by Susan Hahn
After Cecilia picked up the envelope, she opened it and found a long poem. Celie asked her to read it out loud and Cecilia replied, “Are you sure? It’s pretty bad. Do you need a long, bad poem in your head?” Celie laughed and said, “I already have that—my life—so thank you and no.” This quick, decisive assertion made Celie feel good and she thought, “I’ll have to remember to tell this to my therapist.”
Cecilia told Celie, “Wait a week and then call Deidre. Give her my phone number. Celine and I will take her to lunch.”
“Celine?” Celie said quite startled, “Why Celine?”
“Because she can keep the most inane conversations going and drive everything off topic, thereby making for a brief discussion on poetry. I thought you’d be pleased that I’ll have protection.” She said this facetiously and they both smiled. Cecilia then continued, “I know, I know, I’ll have to buy Celine something big for this favor—a gift certificate from the shop. It’s worth it.”
At home in her room, Cecilia reread Deidre’s poem “Confession.” It had the same title as one of hers that had recently been published. In some way she found this less stalky-frightening than sad. She imagined this nutty, anxious woman waiting by the phone for a week, for some reply—all hope in her heart that something good was about to happen in her writing life. Every writer she knew had been there. But Cecilia also knew she could not really help this Deidre person, especially after reading the poem. Now, she just prayed Deidre would be appeased enough by the lunch and that her intrusions on Celie, herself, and even Celine would stall and then stop—that maybe she could take control of at least one small thing.
She could not be Deidre’s lifeline to any particular heaven, but she could try to be nice. These past months she had felt her own lifeline was leading her toward a particular hell where Herr M was always present or, at best, an oblivion fraught with an unending, generalized agitation. However, she pushed these thoughts into a deep fold in her brain and continued on with her plan, which she convinced herself would work. That doing this would help give her some time to straighten out her own life without being distracted by Deidre’s antics, and it also would give Celie some relief.
Exactly a week after Deidre dropped off the poem, Celie called her. Deidre picked up the phone immediately. Celie reported to Cecilia, “I told her I’d gotten in some long skirts for the fall—chiffon—with hand-painted flowers at the bottom and I immediately thought of her. I said she would love them and asked if I should hold a few.”
Celie continued that Deidre seemed surprised by the talk of skirts, but, after a breath and a pause, replied, “Great. I’ll be in tomorrow.”
“I could hear her voice tumble down on the tomorrow. I felt guilty about prefacing the call about the poem with trying to sell her some skirts, but, then again, she has taken up so much of my time. However, it did make me feel badly.”
“Yes,” Cecilia said, “but don’t worry about trying to sell her something. She’s trying to sell something, too—herself.” Cecilia then sighed, “Maybe that’s what we all do.”
Celie added, “It was only then I said, ‘Oh, by the way, Cecilia has read your poem. She would like to talk with you about it. She wants to make a date.’ I gave her your number. When I did this, I felt somewhat better.”
Cecilia just replied, “Thanks, Celie, I owe you.”
“Owe me?” she answered. “After everything you’ve done for me? Never, Cecilia. Never.”
It is true Cecilia has done important things for Celie, but they were easy to do because she loves her and beyond this, all of the Slaughter cousins are bound together, be they in positive or negative ways. We are cut from the same cloth, our dyes a bit different—the patterns of our lives unique shapes—but we are part of the same design, the same picture, the same story and therefore—in life or in death—remain very much connected. We inhabit the same frame. Sadly, sometimes the threads that make up who we are do snarl and snap and no crochet hook or sewing needle can repair the tear to make it appear even superficially right. However, with the murder of Herr M came the complete unraveling of some lives—a permanent, unfixable, rip in the canvas of who we were.
Cecilia thought of Deidre and what she probably was experiencing now—the natural high that comes when someone you believe to be of consequence is actually interested in your work. Again, she hoped Deidre would be satisfied with just the lunch and a few comments, but she was beginning to have real doubts. Also, she worried about herself—if she had enough composure left in her to carry this to a satisfactory conclusion.
