Ya-Yas in Bloom: A Novel Read online

  Sidda sat in the high chair, and I swear she didn’t get a thing on that gorgeous little dress. I thought we should take that dress off before we fed her, but Mother said, “Oh no, let’s just put the bib on, everything will be fine.”

  And it was. Everything was just fine. At any moment things could have gotten ugly between my mother and me. But they didn’t. I think it was the flowers. My mother always believed that fairies lived among the flowers. She taught this to Siddalee. These days, when I spend a lot of time in the beautiful garden that Shep has created, I swear I sometimes think she was right. That magical creatures, or at least some kind of energies, are coming from flowers and plants and trees, and protecting us from ourselves. Protecting us from the demons inside that want to eat us alive. Fairies, my mother used to say, are small but strong. They don’t know the difference between work and play. To them it’s all the same. It’s all play. My mother knew about seeds and buds and vines and the life of a garden. Maybe she knew other things that I will never learn. But then, miracles do occur.

  Sowing Sisterhood Seeds

  THE LEGACY OF TEENSY’S PECAN

  June 1930

  In the beginning was the word. And the word was pecan. Or was it nostril?

  There are a million stories in Ya-Ya City, but the one the Petites Ya-Yas loved the most was How Vivi Met Teensy. The children would make their mothers tell it over and over, and if the teller forgot one single part, the children would make the raconteur go back and include it. The teller could add in new elements, but she could never leave out the essentials.

  That’s the way it is with creation stories. You can embroider them, but you must not leave out the fundamental building blocks.

  Everything started with Vivi meeting Teensy.

  Teensy was four years old, and her Mama loved her and her Daddy spoiled her rotten and her brother Jack would do anything in the world for his baby sister. Nobody could ever tell Teensy Whitman what to do.

  One summer day Teensy was bored. She was bored with her jump rope, fed up with her dolls, and irritated by her storybooks. She was irked by every toy she set her eyes on. And so, to keep things exciting, Teensy stuck a pecan—still in its shell—up her nose.

  Now, this pecan was not one of the little ones with the tender moist meat. It was one of those big old pecans, hard and dry inside. A fat one, about the size of a fifty-cent piece.

  Well, Teensy managed to cram that pecan into her left nostril, but she could not get it out. The nut was wedged in there, and nobody could make it budge. Not Teensy’s Mama, Genevieve, who was from the bayou and thought it was funny at first. Not their maid, Shirley, who tried wrapping a hot cloth around Teensy’s nose and squeezing. And certainly not Teensy’s father in his high-ceilinged office at the bank where Genevieve, in a panic, brought Teensy.

  Mr. Whitman was presiding over a very important grown-up businessmen’s meeting about a whole lot of money when Genevieve burst in with Teensy and her pecan. Both Genevieve and Teensy explained the dilemma, Teensy’s voice sounding a little funny what with one nostril blocked. They thought Mr. Whitman might be able to help because he was such a powerful man. But Teensy’s father stood up at his desk and said, “For God’s sake, I am a banker, not a doctor! Go right away to Dr. Mott.” Then he apologized to the other businessmen, whose mouths were hanging wide open at the sight of a little girl with a whole pecan stuck up her nose.

  Genevieve marched her daughter straight over to Dr. Mott’s clinic. Teensy wasn’t worried. She was having a fine time. She could breathe out of her other nostril, and she adored all the attention. Teensy was a little girl who would rather have attention than food or water. As they walked from the bank to the doctor’s office, Teensy called out to each person they passed, “I stuck a pecan up my nose!” She pointed to her nose. “And nobody in town can get it out!”

  In Dr. Mott’s waiting room, where the seats were hard and there were no magazines like doctor’s offices have today, sat Vivi Abbott with her mother, Buggy. Buggy’s real name was Mary Katherine, but her mother, Delia, nicknamed her “Buggy” because her little girl claimed she could speak in tongues. If that wasn’t buggy, that is to say crazy, then Delia didn’t know what was.

  Vivi had a summer earache, the very worst kind because you can’t swim or even get your head wet. Buggy wanted Dr. Mott (who had delivered Vivi) to look inside her daughter’s ear with his little instrument with the light on the end and tell them what to do. Vivi, bored and weary of waiting, wished more than anything that something would happen.

