Vivi looked down into her daughter’s sleepy eyes. For a moment, Vivi could not see her daughter. She could only see her own shocked expression reflected back to her from the baby’s large hazel eyes.
“Can I do something, Vivi?” Shep asked. “Is there something I can do for you, Babe?”
Vivi shook her head. “There’s nothing you can do for me. Finish feeding your daughter. Then burp her and check her diaper. I’ll be in the bedroom on the phone. Please don’t disturb me.”
Then Vivi turned and walked out of the room, and Sidda began to cry. Shep Walker lifted the infant up in the air so that Sidda’s baby body was slightly above his face. He did not know why she was crying. He did not know how to make her stop.
“Hey, Little Butterbean,” he said. “Everything’s okay. You got your papa’s eyes, you know it? You got your mama’s set of lungs and your papa’s eyes.”
“Can I talk?” Vivi asked Teensy, who was now stretched out on a lounge chair, her shoes kicked off.
“What do you mean can you talk?!” Teensy said. “The only way any of us are going to stay out of The Betty is to talk.”
“I have realized that I do not forgive Holy Mother Church,” Vivi said. “I thought I had, but I haven’t. They should have let us bury Genevieve in the Divine Compassion graveyard.”
“HMC still doesn’t like final exits via barbiturate-vodka cocktails,” Teensy said, sounding vulnerable in spite of her tough words.
“I kept going to Mass,” Vivi said, “even though you quit. Even though Caro gave up on Confession. I kept up everything, just like Necie. Even after I had to switch confessors after Sidda told the world I was the Hitler of motherhood. All my life I’ve been a sucker for that pure, light feeling you get for two and half minutes after you’ve come clean in Confession. The feeling that if you got run over by a truck you’d be just fine.”
“I gave up on that when they told me my striptease was a mortal sin,” Teensy said.
“You’re smarter than me, Teensy-boo.”
Teensy laughed. “In the land of the blind, the nearsighted man is king.”
After taking a sip of her drink, Teensy continued. “I am not smarter, Vivi. But I know Maman loved me. She did not kill herself because she did not love me. She killed herself because she believed she had let my father kill my brother. She left that in her note. My father is the one she punished the most.”
Teensy sighed, then took a sip out of her drink.
“Do you miss him?” Vivi asked.
“I miss Jack every day of the world,” Teensy said softly. “But not in the way you do. He was my brother. I have spent my life with the man I love.”
“I can still close my eyes and see Jack,” Vivi said. “See him running down the court with the basketball, jumping off that rope swing at Spring Creek. Teensy, I can still see him—I don’t know if you even remember the time at the Gulf when—”
Vivi paused to look away. “God, am I crazy, still carrying on like this? Am I one of those nuts who never get over high school, for Christ’s sake?”
“My brother was your true love, Bébé,” Teensy said.
“Yes,” Vivi said, and took a sip of her bourbon. “And I would still give everything I have to smell his scent one more time before I die.”
“That’s something I don’t forgive,” Teensy said.
“What?” Vivi asked.
“God taking Jack. I’m glad we beat the Japs and I’m proud we stopped Hitler, but I still don’t think my brother should have died in that war. It’s how come you and I understood the kids when they were against Vietnam. Patriotism is a crock. True love is not a crock, but patriotism is, cher.”
“The Catholic Church and the United States military really ought not to mess with the Ya-Yas,” Vivi said.
Opening the set of French doors that led from the living room to the patio, Chick said, “Do I hear yall plotting against Church and State? Please, Teensy, I don’t want the FBI bothering us again.”
Teensy and Vivi laughed.
“You crazy fool,” Vivi said. “How’s your marinade?”
“Just call me Julia Child,” Chick replied, affecting the famous chef’s voice. “Yall need refreshing?”
“Oui, oui, s’il vous plaît,” Teensy said. “And, Bébé, we’re almost ready to eat. What can we do to help?”
“I’ve got it,” Chick said. “Yall stay put. I’m enjoying myself.”
“Love you,” Teensy said, standing up and kissing him lightly before she sat back down.
