by Susan Hahn
until she yelled
to stop. From then I never could.
I keep looking for the spot
on my own head, ask anyone
who will to rub.
When I’m alone,
I use two mirrors, struggle
to see if I can get hold
of the anxiety. Deep within
my skull a stem is snarling
and will split the bone.
c. slaughter
I WAS TO BE the One, the one great success of the Slaughter family offspring—my parents had said it and their word on all matters was considered biblical—so when I was dropped from their world to the one beneath, my cousins and their parents, each with his or her individual agenda embedded in the larger family one, were disoriented as to who would be the flag bearer of the family’s legacy.
Years later, Celie would come to say, “Cecilia and Cecily have all the talent in the family, because they were given the extra syllable.” She meant they had an extra syllable in their names. She considered that maybe because my name, “Ceci,” had just two syllables it had not been powerful enough to hold me to that promise. (Celie is more prone than any of us—even Cecilia—to magical and convoluted thinking, her thoughts often arriving through a side door or the even stranger back door in her mind. But there are reasons for this.)
By then Cecilia had published five poetry books and Cecily had two plays produced in non-equity, storefront theaters where the plumbing in the bathrooms was fairly non-existent. Cecilia told me this with some amount of humor when she visited my grave one day, adding, “Ceci, I think there were peepholes in both places with someone snapping pictures or videotaping us. I heard little clicks or a tiny buzz and I saw little ragged openings in the walls and the ceilings. Or maybe they were just made by the rodents living there.” Then she laughed, “Same thing I guess.” Some things deeply bothered Cecilia; some things she could easily joke about, when others could not—peep-holes in the bathrooms both intrigued and amused her, at least before Herr M entered her life. Then, her reaction to any possible intrusion ignited her to full-blown alarm.
Cecily’s two plays received not-great reviews, but now she has written a third one which she believes is a huge improvement. So far, however, no theater seems that interested and she has become wise enough not to call too often for updates on it. Alone, in her large, half-furnished apartment, she thinks, “Perhaps they feel if they ignore you enough—not return your phone calls—you’ll go away.” The emptiness of the place in which she lives has become a metaphor for both who she is and how she feels.
She thinks about going away a lot, but not in the way you first might think. Going away, not as in stopping calling about the play or as in going on a trip, rather she thinks about disappearing. She is tired. Tired of being Cecily Slaughter, granddaughter of the mythically brilliant Cecil Slaughter, cousin of the highly praised poet Cecilia Slaughter, daughter of the sad and broken late Abraham Slaughter, victim of the dead monster Emmanuel Slaughter, daughter of the also deceased Lillian—who, she believes, really did love her in her own weak way.
As for my other female Slaughter cousins, Celine (unlike her baby sister, Celeste, who was gone before she could speak an understandable word) survives rather well in the world she has constructed for herself with flashy colors—most of them variations of shocking pink—her whole being a shock of pink. Celine, is known for such statements as, “Well, I can’t help it if there’s at least two men in love with me.” And, then there is Celie—the one most prone to dissociative thinking—shy, modest Celie, who works in a high-end suburban dress shop. Celie, who seems of little threat to anyone except herself. Celie, who needs love so much and receives so little, except from Cecilia.
In Cecily’s third play the dying mother, Tanya, is all light and grace. Cecily, of course, is not the daughter in the play. She is a poet and although she has borrowed “a bit” from Cecilia’s life, she justifies it in the name of art. The fact that Cecilia is disturbingly beautiful with five applauded books, makes it difficult for Cecily not to hate her, though Cecily, at least consciously, believes she does not. She feels she can fairly assess the adventures that all Cecilia’s beauty and so-called talent have taken her on—borrow from them and create art.
