The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter

by Susan Hahn

  He knows people have hurt her—he knows this directly from his years living with her and most recently both from her cousin, Celie, and from Cecilia herself. Celie called him late last week absolutely frantic about a man Cecilia calls Herr M. “You know, Michael,” Celie said with great agitation, “the name she has dropped into some of her most recent poems. When Cecilia said it out loud to me, she said it quickly so it sounded like ‘harem.’ It’s clear she now includes herself as an addition to the collection of women he’s damaged.”

  She told him that he must not tell Cecilia anything that she had just told him or what she was about to tell him. Michael sighed heavily and said, “I know all about Herr M. Cecilia told me too, and I’m going to take care of it,” which made Celie even more upset and momentarily puzzled him.

  “No, Michael,” she said, “I want to—I have to take care of it. I have to do it!”

  “Do what?” he replied.

  “I-have-a-plan,” she said in a strange, halting way.

  To which he quickly answered, “You’re not equipped.”

  He did not mean to hurt Celie, but he truly could not imagine she was capable of all that much. He thought, “She spends all her time in that dress shop selling clothes and besides that—and everyone knows this—she’d not so long ago broke apart and is still trying to glue herself back. Her life has been difficult, but unlike Cecilia, she really has no passionate outlet for dealing with what she’s lived through.” Not that Michael wanted to get psychoanalytical. He did not. He had paid too many bills to those jerks sitting staring at Cecilia—his mind still angered by the thought that the only impression they had made was their heavy butts indenting their pricey leather chairs.

  After Cecilia told Michael about what had happened with Herr M—after he swore first to just listen, not react, and to never do anything about it—he went directly to the police. Of course, he used Herr M’s real name, but because of his extreme upset, he found himself initially calling him Herr M, to which they responded with a resounding “What?” However, it did not matter, for when he regained his composure and told them his real name, they replied in unison that the person they needed was Cecilia. They needed her to fill out the report and questioned him as to Why now? for what had happened that January night was well over a year and a half ago. All this so close to the same time she insisted on the divorce, the same time she refused to let him near her, covering her body with layers upon layers of fabric even when she was at home.

  When Cecilia finally told Michael of the attack, he did stay composed—as composed as he could in front of her. There was too much terror in her eyes—although not in her voice, for she spoke in a rote, matter-of-fact way. It was her eyes that broke his heart, gave her away, and he could not even bring himself to say something like, “So all the crazier-than-crazy behavior of yours then was because of him ruining your life—and mine. Our future.”

  She said she had just told Celie and was now sorry for doing so because she could tell Celie was much more upset than she revealed—her reaction far too controlled. Then, as an afterthought, she looked at him and cried, “Michael, can’t you see how everything I do is wrong? Everything. Rose and Emil were right. I am just a weed!” He started toward her, but she put out her hand as if to say “stop” and said, “Please, oh please, Michael, don’t get too upset. You promised.”

  So he stood there just listening, not asking the questions now spiking his mind—and lying about what he was going to do, more so than he had ever done with any woman, which felt odd because she was the only one he had ever loved. He had to do something more than just go to the police. Even before he went, he knew they could be of no help if Cecilia would not talk with them, and it was clear to him she would not. It had taken her twenty months to tell him and Celie and that was as far as she would go for any straightforward, public kind of healing.

  He stood there thinking about how he had to be clever. She stared at him, then said his name as if to snap him out of the strange look he had on his face, and when he realized this, he asked if she would like him to comb her hair, which by now had become terribly snarled from her twirling of it as they talked.

  His hands were shaking as he picked up the comb. He wanted to hit someone with it. Anyone, but not Cecilia. She took her place in the computer chair. However, this time was different, for she clicked on the internet for the latest news—and what came next surprised him. Not like what she had just told him about Herr M, but in a different way. In the past when they would watch the news on TV, Michael was not allowed to comment. He would see her taking it all in—the bombings, the killings, the buildings collapsing, the mangled bodies being lifted out of the rubble—but she refused to talk about it. All during the marriage they lived by her rules and this was one of them. If they saw the news together, he could not react. He had to be silent. Both Michael and I knew this had to do with what had happened to Aunt Lettie. Cecilia has read so much about the Holocaust, but will not discuss it in any kind of depth.

  But this time was different. Suddenly she turned to Michael and spoke about the headlines, about what was going on in the world. At the time I wondered if her telling Celie and Michael about Herr M had begun to free her. I thought of sludge. A bottle corked with sludge finally popped open and underneath was clear water.

  Her comments poured from her fully formed, and Michael stepped several steps away from her to just listen as she then began to recite a poem with an anguish equal to what he, at that moment, was holding inside of him. She closed her eyes and as the tears slipped from her lids, past her lashes and down her face, she spoke.

  Where the Tigris and Euphrates meet

  is the Tree cemented in concrete.

  The fruit all picked and eaten.

  Where the Tigris and Euphrates meet

  the holy road once filled with date palms

  and wild geraniums wandering every bush

  is smothered with bombed out bridges

  and scorched tanks and peddlers

  with their fractured stands

  that hold the spoiled apple and the orange.

