Cavedweller (41 page)

Nolan’s mama went a little bit more than a minute and a half without breathing. The paramedics put her on oxygen in the ambulance, and she came to with her mouth open and her tongue out.

“Like a baby bird,” Nolan told Cissy. “Like a happy baby bird.”

A hungry baby bird.

It was a life change for a woman who had never consumed a full thousand calories in a day for thirty years. Her husband and her boys were fat, but Nadine made a religion out of being thin. Rail-thin, starved skinny, a clear-soup-and-celery-stick life. She was painfully proud of the way her hips and collarbone protruded, smugly contemptuous of her wide, soft men even as she fed them all the food she would never eat. Nolan’s mama believed men should be big and women small, and she was sharp-tongued about it. She was sharp-tongued by nature anyway, given to cutting remarks and sudden cruelty, though she believed herself kindly. It was just that she knew how things should be and the world so rarely matched her convictions. Nadine Reitower made gravy but never ate it, baked cakes, pinched the crusts of pies and steamed puddings. She fed her men like a sacrament and starved herself matter-of-factly, until her bones went lacy and fine and fractured in thin, spidery lines.

“Should have put her on calcium and had her walking more for the last decade,” Dr. Campbell grumbled. “Should have seen what she was coming to.” He was chagrined because he had believed Nadine to be supremely healthy, anticipating her visits every time her name appeared on his charts—that fine-boned, ethereal creature he had almost adored. She was a devoted mother, a happy wife, maybe a little bossy and difficult now and then, from what people told him, but no more than should be expected. Her husband’s death changed all that, and Dr. Campbell finally met the Nadine Reitower everyone else knew. From the doctor’s perspective, the woman he admired had been supplanted by one he could barely stand to examine, an indignant, contemptuous woman grown suddenly old and fragile, one who told him he was a fool right to his face. When that creature altered again, he stopped talking with any certainty. What they had was what they had. What might come next was completely past his ability to predict.

“Nolan,” Nadine said, waking up after that last ambulance trip. “Nolan, I’m hungry.” And so she was. Nadine’s disposition changed with that minute and a half of stillness, with the acquisition of the wheelchair, the ramps, and the visiting nurse. Her baby-bird mouth smiled often, and she waved at people from the porch, calling out their names.

Cissy. Dede. Amanda. Anyone who passed. Even Delia. Nadine liked everybody now, and the plumper she got, the more she said so. In a minute and a half, Nolan’s life was remade.

Nadine Reitower was a new woman and everyone knew it. What was not so quickly apparent was the change in Nolan. Only Cissy seemed to see it, perhaps because she saw him so regularly. As Nadine widened in her chair, Nolan seemed to relax and brighten. His late growth spurt intensified. He started doing an exercise routine with a set of weights his daddy had kept in the garage. He swore it had nothing to do with his last run-in with Dede, when she told him she would never go out with a boy who looked like a biscuit on legs.

“I just feel like it,” Nolan insisted to Cissy.

“Naaa, come on. You’re working at this. Damn, Nolan, you’re coming close to having a real physique!” Cissy teased him so relentlessly she was surprised he did not take offense.

“It’s practical, that’s all,” he said. “I have to lift a woman who is just about a dead weight, and heavier all the time. Getting her from bed to bath to chair has been just about breaking my back. Her doc told me I had to get a whole lot stronger or I’d wind up with a hernia. Only other choice is to hire a nurse full-time, and the visiting nurse is all we can manage.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Besides, I need to do it efficiently and quickly. Moving Mama is not something you want to do slow. You want to get it done fast.” Nolan’s face was very pink.

“Yeah?” Cissy was curious. She had never seen him look so uncomfortable.

“She giggles.”

“Giggles?”

“God, yes.” The pink of Nolan’s face went a deeper shade, almost rose red at the cheekbones. He closed his eyes. “Me and the nurse go to pick her up, put her in the bath, and she puts her hands up over her eyes and starts to giggle. She says, ‘Don’t look, son, don’t look,’ and she just giggles all the way through. Naked and all, and I never seen her naked before in my life. She would have died before she let me see her like that. Now she’s teasing me and laughing. God, if she was as embarrassed as I am, it would be awful. I suppose if she wasn’t so cheerful, I wouldn’t be able to stand it at all. But even so.” He stopped, and Cissy could not think of a thing to say.

Nolan kept his eyes shut tight. There was more, a lot more, that he could not say to Cissy. While he was working out to get stronger, he was also trying to persuade Nadine to diet—a project that was awful for both of them. The new Nadine hated diets, hated anything but food fat-rich and tasty. And Nolan loved this new version of his mama, this extraordinary woman licking her fingers and laughing out loud, wheeling her chair around the kitchen, humming along to his music, telling him how handsome he was, how proud he made her, and repeating that to anyone who happened to stop by.

But the doctor kept telling Nolan that bone mass did not replenish. It would not come back, and another break could kill Nadine. “She gets much bigger, those bones will cave in all the quicker,” the doctor said firmly. “Son, you got to be the man.”

Nolan could see what he meant. Nadine’s body was not designed to carry the weight she was adding, no matter the gentle open mouth that only wanted to chew and smile. The bigger Nadine got, the greater the risk. If Nolan did not take care, he would lose his mama, this new creature he loved almost more than his music or his dreams.

Nolan took care and steadily pumped his muscles stronger. He invented games to help Nadine exercise safely, made adjustments in the kitchen while she was at physical therapy with the nurse. Sugar substitute, no-sodium salt, fresh vegetables, low-fat soups. He refused to bring home biscuits no matter how Nadine cried, and finally used her mother love against her. “Mama,” he pleaded, “you have to help me. How will I ever find a wife if you don’t help me shape up
^?
”

Slowly, steadily, Nolan lengthened and thinned while Nadine endured, mourning the loss of butterfat, ice cream, and chocolate pies, but admiring the alteration in her big, soft boy. She watched as Nolan’s shoulders became broad and muscled, his hips and legs slim and powerful. He looked like a football player, a quarterback, strong and handsome, maneuvering his mama’s fragile body as carefully and intently as he played his clarinet.

“Such a handsome boy I’ve got,” Nadine told people when they came to visit. They nodded offhandedly, and then they looked over and realized that she was right. Big, strange, shy Nolan was not the boy he had been. Big, strong Nolan was a man lifting his mama out of that chair, feeding her orange sections and apple slices, dropping his glance when women looked at him, playing his music so sweetly that half of Cayro knew he could go anywhere in the world.

The one who did not look was Dede Windsor. The one Nolan would do anything for, go anywhere to please, never glanced up at the porch where he waited.

“Oh, baby,” Nadine sighed when she saw him looking down the road. Her face was tender, her eyes wise. “Oh, baby,” she said, in that voice that could break his heart. Nolan pulled her up and held her to his chest. He thought, If my mama could become this, then anything can happen. Someday what I want might be.

“Someday,” he said out loud, and Nadine pressed her mouth to his salt-sweet skin. Her boy tasted like apple pie, like a sugar dumpling made to bless her tongue.

 

 

A
fter her sons were born, Amanda became obsessed with trying once again to organize another Christian Girls’ Coalition. Her new emphasis was the high school itself, the girls who smoked outside Dede’s convenience store and laughed into their palms when Amanda came in with her boys.

“They act like they’re not afraid of God or anything,” Amanda complained every time she came into the store.

“They’re not.” Dede was the only person allowed to smoke in the store itself, but she only seemed to actually do it when someone she did not like came in. As soon as Amanda put her hand on the metal bar that held the Camel Red Pack sign, Dede would pull out her pack and start rolling a cigarette between her fingers. “Except for me. All of them are just a little scared of me, and I work that. I work it for all I’m worth.”

“They should learn a little respect.”

“Oh, they’re learning.” Dede smiled slow and flicked ashes in the direction of the muscular dystrophy can. She kept her eyes on little Michael. “They’re learning, I promise you.” Dede knew why her sister came in, knew that Amanda wanted her to put up one of her little posters. Under her arm Amanda carried a set of the cardboard prints that featured Jesus with the crown of thorns biting into his brow and one finger uplifted to point skyward right in front of his nose. Dede actually had one of those up for a while. It made her giggle at the idea of a Son of God who would pick his nose—the kind of savior she could appreciate. But the joke was no longer so satisfying. Amanda seemed more and more to have lost her focus, to come into the store to buy a can of evaporated milk instead of to lecture Dede on the prospects of hellfire and damnation. Some days Dede missed the old Amanda, the one that pulled over the rack of adult magazines after some of the boys had deliberately pulled down the brown paper sheathes that were supposed to spare the Christian eye.

