Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (6 page)

But during those summers, my mother was a goddess of
the creekbank with her girlfriends. Some days I worshipped at her feet. Some days I would have split her wide open just to get the attention she gave the Ya-Yas. Some days I was so jealous I wished Caro, Teensy, and Necie dead. Other days, from their spots on the picnic blankets, Mama and her buddies were the pillars that held up the heavens.

Here in this cabin, twenty-five hundred miles from Louisiana, and many years from my girlhood, if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can smell my mother and the Ya-Yas. It is as though my own body keeps the scents of the Ya-Yas simmering on some back burner, and at the most unexpected moments, the aroma rises up and joins with the fragrance of my current life to make a new-old perfume. The soft aroma of old worn cotton from a linen chest; the lingering smell of tobacco on an angora sweater; Jergen’s hand lotion; sautéed green peppers and onions; the sweet, nutty smell of peanut butter and bananas; the oaken smell of good bourbon; a combination of lily of the valley, cedar, vanilla, and somewhere, the lingering of old rose. These smells are older than any thought. Mama, Teensy, Necie, and Caro, each one of them had an individual scent, to be sure. But this is the gumbo of their scents. This is the Gumbo Ya-Ya. This is the internal vial of perfume I carry with me everywhere I go.

The four of their scents were
in key
. Their very bodies harmonized together.

Surely this made it easier for them to forget things and forgive each other, not to have to constantly “work” on things, the way we do now. This has never happened for me with a group of women. It is hard for me to even imagine. Yet I have seen it. I have smelled it.

Mama’s perfume is a scent that was created for her by Claude Hovet, the
perfumier
in the French Quarter, when she was sixteen. A gift from Genevieve Whitman, it is a scent that is softly shocking and deeply moving. A scent that disturbs
me and delights me. It smells like ripe pears, vetiver, a bit of violet, and something else—something spicy, almost biting and exotic.

Once the scent caught me on the street in Greenwich Village. I stopped in my tracks and looked around. Where was it coming from? A shop? The trees? A passerby? I could not tell. I only know the smell made me cry. I stood on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village as people brushed by, and felt suddenly young and terribly open, as if I were waiting for something. I live in an ocean of smell, and the ocean is my mother.

6

A
fter writing in her journal, Sidda felt sleepy. She let her head drop down over the table and dozed off. Vivi’s scrapbook slid from her lap, and a small key slipped from between the folds of the old pages, and fell on the floor next to her foot.

When Sidda woke, the first thing she saw was the key. It was a small, tarnished thing, dangling from a chain, about the size of a pecan. What could it unlock? A jewelry box? A small suitcase? A diary? She padded to the sliding glass door and let Hueylene out. It was dawn, but the lake was shrouded in fog so thick that Sidda could not see the opposite shore.

The key lay in her palm as she stood on the deck looking out into the fog. A few tiny letters appeared to have once been printed on it, but Sidda couldn’t make them out. Stepping back out on the deck to call Hueylene, she pressed the key between her palms and blew into her hands. Then she did a strange, childlike thing: she smelled the key, and licked it. It had a metallic taste that made her shiver slightly, made her feel a surge of Nancy Drew—like excitement.

She spent the rest of the day walking, eating, and napping. She had no idea she was so tired. Finally, around four, she walked down to the Quinault Mercantile, the small general store that served the area, to use the pay phone.

She made a little Sign of the Cross, then she dialed her parents’ phone number.

It was midway into cocktail hour in the state of Louisiana when the portable phone rang at Pecan Grove. Vivi Walker was sitting at the edge of Shep’s vegetable garden in an Adirondack chair, watching her husband pick vegetables for supper.

“Hello,” Vivi said.

“Mama, it’s Sidda.”

Vivi took a sip of her bourbon and branch water. She immediately felt a stab of guilt at having broken her vow of abstinence so soon. She drew a deep breath, and said, “Siddalee Walker?
The New York Times
oft-quoted Siddalee Walker?”

