He had been thinking about her for almost two weeks, but he’d forgotten the swiftness of her small body, her wild spontaneity, the softness of her smell when she’d just awakened.
Hopping and jumping around them in a clumsy, happy dance, Hueylene barked excitedly, angling for attention.
“Hueylene, Hueylene, you old blonde bombshell of a governor, you,” Connor said in between kissing Sidda’s lips, neck, eyes, ears.
“Happy happy happy!” Sidda said.
Gently, Connor set Sidda down on the deck railing. “Pretty good shape for forty, Hot Little Chili Pepper.”
“Old cheerleaders don’t die,” Sidda said, “we just dye our hair.”
The two of them stood looking at each other, unable to stop smiling.
“Hey, Sidd-o.”
“Hey, Conn-o.”
“Hey, both of you,” Caro said at the edge of the deck door. “Give an old lady a thrill, why don’t you?”
“Caro!” Sidda said. “Good morning.”
“Afternoon is more like it,” Caro said, stepping out onto the deck.
“Grocery delivery?” she asked, glancing down at two large bags from Pike Place Market, which sat on the edge of the deck.
Tugging slightly at the bottom of her T-shirt, Sidda smiled at Connor. “Yes, actually. My deliveryman drove all the way out from Seattle just to bring me some sugar.”
“And they claim chivalry is dead,” Caro said.
“Caro Bennett Brewer,” Sidda said, “meet Connor McGill.”
Extending her hand, Caro said, “Who taught you to whistle, Pal? You’re not half bad.”
Connor shook her hand and smiled. “My mother taught me to whistle. I accept your compliment on her behalf. A pleasure to meet you.”
“Oh, my God!” Necie said. She had just appeared at the door, along with Teensy. “Nobody told me there was a man here. I haven’t even brushed my teeth!” With that, she vanished back into the cabin, leaving Teensy standing at the edge of the deck looking out at the others.
Stepping forward, Connor said, “I bet anything you’re Teensy. I would’ve recognized you anywhere after Sidda’s description.”
Teensy stared at Connor for a moment, frozen. Sidda thought for a moment that she might not have heard him.
“Teensy,” Caro said, punching Teensy on the shoulder, “where are your manners?”
“Excusez-moi,” Teensy said. “I—uh—you look like someone I used to know. Are you Connor McGill, the fiancé?”
Connor laughed and looked at Sidda. “Yes, at least I think I am.”
“You better be, cher,” Teensy said, reaching out to give Connor a kiss on the cheek, “because you are some kind of gorgeous.”
“I simply cannot get over it,” Necie said. “These croissants are perfect. They get crumbs all over you, just like they should. Where did you say you bought them, Connor?”
Sidda, Connor, and the three traveling Ya-Yas were enjoying un petit déjeuner out on the deck, compliments of Connor’s grocery delivery.
Before Connor could answer, Necie said, “Connor, you must come visit us in Louisiana. I would love to prepare some of our local delicacies for you.”
Connor put down his coffee cup and smiled. “With an offer like that, I don’t know how I could stay away.”
“Promise me,” Necie said.
I’m in trouble now, Sidda thought.
After breakfast, the Ya-Yas swung by their room at the lodge to get fresh clothes and change into their swimsuits. Then the five of them spent the afternoon on the lake. They swam and lay on the dock in the sun, the ladies announcing that while Lake Quinault was not as warm as a good swimming hole ought to be, it did have its quaint qualities. Later that afternoon, Connor barbecued some halibut steaks he’d brought from town. Caro helped with the fire, and Necie did kitchen prep, watching Connor closely to see what kind of cook he was. Teensy kept their glasses of Merlot filled, and Sidda was in charge of dessert—fresh blueberries with a hint of Necie’s Courvoisier on top.
It was not yet eight o’clock when the Ya-Yas said goodnight. One by one, they hugged Sidda goodbye. One by one, they whispered into her ear.
“He is au coeur tendre,” Teensy whispered.
“Marry a man who cooks!” Necie whispered.
“Don’t worry about your mama,” Caro whispered. “One breath at a time, Pal, it’s the only way.”
