Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  “Uh-huh.” Rosemary put the cigarette in her mouth. With graceful motions she used her silver lighter to spark a flame.

  Cissy watched her inhale, remembering when Delia gave Rosemary that lighter at a party in Venice Beach. It had an inscription on the bottom, Cissy knew, something about friendship and laughter. “Why’d you come?” Cissy asked.

  “Well, Clint’s dying, isn’t he?” Rosemary blew smoke in a pale stream, then leaned over and reached for the bottle of bourbon that was between her legs. She took a sip. “That’s cause enough for a party. And your mama asked me to come. She doesn’t ask for help easily, you know.”

  “You knew Clint?”

  Rosemary looked into Cissy’s face, her eyes glittering. Then she turned and stared out at the yard. “I knew about him. I think I knew a little more than most. When he had that abandonment notice served on Delia, she just about killed herself. Your mama might have run off and left your sisters, but she tried for years to work something out with that man. He wouldn’t even let her send presents to them, but she did anyway. Wouldn’t let her have pictures or tell her anything about how they were doing. His idea was that she should crawl back here and beg his forgiveness, let him knock her around and use them girls against her all over again. A whole lot of reasons to hate a man I never met.”

  “He’s not so bad.” Heat rose in Cissy’s cheeks.

  “No? You sure of that?”

  “He’s sorry, anyway.”

  Rosemary’s face did not soften. “Maybe. The preachers say people can change. Me, I don’t know.”

  “People change.” Cissy said it with more certainty than she felt. She remembered what M.T. had told her. “You the way to her heart. He can’t get there through Dede and Amanda because they hate him so much. But you. You the way. Get you and he’s got her. Don’t you think the man knows what he’s doing?”

  “Maybe,” Rosemary said again in a voice as dark as her eyes, as silken as her hair. “Mostly, though, I think people die and start over. Get another chance next time.”

  “Next life?” Cissy almost laughed. Another Buddhist come to Cayro. She started to speak, but Rosemary waved her cigarette in the air and the gesture stopped her. The brown cheek was wet.

  “Go inside,” Rosemary said. “Nights here are too hot to be sober. And I can’t properly drink with you sitting there watching me.”

  She remembered Delia’s angry words. You should look close and see. She looked close. Pain, and stubbornness. Who was Rosemary?

  “This an’t bad,” Cissy said. “It’s almost cool now. You should have been here last August. It was so hot I thought I’d melt out of my underpants.”

  Rosemary shrugged and took another little sip from the bottle.

  Cissy propped her elbows on her knees and rested her chin on her hands. She listened to the crickets and the cars pulling into the gravel parking lot by the convenience store just past the Reitower house. Nadine Reitower had complained so fiercely about people using her driveway when they stopped at the little store that the owners had created the lot. No one ever turned in the driveway of Clint’s house except Deputy Tyler, who sometimes idled there to watch who was buying beer. Delia swore one of these days someone was going to kill themselves pulling drunk out of that store on their way back up to the highway. The deputy seemed to agree.

  Rosemary seemed to be listening too, as she hugged that bottle against her hip. Her head moved slightly, as if she were counting time to some music only she could hear, and her gold necklace glinted.

  “How’d you get that scar?” Cissy asked suddenly.

  Rosemary paused with the bottle lifted slightly. “Why do you care?”

  “Just curious.”

  “You tell people how your eye got hurt?”

  Cissy’s face burned. “Nobody asks.”

  “Oh, people that polite around here?” Rosemary took another sip.

  “I’m sorry,” Cissy said.

  “Uh-huh.” Rosemary swirled the liquid in the bottle.

  “Really, I’m sorry I asked.”

  “Yeah.” Rosemary used the stub of her cigarette to light another and took a deep drag. “It was like your eye,” she said after a long silence. “Stupid damn accident. I ran into a wire fence in Rio when I was a girl. Just about cut my throat.” One finger traced the scar delicately.

