Cavedweller (33 page)

“My Lord. Couldn’t we just leave it alone for one day?” Delia shook the veil impatiently.

In a sudden rage Cissy stripped off the ridiculous matron’s dress and threw it at Delia. She stalked down the hall in her slip and nylons and slammed the bedroom door.

“Cissy. For God’s sake, Cissy. Please.” It was Delia.

Cissy pulled on jeans and a blouse, ignoring them all. Dede started to giggle just as Amanda started to cry. Delia came to the door twice to plead with Cissy, but she refused to answer. When the house was finally quiet, Cissy came out to find Nolan sitting on the couch.

“You want a lift?” he asked. He had his black suit on but was clearly ready to do whatever Cissy decided.

“You look terrible,” Cissy told him.

Nolan regarded his hastily polished shoes and his too-short, too-tight pants. “Yeah,” he agreed. “You want to go over?”

“All right,” Cissy said. She would go late to Amanda’s wedding, but she would go. Amanda would whine about it for the rest of her life if she did not. When she and Nolan slipped into the back of the church, she saw that one of Michael’s cousins had been drafted to take her place in the ugly dress. The girl looked as miserable as a female ever looked in this life, but past her shoulder was Amanda, and Amanda looked pretty good. Pancake makeup masked her tantrum’s effects, and at moments she appeared almost pretty, almost happy. At her side, Dede appeared absurd but cheerful. In the short trip from the house to the church, she had gone beyond her earlier sins, ripping off the rickrack and acquiring yet another layer of chemical insulation. She looked like a Magdalene in a deflated inverted tulip, and appeared to have forgotten that she was supposed to be mad. She beamed out across the church and waved Cissy forward.

“Come on,” Dede whisper-yelled. “Come on up here and say good-bye. After today you get your own bedroom.”

As Cissy shook her head, she took in Delia’s stricken face and Amanda’s bowed form. Dede waved one more time and Cissy gave it up, moving forward until she was beside them. The heat at the front of the church was extraordinary. Cissy was overwhelmed by perfume, the smell of Amanda’s bouquet, Michael’s astringent after-shave, Dede’s tobacco aura, Delia’s hair conditioner. She found herself going weak with the desire to get this thing over with and get out of there. Amanda’s makeup was streaked with tears. Dede was tugging at the few remaining strands of yellow material on her skirt, and then Michael looked up and gave Cissy a broad smile of welcome.

Family, his smile said. God’s love, his eyes promised. That’s why Amanda loves him, Cissy thought.

Amanda turned to her, tears gushing freely at Reverend Myles’s pronouncement of her new status. “Oh, Cissy,” she wailed. “What am I going to do with you?”

 

 

“L
ove is past me,” Delia was always saying after Amanda’s marriage. “Love is so far past me I cannot even remember how it feels. But sometimes,” she would add, “I look at my girls and I get the notion—the notion how it should be. God knows they got a better chance than I ever had.”

Once Amanda moved out, Dede kept after Delia to redo the Terrill Road house. It was not enough that she now had Amanda’s bedroom, the one in which Clint died—something none of them ever mentioned. She wanted Delia to widen the back porch and screen it in, put in flower boxes off the kitchen windows, and have all the floors sanded down and refinished. What she really wanted was a new house, a home made over now that Amanda was gone.

“Too much money,” Delia would tell her. “We can’t afford that.”

Dede was undeterred. She enlisted Cissy and Nolan to help her pull up the carpets and rented a floor sander from the B & B Hardware for the minimal twenty-four-hour fee. Together the three of them sanded and swept and mopped and sanded again. They kept the stereo on loud, playing Patti Smith and Kate Bush. Delia stayed out of the house, partly to avoid the stereo. She thought Dede’s taste in music eerily ironic, her girl was a hard-core rock and roller, oblivious to the Top 40 and uninterested in dance music—she called Madonna a joke, though she told Cissy that Cyndi Lauper wasn’t too bad. Cissy liked Prince and the Revolution. She played his tapes at night under the covers.

“Sounds like Mud Dog,” she told Delia.

“No,” Delia said. “It doesn’t.”

Nolan worked like a madman, but Dede never paid him a minute’s notice, not even when he got down on his hands and knees to smooth the sealant over the floors with a cotton towel. It turned out that he also knew how to pop off the sanding disks and use the old polishing ring M.T.’s sister Sally still had from a job she had done. For the last few hours on the rental, Nolan and Dede took turns with the polisher, making those floors shine like something out of the decorating magazines M.T. collected.