Some people would call them less adventures than misfortunes. (And then, of course, there was one person for sure—Herr M—who believed Cecilia Slaughter deserved all the bad things that happened to her—had ever so directly caused them herself.) Cecily believes she is neutral—so she can present a somewhat disguised story of Cecilia’s travails on stage with a clear, clean eye. Although she is beginning to worry that maybe the reason no one has called her back about the play is that they all think she has burgled Cecilia’s life and that “isn’t right or nice or whatever.” She continues to further excuse her feelings about Cecilia, thinking, “Celine believes whatever’s happened to Cecilia is no big deal. That Cecilia clearly just doesn’t know how to handle men.” Then Cecily thinks about Cecilia’s “not so secret habit.”
Cecilia’s mother’s head was a mess of tiny sores from tearing at her hair. One by one Aunt Lettie would pull each out and examine it when she thought no one was watching, but all of the cousins at one time or another saw her doing this. Sometimes, I would hide behind a chair and stare. She would sit on her worn beige couch, almost hypnotizing herself with this motion. If she did not comb her hair just right you could see those irritated moth holes all over her head.
Cecilia only has one moth hole—right at the top of her head. The crown. She calls it her Seventh Chakra. Believes the light of God is able to pour right into that spot, allowing her to be filled with all the magic that the universe has to offer. Yes, Cecilia does have a way of turning a gross neurotic habit into something poetic, odd, lovely, and disturbing all at the same time.
Most unfortunately, Cecilia showed her newly created spot to Cecily when Cecily was seven. Under the bushes next to their three-flat apartment, the one my father bought for the Slaughter brothers when they began to marry, the eight year old Cecilia spread her hair and bowed her head to Cecily and asked her if she’d like to kiss it. “Kiss it?” Years later, Cecily would tell anyone who would listen, “Thank goodness she has an outlet with her poetry, otherwise she’d end up quite crazy, be institutionalized like Grandmother Slaughter.”
My father would boast to his friends that the building where Uncles Emmanuel, Abraham, and Samuel lived cost him “next to nothing,” adding, “Of course, I fixed it up better than the other properties I own.” Then he would laugh. After marrying Esther, Uncle Benjamin moved into his mother-in-law’s apartment, which was a half a block away. The two buildings were almost identical—each with dark, chipped bricks, a patch of grass in front, and a dirt alley in the back that ran the length of a half mile. I would always feel guilty when I visited, given our mansion in the suburbs, situated on an acre of well cared for lawn.
Even now I can easily bring forth the smells that permeated the narrow, poorly lit hallways of those two buildings, the scents coming from those small, clean kitchens—cabbage soup, a chicken, tongue boiling in a large old pot. And, unfortunately, the sounds, most especially the shouts—Uncle Emmanuel and Aunt Sonya yelling at each other and, down the street, Great Aunt Eva screaming at her daughter Adele, or about her, to anyone who would listen.
Of course, each brother’s goal was to move to the suburb where we lived, and each eventually did achieve this. By the time I was fourteen, Cecilia, Celine, Cecily, and Celie all lived within several miles of me. But this did not lessen my shame, for within our mansion my father would mock what he called their “matchbox houses.”
Growing up we would hear her story over and over—how Idyth Slaughter could not adjust to America and left Cecil to go back to Hungary because she missed her country too much, only to return to him because she missed him more and all of this before she turned seventeen. She finally lost him when she was twenty-nine.
Cecily tells her therapists that Cecil, being
much older, must have been both a great lover and a father figure to her. “Can you imagine the to-do they make when I say such a thing?” she says to Celine, who takes such delight in this as she does all things sexual.
Through the years her therapists have appeared, sequentially, in their dull, cramped, stuffy offices, scribbling with their pencils—not that they have helped her. However, Cecily’s internist insists that she talk with someone because when he asks her “How are you?” she always says the truth, “terrible,” and it is not about the physical. Cecily, like each of us, has many issues. It was unavoidable given the atmosphere created by the too many adults that hung over us—their thick breath as heavy as the smoke that covered us from their cigarettes—their weighted, buckled histories and agendas continuously smothering us.
