Painted Dresses: A Novel

1

I INHERITED DELIA by default. My younger sister works the night shift at Hamby Furniture Factory. Furniture is big business in North Carolina. Delia, however, lives a small life. But it is often the small life that brings the rest of the world to its knees.

Delia and I grew up in the house owned by my father, who inherited it from my grandfather. Poppy stole it in a poker game.

We are of the age—our late twenties—when most sisters lay down their feuds and settle for an equitable peace. But Delia, not one to go quietly into the rules of southern female engagement, failed to recognize my white flags of surrender. Long after I had burrowed myself into a love match with a Wilmington pilot, Delia continued living a life of discontent. I managed to move around enough the first three years of our adult life to curb her phone calls to me and send her running back to my father to bail her out. He bailed her out of simple crises, like when she ran out of gas or was about to be evicted.

I was artful in avoiding my sister’s dirt. That was why Delia seldom called me, especially before eight in the morning.

It’s Delia, Gaylen. Daddy’s doctor, Doctor Weiss, has called in the family. You best get on the road to home. Weiss says Daddy won’t be long on this earth.

Home. Boiling Waters, North Carolina. Population 2,972, including quite a few Sylers, some living and some dead. Some of the living counted among the dead. Not a town that wooed me back. Boiling Waters was slow in coming out of the chute, so to speak, like the Sylers. It is part of the towns oral history that the main drag of Fifty Lakes Drive did not see real pavement until the last day of 1959. Technology, pavement, and integrated schools all came late to Boiling Waters, the residue of change seeping across our sleepy borders. Color TV, it was believed, sent radioactive waves straight into the body. Accompanying the thrill of talking heads, Amity once told me, was the intoxicating gossip that circulated whenever a Boiling Waters family snuck a color television into the house. Then word spread from Raleigh that color TV was not radioactive at all, but quite nice for seeing Lucille Ball in flesh tones and electric red hair.

My mother loved Lucy reruns. Fiona Chapel Syler. My mother. She grew up in the town next to Boiling Waters. I never knew the name of that town, but it was called The Bay, a spot on Highway 17 rowed by bungalows and a divergence of snaking dirt roads, no mailboxes. On the porch, a washtub and sundry pots kept for starter plants like begonias. The letter carrier delivered house to house, perhaps twice a week, but it was a surprise to the family when a letter arrived, according to Mother.

Our house in Boiling Waters imitated that house on Highway 17, minus the washtub. Begonias were loved like children.

My mother worked at insulating the days of my childhood in as much sentiment as she could muster while describing her own childhood as bleak as bleak could be.

Down in a bureau drawer, when I was on one of my many sleuthing expeditions as a curious girl, I found a photograph that time had sifted to the bottom. A group of neighbors living close to my grandmother gathered for that photograph: ladies in checkered blouses and faded jeans, sunburned around the eyes, and children perched on their mothers’ hips. My mother looked to be about five. She was shyly hugging a porch pillar, standing next to no one in particular. Her eyes carried a perpetually surprised look, hair pulled back into a braid that encircled her head. One hand was grasping a finger on the other hand, as if she was unsure of whether or not she was supposed to be in the picture.

My mother described herself as spirited and strung high like a kite, the opposite of her sister-in-law, my Aunt Amity. Mother often compared their differences, along with the things they held in common, suggesting a sisterhood had silently formed between them. Both Amity and Mother joined their flesh to the clan of Syler unwittingly. By that I mean that before the I-do’s were said to each respective husband, neither of them knew firsthand about the tomcat-like fighters making up the clan of Syler. But Amity caught on to her in-laws and each woman’s divisive nature by watching the criticism that followed my mother into her marriage to my father.

Amity overcame my aunts’ speculations about her through charm. Mother could have benefited from such a talent. The Sylers hated her, though, and she returned the sentiment.

After her stroke, Mother was never herself again. She passed away a year before Amity.

When people die, things get shaken loose. After my mother died, my father fell ill too.

I drove my aging Neon to Boiling Waters. Braden’s Dodge truck, still parked next to my space, the one marked Resident Manager, needed new tires, and I couldn’t pay for them until my next paycheck. Daddy had squirreled away some money to leave to Delia and me, but even after his mind was touched with the dementia initiated by painkillers, I would not touch a penny of it, not a single penny for myself.

I stopped for gas and to call home. Aunt Renni answered and said, Fanny is here already, and then added in that up-and-down voice so characteristic of southern women, They’ve upped your father’s morphine. Fanny was Renni’s daughter and a trusted cousin. In the Syler clan, a trusted relative is rare, like Flamenco-dancers-in-Arkansas rare.

