Cavedweller (15 page)

 

 

D
elia decided she would be ready to reopen the Bonnet by Valentine’s Day. She and Steph and M.T., with Cissy’s grudging help, put up banners across the window and signs on every pole downtown. M.T. took flyers to church, and Steph went over to Beckman’s and put some up in the women’s lounge. M.T. had not been paid for cutting and styling hair since the twins were born, but she hoped to do as well as Steph. Steph hadn’t worked for a living since leaving high school.

“My family and friends will come to me,” M.T. kept saying. Delia agreed with a smile, though she was still unsure anyone at all would come to any of them. It was a small town, and Beckman’s with its two chairs was not that far away.

The first few days the three women kept the Bonnet’s windows full of fresh flowers and the chairs full of friends getting free introductory haircuts and treatments. Early on the opening Saturday, before the customers came in, Delia served coffee and corn muffins with slabs of bacon.

“You must have got up early to make these,” M.T. teased.

“Yeah,” Delia admitted. “Couldn’t sleep anyway. They’re a little heavy. Don’t have the knack for making muffins, never did.”

“You should have gone over to Biscuit World.” Stephanie spoke around a mouthful of muffin. “Old man Reitower has the knack. Makes the best biscuits you ever tasted, specially the sausage biscuits. Makes you appreciate coffee all over again.”

“Good there’s something worthwhile in that family.” M.T. sipped creamy coffee and smoothed her skirt, which stopped well short of her dimpled knees. No matter how wide her ass became, her legs were smooth and shapely. She had stopped at Biscuit World on the way over and noticed both the owner and his son looking at her legs when she left. And what would Nadine Reitower think about that, that skinny full-of-herself old biddy?

“We get this place going good, I’ll start paying for biscuits,” Delia said. “Right now I can barely afford cornmeal.”

“Thought you was supposed to be rich,” Stephanie said to Delia, waggling her muffin in the air and scattering crumbs on her skirt. “Thought everyone in the music business was rich. Wearing them clothes, riding them buses.” She grinned and pointed a finger at Delia. “Doing them drugs.”

“Oh yeah, drugs.” Delia shook her head. “Lots of drugs. Marlboros and Camels, Southern Comfort and Jim Beam, straight-up whiskey in a warm glass.”

“Sounded like it sometimes,” Steph said. “Way you got so hoarse on some of them songs, sounded like you were sipping something.”

“I was doing more than sipping.” Delia’s tone was harsh. “I was drunk almost all the time I was in California.” She passed the muffins around again and saw that Cissy was listening. “No sense lying. It was awful, but mostly I wasn’t conscious for it.”

“All of it couldn’t have been awful.” M.T. was uncomfortable. She turned her chair so she didn’t have to look at Cissy or Stephanie. “Some of it must have been good.”

“Yeah, that Randall sure was pretty that time I saw him. One handsome man.” Stephanie blushed slightly. “And famous don’t hurt a man. Rich and famous. He made a lot of money on those albums.”

“Oh, Randall was never rich. He just looked rich. Diamonds and Dirt was the only album Mud Dog did that made any money.” Delia blew on her coffee and seemed to forget for a moment where she was. “What Randall had was presence. He looked like a star, behaved like a star. He made people think he was the real thing.” Randall had charmed record company men so thoroughly that he even got them to front the cash for the star lifestyle. Reporters and photographers following everywhere, fancy hotel rooms trashed, glazed eyes, everything done for effect. All those bills handed over to nervous accountants. All those drugs laid out on redwood burl coffee tables polished to mirror intensity. The star life, the star presence. No cash to hand, but lots of perks.

“There just was never any money,” Delia said.

Stephanie raised her eyebrows in disbelief. “No money?”

“Not a dime.” Delia leaned back in her chair. “I didn’t even have a phone for the longest time. Couldn’t make a call if I wasn’t in somebody’s office or hanging at Randall’s.”

M.T. and Stephanie just stared at her. It was unimaginable, what Delia was telling them. A life lived in luxury but without funds. How did it work?

“Crazy how rich you can behave when you an’t got a dime in your pocket. You learned to charge things to the company or borrow against your name.” Old clothes had to be sent out to be cleaned by hotel staff, new clothes bought on credit.

