by Susan Hahn
Later in life, when Celie saw the title of one of Cecilia’s poems, “The Sin-Eater of the Family”—although Celie was pretty sure Cecilia did not have Adele in mind when she wrote it, more her own self—Celie thought of Adele in that old apartment, forced to wear a jagged, tilted, tarnished crown—all the precious jewels fallen out of it, leaving just rusted, empty holes. I also know Celie, Cecily, and even Celine—had she chosen to focus on it, which she did not—would think the title more than applied to themselves. Here beneath the ground, I, too, identified with it, which surprised me for I thought I had worked far past the victim concept.
Overweight, out of control, unable to keep a job, unengaged with no man in sight, Adele grew into her mother’s worst nightmare. Adele was not filled with beautiful music, only mood swings—out-of-sync, out-of-pitch, high-to-low, low-to-high—never to become the concert pianist Eva had dreamed for this daughter. The baby grand piano in the living room was never to be touched again, after “Adele failed it”—that is how Eva phrased it. “It” became the monument—the Monument to Failure.
Once, Celie bolted from her chair in the kitchen during dinner and ran into the living room, lifted the highly-polished, wooden cover over the keys and banged on them wildly. She was five. It was a loud, manic moment, similar to one when she was seven and she leapt from the dining room table when Aunt Bertha, Eva’s cousin, came for her monthly Saturday night dinner, her crutches always positioned in the same place against the doorway that led to the coat closet. Celie fixated on them when Bertha was there—could hardly look elsewhere. Polio had crippled Bertha’s legs, but with braces and the crutches she could get around if adults were always on either side of her. Celie thought it a sad parade, but it did not stop her from focusing on how much she wanted to swing from them. She imagined herself an acrobat, flying away from the table—the room, the people. On the day it became too much to restrain herself, she caused an even larger chaos than the piano incident—almost equal to any of Adele’s. And it was not fun. Their curved tops, even with their heavy padding, dug into her armpits and caused a sharp pain. As for flying—she fell.
After Eva realized Adele would never be a joy, a pride, she focused her complete attention on her younger daughter and for a while Celie’s mother made Eva quite proud. But when she met Benjamin—“wild, tanned, handsome Ben,” as Esther rhapsodized to anyone who would listen—Ben, who told her stories about how he and his brothers would run naked through the woods in Michigan, howling like wolves, Esther imagined such a freedom. She thought Ben, with his movie star looks, would be her savior, would free her from the stage, from her mother, from her trapped life—the too many words, the too many directions to be remembered, to be memorized. So when he proposed, she said a quick, ecstatic, “Yes!”
When Esther would speak of him this way and her cheeks would flame with life, all Eva felt was her own world shifting again and growing cold—almost to frozen. With Eva’s awful memories of her first neighbor, Idyth Slaughter, still very much alive, she could not help but believe a dybbuk inhabited that family and one day it would again spring to life and cause great damage to someone—anyone—named Slaughter. So when her treasured Esther fell in love with one of Idyth’s sons, this became an addition to Eva’s list of nightmares.
However, when Ben showed up the first time for dinner, dressed in a white linen suit and straw hat, and handed Eva—not Esther—violets, it was the beginning of Ben winning—winning over Eva—especially after he talked so politely with Eva and Levi about all his plans for the future—all his great ambitions. And a few months later, when Eva tested the water by suggesting perhaps they live with them after the marriage—that it would cost them “almost nothing”—and Ben, without even looking at Esther, eagerly agreed (thinking about all the money he could save and knowing this was even a better deal than what his brothers Emmanuel and Abraham had made with my father—Samuel eventually moving into their building once he married Lettie) Eva was even more reassured, thinking, “Even though he is a Slaughter, I’ll be able to keep an eye on him and make this work.”
She and Levi threw them the best wedding—one they really could not afford—and, regularly and often, she would pull out the pictures from the top drawer of her bureau, spread them carefully across the oilcloth on the kitchen table like a deck of cards and make everyone sit down, so she could talk about how it all was “so perfect.”
