by Susan Hahn
Celie would quietly come up to her grandmother with a book and ask her to read it to her. Eva would take a quick break from her focus on Adele and say nicely, “No, Celie, not today.” Celie would say, “Tomorrow?” with her nicest little girl smile—similar to the one she perfected as an adult and now always wears at the shop. She did it again and again and often. It was a way of helping her small self release some of the tension she felt from living in that apartment. Knowing Eva’s secret made her feel in control—however momentarily. This secret was Celie’s bullet and she used it—however metaphorically. Celie believed this made her an evil child, so if she tells you that perhaps she did aid and abet in the killing of Adele, she means it should be taken seriously. She thinks, “I can carry a rage as big as the hump I most certainly will grow someday on my all-too-brittle spine—if I live long enough—and this makes me quite capable of hurting a man like Herr M—of hurting Herr M, if necessary.”
If the rumors as to what he has done to Cecilia are true (which she tries hard to believe are not) she feels she would have to lunge at him in some way and directly destroy him. Not like when she followed her grandmother around with her book with Eva saying, “No, Celie, not today,” and Celie’s too sweet response, “Tomorrow, Grandma Eva, tomorrow?” It was their circle in hell—albeit a shallow one. With Herr M, if the gossip proved to be true—that he had attacked Cecilia, Celie believes Herr M’s and her circle would reach into the depths of hell. Of course, she keeps this all to herself, just listening to what the others are saying—trying to sift through all the stuff being flung at her—and also continuously observing Cecilia’s increasingly jittery behavior and reading her poems for more mentions of Herr M.
Adele threw up a lot when she was little. Celie’s mother told her this. Eva had bought a baby grand piano that sat front and center in the apartment’s living room. It was the only piece of furniture not sealed in plastic, although Celie was forbidden to touch it. Eva had wanted Adele to be a great pianist. Adele tried—tried to be what her mother had dreamed for her. But she would vomit too much before each recital. So much so that the doctors said she would have to quit because she could die. According to Esther, her whole digestive tract would become inflamed. Between performances she would eat and eat and look like she might burst. No one in that 1930s neighborhood analyzed it much—just concluded the recitals would have to stop. After that, the piano stayed quiet. The lid on the keyboard slammed shut. No music.
Esther was to be a famous actress. She was written up in several newspapers and called a child prodigy. Starting when she was five, she gave recitations all over the city. At sixteen she auditioned at the Goodman Theatre for the part of Juliet. She got it. Except when the director asked her to meet him later at the Palmer House and she said, “Yes,” adding, “I’ll have to bring my mother.” He replied, “Don’t bother.”
Soon after, Esther met Benjamin and never went on stage again. She was relieved. All those memorized lines in her small child’s mind became a cage of gnarled rope that imprisoned her brain. She believed Benjamin Slaughter would help cut her free, but that was not to be and she grew into an all-too-silent woman.
Adele hated her sister—her suburban home, her three children who actually loved her. She thought Esther had it so easy—which she did not. But she did have it easier than Adele. Adele was left in the apartment of her mother with her screams—“You’re so ___,” “You’ll never ___.” And throughout her life, at least the part I witnessed, Adele was “so ___” and she “never ___.”
Celie once heard Adele had stolen a bicycle. When Celie was seven, she told Cecilia and me, with such a flourish, “I hope it’s true and that she rode it really fast before she got caught!” Both of us hoped so, too.
However, something Celie does know to be absolutely true is the memory, when she was four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine, of watching Adele get ready—ready for the Yom Kippur Night Dance. After our most solemn day—made up of fasting and silence and prayer for what bad people we had been in the past year, Celie would watch Adele put on thick makeup, pink rouge, and red lipstick. How she gussied herself up with flaming colors—silky dresses that clung to her. What a night of promise it was as Adele prepared to find her beau. Celie’s grandfather, Levi, and her father would come out of the back room where they would sit and smoke and say how nice she looked. Even Eva was chatty.
