Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  “Look at me! I am clay from head to toe.”

  “Lord, I got that grit in my hair!”

  “Goddamn, we are just filthy!”

  The apartment Jean and Mim shared was comfortably messy, books scattered about among clothes, shoes, and empty soda cans. Whenever they came back from a caving trip, Mim and Jean would strip in the entry between the back porch and the kitchen. All the muddy clothes they pulled off went into an empty tub by the door. Then they took a shower together in the little bathroom off the kitchen. Cissy would watch them with self-conscious awe. Trying to be casual, she would pull her own muddy clothes off in the entry, but slowly enough as never to be naked in front of Jean and Mim. As soon as they were out of the room, she would speed up, toweling herself down roughly and dressing in clean old clothes she kept just for the trip home. She would sit at the kitchen table drinking spring water and listening to Jean and Mim laughing under the shower. Eventually, she figured, she would get so used to the girls that she would take a shower herself—just walk in naked and take her turn under the hot water. It must be wonderful, to be so at home in your body that you didn’t hesitate to stride around with your butt bare naked and your nipples out where anyone could see. Jean and Mim’s carelessness made Cissy seem even stranger to herself.

  Cissy had her own system for getting the dirt out of her caving clothes. Delia’s laundry room had served as a photo lab when Dede was dating the boy who took all the pictures for the yearbook. They had broken up the double sink and mounted a third so that water ran down from the top one through the next two. Although Dede’s infatuation with the boy was short-lived, Cissy had found the sinks very useful for hand laundry. There had been a moment when she thought about offering to take Mim and Jean’s clothes back with her, to do their laundry as she did Delia’s and Dede’s, and Amanda’s before she moved out. Before the words could come out of her mouth, Cissy stopped herself.

  No, she didn’t want to be that person with Mim and Jean. The Cissy who did her family’s laundry was someone she did not want them to know. She wouldn’t be able to laugh the same way if she became the person Delia and her sisters believed her to be. Neither Mim nor Jean teased her about her silences or her habit of dropping her hair down over her left eye, or about her shyness or her hesitant way of answering questions. For them she was not weird Cissy but simply Cissy. They behaved as if she were exactly like them, and because of that, Cissy began to imagine she was. The things they talked about on the way to and from the caves were the everyday, the expected—how long it took to drive from Cayro to Little Mouth, the grade and weight of rope available at the Bartow County army-navy store, the hopelessness of getting up after spending a day and a half underground. For Cissy, talking to Jean and Mim was like slipping on a second skin. It was luxurious not being Delia’s daughter for a little while. She joined in with them to laugh at her own muddy jeans.

  “Feel this. I think my pants have gained twenty pounds.”

  “You got rocks in those pockets?”

  “Yeah, when I was sliding. Collected a couple of pounds of gravel between my pants and my ass.”

  Jean and Mim laughed, and Cissy basked in the glow of their appreciation. They were so different from her sisters.

  “You are from another planet,” Amanda had told Cissy repeatedly. “There is not an ounce of normal human being in you.”

  Cissy did not argue. She thought Amanda was right. Maybe Delia was not her real mama after all. Maybe she was like those changelings in the storybooks, a fairy-tale creature exchanged for Delia’s real daughter. What else would explain how different she was from everyone she knew?

  “You an’t that different,” Nolan always said. But Nolan? If there were changelings, then he was another one. The two of them were the next best thing to aliens ever seen in Cayro, Georgia.

  Delia’s old washing machine banged when it was overloaded. To get it to do sheets at all, Cissy had to sit on top of it, the weight of her body providing the necessary ballast as the engine churned and spun. She would brace herself with one hand on the cinder-block wall and one leg extended so her foot pressed the metal shelving by the door. Buttressed like that, the machine would hum easily, and one of her hands was free to hold a book or change the channel on the radio or grip the side of the washer when the load became unbalanced again and started to shimmy beneath her thighs.

  Cissy liked the way it felt, that machine heated and pounding under her. In the steamy heat of the laundry room, she fell into a reverie so intense she could not say afterward what she had been thinking. She would load the machine and climb up as soon as it started to bang, becoming instantly transformed, like a dervish who has been spinning for so many years that he can fall into meditation effortlessly. The steamy air exuded rapture. The heat seeped mystery.