Is Delia holding up? I asked.

Whatever Delia blurted out, Fanny stifled with a laugh. I had not spoken to Delia or heard her low, grating voice in over a year. Perhaps that was the reason that my sister’s voice was frozen in that instant, in midair.

Memory foamed up like waves washing to land: the algae stink of Sharon Creek and how the two of us squatted on the creek bank behind my father’s house, watching ants straddle boat leaves.

How do I describe my sister’s voice? Low like our mother’s, an embarrassed alto, at least her speaking voice was. Mother had an uncontrollable vibrato. She sang an octave above her range, her tiny hands poised in front of her, red from dish soap. Not once did I ever hear Delia sing. I recalled how she sighed on Sunday mornings when Mother sang. She pushed one foot out of the sheet, allowing it to drop down from the mattress over my head. We crawled out of the bed on our knees, shuffling across the hardwood floor, peeking around the corner to watch our mother stage a performance in front of the gas stove. Mother sang every Sunday morning. In winter, she warmed in front of the gas stove my father installed in our living room. Daddy was not a good fix-it man, so our house functioned through his primitive inventions and screwed-together widgets, air ducts outside of the Sheetrock, a bathroom sink hanging off the wall with naked pipe elbows perched perfectly so that Delia and I could stand tiptoe on them to brush our teeth.

Delia and I slept in a bunk bed in my mother’s bedroom across the hall from Daddy. The quiet of Sunday was always wrecked by the Sunday Morning Jubilee, a gospel music TV show populated with a cast of family quartets, most from the Carolinas or Tennessee. Mother threw back her head, her hands on her hips, her small elbows drawn back like wings. TV was substitute church for my mother. Mother turned it up loud, singing, I’ll fly away, oh glory. Delia wanted to know who was Glory. She watched Mother, grinning. But her small, bowlike lips never mouthed a single lyric. Not to the eighties Top 40 and not to I’ll Fly Away.

Mother took us to a Church of God service when I was five, a Baptist church when I was seven or eight. Once we visited a Mormon church, a trip she said was a mistake—she’d taken a wrong turn trying to find a Catholic mass. Her mother warned her that she was bringing up the spawn of Satan if she neglected her children’s religious upbringing. We ended up back home on Sunday mornings, singing with the Greenes.

Delia threw off my mother’s religious accouterments as fast as our little toy dog threw off the jingle-bell harness we fastened to him one Christmas. As soon as Delia turned fourteen, she flatly refused to go to church. When the visitation committees paid a call following our respective visits, Delia rejected Mother’s cues. Mother sat poised in her brown chair as if she herself was from the women’s missionary committee. But when she cued Delia to say something nice about church, Delia would say, WE NEVER GO TO CHURCH, PEOPLE, SO WHY LIE LIKE THE DEVIL? I couldn’t blame her. Mother thought of religion as something you lay in front of children like a doormat. To Delia that was the same as a suspicious option she was glad to walk around.

My sister never left Boiling Waters, its small department stores, the town boys growing up to drive bread trucks, girls coming of age and congregating on Saturday nights at the Blue Water Cafe and Raw Bar.

Some people believe that you can come back and relive your life until you get it right. I assume that right is what you get free of regret. If I could relive my life, saying that I was given a choice, push this button to return to age seven, what have you, I’d relive high school. But not the bad grade I got in Mrs. Juarez’s algebra class or the first time I got felt up by an ugly eleventh grader underneath the water’s surface at the city pool. I would rewrite my life with Delia.

People talked about Delia for saying the wrong thing in polite company or impolite company. She could take an average conversation down to the English language’s bottom-most parts. If my classmate Ellie and I waited out in front of BW High for the bus, talking about Gilda Freeman’s new push-up bra, Delia said things like, I think I have a brain tumor. I got mad at Ellie for laughing, not because it might hurt Delia’s feelings. I didn’t want to advance Delia’s campaigns. Laughter was affirmation to keep up the antics. Delia was an affirmation addict. She fabricated wild fictions, but in a manner so subtle that the unwary bystander might stop and give her a serious listen. Ellie laughed at Delia, the same as our cousin Fanny or Aunt Amity did. Delia made people laugh when she responded to the mis-firings of her disorderly neurons. She did believe a brain tumor grew on the left side of her cerebellum. Mother got a call from the school counselor saying that Delia complained that her family was neglecting her tumor and why wouldn’t our family take her for treatment.

