The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter

by Susan Hahn

  “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.

  IF I SET UP THE CHAIRS

  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

  CELIE 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.”

  Maybe you have to be dead (be that distant a witness to all the unending irrational havoc we cause ourselves and each other) to truly understand what an awful idea it was for Cel
ine to agree to go with Celie that day. Here, beneath the ground, I can watch the people above just going along—passing time—not giving others’ requests or behaviors too much thought. Or maybe in this particular instance, and more likely, Celine is just too self-absorbed and had it been anyone else who knew Celie well, the response would have been an emphatic “No.” Anyone else would have questioned her in very precise ways as to what she planned to do with such an item. It was certainly not a secret that Celie could self-destruct.

  Clearly an extra layer of fatty tissue surrounds Celine’s brain, resulting in a huge gelatinous involvement with herself, blocking any thought of how dangerous an excursion this could become for Celie. Cecilia never would have allowed it and would have made sure Celie got better help. And if she had known the gun purchase was on her behalf—because of what she had finally told Celie about Herr M—she would have been horrified. Even Cecily, with all her contorted thoughts, would have known that a gun in Celie’s hands would serve no one any good purpose.

  Cecilia would be at her mother’s grave the day Celie would go to the gun shop and that was the very reason Celie had chosen it. On October 4, the anniversary of Aunt Lettie’s birthday, Cecilia devotes the whole day to traveling here to lie next to her mother. It is one of the frequent times during the year that she is determined to be at the cemetery. The first thing she does when she arrives is to curl over her grave. This autumn, her hair will blend into the russet color maple leaves that still warm us. For now, these visits are the only time that Aunt Lettie’s agitated sleep lifts and she calms—in “eternity time” her rest will soon become peaceful.

  After about twenty minutes Cecilia slowly gets up and speaks to each of us as she carefully positions white lilies next to our inscriptions. Then she carefully traces the embossed letters that make up each of our names with her fingertips, as if she is caressing us.

  Celie knew that on this day Cecilia would not check in with her until late at night and since she was the only one who called her daily, there would be no one else who would worry if she could not be immediately found. Some, including Celie’s brothers and their wives, would go for months without getting in touch with her. She had taken a sick day from the dress shop to go to the gun shop, so no one there would bother her.

  All Celine could think of after Celie invited her was that she had never been to a gun shop, and it intrigued her because she would have to pick something extra special to wear, something different from that which she normally wore, and she was excited to see how she would appear in the mirror in a new and possibly spectacular look.

  What she ultimately chose were black blue jeans, a black belt with highly polished silver studs, and a black spandex three quarter sleeve T-shirt with a cowl neck that could be pulled to one side to expose a shoulder—all from Victoria’s Secret. She told the woman taking her order to send the clothes overnight, which added forty percent to the cost. But she needed to know quickly if the look worked. And anyway, she convinced herself, she rarely did catalogs and was amazed by how little each item cost.

  After she ripped open the delivery and put everything on, she looked at herself in her huge, ceiling-to-floor-length mirror and said, “Cool. Yes, very cool,” out loud and thought, “unlike the visibly unhappy Cecily, who always dressed in dark clothes, I don’t look Goth. More teenager, trim and quite slim, actually thin”—except for her hiked-up breasts, which she raised her hands to cup—held in place by a firm, thickly padded, pointed-tip bra. “Yes, young,” she said to her reflection. She then ran to the local upscale shoe store and bought some black Frye cowboy boots with beautifully sculpted wooden heels.

  The fact was, her face looked prunelike and her behind sagged and seemed disproportionately wide and flat, like badly poured pancake batter. However, not studying herself too closely from the back—too taken by her frontal image—she did not realize this as she happily picked up her black Gucci purse and put it next to the outfit. Dissatisfied with that choice, she ultimately chose the uninitialed, less ostentatious, more expensive Bottega.

  Five days later, on the gun shop trip day, Celie put on baggy khakis and a rumpled gray cotton pullover. She never gave her clothes any thought when away from the shop, and as she dressed she realized how very much she had begun to detest all clothes—how much she enjoyed being alone in her apartment completely naked and how this was becoming more and more of a habit because of the pleasure it brought her. She also did not seem to care if anyone could see her this way through her windows. Increasingly, she liked the freedom of wearing just her skin, for its lack of pretence.

