The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter (20 page)

Celie hated hearing any horrible story. However, in the shop when her clients vented their problems to her, as they frequently did, she had perfected the art of compassionate nodding. But this made her feel so used—that once again she had become the dumping ground for other people's issues, had become the Sin-Eater for her customers.

Her client went on to say, “My niece is very shy, not attractive, and stutters when she speaks. Clearly this so-called
great
man—this great intellectual—treated her as a receptacle until his divorce was final, for when that happened, he abandoned her and moved in with someone else
—three weeks
later. Now, my niece is too depressed to return to school, and I'm worried she might be suicidal.”

She then asked for Celie's advice.
“Me?”
Celie thought, rather startled, “Celie Slaughter, never married, who's
never had a lover! Though men like Herr M make a good argument for celibacy—a life of just fantasy, no matter how lonely.”

Then, Celie considered, “Maybe she asked me because she had heard about my own instabilities.” She did not know if she should worry that this was still being discussed or that she should take it as a compliment, because she was now considered “recovered,” now seen as “very together.” She had heard some of the whispers. Ultimately, she decided it just did not matter. At least she had learned some small thing from her therapist—“People talk. You can't stop them.”

Today, however, she knows too many awful things about this one man and she is finding this too much of a coincidence—as if she were
meant to know, meant to do something.

Cecilia said she had told no one else, and Celie believes this to be true. Yet, when she saw her poem “Nijinsky's Dog” in the
American Poetry Review,
Celie was perplexed and frightened. At first, she thought it was just Cecilia's heightened imagination at work, but as she kept rereading it, its subtext, its imagery, and metaphors, began to scare her. She now understands more clearly how much autobiography was there.

Celie cannot get Herr M's thug fists, the heft of his body on Cecilia, out of her mind. Cecilia shook when she described how each time after he got her, he told her to “Turn! Turn! Turn Over!” “Celie,” she said, holding on to both of her arms as if they were lifelines, “I thought it meant that finally he was going to get off of me, let me up. Let me go. But it wasn't true—it just wasn't true. I couldn't catch my breath.”

Then Celie remembered the winter before last, just a few weeks before Aunt Lettie's death, how heavy Cecilia's breathing was when she drove her home from the hospital, which Cecilia attributed to a mild case of bronchitis. “Nothing serious,” she reassured her. Celie later learned it was walking pneumonia, and it took until the summer for her lungs to become clear of the infection.

Now Celie believes Cecilia will never be totally uninfected by what has happened—that she will not be able to get up completely. She thinks, “Some things can never be gotten up from fully—at best they land on our backs, like rocks we forever carry with us.”

Celie has always loved Cecilia's poetry. Its melancholy. Its unexpectedness. The way her words make her face, and almost accept, her own emotions. They do, for sure, make her feel less alone. She loves the places Cecilia carries her both literally and figuratively. Sometimes she has to look up what Cecilia's referring to, but then she learns even more and feels smarter. Cecilia's language gives her sadness a shape. Always has. At least for the moment she is reading it, she can contain her own feelings within Cecilia's lines.

Yet, now she does not know what to do with the rage that is spiraling inside her—a rage as large as any she has ever known—because of this man. A man she has never met, but now has heard about in two awful, anxiety-filled situations, each horrible in its own way—however, similar. Now that she knows the facts—the truth—not just the rumors and the guessings as to what really happened to Cecilia, she wants to hurt him, hurt him badly, which sounds preposterous, she knows, because she is the furthest person from powerful. And she has read enough
literature, both sacred and profane, to know that dealing with the Devil is always big trouble.

That evening, she wondered what he looked like, so she searched for him on the internet. She got many pictures and studied them for almost thirty minutes. He had a full head of thick, wavy, black hair, his sideburns beginning to gray. His nose was straight and close to perfect. She thought he would look more like a goat, but he did not—although he did have a thick, black goatee, also flecked with gray, which made him look devil-like. “Perhaps to cover a weak chin,” she thought. His lips were full, giving the impression they could be a supple place for words to pass through. However, in several picture a few of his teeth were jagged, almost to the point of looking broken. “Maybe as a result of all the lives from which he'd taken a too-hard bite,” she said out loud to no one.

With all this studying of him, it became clear to her that his real power was in his dark eyes—a softness to his stare, coupled with an odd sexiness, as if he were saying, “I can show you a good time and will never, ever hurt you.” Celie felt drawn to them even through the computer screen. “That's what the Devil—or a psychopath—can do to you,” she said out loud again, when she forced herself to finally click off all images of him. But, even then, she could still see his face staring at her and it kept her up most of the night, along with his words to Cecilia.
Turn. Turn. Turn Over.

She tossed in bed for hours looking for a cool spot, and trying to figure out what to do next. “What do I, Celie Slaughter, do? A woman who always stands on the sidelines of life, smiling with designer clothes in her hands,
helping other women dress well, so they can go to parties with men who might
rape
them”—a new thought she cannot wash from her mind.

“What does a woman do who just works in a dress shop and watches TV or reads books, a woman like
this,
who knows too much that can't be told—what does
she
do?” All night that question hooked her mind and dragged it into every fevered, scary crevice of herself—triggering her earliest, most frightening memories of her grandmother grabbing at her, as if Eva were about to crush her small body—sometimes even leaving bruises on her that took a week or two to disappear—and comparing this to what Herr M had done to Cecilia. She could not stop making this connection. She felt like she was on fire—that her bed was covered with slowly burning charcoals.

When the sun started its rise, she fell into a half-sleep—a slimy, cold sweat covering her, making her feel like she was not totally human, but part reptile. It was not the first time she had felt this way. After the breakdown, while in the hospital, the division became even more pronounced—like she was split down the middle with a “crazed, coiled thing” inhabiting half of her, the other being just a chasm of fears.

