Painted Dresses Page 9

  “But you didn’t answer.” She gasped, and then she pointed at me, her pointer finger spinning. “Nuh-huh!”

  “You think I’m incapable of being bad, is that it?”

  Delia threw back her head in glee. She laughed and slapped the top of her leg.

  “Why do you think everyone is perfect?” I asked. “There’s nothing about me that is essentially good.”

  She kept laughing maniacally.

  I hated Delia more than I had ever hated her. At first I thought it was because she was laughing at me in my vulnerable state. But it was more than that. She could drink and have sex with different men and everyone expected it of her. But me, I had to make the right choices and put on a front for the Sylers and go to church alone on Sundays while Braden slept in. I was the good wife, the obedient daughter. “I’m only funning you, Delia. You’re right. I wouldn’t,” I lied.

  Delia fell quiet and then looked sad. “I didn’t know what to say. You’re the only hope I have that there’s good in the world.”

  A Sunday school scripture came back to me. It must have stuck inside of me like a poppy seed in a kidney. “There is no one good. No not one,” I said.

  In the same manner that Aunt Renni believed that I would rise above my parents’ emotional struggles, Delia believed that I was good; a good wife, a good daughter, a good person. When she was with Lee, she sent me a birthday card with an angel on the front. It was the only card she ever mailed to me. She had drawn an arrow that pointed to the halo and scrawled, “this is u.” Since she was not overly fond of me and harbored a growing resentment dating back to the way we warred through most of our younger years, it seems that it would hit her that if I were truly good, the same goodness she saw me doling out to Braden or my mother would be given to her too.

  The foothills were dotted with small jump-started towns that had sold their colloquial souls to franchised restaurants and strip malls. “Let’s stop to eat,” I said. It was already thirty minutes short of the noon hour. “But not here. Asheville.”

  “But you’re still the person I know, aren’t you?” she asked.

  I wanted to tell her to pipe down, that I was the oldest, the smartest; she could never understand me. But even I did not know why I had failed my husband. I had never been able to answer Braden completely confident that I knew the answer, so what to say to her was even less clear. Revenge, I said once, because of a flirtation Braden had had with a nineteen-year-old college girl. But even that was not completely the reason. Something that I couldn’t put into words had divided my soul. Explaining it to Delia while she wallowed in a curious, self-satisfied euphoria would be more painful than I imagined in my worst horrors. “I’m like everyone else, Delia; the Gaylen that people think they know and then another Gaylen.”

  She lit a cigarette as if she knew I wouldn’t stop her. “I get that,” she said.

  While we took the Georgia pass up through Sky Valley ski resort on the way to Cashiers, we came back the route most tourists take, through Interstate 40. Braden told me once the Georgia pass would cut two hours off the trip. After what the apple seller told us, though, I wish that I had gone the back way home through Georgia too. Mason Freeman could be right behind us. I willed myself to stop watching the rearview mirror down the Carolina highway through Asheville.

  “I need a beer,” said Delia. “Something fierce.”

  I drove through the quaint town of Asheville and the bustling commerce around the Biltmore castle. Braden and I once stopped at La Paz for tamales. I figured Delia had tried only the canned kind. I made several wrong turns but finally turned up at the road that encircled the restaurant. I parked in the only space left open by shoppers out in full force.

  We took the indoor seating although the sun had come out and the temperatures climbed into the sixties. I was more at ease hiding inside the darkened barlike restaurant.

  Delia ordered a Corona while I got a club soda. She greedily gulped down salsa and blue tortillas, swigging it all down with beer. I asked for a taste of the Corona. “Don’t stare, Delia,” I said. I sipped her beer and tasted it with the food. I had to take several swigs before I understood the flavor that Braden once tried to explain to me. The beer was bland, but Delia liked how it mixed with the blue corn chips.

  “You want one, ma’am?” The waitress had come to refresh the tortilla basket.

  “I’m a sweet tea person. Don’t have much of a taste for it,” I said.

  “Ever try a Long Island iced tea?” the server asked.

