Little Altars Everywhere (25 page)

Then the sheriff’s car pulls out of the driveway with the headlights on and takes off down the gravel road toward town. Shep watches until it’s out of sight, then he stares out into the field where the beans have disappeared in the dark. He stands that way for a good long time with his hands in his pockets. When he turns to me, his eyes are so soft and serious.

He says, It goes by so fast, Vivi, it just goes by so goddamn fast.

I know, Babe, I tell him and try to hook my arm through his.

But he turns and walks up the drive saying, I’m hungry. It’s way past suppertime.

Oh God, I think, it’s such a good life, but it
hurts!

After supper I fall asleep, but for some reason I wake up after only a couple of hours. I get up and go into the kitchen and fix myself a Coke over crushed ice.
I will tell him that I still love him
, I think.

I will tell him that when we are old and looking for our mules, we don’t have to be alone, we can help each other.

I rinse out my Coke glass and put it in the dishwasher. Then I walk down the hall to Shep’s room. I start to knock on the closed door, but I think, No, I will just go and sit on the edge of his bed, touch his shoulder, and say his name softly so I don’t startle him.

I reach down to open the door, try to turn the knob to the right.

The door is locked.

There are only the two of us in this house and he has locked his door before going to sleep.

I will never let him hurt me again as long as I live
, I say to myself. As I walk back down the hall, I say it over and over to myself. One of these days I will learn.

I grab my cigarettes and walk out into the backyard. That candy-cane striped swing set we bought the kids years ago still sits out there, looking ridiculous. I look up at the stars and say a prayer straight up to Heaven: Please, do not give me any more than I can handle. I am a strong woman, but don’t push me.
Don’t push me, Lord, you hear me!

I finish that cigarette, then I go in and get back into bed. I need to lay back and give up. I need to surrender for at least one night, for at least eight-and-a-half hours. I look like crap if I don’t get enough sleep. My eyes get all puffy and I’m cranky as hell. I need my beauty rest. I always have.

Siddalee, 1991

I
’m a godmother now.

Baylor called me while I was directing a new play at a small house on Theater Row.

We’ve named her after you, he said, and we’re going to call her Lee. She’s beautiful, looks exactly like you. We’ll wait till after your show opens to have her baptized.

End of October alright? I asked.

Sure, he said. October is the only decent month in this state.

I direct plays. It’s nice work if you can get it. I make about the same amount of money as a teenage golf caddy, but I like what I do. When I’m not in Manhattan, I’m at regional theaters in places like
Milwaukee or Seattle. I go where the work is, season to season. Like a migrant worker. I love studying a script on the page, then presiding over the accidents that occur when the actors let their bodies lead them. The whole process, from first read-through to opening night, feels like a series of tiny miracles to me—one person’s thoughts getting transformed into flesh and movement and conversation and thousands of gestures.

I don’t go back to Louisiana very often. It makes me too sad. I get an emotional hangover for months afterward. There’s too much danger of getting sucked back into the swamp I’ve learned to crawl out of—or at least swim through.

I’m not what you’d call a serene person, but I’m not a walking nerve-end either. Let’s just say that with a lot of work, I’ve managed not to become a full-fledged Junior Ya-Ya. I have one main rule for myself these days:
Don’t hit the baby.
It means: Don’t hurt the baby that is
me.
Don’t beat up on the little one who I’m learning to hold and comfort, the one I’m trying to love no matter how raggedy she looks. It’s sort of a code, a shorthand of the heart.

I murmur
Don’t hit the baby
when I wake up, when I ride the subway, when I board a plane, when I step into a theater. I whisper
Don’t hit the baby
before I go to sleep. And on the nights when I make it through without a futon-soaking nightmare, I know I’ve breathed it like a prayer during my sleep. You can read all the books and
spend a small fortune on therapy, but that one sentence just about covers it all.

It takes me weeks to prepare myself for the trip home for Lee’s baptism. One day I’m fantasizing how warm and loving and familiar it will all be and how much everyone will have changed. Then that same night I’m having one of the old familiar nightmares where I must swim for hours through a black ocean looking for the boat Mama and Daddy are about to capsize in. I swim until my whole body aches. I wake with my neck hurting. I wake up needing to rest from the night’s sleep.

It’s a blessing to have to show up at the theater each day. To block the show, to feel for pacing, to go over last-minute lighting cues and costume changes, to bird-dog the ten-thousand things that lead up to opening night—when you stand in the back of the theater and hold your breath.

The day after the show opens, I sleep fourteen hours, see my therapist for one last emotional rehearsal, then have dinner with my best friend, Connor.

He gives me six of those little Guatemalan worry dolls in a little pouch, and says, Don’t forget: While you’re in Louisiana, blue-green coral is still growing on the ocean floor.

