Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

by Rebecca Wells

  Shep was out at the duck camp all the time, with no Goddamn telephone.

  If I asked the father of my children when he’d be back, all he said was, “I’ll be back when I get back.”

  I couldn’t even make myself talk to the Ya-Yas about how sick I was of my four little monsters. I did not want even my best friends to know how fed up I was. I tried once to explain to Caro.

  “Tell Shep you want more time away,” she said.

  That wasn’t it. I could have a baby-sitter any time I wanted out. But it wasn’t enough. It still left me the responsible one.

  For a while, I had Melinda, this big black baby nurse that the kids called Lindo. She came home from the hospital with me for every one of my babies. My children had gotten used to her.

  So had I.

  Melinda stayed for three months to nurse Baylor and then she left me. She had to. She had another baby to take care of.

  I begged her to stay. I stood in the kitchen and said, “I need you, Melinda. Can’t you just tell Mrs. Quinn to find another nurse? She can get somebody else.”

  “I can’t be doing that,” she said. “I done nurse two Miz Quinn’s babies and she be countin on me. Already got my room fixed up. Miz Quinn fix me up a nice room.”

  “You mean I don’t?” I said. “I know it’s tiny—I’m sorry—I know it’s not a real bedroom. But it’s all we have in this place. I’ll order a new bed if you want, get new curtains, you just tell me what you want. I had no idea you didn’t like your room here. Is it the bed? I mean, I know it’s not a great bed.”

  She just stood there in her big brown body, with that starched white uniform so clean and white you could smell the Clorox rising up off it.

  “It ain’t that, Miz Vivi,” she said. “I got me another baby coming I got to look after. I can’t be staying here. Done been here three months with this new baby, Baylor, just like I done with all your other babies.”

  The monsters were all asleep for once. It was quiet. I could hear that low hum of the refrigerator. I did not want to beg a colored person to help me, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “Melinda,” I said. “I am begging you. Please don’t leave me. I cannot take care of these four babies by myself. Please, please do not leave me. I will pay you anything you want. I will make Mr. Shep get you your own car. How about that?”

  I thought for a minute I had convinced her, thought for a minute she would stay. After all I had done for her and her family, I thought she might at least stay and help me.

  “Miz Vivi,” she said, “they you chilren and you gonna have to tend them one of these days.”

  I put my head in my hands and leaned down on the kitchen counter. That entire house smelled like baby formula. Baby formula was all I had smelled for the past four years. Baby formula, baby poo-poo, and baby throw-up.

  Melinda took out three bottles from the icebox.

  “Use the little saucepan to heat them,” I said, “and go ahead and give Sidda a bottle. I know she’s not supposed to have one, but she’s quieter if she gets one with the others when they wake from their naps.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Melinda said.

  My heart started skipping and I could feel the fist in my stomach. My skin itched all over. It was red from scratching. I had told myself that I would be ready for it. Ready for Melinda to leave me with all four monsters. I handled two kids, didn’t I? I handled three, didn’t I, with another on the way? I handled it, didn’t I?

  “Miz Vivi, you be wanting me to warm you something up? You need to have you a bite.”

  “No, thank you, Melinda,” I said. “Maybe I’ll have something later. I’ll just have a Coke now.”

  “You done had you enough Coca-Colas,” she said. “You need you some food.”

  I pulled the aluminum icetray out of the freezer and ran water over it. Took out one of my squatty crystal glasses and filled it with Coke. Coke was my friend. It settled my stomach; it was the one thing that always stayed down no matter how upset my stomach was. I drank so many Cokes I had to hide the bottles from Shep and Mother. I didn’t want to hear their comments.

  It was almost twilight and still raining hard when I put the kids in the car and drove Melinda home. I pulled up in front of her house, and left the car running. Two long-legged boys ran out to greet Melinda. They must’ve been eight or nine years old. I had no idea she had children that young. They could have been grandchildren, for all I knew. You could never tell with colored people.

  “Melinda,” I said, “won’t you please change your mind? You could visit with your family and I could come back and get you later on tonight.”