  Teensy Whitman prissed into the doctor’s waiting room, leading her mother by the hand, rather than the other way around. Once Teensy was in the room, she walked to the center, put her hands on her hips, and turned in a slow, sassy circle so that everyone could see her. Then she walked over to the couch where her mother was and sat down. Teensy smoothed her dress, the prettiest dress Vivi had ever seen outside of the movies, a crisp blue-and-white-striped frock with the most beautiful hand-smocked pinafore trimmed with handmade lace. Teensy looked like a girl in a storybook. Her hair was jet black and wavy, her eyes so startlingly dark you’d have to call them black. She was a tiny thing, and her feet were clad in soft black leather Mary Janes with little eyelet holes, with a pair of lacy white socks. Dressy shoes were the only thing that Teensy would allow on her feet—something that would continue for the rest of Teensy’s life. If she could not wear dressy little shoes, then she would rather go barefoot.

  Vivi sat next to Buggy, one hand held up to her sore ear, and studied every move that Teensy made. She could not take her eyes off Teensy. Finally, to Vivi’s great excitement, Teensy’s eyes met hers. Teensy was on her feet, walking straight over to the chairs where Vivi sat with Buggy. She stopped right in front of them and stood, her hand on one hip, and announced with great pride and a slight Cajun accent: “I stuck a pecan up my nose, and nobody can make it come out! But I can still breathe. Watch!” And she took a deep breath and let it out through her one open nostril, like she was demonstrating an Olympian talent. Then she leaned in closer so that they might view her prize.

  “See!” she said, her face three inches from Vivi’s. “It won’t come out. Mais jamais!”

  Genevieve stepped to her side. “Are you speaking Bayou again?” she corrected Teensy.

  Then to Vivi and Buggy, she explained, “Please do not breathe a word of this to my husband. He forbids us to speak a word of Cajun.” Throwing up her arms, she sighed, “Et bien, ma foi! What can you do?”

  At that, Genevieve gave Vivi and Buggy a big smile and knelt down to her daughter, who was probing the pecan with her delicate little finger just for the sheer pleasure of it. That pecan was power, Teensy decided. If she could get a pecan that big up her nose, just think of all the other things she could do in the world.

  “Cher, your father called over, and the doctor is working us right in. Now, please, Teensy, don’t touch that pecan again. I don’t want you to push it in any farther. Bien?”

  Teensy’s finger did not move from the Louisiana nut. Genevieve looked at Buggy and said, “Please forgive my fille for bothering you.”

  Then, taking Teensy’s hand (the one that wasn’t up her nose), Genevieve said, “Cher, apologize to the madame.”

  But all Teensy did was glare at Buggy. She leaned in toward Buggy as close as she could and wrinkled her nose, pecan and all.

  Then Teensy turned to Vivi and asked, “You want to touch it?”

  Vivi was dying to touch the pecan. She stretched out her hand, but before her fingers could reach Teensy’s nose, Buggy slapped her hand away.

  “Don’t you dare touch that, Viviane Abbott!” she said. “You’re here for an earache, not to touch foreign objects that naughty little girls jam up their noses.” Buggy spoke as if touching Teensy’s nose pecan would send germs straight into Vivi’s ear canal.

  Buggy stared at Teensy like she could talk some sense into her. “Child, why did you stick that nut in your nose?” she asked.

&n
bsp; “To see,” Teensy replied, with a nasty little grin on her face, “if it would fit.”

  Then the glorious tiny creature began giggling. The sound of her giggles made Vivi feel like she was standing under a waterfall. Vivi started giggling too, and for the first time in two days, she forgot all about her earache.

  At that moment, the nurse stepped into the waiting room and announced, “Mrs. Whitman, the doctor will see you and your daughter now.”

  Genevieve turned to Buggy and said, “So lovely to have chatted with you.” Then she reached over and touched her hand lightly to Vivi’s sore ear and said, “Se rétablir, cher.” Get well, dear one. Vivi felt for a minute like she did when the priest on Saint Blaise’s Feast Day crossed the candles and blessed her throat. Only Genevieve was a lady blessing Vivi’s ear.