  “Most people see it, they think somebody did it to me.” The finger stroked the dark line under the necklace. In the light from the house it might have been a crease of skin or a shadow’s edge. “I always hated telling people I did it to myself. Used to make up lies about it, anything to avoid saying I got it doing something my mother had told me a hundred times not to do, running in the dark, just running in the dark.”

  “Must have been scary.” Cissy watched Rosemary’s long fingers wrap around her throat.

  “It was not a good time,” Rosemary said.

  “It’s kind of dramatic.” Cissy wanted to comfort Rosemary in some way, give her back what she felt she had taken. “Dede thinks it’s kind of cool, sexy even.”

  “Your sister has a lot of romantic notions.” Rosemary flicked ashes into the grass, her voice without inflection.

  “She likes you,” Cissy said.

  “I like her.”

  “She says you coming here is the best thing that ever happened, that you are just what Cayro needs. I told her I couldn’t see why you came in the first place. You told Delia you would never come to Georgia.”

  “You remember that too? Didn’t think you were paying attention.” The tip of Rosemary’s cigarette glowed brighter than a firefly. “But Delia warned me you never forgot anything. Trust a child, she told me, to remember what you want to forget.”

  “Why don’t you have no children of your own?”

  The cigarette drooped. Rosemary took it out of her mouth and exhaled smoke. “I just don’t,” she said. “And now I never will. Delia tell you about that?” She ground the cigarette out on the step and tossed the butt into the grass.

  “No. She said you had your own reasons for coming.”

  The sprinkler at the side of the house came on. Delia or Dede watered every other evening in the height of summer. A cool pocket of air drifted over them, and Rosemary waved her hand again, in the same arresting gesture as before.

  “All this,” she said. “You with your hard little pinball eyes, that man in there eating her up every minute, Amanda with her pinched mouth and nasty looks, Dede like a big old sucker snake swallowing the air wherever she goes—all this, and still Delia is happy.” She shook her head slowly. “Happiest I’ve ever seen her.”

  Cissy raised her chin. Pinball eyes. She did not have pinball eyes.

  “Maybe there is something to all that stuff people say about making babies. Sure looks like it’s pretty much taken over whatever it was that Delia wanted before you came along. I don’t think she even remembers who she was before she made you girls.”

  “You don’t know who we are,” Cissy sputtered.

  “And you don’t know who your mama is.” Rosemary cupped the neck of the open bourbon bottle in her palm and rocked it on the step.

  “And you do.”

  Rosemary rocked the bottle again. “Maybe not. Hell of the thing is, I’m not sure I do know anymore. I look around at this, and it doesn’t make sense to me. There isn’t enough money in the world to make me do what Delia’s doing.”

  “She’s just doing what she’s supposed to do.”

  Rosemary laughed. “Yes, exactly. Being Mama, and Lord knows I do not have any of that. Oh, I had a baby, you know. That was part of what your mother and I had together. She’d left hers and I’d given mine away. She was always talking about getting hers back, and I was just grateful somebody else was raising mine. For being so much alike, we were nothing alike, your mama and me.”

  Cissy was confused. “You lost a baby?”

  “No, no.” Rosemary tilted the bottle and spilled some of the bourbon out. Cissy wrinkled her nose. “What I lost wa
s a life. One I wasn’t intending to have anyway.” The tea-dark liquid trailed down the steps.

  “Damn,” Rosemary said softly. “Goddamn. All that time I was saying I didn’t want any children, I was thinking I could have them someday. When I was ready, when things got right for me. Now here I am, no children, no husband, no settled family. None of it. Just a curse in the belly and a song in the air. My grandma’s never-to-be grandchild.”

  A door slammed behind them in the house. Amanda’s voice and Dede’s rose together. “You’re driving me crazy,” Dede shouted. “You’re crazy already,” Amanda yelled back. Then Delia’s contralto spoke something low and soothing and unintelligible.

  “Family,” Rosemary whispered. “Sounds like a family sure enough.” She upended the bourbon bottle and emptied it, shaking the last drops onto the grass. Then she extended the bottle to Cissy. “You want to give this to your sister? Let her add it to her list?”

  “No.”