  Where the Tigris and Euphrates meet

  the dried mother womb sleeps,

  buried under slabs of tongues and rubble talk—

  the wetlands drained, the marsh a small weep,

  the garden above starved for its life.

  Where the Tigris and Euphrates meet

  all that’s left is the knowledge warned of.

  When she finished, Michael completely lost his composure and raged, “That snake. I am going to kill him.” Because, even though the poem addresses battles far away, and even though she suddenly spoke to him about the news, he knew the poem arose from what the low, filthy Herr M had done to her and how deeply poisoned she was by it.

  Cecilia responded with a panic-scream, “No. No, Michael! You promised to stay calm!” Pulling himself together as best he could, he watched his bare feet move over the eggshell-colored carpet toward her and focused on how clean everything was in the small room where they were at this moment—how untouched—and he kissed her head at the Seventh Chakra spot.

  It was then he realized how much he was becoming like Cecilia, how insulated the space was where they now lived—how unlike his life in the years before he met her, before the vertigo that was her mind spiraled into his. He used to be a guy who watched baseball—a lot—had a favorite team and each time they won his day was complete, and each time they lost, his day felt ruined for at least an hour or two afterward. He played poker every Tuesday night and never came away with less than fifty dollars more in his pocket. Now, he knows more than any other accountant about the Russian poets under Stalin. About Mandelstam throwing himself out a window and how his wife Nadezhda recorded it, recorded all of it.

  A week after her telling him about what happened, Michael is again combing Cecilia’s hair and cannot stop thinking about the poem she recited; about killing Herr M; about Nadezhda Mandelstam unendingly writing down everything. That
at least she did something.

  This night he will stay over, and Cecilia, after working for hours, will come to bed and lay her body next to him. He will wake up and read to her and she will curl tight against him, resting her head on his stomach—her being so fetal against his, her long hair tossed over his body like a luxurious blanket.

  He now knows that all his life—the life that is left to him—they will spend in this position, or the one with him standing over her smoothing her hair, or on the sofa with her tucked into a corner of it slowly sipping a rich milkshake and with him doing the same just a small space away.

  They are watching an old-fashioned, romantic movie in black and white—here there is no blatant sex. The picture is crisp and clean and clear. He will not let her slip into the depths of hell like in some Greek myth. “Whatever it takes,” he thinks, “I will do it.” He has convinced himself of this.

  MANIA

  Sometimes I talk too much

  at a shrill pitch and the bitch

  part of me carries off

  my conversation in directions

  I’d never travel with more peaceful

  lips. But when my brain swells

  and pushes on the small bones

  on my face, what spills out

  seems so rich. I think

  everyone loves me so much.

  Until, alone with the bloated

  moon, I hear the rattle

  of my voice and its twist—

  the gnarled path it takes running

  after any catch, grabbing

  first place in a race

  it does not want to enter,

  accepting the trophy

  with a curtsy practiced

  for royalty. Hater of both halves

  of myself—raving

  slave, desperate dictator.

  c. slaughter

  WHEN CECILIA FINALLY told Celie in a back room at the shop exactly what the critic Herr M had done to her, Celie was shocked and sickened. But she stayed calm, or at least as calm as she could, hopefully hiding her increasing distress. It was in near the end of her hospital stay that Cecilia told her with such excitement in her voice of his invitation. Celie did not remind Cecilia how she had said to her at the time, “Maybe it isn’t such a good idea to go to his apartment alone for dinner.” Celie tells herself, “Yes, that now would only add to her grief. Anyway, I was probably too vague in my warning by just saying too quietly, ‘Perhaps he isn’t such a nice man,’ given the fact that she had just explained to me that he was going through an unending divorce—his fourth. I should have been clearer—more adamant—so in a way this is all my fault.”

  Also, there were things about Herr M that Celie could have told her that she had learned of more recently—that she knew of at the moment of Cecilia telling her about the attack—which would have been unbearable for Cecilia to hear, and this only enlarged Celie’s extreme upset.

  After Cecilia left, she ran into the bathroom and took a double dose of her medication. She stayed in there for about fifteen minutes and then reentered the sales area of the shop. It looked like a carnival—the clothes, the women, all the colors that filled the huge room seemed to be moving too quickly. She wondered if she might have swallowed too many pills in her distress. She felt both her mind and body were being taken on a merry-go-round, which was spinning too fast—its loud, discordant music blasting into her ears. All she could hope was that too fast would not mean out-of-control. She tried to pace herself the rest of the day—she spoke and walked slowly and was extra polite to everyone as if that would stop the flailing of her throbbing brain. It felt like a rabid bat was trapped inside her skull, crashing itself against her too-thin walls of bone, and that her head was about to crack open from the pain.

  Some months ago a client of Celie’s had revealed to her she had a niece who was getting her MFA in poetry at the university and she had been in a class Herr M taught. Of course she used his real name, just as Cecilia had when she told Celie of his invitation for that dinner. According to Celie’s client, she believed her niece had little or no sexual experience when she met him, but then he began an affair with her. With great anguish, she said to Celie, “How could a professor at such a prestigious place get away with something like this? I thought those days were long gone.” She repeated this over and over, while Celie, trying to distract her, showed her the latest sweaters that had just arrived for the fall.