“My Lord!” Delia exclaimed when they finally let her back in the house. “It’s beautiful.” She hugged Dede and beamed at Nolan and Cissy. “You guys could hire out, make yourselves some real money.”

“Hell, no,” Dede said. “I an’t going to work this hard for nobody else.”

Cissy and Nolan laughed but Delia nodded. “Tell you what,” she told Dede, “you pick out the fabric and I’ll make up new curtains, maybe even do a new cover for the couch.”

“All right! Then all we’ll need is some real furniture and a new television set.”

“What’s wrong with this furniture?”

“Delia!” Dede gave one of the battered wooden spool tables a kick. “This stuff is older than I am.”

“Makes it antique, don’t make it bad.” But Delia looked again at what they had. The couch did sag, and the coffee table was another wooden spool that Clint had gotten from a friend who worked for the phone company. Delia had sanded it down and painted it when she was pregnant with Amanda. Maybe she could find something better. She had liked taking things apart and putting them back together when she was a girl. She could buy some old furniture and fix it up. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

“Well, while you’re at it, think about getting some new sheets. It’s embarrassing when you hang those sheets of yours on the line.”

“Don’t start about my sheets.”

“What sheets?” Nolan whispered to Cissy as they went out.

“Kermit the Frog, Snoopy and Linus, Miss Piggy, rocket ships and trains. Delia got them on sale in the children’s department at Sears, and Dede is always bugging her about them.”

“Yeah?” Nolan looked back at Delia and Dede standing on the floor he had worked on so hard. “Cool.”

Delia bought new end tables at a yard sale and a great wingback chair at the Saint Vincent de Paul. She hauled the old spool tables out to the garden and used them as potting stands. Under pressure from Dede she put up new curtains and yielded on the television set, but she continued to cling to her sheets. It did not bother her that they were designed for a child’s bed. When she did not fall asleep on the living room couch, Delia went to her single bed in the smallest bedroom, narrow, hard, and solitary. If it had not been for the sheets and the cartoon-patterned quilt thrown over them, that cot would have suited a nun.

“I like bright colors,” Delia said when Dede showed her an ad for pinstripes on sale. “Just because I’m a woman grown don’t mean I have to sleep on plaid or stripes.”

“But it looks so silly.”

“Who sees it but me? And an’t I the one that matters? I like colors, bright and loud and full of energy. Don’t have to wash them as often, and they don’t go that sad gray. Besides, they look cheerful out on the line.”

It was true. Cissy did the laundry, but never Delia’s sheets. She did not even go into Delia’s room. Delia liked to do her sheets and hang them out on the lines strung from the back of the house to the ramshackle garage, where she kept her garden supplies. She got up late on Sunday morning and put a quick load in cold water while she drank her coffee. She did a little weeding in the small garden off the back steps through the spin cycle. Then she hung those sheets out in the sun and sat on the steps to watch the cartoon figures billow and flap. With her knees pulled up and one hand trailing through her loose hair, she hummed softly to herself while Dede and Cissy banged around in the kitchen. She could have been a young mother with small children, not forty years old and still mourning what she had lost.

Delia’s bed was a joke awaiting comment.

“My bed suits me,” she would say, “and it an’t like I’m inviting company.”

“You an’t dead yet.” M.T. did not approve.

“And I an’t crazy. I like my bed and I like it alone.”

After Clint’s death, men looked longingly at Delia, but few had the nerve to approach her. Delia barely noticed. As far as she was concerned, that was over. Oh, she went out with Emmet, but there was nothing to that. She’d had enough trouble in her life, she told M.T., and when Rosemary called they joked about how many men a woman could go crazy over in this lifetime. One, maybe two, never three. “Well, I’ve had my two,” Delia swore. “I’ve had all I can stand.”

The secret was that Delia’s sheets saw little use. Her insomnia had gotten so bad, she used her bedroom as little more than a storage place for her clothes. Her naps were brief and restless. Mostly she needed to move around. She strung Christmas tree lights along the back of the house and the side of the garage, and took to gardening at night by the dim light of the parti-colored bulbs. When there was nothing left to do in the garden, she started refinishing furniture. She sanded and sealed some lawn chairs Steph had given her, then worked her way through the tables and chairs in the house. She picked up a few pieces of furniture at the Goodwill, fixed them up, and gave them away—a dining room table for M.T., a rocker for Amanda, and a splendid cherry side table for Emmet, with little drawers set on two sides.

