Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  “I bet if we went back over the grade and came down from the train crossing we could get it up faster.”

  “You think?” Cissy seemed eager.

  “I think,” said Dede.

  The Datsun topped seventy-five on the downhill side of the overpass, the body shimmying but the engine roaring along fine. When the speedometer needle crossed the line, Dede whooped, “Damn!” and Cissy crowed with her. She did not see the needle, but she felt the car lift slightly as they passed the crest and gained momentum. She put both hands straight up in the air, her palms flat on the rooftop, and blew a whistle of happy surprise. The surprise was in the exhilaration, the marvelous rush of air pouring in the windows, the lights along the bridge approach flashing past. She had never gone so fast in her life, never been so afraid and unafraid at the same time. Dede’s hair was whipping in the wind. The damp off the river was cool and sweet in Cissy’s mouth.

  “Damn! Damn!” Cissy yelled, beaming at Dede in full impassioned glory. Her stomach felt a little funny. The cigarette, she told herself, swallowing acid. Then the right front tire popped and the car made a terrible shrieking sound. The front spun, poles and trees sweeping past. Dede roared curses along the car’s rooftop as she fought the pull of the steering wheel. They deadheaded a mile marker, then another, slowing with each post that went down. Dede was aiming at the little posts deliberately, Cissy realized, trying to stop the car.

  “God, God, God!” Cissy screamed in a rush of adrenaline.

  “God, yes!” Dede screamed back at her as the car slammed into a dogwood sapling and came to a sudden wrenching halt in the mud and weeds of a shallow ditch.

  “My God,” Cissy breathed.

  “All right, little sister, all right.” Dede was shaking, hands tight on the wheel. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Cissy said.

  “Oh Lord!” Dede put her head on the steering wheel. “Shit! No way Delia an’t gonna find out about this now.”

  Cissy felt her stomach roll. “Damn,” she whimpered, and threw up out the window. “I have always hated this car,” she said, and threw up again.

  Miraculously, the Datsun survived. All the damage was to the body.

  For all Delia’s shouts and accusations, Cissy never admitted how fast they were going. “I asked Dede to drive me,” she said. “It was just an accident and Dede saved our lives.” Cissy stared hopefully at Delia’s stern face.

  “You could have killed your sister,” Delia said to Dede.

  Dede looked over at Cissy, her face suddenly pale and frightened. “I know,” she said, “I know,” and began to sob like a child for the first time in her life.

  Delia watched her and remembered all the times she had said the same thing to Randall. You could have killed her.

  “But you didn’t,” she said to Dede, and took her daughter into her arms.

  It took Amanda about a minute and a half to decide to marry Michael Graham when he proposed to her the Christmas after they graduated. At the time, she and his mother were decorating the tabernacle, carrying in great pots of poinsettias and piles of white carnations.

  “Let me help you,” Michael called to Amanda, rushing over and bumping his forehead solidly into hers. His mother laughed and went outside for more flowers. Amanda saw stars and the bright sheen of embarrassment that flooded Michael’s already rosy features. He’s gorgeous, she thought, and said yes almost before the question was out of his mouth.

  “God led me to you,” Michael told Amanda repeatedly, and meant it with all his heart. His daddy approved. His mama beamed. That Amanda was a good Christian girl, a little serious and unsure of herself now and then, but a fine young woman. People talked about her mother, but Amanda wasn’t wild. She was a faithful member of the congregation. She’d make a fine preacher’s wife.

  At first the only question for Amanda was whether she deserved Michael, whether she was godly enough to be his wife. Her doubts on the subject made Dede stay out of her way, and sent Delia out to her garden and Cissy off on a long contemplation of the more obscure holdings of the county library. But once Amanda convinced herself that she could somehow make herself into the wife Michael needed, she became equally insecure about all the things she imagined would go wrong before the wedding. For weeks Amanda squalled through the house, certain that Michael would drop dead or the sky fall before she could be married. She became fanatical on the subject of church attendance, but neither Dede nor Cissy responded well to harassment. A few times Delia gave in and went with Amanda to Cayro Baptist Tabernacle, where she hadn’t set foot since crying season. There she shifted uncomfortably in the pew next to Michael’s uncle, a carefully benign expression on her face. That expression vanished after the service, when Delia stood outside the church talking and laughing with M.T.