“Underwear was the hardest.” Delia pushed her hair back. “I could get a fancy dress for a show charged to some fancy store on Wilshire, but I couldn’t get panties, bras, or socks. If it couldn’t be charged to some record company account, it couldn’t be had.” In seven years she never had in hand more than four hundred dollars. Delia told them it was like living in the twilight zone. If she stepped away from everything, it evaporated in her hand.

“Can I get a salary?” Delia had asked Randall when Mud Dog/
Mud Dog
was in production.

“A salary? Girl, you gonna be rich!”

“Yeah, well I’d like something I could count on.”

“You can count on me.”

“Randall.”

“Girl, girl.”

As a conciliatory gesture, Randall got Columbia to issue Delia monthly payments of a thousand dollars. “That’s not much,” Rosemary had complained on Delia’s behalf. She was getting a percentage for writing some of the music, though everyone knew Delia was working with her.

“Delia don’t need money. Everything is paid for. She don’t got rent or grocery bills or car payments. She can charge anything to the band. Anything she wants I get for her,” Randall snarled out the side of his mouth. “Delia’s my woman! She don’t need nothing. Shit. Shit damn.”

The joke was, Delia told M.T. and Stephanie, that Randall was always “borrowing” cash from her. More to the point, when she left, she had only the car in her name and six thousand in her bank account.

“Six thousand for what? Eight or nine years?” Stephanie was pensive. “Me and Lyle are doing better than that.”

“Well, I just never thought about the money,” Delia said. “I trusted Randall. Even when I should have known better, I trusted the man. Maybe it was the drinking, but the truth is, Randall had himself a piece of magic. He didn’t know how to use it, and he never cared enough to really work it. But if he turned those big dark eyes on you, you just naturally leaned into him. Couldn’t imagine he was mortal and silly like the rest of us. Thought he was something special just because he could sing sweet enough to break your heart.”

“Ought to rename this the Rock Star Shop.” Stephanie was looking out the window, watching people walk by and look back at her. It was time to open.

The words startled them all. Until Steph spoke, Delia’s nervous chatter had obscured the fact that she was doing what she had sworn to herself she would not do—talking about the years with Randall.

Cissy was right there listening all the time, rocking her shoulders against the arch and watching her mother from behind her dark glasses and thinking about her daddy. Delia had no right to talk about him
in
that casual, scornful way. Stephanie had no right to suggest trading on his fame.

“I like ‘Bee’s Bonnet,’ ” she said loudly. “It’s got history behind it. It’s been here forever.” She waved a hand at the peach walls and the white trim. It had been a gray morning, but light was pouring in the window now, steam rising from the coffeepot in the nook by the door and covering the smell of fresh paint and ammonia. If Delia renamed the shop, Cissy would find a way to burn it down.

Delia looked at Cissy, her eyes bright with gratitude. “Good,” she said. “ ’Cause I an’t going to waste no money repainting that sign.” She stabbed a rat-tailed comb into a jar of blue disinfectant.

Everybody laughed. The moment when it all could have changed passed. Cissy thumped her hand against the arch and bit her lip.

 

 

T
he Bonnet’s first paying customer was Gillian Wynchester, Cayro’s excuse for a liberated woman. Gillian was famous for declaring to her bingo group that she could understand the impulse to burn a bra, that she’d rather swing free than squeeze herself into the scratchy, lace-bedeviled contraptions her husband was always bringing her back from his twice-a-year trips to New Orleans.

“Man goes in those titty bars down there,” Gillian told her friends, “comes home with stuff he saw on them whores, and expects me to wear it for him. Most ungodly getups you ever saw. And look at me—I an’t got nothing up top to speak of. What’s the use trying to make gallon jugs out of teacups?”

Gillian smirked at the awed shock her words provoked. After that she made a point of telling everyone what a freethinker she was. “You can’t tell what I might not do,” Gillian swore, though the truth was that she had not refused her husband anything since the day she spoke her vows—not even coming to bed in the green satin bustier that just pushed her double-A bosom up out of her baby-doll night-gown, though she did make sure her girl, Mary Martha, was safely asleep before she would put it on. M.T. had predicted Gillian would be one of the first in the shop, but she had called even before the Bonnet was open.

