Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  When M.T. went out on the street, men called out to her, mostly men of a certain age, near her age or older, men old enough to remember slow dancing with a sweet-smelling, softly round woman like her. The young boys practicing their sullen passivity at the gas station would watch and wonder. What was it about that fat old lady? But then they would pass close to her in the market, smell her perfume, and wonder again. So soft, so easy, eyes bright with confidence, a mouth that knew things. If they came too close, she would give that deep husky laugh, that laugh that had no cruelty in it, that laugh that was like a conversation, languid and unafraid.

  “You be careful boy,” the older men would tell them. “That’s too much woman for you.” It brought M.T. a new generation, though one everyone was sure she would never take to her bed. “That’s a woman needs a man,” the good old boys would say. But M.T. would just smile. The young boys would rake her yard, show her the new dances, tell her stories whose original versions she had long ago forgotten. Maybe she didn’t sleep with them, but she made them feel as if she might. That was power of yet another kind, one she understood intuitively.

  “How you doing, M.T.?” she’d hear as she went up the street to the Bonnet.

  “Pretty good,” she’d call back without turning around. “Hard for an old woman like me these days, but pretty good nonetheless.”

  “Oh, M.T., you an’t old. You barely into the good part, woman.” M.T. would laugh, then put her hand back to touch a tanned dark arm. There was something in the way she did that, like a trusted older sister. Immediate family. Sexy as hell.

  Cissy decided that M.T. had her own tribe, men who had been hers for a season and then took flight like butterflies lifting into the morning, but her scent remained on them. They were in some sense always hers, even those who married—perhaps especially those who married, those who could no longer flirt easily with her, and could only look longingly at the remembered heaven of her embrace.

  “What is it you got, M.T.? What is it you do?” Dede asked the question as if she were teasing, though Cissy had no doubt she thought, as they all did, that M.T. knew something, had some magic or secret technique she would never share. It was a question that only got more persistent with the years. For no matter how loose and easy M.T. became, the men of Cayro continued to pursue her.

  “You got some exotic skill only possible for a woman of size? You half smother them or something?”

  “Dede Windsor, the way you talk.” Steph looked over at M.T.

  “Oh, leave her alone.” M.T. wiped sweat from her temples and waved a hand in Steph’s direction. “She got to learn the truth sometime.”

  With a growling harrumph M.T. settled herself in an empty pump seat, kicked the lever twice to drop it to a comfortable height, and carefully smoothed hair back off her brow while watching herself in the mirror. She easily had the attention of everyone in the Bonnet by the time she turned to Dede and spoke.

  “Maybe,” she began, “it’s just that I know what men want.” She smiled when Steph snorted and shook her head. “Or maybe it’s just that I’ve reached the point in life where what they want is closer to what I want. So it an’t no big struggle to give it to them. Maybe one thing men want is for things not to be so hard.”

  M.T. paused. A small grin crossed her face and she gave Dede a sly wink before she spoke again. “Course it also might be that with all my padding they know they not going to hurt themselves, you know? Not like some skinny sharp-boned things running around here. Hurt them or hurt themselves. Somebody in pain around here all the time.”

  “Well, that’s a fact.” Steph gave her righteous nod. “That’s a fact for sure. Somebody in pain around here all the time.” She looked over to Delia for confirmation but Delia was looking out the window, her face expressionless and tanned dark. If she was in pain, her face would never let anyone know.

  A rock or a hard place, Delia knew where she had come down. Her hands in rushing water, her mouth pressed tight, she kept her eyes on the crown of Gillian’s head and the hair she was washing, her attention on the talk in the shop.

  “Emmet said there was another reporter hanging around at Goober’s, asking questions about you. Wanting to know if any of Clint’s people were still around.”

  “Ummm.” Delia massaged the scalp gently, knowing that if she said nothing in response, Gillian would tell her more.

