Occasionally the staged rescue would scare one of the little kids, who did not understand that it was pretend. So Mama had gotten in the habit of inviting each Petite Ya-Ya to lean over you, the rescued one, to feel the breath coming out of your nostrils. After the last kid had been reassured, everyone would start clapping. Then Mama would jump on one foot, shake the water out of her ears, and say, “Knew I hadn’t lost my touch.”
For days after Mama saved you from a watery death, you would recall over and over again the thrill of such a close call. You would remember how confidently she pulled you through the water, and you would recollect the taste of her mouth and the smell of her breath. For days you felt unsafe venturing near the deep end, because the “near-drowning” was so vivid. So Vivi vivid. You would begin to fear the alligators even when you were in the safe areas. You would wonder, What would happen if you were drowning and Mama wasn’t around to dive in and save you? Say she simply went away. Like the time when you were little, getting over bronchitis, and it wouldn’t stop raining. That time you went to the window again and again and she was not there. You were bad and she hit you, then just went away.
Mama wasn’t the only strong swimmer. Caro had been a lifeguard too, and had even more stamina when it came to certain strokes. With her smart red-highlighted brown page boy and her olive skin, Caro grew up swimming in the Gulf, and she could swim for hours. Her dips in the creek were minuscule adventures compared to her ocean swims. Mama always said, “Caro is indisputably the strongest lady endurance swimmer I have ever known or ever will know.”
Caro brought out Mama’s intrepidness. She was close to five feet nine, which was terribly tall for a woman in an era that worshipped petiteness. She had long legs and her body was perfectly built for Hattie Carnegie suits, which she still wore in my childhood, even though she’d bought them years before.
With her flat chest and square shoulders, she looked terrific in clothes, although of all the Ya-Yas she cared the least for them. She had one black strapless evening gown with a slit up the back, which showed her calves when she danced. She wore that dress to every Ya-Ya party I remember from my childhood. She wore the gown with a feather boa, which my sister, Lulu, and I followed around like it was alive. For Mama’s birthday one year, Caro teamed a pair of cowboy boots and a cowboy hat with the gown, looking like a cross between Marlene Dietrich and Annie Oakley.
Caro is my godmother, and I have always been told the story of how, at the end of my Baptism, Caro, out of the blue, whistled “When You Wish Upon a Star.” She called everyone “Pal.” “Hey, Pal,” she’d say. “What’s cookin?” Some people might think of New York City taxi drivers calling folks “Pal” or maybe gangsters from the thirties, but when Caro called you “Pal,” she was including you in her own special Bohemianism.
She was the reason I became a Bohemian at the age of eight. Refusing to wear anything except my black dance leotard and tights, and a pair of dark sunglasses left behind after one of Mama and Daddy’s cocktail parties, I changed my name to Madame Voilanska. When people called me Sidda, I refused to answer. When the nuns called Mama to complain, she told them if I said my name was Madame Voilanska, then that’s what they better call me. The minute I got home from school, I changed into my all-black ensemble, and added a cigarette to my overall look. I put my hair up in a ponytail, and sat for hours on a stool in front of the sliding glass doors that led onto the enclosed patio of our house, studying my reflection. I did not pretend to smoke the cigarette. (That was the kind of thing that Lulu would do.) Instead, I employed it as a prop with which to gesture. I held the cigarette between my thumb and index finger and used it to stab the air as though I were making some important, unassailable point. These points were expressed in my original poetry.
My mother has included one of these poems in the scrapbook. It is written in my young Palmer Method longhand, and it’s dated 1961, which meant I was eight years old. I was shocked and touched to see it. My mother is nothing if not a surprise.
Freedom
by Madame Voilanska
26 times I have walked around the house!
I clapped my hands and sang!
Then my hair stood up!
And I did not go back in!
I had loved “bats and balls” ever since the nuns introduced them to us. I could not for the life of me understand why I couldn’t use exclamation points to end every other sentence I composed. Sister Rodney Marie would circle them with mean red marks and write, “Use period, not exclamation point.” At school I finally made myself cut down to using only one exclamation point per paragraph. But in my own private poetry, I used them all over the place. Later, in high school, I discovered that the magnificent Walt Whitman loved exclamation points as much as I did. That, along with his wondering and exaltation, and tender nursing of dying soldiers, made him one of my heroes.