“I want something new and exciting,” Gillian told Delia as she leaned her head back over the sink. “I was thinking I might even put in some color while I was there, maybe some of them honey-blond streaks you always see on that weather girl on the morning news.”

“Mmmmm.” Delia ran her fingers through Gillian’s skimpy brown locks. “Might could lighten you up a bit. Change your conditioner. Give you some body so we could do something different.”

“Different, yes,” Gillian said, sighing as Delia’s strong fingers massaged her scalp. For the next hour she giggled and whispered and told scandalous tales about her husband while Delia murmured and smiled and worked magic with her hands. When Delia combed her out and turned her to face the mirror, Gillian was struck silent for the first time.

“My Lord,” she said finally, patting at the hair that curved back from her features.

“You are a good-looking woman,” Delia said, and used the tang of her rat-tailed comb to lift Gillian’s hair a bit higher at the crown of her head. The style was the one Gillian had worn since her wedding, but for the first time it was cut to suit her narrow jaw and soften the impact of those shrewd eyes.

“I am, aren’t I?” Gillian agreed. In the mirror beyond Delia’s left shoulder, Steph gave a small nod in M.T.’s direction. By the time Gillian had bought a few groceries, picked up her laundry, and mailed a package at the post office, the phone at the Bonnet was starting to ring. By the end of the week the trickle of adventurous customers became a rivulet. By the end of the month it was a steady stream.

When women came into the shop blushing and dreamy-eyed, talking about getting themselves made over, Delia put a cool, damp towel on the back of their necks and handed them her special collection of magazines, the big spring issue of Vogue with its double-thick wedding section, the fall issue of Mademoiselle with all the schoolgirl haircuts. “You see something you like,” Delia told them, “we’ll see what we can do.” No matter how great the disparity between the ads the women chose and the physical reality, Delia would find a way to narrow it.

“You haven’t got quite as much to work with as she does,” she would say to a middle-aged woman holding up the image of a sixteen-year-old girl with hair down to her ass. “But we can make that shag of yours look longer, give it a nice light rinse, make it a little fuller.” And somehow she did, or she made the woman think she had.

“Blind and stupid and mad with lust,” Steph would say as the women went out the door. Steph never talked about love, only lust. “Spring fever,” she would say. “Look like you coming into heat. You can see it in your skin. No joke.”

“You need to get yourself some, Steph. Perk yourself up,” M.T. would tease. “A little heat wouldn’t do you any harm. Pinks the skin and brightens the eyes. Better than a shot of whiskey or a nap in the middle of the afternoon. Truth is, honey, I think you better get you some or you going to lose the notion.”

“You can talk.”

“I can.” M.T. would beam and Steph would blush. Everyone knew M.T.’s reputation.

“Well, talk to Delia. She’s the one needs some.”

“Don’t drag me into this.” Delia would wave her hand and laugh. “I’m doing just fine, thank you very much.”

It was what beauty shops were about—dreams and lust and the approximation of a fantasy. For all the banter, the women of the Bonnet loved the game.

“You’re love-struck,” they would tell some girl who had barely known what she was feeling when she stepped through the door.

“He that fine?” M.T. would ask. “He make you sweat just to think about him?” She’d wink at Delia or Steph, and soothe her victim at the same time.

“Well, a little,” the girl might say. “Makes me think, anyway.”

With M.T.’s fingers on their temples and Delia’s smile in the mirror, the idea was more exciting than embarrassing. A beauty shop was one of the places where such passions could be acknowledged with impunity. “He’s pretty nice,” they’d say, then add, “And nice and pretty,” laughing openly at their own wit. A woman knew where to go when love caught her up. The women at the Bonnet were priestesses of appreciation and encouragement.

“Come on, girl, let’s do you up right.”

“Come on, girl, take a chance.”

“You got to risk a little to get a man worth the trouble. Come on, girl.”

Hair could be tinted, layered, frosted, teased, or made over with a permanent wave. M.T. could do nails in any color, lengthen them or round them off with a glistening manicure, even glue on extensions. Steph could demonstrate a new foundation, a moisturizer, or a way to make eyes look bigger in a dim light. Delia would smile and hand over her magazines, nod and advise and reassure. And the next Saturday, when the woman came in again, eyes swollen and skin blotchy with disappointment, Delia would dredge up another piece of hope.