Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (9 page)

But of course, instead of “breath,” Teensy goes and says “breast.”

She says, “Until I take my last human
breast
.” And she says it loud just to be bad.

My heart is beating so hard I can see it move my chest up and down. And I can see the same thing in Teensy’s and Caro’s chests. All our eyes are shining.

“Now,” Teensy instructs us, “
everybody lick the blood off your thumbs.
”

I look at her. This wasn’t in the plan.

Teensy goes ahead and licks, though, and so I do too. I flick my tongue lightly over the dot of blood on my thumb.

“Now, swallow!” I tell everybody, the words just flying out of my mouth without me even thinking them.

And we all swallow the tiny drops of each other’s blood. Like Holy Communion, but it’s
our
blood, not Jesus Christ’s.

When I have babies, they’ll have Caro and Teensy’s and Necie’s blood! That will make us all related. And when I get old and die, as long as the heart of one Ya-Ya is still pumping blood, I’ll still be alive! Our blood is all mixed into one.

Then Necie says, real soft, “Can I do my closing Divine Walnut Ceremony?”

I had forgotten all about the surprise Necie said she had for the ending.

We follow her to the edge of the bayou, and out of her bag she pulls four walnut halves and hands one to each of us. Then she gives us candle stubs and has us light them.

“Now, drip a little bitty wax inside the shell,” she tells us, “and stick your candle stub in there.”

We are all surprised at Necie coming up with this. Every time I think I know my friends, they surprise me. They are full of secrets I will never know.

You can hear the scratch of the kitchen match against the box and the little
poof
sound it makes when it ignites. We each light our candles and watch Necie. She bends down and gently lowers her walnut shell with its lit candle until it rests on top of the water. She gives the shell a tiny little push, and we all watch it float a little ways onto the dark water of the bayou.

Then we each do the same thing, until there are four walnut halves bearing tiny lights out on the water that look like little fairy boats. The beauty of it makes me want to cry. We are holding hands, and we are high and mighty Ya-Yas, descendants of royal blood, which we will pass on down through many generations.

Back at my house, the white statue of the Cuban Virgin is still sitting on the porch. The porch light is shining
down on her, and June bugs flicker around the bulb, making little crackling sounds. The four of us stop dead in our tracks. We kneel down in front of Mary, and Teensy hands us items from her bag. Caro, Teensy, and I take the very same brand of Dark Beauty Contouring Makeup that Carole Lombard and Norma Shearer use, and begin to smear it on the face, hands, and feet of the turpentined Holy Lady. The makeup feels waxy and it smells like Genevieve’s dressing room. Under my fingers I can feel the smooth wood of the Virgin.

After we color her skin brown again, we dip into the rouge pots and color her cheeks. We apply blue eye shadow to her eyelids and to the folds of her gown, and then line her lips with lipstick that reads “Harem Red” on the bottom of the tube. After that, we remove her jewels from our royal selves and put them back on the Virgin.

When we’re done, we stand back in silence to admire our handiwork. Necie, who has still not touched the Virgin, steps forward and kneels at the foot of the statue. At first we thought she was going to pray. But she reaches over and takes the tube of lipstick away from Teensy, and at the last minute dots little flecks of red on the Virgin’s toes where they show under her gown. She paints the Blessed Virgin’s toenails red, something even the Cubans hadn’t thought of!

I lean over and give Necie a kiss on the cheek. Caro kisses her other cheek. Then Teensy gives our Necie a big fat smack right on the lips.

Back in bed, I can feel Caro’s body next to mine. I hear her breathing and feel her heart beating. I smell her Caro smell that’s like rice cooking and fresh-cut hay.

Moonlight shines down on my friends and me. The smell of sweet olive hangs in the air like someone is breathing it out of her mouth. I look at my three friends sleeping. They
still have traces of makeup on their faces, even though we tried our best to wipe it off with the sheets so Mother wouldn’t see it. The Ya-Yas are my real family. I am Queen Dancing Creek, a mighty warrior. I am of the great and royal tribe of Ya-Yas, and no white man will ever conquer me. The Moon Lady is my mother.