  “Nobody had a word to say to him, a-course. He was cheaper than that guy came around two years ago. Wasn’t offering to buy nobody dinner. Wasn’t flashing no money or talking no trash. Little skinny fellow with straggly hair and a pitiful mustache.” Gillian paused briefly as Delia reached to shut off the water and squeezed water through Gillian’s hair until it ran off in sheets down the sides of the little porcelain sink. Only when Delia rocked her chair forward did Gillian resume.

  “I hate a mustache on a man, don’t you?” she said. “Always tastes like what he ate last, smells like dust, and looks bad no matter how it’s cut. My Richard used to wear one, and it took me forever to get him to cut it off. Thought he had a weak chin, can you imagine ? And that straggly thing was supposed to disguise the fact? Lord, what men think. I mean, can you imagine?”

  Delia wrapped a towel around Gillian’s damp hair. Guided her over to the pump-up chair and saw M.T. eyeing her in the mirror. You okay? M.T.’s expression communicated. Delia shrugged in reply and turned her full attention to Gillian.

  “You want it just generally neatened up, or did you have something special in mind?” Delia’s eyes in the mirror were steady and unblinking, her features impassive, her frame steady, posed behind Gillian’s hunched wet head.

  “Oh, just work your magic.” Gillian patted at her wet temple with one hand and smiled into the mirror at Delia’s face. “You always know what this old head needs.”

  Delia smiled and closed her eyes briefly. Here, she thought, I am right here and nowhere else, and this is what I am going to do. “Trim it up,” she said, opening her eyes, “shape it a little more to the sides of your head.” Her fingers caressed momentarily the temple Gillian had just touched. “If I cut it back just a little, it should fall just to the side of your ears. You used to wear it like that, didn’t you? When you and Richard were first going together?”

  Gillian sighed and nodded, closing her eyes as she did so, leaving Delia free to look again at her own face, the marks there of how many times she had shut her mouth on what she dared not say, the life she had walked away from and never regretted. Randall wore a mustache. It had always tasted sweet.

  Delia thought the only pure thing she had ever known was how she felt in the middle of that roar of sound—Mud Dog onstage and Randall grinning like a man drunk on the reverberations of Delia’s voice. A resounding bass note merged into 4/4 staccato downbeats. Booger’s hands fused to his keyboard, and Delia followed behind, her voice becoming suddenly something separate, something like sex. That music was sex. Or sex was so much less than it was. For Delia, it was the only spiritual rush she had ever felt. Being music, the glory of singing out that predatory chord of need and exaltation, had taken her right up out of herself, her small grief and unrelenting shame. Her voice was made over into an instrument, her whole soul fell into the swell of chord and song. When she sang, Delia forgot what she had done, the baby girls she had abandoned. She stopped hearing the song of their breathing, endlessly reverberating in the back of her brain. The one life was cut off from the other. She could not have both. She had chosen, God knew, the only life she could stand. But she never forgot the other, not Randall and the business, but the music. She never ceased to mourn it.

  When they first came back to Cayro, Delia spent too many of her sleepless nights lying on the couch playing the records with headphones on in the deep of the night. She imagined she could push through her despair with the sound of her own voice, but it did not work that way. There was a darkness in the music that called her name. It was as husky and biting as two ounces of honey in four of whiskey. Too sweet in the fir
st heat of the swallow, it burned into the throat so purely a flush went down Delia’s arms to her thumbs. Every time Randall’s bass thudded into the rhythm, Delia rocked her head back against the arm of the couch, astonished all over again at the power of the music they had made, that thing so much greater than melody on vinyl. Every time the record played over, Delia’s despair deepened and she hunched deeper into herself until all she could do was turn her face into the couch cushions and cry.

  It was not that Mud Dog had been that good, but that they had made their music from the core of who they were—the guitars flexing Randall’s raw anger and Booger’s intractable anguish, that drum ricochet that was Little Jimmy’s plea to move up front, and Rosemary’s tremolo so pure it lifted Delia’s growling song out of heartbreak and up to transcendence. The voice of Mud Dog was not just Delia’s voice but some intimate cry from the voice box of God. As she listened to that music, Delia’s heart would seize up again, as if blood were being wrung from her soul. The feel of those years would wash over her, the lyrics she and Rosemary had pieced out on brown paper bags, the chord changes Randall and Booger put together as resonating as the song they had made out of her restless, angry grief.

