Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  “Death is a change of circumstances,” said a guy wearing leather-wrapped braids and a tie-dyed shirt. He took a sip from a thermos and staggered.

  Randall pulled Cissy out of the flowers all covered in pollen and petals. “Death is death,” he said angrily. He hugged Cissy close and glared at the man. “Funerals aren’t about death, they’re about how glad we are to still be alive.”

  At Clint’s graveside, Cissy remembered the whole exchange clearly, though she hadn’t thought about it in all the years since. Afterward Randall had taken Cissy walking among the tombstones and made jokes about all the cement angels and concrete cherubs. “I’m going to be cremated,” he told her as they sat in the shade of a stumpy California oak. “Get rendered down to ash and bone and used as compost for some big old tree. I’ll turn into flowers and green glossy leaves.” He seemed cheerful about it, especially after all the solemn faces of his friends.

  Cissy didn’t understand what everyone was so sad about. Randall had said that his friend was better off out of this life, that sometimes it was good to go on to feed the trees. At the gate to the cemetery, when he led her back to the long line of waiting cars, one of the drivers said something about hippies, and Randall laughed at him. “Yeah, we’re rich hippies,” he said, and swung Cissy up on his shoulders. She remembered Randall’s laugh and the way he talked about turning into green glossy leaves. That was what hippies did, she had thought at the time, throw parties for their friends and get turned into fertilizer.

  It would have been good if Clint had had a little hippie in him. That last week before he died, he was constantly afraid. He had asked Delia to call Reverend Hillman, and cried while the minister sat with him. When Cissy went in, he had grabbed her hands in his knobby fists and held on so tight she thought he would crack her bones. At the end he had not been able to talk or sleep, just roll in the bed and groan until Delia got the doctor to give him more drugs. When he died, Delia shut the girls out of the room, and Rosemary helped her wash him and dress him in a dark wool suit. For the first time Clint looked like the man in Delia’s old pictures, stern-faced and fully dressed in clothes far too big for his wasted frame.

  “Should bury him naked,” Dede said in a cracked voice.

  “Should burn him,” Cissy whispered, and Dede gave her a look. “Turn him into ash and bone. Feed him to the flowers and the trees.”

  Dede shuddered. “To the rocks, maybe. Feed him to the rocks and let the birds take the bones to use in their nests.” She had not wanted to go to the funeral, but Delia made them all go and stand in a line at her side.

  When they got back to the house, Rosemary put her hand on Cissy’s cheek and smiled gently. “You okay, honey?”

  The child reminded her of herself at that age, low on the totem pole in a house full of demanding, powerful voices. Cissy’s face looked pinched and worried.

  “I’m fine.” Cissy shrugged off Rosemary’s hand.

  “Grandma Windsor looked terrible,” Amanda said. “Her hair has gotten all ratty, and her neck looked awful, like a chicken’s.”

  “Your grandmother is getting older, and it’s hard to lose a son,” Delia said calmly.

  “I was thinking I should go out to see her.” Amanda’s tone was uncertain.

  “If you want to,” Delia said. She didn’t look as bad as Grandma Windsor, but she looked bad enough. The shadows under her eyes were dark as the grapes in the basket of fruit someone had left on the porch that morning. Standing at the table where casseroles and foil-wrapped plates of meat crowded the fruit and several little pots of wilted flowers, she reached out to touch one of the covered bowls, then dropped her hand.

  “I think I’ll lie down for a while,” she said. “I think I just need to lie down.”

  Rosemary put her arm around Delia’s shoulders. M.T. came to the other side. Together they guided Delia down the hall. With every step Delia slumped a little more, until it seemed the two women were carrying her.

  “What you want to bet she sleeps through till tomorrow?” Dede asked Cissy.

  “Day after,” Cissy replied. “Or the day after that. I thought she was going to fall right down into the grave.”

  “I thought Rosemary was going to fall in. Did you see how close she got after they lowered the coffin down?”

  “I saw.” Cissy lifted one of the foil wrappers. She wanted something but it wasn’t food. Her head pounded and her eyes ached. “Allergies,” Rosemary had told her. “Your eyes are all swollen.” None of them wanted to acknowledge that she had been crying. Amanda had wiped her eyes a few times, but neither Delia nor Dede had shed a tear. Only Cissy looked and felt as stricken as Grandma Windsor. She kept thinking about Randall and his funeral before they left Los Angeles.