  Celie hated hearing any horrible story. However, in the shop when her clients vented their problems to her, as they frequently did, she had perfected the art of compassionate nodding. But this made her feel so used—that once again she had become the dumping ground for other people’s issues, had become the Sin-Eater for her customers.

  Her client went on to say, “My niece is very shy, not attractive, and stutters when she speaks. Clearly this so-called great man—this great intellectual—treated her as a receptacle until his divorce was final, for when that happened, he abandoned her and moved in with someone else—three weeks later. Now, my niece is too depressed to return to school, and I’m worried she might be suicidal.”

  She then asked for Celie’s advice. “Me?” Celie thought, rather startled, “Celie Slaughter, never married, who’s never had a lover! Though men like Herr M make a good argument for celibacy—a life of just fantasy, no matter how lonely.”

  Then, Celie considered, “Maybe she asked me because she had heard about my own instabilities.” She did not know if she should worry that this was still being discussed or that she should take it as a compliment, because she was now considered “recovered,” now seen as “very together.” She had heard some of the whispers. Ultimately, she decided it just did not matter. At least she had learned some small thing from her therapist—“People talk. You can’t stop them.”

  Today, however, she knows too many awful things about this one man and she is finding this too much of a coincidence—as if she were meant to know, meant to do something.

  Cecilia said she had told no one else, and Celie believes this to be true. Yet, when she saw her poem “Nijinsky’s Dog” in the American Poetry Review, Celie was perplexed and frightened. At first, she thought it was just Cecilia’s heightened imagination at work, but as she kept rereading it, its subtext, its imagery, and metaphors, began to scare her. She now understands more clearly how much autobiography was there.

  Celie cannot get Herr M’s thug fists, the heft of his body on Cecilia, out of her mind. Cecilia shook when she described how each time after he got her, he told her to “Turn! Turn! Turn Over!” “Celie,” she said, holding on to both of her arms as if they were lifelines, “I thought it meant that finally he was going to get off of me, let me up. Let me go. But it wasn’t true—it just wasn’t true. I couldn’t catch my breath.”

  Then Celie remembered the winter before last, just a few weeks before Aunt Lettie’s death, how heavy Cecilia’s breathing was when she drove her home from the hospital, which Cecilia attributed to a mild case of bronchitis. “Nothing serious,” she reassured her. Celie later learned it was walking pneumonia, and it took until the summer for her lungs to become clear of the infection.

  Now Celie believes Cecilia will never be totally uninfected by what has happened—that she will not be able to get up completely. She thinks, “Some things can never be gotten up from fully—at best they land on our backs, like rocks we forever carry with us.”

  Celie has always loved Cecilia’s poetry. Its melancholy. Its unexpectedness. The way her words make her face, and almost accept, her own emotions. They do, for sure, make her feel less alone. She loves the places Cecilia carries her both literally and figuratively. Sometimes she has to look up what Cecilia’s referring to, but then she learns even more and feels smarter. Cecilia’s language gives her sadness a shape. Always has. At least for the moment she is reading it, she can contain her own feelings within Cecilia’s lines.

  Yet, now she does not know what to do with the rage that is spiraling inside her—a rage as large
as any she has ever known—because of this man. A man she has never met, but now has heard about in two awful, anxiety-filled situations, each horrible in its own way—however, similar. Now that she knows the facts—the truth—not just the rumors and the guessings as to what really happened to Cecilia, she wants to hurt him, hurt him badly, which sounds preposterous, she knows, because she is the furthest person from powerful. And she has read enough literature, both sacred and profane, to know that dealing with the Devil is always big trouble.

  That evening, she wondered what he looked like, so she searched for him on the internet. She got many pictures and studied them for almost thirty minutes. He had a full head of thick, wavy, black hair, his sideburns beginning to gray. His nose was straight and close to perfect. She thought he would look more like a goat, but he did not—although he did have a thick, black goatee, also flecked with gray, which made him look devil-like. “Perhaps to cover a weak chin,” she thought. His lips were full, giving the impression they could be a supple place for words to pass through. However, in several picture a few of his teeth were jagged, almost to the point of looking broken. “Maybe as a result of all the lives from which he’d taken a too-hard bite,” she said out loud to no one.

  With all this studying of him, it became clear to her that his real power was in his dark eyes—a softness to his stare, coupled with an odd sexiness, as if he were saying, “I can show you a good time and will never, ever hurt you.” Celie felt drawn to them even through the computer screen. “That’s what the Devil—or a psychopath—can do to you,” she said out loud again, when she forced herself to finally click off all images of him. But, even then, she could still see his face staring at her and it kept her up most of the night, along with his words to Cecilia. Turn. Turn. Turn Over.

  She tossed in bed for hours looking for a cool spot, and trying to figure out what to do next. “What do I, Celie Slaughter, do? A woman who always stands on the sidelines of life, smiling with designer clothes in her hands, helping other women dress well, so they can go to parties with men who might rape them”—a new thought she cannot wash from her mind.