Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

by Rebecca Wells

  “Come on, yall,” Teensy said, “moan with me. You’ll feel better, I guarantee, mes chères!”

  And so they moaned until a dog started howling somewhere, which made them laugh, because it sounded like he was trying to communicate with their pack.

  “Would Tallulah stay here and boil to death?!” Teensy asked.

  “Look, Pal,” Caro said, “Eleanor Roosevelt herself wouldn’t languish here like this, and she’s one tough trooper.”

  Wearing nothing but their fathers’ old seersucker pajama tops over their panties, the four girls pushed Genevieve’s convertible to the end of the long drive before Vivi climbed behind the wheel and started it. There was only a dollop of gas in the tank so they couldn’t get far.

  “I just know we shouldn’t be doing this,” Necie said as they journeyed into the night. “We should have at least put on pajama bottoms.”

  “Necie, this is not a mortal sin, you know,” said Teensy.

  “I do not recall it being listed in the Baltimore Catechism,” Vivi said.

  “Moses didn’t utter one word about pajama bottoms when he came down from the mountain,” said Caro.

  “Well,” Necie said, “I guess these tops do cover more of our bodies than our swimsuits do.”

  As Vivi drove, it seemed that not only the Ya-Yas’ bodies but the earth and sky were sweating. The very air they breathed was almost a juice. Moonlight spilled down into the convertible, onto the four friends’ shoulders and knees and on the tops of their heads, so that their hair seemed to have little sparks shooting off it. “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” played on the radio. Vivi had no idea at all where she was headed, but she knew that whatever direction she went, her friends would go with her.

  She stopped the car at City Park, near a clump of trees, not far from where the water holding tank for the city of Thornton sat atop a raised tower. Turning off the ignition, Vivi dimmed the lights and turned to the others. “Climb to the heavens, anybody?”

  “Top-notch notion,” Caro said, jumping out of the convertible, without bothering to open the car door.

  “Oooh, yes!” Teensy said.

  “They don’t like you to go up there,” Necie said.

  “That’s one of the reasons we want to do it, Countess,” Caro said.

  “Only the men from the Parks Department are supposed to be up there, yall,” Necie said. “Really.”

  “Necie, Baby Doll,” said Vivi, getting out of the car, “can it, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Yall,” Necie continued. “We can’t climb up there. It is against the law.”

  “We know.” Teensy smiled. “It’s forbidden.”

  Necie stared at the other three for a moment before she finally opened the car door and joined them.

  “I don’t even want to think about what could happen to us,” she said.

  “Then don’t, Sweetie Pie,” Caro said, putting her arm around Necie.

  “I’m just going to think me some pretty pink and blue thoughts,” Necie said.

  They made their way to the back of the platform, where a crude ladder stopped six feet or so above the ground. They took turns giving each other boosts, with Caro, the tallest, going last. As Vivi scrambled up, her heart beat rapidly and sweat ran down the back of her neck. If the sultry heat, the rum, and the late hour were not enough to put her in a trance, the magnitude of the moonlight was.

  At the top of the ladder, Vivi stepped onto a narrow catwalk that encircled the tank. It was an old wooden water-holding tank, once used by the railroads, but now pushed into service by the city, since nearby England Air Force Base and Camp Livingston had swelled its population. From her spot twenty or so feet above the ground, she looked down on the town of Thornton.

  She thought of her mother and father, and Pete, and the baby Jezie, and the wobbly life they lived there. Of the way Buggy stiffened when her husband stepped near; of the way she said, “Here’s your supper, Mr. Abbott,” her lips thin and tight. She thought of the way her father laughed at her mother’s housedresses, dirty fingernails from gardening, and sanctuary candles. She thought about the faint smell of Scotch, not quite disguised with Dr. Tichenor’s Antiseptic Tincture, on her father’s breath; she thought of the clinking sound of his belt buckle when it dangled from the strap.

  Her mother’s discontent lay coiled inside her own body. Ever since Vivi’s little sister, Jezie, was born, Buggy had slept in the nursery, on a daybed against the wall. Although Vivi could not have put it into words, she felt her own exhaustion at constantly attempting to hold back part of her vitality so she would not cause her mother more sadness. At fifteen, Vivi Abbott was more masterful than most at rationing parts of herself without appearing anything but exuberant.