Connor is a scenic designer/carpenter/sometime writer with a fascination for Salinger. He leaves messages on my machine like “Sidd! Listen up! J.D. was spotted in Queens at a retirement party for an old policeman
friend of his. This is fact. Believe it.” For the past year we’ve worked together and played together, and even spent the night at each other’s apartments after late nights at the theater or watching videos about Delta folk artists. We haven’t made love yet, though. Not because the chemistry isn’t hot, but because Connor feels too important for me to risk blowing everything by sleeping together. On good days, I tell myself: Hold on. If it’s meant to be, it’ll happen. You have all the time in the world. Our friendship, or whatever you want to call it, is one of my main comforts. With Connor I get to rest.

You get to Thornton by flying through Dallas–Fort Worth, usually with a long layover. From there, you take a Royale Air Lines commuter plane, which does not even have a bathroom. There isn’t a big demand for flights to my hometown. I can’t imagine why.

During my layover at DFW, I locate the non-sectarian chapel. It’s a small room with about eight wooden benches that face this huge oil painting. Someone received divine inspiration and probably a hefty commission from the Port Authority to paint a Boeing 747 flying through a terrible storm. Flying right alongside the plane is this huge figure of Jesus. His hands hold the plane up, like if it weren’t for Him, that plane would crash in a second and kill everybody involved. His hands curl under the belly of that plane, like the Boeing engineers had designed the body of the plane
with just such a thing in mind. I stand in front of the painting for so long that it finally stops looking like the sentimental trash that gets sold on the side of the highway and begins to make a deep kind of sense to me.

I am really losing it, I think, and go to sit on one of the benches. I swallow half a Xanax, then take a
People
magazine out of my carry-on, but I cannot get too worked up about Madonna’s latest exploits. I keep thinking about Thornton in October. I haven’t been back to Louisiana in three years, and my heart starts pounding and my breathing gets ragged every time I picture the streets of that town. I put down
People
and take the worry dolls out of my purse, checking to make sure my asthma inhaler is still there. I pour the tiny figures out of their little blue striped handmade pouch into my hand. Six of them—one each for Mama, Daddy, Little Shep, Lulu, Baylor, and me. I walk up to the painting and line them up along the frame like little offerings.

Here, J.C., I think, You take care of them. I’m tired.

It’s nighttime when my plane lands in Thornton. I get off the plane and walk across the cracked tarmac to the terminal. I can see the same tired hair-netted waitresses still serving hamburgers in the airport café. Or maybe these women are their daughters. Every Sunday night when I was seventeen, I used to drive out to the airport to watch planes and dream about where they would someday deliver me.

I can still smell that chemical-sweet, faint aroma of
cotton poison hanging in the autumn air, exactly the way it smelled twenty years ago. There is the forgiving coolness in the air that Louisiana gets in late October, a coolness that seems kinder than anywhere else in the world—if only because the heat and humidity which preceded it were so cruel.

Baylor comes forward and hugs me. Welcome home to Wackoville, he says. See? I told you it’d be nice when you got here. It’s football weather!

He checks me into the Theodore Hotel, the restored 1920s hotel downtown on the river. It’s a gracious old building with potted palms and ceiling fans in the lobby. There are desks where you can actually sit and write letters, like people used to do when they were away on a trip and thinking of the folks they had left behind. Mama and Daddy had their wedding reception in the huge hotel ballroom with the mirrors and the crystal chandeliers. There are very few pictures of that event, however, because the photographer got as smashed as the rest of the guests.

After Baylor carries my bags and unlocks the door to my room, he turns on one of the brass lamps above the bed. See, Sidda? he says. There’s a ceiling fan even in the room! He turns it on and its whirring freshens the stale hotel air. Bay walks over to the French doors and pulls open the curtains, and we step out on a small balcony that overlooks the Garnet River. I can smell the water and the loamy earth.

Baylor says, It’s not so bad, huh? I mean, it’s not the Plaza, but it’s not bad for Thornton.

Then he opens up the antique armoire that holds a huge color TV. He turns the TV set on for background noise and walks into the bathroom to break the toilet-seat banner—our ritual as kids whenever Mama and Daddy took us to hotels.

It makes me laugh. Aw, why didn’t you let me do it?! I say.

He walks over and leans down to open the small refrigerator. Look, he points out proudly: Anything you want. You’re uptown, baby. Toasted almonds, Godiva chocolate, they even got a split of champagne in here. You want anything else, just call room service and charge it.

Then he turns to me and asks, Is it okay? I mean, the room and all?

Oh sweetie, I assure him, it’s lovely. It must be costing you a fortune.

This is not New York, he says. Don’t even think about it. These are to the rental car, he explains, and hands me a set of keys. It’s down in the parking lot. A red Tempo. It has a good air conditioner. I checked. And FM. No tape deck, sorry.

Thank you, Bay, I tell him.