Sidda swallowed. “Yes, ma’am, that one. I called to thank you, Mother.”

“Since when do you call me Mother?” Vivi asked.

Shep looked over from a row of green peppers. When Vivi mouthed the word “Sidda,” he moved over to the bean poles, farther away from his wife. He’d been the one who had to live with Vivi’s reaction to the
Times
piece. Vivi had scared him so bad he’d taken her off for a trip to Hilton Head. Shep figured it was better than a doctor-ordered trip, which was what Vivi had seemed headed for.

Shep Walker didn’t understand his wife, never had. To him, she was another country that he needed a passport to visit. He had given up on ever knowing what made her tick. She was harder to live with than a cotton crop, and Lord knows, cotton needed tending. But she could still surprise him, after forty-two years, and she knew how to make him laugh, something not many people did. When she rode in the back fields with him, sitting shotgun in his pickup, she still really
listened
when he rambled on about his rice or cotton or crayfish or soybeans. And once in a while, when she turned to him the way she did, tilting her head to ask a question,
Shep felt like a young man again. There had been a mighty sexual attraction between them when they were young. An attraction that had waned—not so much with years, but from the exhaustion of trying to survive each other.

“I never trusted women who called their mamas Mother,” Vivi said into the phone.

“Sorry. I called to tell you that I’m—well, Mama, I’m overwhelmed by your sending me the scrapbook. It’s incredibly generous.”

“It’s the least I could do for the legitimate theater,” Vivi said. “But remember that Clare Boothe Luce was much,
much
older than the Ya-Yas. And the Ya-Yas
love
each other, unlike those she-cats Luce wrote about.”

“I’m really touched that you would part with ‘Divine Secrets,’ Mama.”

“After the way you butchered my reputation throughout the United States of America, I do think it was rather
big
of me.”

“Not simply big, Mama.
Grand.
”

There was a short silence in which Vivi waited for an apology.

“I’m sorry about it all, Mama. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I do not want to discuss it,” Vivi said. “Now, what about the wedding?”

“I do not want to discuss it,” Sidda said.

“Everybody’s driving me crazy asking me questions,” Vivi said. “I mean, I
have
given countless wedding gifts for the past twenty-some-odd years to every girl in your class, some of them for three different marriages. People want to know where to send the gifts.”

“Your scrapbook is the gift I need right now, Mama.”

“I always thought I’d use that thing to write my memoirs,” Vivi said. “But who has time to write memoirs? I’m still
living
my memoirs.”

“It would be wonderful if you’d write about all those memories, Mama. I have so many questions. I mean, the things in the scrapbook are wonderful, but there is so much I don’t know. So many stories. I found this key, for instance. It just fell right out of the book, and I’m dying to know what it’s to. Has a little chain attached to it.”

“Oh, really?” Vivi said.

“Do you have any idea what it’s to?”

“Could be to anything.”

“Mother, it would be so helpful to me if you would just sit down and
write
about your life for me. What formed you, what went into creating the lifelong friendship you share with Caro and Teensy and Necie. What you felt, what your secrets were, what were your dreams? The stories underneath all this Ya-Ya-rabilia.”

“I
asked
you not to call me Mother. It sounds so Northern. In fact, I believe I asked you not to call me, period. I am under no obligation to write an essay about my life for you. Especially since you seem to feel it
your
obligation to broadcast lies about me to the free world.”

“God, Mama. I could not control that. Let’s not fight, please.”

Vivi took a sip of her drink.

Two thousand miles apart, Sidda could hear the ice cubes clinking against Vivi’s glass. If anyone ever made a movie about her childhood, that would be the soundtrack. She glanced at her watch. How could she have forgotten that it was cocktail time in Louisiana?

“Forget it, Mother.”

“No,” Vivi said. “
You
forget it. You want to pick
yourself
apart, go right ahead. But you’re not going to pick me to pieces. I sent you my Ya-Ya ‘Divine Secrets,’ for God’s sake, what else do you want—blood?!”

