Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

by Rebecca Wells

  This is ridiculous, Sidda thought. Calm down. Act like an archaeologist sifting for clues among the artifacts. And remember to breathe.

  She carried the album to a large overstuffed chintz-covered reading chair, the kind with arms wide enough so she could sit with her legs slung over the side.

  She sat down, and Hueylene came to lie at her feet, sighing with the delicious effort of her dogly job. Sidda pulled an afghan over her legs, and began in earnest to look at the album. She allowed herself to simply turn pages for a while. No order, no plan—something that did not come naturally to her.

  While Vivi had started the book chronologically, she had apparently begun to stick things in at random when she ran out of room. So there was a photograph of Vivi and the Ya-Yas, out-to-here pregnant, striking cheesecake poses on the creekbank, next to a newspaper clipping that read, “Miss Vivi Abbott, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Taylor C. Abbott, of Thornton, is at home for a visit from Ole Miss. Miss Abbott was recently elected most popular girl on campus. She will be home for a week before returning to Oxford, Mississippi.”

  Sidda took a moment to contemplate Vivi, Caro, Teensy, and Necie as they stood in their swimsuits with their swollen bellies.

  These were the faces Sidda scanned for clues to the world from the moment she could see. She learned what clothes, movies, hairstyles, restaurants, and people were “Ya-Ya” (read: charming) and which were “Ya-Ya-No” (read: pathetic). She had heard this so many times that she actually began to assess things to see whether they were “Ya-Ya” or “Ya-Ya-No.”

  In fact, there were times when these words just flew out of Sidda’s mouth. She recalled a night when she and Connor were at a painfully self-conscious evening of performance art, during which thev were forced to watch twenty-seven televisions at once and endure sugar cubes being set on fire and thrown on piles of Barbie dolls. Without thinking, Sidda had whispered to Connor, “Très Ya-Ya-No!” It was as though the Ya-Yas occasionally channeled themselves through her in spite of all the barriers she’d tried to place between their coven and herself.

  She held the scrapbook in her lap. Why do I dwell on my mother and the Ya-Yas?

  Because I miss them. Because I need them. Because I love them.

  Sidda came upon crushed corsages, faded and powdery. Next to one was written “Cotillion w/ Jack. Wore yellow gown.” Stuffed in the crack of the same page was a faded handwritten receipt from some place called The Lucky Pawn. Sidda wondered what it could have been for. She had a hard time imagining her mother at a pawn shop.

  She found tickets to movies that cost only fifteen cents to get into. She found Coke bottle tops; she found an old IOU that read: “IOU 3 back rubs,” but no clue whose back was on the receiving end. One page opened naturally to three blue-and-white raised school letters for cheerleading and tennis from Thornton High School for the years 1941, 1943, and 1944. For some reason, the 1942 was missing. Sidda wondered about that year—what had happened?

  There were countless snapshots from the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, many of them fading with time. It took Sidda a few moments before she realized she had yet to come across one picture of her father. But she was surprised and pleased when she stumbled across a little poem she’d written as a girl. It was folded into an envelope that read to the ya-yas from a bohemian girl.

  Then there was a cardboard foldout frame from The Court of Two Sisters in New Orleans, which contained a photo of Vivi, Teensy, and Genevieve, Teensy’s mother. Genevieve was gorgeous in a young Jennifer Jones sort of way.

  There were printed and engraved invitations to dances and luncheons and balls and afternoon teas.

  She particularly liked the “At Homes,” like the one that read simply:

  Mr. and Mrs. Newton Whitman

  At Home

  Tuesday, the twenty-ninth of June,

  nineteen hundred and forty-three

  from eight until eleven o’clock.

  On that invitation Vivi had scrawled “Wore the apricot tulle.”

  There was a photograph of an achingly handsome young man in a World War II Army Air Corps uniform. There were many photos of men in uniform, of course, but this one caught Sidda’s eye and forced her to linger. She wondered if it was Teensy’s brother.

  There were dance cards filled with gentlemen’s names. Sidda had heard of many of them and had known some of them when she was growing up in Thornton. There were a few fading mimeograph sheets from a class called “How to Be Smart and Charming.” There were holy cards, a red veteran’s poppy, and a clipping from the classified section of The Thornton Monitor, thanking Saint Jude “For Favors Granted.”