The next morning we strip the beds before Mother even comes out on the porch to wake us. We have been up since sunrise, when the colors of the day came alive and we threw back our mosquito nets. Our first morning as full-fledged Ya-Yas.

“Girls,” Mother is saying, “yall didn’t have to remove the linens. There’s no need for you to wash those sheets. Give me that bundle. I can’t have your mothers think I make yall work like laundresses when you spend the night with Vivi.”

We’re trying to hide our sheets from her because they’re covered in makeup.

“Mrs. Abbott,” Necie says, all smiles. “
Please
let me take them home and wash them. I am doing it as a special penance.”

What a smooth talker that Necie can be.

“Why, Denise, that is wonderful,” Mother says. “I only wish Viviane would follow your example more. You are making the Blessed Virgin very happy this morning.”

Necie smiles at Mother and blinks her eyes like a true daughter of Mary, a credit to our tribe.

“Well, come on in for some breakfast,” Mother says. “I’ve got fresh Ruston peaches that Mr. Barnage brought for us.”

We follow Mother around the porch. “Just a minute, girls, I want to see if there are any new blossoms on the gardenia.”

And Mother rounds the porch to where the statue is.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” We’re right on her heels. Mother covers her mouth with one hand and makes the Sign
of the Cross with the other. Then her body starts shaking inside her housedress.

“Who could have done this?” she calls out. “Who in the world?!”

Teensy steps right up, looks straight into my mother’s eyes, and says, “Mrs. Abbott, this could be a
miracle
.”

“
A miracle
,” Mother whispers, like the statue has wept or bled from her palms.

Mother freezes like a statue herself for a moment, then she begins plucking off honeysuckle blossoms, Rose of Montana flowers, sweet olive branches—any bloom she can get her hands on—and showering them upon the Cuban Virgin. She runs out into the side yard and snaps off whole big magnolia branches, she snaps off the heads of tuberoses and hibiscus flowers, and gathers them into her apron. I have never seen her move like this, like she is possessed. When she flies back onto the porch, she drops the blossoms at the statue’s painted feet, then reaches up to shake the Rose of Montana vine so that its flowers fall from the porch ceiling onto the statue’s head. Never has our porch been so filled with my mother’s blossoms. She has turned our front porch into an altar to the gorgeous colored Virgin.

“Holy Mother of Christ!” she murmurs. “Kneel, girls! Kneel and pray.”

So me and Caro and Teensy and Necie all fall to our knees with my mother, who has pulled her rosary out of her apron pocket. She is praying:

Hail, bright Star of all the oceans,
Hail, Mother of the Flowers,
Shower us with the sweet fragrance
Of your love and compassion,
You who carried in your womb
Him who heaven could not contain!

My girlfriends and I kneel beside my mother. We have been saved by grace from the devil alligators, from the raging storm. We alone of all have been spared. The High and Mighty Almost Lost But Miraculously Found Tribe of Ya-Yas is just wrapped up in miracles.

9

I
t was drizzling the next day when Sidda and Hueylene set out for the Quinault post office. Not raining, not showering, not sprinkling. Drizzling. If Sidda could have thought of a word for precipitation that was more passive-aggressive than “drizzle,” she would have used it. For the first time she began to understand what May Sorenson meant when she said the Northwest could mildew a person’s soul.

She used the pay phone outside the post office to check in with her agent. He reassured Sidda that she was not flushing her career down the toilet by taking this time away, and that the world had not ended in the last week.

Waiting for her in the general-delivery basket was a card from Connor made from a recycled watercolor sketch of one of his set designs. On the back he’d written:

Dear Sidda,

The bed is too big now that you’re away. I can’t sleep when I have more than the 1/16 of the mattress you leave me to sprawl on. Finished the designs for the second act, and the Seattle team is good. There are about a million trumpet lilies coming up in our temporary backyard here. Did you
find the box I put in the car? Give Governor Hueylene a belly rub for me.