  She did not know that the holding back did no good. Nor did she have any understanding of the inner rationing her mother had learned herself at a tender age. There was a lot Vivi did not know about her mother.

  She did not know about the old nightmare that haunted Buggy. The dream that came from something that had happened when her mother was twelve years old. At that age, Buggy had kept a journal, filled with her secret feelings and little rhyming sentimental poems. She wrote about anger toward her sister, Virginia, and her mother, Delia. She wrote romantic girlish poems about fairies, love, the Virgin Mary, and her love for horses (which Buggy was too afraid to ride).

  In Buggy’s nightmare, it happened just the way it had happened in 1912. Delia found her journal, became infuriated by what Buggy had written in secret. Forced Buggy to follow her and Virginia to the backyard. There Delia ripped the pages from the journal and one by one handed them to Virginia, who fed them into a fire.

  “Buggy,” Delia had told her, “you are not a writer. There is nothing in your pitiful little life to write about. If anyone is a writer, it is Virginia.”

  As Buggy watched her secrets go up in smoke, she vowed to get back at her sister. And she did. When she was nineteen, she managed, through painstaking calculation, to steal Taylor Abbott from Virginia and get him to marry her. He told her she was the sweetest little thing in Garnet Parish and that he wanted her to be his little girl forever.

  Buggy’s victory was a dubious one, however. She was left with a husband who ran around on her for the duration of their marriage.

  From the top of the water tower, Vivi felt a relief spread through her. What a sweet small-town thrill this was, like the delight of watching a parade from the top of a tall building. She could see the tangled Spanish moss hanging off the oaks in City Park. She could make out the camellia bushes and azaleas, the salvias; she could smell the night-blooming jasmine. Closing her eyes, she imagined she could look down into her house, into her bedroom and everything in it. The four-poster bed with the silk canopy Delia had bought for her in New Orleans; the new vanity her father bought for her fifteenth birthday, on top of which sat a photo of Jack clad in his basketball uniform, fiddle in hand; the tall armoire crammed with loafers and sweater sets; the ceiling fan; the tennis racket propped against the night stand; her tennis trophies; countless photos of the Ya-Yas, and one of Jimmy Stewart.

  Looking away from her parents’ house, Vivi imagined she could see the block she lived on, and then her whole neighborhood. She conjured up all the people she knew and the few she didn’t. She saw them tossing and turning in their beds, too hot to sleep. She saw lights burning on front porches; slivers of light where icebox doors were open, someone standing there, reaching for a bottle of milk, just an excuse to feel the cool air of the icebox. She saw night lights in the rooms of the babies who dreamed soft seersucker dreams, drugged happy with the heat, their pink baby bodies curled against worn cotton, not fearing Hitler yet, their strong, tiny hearts beating in unison with the trees and the creeks and the bayous.

  Vivi saw the flicker of candles burning at Divine Compassion for the souls of the dead; she spotted tiny fiery red tips of cigarettes dangling from the lips of sleep-starved souls seeking the faintest of breezes in backyards; she caught the
soft glow from radio dials left on all night, in case a warning was broadcast, in case the Nazis or Japs invaded on this feverish night, executing the horrors that lived in the town’s heart even as the bank opened for business, as the milk was delivered, as the wafer changed to body and blood.

  Winging higher still, Vivi left her town, went up so high she could no longer see the trees or the boulevard or the faces in ecstasy or worry. She flew above all the forgotten things hanging in the air between people. She lifted above her town until she could see Bunkie and Natchitoches and how the Cane River was more like a lake, and how the Garnet River fed into the Mississippi; she soared over Spring Creek, with its cool shade trees and pine-needle paths leading to the cabin where Jack lay sleeping that night. She flew over the German irises with their pale gray-green spikes, above the brown waters of the bayous with their silent cypress trees; over the swamps; over the cotton; over the shotgun houses, where the tired black men and women who stooped to pick the cotton slept; over the rice and sugar cane; over the swamp myrtles; over the millions of tiny estuaries; over the crayfish in their beds of mud.

