Cavedweller (21 page)

“Of course you will invite Delia’s girl,” Gillian said.

At the party, as soon as her mother left the room, Mary Martha produced a bottle of her daddy’s bourbon and offered it around. Her best friends, Jennifer and Dawn, took quick gulps and pronounced it fine. Cissy took a small sip and nodded, though she didn’t like it much at all. Lizzie Jones, Charlie’s little sister, took a sip and made a face.

When half the bottle was gone, Mary Martha had an inspiration: they would watch the telethon and call in false credit card numbers. But the operators had unerring instincts or very sharp computers, and the girls never got past them. Finally, just after midnight, Mary Martha settled everyone in a circle. “I’ve been planning this,” she said. She turned off all the lights and set one blue candle in front of the triple vanity mirror her mother had bought her at an estate sale. To one side she placed a blue metal bowl on a raised trivet. The bowl contained High John the Conqueror, she told them, ordered from a real bodega down in Atlanta. She got a discount because she bought their candles too. She lit the incense, and a foul smell rose in the room.

“All right. Each of us is going to look into the mirror.” Mary Martha coughed. “You look at the candle, you breathe in the incense, and you pray to see the future. My cousin Barbara, she told me about this. She swears it worked for her. But you got to do it at the right time, you know, like around your first period, or anyway, before you, uh, you know.”

“Before you have sex, you mean?” Lizzie’s face was bright with interest. “You gotta be a virgin?”

Mary Martha nodded.

“Makes sense.” Jennifer sounded like she had a whole theory on the subject.

Cissy’s opinion must have shown on her face.

“Well, it does,” Jennifer said.

“I read about those temples in Greece and Egypt where they had girls sit in the smoke and tell the future. Virgins. Vestal virgins. That’s how it worked.”

“Yeah. I read that.”

Boyfriends, husbands, children, careers—anything might appear in those shadows in the mirror. Anything. You would only get a glimpse, Mary Martha warned, and took the first turn. She lit the blue candle with her left hand. Cissy ate the top off a cupcake and put the bottom half back on the plate. She was starting to feel slightly sick to her stomach.

Great wealth, two husbands, and two sons—Cissy was a bit surprised. She would not have thought Mary Martha would come up with two husbands. Jennifer took her turn next: a career in the movies, a statuette in her arms! Cissy bit her thumb, thankful the light was so dim that she did not have to hide her face. Lizzie took her turn but sat too long, insisting that she almost saw something but it just wouldn’t come clear.

“I think it was a house, a big house.”

Dawn had trouble getting comfortable. She said the mirror was at the wrong angle, so everything had to be shifted around. After a lot of dramatic peering and leaning in, she gasped and threw her hair back. “A race car. I swear I saw myself in a race car, with numbers on the side and everything.”

“Oh my God! I didn’t even know you could drive.”

“I’m learning.”

Mary Martha took another sip of bourbon and passed it around, toasting Dawn. “You could be the first woman to win at Darlington.”

Cissy giggled before she could stop herself. It was a small giggle, but Mary Martha frowned.

“Why don’t you try, Cissy?” Mary Martha’s voice was stern.

Cissy had made a point of being unobtrusive and painstakingly appreciative until even she was tired of herself. She nodded and slid across the rug to the pitiful little candle’s glow, settling herself in a cross-legged position and dutifully looking into the flame. She’d give it a minute and tell them she couldn’t see anything. Cissy stared across the flame into the mirror. The candle was larger there, its light brighter, but around it Cissy saw nothing but shadows, a dark core, and the reflection of the dim room. She shifted a little and her face came into the frame, etched in candlelight in the glass.

The tiny flame moved, and Cissy turned her attention to the blue bead of heat at its heart. It was surprisingly bright close-up, not as small as it looked from across the room. Yellow-white, dancing in some slight breeze Cissy could not feel, the firelight hurt her eyes. Every flicker seemed to splinter and ripple at the edge of the pupil of her left eye. There was a flaw there, she saw, a crack in the smooth surface. Very small, but it was sharply delineated by the flame’s movement. Cissy leaned in a little closer. Her eyes loomed larger in the mirror.