  “You get off on it, don’t you? Giant vibrator under your butt?” Dede accused once, and ran off to tell Delia, who ignored her so determinedly that it was clear she too thought she knew what Cissy had been doing. Cissy imagined what she must look like—riding that washing machine, pink-faced and glassy-eyed, legs spread and knees flexed, feet tucked up on the shelves across from her—but what she was doing was nothing so mundane. Not everything was about sex.

  The laundry room was Cissy’s retreat, that cinder-block chamber with its permanent scent of detergent and bleach and a floral overlay of fabric softener. More caustic odors came from the plastic milk crates of cleaning fluids stacked in one corner next to old bottles and cans of ammonia, paint thinner, and kerosene.

  “None of that can go in the garbage, you know,” Amanda complained to Delia. “You got to haul it out to the dump. Get rid of it before one of my boys gets into it.”

  “Cissy will take care of it,” Delia said. “Cissy keeps track of things out there.”

  Cissy did not haul everything out until the spring Delia redid the house. With Nolan’s help, she pulled the shelves and the machines away from the walls, washed the place down, then set up a fan to dry it out for a day. She put on two coats of white paint, flat white for the ceiling, a glossy oil-based paint for the walls, to resist mildew. She scrubbed the floor with a bleach solution and left it unpainted. Afterward the room was like a temple, purified and clean. There was nothing for the bugs to eat, no trash in the corners to gather dust and spiderwebs. When Dede or Amanda brought in boxes of junk or bags of old clothes, Cissy would take them directly to the dump. Nothing was allowed to remain if it didn’t belong. What Cissy could not say in words she said in that laundry room, in those baskets of spotless white shorts and undershirts, delicate underwear in net bags, immaculate sheets for the beds, perfectly folded towels to stack in the closet, jeans bleached down to a pearly cotton that caressed the skin. Clean clothing, shirts and blouses and underwear made new under Cissy’s hands, all of it breathed the longing she would not acknowledge aloud, the family connection that seemed so tenuous everywhere outside that room—the one place in which she knew where everything was and how it got there.

  But laundry was part of home, that other reality, the reality that did not include Mim and Jean and Cissy’s easy laughter with them. The only time Cissy felt herself to be the dutiful daughter, Delia’s little girl, was when she did the laundry. It was another life, that yearning for the safe girl-child’s place. In the life she wanted, she cared for nothing outside the reach of muscle or sinew. In the caves Cissy would brace a hip, bend a knee, or reach above her head to push her body forward, and see Mim’s eyes on her over Jean’s shoulder gleaming in pleased admiration. There she was nobody’s baby girl. She was a grown woman, strong and able. Cissy feared bringing the scattered parts of her life together—Amanda’s contempt, Delia’s confusion, Nolan’s precise friendship, Dede’s caustic jokes, Mim and Jean walking naked through their kitchen. Between them all, who was Cissy? What was possible for her and who would she be—the proud Cissy who climbed down in the dark or the timid one who hid in the laundry room?

  After their last caving expedition, they cam
e out of Little Mouth at night so grubby Jean refused to let them in her car until they changed. They all stripped down by the trunk, Cissy hiding her blush under her loose hair, grateful the dark covered so much. When Mim poured water over her naked shoulders and Jean waited to towel her back, Cissy tilted her face up to the sky and felt the air against her skin like a satin weight, the pulsing energy of her bloodstream singing to her brain happy to be alive.

  She had crawled down into darkness and out again, risked everything and come up into the starlight caked with mud and sand, bat shit and ancient dust. Washing the mud away was baptism. Cissy unbuttoned the second layer of thrift-store trousers and pulled off her dirty boots. Like Mim. Like Jean. She moved with deliberate unconsciousness, not looking down to see her own nakedness, turning to scrub Jean’s back and rub it dry with a rough towel. The muscles under her skin could be trusted.

