Painted Dresses Read online

  Highway 74 would be less trafficked than Interstate 40 and give us a view of the towns. We drove out of Wilmington and crossed the Brunswick County line. A white cupola surrounded a clean white steeple pointing to the sky. Delia pulled on a loose green string hanging from her sleeve.

  “You need your own clothes,” I said.

  We drove off the James B. White Highway, a strip of road shadowed by a row of naked bay trees, the fruit long eaten by mockingbirds. A ladies’ dress shop called Kramer’s advertised a sale. I parked and led Delia inside.

  The store catered to a mostly retired set, women who bought the brightly adorned clothing only to hang, tags still attached, inside long closets against their everyday drab attire. Delia was fascinated by the riotous colors. She pulled out a dress and held it against her.

  “Jeans are more practical,” I told her.

  “Ladies wear this kind of thing to mass,” she said.

  “When have you ever attended mass?” I asked.

  “Freddy’s Catholic.”

  “Do you want a dress then?” I asked.

  A shop lady watched her from the counter. Her eyes raked over Delia, every light in her eyes scrutinizing Delia’s grating voice and ungainly movements. Delia could not simply walk, of course. She galloped rack to rack, excitedly pulling out items of clothing like an adopted foreign orphan.

  “I’ll show you the dressing room,” the woman said blandly.

  Delia disappeared behind the hand-sewn curtain. I rummaged through a pile of women’s winter sweatshirts.

  A choked gasp emanated from the dressing room.

  Another salesclerk appeared from the back. She held a coffee cup and was looking curiously toward the dressing room.

  “Delia, are you all right?” I asked as if cued. I knew that she was fine, of course, but unfolding a small plan to draw attention.

  She threw back the curtain, strutting onto the sales floor. The dress was not well suited for her frame. It was a fuchsia and white print with a full skirt and long sleeves. She twirled. The skirt fanned out like a parasol spinning in a geisha dance.

  The clerk covered her mouth and glanced at her friend who still had not come out from behind the counter.

  “I want this,” said Delia. She stared in the mirror at the long skirt hanging in chiffon fingertips above her bare toes.

  I held up a blue sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. “Try on?” I suggested.

  She complied, however reluctantly. The jeans and sweatshirt fit her perfectly, giving her more of a shape than Freddy’s jeans and hoodie. I handed her a pair of sneakers and socks. She carted them into the dressing room.

  “Do you carry lingerie?” I asked the clerk. They did.

  She helped me select a half dozen pairs of panties. “Mind if I give her a pair now?” I asked.

  The woman looked troubled, as if shoplifters were afoot on her watch. She acquiesced and asked if she could get me a coffee too. I accepted and handed Delia a pair of panties through the curtain. “Hand me the tags off those,” I said, “and put them on.”

  The clerk appeared with the coffee and gave it to me. “Everything all right?” She smiled in a painful way, as if the training she had gotten her first week was the only scaffolding sustaining her composure.

  Freddy’s underwear flew over the top of the curtain and landed at our feet. “She’s done with those then, I guess,” said the clerk.

  We drove out of Whiteville, past the yards dotted with purple pansies. The day was nearly gone. A band of pink dimmed on the horizon like a fading influenza fever.

  “I wish you’d stop making everyone stare. Everywhere we go, Delia, you have to make everybody in the whole place look at you,” I said.

  “Why you got to criticize me, Gaylen? There you go, like always, picking me apart.” Her tone was deep and full of pain.

  “All I mean to say is that if you have a mad drug dealer on your tail, why do things to make people remember you?”

  “I was only having a little fun. Can’t a body do that without being criticized?”

  I wanted to understand her. “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “Maybe I am funny. Other people seem to think so, other people who ain’t you.”

  “Funny and silly are not the same thing. You don’t act your age, Delia.”

  She pulled a cigarette out and then, remembering not to smoke in my car, sat tamping it against her knee. “Ever heard of being young at heart?”

