Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (18 page)

The other three didn’t respond.

“Well, isn’t it?” Teensy repeated. “Isn’t it marvelous?”

“Oh, it’s marvelous; it’s thrilling; it’s Jimmy Stewart,” Vivi said. “Only it means Jack has to go far away for a long time. It means he will sit suspended in the air miles above the earth in a small metal cigar while Germans try to kill him.”

“Goodness,” Necie said, “I never thought of it like that.”

“Of course, you didn’t, Pal,” Caro said. “Miss Apple Blossom Time.”

“Jack went out to Spring Creek after he dropped me off,” Vivi said.

“Father gave him a whole book of gas stamps,” Teensy said.

“Our Mother of Pearl,” Caro said. “Is your father the
president
of the black market? The guy can get his hands on anything.”

“I don’t know,” Teensy said. “I never ask.”

“Bunch of the guys are going with him,” Vivi continued, taking a drag off her Lucky. “A stag party to celebrate, I guess. They’re spending the night out at the creek.”

“Well, they should have taken us with them,” Teensy said. “It’s always cooler at Spring Creek. I’m about to
die
from all this humidity. I wish somebody would just
wring me out!
”

“He should have at least taken Vivi,” Caro said, standing, walking the length of the porch, her bare feet slapping the boards. Turning and walking back, she picked up a cushion and began to fan Vivi with it. “When’s he leave?” she asked. “Where’s he go? What’s the skinny?”

“I do think the Air Corps has the cutest uniforms, don’t yall?” Necie asked.

“My brother doesn’t need a uniform to be handsome,” Teensy said.

“More hooch, please,” Vivi said, holding out her glass.

Teensy splashed more of Mr. Whitman’s black-market rum into Vivi’s glass, and a full moon shimmered over Central Louisiana. This was no rinky-dink moon. This was a moon you had to curtsy to. A big, heavy, mysterious, beautiful, bossy moon. The kind you want to serve things to on a silver platter. The noise of the crickets and cicadas and the clinking of ice against the girls’ glasses mingled with their voices and sighs. From their spot on the porch, they could see a paradise of stars holding their own with the moon.

Taking turns, they stood in front of the fan with wet washcloths held in front of their bodies. They tried lying in bed, but even the sheets felt soggy. When nothing else worked, Teensy started moaning.

“Come on, yall,” Teensy said, “moan with me. You’ll feel better, I guarantee,
mes chères
!”

And so they moaned until a dog started howling somewhere, which made them laugh, because it sounded like he was trying to communicate with their pack.

“Would Tallulah stay here and boil to death?!” Teensy asked.

“Look, Pal,” Caro said, “Eleanor Roosevelt herself wouldn’t
languish
here like this, and she’s one tough trooper.”

Wearing nothing but their fathers’ old seersucker pajama tops over their panties, the four girls pushed Genevieve’s convertible to the end of the long drive before Vivi climbed behind the wheel and started it. There was only a dollop of gas in the tank so they couldn’t get far.

“I just know we shouldn’t be doing this,” Necie said as they journeyed into the night. “We should have at
least
put on pajama bottoms.”

“Necie, this is not a mortal sin, you know,” said Teensy.

“I do not recall it being listed in the Baltimore Catechism,” Vivi said.

“Moses didn’t utter one word about pajama bottoms when he came down from the mountain,” said Caro.

“Well,” Necie said, “I guess these tops do cover more of our bodies than our swimsuits do.”

As Vivi drove, it seemed that not only the Ya-Yas’ bodies but the earth and sky were sweating. The very air they breathed was almost a juice. Moonlight spilled down into the convertible, onto the four friends’ shoulders and knees and on the tops of their heads, so that their hair seemed to have little sparks shooting off it. “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” played on the radio. Vivi had no idea at all where she was headed, but she knew that whatever direction she went, her friends would go with her.

She stopped the car at City Park, near a clump of trees, not far from where the water holding tank for the city of Thornton sat atop a raised tower. Turning off the ignition, Vivi
dimmed the lights and turned to the others. “Climb to the heavens, anybody?”

“Top-notch notion,” Caro said, jumping out of the convertible, without bothering to open the car door.

“Oooh, yes!” Teensy said.

“They don’t like you to go up there,” Necie said.

“That’s one of the reasons we want to do it, Countess,” Caro said.