Celine had already agreed to accompany her, the gift certificate the perfect payment. Cecilia told her, “As soon as Deidre calls we’ll set a date. I’ll let you know.”
Buoyantly, Celine replied, “I’m ready! I’ve informed my boys that I’ll be away for part of a day sometime soon on an important mission.” She then quoted Yeats, “Only that which does not explain itself is irresistible.”
Cecilia, perpetually shocked by Celine’s knowledge and how she covers it up with cloaks upon cloaks of ditziness, on hearing this, thought, “Maybe she is the smartest of all of us. However loose the boundaries of her life, she does seem to keep everyone in their place, which is something I’ll never achieve—forever unable to erase, correct, or learn from all that’s happened in mine. Or maybe it’s that she learned all too well the art of manipulation and deviousness from her father?” She carefully contemplated this. But thinking about Manny Slaughter began to make her sick as she vividly recalled all the far-reaching soul damage he had caused.
Celie told Cecilia, “She showed up at the shop and bought two skirts. When I asked if she’d called you, with a false casualness she replied, ‘No, not yet.’” Celie excitedly added, “It’s the first time she didn’t try, even subtlety, to interrogate me about you, about the family. So I didn’t have to shut down on her. Maybe this plan will really work. She seems so filled with hope.”
“The thing with feathers,” Cecilia replied, her voice cracking and sounding like it was falling down a well. And, however many pills she had taken to get through the day, the still quick-minded Celie answered, “Emily Dickinson.” Then they laughed, both remembering the joke—between the three of us—that if you were born a Slaughter, hope was pretty much killed off. Cecilia adding, “Oh, Celie, how both of us and ‘our now forever lost Ceci,’ would laugh about hope being something of an oxymoron in this family.”
Later that afternoon when the phone rings and Cecilia sees from her caller ID it says “unavailable,” she worries that it could be Herr M trying to get at her in some way—again. But his calls have never come up like this—usually “anonymous” or his actual number, so she picks it up. It is Deidre—she must have gone through information. Cecilia’s guessing she knows all the phone tricks. Probably if she had not answered, Deidre would have hung up and she would never have known she called, thereby giving Deidre another chance at anonymity.
Cecilia’s pleasant; she speaks softly but in an upbeat way and tells Deidre she has read the poem and looks forward to discussing it with her and, “No,” she does not mind at all that Deidre’s written a poem with the same title as one of her recently published ones. “It happens,” she replies with nonchalance, continuing, “Anyway, they are quite different.” Then surprising herself she continues, “I like the poem’s complexity, the risks it takes, the isolation of the narrator, how it ends.” She compares it to one of Tennyson’s, all the while appalled by the words that are falling out of her mouth and she worries that she has completely lost control of her intentions, her language, her honesty. And she does not at the moment understand the why of this.
Then, getting some small command of herself, she says, “Let’s meet next week at the Arts Club. My treat. Next Tuesday at 1:00 P.M. Does that work for you?” Deidre speaks carefully in a way that intends poise but just comes off as mannered nervousness, and answers, “Next Tuesday at 1:00 P.M. is perfect. Thank you so much.” Actually, she sounds medicated, a bit robot
ic. They hang up.
Cecilia imagines Deidre’s joy at all of this and the beginnings of her plans of what she will wear. She had been there—laying an outfit on her bed to study and then rejecting it, and the day before the big event, getting her hair done and a professional manicure at some upscale beauty shop—the choosing of a color for her nails becoming a too-large issue. She remembers once landing on Soft Shell Pink and how the next day she met her first publisher. For years she never deviated from that color.
Her fingertips were dipped in that shade of tender innocence the night of Herr M’s attack. Now, she just paints them herself with the non-color “clear” as if that will help give her life more clarity—all of this she knows far beyond silly, somersaulting down into a pit of stupidity. “These days,” she thinks, “I have no need to shrivel from Herr M’s reproaches of me—I do this very well to myself.”
