My tension built as I waited for Momma and my aunt to show up. First came Momma, dressed in her prettiest afternoon gown—a soft flowing wool crepe of a pretty coral color, with piping of violet to match her eye color. She wore a pearl choker and earrings with real diamonds and pearls to match the choker. It was heirloom Whitefern jewelry she’d told me many times would be mine one day. Her magnificent hair was swept up high, but a few loose curls dangled down to take away the severity and make her look elegant.
Next came my aunt in her best outfit, a dark navy-blue suit with a tailored white blouse. As always, she wore her dark glossy hair in a figure-eight knot low on the back of her neck. Tiny diamond studs were in her ears, and on her little finger she wore a ruby class ring. She looked very schoolmarmish.
“Ellie, will you let Mercy Marie in?” said Momma sweetly. Tuesday was the only day my mother was allowed to call her sister by her nickname. Only Papa could call my aunt Ellie any time he chose.
“Oh, dear, you are late,” said Aunt Ellsbeth, getting up to lift the piano lid and take from underneath the heavy silver frame that enclosed the photograph of a fat woman with a very sweet face. “Really, Mercy Marie, we expected you to arrive on time. You’ve always had the annoying habit of arriving late. To make an impression, I suppose. But dear, you’d make an impression even if you arrived early.” Momma giggled as my aunt sat down and primly folded her hands in her lap. “The piano isn’t too hard for you, dear, is it? But it is sturdy enough … I hope.” Again Momma giggled, making me squirm uneasily, for I knew the worst was yet to come. “Yes, Mercy Marie, we do understand why you’re always tardy. Running away from those passionate savages must be very exhausting. But you really should know it’s been rumored about that you were cooked in a pot by a cannibal chief and eaten for dinner. Lucietta and I are delighted to see that was only a malicious rumor.”
Carefully she crossed her legs and stared at that portrait on the piano, placed just where music sheets were usually stacked. It was part of Momma’s role to get up and light the candles in the crystal candelabra while the fire snapped and crackled, and the gaslamps flickered and made the crystal prisms on the chandeliers catch colors and dart crazily about the room.
“Ellsbeth, my dear, my darling,” said my mother for the dead woman who had to participate, even if her ghost was often rebellious, “is that the only suit you own? You wore it last week and the week before, and your hair, good God, why don’t you change that hairstyle? It makes you look sixty.”
Always Momma’s voice was sickeningly sweet when she spoke for Aunt Mercy Marie.
“I like my hairstyle,” said my aunt primly, watching my mother roll in the tea wagon loaded down with all the goodies Momma’d prepared earlier. “At least I don’t try to look like a pampered mistress who spends all her time trying to please an egotistical sex maniac. Of course, I realize that’s the only kind of man there is. That is exactly why I chose to stay single.”
“I’m sure that’s the only reason,” said my mother in her own voice. Then she spoke for the photograph on the piano. “But Ellie, I remember a time when you were madly in love with an egotistical maniac. In love enough to go to bed with him and have his child. Too bad he only used you to satisfy his lust; too bad he never fell in love with you.”
“Oh, him,” said my aunt, snorting her disgust. “He was just a passing fancy. His animal magnetism drew me to him momentarily, but I had sense enough to forget him and move on to better things. I know he found another immediately. All men are alike—selfish, cruel, demanding. I know now he would have made the worst possible husband.”
“Too bad you couldn’t have found a wonderful man like Lucky’s handsome Damian,” said that sweet voice from the piano, as my mother sat down to nibble on a dainty sandwich.
I stared at the picture of a woman I didn’t remember ever meeting, though Momma said I had known her when I was four. She appeared to be very wealthy. Diamonds hung from her ears, neck, studded her fingers. The fur trimming on her suit collar made her face seem to sit on her shoulders. Often I imagined that if she rose, she’d have fur about long, full sleeves and rimming the edge of her skirt, like a medieval queen.
Mercy Marie had traveled all the way to Africa in hopes of salvaging a few heathen souls and converting them to Christianity. Now she was part of the heathens, eaten, hopefully, after she was killed and cooked.
