Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  Delia was startled. “You have?”

  “My wife said you had stopped by.” He smiled gently. “And I knew your people. I knew your mother.”

  Delia felt all her air leave her. Reverend Hillman’s eyes were deep-set, sad, and compassionate. He looked at her like she was a child who had fallen and was turning to him to raise her up. For an instant Delia was that child, and then a wave of nausea flooded her throat.

  “I didn’t know that,” she said, and swallowed painfully. “That you knew my mother. I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, I’m not a young man.” The minister brushed dust down the front of his trousers. “And I’ve lived in Cayro most of my life. I was away when you married Clint Windsor, I’m‘sorry to say. Didn’t come back to take over the parish until after you had gone.”

  Gone, Delia thought. Not run off, but gone. “I don’t remember you,” she said.

  “But I remember you.” Reverend Hillman put his hands together in a steeple. “I remember you the Easter after your family was lost—the look on your face when you came to listen to the choir service. You came alone and you stayed at the back. You were just a spit of a girl, and so badly hurt I prayed for you with all my heart. But I was young and unsure of myself. When you didn’t come back, I never went after you. I’ve regretted that for years.”

  “I was all right,” Delia said.

  “Were you?” Reverend Hillman leaned forward.

  Was I? Delia wondered. Probably not.

  “Are you all right now?”

  Delia laughed. “Probably not,” she said, unable to stop herself from grinning like a fool. She had not been prepared for this.

  He smiled back at her. “Well, maybe we can do something about that.”

  “I want to see my girls,” Delia blurted. “That’s why I came to you. They’re with Grandma Windsor.”

  “Louise Windsor, yes.” Reverend Hillman nodded and looked over at his car. “It’s been hard for her, I think. But they are fine girls, Deirdre and Amanda. Fine girls. And of course you want to see them. Who would know better how hard it is to lose a mother?” He turned back to her.

  “I saw you at church a few weeks ago, but you left early. Have you spoken to Mrs. Windsor yet?”

  “No, I hadn’t thought she would want to speak to me.”

  He studied the toes of his shiny black shoes. “Probably not,” he agreed. “A lot of anger in Louise Windsor, a lot.” He sighed. “You want me to speak to her?”

  Delia felt as if her hips had turned to jelly. She had no idea how to stand when she was not wound up tight to argue or plead or fight off an attack. Was he really going to help her? “Oh yes,” she breathed.

  Reverend Hillman licked his lips and glanced at his car again. “I have to ask you, Mrs. Byrd. Are you going to be coming to join us at Holiness?”

  Delia’s hips locked. “I hadn’t planned on it,” she said. “I’ve been going to Cayro Baptist with my friend M.T., but I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Other than stay here. I’m going to stay in Cayro, that’s for certain.”

  For a moment Delia imagined herself attending Holiness Redeemer, under the gaze of Mrs. Hillman and Grandma Windsor and all those old men who had done business with Clint and his daddy. The minister had surprised her by talking about her family, mentioning her mother. But no, Delia thought, she was not going to join his church.

  Reverend Hillman’s eyes were trained on her, sad and knowing. “Well,” he said after a moment, “you should take your time deciding what to do, but I’m glad you’re here to stay. There’s good people here, some hard ones and some that are pretty worn down. But good-hearted people nonetheless—who will be watching over you. There are lots of those.”

  Delia’s throat constricted. He wasn’t going to help her after all. She pulled her hands up to her belly, pressing hard below her heart. “Thank you,” she said, “for talking to me—I appreciate it.”

  “Oh, thank me later,” Reverend Hillman said. “After I speak to Louise. Maybe she’ll listen to me. If she does, we’ll see if you can’t get a little time with your girls.”

  Delia gaped at him. Reverend Hillman ran his hand once over his almost bald head and walked to his car. “We’ll talk again,” he said. “Louise is not going to be happy to see me, so this might take a little time. We’ll talk when I have something to tell you.”

  Delia watched him drive away and looked back at the house. Mrs. Hillman was at the window, her face like a storm cloud and her mouth like a seam. Delia dipped her head and smiled. Some days you get a little, she thought. Some days you get a lot.

