Milk (25 page)

“Come on, Mother,” I said, grabbing Evan's purse and stuffing it under her arm.

One night we had some friends over to meet Evan, who, for the occasion, made her famous enchiladas. “This is how we eat in California,” she told them. “I bet you people've never had enchiladas.” She bustled about the kitchen, her feet squeezed into sandals so tight that her toes popped out the front, her thick, cracked toenails painted fire engine red.

I wasn't supposed to eat the enchiladas, since I was on a diet. I fixed myself a plate of ground beef, carrot and celery sticks, a skinny wedge of melon, and a large gin and tonic, not on my diet but I thought I'd go mad listening to Evan telling my friends her life story and how they ought to have yearly checkups, she was a nurse, she
knew
.…

She began talking about me, my family; how she'd worked for us for almost ten years. “You should have seen Theo, she wore those puffy sleeves and she was tiny, such curly hair! I thought of her as my own!”

I should have told her to stop, but I couldn't. Weak with gin and hunger, I hid in the kitchen stuffing my mouth with Evan's enchiladas, eating them right off the spatula. Then I heard her say, “Theo's mother was a lovely person, until she got sick.”

I stuck my head in the freezer, looking for the ice cream, and then my boyfriend was beside me saying in his Boston accent don't worry, I got her to pipe down, I changed the subject, let's get dessert on the table before she starts up again. I kissed him in gratitude, having known for a while now that I didn't love him and never had and would leave him soon, but that I would always remember this moment.

I saw Evan off at Logan Airport, the last time I ever saw her, Evan who had taught me how to sew, how to shave my legs, how to keep track of my periods; how to keep house, how to cook.

At the gate I held her tightly, breathing in her hair that smelled like air freshener. I promised to see her soon. She would come to Boston again or I would come to California. When in Pasadena, oh yes, I would see her, absolutely. We'd have lunch at Woody and Eddy's. I'd stay the night. We'd never lose touch again.

The recipe box became mine eventually, once Evan stopped working for us. “Let go” is how everybody put it; Evan herself said she was retiring. I was thirteen; I piled my recipes right on top of the old ones. The cards wouldn't fit exactly so I had to fold them over and stuff them between my mother's recipes or stack them on top of Evan's torn-out magazine recipes.

I was never able to change anything about the recipe box, unable to cook from it, add to it, reorganize it, or throw it away. My own recipe box, given to me as a present, somehow disappeared, got lost or dropped in cake batter and ruined—so that my recipe cards ended up in this box.

Most of my cards are empty, I see now—lined, three-by-five cards. In fact, I can only find three recipes: oatmeal cookies, egg nog, and sherry pound cake, using Heinz yellow cake mix and Jello instant vanilla pudding. On each one I drew a smiley face with curly hair—my sad, desperate adolescent logo, as it were, for a girl who so wanted direction, her own mother to teach her to cook.

I have another memory associated with those pathetic smiley faces: being told I needed a bra.

Who was going to do it?

Evan, one would think. But it wasn't her. It ended up being my cousin Susan, Aunt Lyla's daughter, put up for the task. Was this in fact accomplished by family agreement? Was she told what to say? Or did she just blurt it out: “Theo, you know what, I think you need a bra.”

I was humiliated. On the sly I had poked at them with my fingers, prodded them under my books on the way to school—the bumps on my chest that felt like the bottoms of sno-cones, covered over with fat. This was long before Evan started telling me about what boys might want to do to me. I didn't know what the bumps were—mistakes, abscesses, secrets.

Evan bought me my first bra. This must have been after my cousin's informing me that I needed one. Did Aunt Lyla then instruct Evan to take me out and buy me one? (For that matter, why didn't Aunt Lyla get me one, since she was in charge of my clothes?) I'm not sure how the logistics worked, but there I was at Shephard's one day, encased in a training bra, which within a week split right up the middle, whereupon I got something with cups, a tiny embroidered flower between them. When we had to go back the second time, Evan was mercifully subdued.

