Painted Dresses

by Patricia Hickman

  “I’m the last to know everything, Delia. But I’m the girl with the brains in the Syler family.”

  “How many kids you figure he hurt before they caught up with him?” she asked.

  “I’m ordering his court records,” I said.

  “You ever met Jackson and Noleen?” she asked. Her mind wandered off, and she was watching again for truckers.

  “Once when I was young. Jackson helped Daddy sober up a man, I think a cousin of Daddy’s. That’s all I remember. He seemed cordial.”

  She let back her seat and closed her eyes. There was a bit of chocolate left on her lip from the ice-cream sandwich. Sleep overtook her, and she looked like a small girl fallen asleep with not a care in her mind.

  My memory summoned the shaven-headed pencil sketch of Truman that Renni left for us in his box of belongings. The photo of the brown-eyed second grader left an impression of sweetness. The shaven-headed prisoner drawing did not reveal anything. Maybe it was because he did not know himself. Or maybe it was because he did not want anyone to know him.

  If I ever moved out of Wilmington, and it seemed I would be moving somewhere else soon, I decided that I might consider Garland. The historical town shops restored in ice-cream colors looked like a place cut out of a children’s book. In a downtown block, a big sign advertised Christmas on the Square. Children piled out of a bus, tying shoelaces and pulling on choir robes. The urge to spend a bit of inheritance money might have overtaken me, except that a parking space was nowhere to be found.

  “Delia, wake up and wash your face. You have to see this place.”

  She roused, pulling herself up to look at the crowds converging on the square. “Mmff!” She finger-combed her hair out of her eyes. She sat up, still in her stupor, and said, “I was dreaming about a place like I never saw, not on earth. Mason Freeman was standing outside a pair of big tall gates trying to get past the gates along with Mama and Truman. Only Truman was a little boy like in the picture. She ’as holding his hand and slapping him and mad at me the same as Mason Freeman. Except I’m inside the gate, and I got the key. I’m running back and forth teasing them all, shaking the keys at them and yelling, ‘You can’t get in! Not without my say-so!’”

  I saw a road just like Jackson had told me I would find past the square. I turned down it.

  “That would be my heaven, Gaylen. Me holding the keys and letting in who I please and keeping out who I don’t want in.”

  “You’d send Mama to hell?” I asked.

  “Is there an alternative? Like, seems like standing outside the gates watching everybody partying is punishment enough.”

  “Never heard of an alternative hell,” I said.

  “Not straight to hell then. I’d make her say she was sorry for the hateful things she said and did. But I felt sorry for Truman, pitiful eyed, like he was trapped forever holding Mamas hand and getting slapped. Maybe because he was little and not like he is now.”

  “Help me find Gold Dust Street,” I said. We drove right past it, and I sighed.

  “The last place I would expect to be is heaven, now that I think about it,” she said. “Maybe they’s an alternative heaven.”

  “You let us miss our street. Now I have to turn around.” I pulled into a driveway. Finally, I headed down Gold Dust. There was the big one story house, the lawn struggling to keep its summer green in the middle of December. Jackson must have decided we needed a welcoming committee. He and Noleen walked out onto the front porch, arm in arm, posed like a couple of tourists in matching red and green outfits.

  “Gaylen, is that you?” she yelled. She kept saying that first to me and then Delia until Delia giggled in a low and awkward way.

  Noleen set out tables in a glassed-in back porch built by Jackson after he retired from the city of Dallas.

  Jackson was big like I remembered, but his shoulders stooped from age. Noleen had dressed him up in a kelly green shirt with red sleeves matching her green pantsuit. “Here we are right on top of Christmas, and lo and behold, the phone rings, and up comes a North Carolina family. It’s a blessing, that’s what!” she exclaimed.

  Her hair, frosted at the tips and still clinging to a permanent wave, was swept up on one side and clipped by a mistletoe barrette. When Delia commented about it, Noleen said, “I make these for teachers, women down at the Dalrymple Nursing Center, what-have-you. I’ll get one for each of you girls.”