I knew that to be a true Bohemian you had to wear sunglasses. This was the most obvious thing that had established Caro as the leading (and only) Bohemian of Thornton. Back then Caro had to wear sunglasses everywhere. Granted, when they had hangovers, all four of the Ya-Yas wore sunglasses, even at Sunday-morning Mass. Caro, however, developed a temporary condition in which even the least bit of direct sunlight in her eyes could make her sick. For a while she had to wear sunglasses all the time, even at night. She would do her errands, even on the cloudiest wet day, wearing her shades. Thorntonites began to get the idea that Caro was weird in an out-of-town kind of way. Many people did not know that she had a medical problem, they just thought she was being a snob, trying to act like a movie star. “Who does she think she is?” they’d say. Some of the more obnoxious people—“grown men,” according to Caro—would actually walk up to her and say things like “Take those sunglasses off right now and let people see your eyes.” Like Caro was breaking some kind of eyeglass law.
But to me Caro’s sunglasses were simply the cat’s pajamas. I would try to copy her and wear my sunglasses at night at Pecan Grove, even though it meant I bumped into furniture.
Teensy had jet-black hair and eyes that were almost as dark. Barely five feet tall, she had an olive complexion and tiny feet, almost like a child’s. She and Mama first met at the age of four in the doctor’s office. The story has become legend in Thornton because it involved a large pecan that Teensy had stuck in her nose “to see if it would fit.” It did fit, and it took Dr. Mott’s delicate skill to remove it. That pecan is mounted behind glass in a display case in Dr. Mott’s office entitled “Foreign Objects Removed from Children’s Bodies.” Under the pecan it reads, “Nut from Teensy Whitman’s left nostril. June 18, 1930.” When we were growing up, this gave Teensy a sort of fame among school kids.
Teensy had a perfect body, and we all knew exactly what it looked like. One of her eccentricities (when the gang really got going, when the bourbon was flowing, when the time seemed right, when she received the call) was to stage an elaborately drawn-out, sexy, and very funny striptease. We had seen her do it at numerous Ya-Ya parties, and had heard talk about the time she did it at the Theodore Hotel during Caro and Blaine’s fifth-anniversary bash. We Petites Ya-Yas were taught to simply refer to it as Teensy’s deshabillage.
Teensy always wore the skimpiest swimsuits. The Ya-Yas called her the Bikini Queenie and she was the talk of Garnet parish with her risqué little numbers. I always imagined that she received those bikinis in the mail straight from Paris.
She swam only on her back. On her back in her un-Catholic bikini. Every once in a while she would give a furious flutter kick and white water would rise in a fume from her precious tiny toes. She’d cruise with this momentum for a while until she came to a standstill. Then, extending her arms wide in the water, she would gracefully move them as though she were conducting the legato movement of a water symphony. When she grew tired of that, she’d flip over and dive neatly into the water, her toes pointing up like arrows to the sky. Then she’d swim under water for what seemed like days, and we’d all place bets on where she
’d surface. When her pretty black head popped up like a seal, we’d all say: “Where does Teensy put all that air?!”
Teensy always had money, and she gave it away to any of us who needed it. When her father died, he left her a fat bundle of Coca-Cola shares. Her husband, Chick, had inherited money as well, so much that the only reason he went downtown to his office was so he could drink coffee with the other men at the River Street Café. It was Teensy who staked Lulu when she started her own interior-design business. And it was Teensy who—no questions asked—wired me $10,000 when I called her at the end of my first year in New York, broke and scared, with not a job in sight. Teensy is also the one who offered—she was fairly tipsy at the time—to pay for each and every Petite Ya-Ya to go into therapy. She made this offer at my high school graduation party, which was held to jointly honor Teensy’s son, Jacques, Caro’s son Turner, and me.