  She had come to hate the way her customers fussed over what they wore—how they tried to cover up bad feelings about themselves and masquerade as someone else—someone who had great confidence. And since the clothes could never give them a strong, permanent identity, rather quickly they would return for another something—most likely a more expensive item, thinking the higher the price, the higher their feeling of self-worth.

  Of course, being the top saleswoman at the shop, she kept such thoughts to herself. She knew Cecilia would have laughed and agreed with her—that keeping these thoughts to herself on the “sad purchases for a faux confidence” was smart. However, Celie also believed that unlike herself, Cecilia’s own nakedness frightened her and that these past many months she had noticed that Cecilia used more and more layers of clothes to cover herself. Cecilia’s description of Herr M’s attack on her naked being, how she “shivered, then shook, then finally fully quaked into a seizure near the end,” now never left Celie’s mind.

  Celie knew she was not attractive, but she also felt she had wonderfully smooth skin and she loved to cover it with thick Kukui Nut Coconut moisturizer, and then lie on her bed, curve her head onto her arms and smell the soft richness of herself—the pleasure of her own silkiness. She believed her skin’s perfection was because it had never been passionately touched. She never saw its sad pallor.

  The day Cecilia bowed her head and slowly, somberly, and fragilely detailed what had happened to her with Herr M, Celie went home and took two showers, put extra lotion on her skin, and curled into the purity of her virgin nakedness, draping herself in her one great indulgence—an expensive, pure white satin comforter—and appreciated her unmarked self a little more.

  When Celine arrived, Celie handed her a meticulously drawn map with directions on how to get to the gun shop. Celine was driving her white Mercedes two-seat convertible that Aaron had given her several years ago for her fortieth birthday. “To cheer you up for all the years that really didn’t show at all,” was what he said to her, with a nervous laugh.

  In truth, the years had not been kind to Celine and she fully looked her age, plus ten. Too much sun. It was an addiction for her, as were the men. As Cecilia had put it to Celie, “Celine is always in need of a tan and a man.” It was true that when she walked into a room, people looked. That flash of shoulder length, overly-bleached blond hair and the startlingly bright colors she wore were always good for a double take.

  On her way to pick up Celie, Celine fantasized about the rough, muscled men who would be at the shop and how their heads would turn when she entered; which in fact they did, but again not for her imagined reasons, but rather for her high-pitched giggle coupled with a naiveté, which could have been interpreted as stupidity, and for the too-loud questions that she asked. “Why do you need a permit? I thought this was a free country?” she said in a sassy voice, as she batted her lacquered eyelashes at the hardened man with his work-worn wrinkles and tough skin who stood behind the counter. He took his guns quite seriously and looked like he would not mind shooting her after her barrage of childlike questions and flirtatious mannerisms.

  Finally, he took out a shotgun and said, “Perhaps you’d prefer this?” Then he snapped its pump, which made a loud noise, and pointed it at her. Everyone there suddenly stopped what they were doing to look at what was going on. Celine acted unfazed, telling the man in her best Mae West impersonation, “I c
an handle anything I’m a worldly woman.” This made him smile in a way that puzzled Celine, but she chose at the moment to see it as a compliment—which it was not. He had known women like her from his private detective days and found all of them pathetic clichés—deflated balloon creatures, whose authentic feelings had been sucked out of them or never truly existed, and all they did was play at strong. He remembered how much trouble they could cause the people who got too close to them—their demands, and the sometimes frightening, dangerous lengths they would go to get attention.

  He also knew that the instant when he pointed the shotgun at her would come back to haunt her. She would wonder why he had done this to her and she would worry that it was possible he did not like her—or worse, that he wanted to hurt her for some unknown reason. He knew insecurity and paranoia ran high in such women.

  He was right, for when Celine slipped into bed that night and pressed herself against Aaron’s exhausted, flabby body and shut her eyes, she saw the barrel of the shotgun pointing at her and the sinister looking narrow tunnel of its darkness froze her. She neither slept nor moved until sunrise, just lay there in a cold sweat that rose from deep within her—a place of terror and pain she sealed the door to years ago with the death of her baby sister and the image of her father shaking Celeste to wake up.

  Celie came prepared. She made sure she had a pen and paper in her purse and took notes while she listened to the man behind the counter. She studied the application form and worried about the question, “In the past 5 years, have you been a patient in any medical facility or part of any medical facility used primarily for the care or treatment of persons for mental illness?” After a pause of almost a minute, she decided that sometimes you just need to lie and proceeded to put a large X in the no box.