself for years, and not until I began to fashion stories on the page did I sort it all out, see where the lie ended and a broken life remained. But that is not how I am supposed to tell it. I’m only supposed to tell one story at a time, one story. Every writing course I ever heard of said the same thing. Take one story, follow it through, beginning, middle, end. I don’t