Cavedweller (40 page)

In the dark anything seemed possible. Anything could be born there. The cave was a dim, curving stage full of unseen motion. In that dark Cissy was not Baptist or Pentecostal but surely beloved of God. The rocks waiting at Cissy’s feet made her think of falling, and falling did not scare her at all. Climbing shale required absolute concentration, putting the feet exactly right, moving slowly and never allowing a slip. Controlling her body that way made Cissy yearn to stand up, throw her arms wide, and shout out loud. And the act of not doing so created a sense of power held back, a constant tingling sensation at the nape of her neck. In the cave Cissy could feel what she might do, what might happen, her body hurtled against the stone walls, or the walls themselves coming down inexorably on her fragile flesh, pushing her up into God’s embrace, a mystery of darkness and glory. In the cathedral elegance of Little Mouth’s third chamber, Cissy lifted her head and felt a breeze whisper past her cheek. God or ghost, Clint or Randall, the sweating innocent dead or the burning terror of a lifelong desire. Someone climbed behind her, smelling of smoke and her daddy’s tequila. Someone ghostly and resentful coughed hollowly, whispered Delia’s name, and breathed on Cissy’s neck. Every echo wheezed. Every rockfall sounded a bass note. Jesus, magic, or death—anything was possible in a cave.

Cissy moved through the cave like a woman in a dream, loving the sharp taste of her own fear when the rope slid across the rock surface, the steady, distant sound of water dripping, the heat of the other women’s sudden tempers. Every time Jean shouted at Mim, the rock would reverberate and Cissy would straighten her body to take that shout into her belly, to let it shake her inside and out. The beloved of God would shout like that, unhesitating and unafraid. Cissy opened her mouth and felt the echoes resound against her teeth. For their open, unafraid shouts, Cissy loved Jean and Mim completely. Love heated her blood, speeded her heart. For the first time in her life, she did not feel alone.

Her family didn’t understand it, the usually reticent Cissy showing an interest in something besides books. Dede barely noticed, but Delia and Amanda found rare common ground in their concern over Cissy’s renewed enthusiasm for caving and her equally surprising friendship with those strange girls.

“You’re always going somewhere or just back these days,” Delia said with a frown.

“What you trying to prove?” Amanda demanded. “You never talk to us anymore.”

As if I ever did, Cissy thought, but said nothing.

 

 

M
im kicked roughly at the bundle of muddy clothes she had just stripped off after the third trip to Little Mouth. “Ugh. Red mud and yellow clay. Washing that out is going to be worse than washing Daddy’s dog.”

Jean laughed. “I say we put them in that barrel in the backyard and just let water run through them for a day or two. We put them right in the machine, we’ll burn out the motor.”

“Maybe use that spray nozzle we got to wash the car.”

“Yeah, that, or get the guys at the fire station to let us use theirs.”

Cissy had nodded and laughed along with them. Talking about laundry and the sticky mud was part of the ritualized end of their expeditions. The jokes—the same ones told over and over, the same complaints—were a way to leave behind the concentrated exhilaration and fear of being underground. Laughter, nervous shaking, and slow relaxation—the aftermath of the expeditions was as predictable as the trips themselves were not. They did not talk about their claustrophobic terror or the appalling sound that skin made sliding across rock, or about the chafing of the helmet strap under the chin, or the way the slippery crawl spaces closed in around their shoulders, and the damp-rock smell clung to their clothes. Like drinking hot coffee and eating from discount bags of broken cookies, complaining about the filth of caving was a safe way of boasting of what they had done.

“Look at me! I am clay from head to toe.”

“Lord, I got that grit in my hair!”

“Goddamn, we are just filthy!”

The apartment Jean and Mim shared was comfortably messy, books scattered about among clothes, shoes, and empty soda cans. Whenever they came back from a caving trip, Mim and Jean would strip in the entry between the back porch and the kitchen. All the muddy clothes they pulled off went into an empty tub by the door. Then they took a shower together in the little bathroom off the kitchen. Cissy would watch them with self-conscious awe. Trying to be casual, she would pull her own muddy clothes off in the entry, but slowly enough as never to be naked in front of Jean and Mim. As soon as they were out of the room, she would speed up, toweling herself down roughly and dressing in clean old clothes she kept just for the trip home. She would sit at the kitchen table drinking spring water and listening to Jean and Mim laughing under the shower. Eventually, she figured, she would get so used to the girls that she would take a shower herself—just walk in naked and take her turn under the hot water. It must be wonderful, to be so at home in your body that you didn’t hesitate to stride around with your butt bare naked and your nipples out where anyone could see. Jean and Mim’s carelessness made Cissy seem even stranger to herself.