On the day of Cecilia’s truly lucky lunch to meet the person who would publish her first book, she took too many tranquilizers and Mylanta Extra-Strength tablets. Her insides were in total distress. She popped them into her mouth the way she now pops Life Savers when she gets too nervous, as if they can really save her life.
She arrived at the Arts Club far too early, getting sick twice in its large, beautiful, well-appointed bathroom filled with tissues of all kinds and sweetly scented sachets that kept the air smelling like a garden, clean of all bad odors.
She then sat down on the deep-green, velvet settee framed by a rich, dark—almost black—wood, trying to collect herself, and attempted to focus on the wallpaper which looked like silk, with thick stripes in various hues of green, eventually moving to the green velvet bench in front of the dressing table with a satin ecru skirt on it.
The large square mirror that hung above it, bordered in the same dark wood, allowed her to look at herself and realize she had worn too much makeup—that she was wearing the “clown look”—too much blusher to try to make her blanched skin look healthier. All her blood seemed to be draining out of her body as she grew cold, then colder, as a panic was about to overtake her.
Because her meeting also had been at 1:00 P.M., at 12:59 she climbed the austere staircase that had been designed by the architect Mies van der Rohe and brought over from the club’s old building to this new space. She had a compulsive need to be precise. Still does.
As she did this, she thought about all the artists and the wannabes who had climbed these stairs and she wondered how many of them had reached their destination—and how hard her own heart hurt for something good to happen. Which it did, that day.
Today, as she climbs these stairs, she thinks of the mess—the awful mess—that her life has become and the irony of it. “That some woman seems to be living only to spend time with me—to be me.” Also, she feels a rage expanding inside her toward Deidre, as she tells herself, “I need to get this unwelcomed woman out of my life. There have been enough intruders. Maybe Celie was right. This was a bad idea.”
Cecilia and Celine meet early, according to plan, so that they will be seated when Deidre appears. Celine has really outdone herself in terms of what she is wearing—she is impossible to miss in a tight, shocking pink sweater with large, red beads attached to it. Actually, she looks like a whore; an old whore; an old, high-priced whore. Especially when she carefully places her state-of-the-art cell phone next to her as if it were another piece of silverware.
When Cecilia sees the maitre d’ escorting Deidre into the dining room, she also sees that Deidre’s face is ashen with large spots of color standing out on her cheeks and thinks, “She is wearing the clown look.” It is now clear Deidre has seen both Cecilia and Celine and she looks as if she has become dizzy, because she is holding on to the backs of some of the chairs at other tables as she approaches. Both Cecilia and Celine greet her with large smiles. Neither stands up, but they both hold out their hands for her to shake, which she does. Deidre’s is wet and thick and all Cecilia wants to do is wash her hand of Deidre’s sweat.
She pulls out a Wash’n Dri from her left pants pocket and opens it beneath her napkin and wipes her palm. She does not think Deidre has noticed this and wonders why she even cares if she has. Maybe it is because of all the talk that has been swirling about her, Deidre being a substantial participant in this. These days it seems she does not know how to get clean of anything and now she is becoming even more locked into her anger toward Deidre—which she is realizing is in large part a displacement over what she is feeling toward Herr M.
Celine, however, is doing an outstanding job of distracting Deidre, as she sits there like a boil—a body about to burst—too forced into her clothes. With her cosmetically thickened lips, she gushes to Cecilia that she and Deidre are “old friends.” “We’ve been to lunch—such fun!” she goes on. Celine clearly is earning her gift certificate.
Deidre carefully places herself in the empty chair next to Cecilia. She looks bewildered and definitely off balance and Cecilia is getting a little worried that she might faint, so she quickly says, “I told Celine I was having lunch with you, and she really wanted to come, too.” But it is clear Deidre is beginning to feel this is a setup, for a hardness is starting to form at the corners of her mouth.