“You built me a table?” Emmet smiled at her when she brought it over.

“You don’t have to take it,” she told him. “I just liked the way the finish came out and I remembered you had that cherry armoire. Thought it would look nice with it.”

It would, Emmet agreed. He said “It would” with his head down. His fingers stroked the finish. He had asked her to marry him when Amanda married Michael. He had thought she would stop seeing him from the way she had looked at him, but so long as he pretended the question had been a joke, pretended she had not been spooked. They went out almost every other week, eating greasy food at Goober’s and seeing movies at the drive-in near Marietta.

“Wasn’t nothing,” Delia said. “You’d be amazed at the beautiful stuff people throw away sometimes. This treasure was just sitting by the road.”

“Thank you,” he said. He lifted his head.

“Oh, you’re welcome.” Delia was already looking back at her car. “Why don’t you come over next Sunday and I’ll show you what I’m working on for Stephanie’s birthday.”

“I’ll do that,” Emmet said, his fingers gripping the edge of the little table.

“Well, Lord damn!” Steph said when Emmet and Delia delivered her birthday present, an antique vanity. “Girl, you should go into business.”

“I got a business,” Delia said. “Anyway, sanding is like doing hair. Feels like something I know with my muscles more than my brain. It makes me feel good to do it, and I like the way the wood looks when you sand it down real fine.”

“Just as long as you don’t start building flats and compost bins like that crazy woman on television. This is the kind of thing you can take too far.” Steph winked at Emmet.

Delia had a few moments when she thought about giving up the Bonnet and restoring furniture for money. She would never have to smile at a woman with her head in a towel again, and that might be nice. But the truth was she was just restless. Her hips hurt no matter what she did, and no matter where she slept, bed or couch or a mat out on the grass, things seemed to press on her.

One of M.T.’s new boyfriends, George, put a big antenna up on the back porch so Delia could tune her radio to stations as far away as Phoenix. After 2:00 A.M. there were several stations that came in from the Southwest and they all seemed to carry phone-in talk shows hosted by deep-voiced religious commentators. These were the very shows that Delia had never been able to stand before, but suddenly they were her passion. She set up a workstation for herself out back with the colored lights and the radio. Sanding, she would hum along to country rock, switching stations to find music that matched her pace. She tried to time her work so that she was smoothing stain or sealant by the time the talk shows started and got her all excited.

“I get so mad,” she told Cissy. “Mad or disgusted. You can see it in the wood. Sometimes I come close to grinding the grain right down to nothing or gouging whole strips off.”

“Then why do you listen?”

Delia looked at her daughter as if what she was saying was perfectly obvious. “ ’Cause sometimes mad is what I need. A good mad or a good cry. Cussing out loud or kicking a bucket across the porch, just something. Something strong. Sometimes a woman just needs to get mad as sin.”

What Delia could not have guessed was how closely the rhythms of her body were matched by those in Amanda. She could not have known that when she was sweating under her Christmas tree lights, grunting and cursing at some far-off preacher, Amanda was moving with her all the way across Cayro, ironing T-shirts and chanting her prayers. For every “Fool!” of Delia’s, Amanda would whisper an “Amen!” Now and then, as if in harmony, they would stop together, hearts pounding in counterpoint, to lift their heads at the same moment and breathe “Lord!”

A
t fourteen, Cissy Byrd loved folk music—especially Gordon Lightfoot and Delia’s old Joan Baez records—the high school swim team, the sausage biscuits Nolan brought her from his daddy’s early shift at Biscuit World, the straight-leg jeans Dede said were cool, and science fiction books featuring orphan girls with amazing hidden powers. She hated okra, the marching band—from which she was expelled after blowing spit on Mary Martha Wynchester—her sister Amanda, and the entire congregation of Cayro Baptist Tabernacle, where Amanda spent all her time. And Delia. In a completely matter-of-fact way, Cissy hated Delia and tried to make sure she knew it, but Delia never acknowledged the hatred, and sometimes Cissy almost forgot it herself.