Painted Dresses

by Patricia Hickman

  I grocery shopped down the mountain, leaving Delia to stay inside the cabin out of sight. I added a bag of apples, one loaf of bakery bread, a bottle of milk, and some lunch meat to the pantry.

  Delia examined the small bags and said, “Why be such a cheapskate?”

  My aunt’s cabin was not typical of most of the getaways bought by retirees in Sapphire Valley. You see a lot of curios in those parts, like wooden carvings of black bears and wedding ring quilts, as well as the endless shelves of locally canned salsas and pickled okra.

  Amity decorated her walls with dresses. The paintings were formed from actual dresses, dipped in paint, fastened to canvas, and then framed and hung on the wall. Primitive brush strokes left swirls in the dried paint that caught the light from overhead. There were specific designs painted onto the fabric, perhaps overlaid on the paint to give the dress back its original character yet not its original design. The designs were larger than textile art, more like the curlicues and paisleys were dropped onto the fabric rather than having been run through a factory stamp.

  When my mother was alive, she and her friend Effie talked about Amity’s cabin out of jealousy, so I had never quite sorted out the details about the paintings. But I had heard them tell about Amity’s process. My aunt and her best friend, Cally, would pour paint into a washtub and then dip the dress. It would hang to dry for days on a clothesline she had strung across the garage. A line of paint splatters across the concrete garage floor alluded to that fact. She and Cally ran coat hanger wires through the dresses to give them a shape, like the blue and green one over her sofa that appeared to be waving. The dining-room piece was a wedding dress dipped in pink paint and adorned with beads. The dress was fastened to the canvas through some means invisible to me. In the corner was Amity’s fine, cursive pencil explanation: Boo’s wedding dress. The beads are from my grandmother’s necklaces. That one appeared to blow in the wind from a backyard clothesline.

  “What do you make of these things?” asked Delia.

  I went room to room. Every room was decorated thematically to contrast its dress painting. An art dealer had tried to buy them once. Renni and Tootie wanted to sell them, Tootie especially, since she was always having money problems. But my father put his foot down and would not part with them. With Daddy gone, I expected that the dresses would soon disappear.

  The dress framed and hanging over Amity’s bed was the one that held my eye the longest. I put my things in that room and told Delia she could take the loft room, an arrangement that made her giddy since the loft was the only room in the house with a TV. Lying flat on my back, arm in a cast, I studied the careful folds of fabric fastened to the canvas, the tiny spatters of paint—yellow, blue, green, ochre—dripping down a backdrop of burnt umber. The child’s dress was blood red. Amity’s competing color choices contradicted the palette for a young girl.

  I fell asleep, and when I awoke, a smell seeped under the door. Delia was burning something. “Delia,” I yelled. “What’s going on?”

  I found her in the kitchen stirring soup.

  “I was warming peas,” she explained. “But they burned. I’m making soup. You got bread and cheese and apples. That’s dinner where I come from.”

  I ate the soup and then scoured the burned pea pan. Mother never wanted us girls underfoot while she cooked. Yet I picked up cooking tips over the years like girls do. But not Delia. Southern women pass that stuff around like little boys trade baseball cards, but she couldn’t cook beyond the warming of canned goods. I learned to cook Braden’s mother’s potato casserole and my neighbor’s mother’s jambalaya dish imported from New Orleans. Braden never wanted warmed-up soup. He expected me to cook a meal every evening like his mother did. There was the first tense moment when we sat down to eat each evening. I would not eat a bite until he had given me the thumbs-up or -down. When he hated my cooking, he tensed up. I could see the disapproval first in his face. He would lay down the fork and say, “I’ll go and get something edible for me.” He did not offer to buy dinner for both of us. He would put on his coat and walk out of the apartment, jangling keys and covering his thinning hair with a ball cap. He’d bring home a sack of fast food and sit down in front of the TV alone to eat it. I would sit at the table frozen, as if I had to wait for permission to join him on the couch.