According to everything I’d learned from attending these teatimes, Aunt Mercy Marie once had a ridiculous fondness for cucumber and lettuce sandwiches made with the thinnest possible cheese bread. In order to do this, my mother had to bake the bread, trim off the crust and flatten the bread with her rolling pin. The bread was then cut with cookie cutters into fancy shapes.
“Really, Mercy Marie,” said my aunt in her harsh way, “ham, cheese, chicken or tuna is not as tacky as you think. We eat food like that all the time … don’t we, Lucietta?”
Momma scowled. I hated to hear what she’d say next, something cruel and biting. “If Mercy Marie adores dainty cucumber and lettuce sandwiches, Ellie, why don’t you let her eat a few, instead of hogging them all for yourself? Don’t be such a pig. Learn to share.”
“Lucietta, darling,” spoke up the shrill voice from the piano, this time donated by my aunt, “please show your older sister the respect due her. You give her such tiny portions at mealtimes, she has to make up for your stinginess by eating the sandwiches I adore.”
“Oh, Mercy, you are such a dear, so gracious. Of course I should know my sister’s appetite can never be satisfied. A bottomless pit could hold no more than Ellie’s stomach. Perhaps she tries to fill the great emptiness of her life with food. Perhaps for her it replaces love.”
On and on went the memorial teatime, while the perfumed candles burned and the fire spat red sparks, and Aunt Ellie consumed all the sandwiches, even those with chicken liver pâté, which I liked very much—and so did Vera. I nibbled on a sandwich I hated. This kind always tasted like Aunt Mercy Marie might have: damp, grassy and soggy.
“Really, Lucietta,” said Aunt Ellsbeth, using the voice of the dear departed, casting me a grievous look for so obviously disliking what Mercy Marie must have loved most. “You should do something about that child’s appetite. She’s nothing but skin and bones and huge haunted eyes. And that ridiculous mop of hair. Why does she look so spooked? From the looks of her some dry wind could blow her away—if she doesn’t lose her mind first. Lucietta, what are you doing to that child?”
About this time I heard the squeak of the side door opening, and in a few seconds Vera crawled into the room. She hid herself behind a potted fern so our mothers wouldn’t see her and put her finger to her lips when I looked her way. She had with her a huge medical encyclopedia that had cardboard front pieces made of both the female and male body—without clothes on.
I cringed. Behind me Vera giggled. I shrank into that small hiding place in my brain where I could feel safe and unafraid, but that place felt like a cage. I always felt caged when Aunt Mercy Marie’s spiteful ghost came to our front salon. She was dead and unreal, but somehow or other she still made me feel like a shadow without substance. Not real in the same way other girls were real. My hand fluttered nervously to feel my “haunted” eyes, to touch my “gaunt” cheeks, for sooner or later she’d get around to mentioning those things, too.
“Mercy,” spoke my mother chastisingly, “how can you be so insensitive in front of my daughter?” She stood, looking tall and willowy in her soft, flowing dress.
I stared at that dress, confused. Surely she’d walked into this room in something coral colored. How had it changed colors? Was it the light from the windows making it seem violet, green and blue? My head began to ache. Was it summer, spring, winter or fall? I wanted to run to the windows and check the trees, only they didn’t lie.
Other things were said that I tried not to hear, and then Momma strode over to the piano and sat down to play all the hymns that Aunt Mercy Marie liked to sing. The minute my mother
sat on her piano bench, something miraculous happened: she assumed a stage presence as if an audience of thousands would soon be applauding. Her long elegant fingers hovered over the keys dramatically, then down they came, banging out a commanding chord to demand your attention. “Rock of Ages” she played, and then she was singing so beautifully and sadly I wanted to cry. My aunt began to sing, too, but I couldn’t join in. Something inside me was screaming, screaming. All this was false. God wasn’t up there. He didn’t come when you needed him … he never had and he never would.
Mamma saw my tears and abruptly changed pace. This time her hymn was played in a rock style that bounced through the room. “Won’t you come to the church in the wildwood, won’t you come to the church in the vale,” she sang, rocking from side to side, making her breasts jiggle.