When Chick turned to go back inside, Vivi caught Teensy’s eye. “How many years?” she asked.
“Almost golden,” Teensy replied.
“Golden from the beginning,” Vivi said.
“He’s been there through it all, I don’t have to tell you about that,” Teensy said. “I could not have lived my life after Jack and Maman if Chick hadn’t been by my side. Chick and the three of yall.”
Vivi looked at her friend. “You are both blessed.”
“Blessed and lucky, and neither of us sweat the petit caca,” Teensy said. “It also hasn’t hurt that we haven’t had to worry about money a single day in our lives. Mais oui, my marriage has survived even when it looked like my children wouldn’t.”
“That’s part of what worries me about Sidda—what she witnessed in my marriage.”
“Come on, Vivi,” Teensy said. “You and Shep have stuck it out.”
“We were never like you and Chick,” Vivi said. “But that’s no revelation.”
They were interrupted by Chick, who stepped back out on the patio with fresh drinks.
“You know,” Vivi said, “you are an adorable waiter. How much do they pay you in this joint?”
He winked at her before stepping back inside.
Vivi took a sip of her drink, letting the warmth of the bourbon settle into her body. “God, is it a full moon or something?”
“Who knows?” Teensy asked, lighting them each another cigarette. “There are some months when I could swear it’s a full moon for thirty Goddamn days. And we’re supposed to be postmenopausal and serene. That’s a joke.”
She handed Vivi a cigarette. In unison, they said, “Filthy habit.”
Then they each took a puff.
“I had the dream once when I was still sleeping in the same bedroom with Shep,” Vivi said.
She paused for a moment to see if it was all right with Teensy to continue. When Teensy nodded, Vivi proceeded.
“The one where Jack is smiling that long, slow grin of his. You know the one I mean. He’s giving me that smile from the basketball court. He’s turning and giving me that grin. I see his strong jawline and that hank of thick, black hair. And I feel exactly the same way I did back then, the same warmth in my groin, the same heart pounding.
“I lower my head to toss my hair out of my eyes the way I used to do back when I still parted it on the side. And when I raise it again, Jack’s jaw has been blown off. Same thing every time.”
Vivi took a sip of her drink and stared out at the pool. She took a deep breath before continuing. “Shep put his arms around me one night when I had the dream. He got up and mixed me a drink, brought it to me in bed. I was touched by Shep’s concern, but I never told him why I was crying.”
Vivi frowned, then inhaled deeply from her cigarette, letting the smoke out slowly. “Kids know everything. My daughter knows that I held back the core of myself from her father, from my husband of forty-some-odd years. She knows that my marriage wilted on the vine and just hung there. She witnessed me hold back the precious part of me that I buried when I was a teenager. Even when Sidda was not in the room, she saw.”
“Vivi, you’re being too hard on yourself,” Teensy said.
“No, I’m not,” Vivi said, firm. “I have held on to your brother. That dream has torn me up hundreds of times in the past five decades. The only time it left me was when my babies were little. And I missed that dream, Teensy. I wanted it back. I begged that dream to return. And
it did. With a roaring vengeance in 1963, when I dropped my basket. And part of me was thankful. Because as much as that dream destroys me, it gives me back that part of my life.”
Teensy did not speak. She put down her drink and just listened.
Vivi stubbed out her cigarette. “What my thoroughly analyzed daughter doesn’t understand is that you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars in therapy to consider things like this. I think. I try to work it out. You don’t have to pay someone a hundred bucks an hour.”
“I like to think my rates are quite reasonable,” Teensy said.
Laughing, Vivi stood up and kissed her friend. “I love you so much, Teens.”
“Talk to Sidda,” Teensy said.
“Oh, no,” Vivi said. “No, no, no. Not my style. This is my luggage. These are my trunks.”
She walked to the French doors, as if looking for Chick. “I carry these stories. They have my name tags on them.”
Shaking the ice in her glass, she said, “Now where is that darling little waiter? We could use some service in this establishment.”
