Cavedweller (23 page)

Back in the kitchen Rosemary turned to Delia and spoke bluntly. “I am not touching that man. I’ll do anything else you need. Cook and clean for these girls, lend you money or fight any damn body you name. But I am not touching that son of a bitch till he’s dead.”

Delia leaned on the table. Her face was pale and her mouth rubbery. Exhaustion showed in the set of her shoulders and the bluish shadows on either side of her nose. “You don’t have to stay,” she said. “I’m glad you came, but you don’t have to stay.”

Rosemary put her arms around her friend. “Shush, shush.” She hugged Delia close and rubbed her back. “I’m staying. You know I’m staying. You are about ready to fall out. Don’t you think I can see that? You think I am going to leave you alone with these cranky teenagers and that horrible man? Besides, I need myself some peace and quiet, a little listen-to-the-mosquitoes time. This will be a vacation.”

Delia relaxed a little and let her head rest on the silky blouse. “Oh, Rosemary,” she moaned.

“Yes, darling. Yes.” Rosemary stroked her fingers down Delia’s back. “It will be all right. But you and I have never lied to each other, and I wasn’t going to start now. I hate that man, and I couldn’t take care of him. I’d wind up putting diuretics in his milk.”

Delia giggled, then put her hand over her mouth. Rosemary grinned.

“You be the saint,” she whispered in Delia’s ear. “You do what I can’t, and I’ll do the rest. We’ll be fine, just fine.” She pulled Delia closer and grinned wider. “And when he dies, I’ll get drunk for both of us.”

 

 

“
T
hat Rosemary’s quite a good-looking woman,” M.T. said to Dede when she came by with a basket of beefsteak tomatoes the Sunday after Rosemary arrived. It was a smoldering hot day, and Rosemary and Delia had gone for a drive, a trip that was obviously a device so the two of them could talk privately. M.T. drank a glass of Coke and sat for a bit at the kitchen table, fanning herself to dry the sweat on her neck. Amanda was on the back porch with her Bible-study notes, and Dede was in her underwear ironing by the window. Cissy had been reading in Clint’s room but came out when she heard M.T.’s voice.

“You knew her in Los Angeles?” M.T. asked Cissy. “What did she do out there?”

“I don’t know.” Cissy blotted sweat from her forehead with a napkin.

“How can you iron in this heat?” M.T. asked Dede, who shrugged and spritzed a blouse with the spray bottle. She squirted some of the water on the iron so that it sizzled and steamed.

“It needs to be done, and once I’m this hot it don’t seem to matter.” Dede turned the nozzle around and sprayed her shoulders and stomach. “Want some?” she asked, waving the bottle at M.T. with a grin.

“I’m wet enough, thank you.” M.T. turned back to Cissy. “Rosemary was with the band, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

M.T. frowned. “Well, has she said how long she’s gonna stay?”

“Long as Delia needs her.” Cissy looked over at Dede. “Couple of weeks or a month, Delia said.”

“Well, I don’t know what kind of woman can just pick up and take off like that.” M.T. sighed elaborately and looked around the kitchen. A stack of crisp cotton sheets leaned against a neatly piled mound of faded jeans and T-shirts on the shelf beside the washing machine. The dish rack held four glasses and one bowl. There were no more pots sitting around half full of the soupy potatoes that were Clint’s mainstay, and the smell of blood and sick that was omnipresent from the first day Delia moved here had been replaced by a bleached austerity. The room looked clean for the first time in months.

“At least it looks like she’s being a help while she’s here,” M.T. said.

“Rosemary’s a house afire,” Dede said. “She puts on the radio and gets to work first thing in the morning. Don’t stop either. About the time I think she might be ready to sit down and rest, she starts making lists of things that still need to be done. Delia says she don’t know what she’s going to do when she leaves.”

M.T. looked down at the material pulled tight over her thighs. “Is that a fact?” She drank the last of the Coke and stood up. “You tell her hello for me, say how glad I am she came.”

Cissy and Dede watched M.T. walk out to her car. “It’s eating her up, Rosemary taking care of Delia,” Cissy said.

