Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Allison’s family members are scattered. She includes a photograph of an aunt who disappeared without a trace. In addition, she remembers Lucy, an acquaintance in California who can’t stay sober, and speculates that they were related, noting that among the family photographs is a woman who looks just like the acquaintance.

Allison is curious about her family and her mother, who refused to tell Allison anything about her life. Mattie Lee Gibson, Allison’s grandmother, was always happy to share such stories, even when they scandalized people. A photo of Ruth as a girl with her best friend, Pat, appears here. Mattie tells Allison that no matter how difficult life was at home, Ruth put on a happy face at the restaurant where she waited tables. A picture of Ruth’s health department ID card appears here, and Ruth has a big smile on her face. Allison thinks that her mother’s putting on this happy face was masking or performance, and it’s exactly what Allison does now when she stands up in front of people to talk or read.

To augment her descriptions of the uncles and the other boys in her family, Allison includes a photo of one of her uncles and another man sitting in a bar and another of him standing with his foot on the bumper of a car. These men loudly boasted about sexual liaisons, but that was bravado: Allison remembers an uncle coming to her mother’s house one night to weep over a woman who’d left him. Now, Allison knows that this hardness was a pretense.

Allison distinctly remembers having always been “trash” to the Southerners around whom she grew up, noting that the photos of the Gibson women resemble other photos of the working class, especially those depicting disaster sites. A photo of her mother and Dot in the 1980s appears here. They’re unsmiling and stolid in the photo. Allison notes that the Gibson women are solidly built. They look worn down, and people assume that they aren’t intelligent or beautiful. Her aunts taught her this about herself—but they also taught her that looks were nothing compared to determination.

Allison includes a photo of herself as a girl in 1958. She has missing teeth and large glasses. This is close to the time when she realized that her family members didn’t see her as conventionally beautiful. Dot, however, told her that when people call women and girls ugly, she should remember that it’s what boys and men do to girls and women that make them look this way. Likewise, being beautiful is no great thing for a working-class girl. Ugly or beautiful, they’re all subject to sexual violence, and the boys and men who rape them are always ready to offer an excuse for the act. Allison includes a photo of her Aunt Dot in 1952 as a young wife, before her husband left her. A few paragraphs later is a photo of Dot later in life; she looks older and has a slight smile on her lips.

When she was younger, Allison aspired only to never become like the rest of the Gibson women. Despite her wish, she lived with a “mean story” in which, ironically, she cast herself as one of those indestructible Gibson women and girls. That story about herself derived from “nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money […] [and] years of silence” (39).