Not one of us took her up on the offer at the time, a fact I’ve often regretted, since it could have saved me enough money to buy a small country somewhere. Teensy’s only daughter, my childhood friend Genny, had by that time already undergone more therapy (both inpatient and out) than the rest of us could imagine. In fact, at the time we were graduating from high school, she was already in a private mental hospital for the second time. But that is another story. Her fine, fragile craziness that bordered on visionary reminded me of stories I’d heard about Genevieve, Teensy’s mother. That family had its share of sadness.
All of us, so interwoven, so braided, growing up Ya-Ya in that backwater, third-tier state, where our families were the haut monde, their sins charming and mostly unnamed. So many stories in the Ya-Ya clan.
When the Petites Ya-Yas—minus the Walker kids—showed up en masse at a performance of Women on the Cusp, I felt like I’d been granted a partial reprieve from my status of orphan. Even though Mama’s anger prevented the Ya-Yas themselves from seeing the play, the Petites Ya-Yas came. Somehow they even managed to check Genny out of McClean in Boston long enough to come.
Mama’s scrapbook is filled not only with her life and the lives of the Ya-Yas, but inevitably overflows into the next generation. We were a communal tribe, a little primitive matriarchal village. Especially during those summer days at Spring Creek, when the men stayed in town and worked all week, coming out only to visit on the weekends.
Necie was the Ya-Ya who looked most like a mom. But she, too, had her peculiarities. For one thing, she was the only mother from my childhood who had long hair. Her hair was the principal thing about Necie’s looks that let you know she was a Ya-Ya. Wives and mothers in the fifties and early sixties just did not have long beautiful hair like that. Not in Thornton.
Necie’s hair was thick and brown and luxurious, and when she let it down, it was her crowning glory. On summer mornings at Spring Creek, when she had just awakened, Necie’s hair tumbled down onto her shoulders and caught the early sun as she sat on the porch and drank coffee with the others. She would let me play with her hair for hours, taking no notice at all. I would sit, with the sound of the ladies’ voices rolling over me, and simply play with Necie’s hair, heavy and clean and smelling of Breck. I loved lifting her hair and burying my nose in it, just to smell it. I took a soft pleasure from this simple, innocent, sensual act with a woman. Pleasure I wish had not passed out of my life as I grew older.
I loved seeing the Ya-Yas when they climbed out of the creek, with their hair all wet. They looked sleek and elegant and beautiful, like some kind of exotic water animals, some wild water women with secret lives somewhere at the bottom of a lagoon.
In those creek days, Mama never worried about her hair. It was cut very short in a “pixie,” which she called her “Four-Kid Coif.” Her hair was naturally blonde, and without makeup her eyebrows and eyelashes were the same shade. Years later, when Mia Farrow cut all her hair off, the Ya-Yas claimed she was imitating my mother.
Mama’s eyes were a dark reddish brown, and they gave her face a power, a counterbalance it would not have otherwise had. Her fair skin and hair made people at first think she was fragile. Her eyes told them she meant business.
When Mama stepped out of the creek water, she would towel dry her hair for a moment, put on fresh lipstick, and reach for her large white sun hat, because—as Mama instructed us—true blondes can lie in the sun but only with a very wide brim. My mother loved very wide brims.
In those days I knew Mama’s body down to the shape of her toes, her toenails covered in her trademark “Rich Girl Red” polish. Her blonde complexion with tiny cinnamon freckles on her upper arms, on her cheeks. A kind of milky whiteness lay underneath the freckles like a layer of thin cream. Sometimes, in certain light, you could see through my mother’s skin to the lavender and blue veins underneath. When I saw this, it terrified me.
Mama’s legs moved like the tennis player she was. They looked fine in shorts, which she wore places that most ladies wouldn’t dare. She wore shorts, a camp shirt of crisp cotton or old linen, tucked neatly in, white crew socks, and white round-toed Keds. She called it her summer uniform. All white, like a tennis player.