“Oh, she’ll be all right.” Dede went back to the ironing board. “M.T.’s as tough as they come.” She turned the spray bottle up and squeezed into the air so the water droplets rained down on her upturned face.

 

 

R
osemary’s visit scandalized Cayro. Nadine Reitower told her husband that she was sure there would be a tragedy in that house, that if Delia Byrd wasn’t going to smother Clint Windsor in his bed, then that black woman from Los Angeles surely would. “Just look at her,” Nadine kept saying. Her husband shook his head, but he did look at Rosemary. Every man in Cayro looked at Rosemary. Men joked with each other about her at Goober’s on Friday nights. “Did you see who’s staying with that Delia Byrd?” “High-priced tail” was the general consensus. “Yankee nigger bitch,” said Harold Parish, Marty’s older brother. “Time was we’d have run her ass back to New York City.”

“She’s from Los Angeles,” Richie Biron said, drawing out the syllables.

The men around him laughed. “Still a Yankee bitch,” one of them said.

“Oh, come on, son,” Lyle Pruitt said to Richie. “She’s just helping out old Delia Byrd and Clint.”

“That Delia’s another one.”

“Delia Byrd was born right here in Bartow County,” the bartender threw in. “I knew her daddy before he died.”

“Maybe he was born here, but his child got the soul of a Yankee.”

“I don’t know. You ever listened to that band, old Mud Dog? Woman could sound just like Maybelle Carter.”

“Naaa, her voice is deeper. Reminds me of Rosanne Cash.”

“Chrissie Hynde,” Pat, the waitress, cut in.

“Who?”

“The Pretenders, you know that song. ‘Got brass in pocket?’ That deep-voice angry kind of song?” Pat whacked her order book against her hip and tried a Chrissie Hynde chord. The men snickered. “Well, that always reminds me of Delia on
Mud Dog,”
Pat insisted, “like she sings on
‘Lost Girls.’
”

“You crazy.”

“I never liked that one.”

“Still say she’s just another nigger bitch.”

“Delia?”

“No, dammit, that colored girl she’s got staying with her.”

“Oh, Harold, hell. Leave it alone.”

Harold Parish’s racial views didn’t stop him from trying to flirt with Rosemary at the Piggly Wiggly one Sunday afternoon. “How you doing?” he asked her.

She gave his sweaty features and beady black eyes a carefully blank look. “I’m in the market for greens, pork shoulder, and red potatoes.” Rosemary studied Harold’s acne-scarred cheek. “Don’t need any trouble or any big-shouldered men,” she said, and stepped past him.

Harold went red. There was something in the look Rosemary gave him that made him feel not only big-shouldered but handsome and appreciated. He felt as if someone had finally seen past his gangly body and bad skin. After that Harold discouraged the vulgar talk.

“It an’t as if I’d date a black girl,” he told his friend Beans. “But if I was going to, that’s one I’d go for.”

In the second week of the visit, Stephanie bought herself a costume choker that was almost a match for Rosemary’s gold necklace. “Everybody in Los Angeles has one,” Steph told the women who came into the Bonnet and complimented her. M.T. was conspicuously silent. When Dede saw the choker, she blushed. She had been thinking about buying one for herself.

M.T. was polite whenever she saw Rosemary, but she stayed away from the house and even took a few days off to go visit her cousins in Tallahassee. “Ecological niche,” Rosemary joked. “I would probably like M.T. if we’d met first, and she might even like me. But I can tell she’s worrying I’m going to talk Delia into moving back to Los Angeles.”

“Are you?” Dede was hopeful.

“Lord, no.” Rosemary beamed at the girl. “M.T. would hunt me down and rip my heart out.”

It was not simply that Rosemary was magazine-model gorgeous, with those enormous eyes and that fine neck. She was also outrageous. She ignored custom and prejudice, going around in a gossamer skirt. Sometimes she covered her scar with that gold necklace, sometimes with a creamy scarf. Once, when she saw Amanda staring at her as she was washing dishes in the kitchen, Rosemary confided that she was thinking of outlining the scar with eye makeup and glitter.

“It adds character to have a flaw in a precious stone,” she said, and when Amanda hurried outside, Rosemary leaned over and yelled out the door after her. “Don’t you think I’m a character?”

