With her thumbs she’d press at the beginning
stems, try to push them back into her chest
as if that could arrest the budding.
Not wanting anyone to see,
so they couldn’t point, make fun,
she’d stretch her sweaters
down around her knees,
the yarn slackened and blanketing
her body. She didn’t know then that
a young man would come with flowers
which felt like the soft skin
of her own grown breasts, their areolas
knowing how to roughen into crinkled leaves,
nipples ruddy. She didn’t realize how easily
they all could decay,
that someday they’d be taken from her,
the way she imagined her caller stole
each bloom from its stem, a risk
he took for the fantasy of touching her,
his fingers working carefully, anxious
that he’d get in trouble, have to stop—
all blossoms plucked from their hands.
I AM SURE MY mother knew that her nieces hated her and that she understood it to a point. She knew her nick-name—the one her brothers called her openly, and often to her face—“American Beauty Rose”—got to them, irritated and upset them. She understood why not only her nieces, but I too—her own daughter—would go through our lives always troubled by having such beauty in the family. She knew she was the standard-bearer of beauty not just for us, but for any female who encountered her, and that no matter what any of them did to copy her or rebel against such beauty, she believed no one could compete. Consequently, she, as burden or blessing depending on who you were, remained unfazed and moved forward with her life.
Since I was born homely, I gave up rather early on how I looked, refusing makeup, not watching my weight, barely combing my intentionally chopped-up hair, and most certainly giving no thought to what I wore. Eventually my parents accepted how I looked and set me on a different path. I was to become a famous philosopher—a true scholar. I would equal or surpass Grandfather Cecil.
All of the female offspring were named after him—me (Ceci), Cecilia, Cecily, Celine, Celie, and Celeste—a fact that Cecilia thought really dumb and voiced to me. She believed it ridiculous to pay such homage to a man when there was only anecdotal evidence—“glory stories,” she called them—of his brilliance. “Frankly,” she told me when she was ten and I was twelve, “it’s Grandmother Idyth whom they should have honored—that woman locked away for all these years—her impressive stamina for a long life, however much the doctors drugged her.” When she talked like this my eyes would grow so big they felt like they might burst. And Cecilia talked like this a lot. Especially to me, because of how well I listened and laughed at what she said, for deep inside me, there was a rebel—an iconoclast—but I just could not quite bring it forth. Only Cecilia allowed herself to be free enough to give such ideas voice, however quietly she whispered them. She felt with me a safe place, which made our relationship special, for she did not feel there were many safe places in this world for her.
My parents liked to compare things and people to flowers. They would brag unrelentingly about Cecil’s genius—say my mind was so similar, compare it to a rare and gorgeous orchid. At the Passover Seder each year where my father presided with great authority, I was always given the role of the Wise Son, which made me flush terribly with discomfort and guilt. Cecilia was predictably and painfully designated the Wicked Son, and the Simple Son was alternately assigned to Celie, Celine, or Cecily. Joshua and Jeremy, Celie’s brothers, were far younger than the rest of us—either had not yet been born or were too little to be called upon. My father always spoke with great pedantic pleasure on behalf of the Son Who Does Not Know How to Ask.
Once, they called Cecilia a dandelion—which, as everyone knows, is just a weed. It got back to Aunt Lettie—Cecilia’s mother. So directly and quietly, with a sadness and dismay in her voice, she asked, “Ceci, is it true that your parents called Cecilia this?” Telling Aunt Lettie, “It is,” made me sick.
Rather quickly the dandelion comparison made its convoluted path to Cecilia and she cried. She was six. It tangled her mind—bound her to awful bottom thoughts about herself—snarled through her body and knotted it. However, when she was old enough, she looked up “dandelion” in the dictionary and discovered the root was from the French, dent de lion—meaning “lion’s tooth.” From that moment, she felt a little stronger and happier. She found it, perhaps, a divine message. Cecilia thought like that. And she waited …
Cecilia really detested my mother—perhaps the most of my cousins. She thought her soul a muddy, bog-like place—a sewage pit—and I could not argue with any of this, although thinking about her soul in such a manner hurt. The subtle, subversive way my mother talked—always starting out so sweetly, then ending with a twist, an insult—punctured like a dart. For example, she would say, “Cecilia, you look so pretty—today—even though you’re so thin. Doesn’t your mother feed you?” Or, “That beauty mark on your cheek, Cecilia, looks so artificial. Did you place it there with a pencil?” In truth, it was real.
