by Susan Hahn
Initially, Cecily kept the conversation at a light, airy level—nothing rushed or pushy in her speech—and that did eventually help put Deidre at ease, for her discomfort at being there was obvious. She spoke too softly and not very much, and just took delicate sips of her soup, leaving half of it.
Having a hearty appetite, almost a lust for the food, Cecily ordered the shrimp with pasta. It must have been contagious because Deidre ordered it too, and began to eat with a gusto she did not have at the beginning of their meal. Cecily watched, astonished, as Deidre started to impale the large shrimp with her fork and swallow them whole. She did this with the pasta too, stabbing at it and chewing it with large jaw movements. She had become all accelerated motion.
Finally, when they were almost finished with their entrees, Cecily sighed and stared at her. Then she said one word:“Cecilia.”
“Yes?” Deidre replied, as neutrally as she knew how to do. It was only then her pace slowed.
“You know her.” Cecily said this not as a question, but as a statement.
“Yes, yes I do. Somewhat. Just a bit.” Deidre replied with great hesitancy and some amount of sticky melancholy and then she asked, “Is she as beautiful as your Aunt Rose?”
Cecily tried to control how frustrated and infuriated she was by this question and just said as evenly as she could, “I’m not here to talk about Rose.” So sickened was she by everyone’s Rose sickness—her own included.
“What do you think of Cecilia—what do you think of her?” Cecily insisted.
“Think-of-her?” she answered.
She said this haltingly, sounding like a Rogerian therapist who just repeats the patient’s words back in the form of a question. But it was clear Cecily would have none of this and for the first time Deidre felt a slice of Cecily’s well-known impatience and large forcefulness—which she intended.
“Do you like her poetry?” She wanted her voice to sound borderline accusatory.
“Well, yes,” she said. “In truth, I really do. Do you?”
Cecily gave a huge sigh. It was almost as if a puff of smoke came out of her mouth at that moment. She did feel dragon-like. She replied, “It’s okay. A little self-serving, wouldn’t you say? But okay.” Then she paused and leaned forward and said, “Have you read ‘Small Green’? It appeared in Poetry.”
“Yes,” she replied. “It’s sad. I especially liked the Emily Dickinson epigraph.”
“Well, she didn’t write the epigraph,” Cecily snapped. “Do you know she never goes anywhere, except to the dress shop, an occasional lunch, and to give a few local readings? Mostly, she just sits in her apartment, in that tiny writing room of hers. Except, of course for— ”
Cecily then stopped and looked at Deidre as if Deidre were supposed to finish the sentence, which she did not, would not, could not. Cecily had now moved into high gear.
“Except for what?” Deidre finally, carefully, with her best innocent voice, replied. Cecily could see a stringy residue of shrimp caught between her teeth and that made Deidre’s seem all the more vulnerable.
“Except for what?” Cecily said too loud. “Except for what?” she continued. “Don’t you know about the critic?”
Cecily then took Deidre’s hand, patted it and said, “Don’t be shy.” Deidre looked at her palm and then wiped it on her slacks. She did not want Cecily to see this, but she did. Cecily knew she was becoming successful in making her feel uncomfortable. Her look demanded a response.
It was then Deidre remembered the question—the question about the critic. She restated it—“Did I know about the critic?” It was clear to Cecily that Deidre did not quite know what she wanted to say, but finally replied, “I remember the poem ‘The Interior of the Sun.’” Then, suddenly not being able to control herself, she blurted out, “Did he hit her? Did she let him? Is he the one in that poem? Is he the Herr M in the poem? Is he?” The questions were not really for Cecily—for Cecily to answer—it was as if she were asking the air, which seemed to grow too thick for her, for she coughed and could not clear her throat for several seconds.
Cecily laughed a too-loud laugh. Definitely what Deidre said had pleased her.
Cecily waved her hands and said, “Hit her? He raped her.”
“Raped her?” She said in a voice she could barely find. Then added, “Well, I’d heard that rumor, but—”
“Yes,” Cecily glowed. “It’s true,” she continued with great relish. “It’s just been unequivocally established.”
She then looked around the dining room a little self-consciously to see if anyone else had heard her, but they were pretty much alone except for a well-dressed couple at the far end of the room. They seemed so dignified from this distance. She thought, “They must be talking about something artistic.” She wanted to be invited into their conversation. She was certain if she were surrounded by such people she would not have to be here trying to plot something with this silly woman. She would be recognized for her talent and not need to deal with the Deidres of this world. She staunchly believed, “If given the chance, I could rise above everyone, literarily and literally, especially my family.”
“Poor Cecilia—” Deidre started to say, when Cecily interrupted her.
“Poor Cecilia, you say! I heard about the lunch! What did she give you? Tell me. What did you come away with?”
These words, “What did you come away with?” almost seemed to make Deidre cry and Cecily saw her look over at a table, where she guessed it all had happened—or rather, where nothing did. As Cecily followed Deidre’s eyes she could tell Deidre felt she knew her every thought, her every feeling, and Deidre’s face looked scorched. She turned toward Cecily and spoke with an equal dose of forced strength and growing upset, her body starting to lean downward, becoming ungracefully slumped toward the table.