  Rosemary put the bottle down on the step, and they sat listening to the wet swish of the sprinkler as it got cooler and darker. When Cissy finally spoke, she surprised them both.

  “Delia says you are her best friend.”

  Rosemary grunted.

  “She says you are the only person in California she ever trusted.”

  “Only person she should have trusted. I was about the only one wasn’t trying to get something out of her or off of her.”

  “You were in the band.”

  “God, no.” Rosemary lit another cigarette. “I can’t sing. Not all of us can, you know. I can dance, but why would I do that? No. But I gave her that yellow convertible.”

  “With red seats.”

  “Red leather seats.”

  “I remember.” Cissy closed her eyes and saw the car, seats gleaming in the sunlight, the back full of boxes and bags with Christmas wrapping.

  Rosemary looked at her. “You don’t,” she said. “You were a baby. But it was something to remember. Best damn car I ever owned.”

  “I do remember,” Cissy said stubbornly.

  Rosemary ignored her. “It was Randall’s car first. He gave it to me, I gave it to Delia. Bothered the hell out of Randall.”

  Cissy was getting lost. “Randall gave it to you?”

  “Sort of. Traded it for something I had that he needed. And don’t ask, ’cause I am not going to tell you.”

  “Drugs.”

  Rosemary laughed. “You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. There was more than that going on. Ask Delia.”

  Cissy shrugged. “She won’t tell me nothing.”

  Rosemary took a drag on the cigarette and stroked her forehead thoughtfully with her free hand. “Mud Dog’s second album, the one called Diamonds and Dirt. You know that one?”

  “The one where Delia sings ‘Lost Girls’? The one that made all the money?”

  “Made some money. Made some of us almost rich.”

  Rosemary ran her hand over her head. Her short hair had kinked up in the damp. As Cissy was thinking it was the first time she had seen Rosemary look less than perfectly put together, that hand reached out and touched Cissy’s cheek.

  “ ‘Lost Girls,’ ” Rosemary said. “ ‘Minor Chords of Grief.’ ‘Walking the Razor.’ ‘Tall Boys and Mean Dogs.’ All of those songs are mine. I wrote them, the parts that Delia didn’t write herself. It was another thing she didn’t care about. It was Randall busy being the legend. We’d get a little stoned and she’d start it. It would come out of her like a river, and I would write it down. After, she wouldn’t remember a bit of it, though sometimes she’d cry when she heard one part or another. It all came from what Delia said. She’d get to me so badly I’d go write my own version of it. I wanted her name on those songs, but Randall and the record company guys were all over me. Hell, it all had to be Randall. Another Jim Morrison snake-eyed boy poet with a direct line to a woman’s heart. Shit.”

  Rosemary lifted both hands, then dropped them, like a conductor setting a tempo, music in the way her hands moved in the air.

  “Delia didn’t care. Randall did. I did a little. Half the songs say ‘Randall Pritchard and R.D.’ Nobody said R.D. was me, but I had a good lawyer. I got my cash. Delia got nothing. When she brought you back here, I was glad to help her with that damn shop. It was only a piece of her share anyway. It was us, you know. We were the ‘poets with a feel for female grief.’ ” She sighed.

  “But Randall was why the record made money. He was so damn pretty, and so good at working the game. The rest of us didn’t even know enough to care. That’s why Delia is here and not in Los Angeles. She never cared the way Randall did.”

  “She don’t care a thing about Los Angeles.”

  “Oh yeah, right.” Rosemary raised one classically shaped brow. “Like I said, you don’t have any idea who your mama is.”

  Cissy flinched. “You never understood my daddy. He was special. He did understand the heart. He understood a lot of things.”

  “Oh, hell.” Rosemary put her arms around her knees and pulled her legs up to her breasts. “It’s probably just as well I can’t make babies anymore. I’m not any good even talking to you.”

  “Delia’s happy, you said so.” Cissy pushed up off the steps. Her legs were all pins and needles from sitting still so long. She stood in front of Rosemary and scowled.

  “Happier than she was in Los Angeles, yeah.” Rosemary nodded. “She’s doing what she always wanted to do. Doesn’t make any difference to her that she could have walked away from Randall anytime, made her own music, and been more famous than he ever got to be. That wasn’t what your mama cared about.”