  “Lord God!” Delia exclaimed loudly at one point, ruining the good impression her numb endurance of two weeks’ sermons had won her.

  “You embarrassed me!” Amanda wailed once they got home.

  “Why can’t she just marry that boy and leave me out of it?” Delia said to Cissy when Amanda ran back to her room.

  Amanda’s hopes for Delia’s salvation were sudden and constant. She seemed determined to bring Delia to God—specifically to Baptist Tabernacle, Michael’s family church—as proof of her own worth, her destiny as a preacher’s wife. Cissy doubted that even a penitent Delia would solve Amanda’s problem. Amanda was never going to believe herself safely a part of the God-fearing, respectable family that had produced her Michael.

  “You’d probably have to renounce me,” Cissy told Delia with a smirk. “After you joined the church and all.” Delia gave her a long calculated look, but said nothing.

  Amanda got married on the second Sunday in March, a week after her eighteenth birthday. That morning she shut everyone out of the bathroom with the makeup mirror, and Dede kept going out back to smoke. Craig Petrie had reappeared at Thanksgiving with a determined smile and a little baggie of Panama Red. When he left, the smile was wider, and the bag and a packet of papers were safely hidden in Dede’s boxes of secondhand books in the garage.

  “Don’t believe what people tell you about this stuff,” Dede told Cissy when she offered her a toke. “It’s like a bottle of beer but you don’t get bloated or nothing. Makes you a little hungry, though, you got to watch that.” She found another boy to sell her a bag at a good discount. She wasn’t going to let herself become dependent on a Petrie for anything she liked so much.

  Cissy and Dede were giggling at the awful dresses they were required to wear as bridesmaids when there was yet another crisis of faith.

  “Wouldn’t be too bad,” Dede drawled, “if we shortened the skirt, dropped the neckline, changed the color, and pulled off this rickrack crap.”

  Cissy doubled over with laughter and noticed for the first time that Dede had already cut off the hem of her dress. “I think the best thing we could do is march naked behind Amanda, wiggle our butts, and remind everyone what a marriage is really about,” she said.

  Amanda came out of the bedroom with a towel around her neck and her makeup half done. “I heard you. I heard you.” The big wire curlers all over her head rattled menacingly. Limp wisps were already falling around her temples. Those curls were never going to hold up for the ceremony, Cissy thought.

  “This marriage,” Amanda sputtered, “is about joining our souls before God, committing ourselves to the Lord’s service.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Amanda.” Cissy knew she should say nothing, but she couldn’t help herself. “You’re getting married, not taking a vow of celibacy. God isn’t keeping count of every minute of your life. I’m pretty damn sure he’s got other stuff going on.”

  “You don’t know anything about God,” Amanda shouted. “God is the judge of our lives. Wait and see what you know when you’re burning in hell, when the flames of God’s judgment are licking at your crusty soul.”

  “What is going on?” Delia came out from the back.

&
nbsp; “We were just joking about the dresses,” Cissy said.

  “She was telling me about God!” Amanda’s mascara had started to run.

  “Well, what did she say?” Delia’s face was almost as pink as the tea roses pinned to the veil she was holding in her left hand. It was Amanda’s veil, and Delia had been pressing it out when the shouting erupted.

  Cissy stopped in the act of reaching for Kleenex. “I didn’t say shit, but I’ll tell you, she better start asking God to sweeten her soul. She has got to stop trying to run everybody else’s life.”

  “If I was running your life, I’d run you right out of this house. I’d run you out of Cayro. I’d run you clear out of the state of Georgia. Don’t you know you are going straight to hell?”

  Cissy looked from Amanda’s wrathful countenance to Dede’s frank enjoyment of the fight. Then she looked down at the orchid and yellow bell-shaped skirt Amanda had insisted she wear. It was only one dress size smaller than Dede’s, but Amanda did not seem to notice how much Dede had shortened hers. Now that Dede was standing up, Cissy could see that Dede had put in enough darts to make the dress cling suggestively at her hips and bust. Catching the direction of Cissy’s glance, Dede produced a glassy smile. That is not the grin of a sober woman, Cissy thought. Can’t Amanda see?

