by Susan Hahn
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.
Though none of this was a cure—neither an ending nor a beginning for her. Only a middle. Like the bowl that was always placed in the center of my parent’s highly polished table—mahogany, the same as my father’s and my caskets.
That bowl. Her mind focused on the intricate pattern of it as she sat for hours in the various hotel rooms before her readings—twirling and knotting, then trying to unravel the long strands of her hair. “Not brushing and braiding,” she would anxiously think, as she wrote about things too intricate, too fragile, too beautiful. “That bowl,” she would recall, “with its careful, intentional, deep carvings, how easily the dazzling, trapped, decapitated flowers and the elegant glass containing them could fall to the floor while attempting to place it in the perfect spot—the gods eternally looking down, deciding who shou
ld be so unexpectedly cut.”
Cecilia was forever there, waiting for its crash, which eventually arrived some years later with the appearance of Herr M …
WIDDERSHINS II
Only a backward spin
my mangled body threaded
through spokes of the leaden wheel,
seated in the spiked metal
interrogation chair—the agony
from beneath. The crown of my head
shoved into the steel cap, the huge screw
tightened at the top, my pressured skull
drilling my teeth into my jaw, eyes out.
The tongue of confession,
then forgiveness, nowhere to be heard—
screaming, I am
running through the blade
grass. Away from the sun,
his unleashed, slash, god advance,
his rage all ways
disassembling me—
this time, to plant. Now, made
to look up, forever face his gaze
if I am to survive.
c. slaughter
WHEN I FINALLY REACHED Lao Tzu he smiled a gentle smile and I very much felt his warmth. He opened his arms wide and his answer embraced me. “Nothing,” he calmly replied to my question. After what seemed like a forever pause, because of how agitated I was, he continued by quoting Hui Hai:
When things happen make no response:
Keep your mind from dwelling on anything
whatsoever.
Then, he added, “There is nothing to do with that which has been done or for that matter with what is about to be done, if you are not the doer. That which has happened, has happened. That which is about to happen, is about to happen.” Again he paused that feeling forever pause, finally saying, “Stay still,” and he shut his eyes. At that moment, I tried not to show my embarrassment—the sudden, acute humiliation I felt—yet I knew he had seen it and could still see it through his quietly closed, translucent lids.
A frantic energy would not stop emanating from me—would not leave me—and I looked away from him so as to shield myself—I hoped—from his sense of me and thought, “If I had just taken some time—a long pause—I could have absorbed it better, and most certainly would not have fled to him in this bone-panic and presented my alarm in a way which revealed that I had learned absolutely nothing.”
I then turned toward him, bowed slowly, and quietly left his presence, yet I continued to feel stupid and terribly unsettled. I knew if I had just stopped and considered the news—considered it with the deep, large world breaths in this place where I now exist—I could have been more centered and remembered how those above the ground so often go against a nature that can positively move them forward, if they are not so quick to act. It takes great negative energy to turn behavior against its natural forward flow, snarl it into troubles which then become, at best, bad habits and, at worst, self-mutilations—physical or psycho-logical—or when turned outward, into a catastrophe such as murder.
Once again, the beating on myself began with the self-defeating language, “If I had been a better student all the time of his lessons, I would not be feeling such a discom-bobulation. By now, I should have achieved a much more balanced composure, no matter what had happened above the ground.” I was judging myself harshly by the parental standards of my childhood and early adult years and falling short. The building disdain I had for myself, the rush and escalation of these musty, old, sick feelings disoriented me as to where exactly I was—what world was I really inhabiting?—and caused a vertigo I had not experienced since the minutes before I died.
I had thought my soul in better condition—more shaped by now—and perhaps it was this vanity, this earthly thought-indulgence, this arrogance that inflated and deluded me into thinking too well of myself—of what a wonderful student I had been during the time of my tutelage under Lao Tzu—that had done me in. I was clearly too proud. Too proud of myself in death like my father had been of himself in life. My father who lies near to me in blown-up ego pieces, which I fear will never be put together well enough for him to understand the possibilities of the journeys to be taken here—all the dazzling depths and peaks just waiting to be plumbed, climbed, viewed, and considered.
I presented myself to Lao Tzu in such disarray, I can only imagine his surprise and disappointment. Although another part of me peeks through my more refurbished crevices, knowing he fully accepts whatever behavior I exhibit. Still, I cannot stop obsessing on this misstep. I know all this inane self-measuring, the degrading feelings I have about losing control, are ancient material and, especially now, self-imposed—old baggage I still lug with me that gets in the way of the peace I long for and which so obviously is still out of reach. Here, I remain very much the immigrant. Yes, I think, “Miles to go … ” as Frost put it, but not for sleep, rather for the wisdom found in the serenity of self-acceptance.