“I’m sorry, Mama, I didn’t mean to sound like I’m not grateful, but—”

“Do you remember how horrified you were as a little girl when you found the word ‘vivisection’ in the dictionary? Came running to me in tears, remember? Well, I’m not a Goddamn frog, Sidda. You can’t figure me out.
I
can’t figure me out. It’s
life
, Sidda. You don’t figure it out. You just climb up on the beast and
ride
.”

“I’ll take good care of the album,” Sidda said, “and get it back to you like you asked.”

“I want it back before my birthday, you hear me?” Vivi said.

“Yes ma’am.”

“And do me a favor, will you?” Vivi said. “Don’t call me again acting like a researcher for
This Is Your Life.
I don’t need the kind of publicity you come up with.”

Late that night, after Sidda had race-walked for five miles down a long, flat road that led into the Quinault Valley, she sat out on the deck and stared up into the sky. The whole day had been overcast, and no stars were to be seen. She sipped a mimosa and nibbled on some cheese and bread, wondering what Connor was doing at that moment. Her body missed his. She thought of the time in his small office at the Seattle Opera when he’d reached down into the waist of her slacks while she stood at his drafting table, looking over drawings. How he stroked her and how he smiled and how she groaned, Oh, these drawings are so lovely. She missed him, she wanted him. She resented the fact that each time she thought of him she grew simultaneously moist in her groin and tight in her chest.

She turned to look inside the cabin. Vivi’s album sat on the table. She took a step closer and leaned her face against the screen of the door, like a child might do. She raised her glass to the scrapbook in a private little toast. The album drew her back inside.

Leaning over the scrapbook, she opened to a page near
the front. What she found was a cardboard placard with the number 39 written on it. Next to it was a piece of paper on which a childish hand had written the following, so that it looked like the beginning of a newspaper article:

VIVI’S VERY IMPORTANT NEWS
ISSUE NO. 1
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1934
GIRLS POOT AND GET DISQUALIFIED
BY VIVIANE ABBOTT. AGE 8

Sidda smiled and turned the paper over, but it was blank. No story followed, there was only that heading. She scoured the nearby pages for more, but she could find no further information from “Vivi’s Very Important News.” She knew exactly who those girls were. 1934. The depths of the Great Depression. Huey Long was Governor of Louisiana—or dictator, depending on your viewpoint and your parish. She knew that Eugene O’Neill’s play
Days Without End
had premiered that year, and that Pirandello received the Nobel Prize for Literature. But she did not have the faintest idea what her mother had been disqualified from, or who had done the disqualifying.

Shaking her head, she absentmindedly reached down to stroke Hueylene. If only that scrapbook could talk, she thought. Our Lady of Cherubim Chit-Chat, if only that scrapbook could talk.

7

V
ivi Abbott Walker knew she wasn’t supposed to be drinking, and she knew she wasn’t supposed to be smoking. That is why, after she’d cleared the dinner things and said good- night to Shep, she felt a little thrill as she stepped out on the back patio with a snifter of Courvoisier and a cigarette. She sat down at the wrought-iron patio table where she’d set up the Ouija board. She lit candles on the silver candelabra, which had been one of the many wedding gifts fron Teensy’s mother, Genevieve. Then she went into a little trance.

She didn’t pose any questions. She just sat there with the candlelight and the Ouija board and the sounds of the cicadas and the appealing idea that she was some kind of medium.

One hand rested lightly on the pointer, and Vivi smiled as it slid across the board and spelled out the numbers “1,” “9,” “3,” and “4.”

Ah yes, Vivi thought, my first encounter with Hollywood.

Vivi, 1934

You have got to have
exactly
fifty-six curls if you want a chance to win the Shirley Temple Look-Alike Contest. Me
and my best buddies, Caro and Teensy and Necie, spent all morning at the beauty parlor getting our hair
just perfect.

