Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  “I’m wet enough, thank you.” M.T. turned back to Cissy. “Rosemary was with the band, wasn’t she?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  M.T. frowned. “Well, has she said how long she’s gonna stay?”

  “Long as Delia needs her.” Cissy looked over at Dede. “Couple of weeks or a month, Delia said.”

  “Well, I don’t know what kind of woman can just pick up and take off like that.” M.T. sighed elaborately and looked around the kitchen. A stack of crisp cotton sheets leaned against a neatly piled mound of faded jeans and T-shirts on the shelf beside the washing machine. The dish rack held four glasses and one bowl. There were no more pots sitting around half full of the soupy potatoes that were Clint’s mainstay, and the smell of blood and sick that was omnipresent from the first day Delia moved here had been replaced by a bleached austerity. The room looked clean for the first time in months.

  “At least it looks like she’s being a help while she’s here,” M.T. said.

  “Rosemary’s a house afire,” Dede said. “She puts on the radio and gets to work first thing in the morning. Don’t stop either. About the time I think she might be ready to sit down and rest, she starts making lists of things that still need to be done. Delia says she don’t know what she’s going to do when she leaves.”

  M.T. looked down at the material pulled tight over her thighs. “Is that a fact?” She drank the last of the Coke and stood up. “You tell her hello for me, say how glad I am she came.”

  Cissy and Dede watched M.T. walk out to her car. “It’s eating her up, Rosemary taking care of Delia,” Cissy said.

  “Oh, she’ll be all right.” Dede went back to the ironing board. “M.T.’s as tough as they come.” She turned the spray bottle up and squeezed into the air so the water droplets rained down on her upturned face.

  Rosemary’s visit scandalized Cayro. Nadine Reitower told her husband that she was sure there would be a tragedy in that house, that if Delia Byrd wasn’t going to smother Clint Windsor in his bed, then that black woman from Los Angeles surely would. “Just look at her,” Nadine kept saying. Her husband shook his head, but he did look at Rosemary. Every man in Cayro looked at Rosemary. Men joked with each other about her at Goober’s on Friday nights. “Did you see who’s staying with that Delia Byrd?” “High-priced tail” was the general consensus. “Yankee nigger bitch,” said Harold Parish, Marty’s older brother. “Time was we’d have run her ass back to New York City.”

  “She’s from Los Angeles,” Richie Biron said, drawing out the syllables.

  The men around him laughed. “Still a Yankee bitch,” one of them said.

  “Oh, come on, son,” Lyle Pruitt said to Richie. “She’s just helping out old Delia Byrd and Clint.”

  “That Delia’s another one.”

  “Delia Byrd was born right here in Bartow County,” the bartender threw in. “I knew her daddy before he died.”

  “Maybe he was born here, but his child got the soul of a Yankee.”

  “I don’t know. You ever listened to that band, old Mud Dog? Woman could sound just like Maybelle Carter.”

  “Naaa, her voice is deeper. Reminds me of Rosanne Cash.”

  “Chrissie Hynde,” Pat, the waitress, cut in.

  “Who?”

  “The Pretenders, you know that song. ‘Got brass in pocket?’ That deep-voice angry kind of song?” Pat whacked her order book against her hip and tried a Chrissie Hynde chord. The men snickered. “Well, that always reminds me of Delia on Mud Dog,” Pat insisted, “like she sings on ‘Lost Girls.’ ”

  “You crazy.”

  “I never liked that one.”

  “Still say she’s just another nigger bitch.”

  “Delia?”

  “No, dammit, that colored girl she’s got staying with her.”

  “Oh, Harold, hell. Leave it alone.”

  Harold Parish’s racial views didn’t stop him from trying to flirt with Rosemary at the Piggly Wiggly one Sunday afternoon. “How you doing?” he asked her.

  She gave his sweaty features and beady black eyes a carefully blank look. “I’m in the market for greens, pork shoulder, and red potatoes.” Rosemary studied Harold’s acne-scarred cheek. “Don’t need any trouble or any big-shouldered men,” she said, and stepped past him.