Cissy had her own system for getting the dirt out of her caving clothes. Delia’s laundry room had served as a photo lab when Dede was dating the boy who took all the pictures for the yearbook. They had broken up the double sink and mounted a third so that water ran down from the top one through the next two. Although Dede’s infatuation with the boy was short-lived, Cissy had found the sinks very useful for hand laundry. There had been a moment when she thought about offering to take Mim and Jean’s clothes back with her, to do their laundry as she did Delia’s and Dede’s, and Amanda’s before she moved out. Before the words could come out of her mouth, Cissy stopped herself.

No, she didn’t want to be that person with Mim and Jean. The Cissy who did her family’s laundry was someone she did not want them to know. She wouldn’t be able to laugh the same way if she became the person Delia and her sisters believed her to be. Neither Mim nor Jean teased her about her silences or her habit of dropping her hair down over her left eye, or about her shyness or her hesitant way of answering questions. For them she was not weird Cissy but simply Cissy. They behaved as if she were exactly like them, and because of that, Cissy began to imagine she was. The things they talked about on the way to and from the caves were the everyday, the expected—how long it took to drive from Cayro to Little Mouth, the grade and weight of rope available at the Bartow County army-navy store, the hopelessness of getting up after spending a day and a half underground. For Cissy, talking to Jean and Mim was like slipping on a second skin. It was luxurious not being Delia’s daughter for a little while. She joined in with them to laugh at her own muddy jeans.

“Feel this. I think my pants have gained twenty pounds.”

“You got rocks in those pockets?”

“Yeah, when I was sliding. Collected a couple of pounds of gravel between my pants and my ass.”

Jean and Mim laughed, and Cissy basked in the glow of their appreciation. They were so different from her sisters.

“You are from another planet,” Amanda had told Cissy repeatedly. “There is not an ounce of normal human being in you.”

Cissy did not argue. She thought Amanda was right. Maybe Delia was not her real mama after all. Maybe she was like those changelings in the storybooks, a fairy-tale creature exchanged for Delia’s real daughter. What else would explain how different she was from everyone she knew?

“You an’t
that
different,” Nolan always said. But Nolan? If there were changelings, then he was another one. The two of them were the next best thing to aliens ever seen in Cayro, Georgia.

 

 

D
elia’s old washing machine banged when it was overloaded. To get it to do sheets at all, Cissy had to sit on top of it, the weight of her body providing the necessary ballast as the engine churned and spun. She would brace herself with one hand on the cinder-block wall and one leg extended so her foot pressed the metal shelving by the door. Buttressed like that, the machine would hum easily, and one of her hands was free to hold a book or change the channel on the radio or grip the side of the washer when the load became unbalanced again and started to shimmy beneath her thighs.

Cissy liked the way it felt, that machine heated and pounding under her. In the steamy heat of the laundry room, she fell into a reverie so intense she could not say afterward what she had been thinking. She would load the machine and climb up as soon as it started to bang, becoming instantly transformed, like a dervish who has been spinning for so many years that he can fall into meditation effortlessly. The steamy air exuded rapture. The heat seeped mystery.

“You get off on it, don’t you? Giant vibrator under your butt?” Dede accused once, and ran off to tell Delia, who ignored her so determinedly that it was clear she too thought she knew what Cissy had been doing. Cissy imagined what she must look like—riding that washing machine, pink-faced and glassy-eyed, legs spread and knees flexed, feet tucked up on the shelves across from her—but what she was doing was nothing so mundane. Not everything was about sex.

The laundry room was Cissy’s retreat, that cinder-block chamber with its permanent scent of detergent and bleach and a floral overlay of fabric softener. More caustic odors came from the plastic milk crates of cleaning fluids stacked in one corner next to old bottles and cans of ammonia, paint thinner, and kerosene.