  As Sidda looked at these various objects, her imagination kicked into full gear, and she could feel the life that her mother’s keepsakes held. For a moment, she felt overwhelmed with gratitude toward Vivi for sending the scrapbook. She felt almost ashamed at being presented with such an embarrassment of riches. Sidda wanted to cry because she could not bear the thought of how vulnerable the scrapbook had been as it voyaged across the country in planes and trucks.

  Mama parted with these Divine Secrets because I asked her to, Sidda thought. The reason I feel like crying, Sidda realized, is not just because this scrapbook is vulnerable, but because Mama, whether she knows it or not, has made herself so vulnerable to me.

  Sidda returned to the snapshot of the Ya-Yas pregnant and posing creek side. She scrutinized the image. Each one of the women was laughing, and the longer Sidda stared at the photo, the closer she came to hearing their four distinctly different laughs. She studied each woman’s pose, her swimsuit, her hands, her hair, her hat. She closed her eyes. If God hides in details, Sidda thought, then maybe so do we. She took a deep breath in through her nose, held it for a moment, then let it out very slowly through her mouth. Her eyes remained closed, but Sidda was far from being asleep.

  5

  Taking out the journal she’d packed, and intending to make some preproduction notes on The Women, Sidda began to write instead about the Ya-Yas. Her hand moved across the page swiftly. Sidda did not stop to correct herself, or to analyze why she was doing this. She simply glanced at the creekbank photo, sat at the cabin’s table, and wrote from the heart.

  Oh, how Mama and the Ya-Yas laughed! I could hear them from the water where I played with my brothers and my sister, Lulu, and the other Petites Ya-Yas. We’d plunge into the creek, then burst back up and hear their laughter. Caro’s chortle sounded like a grin doing a polka. Teensy’s giggle had a bayou flavor, as if somebody sprinkled Tabasco on it. Necie’s hee-hee-hee sounded exactly like that. And Mama’s head-thrown-back, open-back, open-throated roar always made people turn around and look at her when she laughed in public.

  The Ya-Yas laughed a lot when they were around each other. They’d get going and not be able to stop. They’d laugh till big, fat tears rolled down their cheeks. They’d laugh until one would accuse the others of making her tee-tee in her pants. I don’t know what they laughed about. I only know that their laughter was beautiful to hear and see, and that it is something I wish I had more of in my life right now. I like to pride myself on doing many things better than my mother, but she was always better at giggling with her girlfriends.

  This is how the Ya-Yas used to be on the creekbank in the summers of my childhood. They’d coat their bodies with a baby-oil-and-iodine mixture, which they shook up in a big Johnson’s Baby Oil bottle. The mixture was heavy, reddish-brown, an almost bloodlike tint. They’d coat their faces, arms, and legs, then take turns rubbing the solution on each other’s backs.

  When my mother lay down, her hands went under her chin, her head rolled to one side, her eyes closed, and she’d let out a long sigh that said how much she loved it all. I loved seeing my mother so relaxed.

  This was in the days before anybody worried about skin cancer, long before the rays of the sun were thought to be anything but healthy. Before we killed the ozone that stood sentry between our flesh and the sun.

  Mama and Caro usua
lly wore striped tank suits, replicas of ones they used to wear when they were lifeguards at Camp Minnie Maddern for Southern Girls, before they married and had babies.

  My mother was a beautiful swimmer. Her stroke was the Australian crawl. Watching Mama swim was like watching a woman who knew how to waltz perfectly, only her partner was not a man, but creek water. Her kick was strong, her stroke fluid, and when she rolled her head from side to side to breathe, you could barely see her mouth open. “There is no excuse for a messy swimmer, any more than there is for a messy eater,” she told us. My mother judged people by how well they swam and whether they made her laugh or not.