  Then she left it all, and ascended even higher to banks of clouds, perfect clouds cool with mist and closer to heaven. She could see the whole little earth, blue and white, spinning around in terrifying magnificent space. No people, only hearts, hearts beating, countless hearts; and the sound of breathing.

  This is how it was for Vivi Abbott, age fifteen, labile, in every sense of the word. Such were the places she could travel when a tiny gate opened inside her and her mind went loose-jointed. Such holy and terrible suppleness is not always safe, and never without trade-offs.

  For a moment Vivi stopped feeling solid. And then she began a fast free-fall, which carried a shock of impermanence, a panicky jolt of her own temporariness. She clawed to hold on to the moist clouds, to the grand view. She did not want to return to earth.

  Back on the water-tower platform in City Park, in the heart of the state of Louisiana, Vivi thought: With Jack Whitman, my life will be different. You can be anything you want, Vivi, he said. Anything at all.

  And then Vivi thought: If Jack disappears into the sky, I will shrivel up and die.

  Caro was the one who figured out how to pry the lid of the water tower open. It was tricky and required some work, but the Ya-Yas were wily and hot.

  Even Necie, the careful Ya-Ya, was captured by the vision of the moonlight in the water. They flung off their pajama tops. Seersucker fluttered through the still air to the parched ground below. The Ya-Yas stepped out of their panties and forgot about collecting scrap metal. They didn’t talk much, and they thought even less. They slid into the cool, clear liquid caress of the city water supply.

  A bold kind of holiness hung in the air as the Ya-Yas leaned their heads back in the water, their hair floating out around their shoulders. They stared up into the bright sky, where there wasn’t any war. They counted stars, thought they found Pegasus, and were sure they spotted Venus. They touched their toes to one another’s and kicked their legs to the heavens like Esther Williams.

  Vivi completely gave herself over to the water. A black stone that lived inside her chest was temporarily lifted out, and she breathed deeply, and then released her breath like she was blowing out a candle. Her stomach softened, her shoulders released, her dizziness went away. Then she started to cry.

  After a few moments, and with no explanation, Teensy’s tears joined Vivi’s. Then Necie’s, and a few of Caro’s. Their tears rolled down their faces and into their community’s water. They cried because Jack’s enlistment had cracked open their tight universe to the suffering world. They cried because in their highly resonant Ya-Ya bones, they knew that they would never be the same.

  Through her tears, Vivi gazed at the moon. A silent prayer for Jack issued from her body.

  Moonlight in the summer sky, look down on my love from up on high. Shine on him now while he is safe and shine on him when he flies through enemy skies. Let his journeys into the sky bring him closer to you, so that while he is away from me, he will he safe. Tell him I love him, tell him I am longing for him, tell him I will always wait for him. Your milky brilliance can protect him from all enemies. He is a tender boy, do not let him suffer. Moonlight over the only town I know, bring my love back home so we can live and be happy.

  Turning her head to look at each of her friends, Vivi saw Teensy and Caro and Necie as she had never seen them before. They seemed to glow from within, like there were lanterns inside their bodies. They looked very old to her, and very young all at once. They looked both invincible and utterly, utterly fragile. Their bodies were the density and weight that anchored her, that made her more real. She looked at them and loved them and was flooded with gratitude.

  Officer Roscoe Jenkins didn’t know what to think when he saw the four pajama tops lying on the ground. He’d been making his regular rounds when he spotted the convertible at the side of the lane, and had wondered if someone had run out of gas. The night was so bright he hardly needed his flashlight, but when he shone it on the pajama tops he saw monograms and grew more perplexed. When he spied the panties, he became alarmed. Holding the shirts in his hand, he looked around, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then he heard the faint sound of splashing water. He swung his flashlight up in the direction of the water tower, and that’s when he thought he saw a naked woman.