In her early morning hallucinations, she kept hearing the girl with the stutter desperately trying to articulate something, but only able to make choking sounds, and kept seeing Cecilia, her eyes too wide, her pupils too dilated, unsuccessfully trying to cover black and blue marks all over her naked body.

She awoke from this stupor with a leap—almost did not know where she was—when her alarm went off. She had to get up and go to the shop and paste a grin on her plain face. It was while she was getting dressed that she
gave herself permission to open her mind as wide as it had ever been, and then
the idea
burst in
—the idea
to buy a gun. She allowed herself to understand why sometimes people more than fantasize about wanting to kill someone—someone other than themselves.

On her lunch break, she searched the suburban
Yellow Pages
for gun shops. There were none nearby. She remembered years ago there being one not far from here. She was a teenager and considered suicide a possibility—a way out from not being good enough. Not good enough to be a Slaughter—not smart enough, not pretty enough, not
Aunt Rose
enough. Always carrying around the awful feeling that someday—and soon—she would embarrass herself so badly that the only solution would be to die immediately after that moment happened. Also, there was her unending terror of Death, created in her grandmother's apartment—created by her grandmother herself—and as she got older it seemed one way to conquer Death was to take control. To stop fearing when Death would get her she would take charge—take charge of it. That was when, at thirteen, she searched for an address of a gun shop and found one within five miles of her house.

The only one she told about this was Cecilia. It was at a time when it was clear to her that Cecilia did not feel good about her own self. She had seen the deep red marks on her arms and the small scabs on her thighs. The
obvious
pickings at herself.

They would sun themselves in Celie's backyard, the record player in the family room swooning out Johnny Mathis's voice—“A Certain Smile,” “Chances Are,” “The Twelfth of Never”—into the summer air and talk about finding their “one true love.” One day the phone rang
in the kitchen. Her mother answered it and then came out to say, “A neighbor woman is complaining about the noise. She's trying to study for a test to get a certificate to teach Braille to the blind and the music is interfering with this.” That is how Aunt Esther so blankly put it in her tired voice. Then she turned from the doorway to the yard, went into the house and turned the music off.

Celie rolled onto her stomach and whispered to Cecilia, “I'm a bad person.” She said it as if she were half-kidding, but Cecilia, all too seriously and sadly replied, “So am I.” It was then they really started to talk and she found out how much she and Cecilia did have in common—not just that their fathers were brothers—but the awful ways they felt about themselves.

She told her about the gun shop nearby and Cecilia all too quickly said, “Oh, Yes! Please Celie, give me the address.” Then, suddenly and surprisingly, they both burst out laughing. But today, searching for such a place, Celie is far from laughing. She has to
do something.
She has to
do this.

The awful things we humans do to each other flooded Celie's mind, overwhelming her. She thought about the Holocaust, the Inquisitions, the Cossack massacres, the Crusades—the world's griefs. Some days she cannot turn on the news, just retreats into a Marx Brothers movie—or, better yet, a silent one. Nothing can interrupt, no voice bursting in with the news of some breaking terribleness or a tape running across the top of the screen, updating her on the most recent catastrophe.

She still remembers the stories about how her mother kept writing to the American Red Cross about her grandmother's family. She thinks of her grandmother and the
terrible irony—how fifteen years ago on her last day she crossed the street when she saw Adele coming toward her. How she turned from her—in a way killing off her eldest daughter—and Celie wonders if in that single act, in those few steps, a pure, horrific grief rose up in her grandmother, killing
her.

She thinks about how we have to be careful whom we kill off. But then she realizes Herr M does not fall into any category she has ever known and that nothing she can do to him will kill her, that in hurting him she will only feel better.

On her break she closes her eyes, but can still see the people on television walking with placards taped across their hearts with pictures on them, and underneath their desperate words in bold type, Have You Seen Him? Have You Seen Her? Sometimes she is really glad she has no one, no one to lose—Cecilia being the one exception and she cannot bear that someone has hurt her. She wants to tape a sign across her own heart that says

Herr M Is A Rapist.

Please Help Me

Do Something About This.

At the end of day she sits in the back room of the shop—just a giant version of the coat closet in her grandmother's apartment—crowded with clothes that hang there lifeless, and she thinks about
all
the empty people who will fill them and beyond that all the bad things they will do while so finely dressed—all the rules they will break. And, of course, she thinks of Adele and the Yom Kippur Night Dance.

She thinks of Adam. She thinks of Eve. Of God watching them in their innocent nakedness—how in the beginning they did not need clothes, did not have anything to cover up. How alone He must have felt with their betrayal.
His Rage. What He Knew.
She thinks how utterly alone she is with
what she knows.

Then suddenly, she takes a deep breath and feels omnipotent—she becomes Jehovah, the Messiah, the Savior—the Holy One. She wonders if this is the manic, base part in her rising up again, and she does not care. All she knows is that she has to do something and do it quickly—Herr M
has
to be punished.
Has
to be stopped. And it is then her head finally clears and she gets up and leaves the shop.

When the people come in to pray

they'll need somewhere to sit.

I'll be the one to help them stay

while they make some sense of it.

And when they are done

and go home fully blessed,

I'll be the one

to clean up what's messed.

Will that be equal enough

to what they do,

if I do that stuff

will it satisfy You?

c. slaughter

C
ELIE WAS
WEARING OUT
again, not just from what she had just learned about Herr M, but from all the giving, all the pleasing, all the hurting. This should not have been a surprise to anyone who knew her history—Celine included. So when Celie asked Celine to accompany her to a gun shop, Celine should have taken it more seriously. Instead, she quipped, “Celie, are you
that
tired of trying to make everyone happy that now you're just going to start
shooting all of us?” Celie paused, took a breath, and just said, “It's for protection.”