Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

  She handed Sidda a glass of champagne and a plate piled high with boiled crayfish, new potatoes, corn on the cob, and hunks of buttered French bread.

  “Thank you, Mama,” Sidda said, realizing just how hungry she was.

  “Your daddy prepared the whole meal,” Vivi said. “I didn’t have to do a thing. I’m sorry there’s so little left. My guests just gobbled everything up.”

  “This is plenty,” Sidda said.

  “Can you handle eating that crayfish here on the swing, or should we move to the table?”

  “Mama, I have not forgotten how to suck the heads of a Louisiana crayfish wherever I’m sitting.”

  “Here’s a couple of napkins,” Vivi said, pulling two large squares of pink linen out of her waistband.

  After tucking one of the napkins into the collar of her blouse as a bib, and the other under her plate, Sidda began to shell the crayfish. “Will you join me?” Sidda said, gesturing to a spot beside her on the swing.

  “Thank you for offering me a seat on my own swing,” Vivi said in a tone that Sidda couldn’t quite read.

  Vivi sat down, although not so close that their bodies touched. She stared straight out, keeping one hand behind her back. Sidda could hear her mother breathing. For the first time Sidda realized she hadn’t seen her mother light one cigarette since she’d arrived.

  Afraid to say the wrong thing, Sidda said nothing. She shelled the crayfish and ate. “This is delicious.”

  “Thank God Louisiana men know how to cook,” Vivi said.

  “Not as sophisticated in its flavoring as your étouffée, of course.”

  “Necie made sure you had some?” Vivi asked.

  “I had forgotten food could taste like that,” Sidda said.

  “You really thought it was good?”

  “Good?! Mama, the étouffée you sent up with the Ya-Yas would have made Paul Prudhomme weep over his cast-iron skillet. That man is a short-order cook compared to you.”

  “Well, thank you. I am known for that dish, if you recall. I learned how to cook it from Genevieve Whitman.”

  “Thank you for sending it to Quinault, Mama.”

  “The one thing I did right was feed yall well,” Vivi said.

  Something in Vivi’s tone struck Sidda. Mama is as nervous as I am, she thought. She turned to Vivi and said, “You did more right than wrong.”

  Vivi did not respond. Neither mother nor daughter knew what to say next.

  “You look good, Mother. Really good.”

  “You look terrific,” Vivi said. “I think you’ve lost weight.”

  Sidda smiled. Her mother’s highest compliment.

  “I’ve filled out,” Vivi said. “It’s the weight lifting: adds bulk. And the not smoking: adds Snickers bars.”

  Sidda laughed. “You are amazing with your weight lifting. I keep telling myself I should, but I never do.”

  “Do I look too fat?” Vivi asked.

  Sidda could not count the number of times her mother had asked her that question. Now, for the first time, she thought she heard what her mother was really asking: Is there too much of me? Do I need to trim myself back for you?

  “No, Mama,” Sidda said, “you don’t look fat. There is just enough of you. Not too little. Not too much. In fact, you look exactly right.”

  Vivi kept staring straight ahead, out at the fields, only barely lit by moonlight.

  “Your father,” she said, holding back tears, “has put in over three hundred acres of sunflowers out there. It’s his second crop this season. Not cotton, not soybeans. Sunflowers. Wait until you see them in the daylight. He claims it’s to attract birds for hunting, but he’s not fooling anybody. You don’t need three hundred acres of sunflowers to attract a few little doves. I mean, all he does at the Labor Day Dove Hunt anymore is take photographs.”

  Vivi took a deep breath before she continued. “It’s a Van Gogh out here, Sidda. You think you know a man that you’ve put up with for nearly fifty years and then he does something like that. All for beauty.”

  Vivi began to cry a little, but gave a deep sniffle, and stopped. She patted lightly around her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “Splotchy-splotchy saddle bags.”

  Vivi turned so that Sidda could clearly see her dark brown eyes, her faintly freckled milky skin, her aging chin. Then, in an exaggerated, petulant little-girl voice, she said: “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.”

  Then Vivi burst out laughing.

  Sidda joined her in laughter. God, it felt good to laugh with her mother again!

