Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (27 page)

Focusing her attention, Vivi resumed the game, smashing the ball hard. In the few minutes it took for her to win the game, each sensation was heightened for Vivi.

She shook hands with Anne McWaters, then took her time gathering her racket press, the extra can of balls, her jacket. Stalling, she took a long drink of water, and ignored Pete, who stood waiting, watching her every move.

Finally, Pete rolled his bike to where Vivi stood, pulling on a sweatshirt over her blouse. “Will you come on with me now, Viv-o? Please, Baby-cakes.”

“You’re being too nice to me,” she said. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Come on,” he said, pointing to the bicycle handlebars. “Hop on.”

Carrying her tennis racket, Vivi climbed onto the handlebars and balanced herself. As Pete pedaled, she looked straight ahead, and they did not speak. When they reached the bottom of the circular drive that led to Teensy’s house, Vivi felt dizzy.

“Turn around,” she said.

“What?” Pete said, continuing to pedal.

“I said turn around, Pete. I don’t want to go in there.”

Pete stopped pedaling.

Vivi jumped down from the handlebars, her breath coming fast. She could feel herself begin to sweat as though she had been the one pumping the pedals for eight blocks.

“What did you bring me here for?” she asked him, accusing.

“Cause Teensy wants you.”

“I want to know
why
. Tell me this instant.”

Pete set his bike down on its side. It seemed to Vivi that it took him an inordinately long time to do it, like everything was happening in slow motion. She watched as he walked over and put his hands on her shoulders. She could smell spearmint gum over the scent of tobacco on his breath.

“It’s Jack,” he said, the weight of his hands heavy on her shoulders.

Vivi appeared not to have heard. “What did you say?” she asked.

Pete pulled her to him. She could smell the healthy smell of sweat, and did not know whether it was her brother’s or her own.

“It’s Jack, little sister,” Pete said.

Vivi jerked away.

“Genevieve got a telegram,” he said, choking up.

“You’re crazy,” Vivi said, giving a small laugh. “You’re joking.”

“I wish to God I was,” Pete said.

“You’re messin with me,” Vivi said. She shoved him on the arm as if to say the joke was over. “Shake your head and say you’re messin with me.”

“I’m not messing with you, Vivi,” Pete said, wiping the sleeve of his jacket across his face.

“Shake your Goddamn head, Pete.”

“Vivi—”

Taking her brother’s head in her hands, Vivi shook it from side to side. Pete let her do this for a moment, and when she did not stop, he reached up and took her hands in his. Lowering both their hands to his chest, he looked at her.

Tears rolled down onto Pete’s cheeks. “You got to listen to me, baby sister. I am not making this up. This is real.”

Vivi stared at their hands. She stared at her tennis racket,
which lay on the ground where she had dropped it. She thought of homemade blackberry ice cream and the way Jack’s face looked when he played music. She thought of the touch of his hand on her shoulder when they danced. A long thread of pain entered her through her feet, and worked its way up into her heart, where it knotted, twisting so tightly that Vivi had to drop Pete’s hands and rub her throat in order to continue breathing.

Shirley, the Whitmans’ maid, sat on the bottom step of the winding staircase. Her head was in her hands, and when she looked up at Vivi and Pete, her black face was streaked with tears that shone silver in the fading light.

“I knowed something bad was comin. Jes yestiddy I done heard the screech owl. Oh, I helt that baby boy in my arm when he was born, I done blessed him wit magnolia leaves like Miz Genevieve want. Poor Miss Vivi, you done lost yo sweetheart. I done tried to get Miz Genevieve to drink her nerve tea, but she won’t take it.
Ça, c’est dommage
!”

Vivi could hear Genevieve’s screams coming from the master bedroom. She ran past Shirley and up the stairs. When she stepped into the bedroom, Genevieve was slapping Mr. Whitman on his face, his neck, his arm, whatever she could reach. Teensy stood by herself, near the bay window, her hands covering her face.