  “The soup is good,” I told Delia. “I like the taste of hot soup with cheese. Like, it warms up the cheese and sort of melts in your mouth with the hot vegetables.”

  “My special recipe,” Delia lied.

  I laughed.

  “Finally, I made Gaylen Syler laugh.”

  I didn’t correct her for calling me Syler.

  I tried to call Braden but got no response, so I bathed after dinner. When I dressed, I noticed pencil writing scrawled in the corner of the red dress painting. Amity had written, Dress found in Fiona’s burning barrel last week. The painting was dated May 1981. I was four years old.

  I tried to see into the neck of the dress, but, of course the dress tag was coated too.

  “Almost every dress is from a member of the family.” Delia was standing at the foot of the bed. “Who’s that one from?”

  “From Mother’s leaf burning barrel,” I said. It must have been before she learned to compost. Once a leaf burning project turned bad when she set the yard on fire. The fire chief was mad at her for interrupting the men’s bowl game.

  “My dress or yours?” She came around to the side of the bed and examined the dress. “Mama’s burning barrel?” she asked.

  “Is it yours?” I asked.

  “Ruffled hem. I hated those ruffles. Eventually, it could have been. I wore your hand-me-downs.”

  My mother burned the leaves at the end of autumn. But she never burned our clothes. She and Daddy argued when she bought the fabric to sew those dresses. I studied the lace around the collar, now made stiff by the paint. “Who did she give our dresses to after you?” I asked.

  “Girl cousins.”

  “Amity and Malcolm never had children.”

  “Coulda been torn or maybe stained,” said Delia.

  I could not find a tear, at least on the front of the dress but, since the dress was covered over with paint, who could tell? “She didn’t pass it on. Must have been worn out.”

  Delia rummaged through the books in Amity’s bookcase, selected a romance novel, and disappeared up to the loft bed to watch the war.

  On either side of Amity’s bed were nightstands, both white, but with tole paintings on the drawers; Amity may have painted the flowers on the drawer fronts. I dug through the drawers looking for an ink pen. In case the paintings disappeared, I planned to record the notes Amity had written on each one. I decided I might buy a disposable camera and snap photos of the paintings. Things disappeared from my mother’s kitchen following her funeral. I could never say that it was Tootie looking for a pawnshop item to sell, but she had keys to the cabin the same as Renni and me.

  That is when I thought of taking the red-dress painting while it was still to be had. Amity had used either my dress or Delia’s on the canvas, so either of us could lay some sort of claim to it. I took it off the wall. That is when I found a note taped securely to the back of the painting. It read, Please give this painting to my niece, Gaylen Boatwright. My old address was written under my name. Amity had left me the painting, but to my knowledge no instructions to inform me of the bequest.

  It occurred to me then that no one, not my father or his sisters, knew that Amity had left the painting to me.

  I walked around the cabin, pulling each painted dress off the wall and finding another of Amity’s notes. Behind the canvas of another dancing dress hanging in the living room were instructions to give it to Amity’s friend, Luce Dawson. Luce’s telephone number was included with the address. I had never heard Amity talk about Luce. Renni never brought her up, nor did my mother. I took down each painting, and arrang
ed them around the living room.

  Delia looked curiously down at me. “Redecorating?” she asked.

  “Amity left instructions on the backs of the canvases. She left the red dress to me.”

  Delia ran down the stairs. She took one off the wall. But she was disappointed when she did not find her name taped to it.

  “It’s only because she didn’t have one of your dresses,” I told her.

  “So the red dress was yours,” she said.

  “Must have been,” I said.

  Delia asked, “What made you look?

  I thought about telling her that I was dusting it, and then I said truthfully, “I was thinking about taking the one over Amity’s bed.”

  She forced a laugh.

  “She’s clearly left it to me,” I said.

  “But you didn’t know that at the time.”