“Only the men from the Parks Department are supposed to be up there, yall,” Necie said. “Really.”

“Necie, Baby Doll,” said Vivi, getting out of the car, “can it,
s’il vous plaît.
”

“Yall,” Necie continued. “We can’t climb up there. It is against the law.”

“We know.” Teensy smiled. “It’s
forbidden.
”

Necie stared at the other three for a moment before she finally opened the car door and joined them.

“I don’t even want to think about what could happen to us,” she said.

“Then don’t, Sweetie Pie,” Caro said, putting her arm around Necie.

“I’m just going to think me some pretty pink and blue thoughts,” Necie said.

They made their way to the back of the platform, where a crude ladder stopped six feet or so above the ground. They took turns giving each other boosts, with Caro, the tallest, going last. As Vivi scrambled up, her heart beat rapidly and sweat ran down the back of her neck. If the sultry heat, the rum, and the late hour were not enough to put her in a trance, the magnitude of the moonlight was.

At the top of the ladder, Vivi stepped onto a narrow catwalk that encircled the tank. It was an old wooden water-holding tank, once used by the railroads, but now pushed into service by the city, since nearby England Air Force Base and Camp Livingston had swelled its population. From her
spot twenty or so feet above the ground, she looked down on the town of Thornton.

She thought of her mother and father, and Pete, and the baby Jezie, and the wobbly life they lived there. Of the way Buggy stiffened when her husband stepped near; of the way she said, “Here’s your supper, Mr. Abbott,” her lips thin and tight. She thought of the way her father laughed at her mother’s housedresses, dirty fingernails from gardening, and sanctuary candles. She thought about the faint smell of Scotch, not quite disguised with Dr. Tichenor’s Antiseptic Tincture, on her father’s breath; she thought of the clinking sound of his belt buckle when it dangled from the strap.

Her mother’s discontent lay coiled inside her own body. Ever since Vivi’s little sister, Jezie, was born, Buggy had slept in the nursery, on a daybed against the wall. Although Vivi could not have put it into words, she felt her own exhaustion at constantly attempting to hold back part of her vitality so she would not cause her mother more sadness. At fifteen, Vivi Abbott was more masterful than most at rationing parts of herself without appearing anything but exuberant.

She did not know that the holding back did no good. Nor did she have any understanding of the inner rationing her mother had learned herself at a tender age. There was a lot Vivi did not know about her mother.

She did not know about the old nightmare that haunted Buggy. The dream that came from something that had happened when her mother was twelve years old. At that age, Buggy had kept a journal, filled with her secret feelings and little rhyming sentimental poems. She wrote about anger toward her sister, Virginia, and her mother, Delia. She wrote romantic girlish poems about fairies, love, the Virgin Mary, and her love for horses (which Buggy was too afraid to ride).

In Buggy’s nightmare, it happened just the way it had happened in 1912. Delia found her journal, became infuriated by what Buggy had written in secret. Forced Buggy to follow
her and Virginia to the backyard. There Delia ripped the pages from the journal and one by one handed them to Virginia, who fed them into a fire.

“Buggy,” Delia had told her, “you are not a writer. There is nothing in your pitiful little life to write about. If anyone is a writer, it is Virginia.”

As Buggy watched her secrets go up in smoke, she vowed to get back at her sister. And she did. When she was nineteen, she managed, through painstaking calculation, to steal Taylor Abbott from Virginia and get him to marry her. He told her she was the sweetest little thing in Garnet Parish and that he wanted her to be his little girl forever.

Buggy’s victory was a dubious one, however. She was left with a husband who ran around on her for the duration of their marriage.

From the top of the water tower, Vivi felt a relief spread through her. What a sweet small-town thrill this was, like the delight of watching a parade from the top of a tall building. She could see the tangled Spanish moss hanging off the oaks in City Park. She could make out the camellia bushes and azaleas, the salvias; she could smell the night-blooming jasmine. Closing her eyes, she imagined she could look down into her house, into her bedroom and everything in it. The four-poster bed with the silk canopy Delia had bought for her in New Orleans; the new vanity her father bought for her fifteenth birthday, on top of which sat a photo of Jack clad in his basketball uniform, fiddle in hand; the tall armoire crammed with loafers and sweater sets; the ceiling fan; the tennis racket propped against the night stand; her tennis trophies; countless photos of the Ya-Yas, and one of Jimmy Stewart.