“He actually raped her?”
“Yes. And she deserved it.”
“No one deserves that,” Deidre quietly replied, trying to pull herself together.
Cecily smirked, then put her now completely sweat-filled hand on Deidre’s, and asked her in a slowly paced, yet piercing way, “Do-you-hate-her?”
Again, sounding like a Rogerian therapist, but now dazed, she said, “Hate her?”
“Yes, hate her.”
“No,” she answered, unconvincingly.
“Well, you had to have hated her after that lunch.”
Deidre then woke up to the obvious question and asked, “How did you know about the lunch? You called almost to the minute I arrived home that day.”
“I have my ways,” Cecily said with great authority and a certain amount of pride.
“Yes, I did hate her after the lunch, but I don’t anymore,” she said halfheartedly. Now looking quite scattered, she quoted a line from Cecilia’s poem, the one Cecily had mentioned earlier, as if just muttering to herself:
Acquainted with every pamphleteer, she’s anchored herself to a small green chair …
Then she said she had to leave. That she was feeling sick. However, as sick as she was, when she looked at Cecily it was clear to her she still did not know what it was that Cecily wanted from her and she meekly asked, “Why did you invite me here?” When this question was met with just Cecily’s intended silence, Deidre’s fingers nervously pinched the still crisp, white tablecloth. Finally, she gulped out, “Yes, remembering the lunch does make me hate her.”
“Good!” Cecily said, patting her same hand, and adding, “Perhaps now we can begin.” She then laughed and said, “Wasn’t that the last line in Portnoy’s Complaint? Wasn’t that what the therapist said to Portnoy?” However, Deidre’s anxiety had completely taken over and she could not focus on anything literary.
“Begin what?” she blurted out.
“I want you to help me.”
“Help you what?”
“Hurt her, of course,” Cecily whispered. “You know you want to. And remember,” she continued, “I can help you. I do have some amount of clout in the poetry world.”
Cecily smiled, thinking, “Mies van der Rohe wouldn’t have been pleased.” But, reconsidering, and knowing a little about his huge ego, she thought, “He probably wouldn’t have given a damn, maybe even laughed.” Then she saw Deidre race toward the elevator and disappear.
Cecily wasn’t bothered by this at all. She had set in motion what she had intended—Deidre would not forget their conversation. She was sure of this. Cecily knew she would see her again, and she knew Deidre could be of great help to her with her plans, which she was just beginning to assemble—and, hopefully, to construct even better now that the rumors about the rape had proven to be true. It was clear Deidre did hate Cecilia—hate that Cecilia had promised her something and had given her nothing. It was also clear Deidre was ambitious and that they had this in common. Cecily thought, “She’s just weak, but I am strong, so in a way we’ll make a good team.” Her guess was that Deidre would try to run from the Slaughter family, try to make it without Cecilia, without her. But she knew Deidre would return to her, that her flight was only temporary.
MENS REA
I
Without intoxication or insanity
I put on the rubber glove,
ideal for one time use—
lightweight, tough, disposable, cheap.
It fits either hand—
right or left, good or bad—how easily
it becomes my second skin.
I write with it on—how well
it holds my pen. No one
can read my covered palm—
the past, present, future of
who I am, unknown.
My voice cannot be traced
to the outdoor phone
nor my prints found on the dime-
store paper. My fingers sweat
against the balloony latex.
I’m tempted to take it off,
blow it up—burst open
the situation
that keeps me so hidden.
II
The worm has a simple brain—
just a pair of ganglia,
while the advanced reptile’s
is large and complex.
I did not remember this.
The pink jellylike ball
inside my skull lost
a considerable amount of blood
when you constricted my body,
hissed into me
causing irreparable damage—
although the EEG and the MRI
could not produce the image
of why I wanted to die.
Demented is what I keep
calling myself, forever
confusing your rage for desire
for me, for Eve, alive
in the garden with all that overripe
passion—the rotten spots
in the vegetation now so visible
with my glasses on—I see
the snake always waiting
for some soft and starving woman.
III
This autumn the leaf-like
bundles of nerve
cells in my cerebellum
brittle and I have
lost my balance. Purposely,
Knowingly, Negligently,
Recklessly, I write
you this poem, send copies
to your family and friends.
The hard thick bones
of my head that protected
me from the blows
of this world have thinned.
I know evil in advance
and this time do not plead
ignorance. I claim no
extra chromosome or excess
of dopamine or serotonin.