  I did not know what to say.

  “He’s got nimble fingers,” she said, not taking her eyes off him.

  Jackson blushed.

  She took me into her bedroom and showed me a wall of photographs dating back to the ′60s when she and Jackson married.

  “The last thing I would expect was for you to show up, and here I am without a single picture of you and Delia. I’ll have Jackson take your pictures before you leave, that’s what. Then I’ll add you to the wall of Sylers.” She talked the whole time, pointing to photographs of her brother who fought in Vietnam, a three-legged pet greyhound that needed to be put down, fifteen or more photographs of her son, Taylor, from birth up, and an equal number of photographs of their daughter who had played soccer and danced ballet.

  “Did Jackson grow up knowing my daddy?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, girl! They was two peas, the two of them. Jackson called your daddy Puddin’ until he was grown, on account of his love for Jackson’s mother’s homemade banana-cream pudding.”

  I had never heard my father called by that name.

  She lit a candle under the photograph of her brother.

  “I have a cousin going off to war. Tim.”

  “Not Renni’s Tim?” she asked. “Pshaw! No, tell me that’s not true. Tim’s grown? Time has flown.”

  “You know him?”

  “Like I know you. Of course you and your sister were so little back then. Ask Tim if he remembers Jackson and Noleen. He’ll tell you about the time Jackson took him and our son fishing. They hit some rapids, and the three of them nearly drowned. The authorities found them clinging to a rock. Had to take them out of those waters by helicopter and a rope.”

  “I thought he was lying,” I said, although I was tired of talking about Tim. Since I had finally found a talkative Syler in Noleen, I wanted to see what she remembered about my mother.

  “The way those Syler men tell tales, I can understand your point. But that one happens to be true.”

  Delia was laughing in the next room.

  I closed the door. “Noleen, if you remember me young, then you remember my mothers son, Truman.”

  The sound of my brother’s name set her back. It was the first time she fell quiet since we had landed on her porch.

  “What do you remember about him?”

  She seated me in an alcove with a picture window looking out over what appeared to be naked grapevines. “Your brother was troubled. Nobody tried as hard as your daddy to bring that boy around. He disciplined him, whipped him, but he couldn’t get him to come around and stay out of trouble with the law. That boy was in trouble far back as I can remember.”

  “Truman was in trouble with the law?”

  “He worked for a refinishing shop down from your daddy’s place. The refinisher had a boy who was bad news. He was the one taught Truman to hot-wire cars. I always said that was when Truman leaned too far over the rail to bring back. He seemed to get worse and worse after that. First he was sent away to his Daddy’s someplace here in Texas. Next thing you know, he’s back in North Carolina getting sent to Rowan Salisbury Prison. I think that was the name of that place. Anyway, it was a sad day. Your daddy was ashamed of him.”

  “That’s when you remember him being sent away?”

  “That was the way it was told to Jackson, girl. Why? You know a different story?”

  “For a long time, I had nightmares. Since then I’ve been trying to prove what happened to m
e when I was young.”

  She clasped her hands on her stomach. “I don’t follow.”

  “I started pulling my hair.”

  She gasped and then nodded, remembering. She said, “You pulled out your hair by the handfuls from the time you was a baby. That’s enough to give any child nightmares. Your mama troubled over you, trying to keep your hands out of that pretty silky hair.”

  “But what causes a baby to pull its hair, Noleen?”

  She laughed. “Your mama said one day you just reached up and found a lock. She said it was curiosity. You yelled, red-faced, as if you didn’t know how to let go.”

  Noleen’s voice was grating on me. She laughed like my mother, like women do when they don’t know what to say.

  “What is wrong, Gaylen? You come here for more than a Christmas visit, didn’t you? You looking for answers?”

  I sat up and shook my head. “Not at all. I heard you made the best enchiladas in the family.”