  Three months after Delia started working at the Bonnet, Marcia Pearlman had a stroke while locking up the shop one Saturday afternoon. She slid sideways and cawed like a crow just as Delia reached her car. When Delia ran back, Mrs. Pearlman kicked twice and rolled over unconscious.

  For several weeks the Bonnet was closed while Marcia lay curled in a bed at the hospital. Delia visited her every other day, watching as she slowly regained the ability to speak and move. She was angry at the doctors and then angry at God. “Damn,” she said for the first time in her life, tears streaming down her cheeks. She wanted to sit up, say what she had to say, and take care of herself, but her left leg buckled at every effort to stand and her left arm dangled uselessly, the wrist already turning in and the fingers going blue-gray.

  The doctor told her she had done remarkably well. A stroke was an unpredictable thing. She could have been so much worse off, crippled for life and unable to talk. “Damn,” Mrs. Pearlman said, “damn damn,” and waved him away from the bed.

  “I got nobody,” she told Delia in a halting mumble. “Little Social Security. Little savings. Not much.” She shifted her left arm. “Damn hand hurts. Damn.”

  “You got friends,” Delia told her. “Good friends.”

  “Friends.” Mrs. Pearlman sighed. “Need money. You can make me some money.” Her brown eyes were flinty and keen. “You got talent. I let you run my shop. You make me some money.”

  Delia frowned.

  The shop and the building belonged to her outright, Mrs. Pearlman explained painfully. “But won’t sell it. Lease it to you. Lease it to you, and you’ll make me some money. And”—she paused and forced her lips into a smile—“you got to do my hair. Every week you got to do my hair.”

  “If I run the shop, people might not come.”

  “Who comes now?” Mrs. Pearlman shrugged weakly. “You’re good. Time passes. They’ll come. You’ll make me the money I need.” She closed her eyes, then opened them and fixed them on Delia.

  “Anything you do to the shop, you pay for,” she said. “I pay for nothing.”

  Slowly Delia nodded.

  “Good.” Mrs. Pearlman shook her arm again. “Damn damn,” she said with a frown. “Damn damn.”

  Marcia’s insurance man drew up a lease, and Delia called Rosemary in California to ask for a loan. If she was going to run the shop herself, she meant to repair what years of neglect had done.

  “Just what I have always wanted,” Rosemary shouted into the phone. “To be part owner of a white woman’s beauty salon.”

  “Well, I won’t exactly own it. I’ll be leasing it, but I’ll do your hair when you come visit.” Rosemary could hear the smile in Delia’s voice. “I’ll read up on weaving and stuff, do it any way you want.”

  The Bonnet had been a beauty parlor for forty years and a garage before that. It was just a concrete-floored outbuilding for what had been the Cayro Hotel, but the hotel was long gone. The Bonnet was nothing much—one big room with a set of sinks in a section walled off by a low-hanging arch—but it was the first place Delia had ever earned a paycheck, the site, she swore, of too many of her beginnings and endings. From the back window she had watched the police take her uncle Luke away to jail and Granddaddy Byrd threaten the sheriff. From the front window, with its screen of dying plants, she had watched the sunset the night she knew herself ready to say yes to Clint Windsor’s proposal of marr
iage. And it was in the Bonnet’s doorway that she had staggered and felt the wet stream between her thighs and known by the salt-sweet smell and the bite of pain that Amanda was about to be born.

  When Delia decided to take over the Bonnet, M.T. quit her job at the A&P. “We’ll do fine,” she said when Delia protested. “You and me will do just fine. We’ll get the shop open and going in no time. You wait and see.”

  M.T. read everything she could find on bookkeeping and tax accounting, signed up for a course at the junior college, and designed her own system around what Delia said she needed. “Real friends,” M.T. told Cissy. “Your mama and I are real friends, and we know how to take care of each other.”

  “Well, I hope so,” Delia said with a laugh. “We’ll either do fine together or go to hell in a handcart. Either way, we’ll take care of each other.”

  “Why you think Marcia Pearlman was so set on you taking the shop?” Steph asked. She had agreed to take a chair once the Bonnet opened—strictly on commission, of course, just like M.T.