  “Oh yeah, Cissy is damned if anyone is,” Dede drawled. “No question.”

  Dede was no devotee of Christian dogma. She had even been known to declare herself a Buddhist when pressed, but she took her faith by spells, a fierce believer when she was in the spirit, even if she usually slept through Sunday services and sneaked beer with the boys at Sunday afternoon ball games. Christmas and Easter, Dede worshiped with utmost seriousness. Most of the summer she did not. Last Christmas, right after Amanda got engaged, Cissy found her stoned and supine under the tree weeping out loud at the fate of the baby Jesus. The Cross, Dede explained, was like the tree. It had cradled the Son of God. Dede’s hands were deep in the fir branches and covered with scratches, and Cissy did not doubt either her sincerity or her grief. They might have been chemically induced, but Dede’s doctrine was heartfelt, no matter that she picked absently at the almost invisible scrapes and shrugged off Amanda’s invitation to a revival meeting two weeks later.

  “I got faith,” Dede protested in answer to Amanda’s accusation that she did not. “I just don’t always make a big stink about it.”

  At heart, Delia’s first two girls were believers. Amanda worried about her own worth, but not about the possibility that there might not be a Nazarene to judge her. Dede’s faith was seasonal but there was no blasphemy in her, while Cissy picked at the idea of God like a prickly abrasion on her soul. It was Cissy, they all agreed, who was the heathen.

  “My Lord. Couldn’t we just leave it alone for one day?” Delia shook the veil impatiently.

  In a sudden rage Cissy stripped off the ridiculous matron’s dress and threw it at Delia. She stalked down the hall in her slip and nylons and slammed the bedroom door.

  “Cissy. For God’s sake, Cissy. Please.” It was Delia.

  Cissy pulled on jeans and a blouse, ignoring them all. Dede started to giggle just as Amanda started to cry. Delia came to the door twice to plead with Cissy, but she refused to answer. When the house was finally quiet, Cissy came out to find Nolan sitting on the couch.

  “You want a lift?” he asked. He had his black suit on but was clearly ready to do whatever Cissy decided.

  “You look terrible,” Cissy told him.

  Nolan regarded his hastily polished shoes and his too-short, too-tight pants. “Yeah,” he agreed. “You want to go over?”

  “All right,” Cissy said. She would go late to Amanda’s wedding, but she would go. Amanda would whine about it for the rest of her life if she did not. When she and Nolan slipped into the back of the church, she saw that one of Michael’s cousins had been drafted to take her place in the ugly dress. The girl looked as miserable as a female ever looked in this life, but past her shoulder was Amanda, and Amanda looked pretty good. Pancake makeup masked her tantrum’s effects, and at moments she appeared almost pretty, almost happy. At her side, Dede appeared absurd but cheerful. In the short trip from the house to the church, she had gone beyond her earlier sins, ripping off the rickrack and acquiring yet another layer of chemical insulation. She looked like a Magdalene in a deflated inverted tulip, and appeared to have forgotten that she was supposed to be mad. She beamed out across the church and waved Cissy forward.

  “Come on,” Dede whisper-yelled. “Come on up here and say good-bye. After today you get your own bedroom.”

  As Cissy shook her head, she took in Delia’s stricken face and Amanda’s bowed form. Dede waved one more time and Cissy gave it up, moving forward until she was beside them. The heat at the front of the church was extraordinary. Cissy was overwhelmed by perfume, the smell of Amanda’s bouquet, Michael’s astringent after-shave, Dede’s tobacco aura, Delia’s hair conditioner. She found herself going weak with the desire to get this thing over with and get out of there. Amanda’s makeup was streaked with tears. Dede was tugging at the few remaining strands of yellow material on her skirt, and then Michael looked up and gave Cissy a broad smile of welcome.

  Family, his smile said. God’s love, his eyes promised. That’s why Amanda loves him, Cissy thought.