“Mon fils de grâce!”
Genevieve screamed as she slapped her husband. “You killed my
bébé.
You and your
patriotisme
!” Her reaction was so strong that it seemed to push the very air out of the room, leaving little space for anything else.

Vivi wanted to hold Genevieve, she wanted to hold Teensy. She wanted them to hold her.

“Oh, man,” Vivi heard Pete whisper as the two of them watched Genevieve claw at Mr. Whitman, dragging her nails along the side of his face. Mr. Whitman did not attempt to stop her as she began to kick at him and punch
him, pummeling him wherever she could reach. The man stood there motionless in his gray pinstripes.

Pete took Vivi’s hand, and the two of them stood at the door. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.

There was a lull, a drawing-in of breath from Genevieve. Mr. Whitman slowly reached into his pocket and drew out a monogrammed handkerchief. Without speaking, he wiped his tears with the cloth, and then cleaned the blood off his lips. Only when he was done with the handkerchief did he offer it to his wife. But she took no notice.

Jack would have offered the handkerchief to Genevieve first, Vivi thought. He would have shown good manners.

Genevieve turned to look at her daughter, then at Vivi. Both girls took steps toward her. Genevieve will hug us now, Vivi thought. She will take us into her arms and tell us everything is all right.

But Genevieve took no one into her arms. Instead, she let out a low keening sound, then pulled the skirt of her dress up over her head, revealing a beige slip and bare legs. It was the gesture of a small girl, hiding her face. It was the gesture of a woman whose grief was too much to bear.

The longer Genevieve stood there with her skirt above her head, the more Vivi’s grief compounded. This was the woman she looked to when her own mother was absent. Now this mother, too, was turning away.

“Son,” Vivi heard Mr. Whitman say.

Stepping forward, Pete answered, “Sir?”

Pete did not know Mr. Whitman well, only to be polite to him at the bank or on the street. Mr. Whitman did not know Pete well either, only enough to nod if he passed him, perhaps note the touchdown he’d made the Friday night before.

But on that day, as Pete stepped forward, Mr. Whitman reached out his arms and the man and boy fell into an embrace. Vivi would never again witness anything like it between two men. Often, later in her life, she would long to
have her own sons and husband share such a moment, but that afternoon in the Whitman home what she felt was envy. Envy that she herself was not encircled in the arms of a mother or a father.

Finally, Vivi stopped waiting for Genevieve to lower her dress and hug her. She crossed the room to Teensy and took her into her arms. The two girls began to sob.

Torie was working points from the base of Vivi’s skull down into her shoulder blades when Vivi began to sob. Torie was not alarmed; it was not the first time that a client had cried in her massage room.

Vivi took a deep breath as she lay, facedown, on the massage table. Her body shuddered. I lost all my patriotism that day, she thought. I lost my cheerleading self. From that day forward, when I jumped up and down for the team, I was an actress. A damn good actress, only nobody gave out Oscars.

“Forgive me,” she muttered to Torie. “I’ve got to get a grip.”

Torie began to work Vivi’s shoulders. The touch was so sure, so utterly
free
that it released even more tears. Vivi’s body shook, and the massage therapist stopped briefly to hand her a Kleenex.

Vivi propped herself up on her elbows and blew her nose.

“Do you want to talk?” Torie asked.

“No,” Vivi said, reaching for more tissues.

“Okay,” Torie said.

I will not ruin this massage by crying, Vivi thought. But the more she strained not to cry, the more tense her body became. When Torie began to knead her shoulders, Vivi began to weep again.

“Let’s just call it a day, shall we?” Vivi said, lifting her head. “I cannot seem to stop crying. I’m terribly sorry.”

“Well,” Torie said, pumping more lotion into her palm from a small plastic bottle she wore strapped to her waist.
“Don’t call it a day on my account. You can cry and get massaged at the same time. Why don’t you trying picturing your tears like soft rain?”

Vivi lowered her head back into the padded face cradle.

