Cavedweller
Dorothy Allison
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Acknowledgements
Critical Acclaim for Cavedweller
“Spectacular ... Sensual ... Allison has a spare gospel-tinged lyricism that few can match.”
-Newsday
“Cissy, the cavedweller of the title, a character of mythic dimensions on the order of Toni Morrison’s Sula ... is something to behold.”
—Booklist
“In Cavedweller, Allison gives us the gritty charms and miseries of the place she comes from. She gives us, too, her understanding of pain and of the strong drive to be herself.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A startling and powerful novel about a woman’s painful salvation and a young girl’s coming of age ... and one well worth the time and tears.”
—New York Post “Sensational.”—Esquire
“Funny, heartbreaking ... A brilliant novel.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Cavedweller spans the continent, covers a decade, and traces the lives of four women. It is about grief and sadness and characters crazy with desire to make sense of their lives. A brilliant novel.”
—Virginia Pilot
“Powerful.”
—People
“One of the glories of Allison’s writing is that she refuses to be a good girl ... and that, after all, is what it’s all about.”
—The Nation
DOROTHY ALLISON is the author of Trash; The Women Who Hate Me; Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature; Two or Three Things I Know for Sure; and Bastard Out of Carolina, the acclaimed bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in northern California.
“Cavedweller is about healing: deliverance through compromise, love, hope, forgiveness, reconciliation, and redemption. It is a testament to both the strength and frailty of the human spirit. Compassionate, honest, resonant, and poetic.”
—Philadelphia Gay News
“A woman’s book through and through, filled with women’s suffering, women’s strength, women’s survival.”
—The Advocate
“Voices weaving in and out, instruments going ... lickety-split, [Cavedweller] is more than a ballad—it’s a full-blown hoedown.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Successful in its depiction of the rhythms of everyday life in a small Southern town, Allison’s gift for dialogue is evident on every page.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Moving ... has a restless energy and interesting characters that will keep readers caring about the flawed but valiant women who manage to surmount their private griefs through stubborn determination.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A fine writer ... passages of great beauty.”
—Village Voice
“Impassioned prose ... Superbly salted dialogue ... An altogether wonderful second novel.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Allison has an infallible ear for powerful and painful emotion, and she shows that in her tale of four women who must walk through years of hurt to come together and form a family.”
—Hartford Courant
“Eloquent ... The absolutely dead-on accuracy of the spoken language—the language of rented houses with peeling paint and hard-baked clay for front yards—and the rich rhythms are there.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
“A novel about healing ... You know these women are going to reach a better place, and happy to see them get there.”
—Detroit News
Praise for Bastard Out of Carolina
“Simply stunning ... As close to flawless as any reader could ask for ... When I finished reading it, I wanted to blow a bugle to alert the public that a wonderful work of fiction by a major new talent has arrived on the scene. Please reserve a seat of honor at the high table of the art of fiction for Dorothy Allison. The special qualities of her style include a perfect ear for speech and its natural rhythms; an unassertive, cumulative lyricism; an intensely imagined and presented sensory world; and above all, a language for the direct articulation of deep and complex feelings.”
—New York Times
“This book will resonate with you like a gospel choir.”
—Barbara Kingsolver
“Compulsively readable ... Allison can make an ordinary moment transcendent with her sensuous mix of kitchen-sink realism and down-home drawl.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A hell of a writer—tough and loose, clear and compassionate.”
—Village Voice
ALSO BY DOROTHY ALLISON
Trash
The Women Who Hate Me
Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature
Bastard Out of Carolina
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
PLUME
Published by Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Previously published in a Dutton edition.
First Plume Printing, May 1999
Copyright © Dorothy Allison, 1998
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows:
Allison, Dorothy.
Cavedweller / Dorothy Allison.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-12760-5
I. Title.
PS3551.L453C3 1998
813’.54—dc21 97-43860
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
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For Wolf and Alix, my son and my beloved.
They have taught me all I know about healing the heart.
Chapter 1
Death changes everything.
