10
I WAS STARTING to believe that Delia had been right about Mother, that she was a woman of secrets, secrets I hated because they had been kept from me and might have been about me. I pictured my father and mother lying in the ground, their hands over their mouths. I imagined taking a sledgehammer to their pretty little headstones.
Delia muttered under her breath, tapping the pack of cigarettes with her thumb. She pitied me for having been abandoned by my husband. “Delia, be quiet,” I said. Her pity wore me down, making the minutes seem longer and the miles pass slowly.
“Here all this time I thought you was a princess, like not anything bad ever happened to you. It just shows how wrong a person can be,” she said.
“You know, Delia, you have your own problems, so don’t worry about mine.”
“I don’t no such a thing. I got me a house, all the money I’d want. I’m home free.”
“Mason Freeman went to Wilmington last night to make Braden tell him where you are. Not him exactly, but one of his cronies.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her he wanted to kill her.
“When were you going to tell me that?”
“Braden fought with him. That’s when the thug told Braden that Sophie could die.”
She fell quiet and that was my purpose for telling her anyway. “We have another painted dress to deliver,” I told her. “It belongs to Renni.”
“I didn’t mean to hit Sophie,” she said. “I was shocked as the next person. I just hate to, you know, act like anything bothers me.”
“It’s how we were brought up,” I said.
We drove through Williamston and on to Rocky Mount. In that town, we found a Fred’s store. Delia bought more clothes and a small suitcase. We took 1-95 south to the longest stretch of interstate, as far as I know, in the country, 1-40.
“How do I figure out how far we are from Siphon?” asked Delia.
“See that measurement gauge at the top of the page, the distance scale? Place your finger and thumb on it. How many miles does the scale say it will measure?”
Delia fiddled around with the map. “Twenty miles.”
“Hold your fingers just so. Then place them where we are now on 1-95. Keep moving it down the page until you get to Siphon.”
“Six and a half times,” said Delia.
“About a hundred and thirty miles,” I said. “If we don’t speed, so as not to bring attention, we will be in Siphon in two hours.”
She turned around in her seat and dragged a shopping bag from the rear seat. She pulled out and opened a large boot box. “I like cowboy boots. I’m going to buy me a horse.” She bought a cowboy hat too, a pale straw hat that folded up in curls on either side. She put it on.
“Daddy never kept a horse. He should have,” I said, knowing that she would have forgotten about the horse by the time we got her home.
The countryside had gone dormant along 1-95. The grass was blond and flat, the pale yellow of winter fading into the brown, empty backyard kitchen gardens. A sign along the road advertised smoked turkeys for Thanksgiving. “It’s nearly Thanksgiving,” I said.
“Say, Gaylen, lets put on a big feed. We’ll strut into a ritzy restaurant. I’ll wear my cowboy boots and hat, like I’m so rich I don’t care what anyone thinks.”
“Sure, Delia,” I said.
“Aunt Renni will be surprised to see us. You think she’ll be mad we took the dresses?”
“I guess she could be. She and Tootie act like they want to share Amity’s house with the family like Amity wanted. But Tootie has money problems and Renni’s not much better off. I think they’ll fight with the family over wanting to sell it.”
“They can have it far as I’m concerned,” said Delia. “It’s too far to get there.”
“I’d kind of like to have it around,” I said. “It’s a good place to go and think.”
“Buy it.”
“Delia, we can’t keep spending money. You won’t listen, though. You’ll keep spending until you’re back where you were a year ago.”
“There you go, criticizing. I can’t catch a break at all with you, Gaylen.”
“I’d give anything to see you take care of yourself.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“I wish you could,” I said, trying to hide my resentment.
“Then let me. Give me my share, and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Daddy set the trust up for a reason.”
“To control me like Daddy does. That’s the only reason. Why else would you do it? Is it because you want my share? You think I’m so stupid you can just take it?”
It was hard not to react to her goading. “I haven’t spent a cent on myself, Delia. I took care of Daddy for a year, and where were you while I was fighting to keep him well? Off you were, sleeping with a married man, breaking up a marriage.”