  “What made you do it?” Vivi asked, looking at Sidda. “What made you get on a plane and fly all the way down here?”

  “Lawanda,” Sidda said. “Lawanda made me do it.”

  Vivi turned away. She was silent for a moment. “You didn’t remove anything from my scrapbook, did you? You didn’t lose anything, did you? Because that stuff is priceless. You can’t put a price on any of those treasures.”

  “I brought the ‘Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood’ with me, Mama. It’s in the car. Let me get it right now.”

  “No, don’t get up—that’s all right.”

  But Sidda was already walking toward the car.

  When she opened the car door, Vivi could see her daughter’s wrinkled forehead in the illumination from the car light. So beautiful and intent, Vivi thought, just like when she was little.

  Sidda walked back to the swing, carrying the scrapbook and a small gift-wrapped box, which she concealed in the pocket of her linen jacket.

  Sidda handed the scrapbook to her mother. “I hand-carried it onto the plane with me. I didn’t want anything to happen to it. ‘I want this safely returned to me,’ your note said.”

  Vivi stared at the album in her lap. She ran her hands over the package, then brought her hands up to her mouth. “It’s not the scrapbook I wanted safely returned,” she whispered.

  “Mother,” Sidda said, smiling, “your note expressly said you’d take out a contract on me if—”

  “It was you I wanted to return safely to me,” Vivi whispered.

  “Oh, Mama,” Sidda said, hardly able to speak.

  She laid her hand on her mother’s shoulder. She could smell her mother’s Hovet perfume, with its pears and violets and orris and vetiver chords so miraculously mixed. Underneath that scent, Sidda smelled Vivi’s natural scent, the one that came from her skin, from the very molecules that made up her body. In the Louisiana night air, Sidda could smell again the first scent she ever breathed in.

  A light attached to a telephone pole at the edge of the driveway gave off an old-fashioned country light. It combined with the white Christmas lights strung around the swing to illuminate Vivi’s face. Sidda could see the lines on her aging, almost translucent skin, lines formed from years of charm hiding fear. She could see her mother’s courage, and she could see her pain.

  As Sidda joined Vivi in staring out into the darkness of the fields, where hundreds of sunflowers grew, she thought: I will never fully know my mother, any more than I will ever know my father or Connor, or myself. I have been missing the point. The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?

  There, in the front yard of Pecan Grove Plantation, in the heart of Louisiana, which had not yet had its first freeze of the year, Siddalee Walker gave up. She gave up the need to know, and she gave up the need to understand. She sat next to her mother, and felt the power of their combined fragility. She returned home without blame.

  When Vivi reached out her hand to Sidda, she took it. Their hands rested on the swing between them. At the same moment, each of them looked down and noticed the similarity of their hands’ coloring, the shape of their fingers, the veins that carried their Ya-Ya blood through their female bodies.

  “Oh, my,” Vivi sighed.

  “Oh, my,” Sidda echoed.

&nbs
p; With those few sounds, it was as though mother and daughter exchanged the same breath. Then, without a word, they began to push against the ground with their feet, so that the swing began to rock ever so gently. Nothing rambunctious, just a smooth swaying, as if the swing were a cradle holding both mother and daughter, two separate and equal planets tumbling through space on a night in late autumn.

  “I want to give you something,” Vivi whispered. She reached into the pocket of her silk pants. Then, taking Sidda’s hand in hers, she slipped something into her daughter’s palm.

  When Sidda unfolded her fingers, she beheld a small velvet jeweler’s box. She opened the lid, which snapped back on a tight little hinge. Inside sat the diamond ring Vivi’s father had given her over fifty years before.

  “My father gave me this on the night of my sixteenth birthday,” Vivi said simply. “I almost lost it once, but I got it back.”

  Then, like a priestess, Vivi took the ring from its box and slipped it onto her daughter’s finger, her own hands shaking and soft and spotted with age. Once the ring was on, she raised Sidda’s hand and kissed it. Not like you kiss a lover’s hand, but like you kiss a baby’s fingers because they are so pink and pudgy and because you love them so.

