by Susan Hahn
Of course, Manny never said the word directly to Abraham. He was far more clever and told of his worry about Cecily—“her possible inclinations”—to the mothers of his daughter Celine’s friends, who were Cecily’s friends, too.
Initially, Cecily noticed that none of her friends were returning her calls and were quick to walk away from her at school. When she told her mother of this and of her confusion as to why this was happening, Aunt Lillian had no choice but to tell her about the calls she had received from concerned mothers in the neighborhood, and then mother and daughter just stood there shaking in their too-bright yellow, 1960s kitchen inside their mid-sized, tract row house—a place where sameness and conventionality were revered and not to be disturbed. However, Aunt Lillian carried a rage from what Manny had done to her daughter straight into the grave. She idealized the lives of her sisters-in-law’s daughters and silently hated them—especially Cecilia for her gifts of beauty and talent, thereby making it impossible that this would not seep into Cecily. So it was better than good for Aunt Lillian when Cecily began plotting something to get back at Cecilia. Underneath the ground, inside the underbelly of herself, Aunt Lillian has stayed stuck.
When Cecily first heard the word and learned of the concept of same sex relationships, she was just getting used to the regular facts of life, which ironically she had learned from Celine way before Aunt Lillian had gotten up the courage to explain such things. Uncle Abraham in his reserve, temerity, and exhaustion wanted no part in this, nor was he capable of outwardly dealing with what his brother had set in motion concerning his daughter. The terror within himself that he brought back from the war was too deeply imbedded in both his mind and body, making it impossible for him to directly challenge another person.
Cecily’s own fantasies had been of the popular, athletic boys who never spoke to her in those seemingly unending years of her body’s flat fallowness. Interestingly, at least to Cecily, when she began to rapidly bloom, almost uncontrollably during an especially hot summer in the season of her seventeenth year, the boys did not seem to care at all about the rumors. In fact, with “that body” it only made her more attractive in mysteriously wild ways, which most boys at the time could only imagine. Only a few had seen pictures of such encounters in the magazines that their fathers thought they had carefully hidden. Cecily, however, by then had emotionally shut down, so all the attention she began to receive from boys—no matter how popular—had come to mean little to her. Her silent disorientation from the words Uncle Emmanuel had carefully planted grew into a brittle fury—an anger carefully and slowly turned outward in canny, clandestine ways which would continue to thicken and harden throughout her years. Ironically, it would be she who would come to most resemble Manny Slaughter in her ability to wound others.
When Cecily heard the most recent talk, which confirmed that Cecilia was in fact raped and how others were raging over it, she could not stop thinking about how to best use this. Cecilia herself was talking more and more about it, but only to very specific people, one of them being Michael, who Cecily learned had come back to live with Cecilia—to protect her—and was planning some kind of revenge against Herr M. Cecily hates the way Michael is always there for Cecilia, even in divorce—how no one ever really abandons Cecilia.
She thinks about how no one protects her. Even at thirteen, how no one rescued her from the gossip, from the only path at the time she knew to take—that self-imposed isolation which felt like it was coming more from the outside in, which in truth it was. No one set the record straight, no one grabbed Manny Slaughter by the throat and tried to choke him, or had even the impulse to cut off his viperous tongue—not her hesitant mother, not her frightened father. Cecily thinks about this a lot. And now with Michael coming to Cecilia’s rescue and planning God-knows-what for Cecilia’s honor and her sanity, Cecily finds herself almost out of control with fantasies as to how to hurt Cecilia.
In her barren apartment, where the only sign of some life is a tall, half-sick ficus tree next to an extra-long couch that has never come close to being filled with visitors, she sits and ruminates about calling Herr M (whose real name, as everyone knows by now, is Ivan Durmand)—all the time hating Cecilia’s nickname for him and yet also becoming too attached to it, which she finds annoying within herself. She looks him up in the phone book both at the university and at his home and when she discovers it twice under “I. Durmand” it makes her both smile and feel a little fearful. “I. Durmand, I. Durmand, such an easy pun,” she says out loud as a quick, adrenaline rush branches inside her body.
She wonders if he would agree to meet with her and thinks perhaps he might, if he believes she has information that would be of benefit to him. She even fantasizes about him becoming attracted to her with the same uncontrollable lust it is rumored he had—perhaps still has—for Cecilia.
Everything Cecilia has or had, Cecily wants and wants more of—as if she is smart enough to pick out the good from the bad, distinguish it and handle it. Her hubris and her envy are that great even though having it all over-stimulates her. She feels as though she might explode either way—if she gets nothing or gets too much.
In her play Cecily clearly sides much more with the “critic” than the “poet,” as if the poet deserved whatever happened to her that wintry night. The stage directions are to make the lights go “ice white” with a long pause of cold silence, like something one would find in a Russian novel. She thinks of Boris Pasternak. She really likes this effect, is quite proud of it. The only sound and image on the dimly lit stage at this moment would be that of the wind forcing a branch to scratch at the critic’s window—made to look like a witch’s claw also trying to grab at the poet. However, she is not quite sure what she has written will be a good enough defense of the critic, for it is hard to defend a man against even a highly manipulative woman, if something intensely brutal happens.