“And hiding your own affair.”
“You make me nuts, Delia! Shut up!”
“How is it any different? Why are you so good and I’m so bad? Because you keep it all a big ugly secret, like Mama kept secrets? I’m just dumb enough to let everyone know what I do.” She flung her hat to the back of the car. “Maybe I’m not dumb as you all think, but so smart I’m just on to all of you. I know what you all say about me, that Delia’s trash. What if I’m just happy to be me? What’s the harm in that?”
The connection with 1-40 stared down on us. I turned onto it, not answering Delia because I couldn’t. I hated her for being right. She was chronically wrong until that moment.
The sky would not cut travelers any slack, not parting to let in a bit of sunlight, but staying fastened closed. The cold settled in, the coldest day so far. I knew that Delia needed a coat and that she would not think to go and buy it, that I would have to tell her to do it.
“Are you going to yell at me if I answer?”
“I won’t.”
“Some ways, yes, and others not.”
“How am I not like her?”
“You don’t hit me. You yell, though.”
“Not as loud, though. I know I’m not loud like her.”
“Not as loud. Okay. But it’s what you don’t say that drives me out of my freaking gourd. Why is it that you and everybody else don’t say what you mean? How come people hide theirselves from each other?”
A road sign advertised Siphon ahead.
“I think it’s because we want to be liked.”
“But not for who you are.”
“No. For who we’re expected to be.”
“So everybody likes you because they don’t know you. Where does that get you?”
“Respect and station. You move up the ladder, leave behind your old self.”
“Like a snake shedding its skin.”
“I’d like to think of myself as something besides a snake.”
“Snakes, tramps, whores, lowlifes, liars. What’s the difference?” she asked, and her voice had softened to my great relief. “No difference.”
She kept staring down at the toes of the fake reptile boots. “These hurt like the devil.” She took them off.
Siphon evolved on the wet fringes of Angola Swamp in upper Pender County. Renni’s husband, Tommy, Tim and Fanny’s daddy, bought the little two-acre tract ten miles south of the meandering creek banks of Watermelon Run after the Vietnam War. He was a cook in the army and came home, according to my mother, with a doorknob or two loose.
Beyond the town of Siphon were the towns and island towns feeding into Topsail Sound. Below Siphon was the town of Burgaw, a place known for its spring festival and a small golf course that Braden called a putt-putt.
Uncle Tommy let Tim run wild in that place. As a boy, Tim trekked back into the Angola Creek Flatwoods Preserve surrounding the swamp, and a forest ranger was born in the boy who clambered across marshland, trophy bruises dappling his sinewy legs, calling off bird types and gigging for frogs by flashlight.
Tim was the only one who knew exactly where his daddy finally rested. Tommy gave Tim express details to sprinkle his ashes in the Chowan River beneath a cypress tree where he had caught a prize fish. Renni hung the fish over the mantle next to the photographs of her, Tommy, and, of course, Tim and Fanny.
When we pulled into Renni’s driveway, my car was making a tapping noise. That set the dogs to yapping wildly from inside as if ten or more clambered against her front door preparing to devour anyone who stepped over the threshold.
“Gaylen? Is that you? Delia! I’ll be! Would you look at the two o’ you! Sakes, sakes, I’d never expect to see you two today.” Renni tried to squeeze through the front door, her right foot raking back the dogs.
“I should have called,” I said. “But we just kept driving and talking about coming here and next thing you know.
“Next thing you know!” exclaimed Renni. “Let me fix you both a bite to eat. Come in this house!” She turned, and Delia and I followed her inside. Delia stooped to pick up a white Pomeranian with a tear-stained face. The remaining three dogs, all toy purebreds, trembled upon sight of us, their tails quivering like doorstops.
Renni prepared a midafternoon lunch of warmed-up stew and cornbread muffins. Delia put on a bit of an act, as if she had not eaten in days. “Mmm,” she moaned as she ate each bite.
“Has this sister of yours not been feeding you?” Renni asked, laughing.
“Gaylen and I been living like two Hollywood stars,” said Delia. “Eating, drinking, and laying up in fancy hotels.”