Torie began to lightly stroke Vivi’s back, and to rock her ever so slightly. Her hands were warm against Vivi’s skin, and as Torie stroked, Vivi could feel her own breathing start to steady. Sometimes she could not believe that anyone could touch her body like this, with such acceptance, such loving detachment, asking for nothing in return. There were places she still could not bear to be touched. Her belly, for one. Her belly stuck out too much, she was ashamed of it, could not accept the idea that it was anything but hideous. There were other spots, though—her legs, her neck, her head—which luxuriated in being massaged. There were moments during her sessions with Torie that Vivi could only describe as religious. Moments when she came home to her body in ways she never had before—moments when she felt its aches, varicose veins, and wrinkles so intimately and gently that she groaned with a happiness she could never describe. Fleeting seconds when Vivi knew that her body, in all its imperfections, was her own lived-in work of art. She lived there and she’d die there. Her body had borne four children. Five, if you counted Sidda’s twin, which Vivi always did.

“I do want to talk,” Vivi said softly.

And so Vivi opened up to the massage therapist. She murmured her words in between sighs and tears, haltingly, but with an ease she had never known in a confessional.

“I try to believe,” she said, “that God doesn’t give you more than one little piece of the story at once. You know, the story of your life. Otherwise your heart would crack wider than you could handle. He only cracks it enough so you can still walk, like someone wearing a cast. But you’ve
still got a crack running up your side, big enough for a sapling to grow out of. Only no one sees it.
Nobody sees it.
Everybody thinks you’re one whole piece, and so they treat you maybe not so gentle as they would if they could see that crack.”

Vivi sobbed. Torie placed one palm at the base of her spine and one at the base of her neck, and pressed lightly. Vivi felt as though the massage therapist were touching her actual spinal cord, sending it messages to calm down.

“I’m thinking,” Vivi said, “about an afternoon in my life when all the cracks were clear. Like a pile of broken crockery.”

Torie moved her hands to Vivi’s shoulders. Vivi gave a little jump, as though from pain.

“It is not in my personality to talk like this,” she said.

Another sob escaped from her body.

“But one of these days I might trade in my personality for a new one. I might say: ‘To hell with being popular. Yall don’t think I’m fun enough, then go screw yourselves.’ ”

Then Vivi forced a little laugh and started to sit up. “My God, I’m starting to sound like Blanche DuBois:
‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’ ”

“Maybe I’m not a stranger,” Torie said, pressing into Vivi’s shoulder blades with her thumb.

“Ouch!” Vivi said. “That hurts.”

“Why do you think your shoulders are so sore?” Torie asked.

“Oh, I carry a lot of heavy luggage with me, Dahlin,” Vivi answered. “I carry footlockers.”

“Well, put them down for a few minutes while we work on this kink,” Torie said. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Vivi said, and sank down into the massage table. This table, she told herself, is held up by the floor, which is held up by the building, which is sunk deep into the earth, which is my home.

23

V
ivi put on her sunglasses before stepping out of the massage room. She did not want to talk to any of her health-club pals. Not the young men who always flirted with her, and not the young women who worked for the cable TV station.

Once in her little convertible Miata, a “surprise” from Shep that she had broadly hinted for, she slipped the Barbra Streisand CD out of the player. She could not bear anything else that might make her cry. It was almost evening, but she didn’t feel like going home. Instead she drove toward Teensy’s house.

Vivi and Teensy had not just lost Jack. They lost Genevieve too. For weeks after the telegram arrived, Genevieve saw no one, and when she did, it was to announce her belief that her son was not dead. According to Genevieve, Jack had survived his plane crash, and with the help of the French Resistance was being cared for by village people in southern France. From that day forward, she refused to use her son’s anglicized name, which her husband had always insisted on. “Our Jacques is alive,” Genevieve said. “Without a doubt.” All she had to do was find him.