  “Born on the corner of Nazareth and Calvary,” Randall sang on the opening to Diamonds and Dirt, his voice high and thin. Then Delia took over “Nazareth and Calvary,” dropping an octave while the drum’s pulse resounded like a heartbeat slowing into death. It was a song not about crucifixion, but about guilt and expiation. Delia’s song. Penance and rock and roll. Jesus and the Holy Ghost in leather fringe and high-heeled boots. It was their signature piece. The crowd would take up the theme and sing back at the band like the call and answer at Pentecostal Sunday sermons. Sing, mama. Sing, Delia.

  On the couch, drunk on grief, Delia had hunched and sobbed listening to the live version over and over, her voice and Randall’s intertwined, her memories darker than that room in the night. She had expected penance, been sure of retribution, and almost gloried in her own damnation. It was all part of the romance of the music, sitting up all night and weeping until she had no tears left. It was Cissy who stopped her. One night Delia looked up from the couch and saw her girl in the doorway, eyes wide as dinner plates and lower lip clamped between her teeth. When Delia pulled off her headphones, Cissy ran back to bed. But Delia had seen those eyes. She took the record off the turntable, carried it outside, and smashed it with a rock. Then she sat in the damp grass until the sun came up, wishing away the music, wishing away the pull at her heart.

  What’s it like? the women at the shop used to ask Delia. Being in a band, loving a rock star, going on the road? What’s it like? What’s it like? Delia would just look at them, shrug, and not reply. She could not have explained. It had been a dream, life as a dream. Every day bleeding into the next, stoned one night and drunk the next. Sex outside on the terrace with the lights of Los Angeles gleaming softly over the edge of a low wall. Sweaty, thick air like a blanket pulled too close. Hip bruised from the edge of a flagstone and dust spilling into the corner of her right eye, burning until she wept. From the inside of the bungalow music playing. A woman’s voice made poignant by a low growl that was not meant to be so yielding. Janis doing “Ball and Chain” on a bootleg tape so bad the band was almost inaudible. But it was almost better that way. That voice carried the grief and guts of a woman riding her own nerves out into the unknown, like Delia on a good day. But Delia wouldn’t sing “Ball and Chain” onstage. “That’s Janis’s anthem,” she’d say, though it could have been hers. She had the drawl for it, especially when she had been drinking. But Delia preferred the smoother songs, not so demanding, not so tearing on the insides, the songs the audience might start singing along on. Everybody liked those. The drunks sang along with Janis, the drunks and the grief-stricken. The kids who came to hear Randall would sing with Delia. They would wind up and roar, and that was what Delia wanted—the group mind, the invisibility of being imaginary for a couple thousand people. All roar and lights—no discernible face or consciousness, she wanted to disappear into that huge mass of stink and noise and justification.

  “I think they are sane out in California, which God knows they an’t much here in Georgia,” Delia told Cissy after they came back to Cayro. “But I was born here, so I was born crazy. And I want to die here, die with my hands doing something, not idle and spread. Not empty.”

  “But you could have been rich.”

  “I could have been dead. Like Randall or half the band. Heroin or speed or fast cars on wet streets. So easy, dying. So easy. And I was rich. For a day and a half or so, I was too rich to understand, so rich it didn’t mean anything. But I wanted something different. The crowd, the noise, like a congregation.” Delia closed her mouth, barely stopping herself from saying aloud the one thing she knew that might explain everything. “My mama left me and I left my own. Nothing I do will fix that.”

  What stops grief? What heals the heart? Delia did not know. She had tried to cure herself of hurting, but she thought all she had managed was to put it off. How long can you put off hurting? “A lifetime,” Delia told herself hopefully. “You do it right, you can put off hurting forever.”