Aunt Lettie would tell Cecilia, “When one has such beauty, it can do two things to you—either cause you to have great trouble or to have great luck in life and in Rose’s case, it’s great luck. We just have to get used to the fact of it—that Rose can, because of how she looks, get away with how she speaks and what she does. Don’t you see,” she would continue with amazement in her voice, plus a pinch of bitter, “it never rains when Rose throws an outside party? The sun always shines on her. That’s why everyone wants to get married, or celebrate their anniversaries or birthdays, in that huge and glorious backyard.”
It was true—it never rained on my mother’s plans, only on the other days, so that her flowers could grow as lovely as they were capable, while the dandelions ran amuck in the field beyond her elaborate, expensive wrought-iron fence. When very young, I would wonder if the clouds, the rain, the scary rock hail, too, were dazzled by her and also a little afraid of her powers—her wrath if they dared to intrude.
Eventually, Cecilia came to love the freedom of the dan-delions—their unpredictable paths—the independence of their ways. And once, I even said in an almost angry voice to her, “You are lucky, you are special, you do exactly what you want.” Then I paused, took a breath and said in a whisper, “I envy you.” I said this at the point when I got really sick and began to completely disappear, disorienting Cecilia so much she felt herself becoming all dandelion puff—her mind a’scatter. Those were among the last words I ever said to her. Words which I now truly regret, thinking how wrong I was to envy her gifts, given that they were the direct cause of what happened to her with Herr M.
Cecilia’s mother had said nothing bad would ever happen to my mother, had said it always and it was because of this Cecilia found what happened to me impossible and unacceptable. She could not fit it into her mind—it became a chunk of granite that she would never be able to push through any door, no matter how she tried to angle it.
She concluded God had made a mistake. That she, Cecilia Slaughter, was the daughter who should have gotten sick. She was the daughter who should have died. But it was, in fact, my mother who had lost a daughter. It was my parents who were forced to place a daughter in the earth.
On the day I was buried, Cecilia told her mother and father how she felt—about being the one who should have died. Her father, Samuel, said a too-loud, “Hush,” so upset that his sister Rose was having to go through all of this. Aunt Lettie just remained stunned silent that the myth had a crack, that it had, in fact, split wide open and what oozed out was too grotesque.
The whole family was stupefied that Rose—the golden beauty of the family, of the neighborhood, of the community—had suffered such a loss. From that day, my mother looked at her nieces with an outrage so deep, yet carefully hidden behind her fixed blue eyes, I was pretty sure Cecilia, with her acute eye for detail and ability to pick up on what was too subtle for the others, was the only one who felt the direct hit of it.
That day at my grave Aunt Sonya’s face was empty of emotion, for all feelings of loss had long ago been scoured out of her with the death of Celeste, her baby daughter. Uncle Emmanuel wept violently, his tears really for Celeste, too, and because he was prone to making a spectacle of himself.
Cecilia just stood there numb, staring at each of them—Celine, fussing with the flower pin on her too-tight suit, trying hard not to think of Celeste, her dead little sister; Celie, averting her eyes as she always did in any kind of tense situation; Cecily, tapping her foot as if all she really wanted to do was kick someone, which was not uncommon. Michael, Cecilia’s husband, stood in back of her, his hands on her waist, helping to hold her up. Joshua and Jeremy were in their late teens and traveling through Europe.
My mother’s other brothers and their wives cried hard, while my father stood immobile, stiffly clutching my mother, only the color in his huge face moving tumultuously—from boiling red to violent purple. After the service he turned his back to his nieces. From that moment they ceased to exist.
