On those fall afternoons when Sidda was still keeping a close eye on her mother, she would sit at the counter and listen as Vivi talked on the phone.
“You must let Lizzie Mitchell come show you her Beautiere Line. It’s miraculous,” Vivi would say. “I can shower in it, swim in it, go to a sad movie. You can cry all you want and never, never does it smudge.”
It seemed that no matter how many times Vivi repeated these lines, they made her feel better. It was like she’d found a cure for a disease.
At Vivi’s invitation, Lizzie began coming out two or three afternoons a week, bringing along her little boys. While the boys crawfished or rode Shetland ponies with Little Shep and Baylor, Vivi coached Lizzie on her presentation skills.
“Lizzie Dahlin,” Sidda would hear her mother say, “if you want to feed those boys, then you have got to stop using the word ‘ain’t.’ ”
Vivi helped Lizzie come up with a kicky sales pitch that she was comfortable with, so she no longer sounded like she’d memorized it.
“You are terrific,” she’d tell Lizzie. “Every one of your customers will be delighted to see you at the door.”
The names of Lizzie’s other products cracked up Sidda and Lulu. Estra-Glo was supposedly packed with estrogen. Skin Sublime was packaged in a decorator bottle that was lip-shaped. Beautiere’s Hair Magic smelled a little like Evening in Paris. Each of the Ya-Yas bought Lizzie’s Mixed Gift Pack—they wouldn’t have dared say no. But Vivi was more successful in finding customers for Lizzie among the country women who were married to the cotton farmers who ginned at the same place as Sidda’s father.
Sidda and Lulu took to calling the skin cream “Lizzie Lotion,” but when Vivi heard, she fussed at them.
“Don’t yall dare make fun of that young woman,” Vivi told them. “She is trying to make something of herself.”
With each visit, Vivi herself seemed to be getting her own strength back. By the middle of November, Caro had even been able to talk her into a game of tennis at the country club. Although Sidda could not have put it into words, it seemed that the Beautiere Line was not only a cosmetics line, but also a lifeline. Not only for Lizzie Mitchell but also for her mother.
One afternoon Sidda came home to find Lizzie’s car in the driveway. She expected to find Vivi and Lizzie at the kitchen counter as usual, but instead found the house so quiet she thought nobody was home. It took her a moment to realize that they were out in the den. But when Sidda stepped into the room, she took one look and was filled with terror.
Her mother was lying back in Shep’s La-Z-Boy recliner. She was covered with sheets and Lizzie stood behind her, with her hands around Vivi’s neck. Vivi lay perfectly still, with cotton pads over her eyes, her hands crossed over her chest. The two women were perfectly quiet, so concentrated, so unaware of Sidda’s presence. For one horrible moment Sidda thought her mother was dead.
Sidda held her breath and stepped closer, her stomach clenched, her heart hammering. It was not until she saw her mother’s hand move that Sidda began to breathe again. Then she noticed that Lizzie’s hands were gently massaging something pink onto her mother’s neck. With small circular movements, Lizzie stroked the pink concoction up Vivi’s neck, then carefully around her temples.
Sidda had never seen her mother be touched so tenderly.
As Lizzie’s customer list grew, and as Vivi resumed her life, their visits grew less frequent. A couple of years had passed when Sidda arrived home one afternoon to see an almost-new bright pink Chrysler in the drive at Pecan Grove.
Lizzie was wearing a little two-piece suit and a Jackie Kennedy hairdo.
“Will you look at this!” Vivi announced to her children, “Lizzie has won The Pink Chrysler!”
Lizzie then flung her arms wide like a lady on a TV game show.
“I am a Beautiere Top Ten Saleslady!” she announced. “And I could not have done it—never, ever—without your mother.”
“We’re off for a spin,” Vivi announced, climbing into the car.
Sidda watched as Lizzie backed the big Chrysler out of the drive. She stood at the end of the driveway as the two women rolled down the long gravel road that led away from Pecan Grove in the direction of town. As she watched, she could see her mother’s and Lizzie’s heads silhouetted against the green fields filled with her father’s cotton. For a moment Sidda thought they looked like sisters.