Looking up at her, Teensy said, “Any baggage you have, Bébé, ceased to be only yours the minute that sperm hit that egg.”
Vivi turned away from Teensy so that she could see the water as it spurted out, in a small arc, from the breast of the mermaid statue.
“Don’t you miss her?” Teensy asked.
“I miss Sidda horribly. I think about her all the time.”
“Then why in the world don’t you call her, talk to her, listen to her? Try to answer her questions.”
“I don’t have any Goddamn answers,” Vivi said.
“Forget answers, then. Just tell her what happened. Try to mend this thing.”
Teensy stared into her glass, took out a piece of ice, and plopped it in her mouth.
“Don’t chew on that, Teensy, you’ll ruin your teeth,” Vivi said.
“I have been chewing on ice for sixty-six years, and I still have every single one of my own teeth,” Teensy said, “which is more than I can say for some people.”
With that, Teensy bit down on the ice and glared at Vivi.
“What?” Vivi said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“If you don’t tell Sidda about the hospital that nobody called a hospital, then I will,” Teensy said. “It’s not pretty to lose your mother, at any age.”
Vivi studied Teensy to see if she was serious. “That was not the only time I left my children.”
“I know,” Teensy said gently.
Vivi closed her eyes for a moment, then looked at Teensy. “Okay, it’s in your hands. Do whatever you think is right.”
“I have no idea what I think is right, Ma Petite Chou,” Teensy said. “I simply know that for me to do nothing would be a sin.”
“Let’s not get too Sarah Bernhardt about it,” Vivi said, and reached out her hand to Teensy.
“No,” Teensy agreed, “let’s not.”
Affecting a mongrel European accent, Vivi swung back around to Teensy and asked, “How much do I owe you for today’s session, Dr. Freud?”
“The name is Pootwell,” Teensy replied, “Dr. Pooty Pootwell.”
When Chick stepped onto the patio with a platter of filet mignons, and wearing an apron emblazoned with a crayfish that read, “Suck de heads!” he found the two women in each other’s arms, laughing and crying at the same time. He was unfazed. He had found them this way eighty-four thousand times before.
24
The address on the envelope was barely legible, but Sidda recognized the hand immediately. It was the almost-hieroglyphic handwriting of Willetta Lloyd, the black woman who had worked for Sidda’s family for as long as she could remember. The envelope was so thin that the handwriting within was visible.
The letter read:
December 1, 1957
Dear Miss Vivi Walker,
Why sittin down I think of you and decide to write and thank you for the cashmere coat you done give me. It pretty and warm. I done let it out in the sleeve and hem and now it fit me fine. Chaney and me is fine and send you our good wish and prayers and hope all is fine with you and your family.
Love,
Mrs. Willetta T. Lloyd
How different this letter was from the others Sidda had found tucked in the scrapbook. Written on cheap, lined paper, the page was ragged at the top, where it had been torn from a tablet.
God knows Willetta deserved whatever nice things my mother gave her, Sidda thought. My mother’s life, my own life, would not have been possible without Willetta. What we owe her is so complex I’ll never figure it out.
Sidda contemplated the date the letter was written. What had prompted her mother to give Willetta a cashmere coat? She wondered if the long, soft, cream-colored coat she remembered Willetta wearing for years was indeed the one referred to in the thank-you note. Letter in hand, Sidda walked into the kitchen. Leaning against the counter, wondering if she should make a bite to eat, she half expected to smell that peculiarly Willetta scent: part Ajax, part Lipton tea. She thought of the tall, stately black woman who had fed her, dressed her, handwashed her “delicates,” played with her, sung to her, and listened to her with tenderness. She thought of the letters that still arrived from Willetta in that scrawling hand. She thought of how, each time they spoke on the phone, Willetta would say, “Oh, we misses you ever day here at Pecan Grove.” She remembered Willetta’s six-foot frame, her slightly Indian face, and she ached for this woman who had been a mother to her.