Listening to how handsome Cecil was, of his great charisma and, of course, his brilliance—how there was no one like him, and that is why Idyth got sick after she lost him—we all agreed, was tiresome. Anyway, it has almost become a silent story. Cecil and Idyth now lie side by side at Waldheim Jewish Cemetery. Quietly, or at least that is what those above the ground would like to believe. They do not yet know of the turmoil we bring with us wherever we go.
Last night Cecily could hear a banging in her head like cymbals crashing together. The sound was spaced at about fifteen-second intervals. She was dreaming. Dreaming that she was dead. And death was impossibly loud and nerve-racking. When she awoke she wondered, “Is that where the playwrights go—to some designated circle I don’t know of—especially the ones who borrow on the lives of their poet relatives? Dante did find a not-too-terrible place for the poets in Limbo.” And yes, she can see Cecilia there someday, wandering with her long, silky hair spread wide exposing the moth hole, asking the other desperate souls there to Please, just kiss it.
In Cecily’s play, Lissa, the poet, is always tearing at her hair—just one spot that she shows to the audience three times. Sometimes, she has her suck on the follicle bulb tip. In its own way it is quite sexual. Quite intimate. Cecily does know not to overuse the moment. The lights are directed to shine right into that slick, wet baldness. And then to pause on it. She wants the audience to care about Lissa. Cecily feels she really cares about her, too. Certainly more than she actually does about Cecilia. She knows it is hard not to be at least a little jealous of her cousin—among other things, for her pale perfect skin. In adolescence Cecily spent a lot of time at the dermatologist. From the back, she is sometimes mistaken for Cecilia. People run after her, calling “Cecilia, Cecilia.” Then, when they get close enough, they pause, disappointed, and say “Sorry, Cecily, I thought you were …”
However, Cecily does believe her play portrays the poet in a most fair way. And although it focuses on how crazy she is—she does kill herself in the end—the audience, she is sure, will be moved to tears. “That is, if there ever is an audience,” she obsesses.
Celie has asked her if she worries about Cecilia finding out about the play. That perhaps this will hurt or embarrass Cecilia in a very serious way. And she does not even know the many details of it. Cecily thinks, “Celie’s so sweet. A little simple, but sweet. Maybe it’s her simpleness that makes her this way.” Celine, however, has said that Celie is far more complicated than she imagines. Cecily knows Celie was hospitalized for what was labeled “exhaustion,” but to Cecily that seemed something of an indulgence. When Celine talks about Celie this way—as if she knows a secret—Cecily believes, “That’s just Celine again, trying to stand out, trying to make herself feel special.”
In the dress shop where Celie works all her customers love her. Many of them are educated, rich, bored, frustrated, freaky-thin women—who are dismayed that they have wound up being such clichés. The dressing rooms, however elaborate, have cardboard walls. And even I can listen, though I try not to, for I have learned there are far, far better places to spend eternity’s time.
They talk about their latest diets and their psychiatrists, who are probably equally dismayed that they went to medical school and beyond only to end up listening hour after hour to their patients’ self-indulgent complaints. Although I imagine these paid listeners have large paneled offices with many exotic artifacts from their travels, which they carefully display.
Celie makes her customers feel hopeful—that the next item she brings them to try on will, most certainly, reinvent them. That suddenly they will see themselves in the mirror as they want to be seen—both by others and by themselves. Some tell her she is better than any therapist. “Better, but not cheaper.” Celie just smiles.
Celine is always at the shop, buying up all the pinks, while Cecily and Cecilia occasionally come by for the blacks. Once Cecilia said to her, “Cecily, did you know that just because you wear all black, doesn’t mean you exactly match? There are so many shades of black. And of course, there is also the issue of the fabric and how the black is absorbed in it.” Even though it was all too much irrelevant concern for Cecily, she had to admit that after she concentrated on it, Cecilia was right. Since, like Cecilia, she wears mostly black, after Cecilia said this, she noticed, especially in the sunlight, that sometimes she did not match. In Cecily’s play, Lissa, of course, always dresses in black. She now believes she will have to keep her eye on the costume designer to make sure he or she knows to keep them matched.