It was a little after dawn on the twenty-first of March 1981 when Randall Pritchard torqued his Triumph Bonneville off the 101 interchange southeast of Silverlake. The seventeen-year-old girl behind him gave a terrified howl as she flew off the back of the motorcycle, cartwheeled twice, and slammed facedown on the pavement, breaking both wrists and four front teeth and going mercifully unconscious. Randall never made a sound. He simply followed the bike’s trajectory, over the railing toward the sunrise, his long hair shining in the pink-gold glow and his arms outstretched to meet the rusty spokes of the construction barrier at the base of the concrete pilings. A skinny, pockmarked teenager from Inglewood was crouched nearby, rummaging through a stolen backpack. He saw Randall hit the barrier, the dust and rock that rose in a cloud, the blood that soaked Randall’s blue cotton shirt.
“‘Delia,’ ” the boy told reporters later. “The man just whispered ‘Delia’ and died.”
Delia Byrd had been up for an hour, walking back and forth in the tiny garden behind the house in Venice Beach, thinking about the local convenience store, where the liquor was overpriced but accessible twenty-four hours a day. Eyes on the sunrise, fists curled up to her midriff, she was singing to herself, stringing one lyric to another, pulling choruses from songs she had not sung onstage in five years and segueing into garbled versions of rock and roll and folk. She told her friend Rosemary that there was real magic in some of those old melodies, especially the lesser successes of groups like Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio. Rosemary laughed at the notion of a mantra in the mundane, but Delia found that after a few dozen repetitions of “The MTA” she could unfocus her eyes and laugh at the desire to drink.
“Oh, he never returned,” Delia was singing softly as Randall’s head dropped forward and the dark blood gushed one last time. She stopped then. Something may have passed her in the cool morning air, but Delia did not feel it. Focused on the muscles in her neck and upper back, the ones that ached all the time, she wrapped her arms around herself, gripped her shoulders so tightly she started to shake with the effort, and then let go abruptly. The release was luxurious and welcome. A little of the weight lifted, the weight of more than two solid years of trying not to do what she still wanted desperately to do, to sip whiskey until the world turned golden’ and quiet and safe, until Dede and Amanda Louise, the daughters she had left behind, ceased whispering and whimpering from behind her left ear. She hadn’t had a drink since November, and the strain showed.
I’m tired, Delia thought the moment Randall died. A garbage truck rumbled up the narrow alley behind the cottage. A shabby gray cat jumped the fence with a yowl. Delia’s neck pulled tight again as a shaft of sunlight cut through the tattered palm fronds by the fence. “I want to go home,” she said out loud, and the two girls in her memory lifted their shadowy heads and turned hot eyes in her direction.
Behind Delia, in the little house, ten-year-old Cissy stirred in her sleep and burrowed deeper into the sheets. Her daddy was riding his motorcycle into a red-gold circle of flame. He was laughing and extending his arms high into the bright burning light. He looked so happy that Cissy almost woke up. He hadn’t looked happy in so long a time. “Daddy,” Cissy whispered, then slipped sideways into a dream of the ocean, the water sweet as the rum and Coke Delia let her sip when she was too drunk to say no.
Rosemary called at nine with the news, but Delia had already heard on the little radio she kept set low in the kitchen that opened onto the garden. Within minutes of the report, she had pulled down all the shades and barricaded the front door with a mound of dead plants and old newspapers, hoping the mess would make the house look empty.
When Cissy got up, Delia gave her daughter a bowl of strawberries and a toasted muffin, watched her eat, and then sat down to tell her girl that Randall was dead.
Cissy laid down her spoon and looked at Delia. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’re lying. You’d say anything to keep my daddy away from me.”
“Oh, baby, you know that’s not true,” Delia said.
“No!” Cissy threw off Delia’s arm and pushed her away. “It’s your fault!” she screamed. “It’s your fault! He should have been with us. I hate you!”
Delia said nothing. She had lost count of how many times Cissy had said those words in the last two years, ever since Delia had moved them out of Randall’s house. Keeping still and letting Cissy shout had become second nature to her.
