Cavedweller (10 page)

It would take a few weekends to clean the place up, M.T. said when she drove Delia and Cissy out to see the river house, but it would be nice. When M.T. started opening windows and dusting, Delia sat down on a chair in the kitchen. A couple of times she got up as if she would help, but she sat back down before accomplishing anything. After a while she stopped getting up at all and just sat there watching as M.T. chattered and swept out the whole house. “We’ll get my sister to help,” M.T. promised Delia. “She’ll get this place fixed up in no time.” But Sally was too busy to come, and the weeks stretched and became a month.

Every time M.T. walked in on Delia lying in bed and crying, she would coo and nod with sympathy. This was the kind of thing she had felt when Paul took up with that dancer from Augusta. No one had understood that when it was M.T. lying in bed.

“Sometimes a woman just needs a little time,” she told Cissy.

“Harrumph,” Cissy replied. She watched Delia pull a pillow over her head and draw her knees to her chest like a baby curled up in a crib. She told herself she was learning the family language, “harrumph” and contempt and a sneer. Delia could cry. Cissy did not dare. She had already made it through her first few days at Cayro Elementary on sheer tight-lipped determination, ignoring the whispers and pointing fingers.

No, Cissy did not dare relax, did not dare loosen her tightly clenched fists, her closely pressed lips. She took to chewing her fingernails down and picking at her ragged cuticles. She went to school because she could not think of a way out of it and because it was better than staying in the house with Delia crying in bed, and Ruby and Pearl making ruthless fun of her every chance they got, and M.T. patting her head carelessly on her way to get Delia a tissue or a drink of water. Cissy felt as if her nerves had broken through to lie exposed on the outside of her skin. She slept in a tight little ball—under the bed after the girls poured water on her in the middle of the night—and walked around with her arms crossed over her chest, rebuffing even the few people who tried to be friendly, two other new girls in her grade and the teachers who pronounced her name “Cece.” If Delia was going to cry, then Cissy was going to disappear.

The album covers had been passed around at the school,
Diamonds and Dust
with its long shot of the Hollywood Hills, and the original
Mud Dog/Mud
Dog with the bus hung all over with flags and flowers. Everywhere she went, Cissy was confronted with her daddy’s band, boys who asked her if she’d ever done any drugs, girls who sang a few bars of the music she didn’t really know and the words Delia had never allowed her to hear. Everyone knew her name, her mama’s name, all about Randall and the band and California and more—all about Clint Windsor and the sisters she had never met. She started wearing her dark glasses all the time, not for protection from the light but to discourage questions she did not know how to deflect.

Bumped into the fourth grade for the last month of school, Cissy sat unblinking at the back of the room the first day, her eyes obscured behind the thick lenses. When the teacher asked her to “tell everyone about California,” Cissy stood rigidly at the blackboard while the whole class focused on her stern face.

“California is the thirty-first state. The capital is Sacramento,” she said, and returned to her desk.

Marty Parish leaned over Cissy’s desk when the bell rang. “Full of sass, an’t you?” he said. His glance drifted across the open notebook under her hand. Cissy had written “Cayro” over and over down the middle of the page. “You got your mama’s talent?” he asked her. “You sing nasty songs and shake your butt when you do it?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Hey, girl. You know stuff, I can tell. You could teach me some stuff, right?” A small group had gathered between Cissy and the teacher, who was rummaging through her desk at the front of the room. The grinning boys and one wide-faced nervous girl looked expectant, as if they hoped Cissy would start crying or run out of the room.

“Women in your family supposed to be good,” Marty said with a leer. “Real good. I heard your sister Dede is real hot.”

Cissy pushed herself up. Slowly she tucked her notebook between her elbow and her side, keeping her eyes locked on Marty’s face. “Get out of my way,” she said to him.

“Marty?” The teacher’s voice was loud. She closed her desk drawer and stepped toward the rows of desks. “Is there a problem?”

“No problem. No problem.” Marty shook his dark head and took one step back from Cissy’s obstinate stance. “We were just discussing Cal-i-for-ni-a.” He smiled at Cissy and gave an elaborate shrug.

The teacher looked to Cissy, but her face was blank. Everyone started for the door, but Cissy made a point of stepping close to Marty. “I know stuff, yeah. I been with the band. I been on the bus,” she whispered in his ear. “I’ve been places you’ll never get in this life.”

