The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter (16 page)

Then, suddenly, Celine asks Cecilia about Michael and Deidre's posture quickly straightens. “This
wasn't
in the script,” Cecilia, rather startled, thinks, and wonders if Cecily put Celine up to this, but she stays as composed as she can, given all she is feeling, and replies in the fewest words that make any sense, “He came over last night. We watched the movie
Madame X.
We both agreed it was Lana Turner at her finest.”

“It's so nice that the two of you can still be friends,” Deidre says with a hint of sarcasm. Cecilia answers wistfully, “Yes, very nice.” She can see from Deidre's eyes that Deidre has begun to hate her.

With dessert being served—a rainbow of tiny scoops of sorbet—and any pot of gold Deidre had hoped for from this day about to disappear, she jumps in and asks about her poem: the one Cecilia so enthusiastically had spoken about to her over the phone, the one Deidre so obviously was trying
not
to bring up, but has now found impossible not to, the one that had
supposedly
led to this lunch.
At this moment I feel heartsick for both of them.
And inside Cecilia's head—her clogged mind—she starts to retrace
why
she thought she could do this.
Why
she thought she could pull this off, given all that has happened. She thinks about her mother and how much she wants to talk to her—
right now
—and how she cannot, given that she is deep in a hole beneath the ground. Then the image of her taking a shovel filled with dirt and dropping it onto her mother's casket in that hole at the rabbi's request flashes across her mind. How she
obeyed
him, even though she absolutely did not want to do it. She now adds this to her mushrooming list of disgusts with herself.

Suddenly, Celine bursts in, “A poem?
You
write poems? Oh, yes,
now
I remember. Well, so do
I!”
Shaken out of her morbidity and completely surprised, Cecilia wonders if Celie had rehearsed this with her, because it is all so perfectly absurd. Then Celine's cell phone lights up and looking at the number she says, “Sorry girls, I
have
to take this. I'll be in the lobby.”

Cecilia turns to Deidre and says, “Yes, the poem. I liked it.” She then stops. She is unable to take this any further,
thinking, “I have nothing to give. I just want you to
go away.”
Deidre's face is now so red, she puts both hands on her cheeks to cover her flush. It is clear she wants to kill Cecilia, or at least hurt her badly. Cecilia feels this and thinks, “And why not?” As they stare at each other, Cecilia feels they are two women about to break apart right in front of each other and she internally rages, “You could never understand what's going on with me, so blinded you are by your lust for success, with me your crumbling goddess of it sitting right next to you!”

Then Deidre, in her own despair, fury, and turmoil, starts praising Cecilia. With this, Cecilia knows that inside, Deidre is becoming appalling to herself. She speaks too fast and uses too much hyperbole, going over the top with too many empty adjectives. Her speed-dial talk will not quit—like how Cecilia was with Deidre over the phone about her poem. In their individual, almost out-of-control desperateness, Cecilia thinks, “How ridiculously similar we are.”

By this time Celine returns, beaming, and says, “Cecilia, let's finish up. I've got to go.” They get up and Deidre thanks Cecilia for the lovely time—neither of them extends her hand. Cecilia resists the feeling to do so. She does feel the impulse to say something to ease Deidre's pain, but she also feels completely depleted and immobile. Deidre then tells Celine how nice it was to see her again. Cecilia and Celine take the elevator. Deidre chooses the stairs.

Celine flees the building, while Cecilia goes into the Arts Club bathroom. In a stall, she hears a woman enter and go into the adjacent one. It is Deidre. She is weeping, while repeating, “Clubbed by the arts. Clubbed by the arts …”

This makes Cecilia think again of what Herr M did to her, and then of her Aunt Rose and how my mother's actions and words clubbed
her,
and that for Deidre
she,
Cecilia, has become Rose. It is then she starts weeping as silently as possible, not just for herself, but for Deidre, too.

Being completely overtaken by her upset, Deidre does not hear anyone in the next stall. However, when a couple of minutes later two women walk in, effervescently praising how well the other looks, she quiets, wipes her eyes with her fingers—smearing her mascara further. She then grabs her lipstick from her purse and, with her hand shaking, attempts to reapply it. Not caring that this probably makes her look even more disheveled, she opens the stall door, turns her face away from the women, and runs from their over-animated chatter.

Cecilia by then has pressed herself into a corner between the inside of the door and a wall and stands there immobile for several minutes—well after the women have left. What makes her finally move out of the stall is a female voice calling her name—a waitress from the club. She had forgotten to sign for the lunch. As she writes her name, she thinks about how much the afternoon has truly cost.

Nijinsky danced his last dance, “World War I,”

in January of 1919. He then suffered an

irreparable breakdown.

Nijinsky's dog, if he had one, died last August.

She was a beautiful animal

with all that was rational

beaten out of her strong

cleanly chiseled head.

We'd circle each other,

lonely, in the heat

of the late summer nights,

both of us waiting for you—

for some crumb of attention.

When I didn't finish the dinner

you'd sometimes offer,

you'd slip it into her bowl

and she'd spring toward you,

more starved for love than food.

I'd watch her from my chair,

passing the time until you'd turn yourself

toward me—remember (O please)

I was there. Out on the ledge

she'd sit, elegant and damaged—

her scars buried in her dense gnarled

fur. Since I've come up here I twist

my hair so hard it snaps

and now I have a bald spot

that my barrettes can barely cover. You

almost seemed to cry

when you told me that she died.

But as I came closer I saw

your eyes completely

dry. You left her

on that hot August roof—

the tar blistering

her dog feet. She couldn't stand

to touch the surface

so she sat and sat

on that asphalt edge,

her mind on fire with memory

of how you once took care

with her, gave her a yard

to play in, rolled with her

in cool green grass.