Cecilia was truly the only one who took on the long, mourning task, as if her whole life had been building to it. She could not get out of her mind how I had called the tumors growing inside me, my dying, rotting flowers. Cecilia, with her dandelion tenacity, could not stop digging into the ground pit of herself, forever looking for the why of it. The why of any of it …
“Survivor’s guilt” was what the psychiatrist called it, and perhaps he was right, however crazy he was from his own polluted history, which eventually he told her because he had fallen in love—in love with her. A bad luck story because as Cecilia grew up she had become the other side of what can happen to beauty—a beauty which immediately drew Herr M to her, and, ultimately, led to violent acts and conclusions.
“The ugly duckling to the swan”—how Cecilia remembers that book, which her mother read to her over and over when she was little, as Aunt Lettie sighed and looked at her daughter, whispering to herself, “Well, maybe … ”
Cecilia would stare at the psychiatrist, sitting there in his perfectly coiffed strawberry-blond toupee, for an hour three times a week puzzled, until she eventually figured out he had four different ones of varying lengths so by the fourth week he looked like he really needed a trim—which of course he got by returning the next week to toupee number one. It took her three months to figure out this cycle. That is what she focused on while he gawked at her, eventually convincing her that she had to come more often—that she needed him—and cut his price to a third of what it was originally. Finally, when he nervously said, “Perhaps I should no longer charge you,” then hesitated, leaned too far forward, and continued, “maybe someday, and soon, we could go for a ride, and then have lunch,” she fled his office.
She ran to an overweight, bald psychologist who constantly popped Jelly Bellys into the cupped hole of his mouth while he spoke. After about a month he said to her, “You’ve brought all of your troubles on yourself. Everything is your fault and the flirting with me will have to stop.” Again, she ran—this time to an older, overpriced analyst with his own gray hair, who always wore khaki pants, a crisp white dress shirt with the cuffs flipped up like dove wings, which rose and fell through the air as he moved his animated arms, and brightly colored bow ties with lively paisley patterns on them. Here, she felt perhaps there would be some peace because of his upbeat style—that she would be able to talk about me and how she should have been the dead one. She hoped his hearty enthusiasm could help lift her out of the hole where she had dropped herself. Luckily, because she really could not afford him, at her fifth session he said, “You’re gorgeous! I want to lick you. I want to taste your sour milk.” She raced out of there quicker than ever.
Alone, she began hurting herself, again. Her tonsure became larger and she made small cuts on her thighs, her arms. Afterward she would dab the sores with Q-tips dipped in alcohol, her body becoming a mess of raw, red dots. No one could see any of this except Michael, who was still her husband. Michael, who tolerated a lot. Michael, who thought her fabulous. “Your hair, your eyes,” he would say with such passion. He was full of so many compliments for her with which she could never quite connect—as if he were talking to a person who was standing a little past her left shoulder. Sometimes Cecilia would even look around to see if she could find her.
Michael did not understand all the fuss about my mother—for what he saw was an aging clichéd blonde—and he would say to Cecilia, “Perhaps you’re too much of a threat to her, that all your intensity is too much of a challenge to her own shallow-surface self. Perhaps, that’s why she always puts you down in her coyly angled ways.” It was the “she puts you down” part that repeated in Cecilia’s mind at my service.
Immediately after my funeral my parents left on a trip to the Alps. They wrote postcards about how “one must appreciate nature. Its great loveliness.” They sent their words to everyone in the family, becoming even more, the family philosophers.
Eventually and predictably, they began to throw their large, lavish parties and, of course, it never rained. Cecilia thought it was because the gods had finally taken their revenge. Always their plan, to let the humans believe in their own perfection, then show them. Again, they gave my parents a garden to play in—gave them back their flowers with all the startling beauty that their gardeners could think to plant. “Very Gatsby, my dear Ceci,” was what she told me as she began to write her poetry …
Poetry that eventually got published, though her father underplayed it and her measured mother knew best to only take pleasure in it within herself so as to not make any outside spirits jealous. My parents ignored it, as did the rest of the family, because such accomplishment from the dandelion challenged the family myth, almost as much as my death.