  Delia laughed. She knew more about booze and boys than me in high school, so she was laughing at my lack of knowing how to order a drink. At least that’s what I thought. “I’ll have one of those,” I said and then added, “Keep them coming.”

  The tamales arrived, and by then we were on our second drink. Delia was impressed with the food. The men she dated or married had never seen her as the kind of woman to take to a restaurant.

  I asked her about Freddy. “What made you decide to date a married man?” I asked. “Or did you know?”

  “I fell in love with Freddy. He was nice to me.”

  The drink was taking effect. I felt relaxed. I ordered us a bread pudding to split.

  “I see the way you look at me, like Mama used to look at me, Gaylen,” she said. “I know you judge me.”

  “Worry and judging are not the same,” I said.

  “No one asked you to worry about me. Did I?” She set down her empty bottle. “I did not.”

  The waitress cleared away the bottles and placed the bread pudding between us. “Anything else?”

  Delia held up three fingers, pinky finger out.

  “Another Corona. I guess you’re finished, ma’am,” she said to me. “Those Long Islands will put you on your back.”

  I thought she was kidding. “One more,” I said. “Delia, did it occur to you that I don’t like to see you used by the men you let into your life?”

  “My choice,” she said.

  I knew that. But I remembered the day that Lee told her he was leaving. She was nearly violent. Mama was afraid that she would hit one of us. “Give me one reason to leave you to your own devices, Delia. I’d like to know that you’re going to be all right.”

  “Daddy never let me figure things out on my own. He told me every move to make.”

  But she had gone to him for everything she could not buy with her small paycheck. Daddy owned her through the conduit of her dependency on him. “Why didn’t you go and live your own life then?” I asked.

  “I’ve had bad luck.”

  The waitress set the two drinks on the table and then handed me the check.

  I finished my drink, not saying much of anything. I paid the waitress with the bank card I had ordered when Daddy gave me access to his account to pay his bills after he fell so ill. He sat on the edge of the leather lawyer’s chair, one knee pointed at the floor, signing power of attorney over to me. I had not bought myself so much as a stick of gum with that card, so it seemed wrong still to finally spend his money on me.

  I was having a bit of trouble with the signature line. “Can you drive us?” I asked Delia. She laughed at me. She led me out to the car and buckled me in. I cried, knowing it was silly. I was missing Braden and angry that he had not called. I was mad at Daddy for leaving me to take care of Delia. She drove me to a motel to sleep it off. Funny, I thought about Mason Freeman and how for that instant I was not afraid of him. “Frason Meeman’s a twit,” I said. She was laughing at me when I gave her the bank card, and while she parked to check us in, I reclined the seat and slept like a dead woman in the car.

  When I woke up the next morning, Delia had checked us into the Inn on Biltmore Estate, a luxury suite. Braden and I shopped for a mantel clock a block away not a year before that. Braden had asked about the cost of a room and I remember him whistling, then I got uptight knowing he wanted m
e to say that we ought to blow our last wad and stay.

  She was playing a video game, sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed.

  I crawled up next to her. “Did you realize when you checked in how much it cost to stay at the Biltmore?”

  Delia pointed to the bill on the nightstand. I rolled over on my back, the room ceiling moving overhead. “You can’t spend money like that,” I said. “Before you know it, you’ll be broke.”

  She had figured out the beginner level of the game. Every time a space pod exploded, it reverberated in my head.

  “You tied one on, that’s for sure,” she said. “I was tipsy, but not nothing like you. Still didn’t know until this morning I put us in such a posh place. Got to admit, it’s the life.”

  She was wearing a hotel gift-store T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her shoulders. I noticed a tattoo I hadn’t seen before. It was a daisy, small but palpable on the white surface of her right shoulder. “When did you get that?” I asked.

  “Same time you did,” she said.

