by Nelle Davy
Sometimes I would try and include Charles but he was no good at the game. He would look at me with a blank smile or, even worse, laugh. More often than not, I would rope Ava into my games to play the role of the victim. She would fall down theatrically onto the floor, her arms splayed in a pose reenacted from a movie while I voiced the dramatic noises of her make-believe death.
Once Cal Jr. found us. We were outside in the garden with Charles. Ava had just been poisoned with strychnine (I got the name off of a TV show) and I had directed her as to how she was to die. She fell to the floor writhing in slow soundless motion while I parroted the caws of suffocation and slow death that were gripping her limbs as she slid silently down. She collapsed onto the grass, her arms above her head, her long hair spilling brown onto the green.
I did not see him until the last minute. I had my eyes closed as I vocally demonstrated her death but when I opened them, Cal Jr. was standing above her looking down. He was about eighteen at the time, and Ava would be ten in three months. He saw her there and even though his shadow fell across her face she did not stir.
“Cal?” I asked uncertainly when he would not move, only bent his head to take more of her in and then suddenly he swooped down and lifted her up all in one movement. He was very strong, my cousin, and Ava was such a slip of a thing; while Claudia would be all curves and I was tall and lithe, Ava was delicate, weightless, her clothes often had to be taken in by Mom.
She yelled, of course, as did Charles, but with excitement. Cal had gone running down the garden laughing, holding her higher as she screamed with terror and delight. Charles and I were chasing him, not sure if we were players in a game or heroes in a tragedy. And then he stopped and swung her around and around until she was dizzy, her hair whipping about her head, her legs fast in his arms. We started laughing; we realized it was in fun. We had figured him out.
And then he dropped her.
“Ow, Cal, that hurt,” said Ava and she slapped his foot hard. Her face was flushed and she pulled her hair off her brow as she rubbed her thigh. I knelt down beside her.
“What did you do that for?” I asked and stood up to show him I was angry. He wasn’t looking at me; he had turned away, staring at the rose garden.
“You hurt her, butt-wipe,” I yelled, trying to attract his attention, but when I touched his arm he shrugged me off.
“She kicked me,” he said.
“No, I never,” said Ava, standing up. “I hate you.”
Cal whipped his neck around and grabbed her by the arm as she made to stalk off, Charles and I flanking her. But just then instead of us needing to rally to defend her against his attack, he sank to his knees and in a mock voice started crooning to her for forgiveness, like one of those Italian singers you see in old movies where heroines stand by lamplight before men in tuxedos.
Ava didn’t want to play along, I could tell, but her lips twitched and though she pursed them together in fury, her cheeks relented in laughter as Cal rolled his eyes and contorted his face with the effort.
“Come on, Ava,” I said eventually, grabbing her arm.
“Ah, Merey, it was just a joke,” he called after us but he did not follow. And though I did not respond, Ava turned to give him a smile.
When Pa died I stopped Thirteen at the Table. Suddenly death was not so funny anymore. It was not something I could invite and banish away at will. I learned that there were some things that would come into your life and you would not always be able to fight them. They could pick you up and throw you around like a rag doll and you could plead and reason, but that would not be enough to stop them.
So the picnic blanket was packed away and the bears and dolls no longer met for tea.
The next day Claudia came for me on the dot of eleven-thirty. I was sitting outside on Jane’s porch cradling a whiskey in one of her tumblers.
When Claudia saw me she rolled down the window and frowned.
“Jesus, Mer, it’s not even the afternoon yet. Get in.”
Her tone was so authoritative that I was up and halfway down the walk before I realized why I was out there waiting for her in the first place. I stopped. She slammed her finger against the horn.
I leaned down against the window and she shot me a look of irritation before rolling her eyes.
“I don’t want to hear it—just get in the car,” she said.
“I’m not sure if this… It’s a bit soon, isn’t it, to star—”
“Look, you were the one who said that the farm is going to be auctioned off soon, and you were the one who hightailed it over from New York so we could go over Mom’s stuff and make sure that not everything was dispatched to the winds and all traces of our lives and our parents’ lives were gone forever. Right? Then stop pissing about and get in the fucking car, Meredith.”
She hadn’t lost her touch, my sister. I was there in the car beside her before my head had caught up with my body. Childhood autopilot. When she wanted to, despite my attempts at rebellion, she could flick a switch in me and make me inwardly cower. I had assumed that this was a thing of the past, but as we sped down the familiar roads in her rented car, once again, I was proven wrong.
When we got to the trees I knew so well, I braced my hands against the window and seat respectively.
“You’re going to have to stop,” I said.
“What do you mean?” she asked, staring straight ahead.
My body realized what was happening before I did.
“Oh, God.”
She was so far up the lane I could see the bush lines part and a flurry of speckled white slipped into vision.
I leaned right across her and threw up.
After my father died something shifted in my grandparents. I don’t want to say that something broke, but it did fracture and the fissure ran a course through their relationship, like rivers on plaster.
The strange thing was, the fissure was in my grandfather, not my grandmother.