  Feeling her mother’s tears against her palm, Sidda lifted Vivi’s hand to her lips and kissed it before pressing it against her cheek. Then each of them began to cry. No shoulders shaking, no big gasps, just tears rolling down on their cheeks in silence.

  “Thank you, Mama,” Sidda whispered, “for all the divine secrets you’ve shared.”

  “Secrets?” Vivi said, between sobs. “Oh, Dahlin! If you’re talking about my scrapbook, that was nothing! I don’t even remember half the junk that was in there. You should see the stuff I didn’t send you. Now that’s where the real secrets are!”

  This is my mother, all right, Sidda thought.

  “I tell you,” Vivi said, tears still falling, “it is a sin and a shame they don’t make Wanda Beauty anymore.”

  “Would sure come in handy for sinners like us,” Sidda said, “breaking the ‘Fifth Rule of Beauty and Allure.’ ”

  “My love lights are going to be dingy and lusterless as hell.”

  “Sparkleless in a setting of bags and puffs,” Sidda said. “A girl has enough handicaps in the campaign for love.”

  “Goddamn right,” Vivi said.

  “Okay,” Sidda whispered, “it’s my turn.” Reaching into her jacket pocket, she pulled out the tiny gift-wrapped box she had carried on the plane. Before she handed it to her mother, she gave the small gift a kiss, then slipped it into her mother’s hand.

  Vivi tore the rose-colored handmade paper off the box. She reached in and very gently lifted out a tiny glass vessel about the size of a foxglove blossom. The vial was very old, made of sterling silver over glass, with one jade stone in the center of its little screw-on lid. Gingerly, Vivi unscrewed the top and held the vial to her nose to sniff it.

  “It’s not for perfume. It’s for something else, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s for something else, Mama.”

  Vivi tilted her head slightly to the side, thinking. “Tell me.”

  “It’s called a lachrymatory. A tiny jar of tear drops. In olden days it was one of the greatest gifts you could give someone. It meant you loved them, that you shared a grief that brought you together.”

  “Oh, Sidda,” Vivi said. “Oh, Buddy.”

  “This one dates back to Victorian times, I think. I found it in London a few years ago while scouring antique shops for props.”

  “Are your tears in here?” Vivi asked, holding up the vial.

  “Yes, but there’s room for more.”

  Vivi looked at Sidda and winked. At least it looked like she was winking. She may have been trying to blink a tear. Because in the next moment she was holding the tiny jar under her right eye, bobbing her head up and down, trying to shake her tears down into the container.

  Sidda looked at her mother and started laughing.

  Vivi looked at her and smiled. “What are you laughing about, you crazy fool? I have been waiting for this gift my whole life.”

  “I know,” Sidda said, now laughing and crying simultaneously. “I know.”

  Then Vivi stood up from the swing, still holding the jar under her eyes, and began to hop. First on one foot, and then on the other.

  Once she realized what her mother was doing, Sidda got up from the swing and began hopping too. She hopped first on her right leg and then on her left, leaning her eyes down in the direction of the lachrymatory so that her tears might fall in. Vivi, holding a jar of tears in her hand, and Sidda wearing a once-pawned, now-redeemed ring on her finger, hopped and cried. Hopped and cried and laughed, and made wild impromptu whooping sounds. If someone had happened upon them, they might have thought the two women were performing a strange ritual tribal dance. The Ritual Mother-Daughter Dance of the Almost-Lost-But-Still-Mighty Tribe of Divine Ya-Yas. An ancient passage of tears and diamonds. Diamonds and tears.

  32

  It was after one in the morning when Sidda and Connor checked into the Tante Marie House on Cane River.

  “It’s straight out of a movie,” Connor whispered as they walked up to the front door of an early Creole Greek revival home. Columns lined the deep porch, and the air was fragrant with thick, sweet smells. The flickering of gas lamps created shadows that danced along the shutters and brick walls, making Sidda and Connor feel they had stepped back into another century.

  The owner introduced himself as Thomas LeCompte. By the time he had led Connor and Sidda through a courtyard garden and up a flight of stairs into a gallery apartment in the old slave quarters beyond his house, he’d decided that not only did he know Sidda’s family, but there was probably a good chance that the two of them were related.