  I sat up, feeling like my head would burst open like a grapefruit on the highway. Pulling up the sleeve of the blouse I’d slept in, I slid off the bed and looked at the plain daisy tattoo in the mirror. The faint white petals and gold center were familiar. Delia and I dressed alike as girls, until I stopped all of that nonsense. Our last twin outfit was a white knit top stamped with daisies, Delia’s favorite flower.

  On the dresser top was a tattoo needle in a zipper sandwich bag. Delia saw me looking at it and said, “You wanted to save it, like it was emotional for you. I never seen you drunk before. You’re a slobbering drunk, crying and hanging on me.” She continued to smile and kill the Masters of the Universe.

  My tattoo was on my right shoulder, the same as hers.

  Delia kept laughing while losing the video game battle between the planets. Not since she was seven and losing at battle on the playground had she cared to lose. She did not care then, either.

  “We should have kept driving, Delia. This isn’t far enough away from Mason Freeman,” I said.

  “Mason Freeman wouldn’t look here, would he? Why would he? He’d never think of me hiding out in a castle.”

  Delia had a surprising way of making sense when I least expected it.

  8

  IT TOOK ALL DAY to drive to Edenton. If Amity had not left one of the dresses to Boo, I might have never pulled into the pretty coastal town. I did not know what caused Boo and Thomas to leave Boiling Waters and move to Edenton.

  My dim recollection of the woman the Sylers called Auntie Boo was embedded in a single memory. It was at the foot of our driveway, back in the days when my father dumped gravel down the long rutted path from our house to the road to give his car traction, that Boo and I had an encounter that seemed like nothing and everything. Auntie Boo and her husband, Thomas, lived down the street from us. Thomas liked to fish in our pond. Boo mostly stayed home, but she needed the money, so she watched Delia and me while Mother worked a shift at Weyerhaeuser. Back then everyone could get a job there.

  I recalled how I sensed Boos impatience with Delia and me. I did not understand how women judged my mother back then, so I could only sense how I was treated. The further I distanced myself from the Sylers, I noticed as I came of age, the more respect I got. Perhaps it was not me that she disliked, I reasoned on the way to her house. But dredging up memories from the mental files dating back to when I was a kid was risky. It seemed as if even back then I knew to store whatever I saw as if somehow, later on, an adult’s perception would reinterpret the memory and cough up a secret.

  When my mother took the job at the lumbermill, Delia and I needed a sitter. Boo lived close by. Most of my days with Boo are still in a fog. I recall only one moment.

  Boo troubled over the mud puddle that formed at the foot of our driveway where I played after a summer storm. She might have thought that my mother was neglectful for letting me play in the mud hole. Or maybe it would not have mattered what I did; she saw it as another opportunity to judge my mother. But when she found me sitting in the clay soup of summer rain, she clapped her hands at me, telling me to get out. She marched me up the driveway and then hosed me down near the garage like she might a runaway Pomeranian. If in my adult life I ran into Auntie Boo at the mall, I’d not have known her.

  “Have you listened to a thing I’ve said?” Delia asked. She startled me back to the present.

  The drive down U.S. 17 lasted for a long stretch.

  “You navigated us good,” I told her. “Do you ever travel out of Boiling Waters?” I asked, with a bit of forced enthusiasm. We had been driving for over ten hours. The fatigue of the road was getting to me. The sun was setting on the cold day’s end.

  “I been to Southport. Went to Prospect once. That’s where Leland’s family’s from.” She looked around for a cafe.

  We crossed the Chowan River driving into Edenton. Gum trees shadowed the brown water running beneath the Chowan River Bridge. A single herring floated atop the water’s surface, its scales glistening beautifully in the dying daylight. A sign read “The South’s Prettiest Small Town.”

  “Looks like you take this exit,” she told me.

  I pulled from my jacket pocket the note on which my aunt had scrawled the address of Thomas and Maurabelle Brolin, the neighbors known by the Sylers as Uncle Tom and Auntie Boo.

  I drove down Broad, and that took me into Edenton’s downtown district, which was characteristic of the places tourists flocked to in the summer months in North Carolina. Instead of stretching malls populated with designer chain stores, the downtown was clogged with boutiques and shoe stores, each one owned, more than likely, by some persons aunt whose sole purpose was to service the locals with handpicked brands selected by a buyer whose taste reached for something beyond that place.

