The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter (2 page)

Cecilia really detested my mother—perhaps the most of my cousins. She thought her soul a muddy, bog-like place—a sewage pit—and I could not argue with any of this, although thinking about her soul in such a manner hurt. The subtle, subversive way my mother talked—always starting out so sweetly, then ending with a twist, an insult—punctured like a dart. For example, she would say, “Cecilia, you look so pretty
—today
—even though you're so thin. Doesn't your mother feed you?” Or, “That beauty mark on your cheek, Cecilia, looks so artificial. Did you place it there with a pencil?” In truth, it
was
real.

Aunt Lettie would tell Cecilia, “When one has such beauty, it can do two things to you—either cause you to have great trouble or to have great luck in life and in Rose's case, it's great luck. We just have to get used to the fact of it—that Rose can, because of how she looks, get away with how she speaks and what she does. Don't you see,” she would continue with amazement in her voice, plus a pinch of bitter, “it never rains when Rose throws an outside party? The sun always shines on her. That's why everyone wants to get married, or celebrate their anniversaries or birthdays, in that huge and glorious backyard.”

It was true—it never rained on my mother's plans, only on the other days, so that her flowers could grow as lovely as they were capable, while the dandelions ran amuck in
the field beyond her elaborate, expensive wrought-iron fence. When very young, I would wonder if the clouds, the rain, the scary rock hail, too, were dazzled by her and also a little afraid of her powers—her wrath if they dared to intrude.

Eventually, Cecilia came to love the freedom of the dan-delions—their unpredictable paths—the independence of their ways. And once, I even said in an almost angry voice to her, “You are lucky, you are special, you do exactly what you want.” Then I paused, took a breath and said in a whisper, “I envy you.” I said this at the point when I got really sick and began to completely disappear, disorienting Cecilia so much she felt herself becoming all dandelion puff—her mind a'scatter. Those were among the last words I ever said to her. Words which I now truly regret, thinking how wrong I was to envy her gifts, given that they were the direct cause of what happened to her with Herr M.

Cecilia's mother
had said
nothing bad would ever happen to my mother,
had said it always
and it was because of this Cecilia found what happened to me impossible and unacceptable. She could not fit it into her mind—it became a chunk of granite that she would never be able to push through any door, no matter how she tried to angle it.

She concluded God had made a mistake. That she, Cecilia Slaughter, was the daughter who should have gotten sick. She was the daughter who should have died. But it was, in fact, my mother who had lost a daughter. It was my parents who were forced to place a daughter in the earth.

On the day I was buried, Cecilia told her mother and father how she felt—about being the one who should have died. Her father, Samuel, said a too-loud, “Hush,” so upset
that his sister Rose was having to go through all of this. Aunt Lettie just remained stunned silent that the myth had a crack, that it had, in fact, split wide open and what oozed out was too grotesque.

The whole family was stupefied that Rose—the golden beauty of the family, of the neighborhood, of the community—had suffered such a loss. From that day, my mother looked at her nieces with an outrage so deep, yet carefully hidden behind her fixed blue eyes, I was pretty sure Cecilia, with her acute eye for detail and ability to pick up on what was too subtle for the others, was the only one who felt the direct hit of it.

That day at my grave Aunt Sonya's face was empty of emotion, for all feelings of loss had long ago been scoured out of her with the death of Celeste, her baby daughter. Uncle Emmanuel wept violently, his tears really for Celeste, too, and because he was prone to making a spectacle of himself.

Cecilia just stood there numb, staring at each of them—Celine, fussing with the flower pin on her too-tight suit, trying hard not to think of Celeste, her dead little sister; Celie, averting her eyes as she always did in any kind of tense situation; Cecily, tapping her foot as if all she really wanted to do was kick someone, which was not uncommon. Michael, Cecilia's husband, stood in back of her, his hands on her waist, helping to hold her up. Joshua and Jeremy were in their late teens and traveling through Europe.

