Sometimes I talk too much
at a shrill pitch and the bitch
part of me carries off
my conversation in directions
I’d never travel with more peaceful
lips. But when my brain swells
and pushes on the small bones
on my face, what spills out
seems so rich. I think
everyone loves me so much.
Until, alone with the bloated
moon, I hear the rattle
of my voice and its twist—
the gnarled path it takes running
after any catch, grabbing
first place in a race
it does not want to enter,
accepting the trophy
with a curtsy practiced
for royalty. Hater of both halves
of myself—raving
slave, desperate dictator.
WHEN CECILIA FINALLY told Celie in a back room at the shop exactly what the critic Herr M had done to her, Celie was shocked and sickened. But she stayed calm, or at least as calm as she could, hopefully hiding her increasing distress. It was in near the end of her hospital stay that Cecilia told her with such excitement in her voice of his invitation. Celie did not remind Cecilia how she had said to her at the time, “Maybe it isn’t such a good idea to go to his apartment alone for dinner.” Celie tells herself, “Yes, that now would only add to her grief. Anyway, I was probably too vague in my warning by just saying too quietly, ‘Perhaps he isn’t such a nice man,’ given the fact that she had just explained to me that he was going through an unending divorce—his fourth. I should have been clearer—more adamant—so in a way this is all my fault.”
Also, there were things about Herr M that Celie could have told her that she had learned of more recently—that she knew of at the moment of Cecilia telling her about the attack—which would have been unbearable for Cecilia to hear, and this only enlarged Celie’s extreme upset.
After Cecilia left, she ran into the bathroom and took a double dose of her medication. She stayed in there for about fifteen minutes and then reentered the sales area of the shop. It looked like a carnival—the clothes, the women, all the colors that filled the huge room seemed to be moving too quickly. She wondered if she might have swallowed too many pills in her distress. She felt both her mind and body were being taken on a merry-go-round, which was spinning too fast—its loud, discordant music blasting into her ears. All she could hope was that too fast would not mean out-of-control. She tried to pace herself the rest of the day—she spoke and walked slowly and was extra polite to everyone as if that would stop the flailing of her throbbing brain. It felt like a rabid bat was trapped inside her skull, crashing itself against her too-thin walls of bone, and that her head was about to crack open from the pain.
Some months ago a client of Celie’s had revealed to her she had a niece who was getting her MFA in poetry at the university and she had been in a class Herr M taught. Of course she used his real name, just as Cecilia had when she told Celie of his invitation for that dinner. According to Celie’s client, she believed her niece had little or no sexual experience when she met him, but then he began an affair with her. With great anguish, she said to Celie, “How could a professor at such a prestigious place get away with something like this? I thought those days were long gone.” She repeated this over and over, while Celie, trying to distract her, showed her the latest sweaters that had just arrived for the fall.
Celie hated hearing any horrible story. However, in the shop when her clients vented their problems to her, as they frequently did, she had perfected the art of compassionate nodding. But this made her feel so used—that once again she had become the dumping ground for other people’s issues, had become the Sin-Eater for her customers.
Her client went on to say, “My niece is very shy, not attractive, and stutters when she speaks. Clearly this so-called great man—this great intellectual—treated her as a receptacle until his divorce was final, for when that happened, he abandoned her and moved in with someone else—three weeks later. Now, my niece is too depressed to return to school, and I’m worried she might be suicidal.”
She then asked for Celie’s advice. “Me?” Celie thought, rather startled, “Celie Slaughter, never married, who’s never had a lover! Though men like Herr M make a good argument for celibacy—a life of just fantasy, no matter how lonely.”
Then, Celie considered, “Maybe she asked me because she had heard about my own instabilities.” She did not know if she should worry that this was still being discussed or that she should take it as a compliment, because she was now considered “recovered,” now seen as “very together.” She had heard some of the whispers. Ultimately, she decided it just did not matter. At least she had learned some small thing from her therapist—“People talk. You can’t stop them.”
