The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter (11 page)

Feb. 1

When they grabbed my satchel away

from me, I was left

holding just the string that had helped

to keep it shut.

I tied the string around my hair

making of it a small bow

at the top. This kept my hair out of my face,

for the wind was impossibly harsh.

That day

Mother had made Leah and me go to the line for “Twins.”

I could tell she thought this a good thing—I could tell

she thought we'd be given special attention. I knew

my mother's face so well.

Karl saw us in that line—saw me. He ignored Leah.

He came toward me. He came very close

and touched the string, the bow, my hair.

He chose me. Suddenly,

I turned around and found Leah

had disappeared.

I kept looking for her

until he told me she was

sent elsewhere and

not to worry.

He touched my bow, again.

Called me his

“pretty little maiden.” Then

he asked, “How old?” I remember

saying, “I'm twelve.

I'm Lettie. I'm twelve.”

Feb. 2

A woman shaved all the hair off

my body. Her hands were quick

and rough. She said

it was to prevent lice. I looked almost

brand new. Then I saw

the others

who also had been shaved—older people

now looking like withered children.

They told us how the shavings were “good for us.”

That everything they were doing to us

was “good for us.”

Soon the older people disappeared.

Feb. 3

Karl came back. He touched my scalp

and smiled.

My baldness didn't seem to bother him.

Then, he took my hand

and led me to another room.

Feb. 20

Because I had no choice—this was the life

that was given me—and Karl

kept telling me I was

safe,

I had to believe him—

too fear-frozen

not to.

And I was twelve.

And the red brick building with the small windows

brightened by white frilled curtains

and the picket fence around it “looked safe.”

That's what I told my small, bald, broken self.

Mar. 14

Everything became so familiar, the uniforms,

all of them, the bodies that inhabited them—

the strong, healthy ones, the bird-thin sick ones—

all the smells that were created when they commingled.

This place where life and death

collided and the earth opened herself up like the whore

that she was and swallowed

us into her putrid womb, this womb

became my home.

And because it was my home

and I was twelve and had no choice,

I tried to make my mind think everything would be alright,

but I never truly believed it.

Inside

I was violently heartsick.

June 4

After mama and papa and Leah disappeared,

for the longest time I thought they would come back

and right before the last time the cancer returned,

I had this dream—that they did. They

all came through the door of that red brick building

with the sweet ruffled curtains on the small

windows and found me standing there.

Mama took my right hand, papa took my left—

and we all walked away

together into the clean

warm summer air.

It was only as she got deeper into the diary that Cecilia began to fully understand why her mother kept asking not just for the books about Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Stravinsky, but also for the history books with those awful pictures inside—the books that she dutifully brought her from the library and had to be hidden from her father, buried under an extra blanket in the hospital closet. Her mother was still looking for them—looking for her mother and father and Leah.

She never found anything in the diary that spoke explicitly of what Karl had done to her mother. The closest she came to writing anything sexual or sensual about him was a mention of
his bare, long, perfect legs, his sculpted calves—like a dancer might have.
After reading this, Cecilia thought she might faint—she felt herself grow dizzy, her face becoming too hot, as she remembered Herr M standing above her, naked, with his godlike legs.

Cecilia read the diary many times, each time becoming more and more sensitive to the details—and to the things left out. She had no idea when her mother had written any of this. Clearly, parts of it were quite recent. And since no years were recorded, she knew some of it came from her mother's still quick memory. And with this she remembered how, in all her notes and letters, her mother never put a year on anything, as if she were trying to protect herself from an exact record of
all
things and when they had happened.

After each reading Cecilia threw up and in the last couple of days of her mother's life the guilt of having read the diary—the secrets her mother kept, the secrets of her mother's frightening, small girl life—grew larger and the habit of pulling at her hair from the top of her head became wilder.

On the last day of her mother's life, Cecilia found her mother tearing out the many petals on a small flower from an arrangement her father had brought her. With each pluck she repeated the words, “The man who loves me hates me.” Cecilia truly did not know if her mother meant her father or Karl.

She did this until the flower was completely bald. As Cecilia watched from the doorway—a witness to the flower losing its beauty—her eyes filled with tears so much so that it became impossible for them not to flood her face.

When Lettie saw her standing there, she wanted so much to hold her. Hold on to her daughter forever. Cecilia's breathing seemed so heavy these past few weeks and Lettie worried what had happened with this man she called Herr M had
also made her daughter physically sick. It was then she tried to talk to her about him. She asked her to tell her. Tell her everything. Tell her exactly what he had done to her—her rage against this man who had hurt her daughter in some awful way expanding in her brain, in her heart, pushing at her waning body. But when Cecilia embraced her—held her close—Lettie knew Cecilia could feel how fragile she had become—her bird bones—how she truly was about to break, and she could sense Cecilia's decision that the time for telling had passed as she released her. So they sat there together, wiping each other's faces with soft tissue, taking pleasure in doing this and quietly laughing like small girls—the stripped stem of the flower between them. At that moment Lettie could only hope that someday Herr M would get his retribution from someone—someone would hurt him in the large way he had hurt her daughter.