I believed that Delia could be fixed the same as me. If I made an asinine statement that caused all eyes to look away or, worse yet, to stare, I composed a new thread to lead the listeners into a more sobering topic. Then I returned quietly to the herd to graze on teenage silage, the things we pretended to like so we’d coalesce: a boy making it above the popularity blip or beautifully wrecked jeans. I blended. Delia followed her own voices. She raised her voice twenty decibels in a hushed room. If the topic was clothes, she blurted out, I WEAR THE SAME T-SHIRT EVERY DAY, PEOPLE. CAN’T YOU APPRECIATE WHAT YOU HAVE? She brought the conversation to a frozen state, all eyes fastened on her and our mouths hanging open.

I rehearsed a conversation I might have with her after I arrived in Boiling Waters. I was gassing up the car, so I practiced. How is work? I imagined the wink I would give her when she answered, I think someone is putting cocaine in my coffee. I practiced laughing. A woman across the fuel island averted her eyes.

Delia was not a trophy sister. She was the girl my father called a brick shy a load. One nut shy a pie. When school was in session, she was not my worry. But summer’s lottery with Delia fell to me, her personal guide through and around the small troubles she elevated to tragedy.

One June when we were girls, we collapsed on our backs in clover. While I wistfully looked for four-leaf ones, she picked three-leaf specimens and handed them to me, at first with glee. Then she tossed them at me until I screamed. She had no sense of what was common and what was rare.

I topped off the gas tank and hurried back into the warmth of my car. I checked my phone for messages. Braden still hadn’t returned the call I left him about my father. His suitcase was missing, but I was almost certain he stored it outside in the apartment storage closet. He wasn’t really leaving. What a joke to act like he really meant it! He was funnier than Delia.

Raleigh was gray like Wilmington. As the Neon coasted onto the interstate ramp, white tufts blew across the interchange and stuck to the window glass. The sky unrolled like a towel, shaking snow onto us mortals.

2

TOO MUCH COLD RAIN washed mud onto the surface of the lake by the hill where they buried Daddy. The banks turned into a slough. The brown water spilled all the way into the longleaf-pine woods where pigs-eye-sized grapes once grew in our summers. Water breaking to shore, brown as dung by day but always, always beautiful again by night, lapping against the little bluestem. Pitcher-plant fronds parted to lie limply on the stony shore, languishing on the moss.

I divided up the jobs it took to plan Daddy’s funeral. I helped his sisters, Renni and Tootie, select the floral casket drape, a rug of red roses, and then took a half hour to collect my thoughts and write my father’s eulogy.

I called Braden again on Wednesday. Three days had passed since our fight, and he wasn’t answering the phone at the airstrip. Finally he answered, sounding as if he had just crawled out of the sheets.

My father died, was all I could think to say. He didn’t speak for a few seconds and then said, Gaylen, you asked me to leave, so I left.

I didn’t say leave. It was a fight, so how could he remember? Didn’t he know emotional memory wasn’t dependable? You’re coming today, aren’t you? I asked.

I flew the Weyerhaeuser executives to Phoenix.

But you came back, right?

No, I got drunk. My heads not on straight. I got a room and stayed until I could think straight. Did you say James passed? Are my parents there? They’re not answering the phone. I was still holding my breath when he asked, When’s the funeral?

An hour from now, I told him, not wanting Renni to overhear.

He let out a long sigh as if reeling in the miles between Phoenix and Boiling Waters.

He asked, What are you going to tell the Sylers? That I up and left you in the middle of your daddy’s funeral? I wouldn’t have, you know. He then said, Don’t you tell them this is all my doing. You know better.

Didn’t you check your messages? I’d left three. Call me! Emergency! I had said each time. When I tried to form the words about Daddy, the only thing that came out was the breathing you do when hiding behind poise. Are you saying you didn’t check your phone?

Not until this morning. I thought you were calling about the fight. I wanted time to think. Can you postpone the funeral?

The aunts leave tomorrow. I wiped my eyes. Didn’t he know what he was doing to me, leaving me to deal with the Sylers without the shield of an objective outsider beside me?

He asked again. Did my parents come?

They’re in Jamaica, their housekeeper said. I had talked to Anita before breakfast. She worked for his father and helped his parents out around the house. She hadn’t come in until this morning when she found sixteen unheard messages on the Boatwrights’ answering machine.

Braden’s voice broke. He cried easily. I listened to him saying nothing, as if I knew that he was about to ask me, Are you holding Up?

Delia’s not doing so well. She fell apart when we picked out the casket, I said.