Sidda took a bite of cheese and got up from the sofa. She walked out onto the deck of the cabin and did a few stretches. Rolling her neck in small circles to relax, she remembered once, many years after Lizzie Mitchell, when she had returned home from LSU for holiday break. She had gone up into the attic looking for extra boxes to wrap gifts in. In the corner of the freezing cold attic was a large cardboard box. She opened it to find that it held many boxes in quite good shape. “Perfect,” she thought, “just what I need.”
But when she reached down to pick up a few of them, she found that they were not empty. She picked up one of the boxes and examined it. It took a moment for her to recognize the gray-and-pink packaging, the silhouettes of the two ladies’ heads facing each other. But once she opened it, everything came back.
It was one of the Mixed Gift Packs from the Beautiere Line. There must have been thirty of them stacked in the larger box, unopened. Another cardboard box stood next to it, and Sidda peeked into it as well. More Mixed Gift Packs.
Dear Lizzie Mitchell, Sidda thought. You came into my mother’s life on an afternoon as she hid in her bedroom, trying to nurse some long-seated sadness that flows beneath her vivaciousness like a secret river. Mama looked at you, grieving the loss of your husband, struggling to keep your boys alive by selling cheap beauty products with glamorous names to women who could never be perfect enough. As the unsightly tears flowed from your eyes, Lizzie, my mother’s eyes watered too.
Over a Wand of Beauty, the scientific mascara that still allowed you to cry, my mother taught me something about what it is to be feminine.
Mama taught me a lot of other lessons about femininity too. Some of them carry marks that no cosmetic can erase. My mother lifted Lizzie Mitchell’s chin and said, “Dahlin girl, are you all right?” My mother slapped my cheek, where sometimes it still stings. My mother also laid her Beautiered soft palm on my girlish face and just cupped it there, for love.
I climb to the attic and discover my mother. She is a mixed gift pack.
15
It was Friday afternoon and Sidda was speed-walking on the lake path when she saw the gang of little girls on the beach at the bottom of the Quinault Lodge lawn. The volume on her Walkman was turned up loud, the metronomic beat of her “Advanced Classical Beat Walking” driving her relentlessly forward. She exercised like this for an hour and a half a day. In New York, she walked in Central Park; in Seattle, along Lake Washington. Only a blizzard could force her indoors to a treadmill.
She passed the scene twice before stopping. Positioning her baseball cap so they could not tell she was staring, Sidda observed the scene as she pretended to stretch. Five little girls, ranging in age from five to eight, were running and playing. Two of them wore shorts with no blouses, one of them wore a swimsuit with a little skirt on it. Another girl with pigtails wore a short little dress that was soaking wet, and the other, the oldest, wore a pair of jeans rolled up at the cuffs and a little bikini top.
Some distance away, a woman about Sidda’s age sat on a blanket, under an umbrella, leaning back against an ice chest, painting with watercolors in a large sketch book. Every once in a while, she glanced up to check on the girls.
“Look!” one of the girls yelled out. “There it is!”
With that, the five of them ran headlong into the lake and began dragging out a large piece of driftwood. Working together, they pulled the log onto the beach and balanced it on a large rock. This took quite some time, and as Sidda watched, they gave each other directions and encouragement. When the piece of wood was finally on the rock, the girls stood back and admired t
heir work.
“A seesaw!” the girl with the pigtails called out.
“A seesaw by the seashore!” one of the bare-chested girls said.
Then, bolting in the direction of the blanket, the other bare-chested girl ran to the woman and announced, “We built a seesaw!”
“That’s great!” the woman said. “That is terrific!”
Then the little girl sped back to the others. Without warning, they abandoned their creation, and the five of them all ran screaming into the lake water.
Before long, Sidda heard a voice call out, “Ahoy there!”
She turned to see a group of two women and three men walking down the path that led to the beach from the lodge. Pointing to an older couple who stood on the lawn waving, one of the newly arrived women began to gather the girls.
They came down to the woman on the blanket, and immediately the scene shifted. In a moment, the blanket, ice chest, sandals, towels, and sunscreen were pulled together, and the group started in the direction of the stairs.
As they were leaving, Sidda heard one of the women say, “Oatmeal cookies for the wild girls.”