Celie often wondered where that other Benjamin went. The Ben who ran naked through the summer nights, making wild and wonderful animal sounds—the one her mother had told her about, described to her with such delight. To Celie, because her grandmother approved of her father so much, he must have died. And she missed him, although she never knew him. Niftorim.
When he finally took his family twenty miles away, something died in Eva—again. And in Celie, too. She did not like the suburbs. They were filled with preadolescent girls who looked like the carefully manicured shrubs that lined the streets. Plus, they talked so much about their clothes. About their cashmeres. Celie had never heard the word cashmere before the move. When they asked her almost in unison, “How many do you own?” she did not know what to say and ran home to ask her mother. Esther laughed and answered, “None. Your sweaters are made of Orlon,” which Celie felt she should keep to herself.
Now, Celie is legendary. She knows her fabrics better than the ultrathin women who wrap themselves in them and give no care to what anything costs. However, while covering the living with the expensive silks and satins and sequins that make their lives a’glitter, she spends her time waiting for Death, shrouding this fear with too much food, a fixed smile, and a too-jolly laugh. It is only in her dark eyes that her panic is etched, but her clients are too busy—busy looking at themselves in the gilded triple mirrors—to give it much, if any, notice. For this Celie is grateful.
Someday she hopes to open her own shop, not for clothes, but for linens. Linens with the highest thread count—the softest, finest bedding one can dream on. This is her one, perfect fantasy. This is her one great wish.
Eva did not understand how her granddaughter could settle on just selling clothes. It made her sad and uncomfortable. Actually, embarrassed. Benjamin’s brother, Samuel, had a daughter who was a published poet. To her this was so much better. But she loved her granddaughter and on the surface accepted Celie’s choice. Told her friends, “Celie is the best saleswoman in the Midwest—actually famous.”
Eva had left her family at fourteen. Left them in Russia—five thousand miles away. She waved good-bye for the promise—the promise of the promised land. Her family had chosen her to be their messenger, their memory, their legacy. She carried that luggage with her always—their troubled waves goodbye and her own escape from the pogroms and the looming threat of the camps. And with this grew the need to be ambitious for her children—have a daughter who would be a great pianist or a celebrated actress and maybe someday even a granddaughter who would become a famous poet. Like Anna Akhmatova or Marina Tsvetayeva—well, maybe not exactly like Tsvetayeva, who she later learned had in the end hanged herself. “But, still, how wonderful,” she thought, “it would be to bring such an inheritance across the ocean and be able to report on these accomplishments to my family back in Europe.”
She would sit next to Esther by the radio, and listen to the news about the war—about the men named Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler—while Esther wrote letter after letter to the American Red Cross asking for their help. “Could they find her mother’s family—her parents, her brothers, her sister?” Finally, in 1950 the answer arrived. A stamp over their names, DISAPPEARED. Niftorim.
So six years later, when Eva took the small Celie’s hand and they stood at the living room window—the sounds from the baby grand piano long silenced, a heavily fringed, thick black wool shawl smothering the top of it—she needed, even more, everyone close by, on one street, in one place and never late. And it all became Niftorim.
Same as when Esther disappeared into the suburbs,
even though she and Levi visited there every weekend. Benjamin would drive down to the city, pick them up and bring them back. Two hours in the car on Sundays. And when Levi was gone, he came just for Eva, although on the ride to take her back into the city he would bribe either Joshua or Jeremy to come along and sit in the front seat. Alone in the back, the only noise coming from Eva was that of an old woman checking and rechecking for her apartment keys in her huge, worn, leatherette purse.
As she walked her avenue, sometimes three times a day, snow or wind or rain never stopping her, she watched Manzelman the grocer, Satvitsky the butcher, and Ruben the tailor slowly disappear, and other stores rise up with owners whose names she could not pronounce, nor did she try.