 

 

N
adine ate the strawberries Nolan had left out for her breakfast, but first she rolled them in soft butter and dragged them through the sugar dish. Smiling in the morning light with that butter on her lips, she was careful not to wake Tacey Brithouse, who lay asleep across her notebooks on the kitchen table. The rich cinnamon of Tacey’s bare arms glowed in the sunshine coming in the windows. Tacey had moved in with the Reitowers after hitting her mama’s boyfriend in the head with a garden rake—a story she was happy to tell anyone. She was working at Biscuit World at the time and occasionally helping Nolan out with Nadine. One morning she came into Biscuit World covered with dirt and blood and unable to stop shaking. It took Nolan a good hour to calm her down and find out what had happened: the boyfriend had burned one of her journals, and she had tried to knock his head in.

Nolan went over to talk to Tacey’s mama, Althea, but the woman was full of outrage. She tossed a box of Tacey’s clothes at him and told him to “keep her away from here till she’s ready to apologize.” Since then Tacey had been taking care of Nadine in exchange for room and board, moving into Nadine’s old bedroom upstairs now that Nadine was using the sewing room on the first floor. Tacey had a partial scholarship to Spelman for the fall, and had a stack of unfinished manuscripts in a box under her bed. “You wait,” she told Nolan. “Someday you’ll tell everybody you knew me when.” Nolan did not doubt her.

Tacey was supposed to make sure Nadine had a good breakfast before she left for school, but she had a tendency to stay up late reading or writing in her notebooks, and often napped while Nadine poured sugar on her fruit or slathered butter across her toast. They liked each other well enough, though sometimes Tacey could barely believe the things the old white woman said. There was, for example, Nadine’s assumption that Tacey was sleeping with the garbage men, the mailman, her teachers, and the preacher at her church, Little River Methodist.

“Black girls don’t have to wait like us white girls do,” Nadine remarked one morning not long after Tacey moved in. “My mama told me. It’s in the blood, all that heat from Africa.”

“That right?” Tacey drawled.

Nadine nodded. “Oh, you know. Black girls get to do everything. Me, I never got to do nothing.” Nadine smacked her lips and sighed. “If I’d been born black, I could have been sucking men’s titties since I was twelve.”

“And why would you want to do that?”

Nadine looked surprised. “ ’Cause they taste so good. Men’s titties taste better than women’s do, you know.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, course you did, with all the men you been with.”

“Mrs. Reitower, I have never been with a man.”

“Oh, you don’t have to humor me. If I could get up out of this chair, I’d go sit naked on the garbage cans in the morning just to see if the boys would let me suck on their shoulders and put my heels up on their hips.” She sighed again, a perfect heartbroken sigh.

Tacey snorted and shook her head. “Mrs. Reitower, you are scary.”

“Oh, you should have known me before,” Nadine said. “I was something, yes. I was.”

Nadine liked to listen to the stories Tacey wrote, long romantic tales of black women fighting to become rich and famous and succeeding beyond their dreams. “Like that woman, what’s her name,” Nadine told Nolan. “Tacey makes you think you are just right there.”

Tacey laughed. “That’s me, the black Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel, Rosamunde what’s her name. Lord, Mrs. Reitower, I’m going to have to read you some good black women, give you some better reference points.”

For weeks Tacey read her favorites out loud while Nadine did her ankle lifts and stretching exercises. Sometimes Nadine would stop and say, “Read me that part again.” Soon she took to mixing quotes from Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor with her standbys from the Bible. “Lord, son, the things I never knew,” she kept saying. Nolan smiled. He liked to lie on his bed and listen to his mama and Tacey read together. In his dreams it was their chorus that lulled him along, their antiphony and Dede’s laugh.

Sometimes Tacey brought Nadine little fried pies when she came home from school, and Nadine sneaked away to eat them in the bathroom with the door closed so that Nolan wouldn’t see. Tacey knew she shouldn’t do it, but the hunger in Nadine’s eye was hard to bear.