Year after year Adele would leave and return late into the night—her purse probably already stuffed with things she would have to repent for next year. Celie thought about that a lot as she got older. She would wait for her key to open the lock of the apartment door, then she would fall asleep so happy because she knew the next day Adele would tell her stories about the dance—the music, the food, the clothes, and the best part, about the beau she had found. Adele always had one to talk and talk about. Then Celie would watch her wait by the telephone in the weeks after for him to reappear. Celie would grow sadder and sadder as she sat next to her.
On Mother’s Day Celie always made sure to give Adele a present. Those were the days when she thought she could save her. She even thought she could save her grandmother, and, of course, her too quiet mother. She was always very busy with wrapping paper and ribbons trying to tie everything together into a big, bright, perfect bow. Now, Eva’s gone, as is Esther—wrapped in some eternal package Celie cannot unknot no matter how much she thinks about ways to do it, all the time wondering if Adele’s in there, too—and if her grandmother is still screaming at Adele.
As Adele grew older, it was easier to deal with her when she got depressed. I know it is terrible to say this—but it is true. Everyone in our extended family experienced this—never knowing which Adele would show up. She would become timid and sweet, weepy-sweet to be sure, but that was better than her open-blister rage or her all-knowing PhD, Nobel-Prize-winning arrogance when she was manic. In that state, she would go into stores and buy up everything as if she were an heiress. Eva was called frequently by the local owners, and when she eventually refused to deal with it and then passed away, all the burden went to Esther.
When Esther got so finally sick, Adele became one hundred percent manic—a horrible happy manic. Refused to take her pills, called every day to tell Esther of all her activities—how busy she was, all the places she had gone from morning to night. What fun she was having. Esther listened with good patience. Every day Celie would hear her mother on the phone positioned next to her bed saying, “Oh Adele, how wonderful!” Until one day, coming up the stairs to visit her completely bedridden, bald mother, she heard its crash into its cradle. Celie stood in the doorway and saw her mother smiling a huge smile.
Esther told Celie with such gusto—not at all like a sick person—“Your Aunt Adele just reported on her busy, busy day and after forty-five minutes of babbling, she finally asked what I’d been doing. I replied, ‘Well, Adele, if you haven’t noticed, I’m very busy, too. I’m very busy dying.’” It was then Esther bashed the phone into Adele’s ear and smiled that stunning smile. When Celie remembers this, it still makes her smile. Esther never talked to Adele again. Refused her calls. Had a few weeks of peace from her sister before she left.
That time was also the beginning of Celie losing Adele, of not knowing or wanting to know where her mother’s sister was. She visited her only once in the hospital after she had a surgery. Adele seemed overjoyed with her newfound illness. Her affect so impossibly off, it made Celie want to run back into the coat closet. Adele believed being sick would get her more attention. She wanted the love Celie and her brothers had for their mother. She demanded it. She said, “It was their duty.” When she left the hospital, Celie just sent her flowers. Joshua and Jeremy distanced themselves further, as did Celie’s father—just disappeared from her. She did not figure into any of the equations that made up their lives.
The next and last time Celie saw Adele she seemed physically fine, yet furious. She called from across the room, “Celia.” Not “Celie,” and from just this Celie knew
trouble was heading toward her. She wanted to turn away, but Adele was quick—approached and kissed her. Then, she dug her long, red-painted nails into Celie’s arm and thanked her for the flowers. Then, digging deeper, she screamed, “Was that the best you could do?” Before Celie could answer, she added, “Well it just isn’t good enough, Celia. Celia, do you hear me?” Celie stared at her, then ripped her arm from Adele’s grip and ran out of the house where they both were guests. She ran and ran until she threw up. Her heart was pounding outside her chest. She thought she was going to break. In fact she did.
Even with therapy and pills, sometimes when Celie closes her eyes and the room is completely dark—the TV off—Eva’s screams roar through her head and she does not know if she is dead or alive. No man has ever asked to marry her and she is overweight. She just goes from the upscale dress shop, selling party clothes to the suburban women on the North Shore to her apartment to eat carryout and watch old movies. She particularly likes the silent ones.