Today, however, she knows too many awful things about this one man and she is finding this too much of a coincidence—as if she were meant to know, meant to do something.
Cecilia said she had told no one else, and Celie believes this to be true. Yet, when she saw her poem “Nijinsky’s Dog” in the American Poetry Review, Celie was perplexed and frightened. At first, she thought it was just Cecilia’s heightened imagination at work, but as she kept rereading it, its subtext, its imagery, and metaphors, began to scare her. She now understands more clearly how much autobiography was there.
Celie cannot get Herr M’s thug fists, the heft of his body on Cecilia, out of her mind. Cecilia shook when she described how each time after he got her, he told her to “Turn! Turn! Turn Over!” “Celie,” she said, holding on to both of her arms as if they were lifelines, “I thought it meant that finally he was going to get off of me, let me up. Let me go. But it wasn’t true—it just wasn’t true. I couldn’t catch my breath.”
Then Celie remembered the winter before last, just a few weeks before Aunt Lettie’s death, how heavy Cecilia’s breathing was when she drove her home from the hospital, which Cecilia attributed to a mild case of bronchitis. “Nothing serious,” she reassured her. Celie later learned it was walking pneumonia, and it took until the summer for her lungs to become clear of the infection.
Now Celie believes Cecilia will never be totally uninfected by what has happened—that she will not be able to get up completely. She thinks, “Some things can never be gotten up from fully—at best they land on our backs, like rocks we forever carry with us.”
Celie has always loved Cecilia’s poetry. Its melancholy. Its unexpectedness. The way her words make her face, and almost accept, her own emotions. They do, for sure, make her feel less alone. She loves the places Cecilia carries her both literally and figuratively. Sometimes she has to look up what Cecilia’s referring to, but then she learns even more and feels smarter. Cecilia’s language gives her sadness a shape. Always has. At least for the moment she is reading it, she can contain her own feelings within Cecilia’s lines.
Yet, now she does not know what to do with the rage that is spiraling inside her—a rage as large as any she has ever known—because of this man. A man she has never met, but now has heard about in two awful, anxiety-filled situations, each horrible in its own way—however, similar. Now that she knows the facts—the truth—not just the rumors and the guessings as to what really happened to Cecilia, she wants to hurt him, hurt him badly, which sounds preposterous, she knows, because she is the furthest person from powerful. And she has read enough literature, both sacred and profane, to know that dealing with the Devil is always big trouble.
That evening, she wondered what he looked like, so she searched for him on the internet. She got many pictures and studied them for almost thirty minutes. He had a full head of thick, wavy, black hair, his sideburns beginning to gray. His nose was straight and close to perfect. She thought he would look more like a goat, but he did not—although he did have a thick, black goatee, also flecked with gray, which made him look devil-like. “Perhaps to cover a weak chin,” she thought. His lips were full, giving the impression they could be a supple place for words to pass through. However, in several picture a few of his teeth were jagged, almost to the point of looking broken. “Maybe as a result of all the lives from which he’d taken a too-hard bite,” she said out loud to no one.
With all this studying of him, it became clear to her that his real power was in his dark eyes—a softness to his stare, coupled with an odd sexiness, as if he were saying, “I can show you a good time and will never, ever hurt you.” Celie felt drawn to them even through the computer screen. “That’s what the Devil—or a psychopath—can do to you,” she said out loud again, when she forced herself to finally click off all images of him. But, even then, she could still see his face staring at her and it kept her up most of the night, along with his words to Cecilia. Turn. Turn. Turn Over.
She tossed in bed for hours looking for a cool spot, and trying to figure out what to do next. “What do I, Celie Slaughter, do? A woman who always stands on the sidelines of life, smiling with designer clothes in her hands, helping other women dress well, so they can go to parties with men who might rape them”—a new thought she cannot wash from her mind.
“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.