Renni looked stunned. The simple way my father lived, she had no idea of the pay dirt he had just turned over to his daughters.
“Don’t pay her any mind,” I said. “She’s going on, that’s all. You know Delia.” Fortunately Renni did know her to stretch the truth around the middle, so I relaxed.
“What brought you girls all the way up to Siphon? You working on settling Delia into your daddy’s place? Fanny said you all decided Delia would move into it,” said Renni.
Before Delia exploded with too much information, I said, “It’s true. We’re moving Delia into Daddy’s house. It could use a coat of paint.”
“I’m putting in a swimming pool and buying a horse,” said Delia.
“Delia, you ought to go into the kitchen and fetch the banana pudding out of the fridge,” said Renni, not taking her eyes off me. She told Delia where to dig serving bowls out of the cupboard and spoons out of the wobbly utensil drawer.
Delia picked up the Pomeranian, seeing as how it had formed an attachment to her. She disappeared through the kitchen door.
I sipped the sweet tea that Renni could have used for glucose.
“Gaylen, Fanny says she heard that you and Delia got some drug dealer after you. Now tell me that’s not true,” said Renni.
“How’d she come by that news?” I asked.
“She called your house looking for you. Said you weren’t answering your cell phone, so she got Braden on the line. Braden told her, I’m sure. Poor guy. Has he come around yet? What I mean is, has he agreed to reconcile?”
“Braden shouldn’t have told Fanny.”
“He’s still family, Gaylen.”
“The last thing he gave me were the divorce papers.”
“That sounds final then,” she said flatly.
“I didn’t sign, Renni. When I don’t have my life full of Delia, I’ll get this settled between us.”
“How’d you come to know a drug dealer, Gaylen? It’s not like you.
I rested my forehead in my hands.
“It’s natural for girls to want to experiment, but most of us go for a martini.”
“Renni, I’m not a teenager, and I’m not on drugs.”
Delia was standing in the doorway, a bowl of pudding in each hand. She burst out laughing. “She can’t hold her booze, Renni, let alone drugs!”
A smile spread across Renni’s face. “Delia, how would you know that?”
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“You two must have tied one on,” said Renni.
Delia set down the puddings and pushed up her sleeve. “We got the tattoos to prove it.”
Bringing Renni and Delia together with me was no different than when my mother was tossed into their midst. I had taken Fiona’s place as the new Syler zoo exhibit.
Renni pulled out the neck of my knit top. “Let Aunt Renni see.”
“Absolutely not! It’s nothing,” I said, pulling away.
The door flew open. Three little girls ran screaming into their grandmother’s living room. Behind them, in walked Fanny with a fat baby boy on her hip.
“Look who’s here to see Granny!” said Renni. She scooped a toddler girl up into her arms.
“Don’t get up on my account,” said Fanny. “I was bored with Dill out of town. Since Thanksgivings almost here, we came early. But Gaylen and Delia, I had no idea! This is magic, isn’t it?”
She pulled out a chair next to me. Borrowing my still-clean spoon, she dug into the bowl of pudding Delia had just placed in front of me.
“You come in at a good time,” said Renni. “These two went out and got tattooed.”
Fanny stared at me like it was a joke.
Finally, I stretched out the neck of my black knit top and exposed the daisy tattoo on my right shoulder.
Fanny threw back her head and laughed.
“Maybe I’ll get one too,” said Renni.
I helped my aunt and cousin clear away the dishes. Delia curled up on the sofa and fell asleep. The dogs jumped up and tucked into balls around Delia like she was the dog Madonna.
“Braden said you missed your orthopedists appointment,” said Fanny, talking about the cast still on my arm. “Want me to cut that thing off for you?”
It took a lot of knife sharpening, Renni pulling, and Fanny cutting away at the top of the cast. Finally, the last smelly thread gave way. Renni walked it ceremonially to the trash can and dropped it in. I scrubbed the sooty color from my yellowed arm.