  “You know what I want?” Dede had a piece of ham in one hand and a slice of white cake in the other. “I want a drink, a real drink, one of those mixed drinks people are always ordering on television. A gin and tonic or a whiskey sour.” She took a bite of ham and nodded solemnly.

  “Yeah?” Cissy lifted her glasses and wiped her left eye. The corner was so tender it burned at her touch. Her expression was so sorrowful, Dede had to work to keep from laughing.

  “What is it Rosemary drinks, bourbon or scotch?” Dede asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, whatever. Everything goes good with Coke. Let’s mix ourselves some drinks and have a picnic out back.”

  “Do you think we should?” Cissy looked down the hall. She didn’t want to have to talk to M.T. or Rosemary, and especially not to Amanda.

  “I think we damn sure should,” Dede said emphatically. “We’ll do it for Clint. He’s probably the only one in the house who would appreciate it anyway.”

  There was scotch and bourbon left in the kitchen, though not much of either. Dede made the drinks and gave the scotch to Cissy, telling her she knew it was what Rosemary preferred, so it had to be good. After one sip Cissy suspected she had found the one thing that did not go well with Coke. After the second, she decided it was not so bad. It made the ham sandwich taste a lot better, and Dede announced that bourbon was going to be her drink of choice. They sat under the pecan trees near the garage, and after a while Cissy started to feel better than she had in a week. Maybe it was like Randall had told her, that death was not so terrible a thing. Dead, Clint had looked almost peaceful.

  “What was your daddy like?” Dede was a little hesitant, but determined. “I seen his picture, read some stuff about him. Sounded like he was a crazy son of a bitch.” Dede was sitting against the far outside wall of the garage, holding the stub of a cigarette between two fingers. Cissy had thought Dede just pretended to smoke, but sitting out behind the garage, Dede had already gone through two of the butts she kept in her little metal tin. “I’ve been smoking for years,” she bragged, and the way she puffed it might have been true.

  “He wasn’t crazy. He was just like anybody.” Cissy had her stubborn expression on, mouth pulled tight and eyes intent. “Liked to drive too fast. Got drunk too much. Was always on the move. Doing business, he called it. ‘Got to do some business, Little Bit,’ he’d say. ‘Keep it dry.’ ” She gave Dede a careful look. “I never knew what that meant.”

  Dede shrugged. “You see him much?”

  “When I was little, yeah. Sort of.” Cissy thought for a moment. Had she known Randall at all?

  “Sort of?” Dede said wryly, as if she suspected Cissy of lying.

  “Well, it was hard, you know.” Cissy frowned at the memory. “They were always traveling or in the studio, going places and doing things. When we still lived with him, there was Sonny and Patch. They worked for Randall, took care of the house, took care of everything. They’d look after me while the band was traveling.”

  “You didn’t get to go on the bus?” Dede was disappointed.

  “Not once I got older. Rosemary told me stories about when I was little and Randall and Delia would take me with them, how I would sleep backstage or in one of the bus sea
ts. She even had pictures. There’s one that’s kind of famous where I’m with a bunch of other little kids and we’re all naked off at the end of the stage with a drum set. I don’t remember that at all.”

  “You don’t remember much, do you?”

  “Not what people wish I did.” Cissy grimaced. “I remember stuff. I. remember eating room service in hotels with Delia and Randall lying in bed on either side of me. And playing on escalators. I liked escalators a lot. I liked being with Delia and Randall, but I don’t know, it was the way things were. It was just the way life was. I didn’t know it was that different. And when I stayed home, that wasn’t so bad. I liked Sonny and Patch. They were good to me. They had a little boy of their own, Wren. He was my age, but he didn’t talk.”

  “Retard?” Dede asked.