Like all things, Lavinia took the death of her youngest child in her stride. She did not cry in public, and she did not cover her face in a veil at his funeral. She did not even break her routine once he was buried. She dusted, she cleaned, she cooked. She wrote thank-you notes to those who sent flowers and cards of condolence. She exhibited no signs at all of grief. She called it stoicism. Others called it cold.
While my grandfather’s drinking worsened and my uncle retreated even further into silence, my grandmother was a model of normality. It was she who, when people asked how a man as young and healthy as my father could have died of a stroke caused by a brain aneurysm with no previous symptoms, answered them with the cold facts of the postmortem. It was she who soothed their shaking heads of disbelief and fielded their questions and concerns.
All this I saw when we lived in her house during that time. And I knew then, for the first time, that my grandmother was the one in our family who was the rock against which our waters broke. And yet we were not grateful. We did not want her strength, we wanted to see her body racked with anguish, to watch her pain and know that it cut through her carefully tendered links of self-control.
In other words—to know that she was like the rest of us.
As for my grandfather, he would fall into long lapses of silence around us, sometimes only punctuated by a brief smile that flickered and then died on his mouth before he knocked back whatever drink he was holding. He withdrew utterly from his wife through the medium of compliance. Anything she wanted, she got, anything she asked for, he did without question. It was robotic. My grandmother observed this but she did not raise the issue. She refused to acknowledge anything else was rotten in her home outside of my father’s death. It was in everything she did and said, from how she would smile at neighbors who passed her in the street, to refusing our school to allow us any time off to grieve. Perhaps she even came to believe it a bit, because anytime anyone asked after us all she would say was, “Fine, we’re just fine, aren’t we, girls?”
Despite everything, this small habit
of hers is something that has stayed with me. I use that word all the time whenever my life feels anything but. If you ask me a question and I use that as a response you know that despite my outward calm, something inside me shivers.
Which is why as if on autopilot, as I was gasping after heaving my guts up all over her, while Claudia screamed at me asking what the hell I was doing, saying my name over and over in varying degrees of anguish and disgust, before I could stop myself I was saying, “It’s okay, I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”
At the nearest gas station, as Claudia cleaned herself up in the bathroom, I stood outside, my arms folded across my chest. Despite my earlier nausea, my body felt okay now, numb, but otherwise normal. This, I knew, would anger my sister, who if she had to have her expensive dress covered, however involuntarily, with my vomit at least wanted to know that I had suffered for it.
Which I had, but not in any way she could obviously discern, so what use would that be to her?
Eventually she came over to join me, her dress smudged and in serious need of a dry-clean despite her concerted efforts. Through clenched teeth she asked, “Are you okay?”
“Fine now, thanks,” I said gingerly.
“Great, glad to hear it.”
“Look, I’m sorry—I couldn’t help it.”
“I’m sure.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose, Clo,” I said, suddenly really angry. “I mean for fuck’s sake, it isn’t all about you, is it?”
“Or you,” she suddenly screamed at me. “You think I like being back any more than you? You think I want to be here? That I get some kind of kick from it? I know what you’re thinking, who gives a shit when it was all my fault anyway? Little Miss Bitch got her comeuppance, right?”
Her nostrils were pinched and white, her cheeks blotched with color. For a moment I didn’t recognize her and then I did—far too much. She was panting with exertion. Suddenly she drew herself up and held her hand against her chest to steady her breathing.
“You’re not the only one with memories you’d like to exorcise, Meredith,” she said in a low voice after a while. “Sorry to rip that precious idea from your head but your pain is no more special than anyone else’s. We all have our demons here, so you’ll just have to get over yours like the rest of us. We are going to go down to the farm and we are going to sort through Mom and Dad’s things like we planned before everything gets auctioned off. No excuses, so suck it up.” She glared at me and then sighed. “And next time I’ll bring a change of clothes, just in case.”
Arrogant presumption. Perhaps the reason why she is so angry with me is because I cannot so easily forgive myself the way she has for her mistakes. Maybe she’s made of sterner stuff than I am. Maybe she’s more like our grandmother than she’d like to admit. So am I in some ways. It’s so easy to lay all our faults at Lavinia’s door, isn’t it? Any bad trait, any negative feeling we say comes from her, from her line, her genes. We don’t like to think they may be things inherent in us rather than just inherited. Scape-goating—we’re good at that in my family.
Or maybe she’s more capable of dealing with her memories because she doesn’t have to remember as well as I do. Maybe she does not go over things again and again in her mind, looking for clues she ignored right up until it was there in her face and even then her mind scrambled for a way to deny what was slowly burning its way right through the bone.
We lived with my cousin for a whole month as children and in that time I never noticed anything amiss. If anything during that time, I came to see my eldest cousin as a victim rather than a predator. I saw how awkward my grandfather was around him. How he barely ever looked him in the eye; how he would always find an excuse to leave a room if he suspected the two of them would be left alone together. And I saw Cal Jr.’s resigned attitude to his coldness. He would look at me when I watched him with a questioning eye and shrug, as if to say this is my life, this is just how it has always been. I felt sorry for him, I felt like he needed a champion. I began to court his approval.