And when Esther started to wear scarves—the most beautiful Celie could find to cover her mother’s baldness, a side effect from the treatments—Eva never asked “Why?” Nor did she ever speak of Adele when she and Esther walked together.
Though one day, over the phone, she did talk of Adele to Esther. Said she saw her coming toward her—“a ghost in the night” was how she put it. But, before Adele saw her, Eva said, “I crossed over. Over to the other side.”
She told that to Esther and then they were cut off—it sounded as if the receiver just dropped into its cradle. Eva took a too-difficult breath, pushed a chair as close as she could to the window that overlooked the avenue. Sat down and stared.
Esther called and called her mother back, but she did not answer. With Ben elsewhere and herself too weak to drive, Esther called Celie, begged her to please run down there, which she quickly agreed to do.
It was when Esther hung up the phone that she felt a deep pang of upset about her daughter and wished Celie would be more aggressive—more assertive in life—instead of always absorbing the pain of everyone else, never lashing out—so like Esther herself.
Unbeknownst to Esther, through the years Celie picked up on her mother’s seething and the few times it burst open. One instance being Esther’s thrilling smile when she so finally crashed the phone into her sister’s ear. Another, when pregnant again, she hollered full strength at Benjamin, “If this child is a boy he will not be named after Cecil Slaughter! No son of mine will ever be named after him. Enough! If it’s a boy he will be named after my dear Lettie’s deceased father, Joseph. I’ve had enough of all this! Do you hear me?”
Frightened by the force of her wrath—the insanity he heard in her voice, reminding him, however momentarily, of the piercing screams which emanated from his mother Idyth—he acquiesced, thereby appalling my mother and father and for which he begged and begged huge forgiveness. Which, ultimately and nobly, they gave him.
Celie carried those sharp moments of her mother’s ire into her future, believing someday it would come quickly to her as to how to use her own ever-burgeoning anger.
Celie found her grandmother in the chair next to the window. She stood next to her. They were in position.
Niftorim.
CONFESSION
Admission
In the cabinet with the lattice
opening, I confess to all
the calls and hang ups—obsessions
with the glands and muscles
of the hair: follicle, papilla, blood vessel—
the soft bulb at root’s bottom that I love
to pull out and suck. I knew
Krishna, Lucifer, and Zeus,
phoned them late at night
but would not speak.
When we’d meet at all the seedy strips
of airport motels, my heart
would swell and beat my body
wild until I’d heat into high
fever I thought would last forever.
I stalked their wives and lovers, had license
numbers, kept records of their busy
tones—who was talking
to whom. Adonai in the temple
said a silent prayer over
my bald spot and wept.
Interrogation
Do you swear to tell the whole truth … ?
No Sir, the truth hemorrhages in my pen,
but lies clotted on my tongue.
Do you want a lawyer?
No Sir, I like the unprotected exposure.
Are you a Confessional Poet?
No Sir, they all committed suicide
in the 60s and 70s.
How many lovers?
Once I thought there was one, Sir,
but in fact I have to answer “none.”
Any rapes?
Including you, Sir, four—
no five, I forgot Herr M—
but no one got firmly in.
The last served me
a quarter of a chicken
and while I was delicately
trying to separate the meat
from the bone, yanked me
from my chair to his futon
on the soiled, hardwood floor.
His child had napped there
earlier. I could smell
the urine. I know it’s sick
to say it, but his
desire made me feel young.
Have you considered plastic surgery?
Yes Sir, but just in places no one can see.
I keep looking for the soul—that pure egg
inside the body. How I long to hatch it.
I’d let my doctor-lover keep sucking
out the fat and grow so light—
translucent in the sun—
I’d find the perfect shape,
intercept it with my pen-
knife. Then, I’d sit on it like a hen.
Did you make all those calls?
Yes Sir, but just in June
when the hot pink peonies exploded
inside my head—thromboses of love.
My blood gushed like a bride’s
bouquet, then dried and left me empty.
Do you really have a bald spot?