  “He was all right. He was smart, just didn’t talk.” Cissy remembered Wren’s big smile and shy eyes. He was a sweet little boy, and Sonny was always carrying him around on his shoulders. When Delia and Randall were gone too long, she would pretend Sonny was her father and Wren her brother, that they were a family miraculously intact after some big earthquake had knocked out the rest of the city. Then, when Delia and Randall came home, she would feel ashamed and be mean to Wren until Delia scolded her. After they moved out of Randall’s house, Cissy never saw any of them again.

  “Grandma Windsor had Blanche to help her look after us.” Dede seemed to know that Cissy did not want to say any more about Wren. “Blanche was a second cousin or something. Think she was only fourteen when she come to stay with us. I don’t know. I was just a baby. Amanda didn’t like her, but she always seemed nice to me.” Dede swirled the flat Coke in the bottom of her glass, then drained it. She set the glass between her feet and took out a pack of cigarettes.

  “What Amanda told me was that Blanche had had a baby of her own and got kicked out of school. Maybe the baby died or her daddy gave it away. After she come to live with Grandma Windsor, she never talked about it. She wasn’t no retard neither, but she wasn’t very bright. Had these big old moon eyes, pale blue and wide, pretty but empty. Black-headed and olive-skinned. Pretty enough to get in trouble. Stupid enough to get in more.”

  “Was she nice to you?” Cissy tried to imagine Blanche, fourteen and under Grandma Windsor’s thumb, picking up after two angry toddlers and never talking about her lost baby. If she had been Blanche, she would have been mean to Amanda and Dede. She’d have pinched their butts and pulled their hair when no one was looking.

  “She was all right. Played with us a lot. Don’t think she’d have done that so much if she’d been smarter. We were boring, but she never seemed to mind. She just did whatever Grandma told her to do, picked up, cleaned, watched us. I liked her as much as I liked anybody.” Dede grinned. “Hell of a lot more than some people.”

  “So why didn’t Amanda like her?”

  “I don’t know.” Dede picked a flake of tobacco off her tooth with a lacquered fingernail. “I’ve never been able to figure Amanda. When Blanche died, she acted like she’d been expecting it.”

  “Blanche died?” Cissy was shocked.

  “Accident. Pressure cooker blew.” Dede put a hand to her throat and tapped once to the left of her chin. “Cut her throat.” Her fingers traced a line below the jaw and the ear.

  “My God.”

  “It was the lid,” Dede said. “Sliced a hole in her neck big enough to put a teacup inside.” She caressed her throat briefly, and then the hand dropped. “It upset Grandma Windsor something terrible, but she said it was bound to happen. Blanche had never paid attention to how that thing worked. She was always letting pots burn up, bathtubs flow over, irons scorch sheets. Just didn’t pay attention. With the pressure cooker, she didn’t fasten the lid down tight, so it blew off. Bad luck she was standing right there.”

  “That’s terrible.” Cissy felt sick to her stomach. The black-headed girl she had been imagining looked back at her with a wide smile and a gaping hole in her neck.

  “Grandma said it was a wonder Blanche didn’t burn the house down. She was always staring off into space, always seemed to have some story going in her head, some adventure happening that was much more interesting than the life she was leading. Which was tedious as hell, being a day maid to Grandma and us.”

  “Were you there?” Cissy asked. “When it happened?”

  “In the bathroom.” Dede’s voice was flat. “I heard the explosion. Come running out with my skirt caught in my underpants. Blanche was sitting on the floor with her hands up at her throat and a dark red river running down her front. Everything was dark red. She didn’t even look at me. She just fell back hard. Grandma said she was dead already. You lose that much blood, you are dead before you know it.”

  “Lord God!”

  Dede tapped her cigarette tin on her knee. “Hell, it’s better than how Clint went, way better.” She paused. “It could have been me easy as her. I’d been standing where she was just minutes before. Grandma Windsor said I must think about why I had to go pee at that moment, what I was meant to do now. But I can’t think like that. Who knows what’s meant and what an’t?”

  “It’s scary to think about,” Cissy said, watching Dede’s hand.

  “Yeah, for a while I would dream about it, about Blanche. Dreamed I went in and checked on the pot, fastened it down and she didn’t die. Dreamed she called me in just as it exploded. Even dreamed she came and sat on the bed to talk to me.”