My mother's other brothers and their wives cried hard, while my father stood immobile, stiffly clutching my mother, only the color in his huge face moving tumultuously—from boiling red to violent purple. After the service he turned his back to his nieces. From that moment they ceased to exist.

Cecilia was truly the only one who took on the long, mourning task, as if her whole life had been building to it. She could not get out of her mind how I had called the tumors growing inside me, my dying, rotting flowers. Cecilia, with her dandelion tenacity, could not stop digging into the ground pit of herself, forever looking for the
why
of it. The
why
of
any
of it …

“Survivor's guilt” was what the psychiatrist called it, and perhaps he was right, however crazy he was from his own polluted history, which eventually he told her because he had fallen in love—in love with her. A
bad luck
story because as Cecilia grew up she had become the other side of what can happen to beauty—a beauty which immediately drew Herr M to her, and, ultimately, led to violent acts and conclusions.

“The ugly duckling to the swan”—how Cecilia remembers that book, which her mother read to her over and over when she was little, as Aunt Lettie sighed and looked at her daughter, whispering to herself, “Well, maybe … ”

Cecilia would stare at the psychiatrist, sitting there in his perfectly coiffed strawberry-blond toupee, for an hour three times a week puzzled, until she eventually figured out he had four different ones of varying lengths so by the fourth week he looked like he really needed a trim—which of course he got by returning the next week to toupee number one. It took her three months to figure out this cycle. That is what she focused on while he gawked at her, eventually convincing her that she had to come more often—that she
needed
him—and cut his price to a third of what it was originally. Finally, when he nervously said, “Perhaps I should no longer charge you,” then hesitated, leaned too far forward, and continued, “maybe someday,
and soon, we could go for a ride, and then have lunch,” she fled his office.

She ran to an overweight, bald psychologist who constantly popped Jelly Bellys into the cupped hole of his mouth while he spoke. After about a month he said to her, “You've brought all of your troubles on yourself. Everything is your fault and the flirting with me will have to stop.” Again, she ran—this time to an older, overpriced analyst with his
own
gray hair, who always wore khaki pants, a crisp white dress shirt with the cuffs flipped up like dove wings, which rose and fell through the air as he moved his animated arms, and brightly colored bow ties with lively paisley patterns on them. Here, she felt perhaps there would be some peace because of his upbeat style—that she would be able to talk about me and how she should have been the dead one. She hoped his hearty enthusiasm could help lift her out of the hole where she had dropped herself. Luckily, because she really could not afford him, at her fifth session he said, “You're gorgeous! I want to lick you. I want to taste your sour milk.” She raced out of there quicker than ever.

Alone, she began hurting herself, again. Her tonsure became larger and she made small cuts on her thighs, her arms. Afterward she would dab the sores with Q-tips dipped in alcohol, her body becoming a mess of raw, red dots. No one could see any of this except Michael, who was still her husband. Michael, who tolerated a lot. Michael, who thought her fabulous. “Your hair, your eyes,” he would say with such passion. He was full of so many compliments for her with which she could never quite connect—as if he were talking to a person who was standing a little past her left shoulder. Sometimes Cecilia would even look around to see if she could find her.

Michael did not understand all the fuss about my mother—for what he saw was an aging clichéd blonde—and he would say to Cecilia, “Perhaps you're too much of a threat to her, that all your intensity is too much of a challenge to her own shallow-surface self. Perhaps, that's why she always puts you down in her coyly angled ways.” It was the “she puts you down” part that repeated in Cecilia's mind at my service.

Immediately after my funeral my parents left on a trip to the Alps. They wrote postcards about how “one must appreciate nature. Its great loveliness.” They sent their words to everyone in the family, becoming even more, the family philosophers.