  “That’s not what that means. It’s like people who have a good attitude about life, that’s all, Delia. It’s not permission to act a fool in public places. Teenagers do it, but not grown women.”

  “You sound like Mama. Pick, pick, pick.”

  “Mother wanted to help. She didn’t mean to pick. Besides, she’s dead. Have respect,” I said.

  Delia shook her head. “She didn’t love me.” She held the vowel in love, almost yodeling. “You don’t know how she did me, Gaylen, at the end. You wasn’t around.”

  “Mother loved you.”

  “The day she died, I went over to her bedside to tell her ‘goodbye,’ like you’re supposed to do when someone is dying, right?” she paused. “She slapped me.”

  “Her sister told me how Mother was that day before I arrived. She had been singing a song about Jesus, Delia. That doesn’t sound like a woman who slaps her daughter.” I halfway believed Delia but wanted to talk about something else.

  “She was slapping at my face, over and over. What was I supposed to think?”

  “That she was a woman on morphine,” I said.

  “You didn’t know her. Why do you think I’m lying?”

  “Delia, it’s hard to know when you’re telling it straight. If you would remember right, then people would believe you.”

  “I remember the truth. I say it like I see it.”

  Delia was a revisionist. I knew that, but she never admitted it. “Do you say those things about our mother so people will sympathize with you? Like, you know, when we were ten and we wanted sympathy so that adults would lay off us?” I asked, thinking that if I used a gentler approach, Delia would finally admit something, allow me a minor concession.

  “She treated me like she treated her son, Truman.” There was a familiarity in her tone, as if she knew Truman better than I did. That was impossible. She was too young.

  “What do you remember about Truman?” I asked.

  “Aunt Tootie told me all the dirt on Mama. I asked and she told.”

  Considering we had just talked about Truman over wine coolers, I doubted her. “You didn’t say anything about him the other night?”

  “I knew if I told Fanny, she’d squeal to Renni.”

  Since when had Delia cared what anyone thought? “Tootie hated her, Delia. Why would you sit gossiping with her about your own mother?” I watched for a highway sign. The meandering maze of Highway 74 was easy to venture off of. It could spit us off into South Carolina and we wouldn’t know it for miles.

  “Tootie knows because she knew Mama before she married Daddy.”

  Even if she was making it up, she had me curious. I didn’t want to talk anymore anyway. I wanted to get us as far as Charlotte before stopping. Listening to Delia’s chatter calmed me more, I realized, when I stopped arguing with her. I took a deep breath.

  “Mama, Tootie said, moved away to California. Truman was young. Like, not in school yet. She lived two apartments down from Aunt Tootie. That’s how they met, Daddy and Mama.”

  “Tootie introduced them?” That was news to me. I fingered the bottom of the steering wheel with my one good hand. That was not the story my mother had told me about how she met Daddy.

  “Tootie said that little Truman would go door to door, knocking and asking the neighbors for food,” said Delia.

  “She lied.”

  Delia was ner
vously tapping the cigarette against one palm. “He was covered in filth, not taken care of by Mama. Naked, he was, and neglected.”

  “Delia, our mother was meticulous. Remember how she sewed for us, kept our clothes starched and ironed, our hair curled?” My frustration grew. “Does that sound like her?”

  “Tootie said she had Truman too young.”

  “Why, Delia? Why would she change that much?”

  “Ask Tootie.”

  Tootie was not like Renni. She was my father’s quieter sister, a brooding woman who seldom made an appearance at the Syler house until Daddy’s death. Even then, she said almost nothing to me. “I never see her. When did you see her, come to think of it?”

  “She’s Catholic.”

  “I see. And Freddy’s Catholic, and apparently, now, so are you.”

  “I like the priest. He’s nice.”

  “Are you saying that Tootie told you all of this at mass?”

  She hesitated. “I saw her at mass, and she invited me over for supper.”

