Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

by Rebecca Wells

  She thought of the backyard photo again. It had been taken around the time that her mother had sent Baylor to school with one of her garter belts for first-grade Show and Tell. As a result, the school had called and demanded that Vivi come in to meet with Baylor’s teacher. Evidently Vivi had gotten in a fight with the nun and ended up sideswiping the Infant Jesus of Prague statue that stood not far from the church parking lot.

  Sidda remembered ending up at Caro’s that night. Vivi had been upset, but Caro kept the bourbon flowing and fed them big bowls of chili. In front of the fire, as Vivi told the story, she switched from tears to laughter under Caro’s accepting gaze. The night ended with the women teaching the kids how to cha-cha with a how-to record on the stereo. Sidda remembered dancing, breathless, in Caro’s modern living room with the kidney-shaped coffee table and fireplace shaped like a black funnel.

  “Listen up, kids,” Vivi said. “I sideswiped the Infant Jesus of Prague today. And no one must ever know but us. It’s a secret.”

  One-two-three, cha-cha-cha. That’s not the only secret we kept, Sidda thought. They could bribe us and torture us, and we would not betray your secrets, Mama. There are some things you never show and tell.

  16

  The two clippings from The Thornton Town Monitor were stapled together, with numerous arrows and exclamation points marked in the margins. Sidda shook her head in amazement. She would have given anything if Wade and May were still at the cabin with her. It would have been great to share with them the news of her mother’s entry into a life of crime

  The first clipping read:

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 4, 1942

  DAUGHTERS OF PROMINENT CITIZENS ARRESTED FOR

  DISORDERLY CONDUCT

  Viviane Joan Abbott, age 15, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Taylor C. Abbott; Caroline Eliza Bennett, 16, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. “Bob” Bennett; Aimee Malissa Whitman, 15, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Newton S. Whitman III; and Denise Rose Kelleher, 15, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Francis P. Kelleher, were arrested last night and taken to city jail for disorderly public conduct. Charged with violating Municipal Statute 106: the willful soiling of public property and indecent exposure, the girls gave no explanation for their actions.

  Sidda had always heard rumors of the Ya-Yas being arrested while they were in high school, but she’d never known the details. Oh, how she’d love to transport herself back a half century and just be a fly on the wall.

  The second clipping read:

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 9, 1942

  SHOOTING THE BREEZE

  ALICE ANNE SIBLEY’S SOCIAL COLUMN

  A little bird has it that Mrs. Newton S. Whitman III (the former Genevieve Aimee St. Clair, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Etienne St. Clair of Marksville) hosted an impromptu patio party for her daughter “Teensy” this past Saturday afternoon, from 4–7 in the evening at the Whitman home on Willow Street. Present were Teensy’s close friends, Vivi Abbott, Caro Bennett, and Necie Kelleher, known locally as “The Ya-Yas.” The girls have made news of late with a particularly high-spirited escapade, even by Ya-Ya standards.

  Among those in attendance at the evening fête were Mary Gray Benjamin, Daisy Farrar, and Sally Soniat. Among the high school boys attending were Dicky Wheeler, John Pritchard, and Wyatt Bell, along with Lane Parker, of St. Petersburg, Florida. Mr. Parker is in town visiting his aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Simcoe.

  Served were cold fresh shrimp, cold corn on the cob, tomatoes with dilled onions, and French bread. Jack Whitman, Thornton High’s prize basketball player, entertained by playing tunes on the violin in the French Louisiana tradition. Mrs. Whitman went on to explain that she was throwing the spur-of-the-moment party to celebrate the installation of a new fountain that she has acquired. The fetching fountain, composed of two lovely mermaids who spurt water, is to be ensconced on her patio next to her prize-winning American Beauty roses.

  Mr. Whitman was not in attendance, having left on Thursday for his camp at Dauphin Island, Alabama. Wonder why he’d ever want to miss such a soirée.

  It was too rich. Give me more, give me more, give more more, Sidda thought. It was just killing her not to have the whole story. It made her itch. It made her salivate. And it made her wish, not for the first time, that she was part of a girl gang that got its name in the paper.