She is also worried Herr M will not agree to meet with her now that he is living with a woman with a pristine reputation. The gossip is that this makes him feel reborn and unsoiled—cleansed—although his legacy of damage to women is long, and to think of himself in this way would make anyone with any knowledge of him wince, or at least smirk. Cecily knows this.
At night alone in her bed she fantasizes about killing Herr M, then having the police arrive only to find Cecilia standing over him with a gun in her hand. She dreams of this a lot, but upon waking, she can never figure out how, in reality, she would be able to pull this off and this causes her great frustration. Yet of all my cousins—actually, all the people I know who still walk on the earth’s fractured shell—it is Cecily who is the most capable of such an act.
Cecily also imagines variations of how this might happen. In one, it is Michael who kills Herr M and Cecilia completely breaks apart upon hearing what he has done for her. Cecily then writes a book—creative nonfiction—about Cecilia and beyond this, about the entire Slaughter family and she becomes even more famous than she could have been as a playwright, because creative nonfiction is becoming the hot new thing. She sees herself composed and well-dressed and on television.
Cecily will never come to understand Lao Tzu’s words:
There is no greater sin than desire,
No greater curse than discontent,
No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself,
Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will have enough.
I know when Cecilia recently searched out his sayings to calm her shaky self down and found
Too much success is not an advantage,
Do not tinkle like jade
Or clatter like chimes
she sighed and nodded. She feels she is living proof that a fairly high profile in the low world where much of American poetry resides, is definitely not worth it.
Now, in most of Cecily’s waking hours, she plots out ways to accomplish Herr M’s death, forever focusing on how to trace it back to Cecilia. She remembers her father’s gun—the one another World W
ar II private picked up in the chaos from the boiled mud ground where her father was dragged away. How the man secretly brought it to her mother along with Abraham’s dog tags and Lillian made a shrine of them and prayed there on her knees to bring her Abraham back. The rabbis at the temple, of course, knew none of this, a mezuzah on the door being the only acceptable amulet deserving such reverence.
Cecily only learned about the gun’s existence and the shrine her mother made, after her father died and Aunt Lillian brought a box down from a high shelf in the closet and wept over it. Abraham had survived the gruesome battle of Tarawa in the Pacific. All the adults in the family knew of this and had talked in an agitated and excited fashion about it to anyone who would listen. But when they learned he had ended up on one of the Japanese “hell ships,” as they were called, which were attacked by the Americans because no Red Cross flag was flown, they were speechless. “Friendly fire” was the term the Slaughters were told and they grew sick and silent on the subject to outsiders at my parents’ instructions.
When Abraham was finally rescued—one of the few—and returned home mute on everything he had been through, the only grief Aunt Lillian ever heard from him was years later when he would lock himself in the bathroom and weep the chant, “My own brother, my very own brother, attacking my only child with friendly fire. Friendly fire.” Aunt Lillian would listen to this over and over, getting as close as she quietly could to Abraham’s locked door, her arms folded, rocking herself back and forth, silently repeating her husband’s words.
The effect of what Manny had done reignited Abraham’s fragile, fevered self and this event gnawed at him for the rest of his years, and although he was the youngest, he became the second child of Idyth and Cecil to pass away. Manny preceded him by two years—a very small justice. Though for Abraham—unlike Manny—he was more ready for his journey to this place and found the passage far less painful, even a relief, for it proved to be a permanent escape from Manny. Here, he has successfully cleansed his mind of this brother.
A “prisoner of war” were the words Cecily overheard, as she got older. “And yes, it took all of us to paste him back together,” the adults would tell their friends with more than a touch of arrogance—my parents being the worst offenders. Although at the time Cecily did not know everything, she found what they said condescending. “Why didn’t they see him as brave?” she would think. “A man who tried—forever tried—to keep going. A man who, given all he’d been through, still had enough faith in people and their goodwill to have a child, no matter how vicious the world.”
By the time Cecily learned of her father being on a hell ship, he had died. Unfortunately, when Cecilia, after Uncle Abraham’s death, also found this out, she, too, made the comparison between friendly fire from his country to that of his own brother’s known awful behavior toward him, saying to Cecily, “The pain of this has to be excruciating.” Even though she said this with great mournfulness, all it did to Cecily was to increase her furor toward Cecilia. If I had not been dead, it would have been the first, and the only, time I would have covered Cecilia’s mouth with my hand to stop her words.
Now, while Cecily waits to hear from the theaters about her play, this storm toward Cecilia builds, always with the nagging feeling that it shows—which could make her even more unappealing a person to take on—and, alone on her couch, she worries out loud, while waiting for the phone to ring, “Perhaps they have just forgotten about me, or they know—know that the play is about Cecilia and no one wants to hurt Cecilia—Cecilia with her large eyes, pale skin, and long, thick hair. Snow White Cecilia, whom no one would hurt and get away with it. Except Herr M.” And for Cecily this is only a gift for it raises all kinds of possibilities both in her creative life and in the reality she has been forced to live in since that day so many years ago when Uncle Emmanuel raped her—however metaphorically—at thirteen and she did not know what to do or to whom to run. Unlike now, where her imaginings of the possibilities of what to do and where to go are becoming endless and almost unmanageable.