Beside her, Dawn wiggled and poked her. “Cissy?”

Cissy ignored her. She had never seen the wound before. She leaned in as close as she could get to the flame.

“You see something?” Mary Martha’s whisper was husky with excitement.

Cissy watched the movement of her eye. The left eye generally followed the right unless she was very tired, and even then it just drifted a little. It did not roll up and around like Martin Nouvelle’s did. Cissy saw Martin at the gas station every time Delia took her Datsun in to be serviced. Martin would look at Delia and smile while his left eye peered over in the direction of the ice machine. Cissy had to stop herself from turning to see if there was something that had caught one of Martin’s eyes and not the other. Her affliction was nowhere near so obvious, but it was there.

“Shit,” Cissy whispered.

“What? What!” Mary Martha was getting upset.

Delia never talked about the accident, the wreck in which Randall’s left side was crushed, Delia’s foot broken, and Cissy between them showered with glass. One of the few times it came up was right after Cissy started school in Cayro. The teacher had been very curious about Cissy’s eye, and had sent her home with a note asking Delia to call her. Delia exploded. “It was an accident,” she told M.T. “Cissy was so young. It’s not a problem. She has minimal vision in the left eye, but it’s no problem.” She pounded her hands on the kitchen table and cursed. “Goddamn! None of her business. An’t nobody’s business but ours.” Her rage had shocked Cissy as much as her brief comment. An accident. Cissy had no memory of an accident.

“Randall shouldn’t have been driving,” Delia said. “I never let him drive you again.” Her face was stern with shame and apology.

“Shit,” Cissy said again, her face cloudy in the mirror. She closed her eyes. She could remember Delia and Randall arguing, her daddy’s slurred insistence. After they moved out, Randall would sometimes put his face against Cissy’s and cry. She loved it when he did that, loved her daddy’s touch even though it was bitter with grief. It was Delia who had been so angry at him. Now, for the first time, Cissy understood the expression on Delia’s face. Horror and guilt were etched there. Randall had been driving, but Delia blamed herself.

“I remember,” Cissy breathed. “I do.”

“Remember what? Tell us, Cissy.” Mary Martha could barely contain herself.

Randall had almost killed them. Stoned and careless, he had almost killed them all. Such a little thing. So much hurt. One careless drunken moment and everything came apart. One shard of glass, a splinter really, one little arrow of light had flashed into Cissy’s eye and spilled blood down her cheek. Delia had screamed and pulled Cissy up into her arms. There must have been pain. She could almost hear Delia’s scream, feel the shower of glass. Cissy had dreamed that scream. She had dreamed of that little bit of glass, that arc of light, The dream was terrible, but it did not feel. There was no pain when the arrow flew into her eye, and surely there must have been pain. Didn’t eyes feel? And there were no scars. All that glass had left no mark.

At least Cissy had always thought herself unscarred. Now she saw the scar, the evidence.

Cissy kept staring into the mirror. The glare of the candle brought tears to her eyes. The tears made the surface of the left eye even more shiny, translucent, pearl white. That flaw shone deeper, brighter. A diamond. It was like the glitter off the edge of a jewel, her jeweled center. It was beautiful as cut glass. Cissy blinked and felt the warm tears against her lashes. She looked one more time at the small, pitted indentation at the edge of her pupil, and then turned her face to Mary Martha.

“What did you see?”

“A crack in the world,” Cissy said. “I saw a crack in the world.”

D
elia sat up, her heart pounding. She had fallen asleep on the couch, and for a moment she was back in California, drunk in that garden in Venice Beach. Her muscles ached with that old ghost pain, the need to take her children in her arms, and her heart was bursting with grief that she could not. But it was a dream. The girls in the back bedroom were so close she could almost smell them. She leaned back and rubbed her arms. Her mouth tasted sour. She wanted a drink, she realized. She wanted a drink so bad her need was like a knot in her belly.

“Jesus Christ,” Delia whispered to the dark. “When does it stop?” It was going on two years now, two years since she had been drunk that last Thanksgiving in California. But her stomach still rolled and her mouth tasted of bitter cotton and old need. A glass of whiskey would clean it away, wash out the bitter and set her to singing again. Delia curled up and hugged herself. The worst mistake she had made was to put together her singing and her drinking. Now she mourned both of them, and dared not do one for fear of what would come of the other.