She watched as the woman reached into a bag and handed each of the girls a cookie. As the group climbed the stairs, the older couple who were waiting for them hugged each girl in turn, and the whole group disappeared in the direction of one of the cottages.
Sidda stood and stared, as if waiting for the entourage to reappear. When they didn’t, she went to sit near the seesaw the girls had created. Staring out into the lake, she hugged her arms around her chest.
She craved the warm Southern waters of her childhood. She was overcome with longing for the loud messiness of summers at Spring Creek. For the kids and the moms and the mismatched pajamas and Noxema on her nose at night. She wanted to be part of an entourage like the one she had just witnessed. She wanted to be part of a family. How was it that she was forty years old and she had created no family of her own?
Her life suddenly seemed ridiculous: her career, her apartment, her creation of worlds on stage. It all seemed beside the point. How was it that she had spent the last twenty years bringing fictional characters to life rather than all-too-real children who screamed and flew across the sand and hugged you when you handed them oatmeal cookies? How was it she was here at the edge of the continent alone, while these other women had already made families, surrounded by friends who’d done the same? What was wrong with her?
She felt ashamed of her insularity. She longed for rambunctiousness, for the communal craziness in which she’d been raised. She felt sick at the thought of her constant questioning, her constant self-examination.
Perhaps I should just finish directing May’s new play, leave New York, move to Seattle, and start a family.
The wildness of that thought so rocked her that Sidda removed her Walkman, stripped out of her shorts and T-shirt, down to her swimsuit. She walked out on the dock that stretched into the lake, and dove straight into the freezing Northwest water. The first contact numbed her skin. As she burst back to the surface, she felt painfully alive, charged with energy. She could see the deep blue of the sky, and the endless green of the trees that rimmed the lake. Lying on her back in the water, she began to kick hard, stretching her arms out wide. No matter how hard she kicked, she could still hear the laughter of those little girls.
Letting herself sink beneath the surface, Sidda closed her eyes and swam down in the direction of the bottom. The icy fluid world felt cleansing. Would that these clean waters could wash away all confusion, all doubt, all sins.
She stayed down as long as she could, then broke the surface again, gulping air. Then she began to swim the crawl. Rolling her head from side to side to breathe, barely lifting her face out of the water, hands tilted at just the right angle to break the water. She swam like her mother had taught her.
I have already come to terms with all this, she thought. I never wanted kids, not as a girl, not as a young woman in my twenties, not now—not really. It’s fine with Connor, he made that clear early on. Why do I resent the little families I just witnessed? Why do I fantasize kidnapping those wild little girls, at least for a weekend?
Friday afternoons always got to Sidda. If anything made her want a family, it was Friday afternoons. She was always shocked by this longing, but it blindsided her time and again. Friday afternoons. That school-is-out-a-whole-sweet-weekend-in-front-of-you feeling. Even in Manhattan, when she saw moms walking their kids home on the Upper West Side from the Montessori school, it hit her.
She still longed for those countless Friday afternoons at Pecan Grove. Pecan Grove was a sort of destination house for kids. Nine hundred acres, and all the room in the world to scream and run and ride Shetland ponies and catch crayfish in the bayou and play with the puppies in the huge barn and climb on the old live oak tree. A backyard filled with rope swings hung in the trees, where you could swing out over the bayou. An old golf cart her daddy had given the kids to drive all over the plantation when they weren’t in the mood to ride horses. A big house filled with toys and musical instruments and tons of food from Vivi’s end-of-the-week trip to the A&P.
And Vivi herself, who on happy weekends waited for them with open arms in the backyard, excited at the prospect of kids and making fudge and Saturday Night at the Movies and card games where she, and maybe one or two of the Ya-Yas, would gamble with the boys, happy to take their nickels.
It was nothing for five or six little friends to end up at Pecan Grove for the weekend. It was open house, and Sidda’s little girlfriends loved it. Plenty of fried shrimp for Friday-night supper, as many cold Cokes as you could grab, and, if it was wintertime, hours in front of the fire in the den, playing the Ouija board with Vivi, as she sipped her bourbon. Kids would show up at Pecan Grove without even an overnight bag, because they knew Vivi Dahlin could supply what they needed.
“I’ve got 84,000 extra pj’s and 64,000 guest toothbrushes. Just don’t bring any head lice,” Vivi would say.