My mother was a big woman in a little woman’s body. She stood about five feet four inches tall in her bare feet and never weighed more than 115 pounds—except when she was pregnant. She prided herself on her weight, and took great pains to maintain it. She had the limbs of a taller person. Not that they were actually too long for her body, but they seemed to have a willowiness about them—a willowiness that encased a tightness. It seemed like the life inside my mother’s body was too hot and fierce for her fair skin. “I am going to jump out of my skin,” she always used to say. And as a girl, I feared she would.
She was not like the kind of mother I saw in books and movies. Except for her breasts, which were surprisingly full for her frame, she was not plump or round in any way. She was muscular and somewhat wiry. Any roundness that tried to sneak its way onto her as she began to age was promptly exercised or starved off. Once Necie turned to Mama and asked mildly, “Vivi, why do you insist on staying so thin? We’re not eighteen anymore.” My mother responded, as though it made perfect sense, “I want light baggage when I decide to blow this joint.”
When I close my eyes, I can see my mother’s body in front of me exactly as it looked in my childhood. I can hear her part-Scarlett, part-Katharine Hepburn, part-Tallulah voice, in all its rich, smoky nuance.
I know nothing of her naked body as it is now. I have heard rumors that she finally “filled out a little,” but I have no proof. I have not seen her body without clothes in over twenty years. I do not know if I would recognize her body if her face and voice were hidden from me, and this makes me sad.
When I think now of the Vivi of my girlhood, I am overwhelmed. She gave birth to four children—five if you count my twin who died—in three years and nine months. That means from the time she married, her body never had a chance to settle down from the wild hormonal tangos of pregnancy. It means that she was sleep-deprived for five or six straight years. And Lord knows Mama is a woman who loved her sleep (as I do mine). She used to say she could taste sleep and that it was as delicious as a BLT on fresh French bread.
Even as a child you knew that she was not the kind of woman meant to have four stair-step kids. You would stand next to her and know you were asking too much even as you tugged and begged and insisted, “Look at me, Mama! Watch me do this, Mama. Now watch me do this.”
But during those summers, my mother was a goddess of the creekbank with her girlfriends. Some days I worshipped at her feet. Some days I would have split her wide open just to get the attention she gave the Ya-Yas. Some days I was so jealous I wished Caro, Teensy, and Necie dead. Other days, from their spots on the picnic blankets, Mama and her buddies were the pillars that held up the heavens.
Here in this cabin, twenty-five hundred miles from Louisiana, and many years from my girlhood, if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can smell my mother and the Ya-Yas. It is as though my own body keeps the scents of the Ya-Y
as simmering on some back burner, and at the most unexpected moments, the aroma rises up and joins with the fragrance of my current life to make a new-old perfume. The soft aroma of old worn cotton from a linen chest; the lingering smell of tobacco on an angora sweater; Jergen’s hand lotion; sautéed green peppers and onions; the sweet, nutty smell of peanut butter and bananas; the oaken smell of good bourbon; a combination of lily of the valley, cedar, vanilla, and somewhere, the lingering of old rose. These smells are older than any thought. Mama, Teensy, Necie, and Caro, each one of them had an individual scent, to be sure. But this is the gumbo of their scents. This is the Gumbo Ya-Ya. This is the internal vial of perfume I carry with me everywhere I go.
The four of their scents were in key. Their very bodies harmonized together.
Surely this made it easier for them to forget things and forgive each other, not to have to constantly “work” on things, the way we do now. This has never happened for me with a group of women. It is hard for me to even imagine. Yet I have seen it. I have smelled it.
Mama’s perfume is a scent that was created for her by Claude Hovet, the perfumier in the French Quarter, when she was sixteen. A gift from Genevieve Whitman, it is a scent that is softly shocking and deeply moving. A scent that disturbs me and delights me. It smells like ripe pears, vetiver, a bit of violet, and something else—something spicy, almost biting and exotic.
Once the scent caught me on the street in Greenwich Village. I stopped in my tracks and looked around. Where was it coming from? A shop? The trees? A passerby? I could not tell. I only know the smell made me cry. I stood on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village as people brushed by, and felt suddenly young and terribly open, as if I were waiting for something. I live in an ocean of smell, and the ocean is my mother.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood Page 5