“None of that can go in the garbage, you know,” Amanda complained to Delia. “You got to haul it out to the dump. Get rid of it before one of my boys gets into it.”

“Cissy will take care of it,” Delia said. “Cissy keeps track of things out there.”

Cissy did not haul everything out until the spring Delia redid the house. With Nolan’s help, she pulled the shelves and the machines away from the walls, washed the place down, then set up a fan to dry it out for a day. She put on two coats of white paint, flat white for the ceiling, a glossy oil-based paint for the walls, to resist mildew. She scrubbed the floor with a bleach solution and left it unpainted. Afterward the room was like a temple, purified and clean. There was nothing for the bugs to eat, no trash in the corners to gather dust and spiderwebs. When Dede or Amanda brought in boxes of junk or bags of old clothes, Cissy would take them directly to the dump. Nothing was allowed to remain if it didn’t belong. What Cissy could not say in words she said in that laundry room, in those baskets of spotless white shorts and undershirts, delicate underwear in net bags, immaculate sheets for the beds, perfectly folded towels to stack in the closet, jeans bleached down to a pearly cotton that caressed the skin. Clean clothing, shirts and blouses and underwear made new under Cissy’s hands, all of it breathed the longing she would not acknowledge aloud, the family connection that seemed so tenuous everywhere outside that room—the one place in which she knew where everything was and how it got there.

But laundry was part of home, that other reality, the reality that did not include Mim and Jean and Cissy’s easy laughter with them. The only time Cissy felt herself to be the dutiful daughter, Delia’s little girl, was when she did the laundry. It was another life, that yearning for the safe girl-child’s place. In the life she wanted, she cared for nothing outside the reach of muscle or sinew. In the caves Cissy would brace a hip, bend a knee, or reach above her head to push her body forward, and see Mim’s eyes on her over Jean’s shoulder gleaming in pleased admiration. There she was nobody’s baby girl. She was a grown woman, strong and able. Cissy feared bringing the scattered parts of her life together—Amanda’s contempt, Delia’s confusion, Nolan’s precise friendship, Dede’s caustic jokes, Mim and Jean walking naked through their kitchen. Between them all, who was Cissy? What was possible for her and who would she be—the proud Cissy who climbed down in the dark or the timid one who hid in the laundry room?

After their last caving expedition, they came out of Little Mouth at night so grubby Jean refused to let them in her car until they changed. They all stripped down by the trunk, Cissy hiding her blush under her loose hair, grateful the dark covered so much. When Mim poured water over her naked shoulders and Jean waited to towel her back, Cissy tilted her face up to the sky and felt the air against her skin like a satin weight, the pulsing energy of her bloodstream singing to her brain happy to be alive.

She had crawled down into darkness and out again, risked everything and come up into the starlight caked with mud and sand, bat shit and ancient dust. Washing the mud away was baptism. Cissy unbuttoned the second layer of thrift-store trousers and pulled off her dirty boots. Like Mim. Like Jean. She moved with deliberate unconsciousness, not looking down to see her own nakedness, turning to scrub Jean’s back and rub it dry with a rough towel. The muscles under her skin could be trusted.

Pulling on clean, dry jeans that smelled of fabric softener and sunshine, Cissy laughed out loud. Every time she came out of the cave dark, she remembered the Sunday morning television shows she had watched when they first came back to Cayro. Between the sermons there were sermonettes, little one-act plays in which moral lessons were demonstrated with brutal efficiency—the cursing father developed throat cancer, the fornicator lost a child. Caving was like that. If you put your foot down wrong, you would find retribution. If you ignored the dust, it would choke your light. If you laced your boots too loosely, your ankle might turn or the wet find its way into your socks. If you sinned against the rock, the dark might call your name. But if you persevered, you would come out into the light. Everything would be made right. You would know with unquestioning certainty who and what you were.

I
n the years following her husband’s death, Nadine Reitower broke her hip three times. She hadn’t been on the second floor of their house since Nolan started at the junior college. “She never will again,” Dr. Campbell told Nolan. “She’ll be in that wheelchair till the day she dies.” For all that, Nadine was a happy woman. Something happened to her with the third fall, something terrible and wonderful. A little stroke, a moment of grace, Nolan called it, and maybe God did have something to do with it, the God that made fish without eyes and two-headed calves.