  Pulling on clean, dry jeans that smelled of fabric softener and sunshine, Cissy laughed out loud. Every time she came out of the cave dark, she remembered the Sunday morning television shows she had watched when they first came back to Cayro. Between the sermons there were sermonettes, little one-act plays in which moral lessons were demonstrated with brutal efficiency—the cursing father developed throat cancer, the fornicator lost a child. Caving was like that. If you put your foot down wrong, you would find retribution. If you ignored the dust, it would choke your light. If you laced your boots too loosely, your ankle might turn or the wet find its way into your socks. If you sinned against the rock, the dark might call your name. But if you persevered, you would come out into the light. Everything would be made right. You would know with unquestioning certainty who and what you were.

  Chapter 16

  In the years following her husband’s death, Nadine Reitower broke her hip three times. She hadn’t been on the second floor of their house since Nolan started at the junior college. “She never will again,” Dr. Campbell told Nolan. “She’ll be in that wheelchair till the day she dies.” For all that, Nadine was a happy woman. Something happened to her with the third fall, something terrible and wonderful. A little stroke, a moment of grace, Nolan called it, and maybe God did have something to do with it, the God that made fish without eyes and two-headed calves.

  Nolan’s mama went a little bit more than a minute and a half without breathing. The paramedics put her on oxygen in the ambulance, and she came to with her mouth open and her tongue out.

  “Like a baby bird,” Nolan told Cissy. “Like a happy baby bird.”

  A hungry baby bird.

  It was a life change for a woman who had never consumed a full thousand calories in a day for thirty years. Her husband and her boys were fat, but Nadine made a religion out of being thin. Rail-thin, starved skinny, a clear-soup-and-celery-stick life. She was painfully proud of the way her hips and collarbone protruded, smugly contemptuous of her wide, soft men even as she fed them all the food she would never eat. Nolan’s mama believed men should be big and women small, and she was sharp-tongued about it. She was sharp-tongued by nature anyway, given to cutting remarks and sudden cruelty, though she believed herself kindly. It was just that she knew how things should be and the world so rarely matched her convictions. Nadine Reitower made gravy but never ate it, baked cakes, pinched the crusts of pies and steamed puddings. She fed her men like a sacrament and starved herself matter-of-factly, until her bones went lacy and fine and fractured in thin, spidery lines.

  “Should have put her on calcium and had her walking more for the last decade,” Dr. Campbell grumbled. “Should have seen what she was coming to.” He was chagrined because he had believed Nadine to be supremely healthy, anticipating her visits every time her name appeared on his charts—that fine-boned, ethereal creature he had almost adored. She was a devoted mother, a happy wife, maybe a little bossy and difficult now and then, from what people told him, but no more than should be expected. Her husband’s death changed all that, and Dr. Campbell finally met the Nadine Reitower everyone else knew. From the doctor’s perspective, the woman he admired had been supplanted by one he could barely stand to examine, an indignant, contemptuous woman grown suddenly old and fragile, one who told him he was a fool right to his face. When that creature altered again, he stopped talking with any certainty. What they had was what they had. What might come next was completely past his ability to predict.

  “Nolan,” Nadine said, waking up after that last ambulance trip. “Nolan, I’m hungry.” And so she was. Nadine’s disposition changed with that minute and a half of stillness, with the acquisition of the wheelchair, the ramps, and the visiting nurse. Her baby-bird mouth smiled often, and she waved at people from the porch, calling out their names.

  Cissy. Dede. Amanda. Anyone who passed. Even Delia. Nadine liked everybody now, and the plumper she got, the more she said so. In a minute and a half, Nolan’s life was remade.

  Nadine Reitower was a new woman and everyone knew it. What was not so quickly apparent was the change in Nolan. Only Cissy seemed to see it, perhaps because she saw him so regularly. As Nadine widened in her chair, Nolan seemed to relax and brighten. His late growth spurt intensified. He started doing an exercise routine with a set of weights his daddy had kept in the garage. He swore it had nothing to do with his last run-in with Dede, when she told him she would never go out with a boy who looked like a biscuit on legs.

  “I just feel like it,” Nolan insisted to Cissy.

  “Naaa, come on. You’re working at this. Damn, Nolan, you’re coming close to having a real physique!” Cissy teased him so relentlessly she was surprised he did not take offense.