  Vivi watched Teensy and Genevieve walk toward the door that led back to the examining rooms. Teensy turned around and looked at Vivi the whole time. Just as Teensy and Genevieve stepped out of the waiting room, Vivi leapt up and ran after them.

  “Get back over here right away, Viviane Joan Abbott,” Buggy said in a loud, angry whisper.

  Vivi obeyed her mother. She sat back down next to Buggy. She had forgotten all about her earache. She started swinging her legs back and forth, and she knew something good was about to happen in her life. She could feel a happy tingle charging through her whole body.

  Buggy reached down and put a hand on Vivi’s thigh and said, “Stop that. Stop swinging those legs. Act like a lady.”

  Buggy took out a handkerchief and dabbed at her nose. “The rudeness of those two. Downright rude behavior. To march right into the doctor’s office ahead of us when we have been waiting twenty minutes. Rudeness, that’s all it is.”

  Vivi was not thinking about rudeness. She was thinking about how Teensy had winked at her just as she left the waiting room. It was a magical wink, the kind that not many people can achieve, regardless of their age. Teensy knew how to completely close her right eye without the left one even fluttering. In that moment, Vivi fell in love with Teensy Whitman. That wink was a promise. A promise from Teensy’s dark gorgeous eyes that said: You haven’t seen the last of me yet. There’s more where this came from.

  Vivi began to practice winking the way Teensy did. She began planning—just as soon as she got home—to stick something up her nose. Maybe not a big pecan with the shell still on, but at least a shelled lima bean or a thimble. Or maybe even one of her brother Pete’s marbles. In five minutes, Teensy Whitman had made Vivi sure the world was bigger than she had thought it was. Vivi could not wait to see the Pecan Princess again. Vivi was only four years old, but that laughter was something she knew she could not live without.

  On a dare from a pediatrician friend in New Orleans some years later, Dr. Mott took certain choice objects he’d removed from children’s bodies during his long years as a physician and put them under glass. When the Petites Ya-Yas were growing up, they went with their mothers into the updated waiting room of the clinic, which had been taken over and remodeled by Dr. Mott’s son. Unless they were very sick, the children always made a beeline to the glass display case labeled “Foreign Objects Removed from Children’s Bodies.”

  The objects hung like trophies, and Vivi’s brood studied them as though seeing them anew each time they set foot in young Dr. Mott’s office—which was often, since childhood illnesses ricocheted among them with great frequency. Siddalee especially loved to examine this collection of objects. There was the coin section: a nickel, a quarter, a fifty-cent piece, and an actual silver dollar. There was a thimble, a small metal pencil sharpener, and a top that looked like it came from a tube of Brylcreem. Each item was dated. Above all the other objects was Teensy’s pecan. It was starting to crumble a little with age, but it was still intact. The big pecan was displayed in its own small case. The handwritten card underneath it read: “Nut from Teensy Whitman’s left nostril. June 18, 1930.”

  Teensy inspired a legacy of her own among Thornton children. Indeed, so many Thornton kids knew her name from Dr. Mott’s office that, when they met her for the first time, their first reaction was: “Are you the Teensy of the nose pecan?”

  Once, years later, when Vivi and her four children were in the waiting room, they watched a lady walk up to the receptionist and complain about the trophy case. “You must take that horrid hanging piece away. It only gives children ideas. I insist you remove it. It is tasteless and grotesque.”

  Finally, Vivi, unable to endure any more of the lady’s harping, stood up. “Excuse me,” she said to the woman, “I don’t mean to interrupt, but listen to me, Dahlin: life is grotesque. So shut up and stop your whining.”

  The pecan remained on display in all its glory throughout the Petites Ya-Yas’ whole childhood in Thornton. Not as grotesque, but as a talisman that represented the meeting of Vivi Abbott and Teensy Whitman, members of the Ya-Ya tribe, who made themselves up as they went along and always tried to see what they could hold inside and still keep breathing.

  GOPHER GIRLS OF GOD

  August 1930

  Vivi and Teensy had grown thick as thieves, even though they’d only known each other for two months. They played together every single day Buggy would let them, and Vivi spent happy nights at Teensy’s house, where she got to know Jack, Teensy’s brother, and Shirley, their maid, and the whole rich household, which only grew quiet when Mr. Whitman was home—which was, luckily, a rare event. Genevieve had introduced them to “Coco Robichaux,” a character who had been firmly implanted in her own imagination while she was growing up on the bayou. No one knew who Coco was or where she lived or what she looked like. But she was a bad, bad little girl, and she received the blame for everything.