  Harold went red. There was something in the look Rosemary gave him that made him feel not only big-shouldered but handsome and appreciated. He felt as if someone had finally seen past his gangly body and bad skin. After that Harold discouraged the vulgar talk.

  “It an’t as if I’d date a black girl,” he told his friend Beans. “But if I was going to, that’s one I’d go for.”

  In the second week of the visit, Stephanie bought herself a costume choker that was almost a match for Rosemary’s gold necklace. “Everybody in Los Angeles has one,” Steph told the women who came into the Bonnet and complimented her. M.T. was conspicuously silent. When Dede saw the choker, she blushed. She had been thinking about buying one for herself.

  M.T. was polite whenever she saw Rosemary, but she stayed away from the house and even took a few days off to go visit her cousins in Tallahassee. “Ecological niche,” Rosemary joked. “I would probably like M.T. if we’d met first, and she might even like me. But I can tell she’s worrying I’m going to talk Delia into moving back to Los Angeles.”

  “Are you?” Dede was hopeful.

  “Lord, no.” Rosemary beamed at the girl. “M.T. would hunt me down and rip my heart out.”

  It was not simply that Rosemary was magazine-model gorgeous, with those enormous eyes and that fine neck. She was also outrageous. She ignored custom and prejudice, going around in a gossamer skirt. Sometimes she covered her scar with that gold necklace, sometimes with a creamy scarf. Once, when she saw Amanda staring at her as she was washing dishes in the kitchen, Rosemary confided that she was thinking of outlining the scar with eye makeup and glitter.

  “It adds character to have a flaw in a precious stone,” she said, and when Amanda hurried outside, Rosemary leaned over and yelled out the door after her. “Don’t you think I’m a character?”

  The two of them sniped continually. Amanda complained that there was not enough room for Delia’s friend, and Rosemary talked out loud about how some people might do better to cut back on their praying and do a little more picking up around the house.

  “I pick up after myself,” Amanda huffed.

  “Rosemary is our guest and she’s helping us out,” Delia said. “Don’t be rude to her.”

  “I am not rude!” Amanda shouted.

  “Maybe she’s scared I’m going to steal you away,” Rosemary said to Delia after Amanda announced she was going to yet another prayer meeting and stalked off.

  “No,” Delia told her. “I don’t think Amanda would mind me leaving. You just shake up her simple notions of how the world is supposed to be.”

  “Well, then, I am a blessing in disguise, because from where I stand, your girls are entirely too certain how things are supposed to be.” Rosemary was forcing cooked potatoes through a sieve for Clint’s dinner. She wouldn’t feed him, but she had taken over all the cooking.

  “No, Rosemary, that’s not the problem. They’re not certain of anything, anything at all.” Delia, who had slowly been getting more rest, sounded tired all over again. “Think how they’ve grown up. As far as Amanda and Dede know, there an’t nobody in this world they can trust to be there for them the way you are here for me now.”

  Rosemary frowned and went back to shoving potatoes through the tiny holes in the sieve.

  Amanda could not get over the fact that Rosemary used suntan lotion. “I burn same as you,” Rosemary told her. “Faster. My skin is finer than yours is.”

  “That’s a fact,” Dede said as Amanda left the yard in disgust.

  “Thank God, I’m not that touchy.” Rosemary smiled at Dede as Amanda left the room. “She’s always on her way somewhere, isn’t she?”

  Dede grinned. She and Rosemary ha
d bonded over teasing Amanda and then discovered a mutual passion for fashion and style. Rosemary had shown Dede how to highlight her eyes with a blue-black pencil and shape her brows to follow the line of her eyes. They had taken over the bathroom for hours and set up a mirror on the kitchen counter so Dede could check her makeup in daylight.

  “See, you don’t wear that blush before sunset,” Rosemary told her. “It’s perfect for night. Make you look like a clown in sunlight.”

  “Makes you look like a fool any hour of the day,” Amanda said. “Excuse me, could I please get to the sink?”

  Amanda grew steadily more furious the more Dede followed Rosemary around. Good Christian girls in Amanda’s tiny universe went barefaced until they were married. Wearing makeup was just further evidence of Dede’s intention to sin.