My aunt began to eat cake again. Discouraged, my mother left the piano and sat on the sofa.
“Momma,” I asked in a small voice, “what’s a vale?”
“Lucietta, why don’t you teach your child something of value?” asked that merciless voice on the piano. When my head whipped around, trying to catch Aunt Ellsbeth talking, she was sipping hot tea, which I knew was heavily laced with bourbon, just as Momma’s tea was. Maybe it was the liquor that made them so cruel. I didn’t know if they had liked Aunt Mercy Marie when she was alive, or if they had despised her. I knew they liked to mock the way they thought she’d been killed, as if they couldn’t quite believe Papa, who had explained to me more than once that Aunt Mercy Marie might very well be alive and the wife of some African chieftain.
“Fat women are prized in many primitive societies,” he told me. “She just disappeared two weeks after she arrived there to do her missionary work. Don’t believe everything you hear, Audrina.”
That was my worst problem—what to believe, and what not to believe.
Giggling, Momma poured a bit more tea into my aunt’s cup and some into her own, and then she picked up a crystal bottle labeled “Bourbon” and filled the two cups. Then Momma spotted Vera. “Vera,” she said, “would you like a cup of hot tea?”
Of course Vera did, but she scowled when no bourbon was added.
“What are you doing home from school so early?” shot out my aunt.
“The teachers had a meeting and let all the students off earlier than usual,” said Vera quickly.
“Vera, be truthful in the presence of the living dead,” giggled my mother, almost drunk by this time. Vera and I exchanged glances. This was one of the only times we could really communicate, when we both felt strange and baffled.
“What do you do for amusement, Ellie?” asked my mother in that high-pitched, sugary voice she used for Aunt Mercy Marie. “Certainly you must get bored, too, once in a while, living way out in the sticks, having no friends. You don’t have a handsome husband to keep you warm and happy in your cold, lonely bed.”
“Really, Mercy,” responded my aunt, looking straight into those photograph eyes, “how could I possibly be bored when I live with such fascinating people as my sister and her stockbroker husband, who both adore fighting in their bedroom so much one of them screams. Truthfully, I feel rather safe in my lonely bed, without a handsome brute of a man who likes to wield his belt for a whip.”
“Ellsbeth, how dare you tell my best friend such nonsense? Damian and I play games, that’s all. It adds to his excitement and to mine.” Momma smiled apologetically at the photograph. “Unfortunately, Ellsbeth knows nothing at all about the many ways of pleasing a man, or giving him what he likes.”
My aunt snorted contemptuously. “Mercy, I’m sure you never allowed Horace to play those kind of sick sex games with you.”
“If she had, she wouldn’t be where she is now,” giggled my momma.
Vera’s eyes were as wide as mine. We both sat silent and motionless. I was sure both of them had forgotten we were there.
“Really, Mercy Marie, you do have to forgive my sister, who is a bit drunk. As I was saying a moment ago, I do live with such fascinating people there is never a dull moment. One daughter dies in the woods, another comes to take her place, and the fools give her the same name—”
“Ellsbeth,” snapped my momma, bolting upright from her slouched position, “if you hate your sister and her husband so much, why don’t you leave and take your daughter with you? Surely there must be some school somewhere that needs a teacher. You do have the kind of sharp tongue that could really keep children in their place.”
“No,” said my aunt calmly, still sipping her tea, “I’ll never leave this cluttery museum of junk. It’s just as much mine as it is hers.” She held her small finger in a crooked way I admired. Never could I manage to make mine stay like that for so long.
Odd how my aunt had such prissy manners and wore such unprissy clothes. My mother had very prissy clothes, and very unprissy mannerisms. While my aunt held her knees close together, my mother parted hers. While my aunt sat as straight as if she had a poker down her spine, my mother made herself into a rag and assumed sensual poses. They did everything to antagonize one another, and they succeeded.