  “It’s practical, that’s all,” he said. “I have to lift a woman who is just about a dead weight, and heavier all the time. Getting her from bed to bath to chair has been just about breaking my back. Her doc told me I had to get a whole lot stronger or I’d wind up with a hernia. Only other choice is to hire a nurse full-time, and the visiting nurse is all we can manage.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Besides, I need to do it efficiently and quickly. Moving Mama is not something you want to do slow. You want to get it done fast.” Nolan’s face was very pink.

  “Yeah?” Cissy was curious. She had never seen him look so uncomfortable.

  “She giggles.”

  “Giggles?”

  “God, yes.” The pink of Nolan’s face went a deeper shade, almost rose red at the cheekbones. He closed his eyes. “Me and the nurse go to pick her up, put her in the bath, and she puts her hands up over her eyes and starts to giggle. She says, ‘Don’t look, son, don’t look,’ and she just giggles all the way through. Naked and all, and I never seen her naked before in my life. She would have died before she let me see her like that. Now she’s teasing me and laughing. God, if she was as embarrassed as I am, it would be awful. I suppose if she wasn’t so cheerful, I wouldn’t be able to stand it at all. But even so.” He stopped, and Cissy could not think of a thing to say.

  Nolan kept his eyes shut tight. There was more, a lot more, that he could not say to Cissy. While he was working out to get stronger, he was also trying to persuade Nadine to diet—a project that was awful for both of them. The new Nadine hated diets, hated anything but food fat-rich and tasty. And Nolan loved this new version of his mama, this extraordinary woman licking her fingers and laughing out loud, wheeling her chair around the kitchen, humming along to his music, telling him how handsome he was, how proud he made her, and repeating that to anyone who happened to stop by.

  But the doctor kept telling Nolan that bone mass did not replenish. It would not come back, and another break could kill Nadine. “She gets much bigger, those bones will cave in all the quicker,” the doctor said firmly. “Son, you got to be the man.”

  Nolan could see what he meant. Nadine’s body was not designed to carry the weight she was adding, no matter the gentle open mouth that only wanted to chew and smile. The bigger Nadine got, the greater the risk. If Nolan did not take care, he would lose his mama, this new creature he loved a
lmost more than his music or his dreams.

  Nolan took care and steadily pumped his muscles stronger. He invented games to help Nadine exercise safely, made adjustments in the kitchen while she was at physical therapy with the nurse. Sugar substitute, no-sodium salt, fresh vegetables, low-fat soups. He refused to bring home biscuits no matter how Nadine cried, and finally used her mother love against her. “Mama,” he pleaded, “you have to help me. How will I ever find a wife if you don’t help me shape up?”

  Slowly, steadily, Nolan lengthened and thinned while Nadine endured, mourning the loss of butterfat, ice cream, and chocolate pies, but admiring the alteration in her big, soft boy. She watched as Nolan’s shoulders became broad and muscled, his hips and legs slim and powerful. He looked like a football player, a quarterback, strong and handsome, maneuvering his mama’s fragile body as carefully and intently as he played his clarinet.

  “Such a handsome boy I’ve got,” Nadine told people when they came to visit. They nodded offhandedly, and then they looked over and realized that she was right. Big, strange, shy Nolan was not the boy he had been. Big, strong Nolan was a man lifting his mama out of that chair, feeding her orange sections and apple slices, dropping his glance when women looked at him, playing his music so sweetly that half of Cayro knew he could go anywhere in the world.

  The one who did not look was Dede Windsor. The one Nolan would do anything for, go anywhere to please, never glanced up at the porch where he waited.

  “Oh, baby,” Nadine sighed when she saw him looking down the road. Her face was tender, her eyes wise. “Oh, baby,” she said, in that voice that could break his heart. Nolan pulled her up and held her to his chest. He thought, If my mama could become this, then anything can happen. Someday what I want might be.

  “Someday,” he said out loud, and Nadine pressed her mouth to his salt-sweet skin. Her boy tasted like apple pie, like a sugar dumpling made to bless her tongue.