Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  “Get on, girl. You go in M.T.’s car. I’ll take Amanda and Dede with me.”

  Bang. Bang. Doors slammed. A curtain fluttered. Dust lifted off that porch.

  “Lord, I’d rather eat ground glass than cross your mama.” M.T. wiped her face and started her Buick.

  “You’d have a better chance of getting over it,” Cissy said, watching as the kitchen curtains were pulled roughly together.

  Neither Amanda nor Dede said a word the whole way to Clint’s house. When they got there, Delia had to prod them into the bedroom where he lay limp and almost speechless. Cissy followed, breathing in Dede’s slightly flowery perfume and Amanda’s odor of starchy insistence. The girls stood and stared at their father. When Amanda bent over to kiss his stubbly cheek, Dede made a vague, impatient gesture.

  “Girls. Good to see you here,” the man whispered with clumsy grace, but his eyes wandered to Delia and Cissy, plainly more interested in them than in the daughters he had kept as his own for so long.

  Dede stalked out, but Amanda stood by her father’s bed until he finally met her gaze. “Daddy, you don’t look well,” she said then, in a tone darker than a curse. Clint flinched and blinked up at Amanda with her own piercing gray eyes.

  That evening Delia sat them all down at the dinner table. Her face was stern and open, the girls’ shuttered and blank. The air between them was electric with suspicion.

  “You have to know I never wanted to be apart from you,” Delia said.

  Her words were stones dropping from a great height. Amanda laced her fingers on the table. Dede wiped the corners of her mouth with a forefinger. Cissy picked at her cuticles.

  “I wanted you with me, every moment. I lost myself in California because I could not abide what had separated us. And I did not know how to get you back.” Delia turned from Amanda to Dede and finally to Cissy. Her lips seemed to have thinned under the pressure of speaking precisely.

  Delia took a breath and looked at Amanda. “Your daddy and I have reconciled. We’re going to take care of each other, all of us.” She paused. “You know your daddy is dying. He’s going to take all my attention for a while. I expect to need your help. You’ll all have to help, I think. And you’ll regret it badly later if you don’t spend some time with him now.” She stopped again, her glance darting between Amanda and Dede.

  “I know you don’t want to be here. When you’re of age, you can leave. Eighteen, and you can go where you will. That’s not so long, Amanda. A couple of years is nothing. And the time will come when you will see how much I love you.”

  Amanda kept her eyes trained on Delia’s. “I don’t love you,” she said. “I don’t care nothing about you.” Dede nodded almost imperceptibly. “You’re nothing to me.”

  Delia flushed, but her gaze never wavered. “And you’re everything to me. Everything. The two of you.” She looked at Cissy. “The three of you. The three of you are all I want in the world. If you don’t love me, I’m not surprised. If you hate me, I can take that too. But you’re mine, all of you. You’re everything I am. And whatever else happens, I am going to take care of you.”

  Cissy shifted in her seat. Dede’s mouth was open and her color high as she twisted a strand of hair. Amanda clasped her hands more tightly in front of her, as if in prayer.

  “God watches over all of us,” she said. “You think He doesn’t know what you are doing? You think we don’t? A couple of years is nothing in the sight of the Lord.”

  Dede retreated to the bedroom that first night, the room Delia had so carefully prepared. She pulled on a set of headphones, covered her eyes with one arm, and lay back on the bed, the posture announcing that she was going to stay there until she was eighteen and could get up and walk out of the house a free woman. Amanda camped out in the living room, on the couch near where Delia liked to sit and read. Cissy stood in the doorway for a while, unsure whether to take her usual place on the couch or go read on her bed only a few feet from where Dede sprawled. Clint was coughing hard in his room. Delia had busied herself in the kitchen.

  Never sparing Cissy a glance, Amanda got up and turned on the television set, rotating the dial until she located the news. Then she retreated to the spot she had staked out and shifted down so that she was sitting on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. She looked almost relaxed.

  Cissy joined her, sitting down on the far side of the couch. She didn’t know what she expected, not real conversation surely, but maybe a few remarks about the news, the weather, the local sports.