  “Gillian, you look like a new woman.” M.T. sipped a bottle of peach-flavored iced tea and beamed into the mirror beside Delia’s shoulder.

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?” Gillian put one hand up to the gently curling wave that turned back toward her ear. Her face looked thinner with her hair cut close to her cheeks; the fine line of her temples stood out and drew the glance to big dark eyes. “Delia always knows what I need.”

  “Oh, anybody could cut your hair,” Delia said, shaking out the smock she pulled off Gillian’s shoulders. “Just got to follow the line of your face so it looks the way God intended. Nothing fancy, just a good-looking woman with a long neck.” She did not look at her own face. She kept her eyes on her hands, long blunt fingers and carefully trimmed, unpainted nails. Nothing fancy. Nothing but her own hands.

  Flowstone settles down at the rate of roughly two inches a year, the caving books said. It comes in shades from pure white to calcium yellow to mottled red. After her first trip down into Little Mouth, Cissy dreamed about flowstone, the slowly moving rock beneath the dirt. In her dreams flowstone was not hard but thick and soft as stale meringue. That white paste found in grade school libraries, dense and cloying and slowly stiffening against the skin, that was the flowstone in Cissy’s dreams. She lay back into it and it took on the shape of her body, the warmth of her skin. It settled beneath her, gently crept between her fingers and toes, and rose to cradle her hips. Compressed. Viscous. Alive. Growing slowly, but growing. Flowstone made a white noise in Cissy’s head, intimate and safe. She waited for it to wrap her around, slowly encase her body, and by that motion season her soul.

  Like me, Cissy thought as she dreamed. Flowstone was like her—dirt pressed hard, unvalued and ignored. Kick it and it did not kick back. It crumbled, broke apart, and absorbed what came. It settled down at its own rate, two inches a year or not at all.

  When Cissy dreamed herself into the cave, she felt the stone in her soul, the rock of her outrage. She knew who she was and where she belonged, the worth of her bones and the cadence of her heart. “Her place,” Dede would call it.

  My country, Cissy thought, and in the dream the cave shaped around her as steadily as mud took on the imprint of her heel. In the belly of Little Mouth, Cissy put her hand into sand as old as the earth, extended her fingers, and was not afraid. Whatever she needed, that thing she would find. Wherever she should be, that place was where she was.

  The shuffling struggle of the others washed over Cissy and did not matter, their panting and pushing, creeping progress, and yelps of fear. “Shut up,” she wanted to say, but didn’t. “Listen,” she did say sometimes. “Listen.” Jean and Mim would look around in confusion, hearing nothing of what Cissy heard, the pulse of the rock, the heartbeat of the planet, the echo of the unknown and the mysterious. One could s
ee only so far and then the night took over, the great dark where anything might hide. Anyone. Someone like Cissy or someone so different she could not be imagined.

  Caving for her, Cissy understood, was like sex for most people. Though what other people thought about sex was nothing Cissy really understood. But in the dark she became for the first time fully conscious of her own body and curiously unself-conscious. Unseen, she moved freely. In the dark her body moved precisely, steadily, each foot placed exactly, while her hips rocked loosely on the pistons of her thighs. Is this what California was for Delia? That unknown country where no one looked at her, no one knew her, and she could become anything she wanted, do anything without worrying about what others might see or think?

  When Cissy dreamed about the trip from California to Cayro, it was a nightmare with coyotes howling out in the desert and the wind whipping in the smashed back window, blowing grit in her eyes and stink against her mouth.

  “You didn’t stop to think about me, did you?” Cissy accused Delia in the dream.

  “I thought.” The Delia in the desert nightmare howled out the car windows like a maddened animal. The real Delia never talked about the trip. “We’re going home,” she had said in that flat, stubborn voice Cissy hated. “I’m going home. You are going where I take you.”

  “A hodag,” Jean told Cissy on their first trip. “A hodag is an animal that has legs shorter on one side than the other. Imagine. It can walk on steep hills without bending over lopsided. Can’t walk so good on flat land but moves fast on the steep.” She winked at Mim.