  “She wanted to come home,” Cissy said. “She wanted to be here more than she wanted any of that.”

  “Yeah. That’s right, sugar biscuit. She wanted to drag her butt back to Georgia and pick up after you and your sisters till the day she dies.”

  Cissy’s breath hissed between her teeth. “It’s you don’t know who Delia is,” she said. “You don’t understand her at all.”

  “Maybe not.” Rosemary hugged her knees. “Maybe there’s a whole lot I just am not designed to understand. Look at me here talking to you like you some grown-up, and you are nothing of the kind. Can’t understand a thing I am saying.”

  “I understand plenty.” Cissy felt like crying but was too angry to let herself show it.

  “I swear, you are just like your daddy. You think Delia doesn’t know what she threw away? You think she didn’t throw anything away? You think all she amounts to is what you need her to be?” Rosemary’s voice was hoarse.

  “Diamonds and dirt, legends and rude boys, poets that are no poets at all, babies that never get born or get lost through no fault of our own. Life sweeps you away like a piss river. Saddest thing I know is that there isn’t anybody who knows who Delia is, not even her girls. Saddest thing I know is that she is in there with that evil man, burying herself alive to save you and your sisters, and not a one of you knows what she is doing. Nobody knows who my Delia really is.”

  Rosemary stood. “Nobody,” she repeated, and went up the stairs and into the house.

  Cissy sat unmoving on the step. She heard Dede’s cheerful “Hey, Rosemary!” and then a door opened and closed. “Where’s she going?” Dede asked plaintively. Delia’s voice said, “Leave her alone.”

  Cissy tilted her head back and looked up at the night sky, the stars that were slowly brightening as the dark became deeper. The stars in California had not been so clear and big. The night had not been so still. The sky was always glowing and the night full of noise and movement. Cissy used to sit out behind the cottage in Venice Beach and stare up at that bright sky and listen to Delia’s low crooning inside the house. Drunk or sober, Delia moaned out melody, the words slurred and painful, that voice of hers as rich and strong as melted chocolate. People came to the house and offered her work, wanting her to sing with other bands or make her own records. Cissy remembered their eager expressions, the way they spoke Delia’s name, a
nd Delia’s flat refusal. She could have done something different. She could have made a different life altogether.

  Maybe Rosemary was right. Maybe Delia was a bigger mystery than Cissy had ever imagined.

  Cissy started counting stars. She began at the eastern horizon above the pecan tree. She counted bright and dim, ignoring the constellations and working in quadrants, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, stars in California, stars in Georgia, all the stars between, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.

  When I grow up, Cissy promised herself, I’ll never have children. And if I do, I’ll give them away.

  Chapter 10

  It scared Delia how much time Cissy was spending with Clint. She was in there every day now, and she refused to let Amanda anywhere near him. “Get out of here,” she told her sister one Saturday in the middle of August. She took the Bible from Amanda’s hands, closed it, and gave it back to her with a look so steely that for once Amanda didn’t argue. She had never seen Cissy like that, but she recognized the determination in her eyes as a match for her own.

  Cissy was already in Clint’s room the next morning when Amanda left for church. Delia poked her head in. “Why don’t you go outside a while?” Delia said. “It’s gorgeous out, and it’s so stuffy in here. Clint’s sound asleep anyway.”

  “I’m all right,” Cissy said.

  Delia frowned. “Go on, I’ll sit with Clint.”

  “I’m just reading. You go out, you look like you need some air.”

  Delia took a deep breath, visibly counting to ten. “Cissy, I don’t want you sitting in there all day.”

  “Well, you can’t keep me out. This is Clint’s house, and he don’t mind me sitting here. He don’t mind at all.”

  “No,” Delia said, defeated. “I’m sure he don’t.”

  Sometimes Cissy thought that Clint was the only one of them who had finally figured everything out. He was the only one who had the time and nothing else to distract him. Thinking was better than drugs some days, thinking about how people really were, who he really was.