  “Maybe ’cause she and I both know it suits me.”

  “Yeah?” M.T. turned a page in her accounting book. “You think a building is you all over?”

  “In a way. I think it is a weight,” Delia said. “I think this place is something you carry. I know how to carry it, and I appreciate it, God knows. Couldn’t make a living no other way, but I also know what Marcia Pearlman intends. For a Baptist lady, that woman is almost Catholic. She expects expiation, public and precise. This is where Marcia Pearlman thinks I should be. This is the price she thinks I should pay for all my sins, doing hair till I die and cursing her name with every water bill. I even think she means it kindly. In her own way I think she’s ensuring my chance at salvation. I don’t imagine she cares if I like what I’m doing. Happiness don’t matter much in the Baptist scheme of things.”

  “You think the hippies care if you happy?” M.T. sniffed. She got defensive when Delia started talking about Baptists in that tone. For all her jokes, M.T. knew herself a good Baptist woman.

  “No,” Delia agreed. “An’t no hippies keeping track around here either.”

  Delia and M.T. and Stephanie were working on the shop one afternoon when a big sky-blue Oldsmobile pulled up and Granddaddy Byrd got out. Delia had never seen the car before, or the woman behind the wheel.

  “You got yourself a girlfriend?” M.T. asked when he came inside.

  “Harrumph!” he said, but heat showed on his cheeks.

  Standing at one of the sinks, Delia watched him come toward her. They hadn’t spoken since she arrived in Cayro, and she couldn’t imagine what had brought him to the Bonnet.

  “I got some stuff for you.” Granddaddy Byrd’s tongue appeared and wet his lower lip. “Some curtains and stuff you had in boxes. Thought you could use them here.” The color in his face deepened.

  M.T. waved an arm at Stephanie. “Let’s go get some Cokes,” she said. “I’m choking on dust.” The two women edged past the old man with a quizzical smile in Delia’s direction.

  “I appreciate the curtains,” Delia said, “you bringing them by.” She glanced out the window. The big square-faced woman in the car certainly didn’t look like any kind of girlfriend.

  “That’s Mrs. Stone,” Granddaddy Byrd said quickly. “The deputy told me I can’t drive no more, and she’s been helping me out.”

  “You have an accident?”

  “No, no. Just bumped a little old garbage can at the post office. Nothing hurt.” He licked his lips again. “There’s some flowerpots too. In the car. I thought maybe you’d want to clean up that window, put in some better pots.”

  “That’s real nice of you, Granddaddy.”

  “You an’t spoken to Clint yet, have you?” he said abruptly.

  Delia reached for the mop M.T. had left propped against the sink. “No.”

  “He’s pretty sick,” Granddaddy Byrd said. “Some people say it’s serious. Somebody said it was bad enough he might die.”

  Delia’s hands closed around the mop handle. Sick? What kind of sick? “I hadn’t heard that,” she said.

  Granddaddy Byrd nodded at her. “I figured you wouldn’t have heard. Thought you should know.” He looked around the shop. “You’re working hard.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Why did you think I should know?”

  Her grandfather looked at her. “You went to talk to Reverend Hillman, didn’t you? You went out to the church? Well, Clint don’t go out there, and Louise Windsor an’t about to tell nobody her business. Seemed to me you should know what’s going on.” He shuffled his feet. “You want to get those girls, you need to know what is going on.”

  They looked at each other, the old man with his flushed cheeks and his faded eyes, and Delia with her hands locked around that mop like it was holding her up.

  “Thank you,” she said finally.

  Granddaddy Byrd dropped his head. “You got to help me, if you want that stuff in the car.”

  Delia was carrying the last carton in when M.T. and Steph came back.

  “You all right?” M.T. asked her.

  Delia put the box down. “He told me Clint was sick,” she said. “You know anything about that?”

  “Sick or crazy, I don’t think anybody knows for sure.” Steph dropped in her chair, pushed her mousy brown hair back, and looked at herself in the mirror. She had been talking about dyeing it red like Delia’s.

  “Somebody said he was sick last summer.” M.T. was frowning. “But nobody has seen him in so long. I didn’t know anything to tell you.”