Miss Beverly’s Beauty Parlor was so busy you would have thought it was New York City. Teensy’s mama, Genevieve, took us there to have our hair changed from rags to curls. Genevieve is the one who helped us all get our hair and costumes ready for the Shirley Temple Look-Alike Contest. Yesterday morning she rolled our hair in rags and we were supposed to keep them in all day and all night.

But Caro ripped her rags out in her sleep. When we got to the beauty parlor, her hair was lying there straight as little boards. She said, “Those rags made my scalp itch and they pulled my eyes back like a Chinaman’s, so I ripped them out and threw them in the garbage.”

I know what she means. I’ve still got twitches around my temples that I sure hope go away before I grow up.

“I’m gonna wear Lowell’s aviator cap,” Caro said, and she whipped out her brother’s cap, plopped it on her head, and tucked her hair underneath.

“What a splendid idea,” Genevieve said.
“Très originale!”
Genevieve always says things like this because she grew up on the bayou, near Marksville. She makes everyone call her by her first name, even kids. Whenever all us girls are together, she says, “Gumbo Ya-Ya!” This means “everybody talking at the same time,” which is what we sure do.

Genevieve wouldn’t even be here if she hadn’t married Mr. Whitman, who owns the Garnet Savings and Loan. She met him in New Orleans, where a rich friend of her father sent her to the Ursuline nuns to learn to be a lady. Oh, but thank the Lord she came to Thornton! We adore her. She has jet-black hair and eyes just as dark, and her skin is smooth and she can dance any dance in the world. Besides the Cajun two-step, she has taught us all the jitterbug, Praise Allah, and Kickin’ the Mule. Genevieve is the most fun of any grown-up I know—except when she gets her
attaque de nerfs
and has to stay in bed with the shades drawn. I want to be just like Genevieve when I grow up.

I made sure to count each curl when Miss Beverly took the rags off my hair and spun out curls with her fingers. I didn’t want her to mess up and give me thirty-eight curls instead of fifty-six. Then, in walked Jack, Teensy’s brother. He came right into the beauty parlor, where boys never come.

“Hey!” he said. “Brought yall some donuts. Just out of the oven at Mr. Campo’s Bakery. Vivi, I got you a chocolate, like you like.”

That Jack is so sweet. Not sissy-sweet. Just sweet. He is the best baseball pitcher in town. And the way he hits, people call him T-Babe, short for Little Babe because he can slug like Babe Ruth. Jack also plays the Cajun fiddle, but his daddy won’t let him play at home. Mr. Whitman won’t even let Jack be called by his real name, Jacques. Mr. Whitman forbids Genevieve to speak Acadian French around him. He says, “Speak English, Genevieve! For God’s sake, speak the King’s English!”

“Yall are a whole lot prettier than Shirley Temple,” Jack said. “She looks like a little skunk compared to yall.
Mais oui
, yall are gonna bump old Shirley’s name right off the marquee.”

Caro was the first to hear about the Shirley Temple Look-
Alike Contest, because her father owns The Bob—one of the two movie theaters in Thornton. Mr. Bob also owns The Bob in Royalton and The Bob in Rayville, both down the road. His biggest movie theater is in New Orleans: The Robert. It’s the fanciest of all The Bob Theaters in the world.

A month ago it was formally announced that The Bob would sponsor the contest, with a Shirley Temple man coming all the way from Hollywood. The girl who wins the contest gets to go down to New Orleans on the train and represent our town in the statewide Shirley Temple Look-Alike Contest. And that girl also gets to stay at the Pontchartrain Hotel and be treated like a princess the whole entire time.

Girls just came out of the woodwork. Even some little colored girls tried to sign up, but the contest rules say only white girls could apply. It costs a dime to sign up, but Mr. Bob let some girls sign up without paying. Some people who came to The Bob today paid him with eggs or potatoes. All those eight Nugent kids get to come to the Betty Boop Club Saturday matinee by paying with one bushel of collard greens.