  Spring Creek was not wide like the Garnet River or huge like the Gulf of Mexico or long like some lakes. It was just a small brown body of water, well suited to mothers and children. While the creek was perfectly safe, we were warned about the areas out of sight. Out where the creek curved, where it was too deep. Past where old logs divided the swimming area from a darker, deeper one. Alligators that could eat a kid whole lived out there. They waited for bad little children who disobeyed their mothers. They crawled into your dreams at night. They could eat you, they could eat your mother, they could pull the rug out from under you when you least expected it, and then gobble you whole before you knew it.

  “Even I can’t save yall from the alligators,” Mama used to say. “So don’t push your luck.”

  When Mama swam her laps—ten times around the circumference of the swimming hole—she made the creek seem larger than it was. I marveled at her solitude as she swam those laps. She called it her “swim around the world,” and I couldn’t wait until my own stroke was strong enough for me to follow in her wake. Mama would conclude her swim by coming back to the shallow end, where the sandbar beach was. She’d emerge from the water, shake her head, and jump on one foot to shake the water out of her ear. Then she’d do the same on the other side. I marveled at her beauty, all wet and cool, her hair slicked back, her eyes shining, proud of her strength.

  Mama and the Ya-Yas carried a big red ice chest down to the creek with them every day. The old tin kind with a lid that snapped off. Inside were chunks of ice chipped off large blocks of ice that we’d buy at the Spring Creek Shop and Skate, the local grocery and roller rink across the road from the creek.

  That ice kept their beer and our Cokes cold. On top of the beer and Cokes were our ham and cheese sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. The crusts were cut off the sandwiches for the four of us, who wouldn’t touch bread if the crust was left on. Paper napkins sat on top of the sandwiches, and when we opened the chest and lifted them out, they had a papery, powdery coolness that disappeared instantly, so we would quickly raise them to our cheeks as soon as we could in order to savor the chilly darkness of the ice chest.

  Mama still drank beer when we were little. It was not until I was a teenager that she gave up beer altogether because it was too fattening. But even back then, when we were little, Mama would often forgo a beer in favor of a vodka and grapefruit juice, which she kept in a squat aqua-and-white thermos. Across the front of the little thermos she had written with a freezer pen: RE-VIVI-FICATION TONIC. She described the concoction as “a cocktail and diet aid rolled into one.”

  Mama and the Ya-Yas were always using different plays on my mother’s name. If Teensy walked into a party that lacked pizzazz, she might announce, “This party needs to be Vivi-fied.” Sometimes they declared things to be “Re-Vivi-fication projects,” like the time Mama and Necie redesigned the uniforms of my Girl Scout troop.

  When I was young, I thought my mother was so internationally well known that the English language had invented words just for her. As a child, I would turn to the skinny “V” section of Webster’s and study the many words that referred to Mama. There was “vivid,” which meant “full of life; bright; intense.” And “vivify,” which meant “to give life or to make more lively.” There were “vivace,” “viva,” “vivacious,” “vivacity,” “vivarium,” and “viva voce.” Mama was the source of all these words. She was also the reason for the phrase “Vive le roi” (which she told us meant “Long live Vivi the Queen!”). All these definitions had to do with life, like Mama herself.

  It was the word “vivisection” that baffled me: “A surgical operation performed on a living animal to study the structure and function of living organs and parts.” It seemed to come out of left field. Its very sound gave me chills. I constantly asked Mama to explain it, but I was never satisfied.

  Ever on the lookout for any words that might refer to me, I would paw through any dictionary I could get my hands on. There had to be at least one word that concerned me. At least a “Siddafy,” like “Vivify.” But the closest I could find was “sissified.”

  It was not until I was in second or third grade that my friend M’lain Chauvin told me that Mama had nothing to do with those words in the dictionary. We got into a fight about it and Sister Henry Ruth intervened. When the nun confirmed M’lain’s claim, I was heartbroken at first. It changed my whole perception of reality. It began the unraveling of unquestioned belief that the world revolved around Mama. But along with my disappointment came a profound relief, although I could not admit it at the time.

  I thought my mother was a star for so many years that when I found out she wasn’t, I was stupefied. Had she once been a star and her bright burning had dimmed? Maybe because she had us? Or had Mama never been a star to begin with? Somewhere guilt developed whenever I seemed to eclipse Mama in any little way. Even winning a spelling bee made me worry, because I never trusted that I could shine without obliterating her.