  The night of August 3, 1942, not five hours after Jack Whitman announced he was joining the Army Air Corps, an embarrassed policeman locked Vivi Abbott and the Ya-Yas into a cell in the Thornton jail.

  A month or so earlier, American torpedo bombers had swept down over Midway, only to be killed by flak, their young bodies sacrificed as surely as any kamikaze. Lights were dimmed in cities and towns on both coasts, and many inland cities as well. The Pacific seemed far away from Central Louisiana, and nobody knew how to pronounce the funny-sounding names of the islands. But Nazi submarines had landed spies on the Florida shore, and although nobody in Washington would admit it, folks in Thornton heard endless stories about the U-boats cruising the Gulf of Mexico.

  Vivi dreamed of Roosevelt and Rommel and Robert Taylor. On the tennis court she lobbed bombs across the net to kill Hitler. When she lay in bed at night, after long walks with Jack, her panties moist with arousal, she prayed to the Queen of Peace for all the scared boys in faraway foxholes and on trains crisscrossing the country. She ate little butter, less beef, no bacon, and when she stepped out, she painted “bottled stockings” on her legs. She gave blood every Friday; Saturdays, she collected newspapers; and on Wednesdays, scrap metal.

  Daily, she listened to the news. While the war reports were bleak, the fashion magazines reported that the new uniforms of the Women’s Army Corps would add to the prestige of the foundation industry because girdles and brassieres were included in the ensemble. The Catholic Commonweal opposed the recruiting of women. One article Buggy made Vivi read claimed that “removing ladies from the heart and home would turn them into pagan female goddesses of lustful sterility.”

  Vivi believed in war bonds and victory gardens. She believed that Nazis and Japs were evil. She believed in democracy at all costs. But what she wanted was tenderness and passion, so she did not believe Jack Whitman should go to war.

  The August night was hot and humid. It was almost eight o’clock in the evening, and the temperature had not begun to drop. The moon was almost full, and everywhere there was the smell of grass and river water and high summer in the Deep South. In the South Pacific, Marines were preparing to land on Guadalcanal; in Europe, bombers were getting ready for the first all-American air raid.

  In Thornton, Louisiana, Vivi and Jack were sitting in Jack’s 1940 blue-green Buick at LeMoyne’s Hamburger Drive-In. Vivi was leaning against the inside of the passenger door with her feet in Jack’s lap, holding a Dr Pepper bottle in her shaking hand.

  After he announced he had enlisted, the first thing she said was, “Why are you leaving me?”

  “It’s my responsibility,” he said. “Besides, I want to fly.”

  “You’re lying,” she said. “I’ve never even heard you talk about flying.”

  Then she sat up straight and hit him hard with her fist. She sucked in her breath and tried to keep from crying. “You don’t want to be a pilot. You just want to impress your father.”

  At first Jack did not speak. When he did, he could not look at her. “Mais oui.”

  Vivi and Jack had known each other since she was four and he was seven. She had spent at least two nights a week at his family’s home for the past eight years. There was not a lot he could hide from her about his family, even if he’d wanted to. On the other hand, he also knew her well. Knew the unseen marks her mother’s blaming, jealous silence left on her, especially after her sister, Jezie, was born. And he knew the not-so-hidden marks her father’s belt left on her skin.

  He looked at her, hoping he could make her understand. “Got to do one thing right for the old fellow, you know?”

  Vivi did know, but she didn’t like it, had never liked it. She h
ad always disliked Jack’s father. He was arrogant; he made fun of Genevieve’s accent—he forbade “bayou French” to even be spoken in his home. He refused to let Jack be called by his French name, let alone play the Acadian fiddle in his presence. She had not forgotten Mr. Whitman’s condescension (although she did not know to call it that at the time) when, after their return from Atlanta, he forced the Ya-Yas to spend tortured Saturday afternoons in training with Miss Alma Ansell, whose job it was to mold them into alluring, well-behaved young women.

  “There’s one thing right you could do, Jack.” She spoke in a near whisper. “Stay home and love me.”