In the few first months after Jack’s death, Genevieve’s fantasy impeded Vivi’s own mourning. It was easy, with Vivi’s
imagination, to enter into the sad deception Genevieve offered. Falling asleep at night, Vivi would envision her sweetheart under the same moon she could see from her bedroom window. Together with Teensy and Genevieve, she spent countless hours studying maps of France. She devoured every shred of news she could find about the French Resistance. She helped compose countless letters to the Army Air Corps, which Genevieve instructed Mr. Whitman’s secretary to type. Wanting so hard to believe, for a while Vivi did believe. Joining in Genevieve’s tireless conversations about how Jack was doing, what food he was eating, what sort of bed he was sleeping in, Vivi sometimes grew giddy with the fiction they were creating. She agreed with Genevieve that yes, of course, Jack was learning French folk songs on his fiddle. He was playing music and thinking of the time when he could come home.

Each time Vivi began to cry, she felt guilty for giving up hope. She and Teensy would stand together in the hall by their lockers at school after lunch. Some afternoons they could not bear to walk into history class because the tears were falling too fast. Instead, they sat outside on the grass, and cried. They didn’t want any more history, they’d had
enough
history for a while. Vivi did not want Jack to be a part of history. She wanted him to eat hamburgers with her at LeMoyne’s Drive-In, she wanted to see him round the corner as she sat in a booth at Bordelon’s drugstore, she wanted to see his eyes light up when she entered the room, she wanted him to hold her and give her back her life.

For months, Vivi spent Friday and Saturday nights with Teensy, forsaking all offers of dates. Side by side, they would lie in bed and drink Cokes, and, if Genevieve was not near, they would cry. Later, on those evenings, Caro and Necie would drop by, and often, Chick, Teensy’s boyfriend, whose devotion to the Ya-Yas never wavered. No one thought it odd in those days for two young women to lie in bed like
that, holding each other in their flannel nightgowns. Holding each other until they could stand up again and walk and talk and maybe start to pretend that their lives had not had a hole blown out of them.

It was Buggy Abbott who had stepped in to crush the fantasy about Jack, a move that made Vivi at once thankful and resentful for the rest of her life.

One Saturday night a little over three months after the news of Jack’s death, Buggy had knocked before entering Vivi’s bedroom door. Vivi and Teensy were sprawled on the bed, surrounded by newspapers. It had become a weekend ritual for them to scour not only the Thornton paper but also
The Baton Rouge Daily Advocate
and
The New Orleans Times-Picayune
for news of the French Resistance.

Buggy wore a high-necked gown with a robe tied around it. In her hand was an unlit sanctuary candle. Vivi was surprised to see her. Buggy had rarely entered her daughter’s bedroom.

“Vivi?” Buggy said.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Yall doing okay in here?”

Vivi nodded. “Yes, ma’am, we’re fine.”

“Yall want anything? I saved some peanut-butter fudge for you.”

“No thank you,” Vivi said. “We just had a Coke.”

“Look, Vivi,” Teensy said, holding up a page from one of the newspapers. “Here’s something about a railway line being blown up outside Lyon, France. That’s them, Vivi. I know it.”

Vivi began to read the clipping, concentrating intently.

“The Lyon French Resistance group is the one that first found Jack,” Teensy explained to Buggy.

“Shhh—” Vivi said, trying to silence Teensy, who, like Genevieve, did not attempt to hide her beliefs about Jack’s “rescue.”

Buggy Abbott hesitated in the doorway for a moment before she crossed to the bed and sat on the edge. “Yall keeping real busy with your research, aren’t you?” she asked, awkward.

“We make headway every day,” Vivi said.

“There’s a lot to do,” Teensy explained. “
Maman
says we should put in at least four hours a day on our research.”

Buggy nodded. She was afraid of what was happening to her daughter, but she did not know what to do. She watched as Vivi studied the article in front of her, marking it with a red pencil, then clipping it out of the newspaper with a pair of manicure scissors.

“Hand me the Lyon file,” Vivi said to Teensy.

Teensy reached for a manila envelope, one of the many that Genevieve had procured from the bank to hold their burgeoning files.

As Vivi bent over the envelope, a strand of hair fell from her ponytail into her face. Just as she was about to push it back, Buggy reached up and did it for her. For just the blink of an eye, Buggy let her hand linger gently against her daughter’s cheek. But it was long enough for Vivi to sense the clumsy tenderness. Looking up, Vivi asked, “What’s the candle for, Mother?”

“I was wondering,” Buggy said, “if yall might want to pray with me tonight—for just a moment.” Her voice sounded unsure, almost shy.

Vivi looked at Teensy, who shrugged her shoulders.

“Okay,” Vivi said. “We’ll pray with you.”

Reaching into the pocket of her robe, Buggy pulled out matches. She lit the candle, then set it on the bedside table. Kneeling at the side of her daughter’s bed, Buggy began to pray.

“Blessed Lady,” she said softly, praying in the language of the ancient Mary masses. “Virgin greeted by Gabriel, Light for the Weak, Star in the Darkness, shining with brilliant
light, Comforter of the Afflicted, you know the sorrows of all your children. Take our pain into your heart and bless it. Gracious Lady, gentle and sweet, we cry to you for solace. Be with us in our time of sadness. Holy Mother, shining with brilliant ray, remember the soul of Jack Whitman, who has been called to your loving bosom. Remember Newton Jacques Whitman, whom we have loved.”

With those words, Buggy Abbott pierced Genevieve Whitman’s delusion, which had held her daughter in its grip. The candle flickered beside her daughter’s bed, and its tiny flame released Vivi.

That night Vivi, who had up to that point thought she knew what suffering was, suffered even more. In her sleep, she let go of Genevieve’s fantasy, and when she woke the next day, it was to a new world in which her loss was real.

When Vivi and Teensy attempted to confront Genevieve about the implausibility of Jack’s having survived the crash, she would not listen. “
Sans aucun doute,
without a doubt,” Genevieve muttered, over and over, as if the words were an incantation, a mantra that could make her fantasy come true.

Vivi remembered all this as she pulled into Teensy’s drive. How could five decades have passed so quickly? How many years went by unnoticed, unembraced?

French mulberry bushes grew near the brick wall that ringed Teensy and Chick’s huge yard, and rows of thick mondo grass and large camellia bushes edged the circular drive—all plantings put in by Genevieve many years ago.

Remember the soul of Jack Whitman, Vivi prayed as she reached to open the door of her Miata. Remember Newton Jacques Whitman, whom we have loved.

Ten minutes later, as Vivi sat on the pool patio with Teensy, she fell into the shorthand of their long friendship.
A luxuriant honeysuckle supported by a trellis hung lazily over their heads, while caladiums, impatiens, and elephant ears grew in wild profusion around a fountain from which sprang a stone mermaid. It was an old patio, an old tile pool, and the feeling was one of a meticulous balance of cultivation and wildness.

“The Sidda thing with the scrapbook has me thinking about Genevieve,” Vivi said.

Teensy said nothing for a moment, then asked, “ ‘Without a doubt’?”

“Exactly.” Vivi nodded, comforted by the fact that she was not alone with this memory.

Arriving with a tray with drinks for the two women, Chick looked at Vivi and Teensy and tried to gauge their mood. “Yall want me to put on a couple of filet mignons?”

“Give us an hour or so, please,
Bébé,
” Teensy responded, blowing him a kiss through the air.

“Sans moi?”
he asked, looking at the two old friends.

“Yep,” Vivi said, giving him a smile.
“Sans toi.”

“Holler if yall need anything,
mesdames
,” he said, giving a stagy little bow. “I’ll be inside marinating—vegetables, that is.”

Vivi and Teensy reached for their drinks, then sat in silence. The hissing of lawn sprinklers and the soft slap-slap sound of water as it circulated out of the swimming pool mixed with the growing songs of crickets and the trickling sound from the fountain. Early-evening sunlight hit the pool water as Vivi sipped her bourbon, and Teensy, her gin.

Amazing how that one phrase “without a doubt” held such meaning. How it recalled Genevieve’s long decline: her inability to accept Jack’s death; the short-wave radio in her bedroom; the middle-of-the-night calls to the White House; the all-night “strategy sessions” to stage Jack’s return. Then finally after the war, the disastrous trip to France, where there was, of course, no trace of her son. Only devastation,
disorientation, displacement. And the years that followed, years when Genevieve did not leave her bedroom, which had become a pharmacopoeia.

“It’s the things that aren’t in that scrapbook,” Vivi said elliptically. “The little big things. Dog tags.”

She heard a sharp intake of breath from Teensy.

“Oh, if there had been
anything,
Teens,” Vivi continued. “
Anything.
His dog tags, his boots, the Saint Jude scapular.
Anything.
Genevieve could have accepted it if there’d only been something for her to touch, some little piece, some stupid tiny object. I have sent my oldest daughter—The Grand Inquisitor—our ‘Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.’ But there is so much I didn’t give her, cannot give her. Cannot give myself.”

Vivi took a deep breath.

“I don’t suppose yall have any Goddamn cigarettes around here, do you?” Vivi asked. “I know none of us smoke anymore, but I could use something to gesture with.”

Teensy walked over to a hutch at the outdoor kitchen end of the patio. She returned with a silver cigarette case, which she opened and offered to Vivi. Vivi took two cigarettes and handed one to Teensy.

“Shall we light?” Teensy asked.

“Will Chick find out?” Vivi asked, sounding like a girl.

“He knows,” Teensy said.

“Let’s light, then,” Vivi said, and allowed Teensy to light their cigarettes with a box of matches that sat on the glass patio table beside them.

“Every time I light a cig these days, I say a ‘Hail Mary’ for Caro,” Teensy said.

Vivi turned to look at her old friend. Teensy was still tiny, with stylishly cut, subtly colored dark hair, with just the right amount of silver peeking through. She wore a pair of red silk pencil-legged pants with a black shell. On her size-five feet were a pair of little black-and-white-striped
espadrilles. As she smoked, Vivi could see the sun spots on her friend’s small hands.

“
Maman,
” Teensy said, as though the word itself were an incantation. “There is no escape from our mothers. I don’t even want to escape anymore.”

Gazing out at the pool, then over at the fountain, Vivi thought: Maybe we aren’t
meant
to escape our mothers. What a Goddamn scary thought.

She pictured Genevieve wearing a turban, dancing and singing while she cooked crayfish
étouffée.
Genevieve with that Cajun patois, that laugh of hers, those misbehaving eyes. Genevieve hauling the four Ya-Yas to Marksville for the pirogue races, the hot
boudin,
the
cochons de lait,
the thick black café at four-thirty in the morning on the way to the Fisherman’s Mass. Genevieve hauling her out of that hellhole of a boarding school. Vivi Walker’s life would not have been the same without Genevieve Whitman.

“Sidda wouldn’t be such a worry wart if she’d known Genevieve,” Vivi said.

“Don’t kid yourself,” Teensy said, “
Maman
retreated to some bayou in her head long before Sidda saw the light of day.”

Vivi knew that was true, but still could not help wishing her daughter had known the woman who had been such a beacon. Why were memories flooding in like some internal levee had burst? Was it age? Was it the fight with Sidda?

As Vivi smoked, she remembered how she’d visit with Genevieve when she was pregnant with Sidda and the twin. Sometimes, on good days, the Ya-Yas would spend whole afternoons with Genevieve in her bedroom. Vivi six months and huge; Teensy, four months, but barely showing; Necie pregnant for the second time, and beginning to put on weight all over; Caro, the biggest of them, fit and strong and big as a horse. The four of them, beached whales, surrounding Genevieve, snacking on sandwiches and Bloody Marys
that Shirley brought up on a tray. Genevieve’s boudoir on a good day had the feeling of an intimate if slightly bizarre bistro.

Genevieve would be propped up, dressed in one of her gorgeous bed jackets, ten thousand pill bottles on her bed table, her thick black hair piled up on her head, her nails perfectly done, surrounded by freesias, her favorite flower. She’d listen to every single detail of the Ya-Yas’ pregnancies, no detail bored her. Then, lapsing into her patois, Genevieve would give them remedies she’d learned growing up on the bayou.