  Delia said, “It’s getting dark. I need a smoke.”

  I pulled into a parking space in front of a cafe. I went inside while Delia stopped on the sidewalk and lit a cigarette. A waitress in jeans and an apron seated me at a table that looked out on the main drag. A church was opening up across the street. People were getting out of cars dressed in jeans, not like we dressed back when I went to church with my mother. We dressed to the nines or else stayed home.

  The waitress filled my water glass. I held up the note that had been taped to the back of the painted dress. “Do you know this street?” I asked.

  She pressed open the note. Turning to a woman standing behind the counter, she asked, “Bonnie, you heard of Elm Street?”

  Bonnie came out from behind the counter. “Sure, hon. I’ll write it down.” She wrote on the back of the note while saying, “You’ll go up Broad back this way, make a left on Cyprus and right on Elm. About the only Elm I heard of anyway.” Turning to the waitress, she said, “Flor, you ever notice all our streets is named after trees?” She then asked me, “You from out of town?”

  Delia walked in blowing out a stream of smoke. She took the chair across from me. She was wrapped in a blanket pulled from my backseat. We both ordered a steak and a potato and then ate, watching cars pull up and people streaming into the church.

  Bonnie, the cashier who may have also been the owner, checked out a middle-aged couple and then spoke to me over the register. “Hon, you need to try our pie. It’s banana cream, but not like you’ve ever tasted.”

  Delia said, “I’ll have some. Me and Gaylen here, we just inherited a quarter million.”

  Bonnie looked stunned.

  I lowered my voice and said to Delia, “You’re not supposed to tell people that. It’s not kosher.”

  Delia laughed, “I want to shout to the world, Gaylen. You know how long I been on the down low with Freddy?”

  “What is that?” I asked her, annoyed. “Some sort of hip-hop language?”

  “I heard of it,” said Bonnie, now fully committed to our conv
ersation. “My kids are in public school. They pick up all sorts of lingo.” She warmed up to Delia, ignoring me. “Girl, if you got the dough, you ought to go down to the Nail It and get you some silk wraps.” She held up her right hand, showing Delia her red nails, decorated with some sort of floral markings the color of irises.

  Delia examined the fringed edges of her cuticles. “I’ve never had a manicure. Can we go, Gaylen?”

  “Delia, you have to consider more than just what you want right this instant,” I whispered.

  “Oh, let her have some fun,” said Bonnie.

  “What are we talking about?” asked the waitress. She identified herself to Delia as Flor.

  “These girls have inherited a million dollars,” said Bonnie.

  Customers were turning around in chairs, craning their necks to look at Delia and me.

  It wouldn’t have done any good to correct Bonnie, to tell her that it wasn’t a million. To her a quarter of a mil, a mil, it was all the same.

  Flor pulled up a chair next to Delia. “I know this guy that helps lottery winners with their budgets.” She stopped as if struck by a sudden thought. “Not that you won the lottery. You don’t have to tell me. But anyway this guy is a money wizard. He can take your money and help you multiply it, you know, like Donald Trump.”

  “I’m in,” said Delia.

  “Could we have the check?” I asked.

  We pulled away in my car and drove onto the main drag of Edenton. Delia was still looking up and down Broad to find the Nail It boutique when I spotted the street sign marked Elm. We passed a yellow bungalow and several brick houses nearly covered over with shrubs. Delia was in a good mood, having exchanged phone numbers with Bonnie and Flor.

  “If you trust every person you meet,” I said, “someone could take advantage of you.”

  “Not Bonnie or Flor, Gaylen. They’re nice. You know, you’d have more friends if you’d learn to open up.”

  “You’re too trusting.”

  She loosened the blanket around her neck and turned the heat up. She laughed, disagreeing with me. “When you meet a certain person, you know right off the bat you can trust that person. Don’t you know anything about people?”