  “No, Miz Vivi,” she said. “I can’t go be letting people down. I got my work to be thinking of. What if I let you down when you be bout to birth a new baby?”

  I could not believe what I was hearing. I looked at that colored woman and I wanted to slap her. “All right, Melinda,” I said. “I understand. God forbid I should interfere with your career.”

  I handed Melinda my last ten for a tip, and she climbed out, holding a folded newspaper over her head so she wouldn’t get soaked.

  “M’dea! Oh, M’dea!” the little colored boys called out, hugging her, reaching to help her with her suitcase.

  That’s when Sidda realized Melinda was leaving, and started to bawl. “Don’t go, Lindo!” she whined, and tried to climb out of the car.

  You would have thought someone was torturing the child. You would have thought I was leaving, not some colored nurse.

  “Shhh, Dahlin,” I told Sidda, “stay in the car. It’s raining. Mama’s going to buy you some new cutout dolls.”

  But Sidda scrambled out of the backseat, and the next thing I knew she and Little Shep were both following Melinda out into the pouring rain.

  Oh, my God, there was not one, but two filthy yard dogs standing on the edge of Melinda’s porch. All I needed was for one of my babies to get bit by some rabies-infected colored dog. All I needed was for them to get even sicker with that damn bronchitis.

  “Get back in this car!” I hollered. “Yall get back here this instant!”

  When Baylor, the baby, who was lying on the front seat next to me, heard me holler, he started howling. Just after Melinda had finally gotten him quiet on the way out here. Only Lulu was behaving, sitting in the back sucking down her third bottle since she’d woken up.

  “Stay right where you are, Tallulah,” I told her. “Don’t you move a muscle.”

  Then I climbed out of the car, and stepped down right into a puddle. There was not one Goddamn sidewalk out here in Samtown, and there I was wearing my good brown suede flats.

  A bunch of coloreds were up on Melinda’s porch all dressed up like for a party. “Whoa, Melinda!” they called out, hooting and whistling. “Get yourself in here, girl! We been waitin on you, Honey! We got fried chicken just jumping off the plate waiting for yo mouth!”

  “Oooh, chile,” Melinda said, and headed toward the porch, my two oldest children tagging right along behind her. “I done got me a welcome-home party!”

  You could tell from the tone of her voice that she had forgotten all about me and my children. Like we did not exist.

  “Melinda,” I said, my hair dripping wet, “would you be so kind as to help me get my little children back into the car and out of this pouring rain?”

  “Oh, yas’m,” she said, and handed one of the colored boys her purse. “Yall go on up and wait on the porch,” she told them. “M’dea be right behind you.”

  It has always amazed me the way colored people call their mothers “M’dea.” Short for “Mother Dear.” I don’t know where they get it.

  Melinda scooped both Sidda and Little Shep into her arms, and brought them back to my car. Those two kids would not stop screaming. God, I was sick of their screaming.

  “Yall be good chilren for you mama, now,” Melinda told them. Then she wiped the mud off her dress, where their feet touched her outfit.

  “Thank you, Miz Vivi,” she said, and
slammed my car door.

  Just slammed the door to my car and walked up to her house where all the lights were blazing and her family and friends were waiting to throw her a party.

  I got back in my car with my screaming children and my ruined shoes. I knew it didn’t make a grain of sense, but my feelings were hurt. If Melinda was going to walk off and abandon me like that, then the least she could have done was to invite us in for a minute.

  “Mama, where we going?” Sidda asked from the backseat.

  “Mama, we get hamboigas!” Little Shep said. I do not know where he got it, but the child said “hamboigas” like he grew up in Brooklyn or something.

  I lit a cigarette. “I don’t know where we’re going yet. Just sit there and be still.”

  Both Sidda and Little Shep still had bronchitis. They coughed so hard their whole bodies shook, coughs so deep I couldn’t bear the sound. I couldn’t bear the look in their eyes when they coughed up mucus and almost choked on it.

  “Spit it out!” I had to tell them. “Don’t swallow it, Baby Dahlins, it’ll make you sicker.”