  “She’s fourteen, not forty,” Amanda protested to Delia.

  Delia did not see the problem. “It’s perfectly all right to try things out at home,” she said. “I’d rather she learned how to do makeup from Rosemary than copy some of the girls I see coming in the Bonnet.”

  “She shouldn’t be messing with that stuff at all.”

  “Amanda, your sister has her own ways. She’s not like you, and she doesn’t have to be.” Delia did not want to fight, but she had discovered that it was better to be firm with Amanda than to try to avoid arguments.

  “Ways! What ways? The devil’s ways!” Amanda pointed her finger at Delia. “See what you say when she’s running the streets. See what you say when she comes home pregnant and can’t even name the father.” She crossed her arms under her breasts. This was something she knew about. She had been going to the special family programs with the Grahams over at Tabernacle Baptist. She sat with Lucy Graham and her brother, Michael, the young man everyone said was going to replace Reverend Myles when he was ready to retire. They shared the study guides on the power of prayer and the very real dangers the devil put in the way of teenagers. Michael wanted Amanda to be his partner in the young people’s class on miracles in everyday life, and he had already told her how much he loved her bright scrubbed face and her disdain for worldly vanities, makeup and powder and flowery scents. Amanda knew she could never tell Delia and Dede about Michael, how he smiled into her eyes and how he made her feel. When he touched her, she knew in a way she had never known before the real danger that Dede was courting.

  “Dede’s going to get in trouble, just you wait and see,” Amanda declared.

  “I’m not deaf, you know,” Dede yelled from the bedroom. “And I’m not going to get pregnant. I’m not a damn fool.”

  “She’s not running the streets.” Delia tried to keep her voice level.

  “Wait and see, just you wait and see. I know what I know.”

  Dede giggled at Amanda’s constant harping on sin, but it worried Delia. Amanda started going in to Clint every day to read to him from her Bible, beginning with the Book of Job and working her way through the Psalms. The night she reached Psalm 107—Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, being bound in affliction and iron—Cissy came to the door twice and saw Clint with his teeth clenched and his eyes focused on the ceiling. He looked as if every word out of Amanda’s mouth was grating on his bones.

  “She keeps that up, she’ll kill him.”

  Cissy jumped. Dede was standing in the hall behind her.

  “’Course, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it?” Dede nodded in Clint’s direction. The man was starting to rock slightly under the impact of Amanda’s implacable recitation.

  “You hate him that much?”

  “Oh yeah,” Dede said with a blinding smile. “Grandma Windsor always said it took blood to know blood. My blood knows his blood and hates every drop that moves through his veins.” Her smile flattened into a look of cold assessment. “You don’t hate him at all, do you?”

  Cissy looked back at the narrow bed and the body huddled under the sheets. Clint’s head was turned to the door. His lips were pulled back from his teeth, and his eyes searched Cissy’s.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t hate him.”

  “More fool you,” Dede laughed, “more fool you.”

  “Where are you from?” Dede asked Rosemary, who was looking into the bathroom mirror over her shoulder. Rosemary used a tissue to wipe away the excess foundation she had applied to Dede’s cheekbone and smiled at the girl’s pleased expression. “I was born in a hospital in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Raised in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, and Ceylon. My father was an engineer for a petroleum outfit. He invented a process for purifying certain oils you wouldn’t know how to pronounce.” She drew one finger along her right eyebrow, then the left, smoothing the fine hairs. “I’m your granddaddy’s worst nightmare, child, a black Yankee woman raised to be rich and bossy.”

  Rosemary laughed, a full, joyful tone that Cissy heard in the next room. She knew that laugh. For an instant she could see it all again, Rosemary in California in a tiger-striped bikini and big purple heart-shaped sunglasses. She went to the door of the bathroom, where Dede and Rosemary were still giggling.

  “You were with Booger,” Cissy said, not thinking how she knew.

  “That silly man?” Rosemary waved an arm and Dede cocked her head expectantly. “I was never with that man. I let him hang out with me for a while, be seen with me. That was all. Booger had talent but he didn’t have style. My men have style, always have had style.”

  “Amen,” said Delia, coming down the hall with an armload of sheets.