How could Sidda Walker not think about family on Friday afternoons?
As she swam, Sidda calculated ages and stages if she started a family that very day. When my kids start having spend-the-night company, I’ll be forty-seven. Okay. When they start dating, I’ll be fifty-five. Charming. When they start college, I’ll be pushing sixty. And when they have their own kids, I’ll be out of my mind.
She switched to the breast stroke and concentrated on her kick. She told herself: I am only experiencing the last gasps of a completely normal and inescapable biological urge. I have had these spasms before, and they always pass. My life is not one colossal mistake. Angels of the Evening Sky, something wants to be born, I’m just not sure what.
When she returned to the cabin, Sidda ate standing up, listening to Bonnie Raitt on the CD. She stared at a photo she’d come across when Wade and May were there: the one of Vivi in the backyard, surrounded by the four kids. Was this taken on a Friday? No. If it were a Friday, there would’ve been twice as many kids, spend-the-night company for all four Walker kids. It must have been a school day.
Late September, 1962. Her mother is sitting on the pink-checked picnic blanket. There in the big yard that slopes down to the bayou. Sidda is in fourth grade, Little Shep in third, Lulu in second, and Baylor in first. If Vivi is on the picnic blanket, Sidda knows she’s in a good mood. If Vivi is in her room with the door shut, then you have to leave her alone or else get lucky and find just the right thing to break the spell. You never know exactly what will work. It is magic what makes or breaks Vivi’s moods.
“What on earth did yall do at Divine Compassion today?!” Vivi asks, all eager like the kids might have big news. “Drop those book sacks and gather round.”
The four Walker kids kneel and flop beside her on the blanket.
“Our Lady of Malnutrition!” Vivi says. “Yall look absolutely famished.”
“Famished” is one of Vivi’s words that Sidda loves to roll around in her mouth like candy.
“Are yall really hungry as you look?” Vivi says. “What did they feed yall for lunch? It wasn’t those big, fat, ugly green peas, was it? Oh, I bet it was awful, whatever it was. I don’t know what those nuns do with the money we pay them.
“Here, Little Shep,” Vivi says, starting to hand out sandwiches. “You’re my peanut-butter man. Sidd-o: heavy on the strawberry jelly. Lulu, you like lots of everything, so this one’s for you, but you can only have one, do you hear me? Hand me those Dixie cups, will you, Dahlin? Bay, sweetie, yours is the one cut in fourths. Don’t worry, I’ve cut the crust off all of them, you slave drivers you. Lulu, do not grab. There’s enough for everybody.”
Vivi pours lemonade out of the cooler. The children hold their sandwiches on little gold cocktail napkins with “Happy 10th Anniversary, Vivi and Shep!” printed on them. Vivi freshens her drink from a separate cooler, the thermos that holds her “cough medicine.”
Sidda leans back on the blanket and eats her sandwich. She’s been waiting for this moment all day. The taste of the jelly and the soft fresh white bread make her happy. She watches as Vivi leans back against a stack of pillows. She watches Vivi smoke and stare up at the sky. Smoking and looking up at the sky are some of her mother’s favorite things. Along with matinees, good hamburgers, Spring Creek, lying in the bed reading a good book, and getting dressed up and having fun.
Sidda loves her mother’s hands. She loves her fingernails. Pretty rounded nails that Vivi buffs while she talks on the telephone.
After Sidda finishes her sandwich, she turns over on her stomach. Vivi reaches over and tickles Sidda’s back under her uniform blouse.
Vivi has the perfect fingernails for tickling Sidda’s back. Nobody can tickle her back like her mother. You have to have nails just like Vivi’s to make Sidda feel this good.
Sidda put the photo down and closed the album. She walked into the bedroom and took off her clothes. Lying down on the bed, she looked at her stomach. Even after her sandwich, her belly was still flat. She could see where her pelvic bones stuck up on either side. God knows, she worked to keep her belly that flat. Reaching down, she ran her hand slowly from one side of her stomach to the other. For the first time in her adult life, the sight of her concave belly did not please her. Instead, it made her feel alone, unused, as though she were the kind of woman who enjoyed packing for a trip more than the trip itself.