Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells Read Free Book Online Page B

maybe gangsters from the thirties, but when Caro called you “Pal,” she was including you in her own special Bohemianism.
    She was the reason I became a Bohemian at the age of eight. Refusing to wear anything except my black dance leotard and tights, and a pair of dark sunglasses left behind after one of Mama and Daddy’s cocktail parties, I changed my name to Madame Voilanska. When people called me Sidda, I refused to answer. When the nuns called Mama to complain, she told them if I said my name was Madame Voilanska, then that’s what they better call me. The minute I gothome from school, I changed into my all-black ensemble, and added a cigarette to my overall look. I put my hair up in a ponytail, and sat for hours on a stool in front of the sliding glass doors that led onto the enclosed patio of our house, studying my reflection. I did not pretend to smoke the cigarette. (That was the kind of thing that Lulu would do.) Instead, I employed it as a prop with which to gesture. I held the cigarette between my thumb and index finger and used it to stab the air as though I were making some important, unassailable point. These points were expressed in my original poetry.
    My mother has included one of these poems in the scrapbook. It is written in my young Palmer Method longhand, and it’s dated 1961, which meant I was eight years old. I was shocked and touched to see it. My mother is nothing if not a surprise.
     
    Freedom
by Madame Voilanska
     
    26 times I have walked around the house!
I clapped my hands and sang!
Then my hair stood up!
And I did not go back in!
     
    I had loved “bats and balls” ever since the nuns introduced them to us. I could not for the life of me understand why I couldn’t use exclamation points to end every other sentence I composed. Sister Rodney Marie would circle them with mean red marks and write, “Use period, not exclamation point.” At school I finally made myself cut down to using only one exclamation point per paragraph. But in my own private poetry, I used them all over the place. Later, in high school, I discovered that the magnificent Walt Whitman loved exclamation points as much as I did. That, along withhis wondering and exaltation, and tender nursing of dying soldiers, made him one of my heroes.
    I knew that to be a true Bohemian you had to wear sunglasses. This was the most obvious thing that had established Caro as the leading (and only) Bohemian of Thornton. Back then Caro had to wear sunglasses everywhere. Granted, when they had hangovers, all four of the Ya-Yas wore sunglasses, even at Sunday-morning Mass. Caro, however, developed a temporary condition in which even the least bit of direct sunlight in her eyes could make her sick. For a while she had to wear sunglasses all the time, even at night. She would do her errands, even on the cloudiest wet day, wearing her shades. Thorntonites began to get the idea that Caro was weird in an out-of-town kind of way. Many people did not know that she had a medical problem, they just thought she was being a snob, trying to act like a movie star. “Who does she think she is ?” they’d say. Some of the more obnoxious people—“grown men,” according to Caro—would actually walk up to her and say things like “Take those sunglasses off right now and let people see your eyes.” Like Caro was breaking some kind of eyeglass law.
    But to me Caro’s sunglasses were simply the cat’s pajamas. I would try to copy her and wear my sunglasses at night at Pecan Grove, even though it meant I bumped into furniture.
    Teensy had jet-black hair and eyes that were almost as dark. Barely five feet tall, she had an olive complexion and tiny feet, almost like a child’s. She and Mama first met at the age of four in the doctor’s office. The story has become legend in Thornton because it involved a large pecan that Teensy had stuck in her nose “to see if it would fit.” It did fit, and it took Dr. Mott’s delicate skill to remove it. That