  “This guy,” she said, gesturing at the announcer, “is about the scariest-looking guy on television. Once, I saw his wig slide sideways, and he did the rest of the show like that. Somebody in the studio was giggling and snorting, but he never seemed to notice. Just kept talking with his wig hanging off.”

  Amanda ignored her. With enormous care she opened the backpack she had brought with her, pulled out a giant-sized box of vanilla wafers and an equally large jar of Jiff, and slowly began to spread the wafers with the peanut butter. Her attention was completely focused on the cookies and the television. When every wafer had been painstakingly covered with its layer of Jiff and they were all lying in a great open design on the table surface, she began to pair them, each pressed on top of the other, the edges precisely aligned. With one extended finger Amanda skimmed off the extra peanut butter that oozed from the circumference of each sandwich, and popped it into her small tight mouth. Cissy watched the whole process, unable to look away, until the coffee table was littered with a mass of joined cookies and the whole room smelled of vanilla and peanut oil.

  Amanda gave Cissy one expressionless glance and turned back to her project. From the interior of her backpack she produced a large plastic bag and began to parcel the cookies inside. When the table was empty except for one lone cookie sandwich and a scattering of pale crumbs, she carefully sealed her plastic bag and tucked it in the depths of her pack.

  Cissy discovered that her mouth was open. With a shake of her head she closed it and turned to watch the announcer. When she looked back, Amanda was munching on that cookie, her eyes fixed on Cissy’s face.

  “I despise you,” Amanda hissed, her breath smelling strongly of peanut butter. “And her!” She pointed toward the kitchen. Her mouth barely moved when she spoke.

  “Even if I have to go to hell for it,” Amanda said, zipping up her backpack grimly. “God will understand.” She hugged the pack to her breasts. “You’ll be there, you know. You’re going to hell for sure.”

  “I’m going to bed,” Cissy said. When she went into the room, Dede had turned down all the lights and pulled a sheet up over her shoulders. Nervously Cissy put on her sleeping shirt and climbed into her own bed. Dede’s body was close enough to touch.

  “What’s wrong with your eye?” Dede propped her head on one hand and peered at Cissy.

  “Nothing.”

  “You crying?”

  “No. I just get watery eyes sometimes.”

  “Only the one.”

  “So?”

  Dede shrugged and lay back, falling silent when Amanda came in and knelt to say her prayers.

  For four days Amanda ate her cookie sandwiches and refused everything Delia offered. Breakfast and dinner, peanut butter and vanilla cookies. She bought her lunch at school and threw away the wrapped sandwich Delia had made for her. Nothing belonging to these people was to be hers. When she went to sleep, she stretched herself taut, as if she did not want to relax on sheets that Delia had washed.

  “You are going to hell,” she told Cissy every morning, and “To hell,” she said again, when they passed in the bathroom. Cissy said nothing in reply. What she felt was certainly not to be admitted. It was Amanda’s expression, Cissy thought, her bright, determined eyes. Her voice was so sincere, her words, the smell of her—a girl who would not compromise. Against her will, Cissy was enthralled. Amanda was magnificent, and they were of the same blood. Amanda was Delia’s girl, Cissy’s half sister, someone to be
proud of even if Cissy wished she had never been born.

  Amanda and Dede were as different as Cissy could imagine, especially for children of the same daddy. It was just that the differences between them were not immediately visible. Seen side by side, asleep, they were almost identical, equally slender and lithe. It was also true that both of them had the same white-blond hair, without a hint of Delia’s red. But Amanda kept her hair cut off above the shoulders, and Dede’s was a long brush down her back. It was not even that Dede was beautiful while Amanda was not. Amanda should have been beautiful. Everything was there to make a beauty. Grandma Windsor had called the girls her Roses of Sharon, but it was Dede who was the bloom and Amanda the briar.