  The back of Jack’s neck was magnificent to her. She had lived her life flirting with hundreds of boys, and prided herself on having as many dates as she had the stamina for. But the thought of losing Jack made her ache.

  “I’m sorry, Bébé,” he said. “It’s already done.”

  Vivi closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she could not regain her equilibrium. The dashboard in front of her seemed to undulate slightly; she could not make the objects around her stop moving. It was as if the sliver of fine wire on which her inner balance rested had just been imperceptibly bent. The sensation was vaguely familiar. She closed her eyes again and shook her head in tight, quick, hard, little shakes.

  “Vivi,” Jack said, reaching for her foot, pulling it slowly back into his lap. “You okay?”

  She glanced at him briefly with a look of pure hatred, then turned away.

  He began to rub her foot with his hand, a slow, stroking motion. Although she turned away, she could see his hands in her mind. The long, tapered fingers, the short, square nails. Large, graceful hands that knew how to handle a basketball, a fiddle, and her awakening body with gentleness and easy confidence.

  “Will you come back?” she asked.

  “Are you kidding?! You think I could stay away from you? Of course, I’ll come back.”

  “Do you swear to me you will come back?”

  He reached over to touch her cheek, but she did not respond. “I promise, Vivi.”

  She sat soundless for a moment, perfectly still, staring out. When she turned back to him, she was smiling, her mouth open wide.

  “I think I could learn to love a man in uniform,” she said, and winked, working hard to sound flirtatious. But there was something in her gaze that was slightly off, as though she had seen something in the brief time she had been turned away from him and could not shake it.

  Jack bent down and kissed her foot. He kissed her painted toenails. His black hair fell slightly over his eyes as he leaned over her feet, and when he raised his head, his eyes were wet. He turned his body, so his legs stretched out on the seat, then pulled her into his lap. They sat like that without talking for a while. The strains of Ginny Simms singing “Deep Purple” drifted over from someone’s car radio. A flat-bed cotton truck with a red cab passed by on the street. The aroma of hamburgers and barbecue sauce wafted through the thick, humid air.

  “When you come back, it’ll all be fabulous again, right?” she asked.

  “Ma Petite Chou, Uncle Sam’s the boss for a little while, but when I come home, you write the ticket.”

  “I might be a newspaperwoman by then, Jack.”

  “We could live in New York, how bout that?”

  “I like that,” she said. “Or maybe Paris, after the war is over. Or I might be a tennis star, live in Rio de Janeiro.”

  “There’ll be pictures of you in all the papers.”

  “Or I might be in college studying I don’t know what.”

  “You could go to Newcomb, and I’ll go to Tulane. Rent an apartment in the French Quarter. We’ll head to the bayou on the weekends, how’s that sound?”

  “I wish I knew how long this war will last.”

  “When this war is over,” Jack said, stroking her face, “well, would you have me, Vivi?”

  This question did not surprise her, and she answered almost casually, sounding utterly sure of herself.

  “You are the only man in the world I would ever want to be married to,” she said. “If I can’t marry you, then I’m going to marry the Ya-Yas.”

  Jack laughed. He looked into her eyes.

  “You could do anything, Vivi Abbott,” Jack said. “You could be anything. Anything you want.”

  “Will we have kids?” she asked. “Loud, good-looking ones?”

  “You want them, you got them. You don’t, we won’t. Like Maman says, ‘Nowhere in the Bible does it say every Catholic woman has to have a ripopée.’ ”

  “What’s ‘ripopée’ mean?”

  “Gang of obnoxious children,” Jack explained.

  Vivi laughed.

  “I can have as many as I want, right?” Vivi said. “Or none at all.”

  “Roger wilco,” Jack said.

  “Maybe a dozen.”

  “Okay, cheaper by the dozen.”

  “We’ll put them all in pirogues and row up and down the bayous, teach them the fiddle and squeeze box—”

  “Maman will spoil them rotten. We could name one for her.”

  “Oh, hell, let’s name two for her! Teensy and I will be real sisters. We’ll have a three-story house and raise collies, okay? Tennis court, can we have a tennis court?”

