A seventh trip across town then, without Sally. M.T. left her sorting boxes and helping the twins, Ruby and Pearl, make up their new bedroom. She did not want Sally to see what she intended to do to the perennial bed by what was now, legally, Paul’s kitchen.
M.T. was a big woman, muscular under soft pads of flesh. She grinned widely as she took her spade to the tall delphinium spears and reduced them to a gray-green mash.
“Man got twelve years off me. Thinks he got the best of me. Stupid son of a bitch.” She chopped and tore into the plants, pouring all the rage she had never directed at Paul onto those loved green shoots. “Son of a bitch,” she cursed. “Stupid man. Show his ass.” When she was done, her eyes were full of tears, but she was satisfied.
“Something might come back here,” M.T. said to herself as she turned toward her car, “but it won’t be pretty.” She was swiping at her dirty cheek and arching her aching back when a green Datsun pulled into the driveway.
Later M.T. would tell the story as if she had known them instantly—her lost best friend and the daughter at her side. But sodden and heartbroken, skinny and desperate, Delia did not look like the girl M.T. had loved. For one never-to-be-admitted moment, M.T. thought that the woman driving up was another of Paul’s foolish girlfriends and that the child beside her was one of his numerous little bastards. God knew the man had been cheating on her at least that long. Maybe this woman had shown up to demand fair treatment from M.T., something she knew she would never get from Paul. If a legal wife could be done so badly, what could a girlfriend expect? Then Delia turned her face to M.T. and their eyes caught.
“Goddamn!” M.T. dropped her spade. “Delia,” she shouted as she ran toward the car.
Delia opened the door, and they fell into each other’s arms while Cissy wiped sweat out of her eyes and prayed someone would get her a cold drink.
“Damn, Delia. Goddamn.” M.T. shook Delia loosely and burst into tears. “Damn,” she kept saying, the word soft and reverent, a prayer of thanksgiving.
Delia spoke only once. She mouthed M.T.’s name, and then she began to sob.
“Another minute,” M.T. would say after. “Another minute and I’d have left. Delia was in such bad shape, you cannot imagine. She was almost gone. She was almost lost to herself.”
It was true. If M.T. had not stopped to tear up her garden, they might have missed each other. That would have been terrible, because it was not that Delia was almost gone. Delia was completely gone. Somewhere in the short drive from Granddaddy Byrd’s to M.T. and Paul’s old house, Delia had lost the part of her that could fight back, take care of business, and do what she had to do. The Delia who fell into M.T.’s arms was childlike and broken.
“Hold me,” Delia whispered to her old friend, and M.T. took her at her word, enfolding her like a rag doll, kissing her face and weeping onto her cheek. For several minutes M.T. kept her hands on Delia, one still on her shoulder even as the other reached for Cissy’s cheek.
“Oh, look at you,” M.T. pronounced, “look at Delia’s girl.” When Cissy scowled and shook her hair down over her eyes, M.T. only laughed and packed them both off to her new place—a more difficult prospect than it first appeared, since Delia seemed in that moment to have lost the talent for driving a car. “Never mind,” M.T. said, and loaded them into her old Buick. She placed a dirty box of cuttings on Cissy’s lap and cuddled Delia to her shoulder on the front seat.
It took years for Cissy to learn all that lay behind the friendship between Delia and M.T.—rivalries and resentments as well as rescues and impassioned loyalty. Eventually there were tales of the time M.T. hid Delia in her own honeymoon cottage and of the terrible night in 1978 when just one phone call to Delia brought a check from Randall, no questions asked. But of all the things that happened that day, the one Cissy would never forget was the welcome M.T. made them, the joy on her face when she recognized Delia and the matter-of-fact way she took them in. When they got to her home, M.T.’s voice rang out like a bell. She pulled them out of the Buick and displayed them to her sister like prize puppies.
“Look! Look!” she shouted. “Look who is here. It’s my best friend, my best friend in the world. My Delia has come back.”
M.T. sent Sally over to get Delia’s car while she put Delia down in her own bed. “You need to rest,” she said firmly, and took Cissy into her half-unpacked kitchen. M.T. fed the girl cold chicken and corn relish on slices of white bread and quizzed her about the long trip across country.
“I’m sorry about your daddy,” she said when Cissy mentioned Randall’s death. “I never met him, but I know what it is like to lose someone you love.”
Cissy looked at M.T.’s wide, gentle face and suddenly felt like crying herself. Her daddy was dead. Her daddy was dead and she was stuck in the back end of the world.
“It’s all right.” M.T. came around the table and pulled Cissy’s head into her belly. “It’s going to be all right, honey. Your mama and I will make it all right.” She soothed and whispered while Cissy cried fiercely for a few moments. When Cissy started hiccuping, M.T. took a wet washcloth and squatted down to wipe her face. “It’s going to be just fine. We’re going to take good care of you, sweetheart. Good care.”
Cissy held her breath. Her tears were bad enough, but the hiccups were humiliating. Around the bulk of M.T.’s body she could see two girls watching from the kitchen doorway.
“I’m sorry,” Cissy said.
“Nothing to be sorry about.” M.T. was placid and easy on her feet. She stood up effortlessly and tossed the washcloth onto a pile of laundry near the sink. “You’ve lost your father, and you’ve just come all the way across the country in less time than it takes most people to go across the state. I’d say a few tears are justified. More than a few, and you can cry around here as much as you like. I’m tenderhearted myself, and so are my girls.” She gestured at the twins. “I was wondering where you were. Cissy, I want you to meet my treasures, my Ruby and my Pearl.”