She'd dream of that

and want it back, before

the war that destroyed her world:

your wife's shrieks
take the goddamn

dog if you leave

me
. And the dog

in her dog mind thought and thought

it was all her fault.

I wish I'd been there

when she took her leap

into the too blue, parched

air, over the anchored

oak tree and the naive lilies

reaching toward the idle sky,

to see her resolve—the pause,

then the quick

amazing move—the elevation, the gift

of rising, her thick mane ablaze

against the dazed noonday sun.

How she broke

free in that
grand jeté
,

sailing in holy

madness past her dog life,

her soul bounding out

of her sad dog eyes

while her ragged body hit

a barren patch of earth.

c. slaughter

A
FTER THE MISERABLE
lunch with Deidre, Cecilia returned even more so to thinking about the disastrous dinner with Herr M and the all-encompassing consequences of it—of the damage it had done to her, both internally and externally—her broken spirit and the wretched gossip. The debris—the scum—from it something she feels she can never clean up.

He forbade her to publish the poems. Said he would ruin her career. He said people would know it was
his
futon in one of the poems—its urine smell, the urine of his child. She had shown three new ones to a friend and her so-called friend had shown them to him. He was particularly
paranoid because he was fighting for joint custody of his two year old daughter and in a pit-bull rage he snarled predatorily at her over the phone that the poems
—these poems
—if read by his wife's lawyer or worse, the judge, would cause irreparable damage to his chances. As if a lawyer or judge would read a poem and, even if they did, care.
Poems
as evidence? Not in this country. Never. She sent them out anyway and they did get published. Even though she could not seem to take good care with her body, she felt she
could
with her art—or at least try.

In addition, the poems seemed the only way to relieve her humiliation over what had happened. Yet the deadness she felt—a sick bulb twisting into itself, lost in its path of which way was up and out—seemed to be expanding faster than the speed of her writing. This is not to say she did not want to master the art of forgiveness for both him and for herself, but she could not. She read as many self-help book sas she could tolerate—some with religious overtones—and several on the practice of Zen, but none of what she read on forbearance, self-acceptance, and grace could reach the chaos going on so deep inside her. She even taped little sayings on the rim of the radiator cover next to her writing chair, but all they did was fall to the floor when the heat was turned on.

How she wanted to tell Celie right after it happened. But it was a bad time in her life, too. Emotional. She had just come out of the hospital and was trying to get back to normal. Back to her job at the fancy dress shop. She called her absence an “exhaustion.” The doctors recorded it as a “breakdown.”

Everyone was told when visiting her there to speak of nothing serious—only things “as light as air,” as one
too-perky nurse had put it—so as soon as she was in the car with Celie, driving her home—six days after it happened—Celie wanted to know all the important things she had missed these past couple of months. Cecilia took a breath and sputtered out “Herr” and stopped. When Celie said, “What?” she said, “I meant to say weather—that the weather has been just awful.” Then she smiled and continued, “You picked a good time to be inside.”

She drove her to her modest apartment and then went to the pharmacy with a fistful of prescriptions, returning to the fragile Celie with a bag filled with vials of pills. At that moment Celie most definitely was not the right person to tell.

How she wanted to tell her mother. But every time she tried it was clear her mother did not want to hear any detail—let alone the whole of it. Her mother, too, had become fragile. Physical. She did persist for a couple of weeks. One day when she mentioned Herr M, her mother just called him a “rascal,” took her hand and said, “Cecilia, I
too
have had a few rascals in my life.” She could not tell if her mother was being ironic, sarcastic, or her memory had momentarily gone into hiding from her body's sickness.

Once, she even brought up Diaghilev—Nijinsky's mentor—so that she could then segue into Herr M. She told her mother how he took the young Nijinsky from poverty straight to the Ballets Russes. How he tormented him, forced him into unwanted sexual acts. How he threw him out when Nijinsky finally asserted himself and how this contributed to Nijinsky's eventual collapse—that after he danced his dance,
World War I,
which he had choreographed so as to capture all the cruelties of war, he suffered an irreparable breakdown.

No matter that she was dying, Aunt Lettie's response was sharp and fast, “Art
choreograph
a war,
capture
a war—a
real
war with
all its cruelties? Never!
” No, her mother did not want to listen to any of this. So they went on to speak only about Nijinsky's genius. His use of straight lines and angles as opposed to the serpentine and spiral. How he allowed only essential steps into his dance and how this made every move more powerful.

Then her mother would return to her story of her own mother going to see Nijinksy dance. Aunt Lettie described in detail Nijinsky's costume as the Faun, just like she had to the relatives, when Cecilia in her room had struggled to hear her mother's words. Outwardly, Cecilia was enthusiastic with the repetition, because she saw how much this brought her mother an authentic happiness—that this pleasure, gleaned from the long lost past, lit her up and anchored her. Inwardly, after it happened, Cecilia felt completely untethered and lost.

She could not tell her father. Since his retirement he only liked to concern himself with the smallest of things. Crossword puzzles, the sports section of the newspaper—never the front page. He especially liked to read about golf—the
putt, putt, putt
into that tiny hole. As for his wife, all he wanted was to take her out of the hospital and put her in hospice. “Yes, close the door on
this
room,” her mother would say to Cecilia, pointing to herself. Cecilia found those the saddest words she ever heard her mother say about her father.

It was clear her father certainly did not need or want more grief—or problems—especially from her. They had never spoken about anything important. To him she was pretty much irrelevant, as if her birth was created only
by—and for—her mother. Her relationship with him was always formal—lacking any depth of emotion—so, at best, all she would get from Samuel Slaughter was some amount of fluster, like when he heard her read her poetry.