Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood Read Free Page B

can’t hear what yall are saying with her carrying on like that.”
    Teensy adjusted the volume on the CD player, and caught Caro’s eye in the rearview mirror.
    “They make them so they don’t even show, you know, Caro.”
    “For the umpteenth time, Teensy, I do not need a hearing aid.”
    Vivi turned her head to face Caro and began mouthing words with no sounds. Necie immediately and silently joined in.
    “Crazy fools!” Caro laughed. “Yall cut that out!”
    “I am still mad as hell at Siddalee Walker.” Vivi took a long sip of her Bloody Mary. “ Slaughtering my reputation in the largest newspaper in the country. Who wouldn’t be livid? But I am picking up beeps on my Mama-radar.”
    “I say always listen to your beeps,” Necie said.
    “It was that photograph,” Vivi said. “This engagement-announcement picture,” she added, slipping the photograph out of her purse. She handed it over the back of the seat.
    “She looked so stunning in that shot,” Necie said, “even if it was rather casual for an engagement announcement.”
    “No, look at that picture,” Vivi said to her friends.
    Caro and Necie both studied the photograph, then handed it to Teensy, who was snapping her fingers in a command to have the image passed to her.
    Caro was whistling Bach’s Brandenburg No. 6. Suddenly, in the middle of a measure, she said, “It’s the smile.”
    “Exactement!” Vivi said, turning around in her seat. “Siddalee Walker has not smiled like that in a photograph since she was ten years old.”
    Teensy signaled and slowed down as they approached an old grocery store, its front gallery caving in on itself.The building had been taken over with kudzu, and vines grew out of the rusted Esso pumps like strange Medusa hair.
    Then Teensy turned left onto a smaller road, where the canopy of the live oaks on either side met in the middle at many spots, so that the four women felt they were entering a magic tunnel. These trees were old sixty years ago, when the women were children. They grew silent and let the old trees wrap around them.
    Not one of them could have said how many trips they had made under these trees on the way to Spring Creek. First as little girls with their parents, then with dates and each other, stealing gas-ration stamps to reach the sacred creek waters. Then all the summers when the kids were growing up, when they’d stay a full two or three months, putting on makeup only when their husbands came out on weekends.
    “She’s smiling that smile they smile before they grow bosoms,” Teensy said.
    “The kind you smile for yourself, not the guy with the Goddamn camera,” Caro said.
    “I had that smile too,” Vivi said. “I know I did. Before I worried about my freckles and holding in my stomach.”
    “The Goddamn sonavabitch point is that Sidda isn’t posing , for God’s sake,” Caro said. “She’s not impersonating a woman who’s getting engaged.”
    “Caro,” Necie said, “you sound so—so— strident. ”
    Caro reached her hand over to Necie’s and squeezed it gently.
    “Necie, Pal, I’m sixty-seven years old. I can be strident if I fucking feel like it.”
    “Malissa says her therapist says I am afraid of stridency. She says I am addicted to sweetness. I do not understand why it is an addiction simply because I do my best to think pretty pink and blue thoughts,” Necie said.
    Caro lifted Necie’s hand and gave it a quick kiss before pulling back into herself.
    “Never listen to your child’s therapist,” Caro said.
    “Wait until their kids’ therapists start weighing in,” Vivi said. “Oh, revenge will be sweet.”
    Necie was smiling and looking at Caro, who now sat with her eyes closed.
    Vivi was wondering if her own mother, Buggy, ever smiled like that. She remembered a picture she’d found with Buggy’s things after she’d died. An old picture from around 1916. Her mother had this huge bow in her hair and was staring soberly into the camera. On the back she