M.T. pulled the two girls in close to her hips. They were as thin as she was wide, narrow-faced and sharp-chinned, with dark brown hair in matching bowl-like cuts above their ears. They were not identical twins, though they were the same size and had the same coloring. They were easily four years older than Cissy, big girls, teenagers, and they were nowhere near as good-natured as their mother. Ruby was the sharper of the two, her eyes zeroing in on Cissy like twin rockets ready to flare.
“Your daddy was a guitar player, huh?” Ruby said. “Famous, huh?”
“Famous, huh?” echoed Pearl.
Cissy opened her mouth, then hesitated. Delia had told her that Randall was nowhere near as famous as he’d liked to have been and that Mud Dog was just famous enough to get by. But she could tell from the look in Ruby’s eye that she dared not say anything like that.
“A little famous,” she said. “He’s dead.”
Ruby gave her sister a thump on the arm. “That’s a shame.”
“A shame.” Pearl nodded.
Ruby looked Cissy up and down and smiled. “Well, never mind,” she said. “Welcome to Georgia, Cissy Byrd. What Mama won’t tell you, we will. Anything and everything about Cayro.”
“Everything,” said Pearl.
“You girls,” laughed M.T. “Why don’t you go show Cissy your room.”
A little shudder of dread went through Cissy. They were not going to be any help.
“Real friends take care of each other,” M.T. said that night, after checking on the exhausted Delia for the dozenth time. “Real friends never forget each other. Your mama and I are real friends.”
Cissy stared numbly. She found it tiring and frightening to be so important to someone she barely knew.
“Lord, girl, why are you still up?” M.T. said suddenly. She led Cissy back to the bedroom and tucked her into Pearl’s narrow four-poster bed with a kiss on the forehead. Gratefully Cissy closed her eyes and prayed for sleep.
“You lived in Hollywood?” Ruby’s voice was
a whisper from the other bed.
“What’s it like in Hollywood? People really rich there?” Pearl chimed in.
Cissy almost moaned out loud.
“Did you know any famous people, movie stars and all?” Ruby propped herself on an elbow. The two girls were lying head to foot on her bed, and when Pearl sat up a second later, Cissy felt as if she were facing a courtroom.
“No,” she said. “No movie stars.”
“I heard your daddy had this big old fancy bus that your mama caught a ride on, and that was how they met. Your daddy let you go with him on the bus?”
Cissy closed her eyes. She had only been on the bus a few times, and she was not about to say so to Ruby and Pearl. She tried to think of something that would satisfy their curiosity, but nothing occurred to her. All she had ever cared about was her daddy and spending time with him at his house, but Delia had not let her go over there much the last few years.
When Cissy had no ready answers, Ruby and Pearl quickly lost patience. They already resented the child who was forcing them to share a bed. What business did Cissy and Delia have coming in on their new place, turning everything back to front and getting their mama all excited?
“Why is it the famous people always have such stupid kids?” Ruby asked, head in the air, as if she were speaking to no one at all.
Pearl joined in happily. “Yeah, it’s like fantastic numbers of them kill themselves all the time.”
“I heard that too.”
Cissy ran her tongue over her teeth. The sharp edges of her molars reassured her. She turned over on one hip and looked toward Ruby. “What’s your mama’s real name? Don’t she got a real name? And why’d she give you two those silly damn names?”
“Don’t say nothing about my mama,” Ruby hissed.
“Yeah.” Pearl was louder than her sister. “Don’t talk about Mama.”
“Oh, I like your mama,” Cissy said. She put her thumb on her lower lip and rubbed thoughtfully. “I do. But it’s a bit much, don’t you think? Ruby and Pearl, your mama’s little jewels?”
“You are a bitch,” Ruby said.
“Worse than your mama,” Pearl added.
“Stuck up.” Ruby flopped back on the bed.
“Full of herself,” Pearl agreed. She lay down at Ruby’s side. For a moment the two girls glared at Cissy and then turned their backs to her together.
I want to go home, Cissy thought. But she had no home. Stubbornly she bit into the cotton pillowcase. She was not going to cry. She listened to Ruby and Pearl whispering softly so that she couldn’t make out what they were saying. When they fell quiet, Cissy rolled over, keeping the pillow between her and the other bed like a shield.
Maybe if M.T. had not been there, Delia would not have fallen so completely apart. It was a kind of permission, having M.T. to cook them country fried steak, enroll Cissy in school, and take her downtown to get a few clothes. It was M.T. who found them the house out by the river, the one that belonged to Richie, who worked with her in the meat department at the A&P. She did not tell Delia how much persuasion it took to get that house.
“I don’t know,” the man said. “An’t she that woman run off and left them girls?”
“She’s my dearest oldest friend,” M.T. swore. “And you know me, Richie. If I say she’s all right, she is.”
“M.T., you are about the silliest thing. That’s what I know. And you an’t going to talk me into renting to no woman couldn’t be trusted with her own babies, much less my old house.”
“Oh, Richie, you don’t mean that.” M.T. batted her eyes and smiled and coaxed until she thought her face would break. In the end, Ritchie rented the house to her, not to Delia, and made her swear he would never have to meet the woman, nor do any work if anything went wrong.
“My wife is gonna skin me,” Richie complained.
“She’s going to be happy to get the money,” M.T. reassured him, hoping Delia had more savings stashed away than she had mentioned so far. Twice in the decade Delia had been gone she had sent money when M.T. asked for it, no questions asked and no mention of repayment. But every time M.T. had mentioned money since she found her friend out at Paul’s house, Delia started to cry as if she had no more than the little roll M.T. had already seen in her bag. That could not be right, M.T. told herself. There would be money coming sooner or later. Delia couldn’t have left California with so little to show for all that time.
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?”
“Le
ave 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.”
Since 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.”
Cavedweller Page 7