The two of them sniped continually. Amanda complained that there was not enough room for Delia’s friend, and Rosemary talked out loud about how some people might do better to cut back on their praying and do a little more picking up around the house.

“I pick up after myself,” Amanda huffed.

“Rosemary is our guest and she’s helping us out,” Delia said. “Don’t be rude to her.”

“I am not rude!” Amanda shouted.

“Maybe she’s scared I’m going to steal you away,” Rosemary said to Delia after Amanda announced she was going to yet another prayer meeting and stalked off.

“No,” Delia told her. “I don’t think Amanda would mind me leaving. You just shake up her simple notions of how the world is supposed to be.”

“Well, then, I am a blessing in disguise, because from where I stand, your girls are entirely too certain how things are supposed to be.” Rosemary was forcing cooked potatoes through a sieve for Clint’s dinner. She wouldn’t feed him, but she had taken over all the cooking.

“No, Rosemary, that’s not the problem. They’re not certain of anything, anything at all.” Delia, who had slowly been getting more rest, sounded tired all over again. “Think how they’ve grown up. As far as Amanda and Dede know, there an’t nobody in this world they can trust to be there for them the way you are here for me now.”

Rosemary frowned and went back to shoving potatoes through the tiny holes in the sieve.

 

 

A
manda could not get over the fact that Rosemary used suntan lotion. “I burn same as you,” Rosemary told her. “Faster. My skin is finer than yours is.”

“That’s a fact,” Dede said as Amanda left the yard in disgust.

“Thank God, I’m not that touchy.” Rosemary smiled at Dede as Amanda left the room. “She’s always on her way somewhere, isn’t she?”

Dede grinned. She and Rosemary had bonded over teasing Amanda and then discovered a mutual passion for fashion and style. Rosemary had shown Dede how to highlight her eyes with a blue-black pencil and shape her brows to follow the line of her eyes. They had taken over the bathroom for hours and set up a mirror on the kitchen counter so Dede could check her makeup in daylight.

“See, you don’t wear that blush before sunset,” Rosemary told her. “It’s perfect for night. Make you look like a clown in sunlight.”

“Makes you look like a fool any hour of the day,” Amanda said. “Excuse me, could I please get to the sink?”

Amanda grew steadily more furious the more Dede followed Rosemary around. Good Christian girls in Amanda’s tiny universe went barefaced until they were married. Wearing makeup was just further evidence of Dede’s intention to sin.

“She’s fourteen, not forty,” Amanda protested to Delia.

Delia did not see the problem. “It’s perfectly all right to try things out at home,” she said. “I’d rather she learned how to do makeup from Rosemary than copy some of the girls I see coming in the Bonnet.”

“She shouldn’t be messing with that stuff at all.”

“Amanda, your sister has her own ways. She’s not like you, and she doesn’t have to be.” Delia did not want to fight, but she had discovered that it was better to be firm with Amanda than to try to avoid arguments.

“Ways! What ways? The devil’s ways!” Amanda pointed her finger at Delia. “See what you say when she’s running the streets. See what you say when she comes home pregnant and can’t even name the father.” She crossed her arms under her breasts. This was something she knew about. She had been going to the special family programs with the Grahams over at Tabernacle Baptist. She sat with Lucy Graham and her brother, Michael, the young man everyone said was going to replace Reverend Myles when he was ready to retire. They shared the study guides on the power of prayer and the very real dangers the devil put in the way of teenagers. Michael wanted Amanda to be his partner in the young people’s class on miracles in everyday life, and he had already told her how much he loved her bright scrubbed face and her disdain for worldly vanities, makeup and powder and flowery scents. Amanda knew she could never tell Delia and Dede about Michael, how he smiled into her eyes and how he made her feel. When he touched her, she knew in a way she had never known before the real danger that Dede was courting.

“Dede’s going to get in trouble, just you wait and see,” Amanda declared.

“I’m not deaf, you know,” Dede yelled from the bedroom. “And I’m not going to get pregnant. I’m not a damn fool.”

“She’s not running the streets.” Delia tried to keep her voice level.

“Wait and see, just you wait and see. I know what I know.”