  But they didn’t understand. They got that bronchial thing from Shep. I had never seen anyone cough that hard. Nobody ever did that kind of thing on my side of the family. I had listened to their coughs for weeks on end. Thank God for the cough syrup Dr. Poché had prescribed. It stopped the coughing and made them sleepy.

  The thing about Melinda was she knew just when to take Baylor. She knew just when he was about to drive me right over the edge. She would step into my bedroom, where he was crying, just when I was about to slap him. She would reach down and take him out of my arms, like she was a fat black angel sent to me to stop me from harming my baby. She did that with all my babies. Sometimes I wondered how she knew. Wondered if something in her huge body vibrated so she picked it up like a radio station when I was this close to slapping my babies just to get them to shut up.

  I did not like to spank. It was not something I wanted to do. It just happened, before I knew it. I couldn’t talk about it. Oh, Caro would joke in those days about driving off and forgetting one of her boys at a gas station and not remembering him until the next day, but she was kidding. I could not tell my friends about the things I did to my children when they pushed me too far.

  If things got too bad, Mother would send Ginger over, and sometimes Ginger’s granddaughter, Mary Lee, but she was just a girl herself. It wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough. If Delia were still alive, she would see to it that I never had to call for help.

  When I finally got the kids home and in bed that night, I was so exhausted I was shaking. The son of a bitch, Shep. How could he have left me when he knew it was Melinda’s last day?

  I could not sleep. I was too keyed up. I could feel the inside of my body vibrating. I could feel twelve million nerve endings. Necie’s kids had the measles, Caro was on a new kick of going to bed early. So I called Teensy, but she and Chick had already gone out.

  “Where did they go?” I asked Shirley, who was baby-sitting.

  “To Mr. Chastain’s dining room,” she said.

  I rang the restaurant and had them page Teensy.

  “I need adults,” I told her.

  “I’m flattered you think we qualify, cher. We haven’t ordered yet. Shall I get you some gumbo to start with?”

  “Whatever,” I said. “I’m not very hungry.”

  I hadn’t had an appetite since Baylor was born. My stomach wouldn’t settle down enough; eating was a chore.

  I could have called Mother to baby-sit, but I didn’t want to see that constipated look of blame on her face when she asked me why I couldn’t just cook supper at home. So I called Willetta Lloyd, whose husband, Chaney, worked for Shep and his father on Pecan Grove, where we’d be moving when our new house was built and we got out of that rat-trap rental house we were in back then. Willetta cleaned at Dr. Daigre’s house at the time, but she baby-sat for me, what with the Daigre kids being almost grown.

  “Don’t tell me no, Willetta,” I said. “Please don’t tell me no.”

  I threw on a pair of camel wool slacks and a black sweater, and reapplied my lipstick. I looked tubercular. My hair was getting thinner every day. I found hairs on my pillow when I woke up in the morning.

  After I drank my dinner at Chastain’s, I could not bear to say goodnight. “Oh, don’t be party poopers,” I told Teensy and Chick. “Please don’t call it a night yet. Let’s drive over to the Theodore for an after-dinner drink.”

  “Love to, Vivi Dahlin,” Chick said, “but we’ve got to get home and see if our petits monstres have destroyed the house yet.

  “Teensy, can’t you stay? I don’t want to go home yet. Come play with me.”

  “Vivi Bébé,” she said. “I am exhausted. My babies woke me up early this morning, and I didn’t get my nap today. Rain check?”

  “Absolument,” I said, then I kissed them both goodnight.

  “Vivi,” Chick said, “why aren’t you tired? We’ve only got two kids, you’ve got four, for God’s sake.”

  “Not to mention the fact that Shep seems to think that he has none,” Teensy said. The Ya-Yas didn’t like the way Shep left me for the duck camp. Necie called me the Duck Widow.

  “I’m not in the least bit tired, really!” I told them. “I could go all night.”

  “Gimme whatever you got, then,” Chick said. “We could make a million if we bottle it!”

  The truth was I was tired way underneath my skin. I was tired where even I couldn’t see. I do not know how that happened. How I ended up like that. It all happened so fast.