She could hear Clint muttering and shifting in his bed. The smell of that room was getting worse. She would have to haul him out into the sun tomorrow, scrub the floor again, and wash down the walls with vinegar. She could change all the sheets and spray Lysol in the corners, but the smell would come back in a few days. Was it the cancer that smelled so bad? Or was it Clint himself, the stink of his soul?

The first time Delia touched him was the worst. The feel of his skin made her tongue swell in her mouth and her lower back clench. She had to concentrate to make herself touch him and not recoil. In time, though, she was able to put her shoulder to his to help him to the bathroom without flinching. Clint would set his teeth and fix his eyes in front of him. Delia focused her own eyes on her hands, the floor, anything not to look in his face.

“I’m sorry,” he had said when she bathed him that afternoon. He might have been talking about how awkward he was, how slow and heavy, but Delia knew he meant more. She grunted and pulled him down the hall a little faster than was easy for either of them.

His hands shook, his legs trembled. Red-faced, he told her he’d been pissing in the tub more often than the toilet. “Sometimes,” he whispered, “I sit down and I can’t get up at all.”

Delia nodded expressionlessly. There were railings now in the hall and the bathroom, two-by-fours with braces every few feet. One of the guys from the Firestone plant had done the work for a hundred dollars, but Delia could tell they would not be used for long. Clint could barely drag himself forward even with her help.

“You’d be more comfortable in the hospital,” she told him once they got him into the bathtub.

“No hospital, you promised.” Clint’s face was stricken.

Delia said nothing. She pulled off his pajamas while he shivered and tried to help. He stood in the bathtub with his back to her, holding himself up on the railing with outstretched arms. Delia pulled the shower curtain around him, keeping a hand inside it to steady his body.

“This house goes to the girls,” he said. “This house, the insurance. I sold the truck, but there’s that boat out at Mama’s, some furniture and old coins.” His head was bent and his eyes half closed. He was trying not to look at her. There was a lot more gray than blond in his matted hair. His skin was so dry it flaked off at his shoulders and hips. “The papers I drew up for you are at the bank. They’ll give them to you. When I’m dead, they’ll give you all that stuff.”

Delia turned on the tap. When it felt hot enough, she pulled the lever for the shower. Clint lifted his face. The muscles around his mouth and eyes went slack, the loose skin hanging in folds. He urinated gratefully as the water flooded over his trembling frame. As he relaxed a little, liquid shit ran down his legs.

Delia turned away. God had a hell of a sense of humor, she thought. She remembered lying on the floor of this bathroom, pregnant with Dede, pissing herself because she was hurt too bad to stand. Clint was rubbing his left hip where the bone jutted out. She could not see his cock, but she remembered what it looked like. There had been a time when she loved him, a lifetime before he became the man she hated. He had been a different person then, and so had she. All those years ago, when she had bought that gun at the flea market near the Atlanta speedway, she thought she would have to kill him. She had come back to this house and sat at the dining room table with the gun in front of her. Clint had come in on her there and stood looking from the gun to her.

The guy who sold her the gun was a curly-headed Texan who did business from under a green blanket, no questions asked, cash on hand. It was about as big as a handgun could be, that .38 revolver, all blue-black and hot when he slapped it in her hand, laughing when she almost dropped it. Said, “You be careful now, honey. That’s a real weapon, not some toy.” She wanted to shoot him where he stood, but she paid and walked back to the truck. When she got home, she sat down and put the gun, fully loaded, on the table, and waited.

Clint didn’t believe her when she said she was going to shoot him if he ever hit her again. If she had to shoot herself after, it wouldn’t matter. And if he took that gun, she’d just get another. “There an’t no slaves in the South no more,” she said. “You been trying to make a slave of me.” Clint just looked at her, his dirty blond hair hanging in his face, his jaw working, the hatred in him like a black light shining out of his eyes. He laughed a harsh laugh and turned and walked out. She wanted to go after him. She wanted to shoot him then. Instead she put her head down on the table and wept into her hands.