  “An’t he working out at Firestone?” Delia asked.

  “Well, not the last year. He was for a long time.” Steph turned her chair toward Delia. “Is it cancer? People talked about something like that, but I thought it was just gossip.”

  “The Windsors keep to themselves pretty much. You know that,” M.T. said. “Clint an’t been right in years, always drinking himself into the ground. Don’t think I’ve laid eyes on him since his daddy died and his mama had that big service. I saw the girls then. I wrote you about that.”

  Delia nodded.

  “Well, after that Clint went to live with his mama for a few years, straightened up a little. But he kept your old house, used the money from his daddy’s insurance to buy it outright. I think his mama wanted him to stay with her and the girls, but he didn’t.”

  Steph spun around in her chair. “My Lyle swears Clint can’t stand his mama and that’s why he keeps the house, so he don’t have to stay where he can’t stand to be.”

  “She is a hard woman.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a fact.”

  “But do you think he’s really sick?” Delia stood up and grabbed the mop again.

  “I don’t know,” M.T. said. “I just don’t know.”

  “I’ll find out,” Steph promised. “Just give me a few days and I’ll find out everything.”

  The plan was to reopen the Bonnet in February, and there were only two real obstacles. One was the effort required to get the shop itself ready, but Rosemary’s check helped immensely, and neither Delia nor M.T. was afraid of hard work. Steph complained a lot, but she got down to it too, helping with the scraping and scrubbing while M.T. and Delia did the painting themselves. Most of the paint came again from Sally, who seemed to have endless stockpiles stored out in her garage, cleansers and paper goods bought at discount and bins of stuff other people had thrown out that Sally knew would come in handy someday. That meant that some of the paint was old and useless and all of it came in odd colors. Delia and M.T. experimented until they produced a great quantity of a curious peach glaze.

  “I like it,” Steph told them, and they took that as gospel. It was a good thing they all liked the color, because the greasy, stained walls of the old beauty shop needed three coats. It was also fortunate that they had a little money to buy white for the ceiling.

  “Too much of a good thing is always a problem,” Steph said. “And I think I would
turn bilious if this was all there was all over everything.”

  The curtains Granddaddy Byrd had brought were faded and tattered, but Delia put the pots to good use in the front window, salvaging a few of Mrs. Pearlman’s plants and buying new ones to create a fantasy jungle that would draw people into the shop.

  Once the work was in progress, the other obstacle loomed larger. Nadine Reitower confronted M.T. on the sidewalk one afternoon, demanding to know what they thought they were doing giving over an institution like the Bonnet to a woman like Delia Byrd. Since she hadn’t made any headway with Marcia Pearlman, she had decided to confront the beast in its lair.

  “I didn’t give her nothing,” M.T. said, “though I would sure enough. You know perfectly well that Marcia’s leasing the shop to Delia now that she can’t run it no more.”

  Nadine plucked at the thin lace collar that protruded from her pink sweater, which was buttoned all the way up. “I told Marcia before I wouldn’t have Delia Byrd touching me. Now that hussy’s taking over the only place I’ve ever gone to get my hair done!”

  “Nothing is going to rub off on you, you know,” M.T. said. “You an’t gonna take sin from the touch of Delia’s hand.”

  “Marcia should never have given that woman the shop in the first place.” Nadine tossed her head, and her hen-brown bun bobbed dangerously. She was showing the effect of not having been to a hairdresser for a while.

  “She didn’t give it to her.” M.T. spoke impatiently. “It’s a lease. Steep rent too, and money Marcia is going to need. Seems to me you should be more concerned with making sure Marcia gets her money out of the fallen woman than keeping the fallen woman from doing decent work. If she don’t manage the Bonnet, what you think she’s going to do? She won’t have no choice but to offer sin and wicked ways at half price to support herself and her child!”

  “You are a rude and vulgar woman.” Nadine’s forehead was shiny with sudden sweat.

  “Yes, I am, and I’m late too.” M.T. stepped around Nadine and marched to the Bonnet’s door.

  That evening M.T. and Steph discussed the problem over a plate of fried potatoes and shrimp at Goober’s restaurant and bar.