  It was after you spent a little time with them that the differences between the girls became pronounced. People who knew them forgot the similarities. Though they had inherited the same frame, it seemed their bones were sorted out differently, Dede’s finely carved and willowy, Amanda’s awkward and heavy. She was within a pound of Dede’s weight, but stood out like some thorny desert plant, all bristly angles and serrated edges. Amanda had those astonishing gray eyes, sharp as the ice on meat put by too long, while Dede’s eyes were blue and deceptively placid, and though her smile was crooked, it was almost gentle. Amanda’s smile, severe and fierce, rocked people. Amanda’s smile made people look down to see what was unfastened, what was inside out.

  “Skinny,” people said of Amanda. “She’s skinny as a rail.” But turn them to Dede and a gleam would come into their eyes. “Look at that girl,” they would say. “You see that pretty little thing?”

  As she got older, Amanda’s features became more austere. Her face lengthened until it was as flat as the backside of a shovel. Her nose jutted out and down in a line with the corners of her mouth. It was a face as sad as the grave, always downcast, so that she looked up from under her eyebrows. Dede’s face was forthright, chin, nose, cheekbones, and brows protruding fearlessly, but the impact was cheerful. “Why, she’s prettier than her mama,” men said. Dede seemed always to be looking straight on, hopefully and curiously, and though she often pressed her lips tight together, she had none of the aura of repression that was Amanda’s essence. In Dede the sadness was more subdued, not so awful. In Dede it was almost attractive.

  That sadness, maybe, was what they got from Clint. That sadness, that suspicion, that fearfulness of spirit and deep sense of the fatefulness of life. They both expected trouble, Amanda head down and stubborn, Dede looking it in the eye and throwing her head back as if to say, What now?

  Their silences were different too, not like Delia’s, which were not quiet at all but full of humming, brief snatches of lyric, and muted music. Dede’s moments of stillness vibrated as loudly as Delia’s voice on the old records. And Amanda Louise could say more with a silent glance than most people could say in a string of curses. In her, quiet was a pool of great contempt across which only occasionally flashed a curse or a prayer. Cissy wondered sometimes about herself. She thought of herself as quiet, as a watcher, but she was not sure that was how other people saw her. Angry, resentful, and stubborn, M.T. had called her, and M.T. was rarely wrong. But Cissy had an object for her anger. Delia was the prism through which all her outrage focused. Delia was the fulcrum.

  “Your sisters are too strange for this world,” M.T. told Cissy after discovering that Dede had painted the ceiling of their room black and silver‘and pasted fragments of broken mirror all over it. “Every time I see ’em, I think how lucky I am to have my Pearl and my Ruby.”

  There was a part of Cissy that agreed with M.T. Dede and Amanda were difficult. Delia might be overjoyed to have her girls back, but she was paying for her triumph with every nerve in her body. The sisters did not so much settle into the house as take it over and remake it completely, but there was still no doubt in Cissy’s mind that on the whole she preferred them to M.T.’s butter-mouthed, vicious daughters.

  Dede not only painted the bedroom but hid cigarettes in Cissy’s underwear drawer and communicated with stern eyes that she would be very displeased if Cissy told Delia. Amanda, who was a junior at Cayro High but seemed oblivious to the opinions of the other girls there, promptly organized a prayer circle whose sole purpose seemed to be directing God’s special attention to her own heathen family. Cissy spent a lot of time in Clint’s room, reading or hiding out.

  When the sisters she had seen only at a distance or in photographs walked through the front door of Clint’s house still smelling of the wild clover that grew all around Grandma Windsor’s front yard, it struck Cissy that behind the facade of contempt and resentment she had already pieced out, there was still more that she knew nothing about. There was a world of justified rage in Dede’s pale cheekbones, a simple iron strength in Amanda’s tightly compressed lips. Dede was only two years older than Cissy, Amanda not quite five, both of them close enough to be recognizably family to Cissy, but they were nothing like her, and nothing like Delia. A little shiver went down her back when she looked at her long-lost sisters. All her life she had hated them. But from the moment they walked through Clint’s door, Cissy lost her certainty. Delia had always said the lost sisters were a part of her, and for the first time Cissy began to see how that might be so.