Renni made coffee, and the three of us took it out on the screened-in porch. Renni had decorated it with white wicker furniture and pink and blue cushions. Behind the little settee was a table with a stereo. She took a remote control device and turned on the stereo, selecting a soft country music radio station. Fanny and her mother talked about Thanksgiving, what they would cook, and some add-ons for Dill, the vegetarian.
“You and Delia are here for Thanksgiving, aren’t you?” asked Fanny.
“Of course,” said Renni. “You have to stay on. No need to go back to your daddy’s just yet. That’d be depressing.”
“It’s not safe,” I said, “for you to take us in. I don’t know where to take Delia actually. Maybe farther up north. We have any relatives that could take her in?”
“Uncle Jackson and Aunt Noleen,” said Renni. “Over in Dallas now. They’ve got the room too.” She picked up a ceramic container shaped like a honey pot. She opened the lid, fished out several slips of paper, and handed one to me. “This is their telephone number.”
I accepted it.
“Jackson’s a second cousin. But we all grew up together, so he claims us,” said Renni. She said to Fanny, “They’d love to take in Delia. Noleen always loves a project. Remember when they took in those orphans from Cambodia?”
“It wasn’t Cambodia, was it, Mother?” asked Fanny. “They’d love to see you and help out in whatever way they could.”
I listened to them working out Delia’s problems.
Fanny said, “Maybe you ought to call the police, Gaylen.”
“Has she mentioned her stint in the hospital?” Renni asked me.
“Who, Delia?” I asked.
“You knew that, didn’t you, Gaylen?” asked Fanny. “But then you didn’t see Delia, you said, for a year.”
I did not know that Delia had been in the hospital. But my father had his own worries, what with his cancer. “Did Delia tell Daddy?”
Both women shrugged.
“She was standing up on a ladder, not a stepladder, but steps, actually, leading up to some warehouse materials at the furniture factory,” said Fanny. “She fell.”
“It was a scandal, like the factory boss thought she did it on purpose,” said Renni.
“Dill knows a man who works there who said he saw Delia throw herself off.” Fanny whispered, glancing through the window into the house.
Renni was nodding as if she knew more than Fanny but was holding back.
“Delia would never kill herself,” I said. “She’s a lot of things, but suicidal isn’t one of those things.”
“Not suicide,” Renni whispered. “She was pregnant. Tootie said she had a D and C.”
I was feeling sleepy after lunch. I laid my head back against the cushioned patio chair and closed my eyes. “You saying she had an abortion?”
“Dill said his friend said there was nothing wrong with her, that the factory doctor checked her out. But she went off to the hospital and checked herself in.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said.
Renni said, “She was covering up the abortion. She told your daddy that she had been in the hospital because she had fallen at work. That was when she asked him for money to pay her hospital bill.”
“Whose baby? Freddy Deals’s?” I asked.
“Some black she worked with,” said Renni. “What was his name, Fanny?”
“Don’t say it like that, Mother. ‘Black,’ like you’re spitting out something you don’t like,” said Fanny.
“Maybe I am,” she said to her daughter.
“Freddy was married,” I told them. “Maybe he told Delia she had to get rid of it.”
Renni gasped. “Is he the one? The drug dealer?”
“His brother-in-law,” I said. “His wife, Sophie, is the sister of Mason Freeman.”
“Delia is on that family’s hit list because she slept with Sophie’s husband?” asked Renni, incredulous.
“Delia shot Sophie,” I said.
Fanny turned down the stereo and was looking through the window for Delia. “This is serious then.”
Renni got me a compress for my head. Then she asked Fanny if she would make sausage stuffing in spite of Dill’s protest. Renni said to me, “I know it’s hard for you tell us these things. But shouldering Delia Cheatham’s problems is too much for any one person to bear.”
“What is it about the Sylers and our secrets?” I asked.
“It’s just our way,” said Renni. “We look out for one another.”
Since Renni’s sympathy appeared to be on the rise, I asked, “Can I ask you about my brother?”
“Shoot, honey! Whatever you want,” said Renni.
“Did you know him? Were you around when he lived with my parents?” I asked.