I intend
for something bad to happen.
c. slaughter
A YEAR BEFORE Uncle Emmanuel’s colon cancer killed him, he joined an all-female aerobics class. Since he did not have the energy to make his yearly trip to Las Vegas, it was his final effort to watch breasts bob up and down and beyond this to give quick, too-tight hugs to women, who at first found him innocent enough. In the beginning, the women were delighted to have such a lively old man in the class, working so hard to stay fit. They thought him cute and sweet. However, after a few weeks passed, each felt a growing discomfort at the way he fixated on their bodies. How he used the inner parts of his flabby arms to press into the sides of their chests. How his hands would casually touch their exposed flesh—a shoulder or an upper arm, while in over-animated conversations with them—and how he would then wipe their sweat ever-so-nonchalantly around the rim of his lips. Rather quickly they all noticed this. But the day they secretly agreed to gather to talk about his behavior with their instructor after class—about not wanting this stout, elfin man with his thick grin in their class anymore—he collapsed during a “spread your legs, arms above your head, clap, flex, jump—ten times,” exercise and was carried away in an ambulance, never to return.
From then on Manny Slaughter was relegated to a bed where he lay flattened both physically and spiritually, while the morphine drip seeped into him. As he grew thin, then thinner, becoming a sliver of his lusty, round self, his bodily functions forever messier, no narcotic was able to fully alleviate his pain. Consequently, he swore and screamed his way into death, so ultimately all that remained of him for those who had dedicatedly surrounded his bed were the piercing echoes of those last, vile words they heard from his increasingly large mouth, which seemed to overtake his otherwise shrinking face, and the awful names he repetitively called each of them, as if everything that was happening to him was their fault. He clearly wanted to encapsulate them with such language and to take them with him into his hell.
When my mother found out her brother had joined such a class, she laughed and laughed. “How cute he is. Always the imp,” she would say to her other brothers and Samuel and Benjamin would agree, secretly wishing they had his chutzpah at the late dates in their own dull lives. They were mesmerized by the possibilities of the class and could not control their own fantasies of all those women—“all ten of them”—in their skimpy, bright spandex, stretching, bending, prancing, perhaps even galloping to rhythmic music. “The thought of it!”—they would whisper to Abraham, who remained the quietest on the subject. For beyond the others Abraham understood the possible implications of Manny’s behavior, how it would not take the women long to catch on to his brother’s perversities, and the possibility that they would file complaints against him. He thought about how it was becoming a different world, where women stood up for themselves, would not allow certain lines to be crossed and had many more outside safeguards. And then he could not help but think of his own daughter and the pain his brother had caused her.
When Manny Slaughter arrived here and realized what was possible, the first thing he did was to try to find the path to all of history’s great whores. He searched his small mind, then he asked directions to where he could find Anne Boleyn and her sister—“what’s her name,” as he put it. Even with his limited knowledge, one of his great idols was Henry VIII for all his voracious appetites. For a while he even sought out Anna Karenina—not realizing she was not a real person. With this, I found him far more humorous than I ever did in life—and more stupid. He had remembered Garbo playing her and pictured himself as Vronsky at the time. “Love ’em and leave ’em,” he would grunt to his brothers as if he were the biggest shot of the four—which, in this area, he was. Of course, he had no interest in finding Garbo herself or any other woman rumored in life to have had even a hint of lesbian inclinations. Even in death Uncle Emmanuel is obsessed with homoerotic gossip.
Finally, when he found Tolstoy and bothered him as to where Anna might be, Tolstoy was so startled by this awful little man’s in
trusion on his peace and his bizarre question, that he shrieked at him about both his and Anna’s immorality. He then called Manny “the biggest moron in all of history” for thinking she was more than just a mere character in a book and growled that he was “almost certainly too hopeless for any kind of Christian redemption,” which bewildered Manny’s mind even more than the morphine drip. He wanted to shout back at Tolstoy that the Star of David was on his casket, but he did not, feeling for the first time that he was up against an overwhelming force of a man whom he could never come close to managing or manipulating. So he fled.
Cecily never forgot how Uncle Emmanuel would press his chest into hers and cup his hands, seemingly by accident, around the sides of her disproportionately large breasts. After it happened more than once, she realized that this was no misstep—it was all a measured act of feigned innocence, and she viewed it as an evil, too-obvious trick. Consequently, she would distance herself from him at family gatherings by going to the farthest point in the room from where he stood. However, he always sought her out with open arms—and hands.
She envied the flat-chested models in the high fashion magazines, who did not even need a bra, let alone one that was a 38DD. She resented how when her breasts began to grow, almost uncontrollably, at the late age of seventeen, the phone suddenly began to ring all of the time with boys calling, forever calling, wanting to know if she were “free,” in both meanings of the word. But Cecily had already pulled into herself and built a thick, crustacean shell made out of a wrath way before Uncle Emmanuel’s hand stratagem. What he had done to her earlier was far worse.
The fight between Cecily’s father and his brother when she was thirteen started because Abraham worried that Manny had been making arrangements with shady characters to get the lowest prices for the carpets they sold at their store and what was being delivered was stolen merchandise. When he nervously and carefully told Manny of his concern, it inflamed the latter to the point of calling Abraham all kinds of names, including schmuck, schlemiel, and shlub, ultimately landing on the cruelest thing he could think of doing to get back at Abraham, which was to target the thirteen-year-old Cecily with a name that twisted her mind into a Gordian knot. Her disorientation from this was something from which she would never get loose.