I love you.
Connor

Back at the cabin Sidda dried Hueylene’s long ears, which resembled curly flaps. She made herself a cup of tea, and changed into dry, warm socks. Sorting through the CDs she’d brought, she once again chose Rickie Lee Jones singing the old standards from Vivi’s era. She walked to the windows and looked out at the lake, humming along with “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.”

Picking up a postcard with a picture of a gigantic geoduck, Sidda drew a set of wings on the giant clam, so that the unseemly Northwest shellfish resembled a penis about to take flight. On the back, she wrote to Connor:

Baby-cakes,

Don’t exaggerate. I always allow you at least
one-fourth
of any bed we’ve ever slept in. I miss you too. Yes, Mama’s box is in hand. Well, not in hand—let’s just say it’s here. And there. And everywhere. More on that later. I love you.

Sidda

After she stamped Connor’s card, she reached for the scrapbook. She puzzled at four narrow strips of leather that had been tied together with a piece of twine. A 1941 penny was slipped into a slot on each band of leather. Leaning her head back and staring at the ceiling, Sidda let out a muffled little laugh. Four penny-loafer cutouts! She could picture her mother and the three other Ya-Yas wearing out their loafers,
then ritualistically carving the penny slots out of them. Was this a fad that was popular with all the kids back then, or something peculiar to the Ya-Yas?

On the same page was a photo of the four girlfriends, taken on the side porch of the Abbott home on Compton Street, from the same era as the penny loafers. After glancing at the photo for a moment, Sidda put the album down and went into the kitchen. She checked all the drawers before returning to the big room. There, in the second drawer of an old pie chest that held playing cards, a Monopoly game, and a collection of moon snails, she found what she was looking for.

Returning to the scrapbook, Sidda blew on the magnifying glass, then wiped it clean with her sweatshirt, and began to examine the photograph. She’d looked at it before, but she wanted to really study it. In the photograph, a Rose of Montana vine wound up and across a porch railing so thick with blossoms that the light must have glowed pink. On an oversized rattan sofa with wide, curved arms and chintz-covered cushions lay Vivi, Necie, Caro, and Teensy, two by two, head to foot, with their legs in such a tangle that Sidda could not tell whose painted toenails were whose. Vivi wore a striped halter top and shorts, and her hair was pulled up off her neck, with little blonde tendrils falling loose in the moist heat. A wrought-iron table was to the side of the sofa and held a black rotary fan. Four tall tea glasses sat on the floor with long spoons in them.

Sidda studied every detail. Who had taken this picture? What was happening just outside the frame? What happened the moment before this image had been captured?

Setting the magnifying glass aside for a moment, Sidda relaxed her eyes so that the photo was only vaguely in focus. An afternoon of iced tea and idleness. Those Ya-Yas aren’t going anywhere. They’re lying low on the side porch shaded by live oaks. The Germans are about to reach Stalingrad,
and the gas chambers are heating up, but the Ya-Yas are still in high school, and the life of the porch surrounds them. They are lazy together. This is comfort. This is joy. Just look at these four. Not one wears a watch. This porch time is not planned. Not penciled into a DayRunner.

Those porch girls had no idea they were going to sprawl on that couch until the weight of their adolescent bodies sank down into the pillows. They have no idea when they will get up off that couch. They have no plans for what will happen next. They only know their bodies touching as they try to keep cool. They only know that the coolest spot they can find is in front of that rotary fan.

I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without amhition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

People took porches and porch time for granted back then. Everybody had porches; they were nothing special. An outdoor room halfway between the world of the street and the world of the home. If the porch wrapped around the house as the Abbotts’ did, there were different worlds on the front, side, and back porch. If you were laid up on the side porch the way the Ya-Yas were in the picture, you were private, comfortably cloistered. The side porch—that’s where the Ya-Yas went if their hair was in pin curls, when they didn’t want to wave and chat to passersby. This is where they sighed, this is where they dreamed. This is where they lay for hours, contemplating their navels, sweating, dozing, swatting flies, trading secrets there on the porch in a hot, humid girl soup. And in the evening when the sun went down, the fireflies would light up over by the camellias, and that little nimbus of light would lull the Ya-Yas even deeper into porch reveries. Reveries that would linger in their bodies even as they aged.