“I knew him in California and back here in North Carolina when James and Fiona moved back. We all moved out to California for a year to work,” said Renni. “James made a big wad of cash. He was always a saver. He bought that little piece of land next to Daddy’s place and expanded. When my daddy died, he didn’t want the land divided up, so he gave his part to James. That’s how they came by so much good hunting land.” She was smiling about my father’s conquest, but as my mother suspected, Renni had that strange glint of jealousy when she talked about Daddy’s good fortune.
“Were you around when my mother made Truman leave?” I asked.
She was less buoyant. “The whole family was in an uproar,” she said.
“Mother told me that he was a runaway,” I said.
She cut her eyes at Fanny.
“I’ll get more coffee.” Fanny got up and collected our empty cups.
Renni sat forward, resting her wrists on her knees. Knowing more than I knew empowered her. “Your mother threw that poor boy out.”
“Why would she do that?” I said evenly, staring at the floor.
“She was not a good mother back then, Gaylen.”
“In what way was she bad?”
“Fiona gave herself to any man that came her way. I know that’s hard for a daughter to hear,” said Renni.
Mother’s words came back to me. She had told me once that Renni and Tootie talked about her, that I could not believe anything they said.
Renni said, “When her first husband, Truman Senior she called him, left her to get away from her violent spells, she wanted a new man and fast. She married and then divorced him. I never knew the second husband’s name.
“I think it was Polette, but it doesn’t matter now,” I said.
“So when your mother came flirting round James’s place, Tootie told James to send her packing.” She was holding back, and it showed in the erect way she sat, carefully choosing her words, not implicating herself.
“My mother once told me they kept their marriage a secret from the family,” I said.
“Gaylen, are you sure you want to hear this? Let’s talk about Thanksgiving dinner, how about?” Renni asked, but the eager glint in her eyes gave away the fact she did not really mean it.
“You must have seen her and my brother, Truman, together,” I said.
Renni sighed. “She knew none of the Sylers wanted James tangled up with her. She neglected Truman, and we didn’t want James having kids by her,” said Renni. Her mind had obviously traveled far enough back to make her forget that I happened to be one of Fiona’s ill-fated kids. “It was Tootie that once lived next to her apartment. That was before she met James. When James visited Tootie, Fiona would come out on the apartment landing to meet him.”
I had never heard my mother talk about living next to Tootie. I could see why she resented Renni and Tootie. “Did you ask Mother why Truman ran off?”
“Run off? That boy didn’t run off. He was run off by your mother. We all called Fiona that day as word spread. Me, Tootie, and your Aunt Lilly. But Fiona, she said he was trouble and she wasn’t putting up with his stuff anymore,” said Renni.
“Did she mention me or Delia that day?”
Renni thought for a few minutes. She looked up at me as if she was trying hard to remember back that far. Fanny now stood over us with two cups of coffee. Then she stared out the window into the backyard. She stared a hole through me. “You must remember since you’re asking.”
“I’m trying to remember. I can’t.” I accepted Fanny’s bitterly strong coffee.
“Where did he go?” I asked.
“I figure he went off to his daddy’s in Texas.”
“Mother, you never told me any of this,” said Fanny.
“If you don’t remember, then maybe it’s best left alone,” said Renni. Fanny and I left her like that, sitting alone and walking back through her maze of memory.
The night fell on Siphon. Fanny coaxed Delia and me into staying the night. Fanny put the kids to bed in the guest room. We cousins bedded down in the living room, talking about Tim and Meredith and how silly a baby would make him.
Delia went to sleep on the couch. Fanny and I made beds sitting up in two chairs near a window. I turned off the lamps, and we sat talking in the glow of a radio dial.
“I don’t know what you’re digging for, but have you thought about that thing you did as a little girl that worried the family?” asked Fanny.
I stared at Fanny, not knowing how to answer.
“You pulled your hair out by the handfuls,” she whispered.
I felt my face flush. Of course I remembered, but I didn’t appreciate her trotting out my past like we were swapping boys’ phone numbers.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,” said Fanny.
