The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter (13 page)

Celie remembered when her grandmother, at seventy-five, whispered to her, while riding past a cemetery, that she no longer feared Death. That she was
tired—just so tired.
In her earlier years Eva feared it with such ferociousness that she would squeeze Celie so hard with her large hands that they would leave red marks on Celie's body—sometimes a discoloration that could last for a couple of weeks. From the age of one onward, Eva made Celie stand next to her at the living room window and, whenever anyone was more than five minutes late, Eva would start to shake and hold on to Celie muttering, “Celie, your father (mother—whoever it was) is late, yes, late—
too late.”
Then, Eva would slip into Yiddish and chant the word.
Niftorim. Niftorim.
Way before Celie was three, she clearly understood that meant
dead person.

Eva did not mean to scare her granddaughter; she just needed to share her anxiety and it was the small Celie who was the most available. Anyone would have done as well—her daughters Esther or Adele, her husband Levi, or her son-in-law, the most unavailable of all. Benjamin left Esther and Celie, and some years later Joshua and Jeremy,
in that tiny apartment a lot. He was busy working in the shipping department of a downtown department store during the day and going to school at night, studying to become a CPA and then a lawyer. He was saving his money so that someday “they”—meaning his own family—could move away, out of that crowded apartment to the suburb where we lived and where his other brothers had already migrated—something that caused him no small irritation.

Benjamin was determined to follow my mother's and his brothers' paths as soon as he had saved enough. Then, he and Esther and their children would escape. Not just because of how physically closed in it was in the apartment, but because of the crowd of words that crashed into each other every night—the fights, which he could not tolerate.

Esther's begging him to just move to another apartment was not enough, nor was how she eventually developed patches of eczema on her arms and legs from the stress of that place. He needed to be in
that
suburb, in a house, and he wanted a better house than what his brothers had settled for, something resembling his sister's, even if it were in miniature. It took twelve years for that to happen and it was then, in the weeks before the move, that Eva completely lost control—alternating between screams of betrayal and tears of grief that her beloved Esther was leaving, leaving her. Moving away—twenty miles
dead
north of her. How would
she
survive? Celie wasn't sure if her grandmother meant herself, her mother—or maybe even Celie. Then, in the final week before the move Eva went mute—spoke absolutely no words.
Niftorim.

On the last day, in mid-February—as bleak and cold and dead a day as she could remember—Celie cried
uncontrollably, not wanting to leave the apartment, not wanting her own room. She needed the familiarity of the cot laid out each night in the dining room, which her father carried her to when the grown-ups were done with their after-dinner fights. In the earlier evening she would sleep in Adele's bed in the back room. Under Adele's scratchy sheets, permeated by a strange fish smell and human sweat, Celie would curl herself into as tight a fetal ball as she could and pretend she was Cinderella waiting for the prince. No matter how distasteful, she was used to this. To this day Celie fears change, even if it is for the better.

Mostly the adults fought over Adele—what to do with her, her rebellious ways. She often came home late at night, or sometimes not at all. The fights were about putting her in the hospital. They would lower their voices when they said
hospital,
but Celie could still hear them. It was a secret place that eventually she figured out was for people sick in the mind, not the body. “A place like where Grandmother Idyth was,” she would think, “maybe the
same
place.”

If Adele happened to come in, they still fought about her.
The problem. The failure.
Eva wanted to put her away and Esther and Levi wanted to give her another chance—even after the police brought her home one night, showed them the pin and the ring that they found on her that were reported stolen by the neighborhood jeweler. Benjamin avoided all discussions about Adele, just as he refused to discuss his mother, Idyth, with any of them.

When Celie would hear the loud adult talk, she would twist further into her small self and in a strange way be glad—glad none of this shouting was about her. But there
was a sadness, too, for sometimes she really liked Adele—the freedoms she gave herself. She especially liked her on the Saturdays when Adele would sneak home a paper bag with two non-kosher hot dogs, one for herself and one for Celie, and they would escape down the paint-chipped, creaky, wooden back stairs of the apartment, sit in the outside air on the first floor landing and eat the “forbidden fruit,” as Adele called it. Celie loved this.

Later in life, when Celie saw the title of one of Cecilia's poems, “The Sin-Eater of the Family”—although Celie was pretty sure Cecilia did not have Adele in mind when she wrote it, more her own self—Celie thought of Adele in that old apartment, forced to wear a jagged, tilted, tarnished crown—all the precious jewels fallen out of it, leaving just rusted, empty holes. I also know Celie, Cecily, and even Celine—had she chosen to focus on it, which she did not—would think the title more than applied to themselves. Here beneath the ground, I, too, identified with it, which surprised me for I thought I had worked far past the victim concept.

Overweight, out of control, unable to keep a job, unengaged with no man in sight, Adele grew into her mother's worst nightmare. Adele was not filled with beautiful music, only mood swings—out-of-sync, out-of-pitch, high-to-low, low-to-high—never to become the concert pianist Eva had dreamed for this daughter. The baby grand piano in the living room was never to be touched again, after “Adele failed it”—that is how Eva phrased it. “It” became the monument—the Monument to Failure.

Once, Celie bolted from her chair in the kitchen during dinner and ran into the living room, lifted the highly-polished, wooden cover over the keys and banged on them
wildly. She was five. It was a loud, manic moment, similar to one when she was seven and she leapt from the dining room table when Aunt Bertha, Eva's cousin, came for her monthly Saturday night dinner, her crutches always positioned in the same place against the doorway that led to the coat closet. Celie fixated on them when Bertha was there—could hardly look elsewhere. Polio had crippled Bertha's legs, but with braces and the crutches she could get around if adults were always on either side of her. Celie thought it a sad parade, but it did not stop her from focusing on how much she wanted to swing from them. She imagined herself an acrobat, flying away from the table—the room, the people. On the day it became too much to restrain herself, she caused an even larger chaos than the piano incident—almost equal to any of Adele's. And it was not fun. Their curved tops, even with their heavy padding, dug into her armpits and caused a sharp pain. As for flying—she fell.