  She cackled and pushed up out of her chair. “That is the honest truth! Now you get yourself in here and let me feed you. Your bones look about ready to break. Who’s been feeding you anyway? Not that sister of yours, I’m sure.” She walked out of the bedroom as if I would follow. I was still in the chair when Jackson, sent on a mission by Noleen, came looking for me.

  “My wife about to talk your ears off?” he asked.

  “I’m just tired. I’m coming,” I said.

  “Don’t rush. She’s still melting cheese and slicing tomatoes. She’s got your sister icing a cake.”

  I was too tired to tell him that was a bad idea.

  He took Noleen’s chair. “Can I tell you something I remember about you?” he asked.

  Why not? I thought.

  “Out of all of the Sylers, you seemed like the kid that would rise above your family’s situation. Some kids in your situation, they cry and whine, needy and taking their time about growing up. But you was a strong girl, like no one was going to lead you around.”

  “I appreciate you saying that. But I think I lost a little of her back in Boiling Waters.”

  “Once Noleen and I took you to church. Delia wouldn’t go. You sat right between us, and Noleen had fun pretending you were her girl. She took you to children’s class, and you came out having learned three Bible verses. You won a chocolate rabbit. I never heard so much smacking. You had that rabbit eaten before we ever got you back to your daddy’s house. I think you was afraid your mama wouldn’t let you eat it.”

  “I was afraid Delia would eat it,” I said.

  “You remember then?”

  “It’s foggy.”

  “Don’t go getting old on me. I’m the only one qualified for a senior moment.”

  “When you said that I would rise above the family’s situation, what does that mean to you, Jackson?”

  He scratched his head, uneasy. “I shouldn’t have said that.” His gaze drifted to the wall of photographs and then back to me.

  “It’s like I don’t know myself because I don’t know my family.”

  “Your daddy and his brother, Rudy, they had their issues. I always blamed the war. Now Malcolm, he was sane as Lincoln. But Renni, she said those two brothers had the manic-depressive on account of their mama had it.”

  “My father? He didn’t tell me,” I said. Neither had Renni.

  “Your daddy had too much pride.”

  Mother had never gotten help for Delia either. “What about my mother?” I asked.

  “I don’t know about your mother or her past. When she married your daddy, those sisters of his told a lot of stuff on her. I never knew whether or not to believe it. But when she and your daddy would tangle, you could hear them all the way out to the pond. But I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “Mother could yell so loud, Daddy said she could dust the lamps with her vocal cords.” It was easy feeling guilty over talking about her.

  “I shouldn’t be telling you things on your mother.” The two of us sat staring at Noleen’s floral rug, sharing a big slice of guilt.

  “The last thing we need to be doing is digging up family skeletons on your folks, Gaylen. They’ve passed on and can’t defend themselves.”

  “They wouldn’t allow me to ask any of these questions, though. It was their way.” I pondered why I allowed Mother and Daddy to intimidate me. “I should’ve made them tell me the truth about us and about Truman.” I imagined shouting down into Mother’s grave beneath the hill above Syler Pond. “How could she think I could live a life based on lies?”

  “To her, it wasn’t lies. It was protection.”

  “But I pulled myself baldheaded, Jackson! I was ashamed. I remember the shame of it. The nightmares, the way that dark man in the shadows would crawl into my bed.”

  Jackson handed me a handkerchief. It was embroidered with the initials JCS.

  I dried my eyes.

  “Gaylen, you didn’t have the best starting gate. But you got so much baggage hanging off you, you’re never going to get any purpose about you until you lay some of it down.”

  “It’s the only cargo given to me, Jackson.” I thought, like the top of a train car overflowing with gunpowder.

  “Want to know that verse you quoted when you was with us that day at church?”

  Jackson was the religious cousin. I had forgotten. “Tell me then,” I decided to be polite.

  “Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

  “I don’t remember any of it,” I said.

  “You did and two more. It’s good advice.”

  “Reaching forward sounds better than looking back,” I said. “But a family secret has shaped me into a stranger.” I knew what I had to do. “I’m going to Angola, Jackson. My brother is incarcerated there.”