Once alone, Sidda and Connor did what they’d been longing to do for weeks. As each undressed, their eyes never left the other’s body. Lying on the bed, Connor gently pressed down Sidda’s lower lip and held it there for a moment before he kissed her. The gesture made her shiver, and soon their bodies went where their imaginations had been traveling.
As they caressed, stroked, and entered each other, Sidda felt as though she were being reintroduced to her own body. Each stage of their lovemaking seemed to open her not only to sensual pleasure but to grief that lay in her bones and muscles. Her rapture, which was almost simultaneous with Connor’s, was accompanied by a shout. As she shuddered with release, she began to weep. She felt untied, unfolded, unsecured. As if her borders had dissolved, leaving her open, penetrable on every level. Along with love and longing, she felt a mixture of abandonment and grief surge through her, and it left her raw and wide open.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Connor. “I’m sorry, all I do is cry.”
“Sweet Pea,” he said softly, “whatever it is, it’s okay.”
Sidda tried to make herself laugh, but she could not.
“Baby-cakes,” Connor asked, “what’s wrong?”
Pulling away from him, Sidda sat up in bed. Briefly, she recounted the Lenten story she had learned the night before. He watched her closely as she spoke, and when she finished, he tried to pull her toward him. But she pulled away. She felt she had somehow handed him a piece of kryptonite.
“She should have told me herself,” Sidda said.
Connor touched her hair softly with his hand. “She dispatched her emissaries, didn’t she?”
“It’s not enough,” Sidda said softly, her words catching in her throat.
She got out of the bed. “You don’t deserve this, Connor. I’m a wreck.”
Connor watched her naked body, still flushed, as she walked out of the room, closing the door behind her. He lay in the bed, studying the room he was in. The sight of Sidda’s books, her robe hanging on a hook on the back of the door, a vase of lavender and blue hydrangeas on the bedside table, a marked-up version of May’s latest draft of The Women: A Musical. He loved these everyday signs of Sidda, he loved her forty-year-old body, her mercurial mind. He told himself he would not go to Sidda until the Swainson’s thrush he could hear outside the cabin had stopped its singing. In the meantime, he lay in the bed and tried to name the other birds he could hear singing in the distance.
In the big room Sidda stood at the round oak table and opened the scrapbook. The night was still quite warm, and she could hear the sound of moths hitting the door to the deck.
She turned to a photo of a twenty-something Vivi lying on a picnic blanket outdoors. Her mother’s face was propped in her hands, and she was gazing at a baby girl whose little sunbonnet revealed wisps of strawberry-blonde hair. The baby returned Vivi’s gaze, and the two of them appeared oblivious of anything but each other. The world they shared in that moment seemed utterly private, utterly complete.
Sidda turned the snapshot over. On the back it read, “Queen Dancing Creek with Royal First Daughter.” She turned the photo back over again, and her eyes filled with tears. Why have I left the warm bed of my lover to return, yet again, to these artifacts?
She set the photo aside and reached for the packet of her mother’s thank-you letters to the Ya-Yas. Gently lifting each letter and examining it, Sidda began to perceive the love inherent in her mother’s words. She remembered a phrase she had read somewhere. “Words lead to deeds. They prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness.” Wasn’t it Saint Teresa who’d sa
id that?
Sidda remembered her inexpressible joy at seeing her mother’s face when Vivi had finally returned. The joy of smelling Vivi again, after the seemingly endless, unexplained separation. Vivi’s cotton nightgowns. The outline of her thin frame when she stood in the doorway to tell Sidda goodnight. Sidda’s longing for her mother to step closer, to crawl into the bed and hold her, to promise she would never go away again. The sound of Vivi’s feet in the hallway. The yearning, the aching for her mother taking precedence over the hideous anger Sidda felt at her leaving.
She did not hear Connor walk into the room. When he reached out to touch her on the shoulder, she jumped. Slipping away from him, she grabbed the cotton throw off the sofa.
The lamp in the corner glowed softly. Sidda pulled the throw tightly around her naked body as she stepped back to the table. Connor stood, his arms hanging beside his naked body.