I paid tribute to my father’s love of hunting—the minister had told me that when you don’t know someone well, you talk about the persons hobbies. The field outside the church was frosted over, the grass resistant to every human step. The relatives and neighbors seated in the little Assemblies of God church my mother attended on occasion sat nodding and agreeing to the polite things I read about Daddy.

According to Renni, Daddy was not high on church until he saw the end was near. Two days before he died was the first time, Renni said, that he mentioned matters of religion. He mumbled until I brought my ear close to his mouth. Then your daddy told me, ‘I got some things off my chest with the Big Guy. Ask the preacher to say grace over me. I’ll make it good on the other side.’ She whispered that all to me as the pallbearers wheeled Daddy down the aisle. The front wheel got stuck, though. My cousins all looked at one another until Tim Grady, Uncle Tommy and Aunt Renni’s boy, came forward, fiddled with the wheel, and got it moving again.

Daddy told me, Delia, and anyone who would listen that when he was buried next to my mother behind their house, to let the men from the Masonic Lodge serve as pallbearers. Then Renni told me how horribly her cousins funeral went when the Lodge Masons took over. So my male cousins filled in as pallbearers, wheeling my father’s remains out of the church and into the ice blue limousine. Delia and I rode behind in the family car. The funeral-home chauffeur led the caravan out to the acre behind the house where Delia and I once buried a dead pet cat.

The Masonic Lodge officers showed up but hung back, whispering and cutting their eyes at my sister and me.

Delia and the aunts and their husbands shivered in the cold shade of pines under William Hawkins’ funeral-home awning. The cousins traversed the clearing north of the deer woods to deliver James Syler in a rose-suffocated pine box. Tim Grady took the head pallbearer’s job. The guys surprised us by dressing in duck-hunting camouflage, branches sticking out from hats, leaves hanging about their ears. Tim made everyone laugh. Even Delia laughed. Sweet relief that Tim had taken charge! Sweet boy to ferry Daddy back to the earth like the exultant hunter he knew.

Twelve cars were parked on the sticky mud-and-grass acre like rows of coffins below the hill where my father was buried.

The cold mud clotted the streets from downtown Boiling Waters to our family farm. Laudus, my father’s first cousin and only bachelor cousin, gossiped about my father Wednesday after the funeral. He collected old coins the same as my father and talked about the gold and silver market as if the world were about to end, also like my father. He and the other veterans gathered on the lawn, talking over the women’s chatter. They swapped stories about Daddy, prompting Laudus to say, Winter came early for James Syler.

I remember Daddy telling the old man, I’m goin to die just as I come into the world—at winter’s onset. Mark my words.

James Syler came into the world by midwife in the room that eventually became the place where Delia and I slept.

He got his teeth early and could whittle by five, said Laudus after the service. He knew those things. I grew up with James down on Sharon Creek and was still living there until urban renewal bulldozed the place down in the ′60s. But James, he got the luck of the draw. The interstate missed his land entirely by a good twenty miles. James was lucky, lucky like that his whole life.

The veterans nodded and lit cigarettes off one another.

Laudus found God a year earlier than my mother. Daddy called it queer the way Laudus had taken to reading religious books and the Bible. But he liked the old man in spite of it. After the peeved men from the Masonic Lodge left the cemetery, driving off in matching Cadillacs, Laudus stayed behind, lingering, maybe praying.

The American Legion guys folded up the flag on my father’s coffin and presented it to Delia and me. Afterward, they gathered in a circle on the hill with their hands in their pockets. They laughed, telling a funny story about Daddy.

I memorized Laudus standing over my father’s grave, his hands clasped in front of him, and the serenity of his gaze. He was the last to leave my father’s graveside. I envied what he knew about Daddy.

My father told me things over the phone his last two weeks that I did not notice until after he was gone like, Make sure the house is fixed for winter, the plumbing wrapped beneath the house. Be sure to watch after the plumbing, the roof, the Ford, the light bill, and Delia. Take better care of yourself. You’re bad with money, so don’t spend any. Take care of the place, check the water pipes, he said again. He did not ask me about Braden, but he was never one to ask about my husband. Delia needs looking after, he said again. Don’t let her get pregnant or anything.

Laudus’s tires spun in the mud, and then he disappeared into the curve of Winding Lane.