After Eva realized Adele would never be a joy, a pride, she focused her complete attention on her younger daughter and for a while Celie's mother made Eva quite proud. But when she met Benjamin—“wild, tanned, handsome Ben,” as Esther rhapsodized to anyone who would listen—Ben, who told her stories about how he and his brothers would run naked through the woods in Michigan, howling like wolves, Esther imagined such a freedom. She thought Ben, with his movie star looks, would be her savior, would free her from the stage, from her mother, from her trapped life—the too many words, the too many directions to be remembered, to be memorized. So when he proposed, she said a quick, ecstatic, “Yes!”

When Esther would speak of him this way and her cheeks would flame with life, all Eva felt was her own
world shifting again and growing cold—almost to frozen. With Eva's awful memories of her first neighbor, Idyth Slaughter, still very much alive, she could not help but believe a dybbuk inhabited
that family
and one day it would again spring to life and cause great damage to someone—anyone—named Slaughter. So when her treasured Esther fell in love with one of Idyth's sons, this became an addition to Eva's list of nightmares.

However, when Ben showed up the first time for dinner, dressed in a white linen suit and straw hat, and handed Eva—not Esther—violets, it was the beginning of Ben winning—winning over Eva—especially after he talked so politely with Eva and Levi about all his plans for the future—all his great ambitions. And a few months later, when Eva tested the water by suggesting perhaps they live with them after the marriage—that it would cost them “almost nothing”—and Ben, without even looking at Esther, eagerly agreed (thinking about all the money he could save and knowing this was even a better deal than what his brothers Emmanuel and Abraham had made with my father—Samuel eventually moving into their building once he married Lettie) Eva was even more reassured, thinking, “Even though he is a Slaughter, I'll be able to keep an eye on him and make this work.”

She and Levi threw them the
best
wedding—one they really could not afford—and, regularly and often, she would pull out the pictures from the top drawer of her bureau, spread them carefully across the oilcloth on the kitchen table like a deck of cards and make everyone sit down, so she could talk about how it all was “so perfect.”

Celie often wondered where that other Benjamin went. The Ben who ran naked through the summer nights,
making wild and wonderful animal sounds—the one her mother had told her about, described to her with such delight. To Celie, because her grandmother approved of her father so much, he must have died. And she missed him, although she never knew him.
Niftorim.

When he finally took his family twenty miles away, something died in Eva—again. And in Celie, too. She did not like the suburbs. They were filled with preadolescent girls who looked like the carefully manicured shrubs that lined the streets. Plus, they talked so much about their clothes. About their
cashmeres.
Celie had never heard the word cashmere before the move. When they asked her almost in unison, “How many do
you
own?” she did not know what to say and ran home to ask her mother. Esther laughed and answered, “None. Your sweaters are made of Orlon,” which Celie felt she should keep to herself.

Now, Celie is legendary. She knows her fabrics better than the ultrathin women who wrap themselves in them and give no care to what anything costs. However, while covering the living with the expensive silks and satins and sequins that make their lives a'glitter, she spends her time waiting for Death, shrouding this fear with too much food, a fixed smile, and a too-jolly laugh. It is only in her dark eyes that her panic is etched, but her clients are too busy—busy looking at themselves in the gilded triple mirrors—to give it much, if any, notice. For this Celie is grateful.

Someday she hopes to open her own shop, not for clothes, but for linens. Linens with the highest thread count—the softest, finest bedding one can dream on. This is her one, perfect fantasy. This is her one great wish.

Eva did not understand how her granddaughter could settle on just selling clothes. It made her sad and uncomfortable. Actually, embarrassed. Benjamin's brother, Samuel, had a daughter who was a published poet. To her this was
so much
better. But she loved her granddaughter and on the surface accepted Celie's choice. Told her friends, “Celie is the best saleswoman in the Midwest—actually famous.”

Eva had left her family at fourteen. Left them in Russia—five thousand miles away. She waved good-bye for the promise—the promise of the promised land. Her family had chosen her to be their messenger, their memory, their legacy. She carried that luggage with her always—their troubled waves goodbye and her own escape from the pogroms and the looming threat of the camps. And with this grew the need to be ambitious for her children—have a daughter who would be a great pianist or a celebrated actress and maybe someday even a granddaughter who would become a famous poet. Like Anna Akhmatova or Marina Tsvetayeva—well, maybe not exactly like Tsvetayeva, who she later learned had in the end hanged herself. “But, still, how wonderful,” she thought, “it would be to bring such an inheritance across the ocean and be able to report on these accomplishments to my family back in Europe.”

She would sit next to Esther by the radio, and listen to the news about the war—about the men named Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler—while Esther wrote letter after letter to the American Red Cross asking for their help. “Could they find her mother's family—her parents, her
brothers, her sister?” Finally, in 1950 the answer arrived. A stamp over their names, DISAPPEARED.
Niftorim.

So six years later, when Eva took the small Celie's hand and they stood at the living room window—the sounds from the baby grand piano long silenced, a heavily fringed, thick black wool shawl smothering the top of it—she needed, even more, everyone close by, on one street, in one place and never late. And it all became
Niftorim.