When even Deidre, after their lunch, is unresponsive to her calls, her rage and loneliness overwhelm her. She calls her (she vows) one last time. Finally, Deidre decides to pick up the phone when she sees Cecily’s number and listens, listens carefully to Cecily’s latest plan.
PARANOIA
She dreams of an angry animal awaiting her
arrival on an abandoned island
and tries to figure it out
with her paperback Freud.
Sometimes she thinks
the answer lies
in a different source.
Sometimes she’s convinced
the accumulated clues add up
to almost nothing.
But mostly she just feels
prey to all the evils
she can imagine,
focuses on every furious
story, remembers each misleading
offering perfect with the promise
of everlasting happiness—
the once upon a time
she was caught
in another person’s
spell. Someone gave her token
love which she took
for real,
and it terrifies her to know
how much she wants to kill.
c. slaughter
WHEN CECILY FINALLY called Herr M, it might as well have been me—a dead person. She nervously announced that she was Cecily Slaughter and would very much like to talk to him, stridently asking, “Can we meet? Of course, any place of your choosing.” At first, he was confused and could not place her. After a long pause an image of her clicked into his mind—she was the swollen, distorted version of Cecilia. “Yes,” he thought, “Cecilia Slaughter,” and immediately he felt his heart beating faster.
Both his rage and passion at the thought of Cecilia rose up and renewed itself at high pitch. Of course, he did not want his voice to show any of this, reveal even a hint of emotion, so mostly he stayed quiet and covered the mouthpiece of the phone when his breathing became too obvious. The last thing he wanted was to discuss—or quarrel over—with this intrusive woman was Cecilia. Most certainly he did not want to show how the mere mention of Cecilia’s name could affect him—cut to the depth of his body’s passion.
Cecilia had arrived with Cecily at a crowded poetry reading at the university a little over two years ago. He had yet to be introduced to Cecilia, but he had noticed both women—one so gorgeous and the other a cartoon caricature of the other. He should have stopped himself then—his smoldering urgency to know this woman.
Weeks later they began to meet for coffee, where they spoke of literature in general and her own work in particular. However, he always prefaced their conversation by first asking about her mother, which pleased her because he was such a good listener. She had told him about Aunt Lettie’s illness at their first encounter, it being foremost on her mind and telling him what was happening with her mother did temporarily alleviate a little of the anguish she was feeling. She liked his concern.
The last time they met—before his invitation to that dinner—he went a bit off topic and talked about pleasure. Cecilia sat across from him—her violet eyes so wide open, her whole being seeming so wide open, at least to Herr M—and quietly listened as he said, “I think two adults who are attracted to each other should further realize their relationship through pleasure. That the times they spend together should not be just verbal, but also physically pleasurable.”
Cecilia just smiled her stunning smile, as if mesmerized by him, then suddenly awoke from her trance, looked at her watch and realized she was late for an appointment. She jumped up, shook his hand and said, “Thank you. I love your giving me and my poetry so much attention. See you soon, I hope!” He thought she got it. “Who wouldn’t have?” was his strong feeling. Especially when, a few days later, he called her and said, “I’d like to cook you a dinner. Something special.” She did not miss a beat with her exuberant, �
�Yes, I’d like that!”
She appeared at his door aglow in impossibly soft, clinging winter clothes. I do understand the desire to be a semi-seductress, but, in this case, it was a huge mistake. When she took off her coat, her pants and sweater clung to her from winter static—he remembered its crackling noise and the sparks that encircled her. It made him feel that her whole being was electrified. They both laughed at this and he thought it a good start …
He could not suppress his impulse to want to mess her up, starting with taking his thumb and pressing it over her perfectly formed lips to erase the too-bright color on them, which hid their own natural radiance. Her nipples had hardened from the cold and they stood out, even against the sweater she wore, which felt like that of a kitten’s fur when he touched her arm, and that, too, added to his building arousal as he welcomed her further into his place. It was then he presented her with the bracelet of silver and obsidian. He thought it the perfect moment. He proudly told a colleague, “I think the gift will be a nice touch,” and then he laughed.
Hours later, even after she was naked and shivering and crying on the floor, he could not take his eyes off her—her thin frame, her oversized breasts, their areolas the palest pink. Even now, long after the incident—which is what he calls it—where he does admit he “lost it for a few minutes” and for which he apologized more than once, he can still get excited by this image of her.
“Anyway, what did she expect?” he thinks. “Coming to my place alone, so carefully put together, nothing ragged about her. Clearly coming up to my place dressed to entice.” He knows he saw her interest in him from the beginning—in her eyes, her smile, her not-so-subtle coquettishness.
Now, this woman—he guesses her sister (cousin?), given her last name—has called him, charging in on him, into his new life, thinking that he will just jump like some puppet and agree to meet her. That she can, with her strange, deep, determined, masculine voice and peculiar request, pull his strings and make him hash over things about Cecilia he clearly wants to leave in history. “No way,” he thinks.
