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Authors: Katherine Hill

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Cassandra brushed a final daub of powder onto Valeria’s neck and stepped back, regaining her own expression. “What do you think?”

“I wish I’d known her.”

Her mother nodded, liking this, spinning the shaft of the brush in her hand. “I have to admit this is probably the best work I’ve done all year.”

“Mom,” Elizabeth protested, only to be seized by a sneeze.

“Bless you. I’d never say it to anyone else, but I’m serious! Better than most corpses you see.” She set the brush down on the counter, where it rolled, fanlike, until it struck the cotton ball jar. Wasn’t it true, she thought, that the body knows from birth that one day it will cave in and die? And so couldn’t it be said that every action outward was an effort to leave a piece of itself behind? Every sneeze, every child, every love affair? Every work of art. Every dive into water from a boat.

They topped Valeria with her sleek black wig then peeled off their surgical gloves and took turns washing the chalky dross from their hands. Cassandra had put her hair in a ponytail before they began, and after drying her hands, she shook it down. She combed her fingers through it, feeling the hump that remained where the elastic had been. Strands came out in her hand, as they had since she was a teenager. They curled like broken violin strings and, under the fluorescent work light, appeared red only in painted segments.

She recalled afternoons with her father in this very room, before she’d grown afraid. Much of the equipment had changed from those days, but the cotton ball jar, sitting flush against the wall on the countertop, was the same one he’d always used. It was a stable, fairly girthy cylinder, stainless steel and shiny, having apparently been polished rather recently. There was a lid that clicked free when twisted
just so, and the inside was filled more than halfway up with enormous frothy cotton balls.

She looped the hairs around her index finger and waited until Elizabeth had turned her head. Any normal person—and her daughter, God bless her, was normal—would have put the hairs in the trash. But in this moment, Cassandra didn’t want to be normal. She wanted to leave her mark. She removed the silver canister’s lid and tucked the strands inside.

Shifting her hand back to her pocket, she caught Elizabeth’s untroubled glance. Perhaps all daughters were sphinxes, but hers was particularly metamorphic: half recognizable, half not. “You’re just like me,” she’d blurted countless times, to Elizabeth’s great joy as a child, to her great chagrin ever since. But the older Elizabeth got, the more evident their resemblance became, and the more difficult it became to remain silent. Even when Elizabeth disapproved of something her mother did—as she surely would’ve of this—she did it in a way that Cassandra might’ve done. Which was not to say that Elizabeth was not her own woman. To the contrary. For all their similarities she lived by a modern clock Cassandra wasn’t sure she’d ever understand. She brushed her empty hand against her leg, grateful, at least, that Elizabeth hadn’t seen what she’d done.

But Elizabeth had seen. As she glimpsed her mother’s hand withdrawing from the jar, she knew that she had tucked something private inside, and she experienced a feeling of acceleration, like coming around the bend of a forgotten favorite song as it swells into the familiar refrain. She had seen her do this before, back when she was a child visiting her grandparents—before anyone had died or divorced or even broken up, in the days in which time alone with her mother was just one of many possible ways to pass a late summer night.

They went upstairs to check on Eunice, another version of themselves. Old as she’d always seemed, Elizabeth knew she’d been young once, too. Twenty-one when she met Howard at that dance, a government secretary living in a boardinghouse not far from Capitol Hill. Though he’d always claimed he was completely intimidated by her,
something in him had compelled him to down his drink and cross the floor. And something in her was impressed. Elizabeth pictured them moving together for the first time, he in his suit, she in her gloves, tightly trying out the roles they would play for the rest of their lives.

Now she snored under her bedcovers, mooing faintly, but somehow sweetly. More resilient than either of them, she was already moving on in her dreams. Cassandra switched off the nightstand lamp and closed the door behind her.

Still unready to sleep themselves, they went down to the kitchen to load the dishwasher with all the plates and drinking glasses that had been piling up in the sink all day. After the last of Eunice’s prize tumblers had been stationed in the top rack and a shower of snowy detergent mounded up in the plastic dispenser, they sat awhile at the kitchen table with a bottle of red wine Cassandra had stashed away earlier in the week. Elizabeth accepted a glass, but hardly drank from it, while Cassandra leaned forward on her elbow, her cheek resting lightly on her hand.