Eventually and predictably, they began to throw their large, lavish parties and, of course, it never rained. Cecilia thought it was because the gods had finally taken their revenge. Always their plan, to let the humans believe in their own perfection, then
show them.
Again, they gave my parents a garden to play in—gave them back their flowers with all the startling beauty that their gardeners could think to plant. “Very Gatsby, my dear Ceci,” was what she told me as she began to write her poetry …

Poetry that eventually got published, though her father underplayed it and her measured mother knew best to only take pleasure in it within herself so as to not make any outside spirits jealous. My parents ignored it, as did the rest of the family, because such accomplishment from the dandelion challenged the family myth, almost as much as my death.

My mother's brothers needed their older sister to be the center—the centerpiece—of their lives. She had pulled them through the worst time of their childhood. When their father died and their mother went quickly mad
afterward, it was she who made the plans for them. She found them each a place to stay with distant relatives in small towns with curious names like “Rock Island” and
“Normal.”
However bad their situation, when the latter name was told and retold to me and all my cousins, including Celie's little brothers, we had to cover our mouths to hide our smiles, because each of us in our own way—at our own level—felt the irony.

And when my mother met my father, the wealthy Emil, how he helped the brothers because he loved their Rose—the blond hair, the blue eyes, the curve of her calves. She was unlike any Jew he had ever seen. Short and squat with a large flat face, Emil could show the world what
he
could have—yes, what money could do. And my mother loved him for all of what he did, and her brothers did too.

He helped them go to school, start businesses, make smart investments, and even bought a cheap building in the city and fixed it up a bit so they would have a place with the lowest rent after they married. He welcomed their young wives into the family and then their children on the implied condition that he and my mother be the king and queen of their fairy tale, allowing them all to sit at their royal “shipped from England” table with the finest linen covering it, my mother presiding at one end, my father at the other and a huge glass bowl in the center with the heads of flowers piled high and floating in it.

Together they built an aristocracy that no outsider within the family could follow with the perfection demanded of them, each falling short—meaning the sisters-in-law. Each with a therapist—social worker, psychologist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, depending on their status, meaning what they could afford. But no matter what kind of help they got, that is exactly what they continued to try to do—follow. Even after my father's sudden death seven years after mine,
the devastated brothers, their depressed wives, and their bewildered children followed.

“Just an overnight, minor surgery,” he had laughed, holding Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past
in his lap as he waited his turn. He wanted everyone in the hospital to know they were in the presence of a scholar—emulating the man he had never met, his beloved Rose's father. That night an allergic reaction to pain medication detonated his heart and killed him. Again it had happened and the chorus cried and sadly sang,
impossible, impossible.

To everyone this seemed even more unfathomable than my death—which left Cecilia totally baffled and crushed, as if I had become, maybe always had been, a nothing too—
a dandelion
—which, of course, was true.

Seven years it took Cecilia to get over the guilt, let go of most of her destructive rituals, and start to publish her poetry. Same as the timing between my death and my father's. Cecilia thought it all “very biblical—the land fallow, then not.” She said this with a wry smile to Michael. Michael, who after all of this still loved her and loved that she was well—or as well as she would ever be, always thinking,
“The weed
forever hopelessly there, just dormant, not dead inside her.”

After my father's death, my mother slowed down some in terms of entertaining and traveling and eventually when the air was warm and the sky too blue, she came to position herself on the large veranda that surrounded our house, at the head of a too-sticky, lemonade-stained glass table. There, she would await her guests who regularly and punctually arrived, a paid companion sometimes standing there brushing or braiding her long hair over the slowly growing thickness at the base of her neck. Celie, Cecily,
and Celine often talked about “the hump” and her hair—how it did not look like she colored it, yet it was impossible that she did not.

Brushing
and
braiding
were the words that stuck in Cecilia's mind from our cousins' reports. She was not there to directly discuss any of this or to view the flowers from the now less well-tended, patchy garden. She was busy saying “yes” to invitations for readings and symposiums—her words like dandelion spores, blowing every which way with the wind, scattering themselves to distant places. Her melancholy words, always embedded in the twists of memory—of family.