Willetta had begun baby-sitting for the Walker children when Sidda was three years old, then became their full-time maid a few years after that. “Maid,” however, does not describe what Willetta was to Sidda. Forced by circumstance to spend more time caring for the Walker children than her own, Willetta loved Sidda in spite of the slave wages she was paid for her days, and often her nights. Living just down the lane from the Walker home, in a shotgun house with her husband, Chaney, and her own two daughters, Willetta had given Sidda an acceptance and affection that were miraculous, given the relationship she had to Sidda’s parents.
Of the countless cruelties of racism, Sidda thought, one is the unspoken rule that white children, once we reach a certain age, are supposed to renounce the passionate love we feel for the black women who raised us. We’re supposed to replace it with a sentimental, patronizing affection. We’re supposed to let the thinly veiled jealousy of our own mothers obscure what we feel for the women they hired as maids.
Something about the cashmere coat disturbed Sidda. Once, years ago, Sidda had dreamed of seeing her mother standing in a doorway. In the dream, when Vivi unbuttoned the coat, she had been naked underneath, with gashes all over her body, as though she had fallen on a bed of knives.
Sidda stood in the kitchen of the cabin and recalled the kinds of meals Willetta used to cook for them: stewed okra and tomatoes over rice, pork chops smothered in onions, hot biscuits dripping with butter and honey. She was suddenly seized with longing for a Willetta meal. Something with tons of fat and cholesterol, something to see her through.
Instead, Sidda grabbed an apple out of the wooden bowl on the counter. Then she stepped out on the deck into the warmth of a Pacific Northwest summer morning. She looked out at the tall fir trees that surrounded the cabin. She bit down into the apple. I know nothing, she thought. She looked around at the tall fir trees that surrounded the cabin. I know nothing but the smell of the sun hitting those countless needles from these old evergreens.
25
The next day Vivi went wild cleaning out her closets. She made a thermos of coffee, went back in her dressing room, and started pulling clothes off their hangers. She set out a box for Willetta, a box for the Garnet Parish women’s shelter, and a box for a sassy twenty-something girl who lifted weights at the club with Vivi. That little girl would adore the outrageous things that wouldn’t fit Willetta and would seem too frivolous for the women’s shelter.
Once she finished with her closets,
Vivi climbed to the attic and started going through boxes and boxes of clothes that went as far back as the fifties. When she got to a box marked CHARTREUSE MOIRÉ MATERNITY JACKET, she had to stop and mix a drink.
Carrying the box to the kitchen with her, Vivi put “Judy Garland Live at the Palladium” on the CD player. She mixed a drink, lit a cigarette, and opened the box to examine the jacket.
It was one of the numbers she’d designed for herself when she was pregnant with Baylor, her last child. Cut like a painter’s smock from a gorgeous piece of fabric, with oversized rhinestone buttons. She’d worn it with matching earrings, black cigarette pants, and a kicky little gold velvet beret.
She could only stand to look at the jacket for so long.
Walking into the den with her drink, Vivi lay down on the window seat and stared out at the bayou.
It isn’t easy to lose a mother.
She propped a pillow under her knees and closed her eyes. That maternity jacket brought it all back.
Vivi, 1957
I could not take it any longer.
Seventeen straight days of rain in Central Louisiana. November. Damp to the bone cold. A week before Thanksgiving, when the in-laws would come and scrape me to the bone. Four babies who hardly stopped crying long enough to eat and shit. Four of them. It would have been five if my twin baby boy had not died. I adored them, but I was sick to death of them. Beautiful children can also be cannibals. I longed for someone to swoop down and take them off my hands long enough for me to think one single thought without an interruption.
Sidda, four years old, was still coughing from bronchitis, and asking so many questions I wanted to slap her because I did not have the time to talk, because there was Baylor three months old, who still was not sleeping through the night. And Little Shep, three, who scooted around so fast I couldn’t keep track of him. He toddled faster than grown-ups walk, could make it out the front door and out onto the driveway before I could wipe myself. Lulu Walker, two, who ate constantly. Always starving. If I heard her say, “Mama, I hungry,” one more time, I would kill her.