To my sisters and I, Cal Jr. was older, aloof and the source of a subject that, from the hushed tones of our family, was both taboo and yet enticing. He was mysterious, like a foundling, looking nothing like the rest of us with his shock of red hair and pale blue eyes, so pale they could be diluted, except when he was angry and then they would suddenly color. We sought his attention as kids. He was the eldest, the strongest, the most difficult to please and so the most pleasing when we finally secured his favor. If he laughed at a joke, we were funny; if he scorned us we secretly wondered if there was something in us that was wrong. He had a way for such a long time of making you wonder about yourself rather than about him. But it was Ava on whom he focused his attentions the most. I could not see it for a long time, and even afterward could not understand it, but I do now. Now that I’m old enough and have seen enough, I understand how such things can happen in those ways. There were times when I saw him look at Ava and I would wince ever so slightly. Yet I did not try to keep them apart, I did not warn her, and, more importantly, I did not question her. He is my monster because of what I know now, but back then he was my cousin and though I feared him, I also loved him.
Strangely it was always our grandmother he turned to, our grandmother in whom he confided, leaned on, learned from. Piper was always hurt and surprised at their relationship, constantly cajoling, even wheedling him for that same needless affection that he threw so readily on Lavinia. She could not understand it; even more so she could not understand why my grandmother took it. It was a question she was too innocent to answer. Even after all she had learned she could not sense a power struggle when it was right under her nose.
On her bed, her breath rattling, suddenly out of nowhere, she interrupted my reading aloud and said, “Don’t trust him.”
“What, Grandma?” I asked, dropping the book and leaning farther in so she did not have to exert herself.
She closed her eyes in frustration and for a moment I thought she had slipped back into whatever blank she had stirred from, but then as I folded back the page she said again, “Don’t be fooled. I’m not. He’s not capable of love. But he’ll take care of the place, he won’t let it go. He needs it. He knows he’s nothing without it.”
“What are you talking about Grandma?”
“Obsession, that’s all it is. He has to have it, but it’s better than nothing. Get away from me!” She struck my hand as I went to rest it on the covers and then she looked at me and started laughing, really laughing, as if her body would erupt with the joke that was on all of us.
But she was wrong. Cal Jr. could love. I remember when he was about fifteen he had a pet once, a kitten given to him by Piper. He adored it, connected to it with a softness and protective possessiveness that no one had thought him capable of. And then one day, quite by accident, he broke its neck. He had held it so tightly against his chest in the crook of his elbow that its fragile vertebrae had snapped. To his credit he was inconsolable for days afterward, it even made him ill. My grandmother nursed him and when he was better again we never spoke of it. That should have been a warning to us all about the dangers of our cousin, who was so destructive even when he was trying to be good, but it wasn’t—at least not until it was far too late.
In those few weeks of my childhood after we’d moved back home with our mother, our lives slowly began to resume a newfound sense of normalcy. Our house was tidy and clean, we did our home chores before we went to school and we helped out on the farm when we came home. Ava took up dance lessons; I tried and failed at piano. Our mother insisted on trying to implement structure and order into our lives. We became governed by routine. Every spare moment seemed to be accounted for, as if she were afraid that any gap was the chance for disaster, that every pause would be an invitation for crisis. Or perhaps she just thought that to aid us in our grief we should be kept busy so we could not dwell on the death of our father. But how could we forget, how could every moment not be colored by his absence? From
our school plays, when we looked out into the audience and only saw our mother where once there were two, to the simple quotidian acts of each day, such as setting out places on the table for supper and realizing you’d laid too many plates. I remember seeing Claudia staring at the extra place mat, stricken, the plate still in her hand, and then as she heard our mother’s footsteps, hurrying to put away the offending item before she saw it.
And of course every Sunday we still went to the tall white house for a big roast dinner, which my grandmother and Piper would cook, and there we would watch our grandfather and uncle drink until their faces turned red and their mouths grew slack, while everything in my grandmother tightened to make up for their slow descent. Cal Jr. would be there, sitting across from us beside our grandmother. He would change allegiances per the day. One day he would talk to Claudia, making low jokes and snide looks with his eyes that he knew Ava and I were meant to see and burn over. Other times it would be me and, just like my eldest sister, I entered into his contract of favoritism because being on the inside was more attractive than being on the outside. But with Ava he would never use her against us—instead when it was her turn, he was kind, attentive. He made her laugh, coaxed conversation from her. In short, he knew how to play to our weaknesses: mine and Claudia’s were a propensity to be in the spotlight; Ava’s was to be loved.
Even though they were both heavy drinkers, my grandfather and uncle still managed to run the farm as efficiently as they had before. That is, they made harvest every year, the numbers did not slip, our lands still provided and our farm as a business was still revered. But as people, their alcoholism changed them irrevocably. My grandfather became a muted drunkard whose light could only be turned on in his mind by a tumbler being placed in his hand. My uncle became altogether far nastier a creature. He never touched Charles, but we all knew he beat the shit out of Georgia-May. In the mornings as we would go off to school she would come over to our mother’s house and Mom would bathe her and patch up her back from his belt scars and plead with her to leave him, but she never would.