 

 

S
ince that morning at Granddaddy Byrd’s, Delia had stopped talking about Amanda and Dede, hadn’t even spoken their names. It was Ruby and Pearl who made sure Cissy knew all about her sisters.

“Oh, they’re looking for you,” Ruby warned gleefully one night. “Everybody knows that. I’d think you’d be dreaming about them all the time, them sneaking through the bushes, climbing in the windows. Carrying rocks and razors with your name on them. You just lucked out getting here after Dede went to seventh grade. If she was still going to Cayro Elementary, she’d have kicked your butt three times over by now.”

“Four times,” hazarded Pearl. “Your whole family is crazy, but them girls are genuinely disturbed.”

“Disturbed, yeah.” Ruby beamed at Pearl appreciatively. “Old Amanda is like this century’s only Baptist Pentecostal nun. Goes around all the time in them high-neck dresses in the hottest weather, wearing them white socks and Mary Janes like she was a first-grader or something.”

“Always praying and telling people they’re going to hell,” Pearl put in.

“And that Dede is like so different you can’t believe it.”

“Oh Lord!”

Pearl put her hand over her mouth and giggled. Ruby nodded wisely. They looked at each other and then gave Cissy slow, pleased smiles.

“Everybody says she’s done it.”

“Uh-huh. Everybody.”

Cissy frowned in confusion. “Done what?’

“It. It. Sex.” Pearl was bouncing on Ruby’s bed.

“She an’t no virgin, you can be sure,” Ruby said. “And her going off to Holiness Redeemer with her sister and grandma every Sunday. Lord should strike her dead. What is she, twelve?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“She sneaks out of her grandma’s place and goes driving with boys. Everybody knows.” Ruby’s voice was adamant, her smile enormous.

Cissy crossed her ankles on the mattress and put her hands behind her neck. “Well, it’s nothing to me.” She closed her eyes. “I an’t never met them and an’t looking to meet them.”

“Oh, you’ll meet them.” Ruby kicked at the side of the bed once, inspecting the room as if she wanted something else to kick. “Like I said, they’re sure looking for you.”

Cissy kept her eyes closed. She didn’t want to give Ruby the satisfaction of seeing that her words were having any effect. The truth was that Cissy did dream about Amanda and Dede, did watch for them. The truth was that she had already run into Dede. And she had Ruby and Pearl to thank for that too.

Every Saturday afternoon for the last month, Cissy had been going downtown to Crane’s, the paperback resale shop, to trade in the books she was steadily pilfering from the twins. Their books were the only things they had that Cissy envied. She had left most of her own books behind in Venice Beach, and the few that Delia let her bring had been stolen. It was a simple matter to run her fingers along their careful stacks and pull a couple out now and then to tuck in a paper bag and hide in the trunk of the Datsun. Crane’s had an inexhaustible need for the books the twins collected, the kinds of books Cissy thought contemptible.

M.T. and her girls shared a common passion, Regency novels full of tightly laced bodices, medieval tales of saints and courtesans, historical melodramas about Roman soldiers bedeviled by women who wielded trefoil daggers and called on the goddess to defend their lives, generational sagas of British aristocrats who chose badly in love or of serving girls who married up and made their children rich. There were boxes of books under every bed, romances of every kind. Pearl and Ruby were not of this world, and their taste in paperback fiction proved it. Cissy found the more contemporary romances—nurses with doctors, secretaries with gentlemen—only under M.T.’s bed. She never touched those, but it gratified her to take one of Pearl’s beloved sixteenth-century Gothics, or one of Ruby’s endless series set in the eighteenth-century Court of St. James, and exchange it for one of Ursula Le Guin’s
Earthsea
fantasies. A world in which terrible curses could be cast on the wicked had a ready appeal for Cissy.

One Saturday Cissy was hovering over the trays picking through the thrillers and science fiction. Just as she reached for a prize copy of Vonda McIntyre’s
Dreamsnake,
another hand closed over the spine, and she looked up to see a skinny blond girl looking back at her. They stood there, motionless, until Mrs. Crane dropped a stack of books and their heads turned together. Red-faced and shaking, Mrs. Crane bent to pick up the books without taking her eyes off the girls. Each of them frowned in the same way and looked again at the other, and each pulled back her hand.