When people encountered them years later with babies on their hips; or, still later, with hands shaking from some
deep-six sadness nobody could name, there was an aura about them. You could not put your finger on it, but you knew these women shared secret lagoons of knowledge. Secret codes and lore and lingo stretching back into that fluid time before air conditioning dried up the rich, heavy humidity that used to hang over the porches of Louisiana, drenching cotton blouses, beads of sweat tickling the skin, slowing people down so the world entered them in an unhurried way. A thick stew of life that seeped into the very blood of people, so that eccentric, languid thoughts simmered inside. Thoughts that would not come again after porches were enclosed, after the climate was controlled, after all windows were shut tight, and the sounds of the neighborhood were drowned out by the noise of the television set.

Viz’tin
. That’s what the Ya-Yas called their impromptu get-togethers when Sidda was a girl. The four Walker kids crammed into the T-Bird with Vivi, bombing into town to Caro’s or Teensy’s or Necie’s, pulling into the driveway, madly blowing the horn, shouting out, “Yall
better
be home!” Then a batch of Bloody Marys appeared, and cream cheese with Pickapeppa and crackers, a gallon of lemonade and Oreos for the kids, Sarah Vaughan on the stereo, and a party. No planning, no calls in advance.

On such outings, Sidda might dress up in one of the Ya-Yas’ trousseau peignoirs and let Vivi coach her in reckless, delicious Isadora Duncan—inspired interpretive dancing. Waving a yardstick magic wand with a tinfoil star, Sidda might gyrate wildly across whomever’s porch they happened to be on. What heaven it was when Vivi’s light shined on her! Afternoon would pass into evening and evening into night, and before you knew it, the day was gone, and Vivi and the kids were weaving their way back home to Pecan Grove, windows rolled down to a cool breeze.

“Ain’t we got fun, Little Buddies?!” she’d call out to the kids.

And they’d call back, “Oh yes, Mama, we do got fun!”

Sidda picked the magnifying glass back up and studied her mother’s eyes in the photograph. When did things go bad? What created the paradox of Vivi full of light, Vivi full of dark?

For every such scene of magic, there were an equal number of terrifying cocktail hours when Vivi’s bourbon and branch water took her far away from her children, although she might never leave the house.

On those evenings, when Vivi stepped out of her bedroom to freshen her drink, she would say, “Get away from me; I cannot stand to look at you.”

Sidda learned to stay on the ball, she learned to walk the tightrope. She perfected the ability to walk into a room and instantly divine each person’s mood, need, desire. She developed the capacity to take the temperature of a scene, a character, a conversation, a single gesture, and to gauge just what was needed and when and how much. Vivi swung wide in her waltzes with angels, in her jousting with demons, and her daughter learned to choreograph drama from these fluctuations. Her daughter learned the subtle, wobbly, inspired emotional patois that a good theater director needs to speak fluently in her art.

But Sidda was tired of being vigilant, alert, sharp. She longed for porch friendship, for the sticky, hot sensation of familiar female legs thrown over hers in companionship. She pined for the
girlness
of it all, the unplanned, improvisational laziness. She wanted to soak the words “time management” out of her lexicon. She wanted to hand over, to yield, to let herself float down into the uncharted beautiful fertile musky swamp of life, where creativity and eroticism and deep intelligence dwell.

As Sidda set down the magnifying glass and closed the book of “Divine Secrets,” something caught her eye. An adult and an adolescent eagle took off from the uppermost perch of an old cedar near the cabin. As the adult swept from her spot in the tree, her wings beat so loudly it almost sounded amplified. When Sidda heard the clamor, her head tilted to one side. Those eagles, like angels, don’t distinguish between work and play. To them, it is all one and the same.