Red clay coated the relatives’ car tires. Bad for the alignment, said Uncle Carl, my great-uncle. He asked the great-nephews to run a hose across the field to wash mud from the cars. Give ye a dollar a car wash, he told them as though the boys would gasp. He threw in a movie ticket each to attend the opening of the Royal movie house Friday night in downtown Boiling Waters. He was a retired cabinetmaker but was given free passes when he installed the countertops for the theater’s concession counter. He called it a genuine downtown movie house, not like the one-theater building shut down last summer. The Royal boasted four different theaters. Don’t let the water run like that! yelled Uncle Carl. The hill hardened into an icy knob.

The constant flow of cars driving in and out rutted the acre surrounding the farmhouse like a bird held too long by the neck.

By the end of the day, Renni was pale. I was the only one who saw her kneel on the floor near my father’s bed. She cried and kept touching a pack of his cigarettes. It was the only time I would hear her say, I miss you.

Wednesday came and went. The funeral behind us now, it was happy Thursday and good morning and we ought to not take so long to gather as a family and sorry for the circumstances. The trio of aunts, Renni, Lilly, and Tootie, were a cloud of gossip and Camel tobacco smoke. The women bobbed and teased their hair into what might have been perfectly opaque helmets were it not for the parlor lamps shining through the thinning fringes. Renni, who was Tim’s mother, smothered Delia and me in big-armed hugs until we slipped away to the front porch. She followed close behind.

Lousy to crash your husbands plane, and what with you all doing so well, Gaylen. Renni meant it in the best possible sense. You staying outside, Gaylen? It’s getting cold out on this porch, she said.

I’m fine, I said. I took the rocker with the creaking leg. None of us could bear to sit in Daddy’s chair. I pulled my knees up into an oversized sweater. Delia rocked beside me for only a moment and then trailed Renni back into the house.

The fog kept most of the men out of the deer woods, all but a few cousins promising one last hunt to honor Uncle James.

When you hear the first round, Gaylen, that one’s for Uncle James, Tim Grady told me. He held Daddy’s rifle over his head. So good of him. Sappy but good, but Tim never shied from sentiment. Delia and I grew up playing with him and his sister Fanny, down by the stream running east of where Daddy kept bees. Tim was the boy who swathed Delia in a surplus of kind words. When at age twelve she babbled like a six-year-old, Tim told her, You ought to be a comedienne, Delia.

Daddy called Tim big for his age and a chump for taking teasings from us Syler girls. After neglecting his earlier studies for the outdoors, he finally got his payoff when he made forest ranger for the state of Colorado.

You’ll have the whole woods to yourselves, I said. Out of respect for my father’s death, none of the neighbors had inquired about deer hunting on the Syler land. Word spread throughout Boiling Waters that James Sylers prostate had finally given out.

Try not to shoot each other, I told Tim and the guys before they headed into the deciduous woods. Two-hundred-year-old trunks and a milky mist hid the quarry. But Tim and a nephew, Fanny’s son, claimed to have spotted a white buck at dawn, sight enough to whet their appetites.

I’d forgotten how warm it still is in November in North Carolina, yelled Tim. Woo-hoo! He gathered our other guy cousins, all tall as pines now, most gainfully employed, at least as far as their mothers knew, and led them into the woods. Five red vests turned pink as salmon in a morning fog that swallowed them whole.

It ain’t warm to me, said Renni, stumbling through the doorway rubbing both arms.

Tim’s in Colorado now, I told her. North Carolina would be warm to him.

I’d not be out on this cold porch, but it’s loud in the kitchen. Didn’t Fanny have a lot of children? asked Renni.

I turned my chair back toward the mound of fresh burial dirt.

Renni dropped into the chair evacuated by Delia. She moved the rocker closer to mine. I’ve done good this week not to ask, Gaylen. You ain’t said a word about Braden. Now that we’re alone, you can trust me. I won’t tell. There was no escaping her.

We’re working things out. He did have a big client to deliver to Phoenix, though. Renni wasn’t wrong about the cold, so I zipped my jacket closed. Braden had to take the only good plane left to Arizona. What else was he supposed to do? It was his way of punctuating his anger, of making me feel guilty after I crashed the new Embraer—and for sleeping with the professor from the university.

Renni stubbed out her cigarette in the tin ashtray I had won for my father at a county fair.

The more I thought about it, the more the affair seemed like something that had happened to another woman in another place. Like I was someone else watching me like my sister watches the war on TV. Instead, I kept the talk light. Braden doesn’t want the family mad at him, I said.

Braden loved your daddy as much as you. It don’t make no sense, said Renni. She kept saying, It don’t make no sense, and staring down at her red cuticles. She and Aunt Lilly had just sliced beets for soup. Your daddy told me he wanted Braden to have one of his guns. So’s he coming in later? Is that the grand plan?