Cecilia wants to be nice to her, to give her something she can take away from this encounter that is positive so she will be satisfied for at least a while, but she is beginning to feel stuck, almost frozen, and her ability to talk is shrinking to mute.
Celine, true to form, is now showing them her new gold bracelet. “From Morris,” she says with a wink to Cecilia, which even I feel is a little much, while Cecilia pretends to enjoy our cousin’s jester-antics. Deidre says, “Your husband has terrific taste,” which is met with a pause from both of them. Celine, even more aglow and pleased with herself, replies, “Well, actually Morris—” when Cecilia interrupts with, “Perhaps we should look at the menu. It’s getting late.” With this Cecilia sees a fury begin to swell Deidre’s face. When it is her turn to order Deidre stammers out, “The salmon.”
Cecilia thinks of the salmon forever swimming upstream to spawn and die and then being delivered to Deidre’s plate and feels a triple misery—for herself, the salmon, and Deidre—which she knows Deidre would never believe. However, she also wants to scream at her, “Whatever gossip you’ve heard about me and repeated, you’ve idealized my life to the point, it seems, of wanting my life, which, if you believe anything of what you’ve heard, makes you truly crazy.”
Celine is now telling them about the rings and necklace she is wearing. She really does talk too much about herself and it is even getting on my nerves, no matter that I have been physically removed from Celine’s presence for some amount of time and thought I had built up a far larger reserve of patience. The way she keeps her eye on her cell phone, checking and rechecking if it lights up is completely annoying. “The club’s rule is you have to turn the ringer off,” she chortles to them.
Then, suddenly, Celine asks Cecilia about Michael and Deidre’s posture quickly straightens. “This wasn’t in the script,” Cecilia, rather startled, thinks, and wonders if Cecily put Celine up to this, but she stays as composed as she can, given all she is feeling, and replies in the fewest words that make any sense, “He came over last night. We watched the movie Madame X. We both agreed it was Lana Turner at her finest.”
“It’s so nice that the two of you can still be friends,” Deidre says with a hint of sarcasm. Cecilia answers wistfully, “Yes, very nice.” She can see from Deidre’s eyes that Deidre has begun to hate her.
With dessert being served—a rainbow of tiny scoops of sorbet—and any pot of gold Deidre had hoped for from this day about to disappear, she jumps in and asks about her poem: the one Cecilia so enthusiastically had spoken about to her over the phone, the one Deidre so obviously was trying not to bring up, but has now found impossible not to, the one that had supposedly led to this lunch. At this moment I feel heartsick for both of them. And inside Cecilia’s head—her clogged mind—she st
arts to retrace why she thought she could do this. Why she thought she could pull this off, given all that has happened. She thinks about her mother and how much she wants to talk to her—right now—and how she cannot, given that she is deep in a hole beneath the ground. Then the image of her taking a shovel filled with dirt and dropping it onto her mother’s casket in that hole at the rabbi’s request flashes across her mind. How she obeyed him, even though she absolutely did not want to do it. She now adds this to her mushrooming list of disgusts with herself.
Suddenly, Celine bursts in, “A poem? You write poems? Oh, yes, now I remember. Well, so do I!” Shaken out of her morbidity and completely surprised, Cecilia wonders if Celie had rehearsed this with her, because it is all so perfectly absurd. Then Celine’s cell phone lights up and looking at the number she says, “Sorry girls, I have to take this. I’ll be in the lobby.”
Cecilia turns to Deidre and says, “Yes, the poem. I liked it.” She then stops. She is unable to take this any further, thinking, “I have nothing to give. I just want you to go away.” Deidre’s face is now so red, she puts both hands on her cheeks to cover her flush. It is clear she wants to kill Cecilia, or at least hurt her badly. Cecilia feels this and thinks, “And why not?” As they stare at each other, Cecilia feels they are two women about to break apart right in front of each other and she internally rages, “You could never understand what’s going on with me, so blinded you are by your lust for success, with me your crumbling goddess of it sitting right next to you!”