  Cissy shivered, thinking of how she dreamed about Randall coming to talk to her. She had had a lot of them in the last couple of months. He sat on the bed and called her “Little Bit” while he scratched at his mustache and looked around the room. “I know I wasn’t no kind of decent daddy,” he said. “I wanted to be, but I never had it in me. But nobody raised me either, and look how I turned out.” Then he grinned as if he knew what he had said was not at all reassuring. “I’m kidding, Little Bit,” he told her. “I’ll keep an eye on you.”

  “Grandma told me that it was a dangerous thing, having a ghost in your dreams. She drew circles around the bedposts with salt, said that would stop the dreams. After a while it did, or they stopped themselves. Maybe they would have anyway.”

  Cissy wondered if she wanted her dreams of Randall to stop. Should she sprinkle salt under her bed? Would Clint start showing up in her dreams now?

  “So tell me your happiest earliest memory.”

  “Happiest?” Cissy closed her eyes and pressed her lips together in concentration. Slowly a smile bloomed. Her eyes opened. “The fire show Randall made me when I was five.”

  “What’s a fire show?” Dede was genuinely curious.

  “Something he made up.” Cissy’s smile widened at the memory. “Randall had this big old statue of a bird out by his swimming pool. It was ugly, black metal and sharp edges. Delia hated it. But Randall used it to hang things up—wind chimes and ribbons and balloons for parties. That evening he taped all these old garbage bags Delia was saving all over it. She never threw nothing away and he said it was time to make use of her stuff. When the sun went down, he set fire to the bags one at a time.”

  “He burned a bunch of garbage bags? What’s so great about that?”

  “They burned in colors. All these colors. Some of them wouldn’t catch and just made messy smoke, but some of them went up in a glitter of red and green and blue and gold all mixed together like oily water. The color would change as the flame ran up the bag. So then he took a bunch of bags and tied them to each other, and when he set fire to those, the colors changed as the flame ran up the strings of bags.”

  Cissy rocked gently, remembering. “It was all weird and strange and wonderful. When it got really dark it was even better, and Randall went all through the house collecting everything plastic he could find. Burned it all, even some of the curtains out of the pool house.”

  “Weird.” Dede pried the lid off the tin, removed a butt, and lit it.

  “Yeah, Delia was mad when she got home. There was black
stuff all over the grass, and melted plastic on the statue and the flagstones. I had a burn on my foot, and Randall’s jacket sleeves were all scorched. She was really pissed.”

  “I bet.”

  “But I liked it.”

  “Well, you were five. You would like it.”

  “It was beautiful,” Cissy insisted.

  Dede sucked smoke. “I like fire,” she said. “Always have. Grandma Windsor wouldn’t let me burn nothing. Made me rake up all the leaves and crap but wouldn’t let me burn it. She’d make Amanda burn it. And Amanda hates fire.”

  Cissy thought about Amanda. Yes, Amanda would hate fire. “What’s yours?”

  “My what?”

  “Best memory from when you were little.”

  Dede shrugged her shoulders and blew on the end of the cigarette stub. “I don’t know. I liked the cows. Granddaddy Windsor had two really good milk cows, big old lady cows with swollen nipples hanging down. He kept them producing, and they had a great setup in the barn. Sweet-smelling straw and the walls all scrubbed down and whitewashed. That milk barn was cleaner than the house, and I liked to hide out in there. In the winter I’d sneak cups of warm milk from the buckets and climb up on the hayrack and drink it slow.”

  “Was it sweet?” Cissy tried to imagine warm milk fresh from a cow.

  “Naaaa, not sweet. Frothy and funny-tasting. If the cows got spooked or ate something they weren’t supposed to eat, it would taste kind of sour or get this strange tang. I didn’t care, though. I’d put bread in it to soak it up and eat that for dinner when Grandma was mad at me. You didn’t want to sit at table when she was mad.”

  “She looks like the kind would get mad easy.”

  “Yeah, but mostly she was tired all the time. Amanda said it was like she was used up and just wanted to coast till she died. Seemed like the only time she was happy was when she was alone. You’d come on her out in the garden or somewhere where she didn’t see you, and she’d be smiling and relaxed, big old smile. Then she’d spot you and get all stern-faced and sad. I don’t think she had too many happy memories.”