  “As a matter of fact,” Thomas said, stepping through the French doors out onto a gallery that looked down upon the garden, “that camellia bush over there, a Lady Hume’s Blush, came from plantings your maternal grandmother gave my father. I think her name was Mary Katherine Bowman Abbott, wasn’t it? A tremendous gardener, your grandmother. My father was, too. A camellia nut. When a camellia blossom fell, he spoke of it as a beheading. Daddy would kill me if he saw the way my gardener has pruned your grandmother’s jewel.”

  Beside him on the gallery, Sidda and Connor looked down on the garden, a wild profusion of blooming begonias, impatiens, and the remnants of big, showy caladium leaves. The sweet scent of butterfly ginger, its white flowers glowing in the darkness, reached up to greet them. Surrounded by the tangled masses of Spanish moss hanging from giant live oaks, the garden was enclosed by old brick walls, which were covered by a few remaining Rose of Montana blossoms. A fountain with a small pool sat in the far corner of the garden, buttressed on one side by a chinaberry tree and on the other by a crepe myrtle, its leaves gold and red with autumn. Lush plantings of a variety of camellias, azaleas, roses of all kinds, salvias, and jasmine filled the space so completely that the red brick floor of the courtyard was barely visible.

  Sidda looked at the huge camellia bush, its buds full and swollen. “I never knew Buggy—that’s what we called my grandmother—was such a great gardener,” Sidda said.

  “Oh, well,” Thomas said, “that sort of thing is only known among the true gardeners, you know.” Then, making the Sign of the Cross, he muttered, “Daddy, forgive me.”

  Connor, a true gardener, said, “That variety of camellia is legendary, Sidda. A Lady Hume’s Blush that size is comparable to a black pearl. I didn’t think they really existed.”

  “I must let you get to bed,” Thomas said.

  Connor and Sidda watched as he descended the stairs.

  “I can’t believe I’m in America,” Connor said.

  “You aren’t,” Sidda said. “You’re in Louisiana. And we’re about to spend the night in converted slave quarters that look like they’re straight out of Soutbern Living. It makes me feel a little guilty. All the mis
ery these four walls have held.”

  Connor looked around the living room, filled with antiques, plush carpets, and Audubon prints. “A lot of misery, yes. But life happened here, too. Couples made love, babies were born, people sang as well as wept. These walls have probably witnessed joy along with the suffering.”

  * * *

  After they’d fallen back into the huge four-poster bed, Sidda told Connor the bare bones of her reunion with her mother. She did not feel much like talking, though. They made love briefly, intensely, sleepily, sweetly. They were both exhausted. After their lovemaking, Sidda did not fall asleep. Connor stroked her back and made up little bits of a song for her. Something about a little bulb growing underground in winter. He sang softly until finally his voice drifted off and he fell asleep.

  If God is good to me, Sidda thought, I will be sharing a bed with this man when I am eighty.

  After a few moments, Sidda climbed out of the bed, careful not to wake Connor. Naked, she walked barefoot across the wide cypress-plank floors and down into the garden, into the warm, humid Louisiana night. She stood in front of the camellia that was her grandmother’s black pearl. Then she crossed to the fountain and dipped her hands into the small pool. Her fingers wet, she touched her eyes, then her lips, then her breasts. She breathed in and out, she offered herself mercy, she gave herself forgiveness. Sometimes lost treasures can be reclaimed.

  The next morning Sidda spooned up against Connor and suggested they do things together she had never done before within a hundred-mile radius of her hometown. After that, she whispered a few decisive words to him. When he heard what she had to say, he pulled her to him without speaking, and held her. He kissed her forehead, her eyes, then her nose, her lips, then the tips of her fingers.

  “I’m sorry for all my crazy indecision,” she said, “for making you hang on a thread over the canyon of doom.”

  “Ah, Sweet Pea,” Connor said, rolling back onto his side so that he looked into her eyes. “We’re all hanging by a thread in the canyon of doom. We’re all each other’s keepers.”