However, she does know she is very good at her job. She can always find her customers the perfect outfit. When they say, “Celie, I need your help,” she likes that. She knows a lot about their lives. She finds them outfits for their children’s bar or bat mitzvahs, confirmations, graduations, weddings, and for the Opera Ball—all the charity benefits. Their festivities are endless. She likes to hear about each event—the food, the music, how they danced and danced through the night.
Yet sometimes, when a client accepts her offer of hot coffee or a cold drink while waiting for a fitting, Celie has the urge to throw the drink into her client’s face. This impulse frightens her. It makes her feel she could do anything to anyone. She has worked on this in her therapy sessions and now realizes that this is similar to what Adele felt toward Esther.
Unlike Adele, however, Celie is a terrible dancer. Adele was really great. She would even show Celie steps and tell her she needed to relax. Celie thinks about her often—I guess this is obvious. And sometimes Celie dreams of both of them at the Yom Kippur Night Dance. They are twirling with their beaus, so bright and flushed they are with life—forever freed from all sin, all guilt, all of the past. The only rage they know of is in the flamboyant colors of their clothes.
THE SIN-EATER OF THE FAMILY
Ointment rubbed over the skin—
3 drops Frankincense,
2 drops Peppermint,
1 drop Clove, 1 drop Pine—
could not bring on the exorcism.
All hands blunt clumsy.
Too much food had been eaten.
Egg and chop and leg of duck
were placed on the breast
of the dead one,
then passed to my lone figure
in the corner—the sin-eater
of the family chewing, chewing
so the beloved’s soul could be free,
made light to have
an easy journey.
c. slaughter
IN THE YEAR BEFORE Great Aunt Eva died she cared less and less to understand, fix, or tell anything to anyone about her own troubles—and if she got angry she no longer yelled, just suffered silently. She also did not care to hold anyone close or captive. This is one way some people prepare for their above-the-ground exit—quite the opposite of Uncle Manny’s fury to grab anyone near and try to take them with him into his wretchedness.
Eva believed she had been a kind, generous person and to people who did not get too near to her, there was no one finer. She gave Mario the handyman large tips—even though money was terribly short—and on his holiday, Christmas, a present and she still, “at her age,” made a hot lunch for Odette and served it to her, when Odette came twice a month to help Eva clean her apartment and move the heavy furniture. And when the young, handsome, Catholic president was shot, how Eva grieved, and lit a Yarzheit candle for him on the first Yom Kippur after his death—the rabbi at the temple telling her this was a mitzvah. True, she had not voted for him, since she never realized her good intention to learn to read English and consequently never became a citizen of her “new country”—but she was dazzled by his Hollywood image, his star-like family, and was stunned for a long time by what had happened to him, similar to when her son-in-law Benjamin’s sister, the “perfect Rose,” as Eva called her in a sour way, had lost a daughter—meaning me.
Mostly alone, she took long walks on her avenue no matter what the weather. Always with her huge, worn, black leatherette purse and orange nylon net bag to carry a few groceries—an apple, a pear, whatever—both hooked on to her left arm. The net bag matched the color of her hair. Once she was a true redhead.
Often her daughter Esther came down from the suburbs to walk with her. Celie sometimes came too, but then Celie began to visit less and less and that was okay with Eva. So different from years past, when she would clutch Celie so tightly, Celie thought she might break.
In truth, it sort of made Celie sick to be with her grandmother, because she felt her grandmother was walking with Death and Celie is petrified of Death—goes to a psychiatrist because of this and other terrors. He gives her pills that open her up to the day and others that close her down at night. The pills help too with the rituals—obsessions, compulsions are what the doctor calls them—the repetitive checkings and numbered spinnings that she does for safekeeping before she leaves her apartment. She has tailor-made them for herself to keep Death away.