  “I do now.” One of the framed dresses measured over five feet in height. “We might get a few in the trunk, maybe one in the backseat.”

  “Renni and Tootie will scream, Gaylen, if they find them missing.”

  “They will sell them. We can make sure they go where they’re supposed to go,” I said.

  The phone rang. It was Braden. I walked out of the living room and onto the front porch, the only way to get a cell phone signal.

  He asked, “Is your sister Delia with you?” He sounded confused, probably because he expected me to say, “Of course not.” He knew Delia and never expected to find us spending the weekend together.

  But something in his tone made me ask, “Who wants to know?”

  “A guy called the house, asking for you. When I told him you were at your father’s, he said he was looking for your sister. He thought you might tell him where he could find her.”

  “But not Cashiers. You told him I was in Boiling Waters.”

  There was a pause.

  “I think I said that. Did I know you were in Cashiers? I can’t remember. But I told him I’d pass along the message. If you see Delia, will you let her know her friend Mason Freeman is coming to town?”

  I could hear him breathing.

  Braden asked, “Do we know Mason Freeman? Are you all right, Gaylen?”

  I told him I would call back, that Delia and I had to go. “Delia, help me cart the paintings out to the car. I’ll get my things.”

  “Were leaving?”

  “Mason Freeman might know we’re here.”

  “Mason Freeman called your place?” Delia stared up the mountain slope at the road curving from town and meandering into the cottage neighborhoods.

  I put one painted dress in the backseat, and Delia and I stacked four in the trunk, laying bed sheets between each one. I made cheese sandwiches from the leftover food. When Delia saw me packing a lunch away between the car seats, she said, “We got a quarter of a million between us, but my sister’s making cheese sandwiches.”

  I locked up the rear of Amity’s cottage. The house was a dusty cavity without her painted dresses. I turned off the lights and locked the front door behind me. Delia was already waiting in the car. “Sophie must have ratted me out,” she said. “She never was fit for nothing.”

  I reached into the backseat and pulled Amity’s taped note from the back of the painting. “Amity’s friend doesn’t live far from here. Let’s take it to her. One less painting taking up space.” The delivery of the paintings, as I saw it at that particular moment, had one useful merit. I was convinced at the time that a winding road trip would throw Mason Freeman off Delia’s scent.

  Luce Dawson lived in a brick and frame ranch house covered over with oaks and mountain laurel. She stood in the picture window looking out, taking a drag on her cigarette. She was a black woman, her hair combed down tight and pulled into a ponytail.

  She was happy for visitors, her face registering out-and-out shock when we gave her the painted dress. “Do you know why Amity gave me this dress?” she asked.

  Delia pulled out her pack of cigarettes.

  “I don’t know everything about my aunt,” I said.

  “Dolly, her sister, and me was best friends. She was killed in a car crash.”

  Amity had never talked about her sister. It seemed that Amity had a life she kept separate from the Sylers. Preserved may have been a better word.

  Luce and I propped the painted dress against the wall next to the fireplace. She could not take her eyes off it. She sniffed and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She sat next to me on the long gold sofa that gave us a view of her woody front yard. “Dolly never liked Malcolm much, and she and Amity argued when they married. I think she was afraid that Amity would move away from Cashiers. When Malcolm took the job with Weyerhaeuser, he promised Dolly that he would bring her back to Cashiers once they had saved enough money. But she died before that. Amity never got over it.”

  Delia laughed nervously.

  “Dolly loved going to flea markets and bargain basements. She found that dress in a store along the highway. I talked her into it. She wore it often, so it was exactly how I remembered her.” She put her cigarette in the ashtray she cradled in her lap. “It was the only thing I wanted. But I stopped going to see Amity. That was wrong, I guess. I never knew what came of the dress.”

  I asked her, “Did you know about the painted dresses?”