Layer by layer, I empty out the recipe box onto the carpet. My mother's era, Evan's, mine. There is no recipe for cold fruit soup—what started this in the first place—just zucchini patties, lists for hot sandwiches on English muffins: creamed egg and asparagus, or bubbling cheese with bacon and avocado; wine jelly, guava jelly.… At the very bottom of the box are half a dozen slips of paper detailing various jam- and jelly-making ventures—boysenberry, apricot, strawberry.

Yield: 35 jars @ 12 1/2 c. per jar

I'm not sure why my mother kept these records. To compare costs and yields year by year? For posterity? For me, someday?

There's a tiny corner of blue paper sticking out of the bottom of the recipe box's metal bottom. I fish it out with my fingernail, but it starts to rip; the paper is very thin, pastel. Some kind of origami paper, possibly—did my mother learn origami in addition to Japanese flower arranging? I grasp the small metal bar running up and down the length of the box, yank on it—nothing. I shake the box, imagining I hear the thin blue sheet of paper rattling inside, but it's not my imagination. I know the paper is there; I can see the half-ripped corner, I can see there is more. I turn the box over, wood on the bottom, no way to open it from there. Returning to the metal bar, I pull on it inch by inch, looking for a weak place.

Rising to my feet, I hold the box over my head, hurl it to the floor. The hinges break and the top begins to crack; I hesitate, as though something inside me is about to tear and be broken. Picking up the recipe box, I throw it to the floor once more, then try the bar again, shaking the box and slamming it against the floor again and again until the cracks deepen and the hinges fall out as easily as pushpins, and finally the false metal bottom gives way. Underneath it is crammed with pale blue sheets of tissuey paper, written on front and back, and I'm so frightened that I continue holding onto the box as the papers sail out and seesaw downward, weightlessly, soundlessly.

T
WENTY
-T
HREE

March 5, 1964

Dear Theodora,

There is not one secret or memory, but scores of them splintering into thousands, all wedged and nailed inside you row upon row in the dark, like pelts on a wall.

I know all your secrets, little duck. I share them, I am the cause of them, I have the wrists to prove it. Ragged scars disguised by tinkling bracelets, a gold watch. I have the throat as well, made sore from all the pills and the lies I've had to swallow.

There is no candle out here in the darkness.

Your mother,

Marian

Dear Theodora,

Little girls, smiling faintly, we were body parts to be used, borrowed, and returned, though no longer in mint condition. I was the dutiful daughter, so that Lyla wouldn't have to be. To spare her.

Our father didn't spare her.

Divide and conquer: whenever I think of that expression I imagine tall grass being parted, like hair with a comb. Brutality disguised as a civilizing gesture that everyone can agree upon. Lying down flat, prostrated before the conqueror.

Lyla planned her own escape (more successful than mine, it turned out)—who needed college? She scratched herself to pieces to cover up the bruises, the scratching diagnosed as eczema. Sent to the Arizona desert to recuperate, whereupon every time they tried to send her home, she developed more symptoms. Wheezing, hives, welts. Congestion so bad I didn't recognize her voice on the rare occasions she was allowed to call home.

She was not spared, not any more than you have been, from me.

There is a look on your face I know well, Theodora. The gaze of a deer before it is hit by a truck on the road at night: a knowing look, a sixth sense. You know you are about to die. Do not feel what is happening around you, do not feel your body handled and twisted and forced. Your jaw aches, you nearly vomit; why would God let this happen to a girl, to anyone? Don't think about the details. Your body is a detail, demolished in most respects. Afterwards you are bruised, bruises that float away in the sunlight; you can make everything, your body, your smile, your bruises, float.

Marian

Dear Theodora,

Sometimes I experimented. I don't remember, I was drunk, fed by pills. I experimented on you. A pop bottle or an envelope rolled up small like a finger, or a lipstick, the canister made of chipped painted metal. Lipsticks I didn't want anymore, I used on you. I pretended to need to know how deep you went inside. I didn't pretend exactly. I was drunk; it was a blur.

