The Murderer's Daughters
Read The Murderer's Daughters Online
Authors: Randy Susan Meyers
Tags: #Fiction, #Family Life, #Contemporary Women
The
Murderer’s
Daughters
Murderer’s
Daughters
Randy Susan Meyers
St. Martin’s Press
New York
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this
novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE MURDERER’S DAUGHTERS
. Copyright © 2009 by Randy Susan Meyers.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address
St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Meyers, Randy Susan.
The murderer’s daughters / Randy Susan Meyers. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-57698-1
1. Fathers and daughters—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 2. Children of uxoricides—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 3. Criminals—Family relationships—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 4. Abused children—New York (State)—Fiction. 5. Abusive parents—New York (State)—Fiction. 6. Problem families—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 7. Adult children of dysfunctional families—Family relationships—New York (State)—Fiction. 8. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 9. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.E9853M48 2010
813'.6—dc22
2009033570
First Edition: January 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my husband, Jeff, who made my dreams come true
To my sister, Jill, who is my other half
And to my daughters, Becca and Sara, who own my heart
July 1971
I wasn’t surprised when Mama asked me to save her life. By my first week in kindergarten, I knew she was no macaroni-necklace-wearing kind of mother. Essentially, Mama regarded me as a miniature hand servant:
Grab me a Pepsi, Lulu.
Get the milk for your sister’s cereal.
Go to the store and buy me a pack of Winstons.
Then one day she upped the stakes:
Don’t let Daddy in the apartment.
The July our family fell apart, my sister was five going on six, and I was turning ten, which in my mother’s eyes made me about fifty. Daddy didn’t offer much help, even before he left. He had problems of his own. My father wanted things he couldn’t have, and he hungered for my mother above all else. Perhaps growing up in the shadow of Coney Island, Brooklyn’s fantasy world, explained his weakness for Mama’s pinup façade, but I never understood how he missed the rest. Her sugary packaging must
have kept him from noticing how much she resented any moment that didn’t completely belong to her.
Mama and Daddy’s battles were the heartbeat of our house. Still, until the day my mother kicked him out, my father was the perfect example of hope against knowledge. He’d return from work each night looking for supper, a welcome-home kiss, and a cold beer, while Mama considered his homecoming her signal to rail against life.
“How many hours a day do you think I can be alone with them, Joey?” Mama had asked just days before he moved out. She’d pointed at my sister, Merry, and me playing Chutes and Ladders on the tiny Formica table stuck in the corner of our undersize kitchen. We were the best-behaved girls in Brooklyn, girls who knew that disobeying Mama brought a quick smack and hours spent staring at our toes.
“Alone?” Beer fumed off Daddy’s lips. “For God’s sake, you spend half the day yakking with Teenie and the other half painting your nails. You know we got a stove, right? With knobs and everything?”
Mama’s friend Teenie lived downstairs on the first floor with five sons and an evil husband whose giant head resembled an anvil. Teenie’s apartment smelled like bleach and freshly ironed cotton. Ironing was Teenie’s Valium. Her husband’s explosions left her so anxious that she begged Mama for our family’s wrinkled laundry. Thanks to Teenie’s husband, we slept on crisp sheets and satin-smooth pillowcases.
I dreamed of deliverance from my so-called family, convinced I was the secret child of our handsome mayor, John V. Lindsay, who seemed so smart, and his sweet and refined wife, who I knew would be the sort of mother who’d buy me books instead of Grade B faux Barbie dolls from Woolworth’s junky toy section. The Lindsay family had put me in this ugly apartment with peeling paint and Grade C parents to test my worth, and I wouldn’t disappoint. Even when Mama screamed right in my face, I kept my voice modulated to a tone meant to please Mrs. Lindsay.
Mama sent us to take a nap that afternoon. The little coffin of a bedroom Merry and I shared steamed hot, hot, hot. Our only relief came when Mama wiped our grimy arms and chests with a washcloth she’d soaked with alcohol and cold water.
Lying in the afternoon heat, impatient for my birthday to arrive the
next day, I prayed that Mama had bought the chemistry set I’d been hinting about all month. Last year I’d asked for a set of Britannica encyclopedias and received a Tiny Tears doll. I never wanted a doll, and even if I did, who wanted one that peed on you?
I hoped Mama’s recently improved mood might help my cause. Since throwing Daddy out, Mama hardly yelled at us anymore. She barely noticed we existed. When I reminded her it was suppertime, she’d glance away from her movie magazine and say, “Take some money from my purse, and go to Harry’s.”
We’d walk three blocks to Harry’s Coffee Shop and order tuna sandwiches and malteds, vanilla for Merry and chocolate for me. Usually I’d finish first, wrapping my legs around the cold chrome pole under the leather stool and twirling impatiently while I waited. Merry sipped at her malted and nibbled itsy-bitsy bites from her sandwich. I yelled at her to hurry, imitating Grandma Zelda, Daddy’s mother. “Move it, Princess Hoo-ha. Who do you think you are, the Queen of England?”
Maybe she did. Maybe Merry’s secret mother was Queen Elizabeth.
After Daddy moved out, Mama instituted inexplicable new rules.
Don’t open the door for your father and when you visit him at Grandma Zelda’s, don’t say a word about me. That old bag is just using you for information. And never tell anyone about my friends.
Men friends visited Mama all the time. I didn’t know exactly how to keep from saying anything about them. Not talking about Mama meant being outright rude and disobedient, since seconds after he’d kissed us hello, Daddy’s questions started:
How’s your mother?
Who comes over to the house?
Does she have new clothes? New records? New color hair?
Even a kid could see Daddy was starving for Mama-news.
I felt a little guilty at how relieved I was by Daddy’s absence. Before he left, when he wasn’t demanding or, later, outright begging Mama for attention, he’d be staring at her with a big, moony face.
I sometimes wondered why my mother had married Daddy. Because I was too young to do the math and figure out the time between their wedding and my birth, it had never entered my mind that I was the reason,
and Mama didn’t invite girlie mother-daughter conversation. Mama didn’t cotton to anything smacking of introspection. That’s probably why she was so close to Teenie. Teenie didn’t dip into the deeper meanings of life. She’d spend hours and hours judging Mama’s fingernail polish, glancing away from her ironing long enough to pick the tone most flattering to Mama’s pale skin as my mother painted one nail after another.
I flipped the page of
The Scarlet Slipper Mystery,
sweat dripping from my arms. Since I could take only six books per visit from the library, I had to time it right, or I’d be stuck on Sundays rereading the five Reader’s Digest Condensed Books sitting on our red lacquered living room shelf. Green-bronze statues of fierce-looking Chinese dragons with long, sharp tails bookended the volumes. Symbols of luck, Mama said.
Black onyx boxes in various shapes and sizes with mother-of-pearl inlay covers decorated the living room shelves. They were smooth and cool to the touch. Mama’s father brought them back from the war in Japan. Mama’s mother, who we called Mimi Rubee, gave Mama the boxes after our grandfather died because Mama demanded them enough to drive Mimi Rubee crazy.