Cissy pushed herself back from the table. “You killed him,” she said. “You killed my daddy.”
“Cissy, please,” Delia said. “We’re going to need each other now.” Delia was still struggling for control. She crossed her arms over her breasts. “And that’s no way to talk to me,” she told Cissy.
“How am I supposed to talk?” Cissy’s tone was sharp and wheedling. “Please, Mama, don’t fall down drunk on the floor. Please, Mama, don’t pass out at the breakfast table. Or please, Mama, don’t forget what day it is and send me to school when nobody’s there.”
Delia flinched as though she had been struck.
Cissy glared at Delia’s pink face. “I hate you,” she said. “I hate you more than Satan and all the devils.” She turned away to hide the tears she couldn’t keep back any longer.
Delia forced herself to look at her daughter. The shape of Cissy’s profile seemed to alter as she watched. “You don’t even believe in the devil,” she said softly.
“Oh yes I do,” Cissy sobbed. “I believe in the devil. He’s the one made you.”
Delia felt the bones in her neck turning to concrete. She wanted to weep at what she saw, the child’s face lengthening and closing against her. The left eyelid drooped a little as it had since the accident, but Cissy’s eyes were Amanda Louise’s eyes, her mouth the exact shape of lost baby Dede’s.
Slowly Cissy, the daughter Delia had always sworn was pure Randall and none of her, had grown more and more like the babies Delia had left behind. With every day Delia was sober, Cissy became more pale and cold, more angry and hurt. In Delia’s dreams her girls became one creature, one keening source of anguish, one child monster damning her name.
“I hate you,” Cissy said, and it was as if Delia’s three girls spoke in one voice. “I hate you” became the chorus that slowed Delia’s pulse until she felt as if she were swimming a mud tide, the thick scum of her guilt clogging the chambers of her heart. For two solid years, Delia had scoured her own insides trying not to be what she knew she was—hated and deserving hatred in full measure. She had abandoned her babies and spent most of a decade drunk on her butt. Even the daughter she had tried to protect despised her.
Every time she went back to the bottle, Delia sang the same song. She called it the hatred song, the I-deserve-to-die song. It had no words but Cissy’s curse, no melody but Delia’s own pulse. Sunrise-sunset-goddamn-me-to-hell song. Delia sang it the way she had sung for Mud Dog, with her whole soul and every ounce of her blood. People said that hearing Delia Byrd sing in concert was like hearing heartbreak in a whole new key. Her voice could make you sweat, make you move, make you want to lift your hands and pull justice out of the air. But the song Delia sang inside herself was me
aner than anything anyone ever heard onstage. It was almost meaner than she could stand.
When Rosemary came over that afternoon, Delia was sitting on the hassock near the big leather couch, turning over the same six photographs and humming “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Three of the pictures were in color. One showed Delia leaning back against a lazy-eyed Randall, the infant Cissy cradled in her arms. Another showed Cissy at five, riding Randall’s neck with a big smile and bigger eyes. The third, dated two years later, captured them in the same pose, but Randall was noticeably thinner, his face gray and lined, and Cissy wore an awkward bandage over her left eye.
The other three photographs were black-and-white snapshots with cracked edges. Delia fingered them tenderly. In the top one she was holding a baby exactly as she held Cissy in the color photo. A solemn-faced toddler was beside her, and leaning in over her shoulder was a man with washed-out features and stunned, angry eyes. Delia put her thumb over his face and stopped singing. “Damn you,” she said, and looked up to find Rosemary watching her.
Without a word Rosemary picked up the two remaining photos. That man—Clint Windsor—lifting the toddler, Amanda, in front of a small frame house with a bare dirt yard and a porch half shaded by an awkwardly hung madras bedspread; and then baby Amanda, with her wispy blond hair pulled staight up into a knot at the top of her head, and baby Dede, hair just as blond and fine barely visible in the faded photograph, the two bracketing a dark-haired older woman whose hands were linked into a clumsy praying fist. The woman’s eyes were on her hands, but the girls were looking straight out at the camera, eyes enormous and fixed.