Why hadn’t Cissy said something? But what could she have said? Dede had looked like any other raw-faced teenage girl, blond hair pinned back, blue eyes piercing and cool. What bothered Cissy later was that her half sister looked so ordinary, that there was no aura of mystery about her, no electrical shock when they touched. In any book the twins owned, there would have been an ominous scent in the room, a flash of sisterly recognition. Cissy stood there wondering what to do. Were they supposed to speak? Dede took the book in hand and added it to the other she was holding, a dog-eared copy of Eudora Welty’s
The Optimist’s Daughter.
Her eyes went to Mrs. Crane, then dropped back to the bin of books. She moved down the aisle, not looking at Cissy again. Cissy put down the two books she had selected and left the shop without a word. When she got home, she went straight to M.T.’s makeup mirror to see if there really was a resemblance, if any stranger could tell at a glance that she and Dede were related. Despite her dark red hair and hazel eyes, she saw in the mirror what anyone else would see—that both of them looked like Delia, with her nose, her chin, and the same fine arched brows above clear eyes.

The immediate difference between them was that Dede was pretty. For the first time Cissy wondered what she would look like when she got older. Back in Venice Beach, Rosemary had once showed Cissy how she did her makeup, pointing out that they both had the same heart-shaped face. “Better than those square-faced ugly women,” she laughed. “Makeup can only do so much. You wait. With that face, you’ll be pretty as your mama.”

Cissy had paid no attention. But gazing into the mirror with the memory of Dede’s features still imprinted on her own, Cissy saw what pretty looked like. What she could not puzzle out was the other thing she had seen in that face. Dede had looked at her with curiosity, not hatred. Her face had been neutral, cool, and distant, not hostile. That face that was Cissy’s face had been almost as unreadable as her own.

 

 

T
he river house was a furnished cinder-block structure with two bedrooms and a living room only slightly larger than the kitchen that opened out of it. The bathroom was a rathole squeezed between the bedrooms, a dark, smelly cubicle with a mildew-stained shower, one of those cheap plastic inserts, and one window covered with orange paint.

Over a June weekend, M.T. and Sally tackled the house in earnest and got most of it ready in short order. It was the bathroom that stymied them. They sprayed bug killer everywhere, let it sit a few days, and scrubbed down the floors and walls with bleach twice, airing the room out between cleanings. It still reeked.

The next Saturday, Sally stepped in, took a deep breath, and pronounced, “Crap!” She climbed up on the toilet, drew back her leg, and with two well-placed kicks knocked the window out of its frame. Light and air poured in, and a small army of roaches poured out. Sally nodded and called in her crew from Dust Bunnies, the cleaning service she ran. They pulled the rug out of the living room and burned it out back. Then they sealed all the windows with plastic and set off industrial-strength bug bombs. Two days later they took all the furniture out and scoured the place while Sally’s husband put a new window in the bathroom. Using paint left over from various jobs, Sally and her crew redid the walls in the bathroom and kitchen and touched up the bedrooms. When they were done, they put the furniture back in and laid down a rug M.T. had provided in the living room.

M.T. drove Delia and Cissy over the next day with their few things and some new curtains, a bright yellow one for the bathroom. While M.T. told them how Sally had kicked out the bathroom window, Cissy nodded balefully and walked around the kitchen feeling the linoleum buckle under her shoes, wishing Sally had kicked out all the windows. She would rather camp under the stars than live in this horrible house, so ugly compared to the cottage in California. But Delia sat right down at the kitchen table and wept at how clean and bright everything was.

Sally offered Delia work with Dust Bunnies, and Delia took it gratefully. It was night work, and she didn’t have to speak to a soul to do it. Every evening she went out in the same T-shirt and jeans to clean offices in Cayro’s claim to an industrial park, and came home before dawn with her hair pulling loose from the rubber band at the back of her neck. She would sit at the kitchen table with her blank face until Cissy got up, then make the only breakfast either of them could stand, apple butter on untoasted bread. When Cissy went off to her room to read, Delia would put her head on the table and cry for an hour or so before she went to bed to sleep till late afternoon.