“Is it over then?” she asked. “Between you and Kyle?” As though Elizabeth had brought up the subject.

The question tired her, but she couldn’t blame her mother for asking. She’d seen how desperately she’d wanted to know these past few days, how urgently she’d been restraining herself.

“I don’t know. I spoke to him this afternoon.” He’d been walking when he answered, and he sounded faraway in her ear, as though a cascading river gorge ran between them. He was on his way to the cop show audition, they’d moved up his time, and the relief in his voice at hearing hers made her want to leap into the river, haul herself across the bony crags and up onto the other side. He was not even angry it had taken her so long to call. He just wanted to see her. She wanted to see him, too, she said, tentatively. Though she knew there were things she had to tell him, things that wouldn’t offer much relief.

“So I don’t know,” she said again. “We’ll see.”

“Good,” Cassandra said, and raised her glass to her lips. The wine caught a strip of light from the fixture over their heads, which cast
a rosy wave across her cheek, illuminating the few dilated capillaries that had in recent years become visible. A dryish rim ringed her mouth and her jawline sagged a bit. In general, though, she’d taken good care of herself, and it showed. She wore sunscreen daily, and more of it when she spent time outdoors. She reminded Elizabeth to wear it too, as though she, and not Elizabeth, were the future dermatologist, preparing to devote herself to the surfaces of life.

Stay young,
Elizabeth begged her mother to herself, and it was almost as if she’d heard. Cassandra cocked her head like a woman on the prow of a ship, shaking her hair off her shoulder the way a changing sea wind might’ve done. It wasn’t fair that Elizabeth would never get to be young with her mother, or her grandmother, that the three of them would never sit together at a table like this one and conspire to take over the world, each of them hungry and fast, with indefinite time ahead. Elizabeth sipped her wine and let the bitterness of this reality soak into her tongue with the tannins. Well, if they couldn’t share time, they could at least share this moment of resignation.

But Cassandra, it seemed, was of a completely different mind. Her eyes were blue-green and open wide, as if taking in an ocean, her hair a red flag of victory, somewhat tattered perhaps, but whole, forever unfurling itself over the waves. Why lament what they could not change? Elizabeth’s mother was still as beautiful as a Disney mermaid, which seemed to mean that somehow, it was not already too late.

Acknowledgments

I
am deeply grateful to my heroic agent, Jim Rutman, and to my editors, Nan Graham and Mary Mount, for their abiding faith and wisdom. Thanks also to everyone at Scribner, especially my lifelines Kelsey Smith and Daniel Burgess, and to Ulrike Ostermeyer, Szilvia Molnar, Dwight Curtis, and Kelly Farber. Thanks to Allison Lorentzen and Gail Winston, for their indispensable guidance; to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, for precious time and space; to my former colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, especially Lois Chiang and Marcia Longworth, for supporting my double life; to Commander Bob, for his christening ceremony; to the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, especially Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Alice Mattison, and Martha Cooley, who encouraged this book in its rawest form; to my readers Kirk Michael, Jenn Scheck-Kahn, Dave Scrivner, Ross Simonini, Elizabeth Farren, and Kate Marshall, who gave me excellent advice; to Freddi Karp, whose wings are always flapping; to the irreplaceable Barbara and John Hill, who bought me books and taught me to learn and who never, ever doubted; and to all the other outlandishly generous people who have cared and rooted for me over the years, answered my questions, and turned up at my door with dessert. Above all, to Matt Karp, my partner in everything, my constant friend.

MATT KARP

KATHERINE HILL
is a graduate of Yale University and holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her writing has been published by
AGNI
,
The Believer
,
Bookforum
,
Colorado Review
,
The Common
,
n+1
, and the
San Francisco Chronicle
. She is an assistant editor at
Barrelhouse
.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Katherine Hill

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Jacket design by Christopher Lin

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012050791

ISBN 978-1-4767-1032-7

ISBN 978-1-4767-1034-1 (ebook)

Contents

Epigraph

Prologue

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part II

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part III

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Part IV

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Acknowledgments

About Katherine Hill

BOOK: The Violet Hour: A Novel
4.76Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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