  Every time a little girl was naughty, Genevieve would say (as her Mère had told her): “Oh, surely you didn’t do that! Only Coco Robichaux could be so naughty as to do something that bad!”

  Coco Robichaux possessed all the faults that any girl could possibly have. Coco Robichaux was the perfect excuse for anything and everything.

  This did not set well with Vivi’s mother, Buggy, not one bit. She told Vivi, “Stop blaming things on that little devil Coco. That’s what Coco is, a devil-girl.”

  And yet the way Genevieve employed Coco Robichaux seemed to have a corrective effect on Teensy and Vivi. At least sometimes. When Genevieve blamed Coco Robichaux for something naughty, they hung their heads and responded, “Oh, that bad little Coco Robichaux. I’m sure glad I’m not her.” Of course, they also used Coco to their own advantage, blaming bad things that they had done on her. The one person who Vivi couldn’t do this with was her father. She had tried it once and had the belt-whipping marks to prove it. After that, she kept quiet about Coco Robichaux around Mr. Taylor Abbott.

  Secretly, the girls chattered constantly about Coco Robichaux. They were always on the lookout for her, girl spies ever searching for the brave, sassy little she-devil “Coco Robichaux.” They knew she was mythical, but they also believed she might be real. How they longed to meet a little girl their very age who could do such bad things and just keep on dancing! Once they thought they saw her under an oak tree with the long gray hair of Spanish moss hanging all over it down by the river. Another time they thought they spotted Coco near the storeroom of Miss Beverly’s beauty parlor, where Genevieve had her beautiful black hair cared for. But Coco scooted around so smoothly, fast as greased lightning. So they were never sure. Not to mention that Coco could disappear into thin air if she wanted to!

  Because Coco Robichaux could be anywhere and take any form, she could be in church, too. Once Vivi and Teensy thought of this, Our Lady of Divine Compassion Catholic Church became another place where they stayed on the lookout for their magical friend. They decided it would be just like Coco Robichaux to disguise herself as the most saintly little girl in church, and then do all sorts of bad things and laugh at people because they thought she was so sweet. Coco would enjoy it all the more because it was in church!

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sp; For several Sundays, Vivi and Teensy had their eyes glued on a little girl who sat with her large family on the Lady Altar side of the Our Lady of Divine Compassion Church. The little girl was one of ten children. The size of that family was a sure sign that they were holier than Vivi’s and Teensy’s smaller families. This girl was just too good to be true. She knelt and prayed and genuflected so perfectly that they were convinced that the girl must be Coco Robichaux in her goody-goody disguise! They loved the girl’s long dark brown braids of hair that hung down to her waist, and the fact that she carried a little purse where she put her own little prayer book and rosary beads. They decided that if they were right, then all they had to do was yank her pigtail, and she would reveal herself as The One and Only Coco Robichaux. It would be a miracle! For weeks they discussed this pigtailed little girl in the patois unique to their friendship. At age four, they already had code words that nobody else could understand. After much conferring, they came up with a plan, complete with signals and timing. They could get into trouble, especially Vivi, but they decided that revealing Coco Robichaux in all her bad splendor was worth it.

  Their target day was Mass on the morning of Friday, August 15, 1930, the holy feast day of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Assumption into heaven. They loved that Mary’s whole body had just flown up into the sky! If that could happen, then maybe the Holy Lady would help them reveal Miss Goody Two-shoes as the true Coco bad girl she really was.

  At Divine Compassion Catholic Church, each family had its own pew, a tradition that was sacrosanct. If a stranger came in looking for a seat, he had to stand rather than sit in an assigned pew. The Whitmans—Genevieve, her husband, Newton Whitman, their son, Jack Whitman, and Teensy—sat in the third row on the Saint Joseph side of the church, which was the pulpit side. Vivi and her family—Buggy, Taylor Abbott, and her brother Pete—sat in the fifth row back from the Lady Altar.