Sometimes I was gentle, sometimes not. You stared at the ceiling, hardly moving, your eyes open but unseeing—I know this so well, how one can be in a twilight, how one does not feel physical pain.
My arm does not exist from the shoulder down. I am dead below the waist
. How the body is broken into parts, disassembled for the occasion, painlessly blown across the room as if by mortar.
It's just a body, somebody's body. I might know her
. How one can watch from another point in the room, the ceiling perhaps; how one can actually float above the scene and watch, because somebody has to witness this.

What he did to me, I did to you, and I might have done to Charlotte, had she lived.

I don't remember very clearly what my father did to me, only that over the years I became aware of a loathing whenever he entered a room. I came to hate him. Naturally the possibility arose in sessions with my psychiatrist: the fantasy of sleeping with my father. I would picture a small girl who happened to look like me, staring up at the ceiling in a bedroom that happened to resemble mine—or else she is face down in the pillows. Something horrible is taking place on top of her, she is numb from the waist down; something vile and rasping and painful. Sometimes there is a pillow over her head, so that she won't scream, or is it for him, so that
he
won't have to see and be reminded?

This was fantasy, my psychiatrist offered, and of course I was quick to agree.

Marian

Dear Theodora,

One time I came into your room, during one of your naps. Not long after Charlotte's death. I'm not sure what brought me there—if I'd come simply to stare at you, or to harm you, but I found myself at your bedside. As always your eyes were open, and somehow you'd gotten hold of a straight pin, which you jabbed and pierced into your fingers, stopping now and then to suck the blood or wipe it off on the sheets. Those stiff white muslin sheets, do you remember? I sank to the floor and watched you, because in my blurry trance, from drunkenness or insanity, this seemed an enactment of the truth: you were venting the poison from within. I could see it rising in wisps above your small child's body—

Marian

For my daughter, Theodora—

The dead must rely on the living for their vengeance, Theodora. As I am counting on you.

A gun is small, fits into your purse. It's sure and reliable, unlike poison or a knife.

A gun is definite, violent, bloody—as opposed to what was done to us, which was often indefinite, secretive, not always violent. Bruises are but blood under the skin, easy to hide from others and yourself. If you don't look, you won't see; no lingering in the bathtub, no lifting your blouse; no dressing or undressing in front of others, no gazing into mirrors—you know the rules we set for ourselves.

Our father taught us to shoot. Marian and Lyla, lying down on the cool, cool mat.

A shooting range out in the desert, but one could never tell. Appearances were usually deceiving with him, and we were understandably nervous lying on our stomachs; what might he do next? Everything was a surprise with him. Sometimes lovely surprises, grownup necklaces and bottles of perfume, or candy or stuffed animals, new dresses—sometimes the other kind of surprise. This time he deposited a rifle into our arms and told us to shoot. How? we asked. Shoot what?
The target, silly
.

A girl should know how to shoot, he said later on, after we had dutifully discharged our bullets, after we had walked thirty paces to retrieve our targets; we couldn't help noticing the spent bullets lying about in the sand; we couldn't help noticing his eyes upon us, the rifle cocked in his arms.

There is the matter of the gun I bought to use on you, on me, on us. One didn't need a permit or the permission of one's husband; I simply walked into a gun shop and pointed to what I wanted, a small black automatic pistol that fit into my handbag. I picked it for its smallness, its simplicity: it seemed like an answer. “Can you show me how to load this, please?” It was as easy as loading staples into a stapler and made nearly the same sound, the sliding of metal against metal, a click.

“Lady,” the man said, “do you know how to use this?”

“Certainly.” I'd learned on a rifle, but one could extrapolate.

I wasn't really sure why I was doing this. It wasn't a thought-out plan as it would seem, but a need. A need to have this answer in my possession, a say in my destiny at last—in our destiny. But never, never did I think the words: I am going to kill myself, I am going to kill my daughters. The gun was a weapon I kept in my handbag, a comfort, unattached to any action.