  “I saw the one she hung over her bed,” she said. “Little girls dress. Belonged to her niece. She said that Malcolm’s family was troubled. Her sister-in-law threw out one of her children’s dresses, but Amity saved it.”

  I put down the glass of tea that Luce had given me. “Why would she throw away a dress?”

  “Law, I don’t know.” She offered me more tea. “Amity saved that little dress as if that woman would want it back. Amity was like that, always redeeming things that got thrown out.”

  “Did Dolly and Amity ever speak again?” I asked.

  “Amity never said. You know I might have tried to stop Amity from covering over that dress with paint. But now that I see it, dancing like that, its like Dolly’s come alive in it.”

  I helped Luce hang the dress over the fireplace after that.

  Delia was in a lighter mood. The sun was disappearing. She talked all the way down the mountain. “I’m not surprised Mama kicked Truman out of the house, though. She tried to make me leave, but where was I supposed to go, I ask you?”

  It was hard to tell if Delia was spinning another of her fables, so I changed the subject. “The next stop is closer to home. The rest of the dresses belong to relatives all out on the Outer Banks,” I said.

  Delia pointed, excited. “Apple stand!” Patio lights were lit up around the eave of the tourist shop roof. Delia jumped out as if she had never seen so many apples.

  A man dressed in a bloodstained apron gave her a bag to fill. He apologized for the apron. “Sorry, ladies. A friend of mine brought me a deer to skin not an hour ago, and I been running back and forth from the kitchen to the stand.” His breath was like rotted fruit.

  I paid him for Delia’s apples. He watched us trudge back across the gravel lot, but I told myself he wasn’t watching us in any sort of queer manner. Before I was strapped into the seat, though, he appeared at my window. “You girls look like a nice pair. Sisters, are you?”

  “What’s it to you?” asked Delia.

  I touched her leg.

  “Fella kind of rough looking stopped at my stand right about the time I was hauling that deer out of the truck. Sure as all get out he described the two of you.” He lifted up and helped me close the car door. I rolled down my window to hear him say, “Probably nothing, but I know people. He had a look about him and a bad suit, like no suit I ever seen on a man.”

  Delia started muttering and shaking her head.

  I thanked the man and drove away. We found a small motel off the highway where we could sleep for the night. We had to shar
e the bed. Fishermen had converged on the motel leaving nothing to rent but a single occupancy room.

  When my eyes finally closed, she was giggling. She said, “We should have done this a long time ago.”

  7

  I SLEPT LATE the next morning for the first time since we had left Boiling Waters. I shook Delia awake. There was a small mom-and-pop cafe close to the interstate ramp. We ate and got onto the interstate headed back to the coast.

  She was reading a brochure picked up at the apple stand about a giant block of granite in the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Rock climbers wanted to buy the granite mass and were holding a fund-raiser. Delia did not understand the point of paying for the preservation of this giant mass of rock. I knew her well enough to know that if I explained the preservationist’s creed, she would continue to argue her point, ignoring my explanation. She didn’t really mean that she wanted to know the answer, so instead of answering her, I stared straight ahead at the snaking highway that we rolled along on together like a pinball.

  We were nearly down the mountain, avoiding talk about Mason Freeman, when she asked, “What made you and Braden break up?”

  My mind was on the granite, not Braden, at that exact moment. Delia, in her simplistic manner, fired and spoke. So I said what every-one says when they don’t want to admit that they’ve screwed up a relationship. “We’re having trouble communicating. It’s complicated.”

  “He’s cheated on you, hasn’t he?”

  Maybe it was our high elevation that swamped reason. I defended Braden while forgetting to watch my own back. “You’ve got it wrong. Braden’s not perfect, but neither am I.”

  “I can’t imagine you doing that,” she said.

  I could have coasted the remainder of the way down the mountain ridge without asking, “What makes you say that?”

  She was quiet for the space between two mile markers. “You’d never do that, Gaylen, would you? Cheat on Braden?”

  “That’s an ugly question.”