“I was just looking at this book of supposed divine secrets,” Sidda said.
Reaching out, Connor turned a few pages of the scrapbook. “Ya-Ya maidens with child,” he said, stopping at a photograph.
Sidda glanced at the image. She’d come across the snapshot earlier, but never really studied it. Captioned “Beauties of 1952,” it showed the four Ya-Yas, in their early twenties, all eight or nine months pregnant, sitting around a kitchen table. Caro’s feet were propped on the table, and one of her arms was around the back of Vivi’s chair. Necie’s head was slightly lowered, her eyes almost closed in a smile. Teensy’s hands waved in the air as though she were telling some outrageous joke. Her feet were propped on the table next to Caro’s. Vivi’s head was thrown back in a big laugh, her mouth wide open so you could see her teeth. Each one of the women was dressed in a maternity smock of some kind. Each held a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other—with the exception of Necie, the only one who had never smoked.
“Fetal abuse captured in a Kodak moment,” Sidda said.
Connor leaned his hands on the table and dropped his head down closer to the image. “1952,” he said. “She was carrying you, Sidda.”
He pointed with his finger to Vivi’s huge belly. “Looks like the tribe is having fun,” Connor said. “You were nestled in that big double-basketball belly with your twin, huh?”
“I’m sure my twin thrived on all the alcohol and tobacco smoke,” Sidda said.
“Look at these women, Sidda,” Connor said. “They’re drinking and smoking, but doesn’t the other stuff count too? Look at it. Look at that image.”
He held the book up closer to Sidda’s face. “Look at them. Look at them like you look at actors, without yourself in the way.”
“Stop it, Connor.”
“No, Sidda, I won’t stop it.”
Sidda forced herself to study the snapshot. To look at the glimmer in their eyes, the tilt of their heads, their facial expressions, the lack of tension in their bodies, their relaxed gestures. She let herself receive the photo until she felt, as she did with actors, the very energy that radiated from their bodies.
“What do you see?” Connor asked.
Sidda held on to the edge of the table. “Ease,” she said, barely audible. “I see lightness and ease. I see suffering somewhere in my mother’s eyes, but I also feel the camaraderie. Laughter. Friendship.”
Connor watched her, listening.
“But—” Sidda said, and stopped.
“But what, Sidda?” Connor asked.
Straightening up, Sidda turned away from the table and started toward the kitchen. Catching her arm, Connor repeated the question.
“But what?”
“But,” Sidda said, “she did not know how to love me and I don’t know how to love you.”
“No,” Connor said, and pulled her back to the scrapbook. “That is not the way it works.”
He pointed again to the photograph. “Look at them. I met these women, Sidda. They’re still full of the same lightness and ease at seventy. And they love you. They want you to he happy. I realize I haven’t met the divine Vivi yet, but I promise you she feels the same way. Doesn’t their laughter count for something? Doesn’t that sisterhood and the laughter and the not being so damn alone in the world count for something? Didn’t you absorb some of that spirit along with whatever else passed through the placenta?”
Sidda turned away from the scrapbook, but Connor took her face in his hands and forced her to look at him. “Sid, I’m not your mother. And I’m not your father. And I want to take you for better or worse.”
Sidda was silent for a moment. “There’s such a thing as alligators that get in the way for some people,” Sidda said.
Connor’s eyes were wet and his breathing was a little ragged. “I’m stronger than alligators. Smarter too.”
A sob shook Sidda’s body. “You can’t do this for me, Connor,” she said. “I have—”
“I don’t want to do anything for you, Goddamn it!” He broke away, so that he stood naked, in front of the door to the deck. He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, almost like a boxer. Sidda could hear his bare feet as they slapped the floor. She could see his lean, muscular forty-five-year-old body, utterly unselfconscious in its focus and intensity.
He locked her with his gaze. “I don’t want to do anything. I just want to love you.”
She could not respond.