  “Why did Mother never mention any of this before, that she lived next to Tootie in Salinas or that she met Daddy there?”

  “You were born in Salinas.”

  “They were married two years when I was born, Delia.” Mother had made a huge deal about it.

  “You ever see the marriage certificate?”

  I looked for it once, but never found it. One hot summer I stayed inside to keep cool and teach myself how to sew. Mother’s electric sewing machine was difficult to thread, so she let me practice sewing on her grandmother’s Singer treadle machine. The smell of machine oil was suddenly alive in my memory. While digging through a drawer for thread, I found a work card. It was for a factory where she had worked in Salinas. Her name was wrong, typed as Fiona Polette, so I asked her about it. She told me I ought to be an attorney.

  “Was she ever named Polette?” I asked.

  “That was her second husband,” said Delia. “Tootie told me that too.”

  “So she was married to Polette in Salinas?” I asked.

  “They was divorced, and she moved away from Boiling Waters to get work in Salinas.”

  “It’s still not right, Delia. I was born in Salinas and my name is obviously not Polette but Syler.”

  The sky was the color of ash. The sun slipped out of our sight as we drove toward the west. Delia did not talk for the next couple of miles. She was not the kind of woman who liked the quiet or allowed silent spaces in the conversation, so it was a clumsy silence. Finally she said, “Mama was two different women. The one she wanted us to believe was her and then the real Fiona Syler.”

  “You don’t know that, Delia.” Whether or not she was right was not plainly obvious at the time. But what we both knew, or felt we knew, was most likely some combination of the truth of the matter; who my mother was before I was born and why my version of her was so different than Delia’s seemed best left untouched. But Delia could get her facts confused within minutes after having heard the truth.

  “I’ve heard people say that everyone is really two different people,” said Delia. “Not me. What you see is what you get.”

  She was finally right about something.

  Uncle Malcolm, Amity’s husband, liked singing a Randy Travis song.

  Im digging up bones, Im digging up bones.

  Exhuming things that’s better left alone.

  I did not know why that song stuck in my head the whole trip to Cashiers.

  6

  DELIA SLEPT LIKE a newborn kitten in the Charlotte Sleep Inn. The continental breakfast the next morning was tasteless, but she said it tasted a lot better than the instant grits Freddy made her cook every morning.

  “You don’t sleep much, do you, Gaylen?” she said over her doughnut.

  “I keep expecting a drug dealer to bust through the door, Delia, guns a-blazing. I don’t know why I’d think that, though,” I said, not hiding the sarcasm too well.

  “I woke up, and you were standing in front of the window, looking out like you was watching the stars. The streetlight was shining right down on you, like you was being pointed down on from the finger of God.” She laughed. “You know, like when a person in a movie is supposed to suddenly know everything she needs to know and it seems like she’s getting it all transmutated from heaven.”

  I watched her eat for a while, guileless and not once looking over her shoulder at the quiet black guy sitting behind her watching her talk. “Do you ever worry about anything, Delia?”

  She thought for a moment. “Going to hell. You believe in heaven?” she asked.

  “Of course I do,” I said.

  “I worry about that sometimes. If I go on a good day, I guess that’s where I’ll be. But if on a bad day, then hell, I guess.”

  “Lately, I don’t think I’m headed for heaven,” I said.

  “You always are,” she said. “That’s what Mama liked best about you. You was good. Delia was bad.”

  “Maybe I’m two women too,” I said.

  “I doubt that, Gaylen. The last thing I’d believe about you is that you’d mess up. I never seen you make a mistake your whole life.”

  “You’re not around every minute of the day. No one sees every minute of all we do,” I said.

  “I couldn’t be as good as you if I tried.”

  “Delia, life isn’t always about being bad or good. Sometimes people get stuck in situations and no matter which way we choose, it turns out wrong. I get stuck just like you.”

  “I feel like that every day of my life. Like no matter what I do, someone’s going to be mad. I make people mad without meaning to.”