Looking away from her parents’ house, Vivi imagined she could see the block she lived on, and then her whole neighborhood. She conjured up all the people she knew and the few she didn’t. She saw them tossing and turning in their
beds, too hot to sleep. She saw lights burning on front porches; slivers of light where icebox doors were open, someone standing there, reaching for a bottle of milk, just an excuse to feel the cool air of the icebox. She saw night lights in the rooms of the babies who dreamed soft seersucker dreams, drugged happy with the heat, their pink baby bodies curled against worn cotton, not fearing Hitler yet, their strong, tiny hearts beating in unison with the trees and the creeks and the bayous.

Vivi saw the flicker of candles burning at Divine Compassion for the souls of the dead; she spotted tiny fiery red tips of cigarettes dangling from the lips of sleep-starved souls seeking the faintest of breezes in backyards; she caught the soft glow from radio dials left on all night, in case a warning was broadcast, in case the Nazis or Japs invaded on this feverish night, executing the horrors that lived in the town’s heart even as the bank opened for business, as the milk was delivered, as the wafer changed to body and blood.

Winging higher still, Vivi left her town, went up so high she could no longer see the trees or the boulevard or the faces in ecstasy or worry. She flew above all the forgotten things hanging in the air between people. She lifted above her town until she could see Bunkie and Natchitoches and how the Cane River was more like a lake, and how the Garnet River fed into the Mississippi; she soared over Spring Creek, with its cool shade trees and pine-needle paths leading to the cabin where Jack lay sleeping that night. She flew over the German irises with their pale gray-green spikes, above the brown waters of the bayous with their silent cypress trees; over the swamps; over the cotton; over the shotgun houses, where the tired black men and women who stooped to pick the cotton slept; over the rice and sugar cane; over the swamp myrtles; over the millions of tiny estuaries; over the crayfish in their beds of mud.

Then she left it all, and ascended even higher to banks of
clouds, perfect clouds cool with mist and closer to heaven. She could see the whole little earth, blue and white, spinning around in terrifying magnificent space. No people, only hearts, hearts beating, countless hearts; and the sound of breathing.

This is how it was for Vivi Abbott, age fifteen, labile, in every sense of the word. Such were the places she could travel when a tiny gate opened inside her and her mind went loose-jointed. Such holy and terrible suppleness is not always safe, and never without trade-offs.

For a moment Vivi stopped feeling solid. And then she began a fast free-fall, which carried a shock of impermanence, a panicky jolt of her own
temporariness.
She clawed to hold on to the moist clouds, to the grand view. She did not want to return to earth.

Back on the water-tower platform in City Park, in the heart of the state of Louisiana, Vivi thought: With Jack Whitman, my life will be different.
You can be anything you want, Vivi,
he said. Anything at all.

And then Vivi thought:
If Jack disappears into the sky, I will shrivel up and die.

Caro was the one who figured out how to pry the lid of the water tower open. It was tricky and required some work, but the Ya-Yas were wily and hot.

Even Necie, the careful Ya-Ya, was captured by the vision of the moonlight in the water. They flung off their pajama tops. Seersucker fluttered through the still air to the parched ground below. The Ya-Yas stepped out of their panties and forgot about collecting scrap metal. They didn’t talk much, and they thought even less. They slid into the cool, clear liquid caress of the city water supply.

A bold kind of holiness hung in the air as the Ya-Yas leaned their heads back in the water, their hair floating out around their shoulders. They stared up into the bright sky,
where there wasn’t any war. They counted stars, thought they found Pegasus, and were sure they spotted Venus. They touched their toes to one another’s and kicked their legs to the heavens like Esther Williams.

Vivi completely gave herself over to the water. A black stone that lived inside her chest was temporarily lifted out, and she breathed deeply, and then released her breath like she was blowing out a candle. Her stomach softened, her shoulders released, her dizziness went away. Then she started to cry.

After a few moments, and with no explanation, Teensy’s tears joined Vivi’s. Then Necie’s, and a few of Caro’s. Their tears rolled down their faces and into their community’s water. They cried because Jack’s enlistment had cracked open their tight universe to the suffering world. They cried because in their highly resonant Ya-Ya bones, they knew that they would never be the same.