Genevieve had her dressmaker, Cecile, do up all our costumes. I have the darlingest little blue-and-white-plaid dress with a little red tie that fits me to a tee. Over it, I’m wearing a matching little blue coat and a black cap, all just like the outfit Shirley wore when she sang “Good Ship Lollipop.” I modeled it for Father last night, and when he saw me, he said, “Come on over here and give your father a hug.” He doesn’t usually like to be hugged when he gets home, so I was surprised. I went and wrapped my arms around him, and then he gave me a two-dollar bill.

Caro’s outfit is so spiffy! She has a little brown leather jacket that she borrowed from her brother, and she’s wearing it over a pair of baggy dungarees, with an aviator cap on her head. Just like Shirley wore when she met Loop’s plane in
Bright Eyes.
Oh, Caro is so beautiful. All my friends are beautiful.

Necie has a bright yellow coat and a white tam over her curls. And that Teensy, she has a pink ballet tutu, like Shirley got for her birthday in that movie.

I secretly think that I look the most like Shirley Temple. After all, I am the one with the blonde hair. But I wouldn’t dare tell anybody this.

When Genevieve brought us to the theater this afternoon, they made us check in at the door, where a lady gave
each one of us a piece of cardboard to hang around our necks on a string. The cardboard has our official contest numbers written on them. Mine is 39, Caro’s is 40, Teensy’s is 41, and somehow things got mixed up because Necie is number 61. I hate this cardboard hanging around my neck. It covers up the buttons on my little blue coat.

The Shirley Temple Look-Alike judge spends his whole life riding trains all over the country judging who looks like Shirley Temple and who doesn’t. His name is Mr. Lance Lacey, but Caro just calls him Mr. Hollywood. He arrived yesterday, and Caro and her mother and father went to meet him at the train station. They took him back to Caro’s house, and he changed out of his suit into a powder-blue shirt and loose, baggy pants that Caro said looked like pajamas. During supper, he received three long-distance calls. We don’t get three long-distance calls in a month at our house! They all sat there, Caro and her parents and Lowell and Bobby, her brothers, just waiting for Mr. Hollywood to get off the phone so they could finish eating. Then this morning he got another long-distance call before breakfast!

I have always always wanted to be up on the stage of The Bob, and now here I am! Oh, I was meant to be a star! Standing up in front of the footlights, high above the audience. Lights, lights, lights! It’s better than Christmas. It’s hard to see out into the audience, but I can tell exactly where my brother, Pete, is sitting because he yelled out, “Hey, Stinky!”

I want to step out in front of all these other little ringlet-headed girls and break into a dance. Make everyone look at me, only me! But you have to stand in line. All we’re supposed to do is stand up here and try to look like Shirley Temple. I hate it when I have so many other talents! I can sing, dance, spell “prestidigitation,” recite “The Ancient Mariner,” whistle, and act out stories I made up myself. These folks don’t know what they are missing.

Mr. Hollywood’s voice flows out all velvet from the microphone. “Shirley Temple represents what is best about America,” he says. “Her innocence and smile are a ray of sunshine that beams across these forty-eight states. And when times look down and regular Joes have trouble buying a cup of coffee, Shirley’s dimples can cheer up even the saddest Depression hobo. ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ has danced her way into the hearts of millions, lifting up our land with her unique brand of sweetness.”

He glances back at us girls for a second, and then gestures our way. “Now it is my pleasure to be in your fine town and look over your crop of little girls. It’s my job to judge which one of these young ladies comes closest to Shirley Temple’s wholesome charm and innocence. Which one of them is adorable enough to cheer up this great nation of ours like America’s Sweetheart?”

Oh, if only they would let me show my real talent, I could cheer up this nation! I would tell my story about Alligator Girl with the head and shoulders of a girl, and the rest of her body pure alligator. Kind of like a mermaid, but mean. Oh! I am the world’s best scary-story teller!