  What was she? Amanda wondered. Some kind of prostitute? In her mind, that was the only way Rosemary made sense. If not, where did it come from—the arrogance, the jewelry and clothes, the glossy look of that skin? Sin, it had to come from sin.

  “Doesn’t she have a job she has to go back to?” Amanda asked Delia, echoing M.T.’s question.

  “Rosemary owns things,” Delia said. “And she’s always been good with money.”

  “Owns what?” Dede was fascinated.

  “Shopping centers, mostly,” said Rosemary in a bland, honey-coated voice. “I’m partial to commerce, not just property. I like my money to make money. That was what my father told me, that money is meant to be put to work or given away.”

  “You given a lot away?” asked Dede.

  “Oh, honey, I’ve given away more than most people ever get.” Rosemary put her arms around Dede’s shoulders and laughed like a bird, high and bright. “Isn’t that right, Delia, haven’t I given away more than we could count?”

  Delia nodded, and Amanda glared. Dede leaned back into Rosemary’s embrace. Delia shifted the sheets in her arms and gave her friend a long look. Cissy wanted to ask about all that money and all those years in California, and all the things she thought she remembered from when she was a little girl, but the look in Delia’s eyes stopped her. The gleam there implied a world of story behind the tale Rosemary was spinning. Treasured daughter, careful education, loving daddy, California shine—there was something else, another story, not so simple, from the look in Delia’s eyes.

  Rosemary picked up her glass of soda and drank deeply. “Can I have a sip?” Dede asked.

  “You don’t need none of that,” Rosemary said curtly.

  “Drinks a lot, don’t she?” Cissy said to Delia a few days later. Rosemary had gone to the Piggly Wiggly, and they were cleaning up the kitchen after breakfast. “After we go to bed, Rosemary sits up and drinks like a fish.”

  “I’ve never understood that comment.” Delia held a towel over the wastebin and shook out crumbs. She gave the towel one last flick and then folded it half over half. “It’s just the strangest thing to say. You imagine fish absorb water like taking in air?”

  “Maybe it’s the way she consumes as much as she would displace if she was dropped in a pool.”

  Delia put the kettle under the faucet and ran cold water into it.

  “Well, she drinks at night, don’t she?”

  “You don’t know that,” Delia said.

 
; Amanda appeared in the doorway. “She does. I been keeping track. She did a fifth the first two weeks, another bottle half gone since last Saturday. Talks big, but look at what she’s doing. That woman is drinking herself drunk every night after we go to bed.”

  Delia slammed the kettle down on the burner and then turned to Amanda and Cissy. “Rosemary is my friend,” she said. “Maybe you haven’t figured it out, but this is no place a woman like her comes to visit for fun. She’s here to help me. If you’d look a little closer, you would see what kind of woman she is.” Delia paused for a moment, her eyes dark in her pale face.

  “God,” she said, and it was not a curse. “God knows you could look a little closer, see yourselves now and then. While Rosemary is here, you will treat her with respect. You will not make rude comments on what you cannot understand.”

  Cissy dropped her eyes. Even Amanda looked abashed as Delia turned her back on them. Cissy sat at the table for a while trying to figure it out, why Delia would get so angry so fast. Amanda had said worse, far worse, many times over. But this was clearly the straw on Delia’s back.

  Cissy was still thinking about Delia’s outburst that evening as she sat in Clint’s room reading Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, another loan from Nolan. She looked out the window to the shadowed backyard. A thread of smoke hung in a line above the stoop.

  Rosemary was sitting on the third step, big eyes catching the reflection of the lights from the house. Cissy went outside to join her, took a breath, and smelled the liquor on the night air.

  “You still have that striped bikini and the purple sunglasses?” she asked.

  Rosemary laughed. “You remember that? But hell, why wouldn’t you. Every woman in Los Angeles has a striped bikini, and for a while there we all had those sunglasses too.” Rosemary stubbed out her cigarette and shook another out of the pack lying next to her hip. She tapped it on the back of her wrist.

  “Yours were heart-shaped,” Cissy said. It had been another hot day. The wooden step under Cissy’s thighs was just beginning to cool as the night came on.