He sits on the bed awkwardly and examines my luggage. I can tell he doesn’t want to leave. He stares at the 1930s suitcases I bought at a thrift store in upstate New York. They’re plastered with decals from all over
the country, so I can feel like an old-time vaudeville artist when I job-out to direct plays.

Have you been to all of these places? Bay asks.

Uh-huh, I tell him in my best Chaney voice. Been ever’where. Done ever’thing.

He looks up at me and smiles.

I love you, Baylor, I say.

Thanks for coming back for the baptism, he says.

Well, I’ve never held my godchild in my arms. It’s a big deal.

Blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, Baylor says. Then he kisses me and says: Good night! Sleep tight! Don’t let the bedbugs bite! Like Mama said to us eighty-four thousand times when we were growing up.

The next day, I almost faint when I pull the Tempo into the circular drive of Baylor’s new house. He’d sent me photos, but still, I had no idea! It’s a mini-mansion straight out of
Southern Living!
Columns running the length of the porch. Ten white rocking chairs lined up, with pots of flowers next to them. A manicured lawn that must take scads of workers to keep up. There is something almost embarrassing about how new Old South it all is.

The twins, Jeff and Caitlin, run out to greet me.

They haven’t seen me in three years, but they yell out, Hey! Aunt Sidda! Hey! I talk to them on the phone every Sunday morning from wherever I am, so it’s not like we’re strangers. But still, I almost burst into
tears to see how much they’ve grown since I last visited. How can they change like that without me being here?!

Their accents are thick as Louisiana coffee. I love it. I drop my cultivated Yankee accent right then and there and relax into my mother tongue.

Angel-twins! I call out. Come here! Oh, I’ve missed-missed-missed yall!

They hug me and say, We missed-missed-missed you too, Aunt Sidda!

They’re dressed to within an inch of their lives. Melissa loves dressing them up. It’s her art form. She comes out and gives me a small kiss on the cheek.

Oh Siddalee, she says, we’re so glad you could come. Now come see Lee! She’s been waiting for you.

Melissa gives me a quick peek of the house on our way to the nursery. Huge formal dining room, a pool with a deck that I can see through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Live oaks lining the yard. At least Bay built on an old lot, I think. Jesus, French doors everywhere. A master bath the size of my studio apartment in Manhattan. A study with 1840s mahogany and glass bookcases and antique butler’s tables. A handsome antique globe of the world. Mile-high carpet everywhere you step. Baylor’s kind of house.

The nursery is straight out of a dream catalog. But who can look at the decor? It’s Lee who pulls me in. Lee with the huge black eyes that stare straight up at me, as if to say: Okay, introduce yourself, Godmother. Lee of
the dolphin forehead. Lee of the jet-black hair and thick eyelashes. Lee, the only force on earth that could make me move back to Thornton just to be in the same room with her every time she wakes from a nap.

We waited until you got here to dress her, Melissa says.

Baylor’s in the doorway knotting his tie. He comes over and hugs me, Hey God-mama! he says. Is your goddaughter a doll or what?

A white linen and ecru lace baptismal gown is laid out on the changing table, along with a pair of white satin booties and a little white cap that ties under the chin.

I can hardly believe all this stuff! I exclaim. You guys don’t kid around.

Melissa says shyly, The gown was my great-grandmother’s. I bought the booties and cap in New Orleans. You don’t think they look too new, do you? she asks me worriedly.

I look at my sister-in-law, who I used to consider beneath my brother, who I once described as a “classic Southern bimbo who reads only dime-store romances.” I was wrong about her. She is kind. One time, in a pique of jealousy, I called her “mindless” in front of Bay. He didn’t get angry with me. He just said: Sidda, what can I tell you? When I wake up with nightmares, she holds me and she doesn’t ask any questions. She loves me. Don’t talk bad about her.

I shut up after that.

I look at Melissa and say, The hat and booties are beautiful, sweetie. Everything is beautiful. Thank you for waiting to let me dress her.

I lift Lee and begin to put the gown on her. I’m so awkward, I keep saying under my breath, Forgive me, Lee, I’m new at this. She helps me (I swear) put her little arms into the sleeves of the gown and she doesn’t squirm when I slip the tiny socks and satin booties on her feet. I hold one of her feet before I slip the socks on. Her toes are so pink and perfect. Her tiny foot sits in my hand like a new potato just out of the ground. I pick her up in my arms and for a moment the wisdom of fairy tales sparkles through: We all need blessings in our cribs, we all need protection from the witches.

I hear a phone bleating down the hall. A moment later, Bay sticks his head in the nursery. It’s our alleged mother, he says, and hands me a portable phone. I put Lee down and step out into the hall. I need to focus all my concentration when I attempt a conversation with my mother.

Dahling! Mama says breathlessly. Why didn’t you call us as soon as you got in last night?