On that last night, as Cecilia was leaving her mother's room, she carefully wrapped the naked flower in one of the tissues they had used to wipe each other's tears and placed it in the pocket of her coat. On the long ride home she kept touching it in its moist blanket. She could not stop. At home the first thing she did was to take what was left of it and press it between two pages of her mother's broken book. Then, she took the book and buried it deep in a drawer—next to her own most painful, secret thing—never to look at it again.

Aunt Lettie died twice in her life; both times it was February 1.

At the end of each prayer, she'd add her own—

to find someone to marry.

In shul, where the men and women were separated

by an aisle, she'd lament and vow

to change the ways she wasn't good, then

break the fast with family and rush

to dress for the Yom Kippur Night Dance.

There, she'd wait with the girls in taffeta and years

later with the women in rayon knit.

Often she took a man

for the night, let him slide into her

because she felt she could hold him

there, pretend her life was like some

romantic song. Beyond the long somber chants,

the half wails of the chorus,

in the dark she'd start to sing

at the high pitch of happiness,

her appetite as huge as Eve's

before she knew she'd have to leave

the bliss, bow her head

and ask again for forgiveness.

c. slaughter

W
EEKS AFTER AUNT LETTIE'S DEATH,
Celie began to experience an acute anxiety that her mother's sister, Adele, had just died—more and more she was fearing this. If Adele were alive, Celie definitely felt Adele would have told anyone who would listen, “Celie is helping to kill me.” And the fact that I knew that Adele was not yet buried here—was still alive at the time of Celie's heightened worry about Adele's existence—is immaterial. (Adele arrived way over a year later—just a few weeks before the conclusion of the Herr M horror.) It is only what Celie chooses to find out or not find out which is important. Some stories we would rather avoid, not know their endings; we would rather have someone pull them from our minds—if such a thing were possible.

In Celie's case not knowing—not wanting to find out—
was
a form of protection, actually a good defense, from the too heavy responsibility she felt as a child—as if five pound weights had been placed in each of her vulnerable, toddler hands. Her mind and body have ached ever since.

If Celie knew Adele to be dead, she would have thought that she
did
in some way participate in killing her. The truth is Celie knows Adele has had a terrible life—whether she is alive or dead. Not the kind, of course, that you see on the television these days—the unending, awful stories that make the news. No, Adele had an ethnic American immigrant-influenced twentieth-century kind of terrible life.

Adele and Celie's mother, Esther, were separated in birth by two years, Adele being the older sister. Celie's Grandmother Eva wanted two perfect daughters who were better than any of her cousins' American-born children. Eva had never become a citizen of this country, and she never learned to read. Both were secrets. But it was okay
to laugh about the citizen part, especially when their family took driving trips and crossed the border into Windsor, Canada. Celie's little brothers would chuckle about how their grandmother would have to be left there and that would make more room for them in the back seat on the return trip. Eva did not seem to mind such talk—they were her “little men.” That is what she called them. Celie took the threat more seriously, believing they could all end up imprisoned.

Her brothers did not know about the other secret—that their grandmother could not read. When they moved out of her crowded apartment, Celie was nine, Joshua was two, and Jeremy one. They do not have the same memories of that place that Celie does—they pay no important price, have no psychiatric expense. Everything in life adds up fairly easily for them. Both are now accountants, following in their father Benjamin's footsteps. Their tally books are neat and precise, their life ledgers always balanced.

Celie can never wipe her mind clean of her grandmother's screams—her screams at Adele. They are forever background noise—a tinnitus in her ears. Eva would scare Celie so much that sometimes she would hide in the closet and whisper to the disembodied coats how much she could not stand it. “Adele, stop eating! Adele, you're too fat! Adele, no man will ever marry you!” Over and over—those words, “Adele. Adele. Adele. Stop. Too fat. No man will …”

Actually, someone did ask Adele to marry, but when Eva saw the ring she screamed, “You call this a diamond?” Needless to say, the would-be fiancé took himself and his minuscule gem somewhere else and last Celie heard he had married and had two children. “That was many years ago,
so perhaps he, too, was dead,” Celie considered, “but then again, maybe not.”

Celie would quietly come up to her grandmother with a book and ask her to read it to her. Eva would take a quick break from her focus on Adele and say nicely, “No, Celie, not today.” Celie would say, “Tomorrow?” with her nicest little girl smile—similar to the one she perfected as an adult and now always wears at the shop. She did it again and again and often. It was a way of helping her small self release some of the tension she felt from living in that apartment. Knowing Eva's secret made her feel in control—however momentarily. This secret was Celie's bullet and she used it—however metaphorically. Celie believed this made her an evil child, so if she tells you that perhaps she did aid and abet in the killing of Adele, she means it should be taken seriously. She thinks, “I
can
carry a rage as big as the hump I most certainly will grow someday on my all-too-brittle spine—if I live long enough—and this makes me quite capable of hurting a man like Herr M—
of hurting Herr M, if necessary.”