During teatime I never contributed anything unless it was demanded of me, and Vera usually stayed just as quiet, hoping to hear more secrets. Vera had crawled around in back of a sofa, and there she sat with her lame leg stretched straight out, her other pulled up to her chin as she slowly leafed through that illustrated medical book that showed human anatomy. Just beneath the front cover was her cardboard man of many thick paper layers. In the first one he was just naked. When that cut-out man was turned over, he was shown with all his arteries painted red, his veins blue. Beneath that colorful plate was another man with all his vital organs showing. The last plate showed the skeleton, which didn’t interest Vera at all. There was also a naked woman who could be viewed inside out, too, but she never held much interest for Vera. Long ago she had pulled the “fetus” from the womb, and in her schoolbooks she used that tabbed baby for a bookmark. Bit by bit Vera began taking the naked man apart, untabbing his numbered paper parts and studying them closely. Each organ could be fitted back into proper position when the tabs were stuck through the right numbered slots. In her left hand she clutched his male parts, even as she plucked out his heart and his liver, turning them over and over, before she again took that cardboard thing from her left hand and examined it in great detail.
How strangely men were made, I thought, as she put the man back together and he came out right. Then she started again to take him apart. I turned my eyes away.
By this time both my mother and Aunt Ellsbeth were more than a bit drunk.
“Is anything as wonderful as you thought it would be?”
Wistfully, Momma met my aunt’s softened gaze. “I still love Damian, even if he hasn’t lived up to his promises. Maybe I was only fooling myself anyway, thinking I was really good enough to be a concert pianist. Maybe I married to keep from finding out just how mediocre I really am.”
“Lucietta, I don’t believe that,” said my aunt with surprising compassion. “You are a very gifted pianist and you know it as well as I do. You just let that man of yours put doubts in your head. How many times has Damian soothed you by saying you wouldn’t have succeeded if you had gone on?”
“Lots and lots and lots of times,” chanted my mother in a silly, drunken way that made me want to cry. “Don’t talk to me about it anymore, Ellie. It makes me feel too sorry for myself. Mr. Johanson would be so disappointed in me. I hope he’s dead and never found out I amounted to nothing.”
“Did you love him, Lucietta?” my aunt asked in a kindly way.
I perked up. Vera looked up from her play with the gross, naked man whose heart she was squeezing in her hand.
Mr. Ingmar Johanson had been my mother’s music teacher when she was a young girl. “When I was fifteen, and full of romantic notions, I thought I loved him.” Momma sighed heavily and rubbed at a tear that trickled down her cheek. She turned her head so that I saw her beautiful profile, and she stared to
ward the windows where the winter sun could only dimly filter in to pattern our Oriental with faded patches of light.
“He was the first man to give me a real kiss … boys in school had, but his was the first real kiss.”
Weren’t all kisses alike?
“Did you like his kisses?”
“Yes, Ellie, I liked them well enough. They filled me with longing. Ingmar woke me up sexually and then left me unfulfilled. Many a night I lay awake then, and even now I wake up and wish I’d let him go ahead and finish what he’d started, instead of saying no and saving myself for Damian.”
“No, Lucietta, you did the right thing. Damian would never have married you if he’d even suspected you weren’t a virgin. He claims to be a modern man with liberal ideas, but he’s a Victorian at heart. You know damn well he couldn’t handle what happened to Audrina any better than she could …”
What did she mean? How could the First Audrina have handled anything when they found her dead in the woods? Suddenly Momma turned to see me half hidden behind the fern. She stared, as if she had to readjust some thoughts in her head before she spoke. “Audrina, why do you try to hide? Come out and sit in a chair like a lady. Why are you so quiet? Contribute something once in a while. No one enjoys a person who doesn’t know how to make small talk.”
“What was it the First Audrina couldn’t handle any better than Papa?” I asked, getting to my feet and falling unladylike into a chair.
“Audrina, be careful with that cup of tea!”
“Momma, exactly what happened to my dead sister? What killed her—a snake?”
“That’s not small talk,” snapped Momma irritably. “Really, Audrina, we’ve told you all you need to know about your sister’s accident in the woods. And remember, she would still be alive if she’d learned to obey the orders we gave her. I hope you will always keep that in mind when next you feel stubborn or rebellious and think being disobedient is a good way to get back at your parents, who try to do the best they can.”
My Sweet Audrina Page 6