  Jack stopped Vivi with a kiss.

  My father, Jack thought. My father will see what kind of man I am, and he will be very, very proud.

  “Because,” Teensy said, as she poured rum into a tumbler filled with Coca-Cola and handed it to Vivi, “Jack made me swear not to say a word until he told you himself.”

  The Ya-Yas, having returned from their respective dates later that night, sat in their panties, smoking cigarettes and talking, on the upstairs sleeping porch of the Whitman home.

  “There’s not a Goddamn breeze in the state of Louisiana,” Caro said, slumped down into the cushions of a rattan chair, her feet propped on the screen, smoking a cigarette.

  “He only told Maman and Father and me this morning,” Teensy continued. “Father came home from the bank this afternoon with a bottle of French champagne to celebrate. Can you imagine—French champagne?”

  “Leave it to your father to lay his hands on something like that in the middle of the war,” Caro said.

  “I’ve never seen Father make over Jack like this before. Not when he was elected class president or captain of the basketball team. Papa said he’s going to organize a black-tie scrap-metal drive in honor of Jack’s signing up, and we’re all supposed to put on the dog.”

  “What did Genevieve say?” Vivi asked. She sat next to Necie on the glider, holding her drink against her left temple.

  “Maman asked if it was too late to change his mind!” Teensy said. “Father called her unpatriotic. ‘My God, woman,’ Papa said. ‘This is France, this is the free world we’re talking about!’ You know how he gets. Made a little speech and gave a toast to Jack. Maman wouldn’t even touch the champagne—and yall know how she adores it. She went upstairs, and after a few minutes, Jack went up to see about her.”

  Fanning herself with one of Genevieve’s fans made of vetiver root, Teensy lay across one of the beds. “It’s really rather momentous, yall,” she said. “The first one of our crowd to join up.”

  The other three didn’t respond.

  “Well, isn’t it?” Teensy repeated. “Isn’t it marvelous?”

  “Oh, it’s marvelous; it’s thrilling; it’s Jimmy Stewart,” Vivi said. “Only it means Jack has to go far away for a long time. It means he will sit suspended in the air miles above the earth in a small metal cigar while Germans try to kill him.”

  “Goodness,” Necie said, “I never thought of it like that.”

  “Of course, you didn’t, Pal,” Caro said. “Miss Apple Blossom Time.”

  “Jack went out to Spring Creek after he dropped me off,” Vivi said.

  “Father gave him a whole book of gas stamps,” Teensy said.

  “Our Mother of Pearl,” Caro said. “Is your father
the president of the black market? The guy can get his hands on anything.”

  “I don’t know,” Teensy said. “I never ask.”

  “Bunch of the guys are going with him,” Vivi continued, taking a drag off her Lucky. “A stag party to celebrate, I guess. They’re spending the night out at the creek.”

  “Well, they should have taken us with them,” Teensy said. “It’s always cooler at Spring Creek. I’m about to die from all this humidity. I wish somebody would just wring me out!”

  “He should have at least taken Vivi,” Caro said, standing, walking the length of the porch, her bare feet slapping the boards. Turning and walking back, she picked up a cushion and began to fan Vivi with it. “When’s he leave?” she asked. “Where’s he go? What’s the skinny?”

  “I do think the Air Corps has the cutest uniforms, don’t yall?” Necie asked.

  “My brother doesn’t need a uniform to be handsome,” Teensy said.

  “More hooch, please,” Vivi said, holding out her glass.

  Teensy splashed more of Mr. Whitman’s black-market rum into Vivi’s glass, and a full moon shimmered over Central Louisiana. This was no rinky-dink moon. This was a moon you had to curtsy to. A big, heavy, mysterious, beautiful, bossy moon. The kind you want to serve things to on a silver platter. The noise of the crickets and cicadas and the clinking of ice against the girls’ glasses mingled with their voices and sighs. From their spot on the porch, they could see a paradise of stars holding their own with the moon.

  Taking turns, they stood in front of the fan with wet washcloths held in front of their bodies. They tried lying in bed, but even the sheets felt soggy. When nothing else worked, Teensy started moaning.