  I did not understand then that my mother lived in a world that could not or would not acknowledge her radiance, her pull on the earth—at least not as much as she needed. So she made up her own solar system with the other Ya-Yas and lived in its orbit as fully as she could.

  My father was not included in this orbit, not really. All the Ya-Ya husbands existed in a separate universe from the Ya-Yas and us kids. In our summer world at Spring Creek, we plotted against the men, made fun of them, listened to our mothers as they did imitations of our fathers around the campfire. We watched them treat our fathers like bosses or fools or sometimes sweethearts. But we did not watch the Ya-Yas treat their men like they were friends.

  Perhaps Mama, more than Necie, Caro, or Teensy, depended on her girlfriends to give her what her marriage did not or could not. I do not doubt, for all their problems, that my mother loved my father, in her way, and that Father, in his way, loved her. It’s just that the ways I saw them loving each other left me terrified.

  Much of the Ya-Yas’ time on the creekbank was spent chatting, dozing, reapplying their sun-grabbing tincture, and keeping an eye on us. They took turns being responsible for watching us as we splashed, dove, cannonballed, jackknifed, dunked, kicked, floated, and fought in the creek water. The Ya-Ya who was on watch could only keep one foot in the conversation because she had to concentrate on how many heads were visible in the creek. Altogether, there were sixteen of us Petites Ya-Yas. Necie had seven kids; Caro had three—all boys. Teensy had a boy and girl. And then there were the four of us. Every half hour, the Ya-Ya in charge would stand up, look out at the water, and blow a whistle hanging from an old costume jewelry necklace. At the sound of the whistle, we immediately had to stop whatever we were doing and count off.

  Each of the Petites Ya-Yas had an assigned number, and the Ya-Ya on watch would listen for our voices as we called them out. Once we were all accounted for, we could resume our playing, and that Ya-Ya, her half-hourly job done, could settle down on the blanket. Although the ladies did not stop drinking while they were on lookout, it must be said that not one of us Petites Ya-Yas drowned during all those endless summer days spent on the creek.

  At least twice a summer, Mama would make one of us pretend to be drowning in Spring Creek so she could practice her rescue technique. Mama learned how to rescue drowning people long before we were born. She got recertified by the Red Cross every thre
e years, but proclaimed it her responsibility to test herself every single summer. We begged and screamed and fought to be the drowning victim. We loved the special attention.

  Basically, what you had to do was swim to the deep end and bob up and down in a panic, flailing your arms and screaming like you were about to take your last breath before sinking.

  Mama would be up on the creekbank as planned. She’d be wearing her shorts and camp blouse over her swimsuit, and as soon as she heard your screams, she’d raise her hands to her eyes to block the glare. Then she’d scan the horizon like an Indian princess, and spot you. Even as she was searching, she’d start ripping off her blouse and shorts, and kicking off her tennis shoes. Then she’d run to the edge of the creekbank and plunge into the water, employing one of her famous shallow lifeguard dives. At the sight of Mama’s leap, you would quiet down a little and watch her swim, fast and sure, to the spot where you were drowning.

  When she’d reach you, she’d shout, “Flail more! Dahlin! Flail more!” And you’d flap your arms harder and kick and scream with increased vigor. Then, with great assurance, Mama would hook her hand under your chin, lean your head back against her chest, and begin the rescue, using her mighty inverted scissors kick to propel the two of you through the water in short little bursts.

  Once back on the sandbar, Mama would lean over you with her ear to your chest. Then she’d feel around in your mouth with her fingers to make sure there was nothing blocking your throat. After that began the most dramatic component of the rescue: mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The Kiss of Life. Or as we called it, “mouth-to-mouth re-Vivification.” This was the crucial part of the rescue attempt, which could mean the difference between life and death. She’d clamp your nostrils together, put one hand on your chest, and begin to breathe into you. She’d breathe, then pump your chest with her palm, then breathe again. Then, when she was satisfied, Mama would stand up, her hands on her hips, her hair slicked back like a mermaid-lifeguard, and announce with a proud smile, “You were almost a goner, Dahlin, but now I think you’ll make it!”