by Cathy Lamb
So I’ll tell people what to do about sex.
As if I know what I’m talking about.
I am a hypocrite. I hate that part of myself.
That “other” part.
I thought of the man I used to know who liked snakes. Seeing him on TV awhile ago had brought so much rushing back.
I ignored the voice that told me I was a slut.
“Keith Stein on the phone, Madeline,” Georgie called. “And Stanley wishes you a tranquil day.”
Stanley barked.
I picked up the phone.
“We can’t do anything about the article, Madeline. They’re determined to print it. It’s the anniversary of the trial. She’s interviewing everyone—both judges; some of the jurors; the people in Cape Cod; relatives of Sherwinn, Gavin, and Pauly; even Pauly’s son, apparently. And she wants to talk to you, Annie, and your grandparents, as you know.”
I felt myself boil once again. I haven’t hidden that part of my life, but neither have I talked about it. It happened years ago. It was nationwide news then, but Annie and I were able to slip into life here in Oregon with few people knowing that we were Marie Elise O’Shea’s daughters. By the time we arrived, many months after her trial, the media was no longer interested in us.
Annie wasn’t speaking when we arrived in Oregon; she was half-comatose, stuck in her own world, barely moving mentally or physically, certainly not crying, Annie never cries. I was raging, destructive, hurting.
Grandma and Granddad’s love, patience, and attention was unending. After tending to the animals here, the sheep, the dogs, and cats, Annie started talking again, and after hundreds of hours of pounding horseback rides, almost obsessive playing of my violin, and the violin in my head playing softly almost nonstop, I began to stop wishing I were dead.
Annie didn’t play the piano, though. Not a key. Even though Granddad and Grandma encouraged her to. She refused. “The piano is dead for me.”
The thought of dealing with what happened again via a magazine article . . . of reliving it . . . the trials, the gunshots that to this day I still hear in my head, Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor . . . the pain it would bring to my family. I hated that reporter.
I hated her. It’s not personal.
Hate kills you.
And I still hated them. After all these years, I still hated them.
I felt my rage, hot, simmering, overwhelming, slicing up my breathing into bits.
When I got home, I opened the drawer where I’d flung the manila envelope. There it was. My emotional demise.
Sherwinn pretended he was nice in front of our momma. Gifts of necklaces with heart lockets, or rings with big pink stones from the five-and-dime, hair ribbons, jewelry boxes.
We never believed he was nice. Never.
We never believed he was kind. Never.
Kids can sniff out this type of deceit in adults. They sniff it.
We did believe him when he told us we were bad girls, that he would tell everyone.
We believed him when he said he would kill our momma.
We believed him because he wielded a knife, sometimes under our chins. He pricked me once and I bled. He made me tell my momma I fell from the tree house my dad built us.
I lied to my momma.
Sherwinn appeared normal to many people. He was not normal.
I hesitated at my closet with no doors the next morning. Usually, I pull out yet another suit, my modern armor, and appropriate, sedate jewelry and low-heeled shoes.
When Annie and I were younger, we wore the funniest outfits.
We’re only fifteen months apart, and my momma told us once that from a very young age we had “firm opinions” about what we were going to wear. “I never knew what the two of you would walk out in.” She kissed us both. “I still don’t know what you two are going to wear, but I look forward to it each morning. Your creativity is sunshine to my day.”
One year Annie and I decided to wear our gauzy pink ballerina skirts from Grandma every day, no matter what. I was in first grade, she was a kindergartner, and we pirouetted through that year.
Our grizzly bear outfit phase followed that, where we wore only our grizzly bear outfits for two months. The grizzlies were sewn for us by Grandma, and we spent a lot of time growling at each other and “dancing like bears.” Each bear had a pink heart on its chest.
When I was in third grade, Annie and I decided to wear glittery pink headbands on Mondays; kimonos on Tuesdays, which we paired with our red cowboy boots; our sequined pink poodle skirts on Wednesdays; our Wonder Woman outfits on Thursdays ; and all black with pink tennis shoes on Fridays.
Sometimes the kids giggled, but we didn’t care. We were the Pink Girls! Our momma was Marie Elise and our dad was Big Luke! If we were lucky, we’d start a trend and other kids would pick up on our styles.
Before taking us exploring on the beach one time, our dad cut out whales from cardboard and we painted them. Momma pushed strings through the top and we wore them all day long. Even our dad wore a cardboard whale around his neck.
There are photos of Annie and me, standing with our dad wearing hats made out of sticks and wrapped in twine. I am holding Bob the Cat. One sunny day, when the weather was benevolent, we made dresses of white butcher paper and colored flowers with rainbows all over them. We wore only underwear and striped socks beneath. We made a dress for Dad, too.
Style we had. Funny, quirky, never-boring style.
I thought of my suits.
No style.
I thought of my hair.
No style.
I pulled my mercilessly straightened hair back off my face and secured it with a boring clip. My suits, my hair, my discreet, boring jewelry. All armor.
My armor is like my house. It’s expensive. It’s modern. It’s a show. A show to all that I have made it.
It’s a battle within, a battle outside.
Every day, a battle. A battle to win, to achieve, to convince myself that I am someone. A battle against the past and what happened, a battle against a maniacal giggle, a cage, and a camera.
Click, click, click.
None of the Giordano sisters’ cats were feeling healthy.
“Princess Anastasia feels restless, unsettled,” Adriana said, peeking woefully into her cat’s basket. Princess Anastasia was wearing a shiny red bow. The red matched Adriana’s red, lownecked gown, more appropriate for a ball. She made a spitting sound. The cat, not Adriana.
“Bee La La is sad. The sadness comes upon her sometimes and drags her deep, deep down to where she feels she can’t get out and be normal again,” Bella said, wringing her hands. “Poor Bee La La! Am I a bad mother?” Bee La La was wearing a purple bow, which matched Bella’s four-inch designer heels. She rolled her eyes at me, I swear she did. The cat, not Bella.
“Candy Stripe is grieving. I don’t know why, but she is,” Carlotta said, clucking her tongue. “It’s loss. It’s loneliness, I know it.” She petted the napping cat. Candy Stripe was wearing a striped blue and white bow. The blue matched the blue silk sarong wrapped around Carlotta’s skinny frame.
I stared at all three ladies sitting around my table. Wealthy. Expensive. Spoiled. Coiffed to within a millimeter of their fake eyelashes.
Lost. Purposeless. Shallow. Bored, but don’t get it.
“Ladies, we’re going to play ‘I Wish’.” I handed each one of them a glittery, purple magic wand.
“Your royal highness,” Adriana said, bowing at the waist.
“Goody! I love being a princess,” Bella said. “Princess me!”
“Sometimes we need to say out loud what we wish to have in life,” I said.
“Like one more pair of Jimmy Choos,” Carlotta gushed. “The new ones with the dots that look like miniature cheetah paw prints.”
“Not exactly,” I said. I eyed all of them. We’d had our fun. Let’s see what else was behind these ladies. “When you say, ‘I wish,’ what you’re trying to do is go deep. Way deep into your inner desires and dreams. It’
s the O’Shea Be Honest With Yourself, You Liar plan.”
“I understand,” Adriana said. “Go deep into our minds and think about what we really wish for, what we really want. Like when we buy our new Porsches next month. Do we all really want to buy the same color? Maybe we should buy different colors.”
Bella sucked in her breath.
Carlotta made a squeaking noise.
“To show our personality,” Adriana said.
“But,” Bella said, “we are a personality. We’re the Giordano sisters.”
“That’s right. Adriana, Bella, Carlotta. We’re one. We’re a unit. The unit,” Carlotta said, bewildered.
“But should the unit have different color Porsches? It’s a thought, an idea, a bug in our ears,” Adriana said, hugging herself tight.
Bella rolled her lips in tight. Carlotta tapped her fingernails together, worried. This was new! Individualism? A rebel among them?
“Thinking beyond the Porsches,” I said, before things degenerated, “when you play ‘I Wish,’ the real goal is to figure out who you are, what you’re made of, what you want your future to look like, what you wish didn’t happen to you, maybe. We’re trying to figure out what you want for your life.”
“What I want for my life? We’re thinking about a pool,” Bella said.
“With two curlicue slides!” Carlotta added.
“No, not like that,” I said. “Not stuff.”
“Hmmm,” Adriana said, plucking at her red gown. “Okay! I think I get it. Let’s do it, girls! Let’s play ‘I Wish’!”
Bella gave a cheerleader-type cheer, one leg out, her metallic jumpsuit so shiny.
Carlotta kicked up her black knee-high leather boots. “Hee-haw!”
“All right, I’ll start, then I’ll skip myself and you three go round and round. Each one of your sentences must start with ‘I Wish.’ Got it? You can’t interrupt each other. You can’t add anything. You can’t start chatting. Now think, ladies. I wish . . .” I paused, trying to settle my mind. There was so much to wish for. “I wish I understood what my grandma was talking about when she talks about the blood. I wish that her dementia would clear so I would know what happened to her as a young woman.”
The sisters gaped at me.
“My!” Adriana said, fingering her fur coat, which she’d folded onto her lap. “I didn’t know we were going into . . . emotions . . . sadness and all that!”
“I thought we were going to talk about next season’s fashion, maybe what restaurant we want to visit during our trip to Paris, or if yellow is too bold for high heels,” Bella said.
“Let’s go, ladies,” I prodded.
I waited in the silence that followed while all three petted their cats. Princess Anastasia made that spitting sound. Bee La La rolled her eyes. Candy Stripe woke up and yawned.
I continued to wait.
Waited more.
“I wish that Favio had delivered that glass sculpture on time. I died waiting for it!” Carlotta said.
“I wish that my manicurist never went on vacation! I miss the butterflies she paints on my nails!” Adriana said.
“I wish that my favorite lipstick from Dominique had not been discontinued. I tried to sue them, but my lawyer said it would never work,” Bella said.
“I wish I were wearing my pink padded bra.” Carlotta grabbed her boobs and stared down at them. “This one doesn’t have enough lift, up and in, and I—”
“We should go bra shopping!” Adriana said.
“Excellent!” Bella enthused. “We’ll have a Giordano sister bra day and we’ll go for a salad and soup and a red wine lunch and we’ll—”
I stomped both feet. “No. Stop. Stop being shallow, stop being superficial!”
The three of them sat straight up, as if I’d punched them in their diamond necklaces.
“Stop avoiding depth and sincerity in your conversations. Be honest. Close your eyes, dig deep, bring up what you’re upset about, what you worry about. Let go of all this artificial, exhausting prancing about.”
They twitched and fidgeted, opened and closed their eyes, tapped their nails, swung their expensive shoes, until they finally settled down.
I waited. I was rather taken aback when I heard Adriana sniffle. Bella wiped a tear. Carlotta brought a hankie out of her purse and blew her nose. “I wish we had had a mom who wasn’t always upstairs in bed, drunk. I wish we didn’t have so many maids raising us, that she could have done it, made our lunches, met us after school. I wish we weren’t screamed at as much as we were. Nothing we did was right.”
“Nothing,” Adriana said.
“Not a thing,” Bella said.
“I wish that Daddy hadn’t yelled at her, shoved her against walls, hit her . . .”
“Smashed her face into the sink that time . . .”
“Yanked her down the hall by her hair. . . . She never grew hair there again.”
“Held that gun to her head that time by the fireplace . . .”
“I wish that Daddy hadn’t lived with us, because he scared Mom so badly she cried all the time.”
“I wish he hadn’t lived at all.”
“I wish he’d died.”
Whoa!
“I wish she hadn’t had a nervous breakdown.”
“I wish she had taken us and run. I wish she had protected us. I wish she would have stood up to him, but she drank too much.”
“She drank to drown herself.”
“I wish there weren’t all those scary men around and that I didn’t see Daddy out in the guest house with them and I wish I hadn’t heard screams or seen those two bodies dragged out of there and I wish I hadn’t read the paper about the men who died and were found in the river, because I remember seeing them at the guest house . . .”
“But before Mom died—”
“Yes, before she died, she told us where the money was, where the accounts were.”
“You see”—Adriana held out her wrists—“Diamonds. From Daddy. Sort of. We consider them gifts from Daddy for the yelling, the guns—”
“The embarrassment at school when kids called us Mafia Queens—”
“And how horrible it was when everyone said that Daddy had Quanta’s father killed.”
“And Anthony’s dad, too.”
“And maybe Horatio’s. We weren’t clear on him.”
Double whoa.
“You see, Madeline, the more we spend, the more we laugh. Daddy’s never getting out of prison. Never,” Bella said, for once the fake smile gone, replaced by a steely gaze as she spoke out of turn for the first time. “We send him photos of us with our cars and clothes and boats and fancy vacations. It pisses him off.”
“We’re spending his money, all of it,” Carlotta said, her face tight. “Think of it as our revenge.”
Adriana wiped her tears, as did Bella and Carlotta.
I reached for their hands, they reached for mine, and we all held hands together while they cried. Money does not protect from neglect and abuse. It doesn’t.
Adriana dug in her purse. “I don’t want to play this ‘I Wish’ game anymore.” She opened a box of very spendy chocolates. “These chocolates cost one hundred dollars. Thanks, Daddy!” She dropped it on the table, and they were gone within minutes. They were soft and delicious—thick dark chocolate, white chocolate, peppermint chocolate, lemon-tinged chocolate.
“Thanks, Daddy,” Bella muttered. “You fucker.”
“Thanks, Daddy,” Carlotta said, smashing a fist on the table. “I hate you.”
I received another letter. Plain manila envelope.
All three photos were of me alone. I was naked.
I thought of Annie. She had not received a letter, to my knowledge. I laughed, bitterly, like my laugh had gotten stuck in a bottle of rotted limes, thinking that maybe she had gotten letters and hadn’t told me. That was a definite possibility. I didn’t want Annie to know, and she would feel the same way about me.
I would have to tell her. She would rip out her ch
ain saw and demolish a thick log. She might scream a bit as the wood chips went flying, her roar slashing through the day like hate on supersonic speed.
I would have to tell Granddad.
He would curl up and wilt, at least on the inside. On the outside, he’d put his chin up, stand up straight, stuff his ever-present grief for his daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughters back into his spine, and bear it. Next he would throw a considerable amount of money into doing whatever it took to hunt down and locate the blackmailer and punish him, all the while comforting us, reassuring us.
My granddad was a man, in every sense of the word.
But it wouldn’t put an end to all this, I knew that.
I picked up my violin with shaking hands. I practiced Schubert’s Sonatina in D Major, then, rebel violinist that I am, I played “The Irish Washerwoman” and “Drowsy Maggie,” two of my dad’s favorite Irish fiddle tunes.
They brought little comfort.
That night, after I lifted my head once again from the porcelain goddess, I turned off the lights in my modern house that I don’t like, lit candles, watched the city lights flicker, and listened to an orchestra playing a Beethoven symphony in my head.
The first time I heard violin music was on my third birthday. I remember hearing a full orchestra when I blew out my candles. I clapped for the music, because I loved it, and everyone thought it was “darling” that I clapped after blowing out my own candles.
I realized I was the only one hearing the music when I was about four and on the teeter-totter our dad had built for Annie and me in our backyard. She was three. We went up and down, and each time we were up, the sea stretched way out in front of us. We called it the Sea Saw.
I said to Annie, “Do you like that song?”
She looked at me, puzzled, and said, “What song?”
“That song!”
“There no song!”
“I mean, the music! The violins!”
“There no violins.”
“Yes, there is, Annie, listen.”
She listened. “I not hear anything.”
“Listen, Annie, listen!”
She shook her head. “I like piano.” Annie was already playing the piano. She loved it. Our dad taught her.