O Yes Sir, a perfect circle
of “Yesses.” I look at it with awe.
It is my flawless flaw.
ARE YOU A CONFESSIONAL POET?
NO SIR, I ALREADY SAID THEY ARE ALL DEAD.
When do you die?
Sir, every morning when the world wakes
new I go to sleep naked and wrapped
in a simple white sheet.
Unembalmed as an Orthodox Jew,
I watch my body disintegrate.
Punishment
All agreed to leave her
disconnected—cut any pulse
of light that might travel
from her. Jailed, without
a mouthpiece—diaphragm
and carbon chamber—
it was believed
she could not call, never answer.
Truth
I love this claustrophobic box,
the formality of its walls,
the hidden arrangement,
the simple judgment chair.
I do not need another’s ear,
just a pen and some paper.
c. slaughter
CECILIA GAVE CELIE the message to tell Deidre that if she would like, she would be happy to read either a long poem or several short ones. Her thinking was that by spending a little time with Deidre in person, responding to a poem or two of hers, Deidre would leave her and Celie alone—or at least give them a respite. Celie did not agree at all, saying, “It won’t work, Cecilia. You don’t realize how overdetermined she is. This will only create a further desire in her to get closer to you.”
Cecilia told her that she had seen how easily pleased the people were by her comments in the workshops she occasionally taught and that no one bothered her for more after that. Celie’s voice deepened and dropped as she said, “Okay. I’ll do it, but it’s a bad idea both for her and for you.” Her warning was prophetic.
In truth, Celie was sick of being the messenger, the middleman, stuck between other people’s craziness. So when she hung up the phone she thought she
might start screaming so much she would never be able to stop. But she calmed herself with extra pills and the thought, “I’m doing this for Cecilia. I’d only do such a thing for Cecilia.” And this made her feel better.
Within two days, Celie called Cecilia and said, “I’ve got it. Deidre just left the shop, but not before handing me an envelope addressed to you.” Celie then added, “She bought a beautiful black cashmere sweater set. The cardigan has large crystals for buttons which change every which way the light hits them, inside a dimly lit room or outside under the sun or moon, and she was particularly attracted to this, declaring, ‘Oh Celie, they are like my moods!’”
Celie, startled by this admission, said to Cecilia, “I just stood there with my best shop-girl grin as she continued to jabber. ‘Of course, I can never take off the cardigan—my upper arms are too unshaped. That’s what Harrold said to me two weeks ago in bed. Not that I didn’t already know this. What woman doesn’t, when this is the case?’”
Celie continued, “She then laughed a chaotic laugh, almost a cackle, and confirmed to me what she had told Celine about the state of her sex life, saying, ‘Oh, well, he is a clumsy man. We never touch in our parallel lives. The way we lie in bed together has become the essence of our marriage. Someday we’ll lie forever like this—parallel and separate—in our caskets. ’”
Celie and Cecilia did agree that Deidre seemed to have a borderline personality disorder and the last thing either of them needed at this point in their lives was someone so clearly uninhibited and peculiarly subversive. Celie then told Cecilia, again, that she felt her approach was all wrong. That she had had much more contact with Deidre than Cecilia and that Deidre was becoming unrelenting in her pursuit of her. She then reported, “I meticulously took her envelope, went to my desk, opened the locked drawer where I keep my purse and placed the envelope inside the drawer as she carefully watched. After I did this, she kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘I’m off! I’m off!’”
“Clearly, Cecilia, she really is off,” trying to emphasize further that her plan was a big mistake. Ignoring her warnings, Cecilia responded, “I’ll get the envelope later today and do something about this in as simple a way as possible—maybe all that’s needed is a new approach. Everyone needs a little focus, a little attention.” However, when Cecilia hung up the phone she thought, “Am I capable of even solving anything in a simple way? Perhaps I just complicate every awfulness. Maybe Celie is right. My judgment of late has been as off as anything Deidre has ever done or said. Actually, more so.”