The shameful feelings came back, as if Mother had walked in right that instant and caught my fingers tangled up in a freshly pulled strand of hair. “Why say it then? I wish I didn’t remember.”
“I’m saying it for a reason, Gaylen. Your mother took you to the doctor, worried sick over you. She tied your hands to the bed to keep you from pulling your hair in your sleep.” Fanny’s words were nearly a staccato. She continued tiptoeing over my life without consent.
“I’m surprised you remember,” I said. If Fanny had found me naked, I’d not have felt any less humiliated.
“It scared me and Tim. We thought your mother was loony for tying you up like that.”
Until the last few days, it was another of those covered-over memories that I had gratefully chosen to leave in hiding. “Mother obsessed over it,” I said. “I fought her over it. It seemed unnatural.” It came to me I had not so much as told Braden, but not because I did not know how he would take it. Forming the words to tell that old story made me feel small again and sick. I was turning back into a Syler.
“Don’t you want to know why you did it?” she asked.
I turned the radio dial until I found an oldies station. Renni was sitting in the kitchen, and I wanted only Fanny to hear me. “You knew my parents. It’s not hard to understand. I figure that I have a few short decades, and then you will have to strap me to a bed in an institution for good.”
“Don’t you say that, Gaylen! You are not like them,” she said.
“Then why else would I pull out my own hair?” I asked.
“I’d want to know,” she said.
“I asked Mother about it before she died. I asked when it started, the hair pulling. Because once I was old enough to be aware, I just stopped.”
“When did she say you started?”
“Age six months.”
“Gaylen, are you kidding me? A six-month-old pulling her hair? What did she think, that you needed a shrink?” Fanny reached out and took my hand.
“I was four when I finally stopped,” I said.
Fanny sat forward, her eyes wide as if the sun was coming through them. “Next talk about the nightmares.”
“It’s always a man. He’s crawling into my bed. He is the color of shadows.”
“You talked about that when you were young,” said Fanny.
“Renni didn’t like me asking about my mother and brother, did she?”
“You have a right to ask about your own life without feeling as if you’re prying.” Fanny spoke with her usual self-confidence.
“I would give anything to have what you have, Fanny.” I meant her assurance. But also the whole package that was Fanny. She was comfortable with love. She loved crazy, instigating Renni and even her father who had lost part of himself in Vietnam. I accepted a tissue from her. “I’m realizing how hard it is to look for a missing piece of yourself while connecting with a family that has let go of you.” I cried, not sobbing, but reacting to the sense of being pulled in two.
“We didn’t let go of you, Gaylen.”
“Why do I feel so cut loose, then? You know how long I’ve felt adrift?” Even marrying Braden didn’t take up the gap in my soul. “I don’t have a map for finding my way back from age four, Fanny. You all have your own lives now. Here I sit demanding answers from the grave. I want to return to a single day in my life that will tell me everything. But when I try, nothing.”
We pulled the armchairs together, making pillows out of our blankets. We lay our heads down on the same pillow. Fanny said, “You know what you have to do now.”
“What?”
“Only one thing works for the blues.”
“No, not that,” I said.
“You have to. You swore.”
“But I was ten and desperate to borrow your U2 T-shirt.”
“You have to sing it or else die listening to Britney Spears, your ears bleeding, and your tongue hanging out.”
“It’s too humiliating.”
“Sing the song!” she said.
Only because forced by Fanny’s irresistible persuasion did I sing with her:
Sisters, we are one underneath a starry blanket
On the banks of our river, we will join in reverie
I’m your mother, you’re my daughter, we are sisters in a prayer
That no guy will come between us; no guy will come between us
We are sisters
We are we.
Tim was mad at us for writing a girls-only song. He called us feminists. We didn’t know about that, but we liked having our own song. Delia wrote the last line. But of course, she did not sing and only watched Fanny and me arm in arm, nearly yodeling the lyrics.
Renni kept a strange vigil in the kitchen by the window. She pulled out Tommy’s rifle and sat in a chair cleaning the stock. The last thing I remember before falling asleep was the way she watched out the window, my uncle’s gun resting at her side.