My mother’s brothers needed their older sister to be the center—the centerpiece—of their lives. She had pulled them through the worst time of their childhood. When their father died and their mother went quickly mad afterward, it was she who made the plans for them. She found them each a place to stay with distant relatives in small towns with curious names like “Rock Island” and “Normal.” However bad their situation, when the latter name was told and retold to me and all my cousins, including Celie’s little brothers, we had to cover our mouths to hide our smiles, because each of us in our own way—at our own level—felt the irony.
And when my mother met my father, the wealthy Emil, how he helped the brothers because he loved their Rose—the blond hair, the blue eyes, the curve of her calves. She was unlike any Jew he had ever seen. Short and squat with a large flat face, Emil could show the world what he could have—yes, what money could do. And my mother loved him for all of what he did, and her brothers did too.
He helped them go to school, start businesses, make smart investments, and even bought a cheap building in the city and fixed it up a bit so they would have a place with the lowest rent after they married. He welcomed their young wives into the family and then their children on the implied condition that he and my mother be the king and queen of their fairy tale, allowing them all to sit at their royal “shipped from England” table with the finest linen covering it, my mother presiding at one end, my father at the other and a huge glass bowl in the center with the heads of flowers piled high and floating in it.
Together they built an aristocracy that no outsider within the family could follow with the perfection demanded of them, each falling short—meaning the sisters-in-law. Each with a therapist—social worker, psychologist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, depending on their status, meaning what they could afford. But no matter what kind of help they got, that is exactly what they continued to try to do—follow. Even after my father’s sudden death seven years after mine, the devastated brothers, their depressed wives, and their bewildered children followed.
“Just an overnight, minor surgery,” he had laughed, holding Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in his lap as he waited his turn. He wanted everyone in the hospital to know they were in the presence of a scholar—emulating the man he had never met, his beloved Rose’s father. That night an allergic reaction to pain medication detonated his heart and killed him. Again it had happened and the chorus cried and sadly sang, impossible, impossible.
To everyone this seemed even more unfathomable than my death—which left Cecilia totally baffled and crushed, as if I had become, maybe always had been, a nothing too—a dandelion—which, of course, was true.
Seven years it took Cecilia to get over the guilt, let go of most of her destructive rituals, and start to publish her poetry. Same as the timing between my death and my father’s. Cecilia thought it all “very biblical—the land fallow, then not.” She said this with a wry smile to Michael. Michael, who after all of this still loved her and loved that she was well—or as well as she would ever be, always thinking, “The weed forever hopelessly there, just dormant, not dead inside her.”
After my father’s death, my mother slowed down some in terms of entertaining and traveling and eventually when the air was warm and the sky too blue, she came to position herself on the large veranda that surrounded our house, at the head of a too-sticky, lemonade-stained glass table. There, she would await her guests who regularly and punctually arrived, a paid companion sometimes standing there brushing or braiding her long hair over the slowly growing thickness at the base of her neck. Celie, Cecily, and Celine often talked about “the hump” and her hair—how it did not look like she colored it, yet it was impossible that she did not.
Brushing and braiding were the words that stuck in Cecilia’s mind from our cousins’ reports. She was not there to directly discuss any of this or to view the flowers from the now less well-tended, patchy garden. She was busy saying “yes” to invitations for readings and symposiums—her words like dandelion spores, blowing every which way with the wind, scattering themselves to distant places. Her melancholy words, always embedded in the twists of memory—of family.
Though none of this was a cure—neither an ending nor a beginning for her. Only a middle. Like the bowl that was always placed in the center of my parent’s highly polished table—mahogany, the same as my father’s and my caskets.
That bowl. Her mind focused on the intricate pattern of it as she sat for hours in the various hotel rooms before her readings—twirling and knotting, then trying to unravel the long strands of her hair. “Not brushing and braiding,” she would anxiously think, as she wrote about things too intricate, too fragile, too beautiful. “That bowl,” she would recall, “with its careful, intentional, deep carvings, how easily the dazzling, trapped, decapitated flowers and the elegant glass containing them could fall to the floor while attempting to place it in the perfect spot—the gods eternally looking down, deciding who should be so unexpectedly cut.”
Cecilia was forever there, waiting for its crash, which eventually arrived some years later with the appearance of Herr M …