  “I never heard that. What’s he in for?”

  “Molesting kids.”

  “What do you think, that he’ll confess all to you? Men like that bury their crimes in lies. He’ll never tell you and you’ll leave even angrier than you are now.” He helped me out of the chair. “The past is all it is, Gaylen. Gone. Who told you that what happened a long time ago could give you the shape of your life today? Forget the past and move on. Closure’s the best thing in the world for you.”

  “You don’t know the things that have happened to me, Jackson.” I could not tell him, even though I wanted to tell someone. “It’s like a person I don’t know is sitting in the driver’s seat making my life for me.” Jackson didn’t know me or my family as well as I had hoped. He couldn’t understand something that happened outside of his own skin. It was easy for him to tell me to drop it all like it had never happened. He did not have to live with my painted-over memories.

  Noleen called the dining room the red room for good cause. The walls and draperies were red as cranberries. She lit red candles down a buffet, on a serving table, and along a table candelabra. “Every place setting is a Christmas pattern from a different country. Yours, Gaylen, is from Germany.”

  “Did you go to Germany?” Delia asked.

  “There and Sweden, Luxembourg, Spain, and France,” said Jackson, fishing his billfold out of his back pocket so he could sit comfortably. He deposited the billfold and his eyeglasses on the buffet, much to Noleen’s consternation. But she only gave him a look and then melted when he flashed her his melon-slice smile.

  “We got family coming in soon from Biloxi,” said Noleen to Delia and me. “You girls stay on. We’ve got the room. Out back is the cottage we built for Jackson’s mother before she passed. Got a kitchen in it and even its own carport.”

  “Biloxi was hit hard by that awful hurricane,” said Jackson. “That’s where our son, Taylor, and his wife and children live now. Noleen and I took our RV down
there. Took us three days before they’d let us in. Couldn’t get a phone signal or e-mail. Thought Noleen would faint when they stopped us at the county line and made us set up camp outside the city.”

  I remembered watching the news from the sofa, unable to move, the same as when the Twin Towers were hit by terrorists. My family was not one to react when bad things happened. Instead we watched, more like it was a spectacle, like it was a place far off that made us glad to be alive. “What was it like, Jackson?”

  “Like a bomb had hit the place. Some houses still set in shambles,” he said.

  Delia scooped bean dip onto her plate.

  Noleen served up the enchiladas. “So are you girls going to stay over for Christmas?” she asked.

  “Might we come back here after we go to Louisiana?” I asked.

  Delia blinked. “Huh?”

  “I’ve got business in New Orleans,” I said. “But if we could leave Delia’s car here, say, parked in your carport, we could come back in time for Christmas.”

  Noleen handed the dish of enchiladas to Delia.

  “If you’re determined to go, then at least let your husband fly you there. I’d feel better if you went escorted,” said Jackson.

  “Good idea,” I said. The police were looking for Delia. If Braden flew us, we could travel under the police radar.

  “Braden wouldn’t, would he?” asked Delia.

  “I’ll ask,” I said. “He might.”

  Flying on the jet to Texas had not given me pause. But the thought of climbing back into our Embraer brought back the memory of plummeting toward Wal-Mart. Before the crash I saw my mother in the same manner that people who have afterlife experiences see a dead relative sent as a divine escort. She was dressed in a floral cotton shirt tied at the waist and walking shorts. She did like taking walks along the pond. But she was wearing my grandmother’s tall black hat, and she held a key out to me. It was a delicate key, like a diary key that is scarcely able to lock up secrets.

  “Gaylen,” said Delia, seated in a rattan chair in Noleen’s guesthouse. “Where’d you go?”

  Mother’s image faded. “No place. I was thinking about the crash.” Braden had not answered when I called but phoned back directly. I relayed what he told me. “He’s picking us up in the morning on a trip to Kansas. He asked why Louisiana. I told him we decided to visit Truman and that’s where he lives.”