  Chapter 8

  Nadine Reitower was beside herself. “That hussy, she’s purely shameless,” she told her new hairdresser at Beckman’s. “Bad enough that place down the road’s been an eyesore all these years, with that worthless drunk staggering in and out, but now she moves in with those pitiful girls of hers, and God only knows what’s going on in there. And Lord, the youngest one, that devil child, going around in those dark glasses and always pestering my Nolan.”

  Nolan Reitower was Cissy’s first real friend. “I think he’s about the only young ’un around here,” M.T. had said when Delia and Cissy moved in with Clint. “And his mama keeps him pretty close to home. She’s a bit difficult, that Nadine Reitower.”

  Cissy never forgot the first few times she saw Nolan, planted on his mama’s porch every afternoon with a different paperback book in his hand. It was the books that drew her. Nadine had sniffed at Delia’s girl when she walked up to that porch and asked Nolan what he was reading, but Nolan just pushed his glasses up his sweaty nose and held out the book, a pristine copy of Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.

  “You read Stranger?” Cissy asked.

  “I’ve read ’em all. Only one I don’t reread is Podkayne. That one got on my nerves.”

  “Yeah, it’s like he wrote it on drugs or something. Most unbelievable girl in science fiction. I prefer Telzey myself. You know her?”

  Nolan nodded. “Schwartz,” he said, identifying the author.

  There was a cough of disapproval from Nadine’s chair as she pulled loose threads from a hem she was taking down.

  “You like science fiction then?” Nolan asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Nolan put Starship Troopers down with a scrap of ribbon marking his place. “Come on,” he said, and led her around to the back of the house and down into the basement. Along one wall of the workshop his daddy rarely used there were four tall bookshelves built just to hold paperbacks. Each was crammed tightly, books sorted alphabetically by author and marked with little cardboard dividers.

  “My collection.” Nolan’s voice was deep with pride.

  “Lord.” Cissy ran her fingers along the spines of some of the titles in the middle of one shelf: Harry Harrison, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Tanya Huff, Fritz Leiber, Ursula Le Guin, and multiple copies of the Julian May books arranged in sets. The bottom two shelves of each bookcase held magazines—Analog, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction—each boxed by year in labeled cardboard cases, though many were without covers and the oldest were stained and mildewed.

  “This is serious.” Cissy’s voice was hushed, and she looked up to see Nolan smiling at her.

  “If you want, you could borrow some.” He said it casually, but Cissy k
new it was no casual offer. A boy who sorted and shelved his books so meticulously but then had to put them down in the basement, that boy was not going to be casual about sharing them. Looking at Nolan’s collection, Cissy understood more about him than his mama had figured out in years.

  “I would appreciate you trusting me with your books,” she said. “And I’d be careful with them, very careful.”

  Cissy and Nolan became friends in that moment. It did not even bother her when she realized that he was in love with Dede. A boy who reread Tolkien and Heinlein every summer had to be a romantic, and Nolan’s first encounter with Dede was proof if more were needed.

  “Lord, look at you!” Nolan was on his way up the front steps with a couple of new books for Cissy and walked right into Dede racing out the door. “You’re beautiful,” he blurted.

  Dede laughed. “Well, look at you,” she said back. “Bet you’re your mama’s little precious.” She flashed a look of teenage contempt and walked away.

  “What she say?” Cissy asked, coming to the door.

  But Nolan just shook his head. He did not, fortunately, remember Dede’s exact words, only the look and feel of her as she trained those crisp blue eyes on him. Magnificent, he thought, and blushed every time he saw Dede on the street. It did not matter that she was two years older and could not see him at all. Nolan was in love, heart-struck and imprinted. Dede could have cursed him up one side and down the other, and he would have stood there waiting for her to curse him some more.

  Nolan was not the only one smitten with Dede. Young as she was, Dede caught the eye like something diamond-edged and precious. Boys would look over at her against their best intentions, be drawn in and made over just by standing next to her. It was something about the way she smelled. Good boys, churchgoing and respectful, would get a whiff of Dede and turn in a day to sucking Marlboros and spitting, talking bad and hoping for more than they could explain.