“Look, I’m five years older than you are, and I’ve never even wanted to get married before. I’m making this up as I go along. You think I’ve felt tranquil since you postponed the wedding? I’ve been dangling by a thread over the canyon of fucking doom. I’m not cut out for limbo, Sidda.”
Connor opened the door and stepped out onto the deck.
A horrible little line from her Catholic catechism surfaced for Sidda: “Limbo is not hell. But the baby souls suffer there, nonetheless, because they cannot see the face of God.”
As Sidda stepped out onto the deck, fat cumulus clouds passed by the moon, now a little less than full. She walked to where Connor was standing, his hands on the railing, facing out at the lake. Letting the cotton throw fall from her body, she leaned her body against his back.
“I don’t have too many boogeymen for you?” she whispered.
Connor McGill stood perfectly still as he stared out at the lake. He watched the clouds cross the moon, obscuring it briefly before they moved on, revealing once again the lunar snowiness. He chose his words with care. “No, you do not have too many boogeymen for me. You have just the right number.”
Sidda embraced him then. She held him tightly, breathing in the meaning of his words. They stood that way in the moonlight for a long time, Hueylene sitting patiently at their feet.
Finally Sidda asked, “Maybe a little midnight swim?”
They walked down the steep stairs to the dock, where, naked, they slipped into the freezing Northwest water. On their way back, they swam on their backs so they could look up at the moon, their strong flutter kicks sending plumes of water into the air.
When they returned to the cabin, they were both wide awake. As they dried each other off on the deck, Connor spotted the small key Sidda had hung in the window.
“What’s the wee little key belong to?” he asked.
Giving her hair a swipe with the towel, Sidda looked up. The moment she spotted the key, she froze. Her body leaned slightly forward, and her head tilted to one side. She looked as though she were listening to a faint call that was trying to reach her from a long distance away.
Then, breaking her almost trancelike stillness, Sidda stepped into the cabin, stood on tiptoe, clasped her hand around the key, and pulled it down from where it hung. A smile spread across her face. Reflexively, she covered her mouth. She looked like a child who had just discovered hidden treasure.
Finally, Sidda emitted a delighted laugh. “Connor, would you be interested in sharing a bottle of Moët that mysteriously appeared in my refrigerator within the past twelve hours?”
“You could twist my arm to ‘sip some stars,’ ” he said.
When Connor returned with the Moët, he found Sidda sitting in the moonlight, stroking Hueylene with one hand and fingering the key with the other. Brandishing two jelly glasses, he popped the cork, poured the champagne, and set the bottle in an empty tin olive oil container that he’d filled with ice.
“What shall we toast to?” he asked.
“Lawanda the Magnificent,” Sidda said, giving the tiny key a kiss, then holding it up for Connor to see. “That’s what this key unlocks.”
“Lawanda?” Connor asked. “Is there a story behind that name?”
“Funny you should ask.”
“I’ve got all night,” he said. “And then some.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m in an Isak Dinesen mood.”
“Well, then, Ms. Walker,” Connor said as he pulled her feet into his lap and began to rub her toes, “fly me to the moon.”
Sidda closed her eyes for a moment, as though she were calling the story to her. Slowly, she brought the glass of champagne to her lips and took a sip. Opening her eyes, she glanced for a moment at the little key she held in her hand. Then she began to speak.
29
Lawanda, the Magnificent, a huge female elephant, came to Thornton in 1961, the summer after I finished second grade.
Local developers had just paved over acres of farmland to build the Southgate Shopping Center, the very first of its kind in Central Louisiana. Thornton was a town of about ten thousand. When someone opened a new business, let alone a whole shopping center, it was big news.
In those days everybody still shopped downtown, along the river. Still stepped gratefully into the few stores with the Kool penguin sign that read “Come on in. It’s Kool inside.” Old codgers still sat on chairs in front of River Street Café and chewed the fat about Earl Long’s latest antics. The Colored water fountain was still around the back by the storeroom, although a few bold souls were already refusing to use it. Only the lucky or the rich had air conditioning at home, and while my family was both, we were still used to sweating the semitropical Louisiana heat, where a comfortable summer day meant anything below 98 degrees and 98 percent humidity.