  Once the Ya-Yas agreed to come down from the tower, Officer Roscoe Jenkins was every inch a gentleman. Averting his eyes, he handed each one of them a pajama top before climbing up to the tower himself to make sure they had indeed closed the lid back tightly over the water. He knew these young ladies. He’d known the Whitman girl ever since she managed to get a pecan stuck up her nose when she wasn’t but four or five. Blowing out the side of his lips and shaking his head, he was more embarrassed than angry. The fact that he let the gang follow him to the station in the convertible rather than shuffling them into his squad car was not a sign of trust. Actually, he was a little nervous about sharing a car with the four of them.

  In Genevieve’s convertible, there was some controversy about whether they should actually follow him, or gun it and head for the hills (of course, there were no hills).

  Teensy finally prevailed. “Come on,” she said, “I’ve never been in a lockup before!”

  * * *

  When their fathers arrived at the station, rumpled and hot, they conferred among themselves.

  “Too bad we can’t harness their energy. It’d be an asset to the Allies,” Caro’s father said.

  “It’s their utter lack of regard for appearances that astounds me,” Teensy’s father said. “My son has done something praiseworthy, and now my daughter turns into a common criminal. Those four have been a quartet of embarrassments ever since they humiliated my family in Atlanta.”

  “I wonder how the water department might go about purifying that holding tank,” Necie’s father said.

  “Cool em off in a cell for a night,” Mr. Abbott said. “Maybe that’ll clip their wings.”

  “Book them?” Roscoe said, not believing.

  “Book them,” the fathers agreed. Then they turned and left.

  “Book them!” Teensy said, her hands dramatically clenching the bars of the cell. “Aren’t those marvelous words!”

  “The pokey!” Caro said.

  “Jailed for our convictions,” Vivi said.

  “Oh, my,” Necie said.

  The cell the girls were escorted to was possibly one of the coolest spots to sleep in all of Thornton. At basement level, with windows on both sides and a side door propped open (not to mention the fan that Officer Roscoe Jenkins moved from his desk to a card table just outside the cell), the space was downright pleasant. Their hair was still wet, their bodies still cool from the water, and Roscoe brought them sodas from the station’s icebox, for which they thanked him politely.

  “Roscoe,” Vivi told him, “when I write my memoirs, you will be much more than a marginal character.”<
br />
  The Ya-Yas drank their sodas and lay on the bunks.

  “My père,” Teensy said, “hasn’t a shred, not even a shred, of human understanding. Jack is lucky to get away from him.”

  “We are not common criminals,” Caro said.

  “There is nothing common about us,” Necie said.

  Vivi stared up at the low ceiling of the cell. Sometimes higher laws than Thornton’s must be obeyed, she thought. Too many people hide in their rooms when the light of the moon is strongest, when she’s bouncing light back to us whether we want it or not.

  As the Ya-Yas slept that night in the Thornton City Jail, the moon loved them. Not because they were beautiful, or because they were perfect, or because they were perky, but because they were her darling daughters.

  17

  If Sidda Walker had been able to witness Vivi and the Ya-Yas in the light of that summer moon in 1942, their young bodies touching, their nipples luminous in the light, she would have known she came from goddess stock. She would have known that a primal, sweet strength flowed in her mother like an underground stream, and that the same stream flowed in her. Whatever scars Vivi had inflicted with her unhinged swings between creation and devouring, she had also passed on a mighty capacity for rapture.

  Anxiety hijacked Sidda as she walked down the steps to Lake Quinault. Even as the moon strutted, prissed, and swelled into a gorgeous globe, Sidda was aware only of her own confusion and rattled determination to get to the bottom of things. But a summer moon will put up with inattention for just so long. Just as Sidda was about to place her foot down onto the step in front of her, moonlight tapped her on the shoulder and forced her gaze skyward. She took a long, deep breath, and when she exhaled, she felt a spaciousness that had not been there before.

  Beholding the moon in its chalky wonder, Sidda thought, Our Lady of Pearl! That moon is why the word “comely” was invented.

  Sitting down on the wooden steps, she reached her hand down to Hueylene’s long, curly ears and began to rub gently. Sidda rubbed and the dog sighed, producing funny little off-key sounds, like the cockeyed music a child might blow on a harmonica. Sidda could feel her heart beating and could hear crickets around the lake’s edge.