  I loved the sound of Shep’s voice. I loved the way the sun shone on the blond hairs on his forearms. I thought: we will have beautiful children, he has good bones, good eyes, he’s from an old family. I thought: he is not Jack, but I cannot have Jack.

  Shep brought me to see Pecan Grove. He drove me across the eight hundred acres in his convertible, showed me the spot where he wanted to build a house. I felt sexy with him. I felt something like love.

  I did not know what it would take to wake up every day and see Shep. He was not the man I wanted, he was not the man I truly loved.

  I adored actually being pregnant. I adored walking into a room with my latest p.g. outfits that I designed myself and had Mrs. Boyette tailor.

  But then there were these four creatures who depended on me. They wouldn’t go away. You couldn’t take them back because they kept getting bronchitis. I didn’t mean for it all to happen. I didn’t mean for it not to happen. I just drifted into the mother club like a boat without a rudder. I did not know what motherhood would smell like.

  I did not know that being a mother meant I would lie awake in torture, the weight of responsibility biting into my skin. Was I doing it right? Was I giving my babies what they needed? Was I doing enough? Was I doing too much? Would I burn in hell if I did not put them before me in every Goddamn thing I said and did? Did I have to be the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother herself, rather than Vivi Abbott Walker?

  If I had known what I was getting into, I would have said no to all of it. Would have taken off running at the mere mention of babies.

  Willetta left when I got back from Chastain’s. I gave her a tip for coming over at the last minute. She would not spend the night like I asked. These colored women were suddenly all saying no to me. Chaney came and got her. He came up to the door and brought her an extra sweater, and they turned around and walked down the sidewalk to the pickup truck with PECAN GROVE written on the side.

  I had not slept more than five hours a night in over four years. I was a woman who used to sleep ten, eleven hours a night. Sleep was so sweet to me I could taste it. I could taste a good nap like a bacon, lettuce, tomato sandwich on fresh French bread.

  It was not only the rest I missed. I missed my dreams, God, I missed my dreams. Even the dark ones. Even the Jack dream. It had been so many years since I’d dreamed. Always being uprooted to warm a bottle, lead a sleepy-eyed kid to the bath
room, and return to bed angry as hell, knowing I’d be exhausted the next day.

  On good nights, I used to dream of lying in a pool under a waterfall and how my body could dip under the water and live without air, then pop up and begin to fly. I used to fly all over the place during those good deep sleeps, and when I awoke I would be smiling.

  With my kids and Shep, I couldn’t do what I wanted. I wanted to run away with a stranger and be rich rich, filthy rich. I wanted no responsibility. It’s not that Shep was a bad man. He wasn’t. We were building a big new house on a Goddamn plantation. In the meantime, though, we lived in that ratty little rental of his father’s. Six of us living in two bedrooms where I could not breathe.

  How was it that I came to hate Shirley Fry for winning the U.S. Women’s Singles? I used to love winners. I used to be a winner. I used to play tennis, I mean really play. I was so strong. My stomach so flat, my legs so tan, my hair so blonde.

  I mixed another drink, a stiff one. I watched the television sign-off, cried at the “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Lit a ciggie in bed. I tried to read, but that last bourbon must have been stronger than I realized. Hard to focus on the words.

  So I peeked in on the four of them again. God, they were beautiful. My children were perfect, each one of them more gorgeous than I could have ever imagined. I thank God for not giving me an ugly child. It’s so much easier to love them when they’re beautiful. I made good babies.

  Lulu snored like her father, but her eyes were bigger. Sidda with those cherry-stained lips, perfect little lips, and red hair any one of the Ya-Yas would’ve died for, not to mention those lashes. Little Shep with his toy tractor that he insisted on taking to bed with him every night. Such a muscular little boy terror.

  Baylor in his crib. I stared down at him, tufts of cotton-top hair sprouting, little pea thumb in his mouth, puffy little breaths like he was blowing feathers.

  The nightlight was on, but I tiptoed over and turned on the closet light as well. If they woke up, I didn’t want them to be afraid. I didn’t ever want my children to be afraid.

  Back in my room I closed my eyes and thought about Jack.