  I told her, “Everyone does that from time to time.”

  “But every day I do.” She pushed away her coffee cup. “Before today is gone, you’ll be mad at me.”

  The black customer picked up his luggage and left.

  “So work on not making me mad.”

  She threw up her arms. “It’s like a big mystery to me, Gaylen! I don’t even know I’m doing it when I’m doing it. So how am I going to work on it?”

  My phone rang.

  Delia said, “Hah!”

  By the time I dug it out of my purse, the caller had hung up. Finally, though, it was Braden. I would call him when I got to Cashiers.

  Delia talked the whole way between Charlotte and the town of Clayton, Georgia. We stopped for lunch. She wanted ice cream and was pointing to a small freestanding mom-and-pop stand. I turned around and pulled into the small lot. I paid for her mint chocolate chip cone.

  “I appreciate you buying my food,” she said. “I know I’m broke and not helping out with the expenses.”

  “It’s Daddy’s money,” I finally confessed. “And you’re not completely broke. He left us money, you know.”

  “When you going to tell me how much?”

  I didn’t answer right away. “I planned to tell yesterday, only you shot a person, and we’ve been busy since.”

  “How long you going to make me feel bad about it?” she asked. She followed me out into the parking lot.

  “It’s a surprise to me that you feel bad about shooting Sophie Deals.”

  “What kind of monster you think I am?” She was indignant. “Besides, I barely scratched her. She put a Band-Aid on it and forgot about it.”

  I remembered standing over the pool of blood at the end of Delia’s lawn. “What if she died, Delia?”

  “You’re getting mad already. See how I don’t even see it coming?”

  “When will you admit anything? Do you ever do anything wrong in your eyes?”

  “Everything I do is wrong, Gaylen, according to you!”

  A woman guiding four children into the ice cream shop stopped and stared at Delia.

  I unlocked the car doors. Delia clambered inside, still stewing. />
  We drove out of Clayton toward Dillard. “I need you to navigate for me.” I handed her the atlas. “Aunt Amity showed me this back way up the mountain to Cashiers. It’s easy to get lost, so try and keep us on the right road for once.”

  “See. That’s what I mean. You got to get your digs in, like Mama.” She slapped the atlas against her lap. As we meandered through Dillard, I saw the signs for the ski resort we would travel past to get to Cashiers.

  She was quiet for the longest space of time, and then finally she said, “How much money did I get?”

  “You won’t get it all at once,” I said.

  “How much?” she giggled.

  “It’s in a trust.

  “Are you going to keep me in suspense?” she laughed.

  “Ten grand a year for a while,” I told her. “But he left us a quarter mil. So we divide that; then your part will come to you once a year, ten thou at a whack.”

  “I’m rich, is that what you’re telling me, Gaylen?”

  “Not rich. You’ll still need to work, Delia. But the house is paid for, and this will give you extra each year to help out with what you make at Hamby’s.”

  She shouted all the way up the mountain, rolling down the window, hanging her head out and whooping, “Woo-hoo!”

  The temperature was dropping to below freezing. “Get your window up, Delia,” I muttered. “You’ll catch something.”

  A cold November front followed us up the mountains.

  Every few yards, we were in a different state. Delia yelled, “Welcome to Georgia!” and then “Welcome to North Carolina!” all the way up the steep slope that snaked along the state line.

  The last vestiges of autumn had died, leaving leafy graves underneath the naked tree huddles in the mountain town of Cashiers. Fog lather-white rolled into the deer woods from Lake Glenville. Amity’s cabin sat in a blanket of fog.

  Delia and I hauled my bags into the cabin.

  Amity’s pantry was sparsely kept by the relatives: a half dozen cans of Campbell’s soup, and, in the refrigerator, a half pound of cheese, a tub of margarine, and a bag of coffee rolled down to the bottom and clipped shut with a clothespin.