Suddenly, I longed for Wyatt—the man who made of me an ecstasy of the flesh. I wanted to forget my deadness—how my father and uncles had ripped my happiness from me and how much I hated them at the time for this and, yes, now here in this present moment. I once again became all flesh need with its rough, erotic seeds and seediness so as to try to forget everything that had just happened and only inhabit that place of the physical orgasmic surge.
I continued to make excuses for myself upon leaving Lao Tzu—I excused myself for my sudden backward turn to human want and concern, my defense in part being that I am greatly exhausted by this waiting. This waiting for my mother. For her arrival. For she who does not arrive. Like the characters and audience in the play Waiting for Godot, this waiting seems endless. I have begun to think that she never will, if for no other reason than she refuses to do so, that she will not let go of the prize that is her life. She will not let go of the physical shell of who she was—Rose, the woman who always won the beauty competition, always took home the crown; Rose, who still believes she is that young empress of loveliness in complete control of her domain. In truth, she has become like an old tree—its wood weaker because it is harder and more brittle, no longer able to bend with the wind, its branches no longer exquisite, looking more like clawed tentacles.
She was thirty-three when I was born—an age considered old in those days to have a first child, but she was reluctant to give up her figure, however temporarily. So far, she has lived almost fifty years longer than I. I died at thirty-two—one year short of her age at my birth.
Yet, even now as she lies half paralyzed, she grabs hard with her one good hand to that old life. With her one still strong fist she holds it firmly and thinks, “Why? Why should I leave here—this place that has held me so dear? To go where?” She intuits right. Never again will she reign over such a space.
Here, if she does not enlarge herself, she will inhabit a tight corner in a tiny room of withered spirits who think minute thoughts and whine and wonder to themselves and to each other why no one pays attention to them with all their once earthly gifts of perfect symmetry of face and body, money, fame, or sometimes, earned accomplishments—but only for the low motive of trying to gather more power and attention. They reminisce a lot and moan, “Why is no one interested?” Though I wish I did not, sometimes I, too, still hear their voices.
I know my mother will most likely live in such an enclosure here—a small apartment of the heart—but I still long for her. I have been without her for what sometimes feels forever and I have missed her, and I admit with what I hope is just a crumb of hubris that perhaps, when she does arrive, I can designate myself to be her guide. Maybe the loft of such a thought is part of the reason she keeps from me. I think Lao Tzu might agree.
Yet, there is another part of me that is pleased she is not dead. Losing a mother is quite sad, even for the child who has great ambivalence about her mother, even for the child already dead. Among the living I can so easily find her, predict her behavior, even the clothes she chooses to wear, see her in the familiar places she inhabits. I can both decide
to find her and to lose her whenever I want to—death is not like that. Choices are not as fluid, the paths we cut for ourselves, whether with hacksaws or pen knives, are filled with innumerable bramble bushes. The Mother Goose lines easily apply—
He jumped into a bramble bush
And scratched out both his eyes.
One must move slowly here for the ways are clogged with thousands of possible thorny directions and thunderous, innumerable voices. It truly is hard to search out and find the delicate bell music. It is as confounding a place as Wonderland, with all its ramifications. And, yes, sometimes I still do feel as bewildered as Alice repeatedly begging the Cheshire Cat (Lao Tzu?) for directions.
Also, I fear when she does arrive, she might turn away from me. She could. She is capable of such an act. Turn away for eternity, like Great Aunt Eva did from her daughter Adele. A spirit can harden into a forever disregard—an indifference—or non-forgiveness, no matter the blood relation and in life, I was not entirely agreeable to my mother.
Clearly, absorbing the fact of Herr M’s death and its horrific aftermath shook me from my mother-watch trance and I wanted an easy fix for all my upset. I know I could not have stopped the act, even as I saw it arriving—arriving from so many possible people with overdetermined motives. Too many negative fantasies about him were floating in that atmosphere, threatening his earth-existence. Reasons, however skewed, were piling too high like the snow and ice of this too bitter winter in the lives of my cousins and over the graves of those who loved them. I could feel Aunt Esther, Aunt Lillian, and Aunt Lettie—even in her stiffened, frightened silence—egging their daughters on for their own strange and diverse reasons—for their own unfinished earthly business.
While some are stunned to stillness with true grief or just shocked surprise, others are planning to temporarily flee the country from the family’s humiliation, as I rest in my disintegrated silk cloth, which now covers just a few patches of bone. Finally, I have quieted my mind and contemplate Herr M’s death and its terrible repercussions—why it became so necessary for others to consider it and consequently make such a fantasy a reality. And I consider his own brutal acts. How the velocity of them led to this violent conclusion. It is true he was not a good person, but I cannot help but wonder if there could have been a better closure. I think of Lao Tzu’s words:
