by Joan Chase
Aunt Libby left the bathroom door open; she talked to us while we sat on the tub or stood in the doorway; sometimes we would see a Kotex dangling between her legs. We felt sickened by the sight of it. Then she stood and arranged a fresh pad to ride amidst her prickly black hairs, between her olive stretch-marked cheeks. She dropped her used pads in the trash unwrapped; she said being female was a dirty business, no use trying to hide it. She pouted disdainfully, none of it her fault. Uncle Dan said that somehow none of this fit his particular notion of a child of nature; but he was never really offended, it seemed, although his own personal habits were discreet and modest. Perhaps to a butcher— stuffing entrails, grinding meat—such things were common enough.
But while she dressed, Aunt Libby reminded us of some swarthy half-wild gypsy woman, her face, partly obscured by her morning tumble of hair, conveying a mysterious charm as she stood by the closet door with her bra dangling from her hand, her smooth olive skin glowing around the pointed wrinkled berries of her nipples. Standing half in and half out of the closet, with no trace of self-consciousness, she appeared almost to reflect the flickering shadows of woods, while from the edge of a clearing all of us watched. Uncle Dan breezed in and out, whistling and razzing, and then he went down to the kitchen to make the meat sandwiches, talking to Gram, that old farm woman who hadn’t been up that long herself but was already tapping her foot, impatient for the passing of time until she could bathe herself and put on her silken-jersey dress and go to the matinee at the Coronet or off to the races in Franksville.
Infrequent and bitter, Aunt Libby’s and Uncle Dan’s fights astonished us. A stifled row, overheard from the kitchen, a door slamming into its frame—then Aunt Libby shouting “goddamn” and “shit” and “turd,” and Uncle Dan thundering down the stairs and out the side door, spitting gravel back at us as he disappeared up the drive in his delivery truck. Soon Aunt Libby would come down and tear into the sack he’d left on the counter and slam down the meat and pickles, the soft white bread. Gram, if she was there, her bottom lip out a mile, would take up for Uncle Dan, as if she knew all about it. We always heard her say that he was all right for a man, the best of the lot, and that Libby was too much of a damn fool to know when she was well off. Aunt Libby ignored her. Beneath the smoothness of her skin, more often sallow than golden, an undercurrent of turbulence ran now and it lit her eyes with a passion she seldom allowed to show, with a delight in the battle which had just belonged to her.
Their making up was in secret too, perhaps accomplished over the phone when Aunt Libby called the store to order the steak; usually by the time Uncle Dan drove in at evening it was as if nothing had happened. But sometimes we would hear Aunt Libby talking to her sisters while they canned peaches or boiled jam, or just drank coffee; saying that it was Dan’s fault she had become so droopy-chested, a consequence of his ardent making up. It pleasured her, though, to be so desirable, fully mature and tempting, with even her brown eyes gold-shot at times like the ripe skins of the pears simmering, spiced dark with cinnamon and cloves.
There was one memorable fight; it lasted two days. Uncle Dan came home with groceries and a flowered lounge for the yard or porch and Aunt Libby hit the roof the second she saw him unloading it, yelling from the window, “We can’t afford that kind of thing. You have no business. What would we do anyway with a piece like that?” Going on to tell Uncle Dan that he was forever needing some new trinket for amusement. When would he ever grow up? And when had he ever had a spare minute to lay in the sun?
“In California,” he said, as he worked to adjust the mattress, “they’re set up for this kind of thing. They don’t mind a little fun. A fellow works all his life. What’s the harm?” His face looked as though it had rained all his summers, his eyes gray from clouds that had passed over his heart.
Aunt Libby’s voice spurted anger and something of alarm too. “You! You have a sudden uncontrollable notion to lay in the sun. What are you, a beach boy? Use a blanket. A towel, for God’s sake. I don’t live at home with my mother, scrimping and saving, to look out the window and see you snoozing on a bed of roses—orange roses at that. That thing reminds me of an orgy, just looking at it.”
“That thing reminds me of everything I’ll never have,” Uncle Dan said.
“Then why didn’t you stay the hell in California? You liked it so well.”
Uncle Dan was silent, looking up at her from the yard at the bottom of the porch.
“Then don’t complain. A bargain’s a bargain.” Aunt Libby went back inside, letting the door slam hard, as hard as her set face.
But Uncle Dan did keep it; it rested on the lawn through sun and storm until the cushions erupted soggy cotton swabs that we kids threw at each other. We used it in various ways until the frame finally cracked clear through and it wouldn’t stay upright. Then we dragged it over into the high weeds by the doghouse and no one ever mentioned it again.
Just once we saw Uncle Dan make use of it: the first Wednesday afternoon after he had bought it, the afternoon when all the stores in Sherwood regularly closed. He came home from the market, changed into a black knitted bathing suit which was a little tight, the front buckle digging into his stomach. It was the one he’d had in California. He wore a pair of dark glasses we didn’t know he had and he took out a bottle of baby oil, pink with iodine, and a towel. He set the chaise precisely near the shadow of one of the spruce trees, which were taller than the house, right at the edge of the pool of darkness it made on the grass at noontime, and he turned on his portable radio, opened a beer and lay down. We wandered over near him and sat in a semicircle on the grass to watch him take his sunbath. He took a long drink from the bottle. His eyes were obscured behind the smoked glass. Perhaps they were closed. After a while, when he didn’t move again or talk to us, we asked right out was he really going to tie one on. He raised up his glasses and peered at the four of us and his eyes were nearly lidless slits of slivered light. “Now that’s some kind of talk. Whatever gave you that idea?” Then, his voice weary: “No, don’t tell me.” And we didn’t want to say any more of the things Aunt Libby had muttered while she was crying and shoving the carpet sweeper over the floor. The air was stifling under the trees, drenched with resin and sap, Uncle Dan glistening with oils and sweat; for a moment we too seemed rooted together, captured in the presence of the dense trees, while beyond the swags of branch the blackbirds skimmed the field. Soon afterward he picked up all the things he’d carried out and went back inside the dark house. We sat on, transfixed before the flowered canvas mattress, until the advancing shadows covered us. Uncle Dan didn’t come back to his lounge, although he left it sitting there, in plain sight, a reminder of California, of another life.
An accomplished seamstress, Aunt Libby spent much of her time in a little upstairs room, the room so littered with snips of thread, pins, scraps, it seemed she sat in an intricate nest of her own design. There was a green couch, old and sagging, a chintz-covered chair and the sewing machine console, a good one, modern and dependable. A silent, diffident, ill-at-ease woman outside the family group, with us she was absolutely herself, hardly capable of restraint. We girls flopped all over the furniture or the floor while Aunt Libby, a brace of pins in her teeth, embroidered her tales of disillusionment as with tiny needle tacks she tied off her threads. She whacked away at her own remnants of romanticism as if she could still be caught off guard and swallowed whole.
We might have passed Rosalie Morgan on the street that morning. Now she told us that Rosalie was “getting it.” For shame, Rosalie Morgan. There was a thrill in it, no mistaking Aunt Libby’s tone; but the peril of it was absolutely certain and without remedy. There rose in us a longing commensurate with our deprivation and fear. We blamed Aunt Libby. Wise and embittered herself, she would deny us even our early innocence so that, just as she intended, we would never learn for ourselves the full fascination and implication of her knowledge.
We accused her. “How do you know a thing about it? You don�
��t even know Rosalie Morgan.”
“I can smell it,” she said. “Besides, I’ve known her mother since before you were born. Just take a good look at her eyes.” Rosalie had larkspur eyes sunk in the bluish-brown circlets of their own thrown shadow. Those were the shadows of despair, Aunt Libby said. “For where can it lead, girls? Either Sammy will waltz off with the next one he spies, free and clear, or he’ll hang around until he ends up having to marry her. And which is worse, I ask you?” She’d seen more than enough of that particular misery —wedlock forced on a resentful man who would never let you forget it.
There was never any hiding from Aunt Libby, sniffing and patrolling, everything figured out. Other people talked, around her, of weather or shopping. Aunt Libby half listened, preoccupied with her own divinations and prophecies. There was no arguing with her. So we didn’t try—better silence and subterfuge. Someday we would escape. In the meantime we would lie low, guarding secrets and longings even from ourselves or we would have nothing left when she was done with us.
“You girls make me sick. Mooning around here. Swallowing all that crap.” The machine whirred under her touch with the murmurous precision of a loom.
We reminded her of Aunt Rachel, who had remarried the summer before. That was love and she was blissful on account of it. Aunt Libby had to admit that. Right then, without her makeup, her mouth pinched, yellow-skinned, sepia-splotched, her tucked chin reminding us of Gram’s fallen face, she was ugly to us—a woman spurned and rejected. Poisoned, she would poison us. She raised her eyebrows; we could see the stubble stumps, unplucked, in the glare from the window. “I s’pose,” she snorted, two words, her tone bleak as ditch water in November. And we knew there was something more to it, more than we would ever know or want to, Aunt Rachel self-deceived, no happier than the whole love-lost world.
“There’s one true love in the world, someone for everyone.” We declared things like that. Then we would stand on our heads on the back of the sofa cushions, feeling the blood rush, our bare feet slapping the wall, so we didn’t have to look at Aunt Libby’s face, though still we could hear her derision in the mechanical and unerring drive of the needle down a seam.
“Don’t think I don’t know the charms of young men,” Aunt Libby said, and we knew she did; beautiful again, a trace of blood spurting from her cold heart, illuminating the texture of her skin, warming yellow to gold. And her eyes softening like a melting amber. They hardened again. We trembled to hear her. In Aunt Libby there was none of Gram’s flip “You may as well fall for rich as poor.” For Aunt Libby it was a matter of outrage and contest.
She spoke to us incessantly of love. Endless betrayal, maidens forsaken, drowned or turned slut, or engulfed by madness. Most chilling were the innocent babes—stabbed with scissors and stuffed into garbage cans, aborted with knitting needles. In all this, love was a blind for something else. For sex. Sex was trouble and when a girl was in trouble, sex was the trouble.
Nor would Aunt Libby allow us the miscalculation that marriage put an end to trouble. Men were only after what they could get. When they got it they didn’t want it anymore. Or wanted what someone else had. The same as the cars they bought and used. It was their nature. Some got nasty about it. That she attributed mostly to liquor—which men turned to out of self-pity and petty vengeance.
These matters were serious enough so that once the lid was off she began to reveal family secrets. Long silences would punctuate her stories or comments, but we didn’t harry her with questions, reminding her we were there, making her self-conscious. We waited. And finally she would continue, plainly needing to. “Dad would come in at night. When he was drunk. Fit to be tied. Get me and Rachel out of bed and beat us. For nothing.”
She would begin another seam, her concentration flowing between her thoughts and the work. “He liked doing it, somehow. Like it worked through him and made him feel powerful. So then he would take on Momma afterwards.”
Didn’t she save you, we thought, Gram fierce as anything; we’d heard of her, straggle-haired and screeching, heading with the lye toward Grandad at the table, her daughters struggling with her for the can, rusted and half eaten through.
“He’d lock Momma out. And she’d stand beyond the door and pound and scream. After she got her money she dared him to try it again. ‘Lay a hand on them kids.’ But he was too smart for that. Or maybe it had all just been too much for him before. Seven of us. No money.” Under the steady run of the sewing machine and her remembering, Aunt Libby seemed to open as though she were scratching old wounds. “Selma, my cousin. She told me once: her mother hid out in the barn when Uncle Del came home late from drinking. Only this time he caught her and took hold of her and forced her hand against the lantern globe until the flesh just melted. I remember seeing the mark of it when I was little.” The mark of a man. Our own flesh burned.
“There’s been more than one woman, I can tell you, has come to feel so degraded and hopeless she can’t go on. Your father,” she would begin, looking at the two of us who were her dead sister’s daughters, then biting her lip. “Well. She always went back.” She didn’t want to say more.
“Weren’t you ever in love?” we asked her.
“More than once.” She smiled downward at her own admission. “Or thought I was. Those Italian boys from the old neighborhood on North Street—beautiful dark boys.” She wouldn’t say more about that. We imagined for her a love that had killed love. We pitied her.
“Love,” she spit out. “Sex is what it was and is and will be.” The way she said “sex,” we knew it was something wonderfully powerful, rising with a naturalness like the deep cold suck of water at the barnyard spring on a hot day. Love, on the other hand, she told us, was something you had to learn. “Love takes time. You learn it over a long time of being with a good man.” It sounded like hard work and cold potatoes.
“Marry a man who loves you more than you love him”— that summed it up. And we thought of Uncle Dan down at the market, coming out of the food locker with a slab of meat over his shoulder, his eyes fathomless, glimmering under the bare bulb, inside him a heart raw with love for Aunt Libby.
“Don’t let it fool you—sweet looks and sweet talk.” What were we to do, desiring desire more and more as she paraded it before us in all its allurements; even her warnings were tempting. Sometimes now, by chance, we would see, in the appraisal of a male, a vision of ourselves changing, illuminated. Playing at the brook we saw a condom, flushed down the house sewage system, floating in the slime. Sex was going on all around us, in spite of danger and disruption; in spite of love.
Aunt Libby would push harder at the machine, driving it faster and faster as if she were getting someplace; we could see sparks spray off the wheel. “Oh my God, look what I’ve done now,” the possibilities for disaster at her fingertips—perhaps a sleeve secured to a neckline, a collar binding a trouser leg. “See what I get for not paying attention,” she said meaningfully, resigning herself to the punishment of painstaking backwork. Everything she made had to be just so, otherwise she would worry it endlessly, never forgive herself. Such was the discipline required to master the upheavals of passion, constantly lurking.
As we grew older, Celia was more and more absent from our sessions with Aunt Libby. All the time, though, we were thinking of Celia and Aunt Libby was too, for it was all coming due— Celia was now attracting college men who had cars and money they had earned themselves, pumping gas or cutting hay. They took her away from the farm, the town—dancing at a lake near Cleveland, out to restaurants where there was a wine list. Celia was forbidden to touch a single drop of the stuff and furthermore to ride in a car with anyone who did. “Two dead last night over in Mullerstown. Girl fifteen. Boy seventeen. And the other will wish she’d died, five hundred pieces of glass in her face.” Aunt Libby looked over at Celia as though she had counted every sliver herself, but Celia didn’t seem to care much, while she ironed each tuck down the front of a blouse, evidencing the perfectionism of her mot
her. Her face was still so clear and abstracted it could have been made of glass. Aunt Libby increasingly made mistakes in her sewing, threw four yards of misstitched dimity into the trash, then cried. She lost the thread of her hemstitch, the thread of her conversation. Agitated and distracted, she left the iron turned on for days at a time.
“I should have locked that one in a convent,” she would say. This from a woman who thought the Catholic Church primarily responsible for the suppression of women, the promulgation of all claptrap. “Ever since she was little it was always the men. Climbing on their laps, teasing their whiskers. It’s a family disease, I guess.” But one she would cure if it killed her.
Yet there was something else in Celia, which wasn’t pure obstinacy or boldness, something Aunt Libby couldn’t touch because it was natural to Celia, coming as it did from her father. That was a kindheartedness, an absence of self-regard if any creature aroused her pity. A stray cat, a toddling baby—these had her attention while the rest of us failed. She would turn down dates to baby-sit for a relative’s young children and once she sat all night with an injured dog from the highway, until even Gram relented and let her bring its basket out of the cellar. When it recovered, that dog took the place of the red setter that had once lived at the back of the yard; though the dog was a mangy mongrel now dragging a leg, Celia devotedly fed and groomed it, whispered into its ear, making the rest of us seethe with jealousy so that we ignored the dog completely. It wasn’t that she disliked the rest of us, or the girls at school; it was more an absentness, an inability to focus her attention. As if we didn’t need her.