  Amanda turned to her, tears gushing freely at Reverend Myles’s pronouncement of her new status. “Oh, Cissy,” she wailed. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “Love is past me,” Delia was always saying after Amanda’s marriage. “Love is so far past me I cannot even remember how it feels. But sometimes,” she would add, “I look at my girls and I get the notion—the notion how it should be. God knows they got a better chance than I ever had.”

  Once Amanda moved out, Dede kept after Delia to redo the Terrill Road house. It was not enough that she now had Amanda’s bedroom, the one in which Clint died—something none of them ever mentioned. She wanted Delia to widen the back porch and screen it in, put in flower boxes off the kitchen windows, and have all the floors sanded down and refinished. What she really wanted was a new house, a home made over now that Amanda was gone.

  “Too much money,” Delia would tell her. “We can’t afford that.”

  Dede was undeterred. She enlisted Cissy and Nolan to help her pull up the carpets and rented a floor sander from the B & B Hardware for the minimal twenty-four-hour fee. Together the three of them sanded and swept and mopped and sanded again. They kept the stereo on loud, playing Patti Smith and Kate Bush. Delia stayed out of the house, partly to avoid the stereo. She thought Dede’s taste in music eerily ironic, her girl was a hard-core rock and roller, oblivious to the Top 40 and uninterested in dance music—she called Madonna a joke, though she told Cissy that Cyndi Lauper wasn’t too bad. Cissy liked Prince and the Revolution. She played his tapes at night under the covers.

  “Sounds like Mud Dog,” she told Delia.

  “No,” Delia said. “It doesn’t.”

  Nolan worked like a madman, but Dede never paid him a minute’s notice, not even when he got down on his hands and knees to smooth the sealant over the floors with a cotton towel. It turned out that he also knew how to pop off the sanding disks and use the old polishing ring M.T.’s sister Sally still had from a job she had done. For the last few hours on the rental, Nolan and Dede took turns with the polisher, making those floors shine like something out of the decorating magazines M.T. collected.

  “My Lord!” Delia exclaimed when they finally let her back in the house. “It’s beautiful.” She hugged Dede and beamed at Nolan and Cissy. “You guys could hire out, make yourselves some real money.”

  “Hell, no,” Dede said. “I an’t going to work this hard for nobody else.”

  Cissy and Nolan laughed but Delia nodded. “Tell you what,” she told Dede, “you pick out the fabric and I’ll make up new curtains, maybe even do a new cover for the couch.”

  “All right! Then all we’ll need is some real fur
niture and a new television set.”

  “What’s wrong with this furniture?”

  “Delia!” Dede gave one of the battered wooden spool tables a kick. “This stuff is older than I am.”

  “Makes it antique, don’t make it bad.” But Delia looked again at what they had. The couch did sag, and the coffee table was another wooden spool that Clint had gotten from a friend who worked for the phone company. Delia had sanded it down and painted it when she was pregnant with Amanda. Maybe she could find something better. She had liked taking things apart and putting them back together when she was a girl. She could buy some old furniture and fix it up. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  “Well, while you’re at it, think about getting some new sheets. It’s embarrassing when you hang those sheets of yours on the line.”

  “Don’t start about my sheets.”

  “What sheets?” Nolan whispered to Cissy as they went out.

  “Kermit the Frog, Snoopy and Linus, Miss Piggy, rocket ships and trains. Delia got them on sale in the children’s department at Sears, and Dede is always bugging her about them.”

  “Yeah?” Nolan looked back at Delia and Dede standing on the floor he had worked on so hard. “Cool.”

  Delia bought new end tables at a yard sale and a great wingback chair at the Saint Vincent de Paul. She hauled the old spool tables out to the garden and used them as potting stands. Under pressure from Dede she put up new curtains and yielded on the television set, but she continued to cling to her sheets. It did not bother her that they were designed for a child’s bed. When she did not fall asleep on the living room couch, Delia went to her single bed in the smallest bedroom, narrow, hard, and solitary. If it had not been for the sheets and the cartoon-patterned quilt thrown over them, that cot would have suited a nun.

  “I like bright colors,” Delia said when Dede showed her an ad for pinstripes on sale. “Just because I’m a woman grown don’t mean I have to sleep on plaid or stripes.”