If I could only strut my stuff, I would not only win this contest, but I’d win the one in New Orleans too. I would get my own private rail car with my own bathtub in it and velvet curtains, and then I’d invite Caro and Teensy and Necie to come with me on my trip around America. We’d go to Washington, D.C., where the President and Mrs. Roosevelt would be waiting, begging me to come have tomato sandwiches with the crust cut off. I’d tell them this Great Depression has gone on too long and I’ll give them my ideas on how to help the poor folks at Ollie Trott’s Trailer Paradise who lost their real homes. Oh, I’ll wave to everybody and they will forget Shirley Temple ever existed!

Mr. Hollywood turns to us, with his hands up to his mouth, stretching out his lips. Has he hurt his lips? No, he
is trying to make us smile wider. He gives a signal to the piano player, who starts playing “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Then he circles around us and stops at one girl who’s wearing a fuzzy white fur coat. He makes her turn in a circle, then he writes something down on his clipboard. He doesn’t say a word, just sort of examines her like you do a horse.

“My mouth is starting to hurt from all this smiling,” I whisper to Teensy. Then, I don’t have the slightest idea in the world what gets into her, but she hauls off and steps on my toe. So I step right back on her toe and grind down a little.

“Ouch!” Teensy hollers. She loves stuff like this. It’s what keeps her going. She turns around at one of the other little girls and sticks her tongue out. Well, that makes that little sissy start crying.

“Titty-baby! Little sissy titty-baby!” Teensy whispers. Then out of nowhere, nowhere at all, Teensy
poots!
One of the biggest poots you have ever heard! You would not think that a poot that big could come out of a girl that small. The look on her face is shocked. She looks behind her like she can’t believe she did it. Like when our dog poots and it scares him.

All the other girls heard it, though, and they back away from us. Like Teensy’s poot is alive and might knock them down and crawl all over them. Teensy and I start laughing and we cannot stop. If you know of something funnier than pooting, then I wish you’d tell me about it.

Mr. Hollywood himself must not have heard the actual poot. He’s still on the other side of the stage, still examining girls. But when he hears us laughing, he looks over our way, and I can see his lips moving, mouthing the words, “Be quiet.”

Well, that makes us laugh even harder, and Caro and Necie start cracking up too.

“Shhh!” Mr. Hollywood signals, his Shhh! finger in front
of his mouth. Then he takes that same finger and uses it at the corner of his lips to make a big smile, trying to make us do the same thing. The sight of Mr. Hollywood smiling like that just pushes us over the edge and we start howling, the kind of laughing that makes our mothers send us outdoors.

Then, all of a sudden, Mr. Hollywood turns on his fancy heels and heads our way. By this point, there is no stopping us. We couldn’t stop laughing even if we wanted to.

Mr. Hollywood stops right in front of us. “Pipe down this very instant!” he says.

His eyes are popping out and his mouth is wide open, and we can see that he has not one, not two, but
three rotten brown teeth!
The front ones are shiny white, but those back ones are rotted! This just makes us scream with laughter. When we don’t quiet down, he throws his clipboard slam-bam right on the stage floor, and takes a step toward us, and for a second I think he’s going to hit us. But then he changes his mind.

He signals to the piano player to play a little softer. Then Old Rotted Teeth steps up to the microphone and says, “Some of our would-be Shirleys seem to think something is very funny. Numbers 39, 40, 41, and 61, would you please step over here to the microphone?”

When we get over to the microphone stand, Pete yells out, “It’s Stinky!” I throw a kiss out to the audience.

Mr. Hollywood Rot-Tooth looks at us and smiles this big old fake grin. “Girls, since you know something so funny, I want you to tell it to the rest of us.”

The four of us look at each other. Then Caro steps closer to the microphone. She reaches up and takes her aviator cap off and holds it down at her side. Her hair is flat as a rug. “Do you really want to know what is so funny?” she says into the microphone.

Mr. Hollywood leans into the microphone and says, “Yes, Number 40, we do.”

“Well, okay,” Caro says, and looks straight out into the audience. She opens her mouth and says loud and clear:
“Teensy farted.”