Celie remembered when her grandmother, at seventy-five, whispered to her, while riding past a cemetery, that she no longer feared Death. That she was tired—just so tired. In her earlier years Eva feared it with such ferociousness that she would squeeze Celie so hard with her large hands that they would leave red marks on Celie’s body—sometimes a discoloration that could last for a couple of weeks. From the age of one onward, Eva made Celie stand next to her at the living room window and, whenever anyone was more than five minutes late, Eva would start to shake and hold on to Celie muttering, “Celie, your father (mother—whoever it was) is late, yes, late—too late.” Then, Eva would slip into Yiddish and chant the word. Niftorim. Niftorim. Way before Celie was three, she clearly understood that meant dead person.
Eva did not mean to scare her granddaughter; she just needed to share her anxiety and it was the small Celie who was the most available. Anyone would have done as well—her daughters Esther or Adele, her husband Levi, or her son-in-law, the most unavailable of all. Benjamin left Esther and Celie, and some years later Joshua and Jeremy, in that tiny apartment a lot. He was busy working in the shipping department of a downtown department store during the day and going to school at night, studying to become a CPA and then a lawyer. He was saving his money so that someday “they”—meaning his own family—could move away, out of that crowded apartment to the suburb where we lived and where his other brothers had already migrated—something that caused him no small irritation.
Benjamin was determined to follow my mother’s and his brothers’ paths as soon as he had saved enough. Then, he and Esther and their children would escape. Not just because of how physically closed in it was in the apartment, but because of the crowd of words that crashed into each other every night—the fights, which he could not tolerate.
Esther’s begging him to just move to another apartment was not enough, nor was how she eventually developed patches of eczema on her arms and legs from the stress of that place. He needed to be in that suburb, in a house, and he wanted a better house than what his brothers had settled for, something resembling his sister’s, even if it were in miniature. It took twelve years for that to happen and it was then, in the weeks before the move, that Eva completely lost control—alternating between screams of betrayal and tears of grief that her beloved Esther was leaving, leaving her. Moving away—twenty miles dead north of her. How would she survive? Celie wasn’t sure if her grandmother meant herself, her mother—or maybe even Celie. Then, in the final week before the move Eva went mute—spoke absolutely no words. Niftorim.
On the last day, in mid-Feb
ruary—as bleak and cold and dead a day as she could remember—Celie cried uncontrollably, not wanting to leave the apartment, not wanting her own room. She needed the familiarity of the cot laid out each night in the dining room, which her father carried her to when the grown-ups were done with their after-dinner fights. In the earlier evening she would sleep in Adele’s bed in the back room. Under Adele’s scratchy sheets, permeated by a strange fish smell and human sweat, Celie would curl herself into as tight a fetal ball as she could and pretend she was Cinderella waiting for the prince. No matter how distasteful, she was used to this. To this day Celie fears change, even if it is for the better.
Mostly the adults fought over Adele—what to do with her, her rebellious ways. She often came home late at night, or sometimes not at all. The fights were about putting her in the hospital. They would lower their voices when they said hospital, but Celie could still hear them. It was a secret place that eventually she figured out was for people sick in the mind, not the body. “A place like where Grandmother Idyth was,” she would think, “maybe the same place.”
If Adele happened to come in, they still fought about her. The problem. The failure. Eva wanted to put her away and Esther and Levi wanted to give her another chance—even after the police brought her home one night, showed them the pin and the ring that they found on her that were reported stolen by the neighborhood jeweler. Benjamin avoided all discussions about Adele, just as he refused to discuss his mother, Idyth, with any of them.
When Celie would hear the loud adult talk, she would twist further into her small self and in a strange way be glad—glad none of this shouting was about her. But there was a sadness, too, for sometimes she really liked Adele—the freedoms she gave herself. She especially liked her on the Saturdays when Adele would sneak home a paper bag with two non-kosher hot dogs, one for herself and one for Celie, and they would escape down the paint-chipped, creaky, wooden back stairs of the apartment, sit in the outside air on the first floor landing and eat the “forbidden fruit,” as Adele called it. Celie loved this.