If, however, you are thinking Cecily is some poor man’s Cecilia, do not even give a hint of this to her, for she will attack you with unforgettable rage, screaming, “There’s no bald spot atop my head—and even if there were, I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone—and no man—artist or otherwise—has actually raped me or even attempted. It’s true, Cecilia brings out the fire in men, which—trust me—isn’t always a good thing. So, big deal.” What Cecily does not yet know is that this will become a big deal—not just for Cecilia, but for her, and the others, too.
Then only to herself Cecily says, “In the play Lissa brings out that fire, too. And yes, there is a rape. But it’s quite inventive—more like a dance. It shows the complexities, the contradictions. Exactly who is provoking whom? Not that I’m saying in real life Cecilia was or wasn’t raped. I don’t know. But, what if the critic asked…. Yes, at the dinner in his apartment, where she went alone though she barely knew him. (Here, the stage is so stark, the audience as tense in the moment as the characters. I can just see it!) What if he asked? Asked about the spot, asked if it truly did exist, asked to see it. It is all over her poetry. And she showed it to him—allowed it. I imagine how she unclipped the golden barrettes she wore that night and let her hair run wild over her deep V-necked, soft, black sweater, over her thin black tank top—her shoulders, her breasts—as she parted the shimmering strands (highlighted in the candlelight) with her delicate fingertips (like Lissa does in the play), bowed her head to him and said that the most sacred thing one can do is to kiss it. And he did …”
NO SAD SONGS SUNG HERE
How quiet the stretched skin over
the singular body—its coo and hum
and minute beat on the planet
crust. The mattress
is so bumpy and sunk,
squeaking on—sad song
sing-along to a distant memory
of a ram’s horn trumpet inside
the temple’s walls. Sing to me
asked the woman of the man
and just a hollow column of air appeared,
begged the man to his god
and just one plucked string was heard,
cried the child in her crib. So I did
something spontaneous, I then forgot.
Afterward, we slept all
coo and hum, only the child
firm on the words she dreamed on.
c. slaughter
CELINE SHOPS A LOT. She likes pretty things. Pretty things on herself. They make her feel prettier, as in prettier than my mother, which we were all taught to believe was the most difficult “pretty” to conquer—that, quite frankly, unreachable goal, especially in
my father’s and my four uncles’ eyes.
Celine’s father, Uncle Emmanuel, would say to her, and often, “Celine, you are the prettiest of your first cousins.” He would hug her tightly and call her the sweetest, the prettiest of all the little raisins. Raisins? It would make her feel so small, so shrunken, although I am sure he meant it as a compliment in his own distorted way. However, he also believed my mother—all sunflower, all golden, in full bloom—glowed above Celine, no matter what the season of Celine’s life, and she felt it.
When Celine wears the best and brightest clothes she can find, she feels she, too, glows. It is a warmth that starts outside her body when she touches the silk, the velvet, the cashmere. Then it travels deep within her, the luxurious threads weaving her insides—holding her together—making her feel rich and valuable and worthy. She thinks, “Clothes have a permanence. That is, if you take good care of them. They can last forever. People, no matter how much care you give them—take care with them, care for them, love them—can disappear from you, sometimes slowly, sometimes in an instant.”
Her father, although he did seem to care some for Aunt Sonya, had many women. They, too, were never enough for him. In her adolescence it became quite clear to Celine that he was always searching for someone, someone like his sister—as were all the Slaughter brothers. He never found her. Aunt Sonya knew. Everyone did. Except Celeste. She would have, if she had grown old enough.
After her second child was born, Aunt Sonya could not stand the coercion from the family to name yet another child after Cecil Slaughter, but Manny put so much pressure on her to do so that she felt she had no choice. However, when alone with her baby “Celeste,” Sonya would call her “Sonyi,” thereby naming her precious new daughter after herself. She loved being alone with her baby and calling her this. She loved the secret power it gave her. Celine and Uncle Emmanuel never knew of this and, for the few short months she was a Slaughter, to them she was always Celeste.