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?
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 Celine 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 can 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.
She also decided that however interesting the pump action of the Remington 820 shotgun was—the one that had been pointed at Celine—she preferred the Colt semiautomatic pistol. It looked just like the one Uncle Abraham—Cecily’s father—had from World War II, which Cecily had shown to her, Celine, and Cecilia. Celie also thought the handgun could be carried so easily in her purse, unlike the other, which looked like it would need at least a violin case.
She learned from the man behind the counter that the shotgun was more successful in scaring a person and, if need be, more accurate for hitting the target. “The shotgun shells—their spray—would be better for someone inexperienced, better than a single bullet.” But to her the pistol seemed a more private purchase. “The shotgun,” she told him, “seems too glamorous,” which made the man with the reptilian skin grin at her. She was more than happy to take the slip of paper he offered with the addresses of firearm ranges where she could practice once her application had cleared, which she had convinced herself it would.
After she completed it, the shop’s photographer—a strong, pretty, young woman—positioned Celie in front of a screen to take her picture. When both the man and the photographer questioned her as to exactly why she wanted a gun—Had there been some trouble where she lived? Was someone bothering her?—she quickly answered, “For protection. I live alone.” She had practiced these words in front of her medicine cabinet mirror for days. But still, when she had to say them for real, her voice cracked, which embarrassed her, and she blushed. The effect this had on the man and the young woman was to focus even more on helping her. They would remember her seriousness, her politeness, her vulnerability.
Celie, however, did not notice this, so intense she had become on learning more and more about guns, for with this knowledge came the growing, exciting reality that the plan to kill Herr M was truly in motion. She could do this. She had thought of sending letters to the university about him, telling the administration about the terrible things he had done, and one to his live-in girlfriend, a woman who had escaped from Castro’s Cuba as a small child and was now teaching at the university. She had more degrees than any three people and kept winning awards with large sums of money attached for her writings on nonviolence—an irony not lost on Celie. But in the end the letter idea did not seem powerful enough. It did not settle her, could not clip off even a corner of her upset.
Now that she had figured out what she really needed to do, she felt she was on a religious mission—her own crusade—her Christian purpose, as she began to call it to herself, although she still considered herself a Jew. Through the years religion had become a mixed-up thing to her, like so many of her thoughts, just a jumble of ideas.
But with this purpose there came a sacredness. To kill an evil man seemed a good thing and certainly equal to what any Slaughter had accomplished. Suddenly, to Celie, being the most beautiful, the most talented, the most popular, the smartest, the richest, all the mosts she had grown up with, seemed so small and superficial against her own assignment.
She was no longer just doing this because of what Herr M had done to Cecilia, but also because of what he had done to her—Celie—which she knew was odd. Herr M was rapidly becoming a symbol for everyone who had hurt her—a trigger for her escalating emotions caused by all the people who had pushed at her for more and then for more again and added to this, all the people who had pushed at her mother, Aunt Esther.
While being positioned for the photograph—her mission becoming so real—she remembered a poem Cecilia had written especially for her when she was almost ten and Cecilia twelve and she smiled, which she really would rather not have done in a photograph for such a purchase.
She and Cecilia had never wanted to go to the family-mandated Friday night services at their new, fancy suburban temple, so they tried to figure out different ways—alternative ways—they might please God. One Friday night at the Shabbat service, Cecilia handed Celie a folded piece of paper during the silent prayer. Celie read it and burst into uncontrollable laughter. Both she and Cecilia were quickly ushered out of the sanctuary and later paid heavily with solemn and harsh lectures from their parents, both rabbis (junior and senior), and the cantor and as punishment made to go to even more Shabbat services—the summer ones, from which until this time they had been exempt.
As Celie stood there staring back at the small camera she said, quite inadvertently, out loud, “If I Set up the Chairs.” The young woman photographer said, “What?” To which Celie replied, startled by how the words had just fallen out of her mouth, “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of something—something I have to do.” She then took a deep breath, her face gleaming, and silently repeated the poem to the lens of the camera, as if it were the eye of God.
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 this stuff
will it satisfy You?
For Celie, repeating Cecilia’s lines, which had been handed to her in the temple so many years ago, to the camera, it seemed as if the eye of God truly had winked at her, although it was just the shutter on the lens. Of course she knew this, but she also believed it was more too. Cecilia had taught her about metaphor—how one kind of object or idea could be used in place of another to suggest a likeness between them. Plus, Cecily was always talking about subtext—the importance of it in the plays she wrote. How under the dialogue were all the unspoken motives and beliefs of the characters—the truth as to what was really intended.
Consequently, for Celie standing there having herself photographed for the gun application became a much larger thing and she calmed more than she ever had with any of the medications given to her by any doctor. When the strong, young woman told her she was finished and everything would now be processed, Celie bowed her head as she had done many times in temple as a child, when the rabbi removed the Torah from the ark, and the law of God, with all its commandments, was about to be read. For the first time she felt aglow and anchored and religious.
When Celie arrives beneath the ground she will have to learn how to slowly rid herself of her angers by listening to the music here, especially the clear, pure bells. Eventually I will take her to visit Lao Tzu and she will come to understand his words:
Weapons are the tools of violence and all decent men detest them.
She will come to appreciate this because Celie is a good person and always will be, no matter what she thinks or does.
However, when Celine arrives, she will likely stay locked in her above-the-ground mind-set and not be interested in what is possible to learn from our unending journey. She will probably gravitate to the large circle of narcissists who pock the underground and stay forever fascinated with themselves—fastened to their vanities—never to spiral up and out of the mirror of their own stories.
Celine’s preoccupation with herself definitely peaked that day in the gun shop, where she continued busying herself staring at all the different knives in the large display case by the entrance to the shop—their various elongated, curved shapes. She thought of all the men she had known and the various elongated, curved shapes of their private parts. How Lew had once traced the curves of her body with the sharp edge of a small steak knife—over her fully plucked, shaved, waxed, naked skin—and how much it had aroused her. When he had called the next day to ask her if she were “still marked,” this had stimulated her even more as she took off her robe, carried the phone to her mirror, described to him what she saw, and touched herself with great excitement.
She also stared at the handcuffs, with which she was quite familiar. Lew liked to use them on her. This excited her too. She thought about how they would giggle over buying more “equipment.” It made them feel devilish, like their particular affair was more special than anyone’s—ever.
She looked at the various kinds of ropes in another case and remembered how Morris kept asking if he could “watch”—watch her with another woman—and how she finally gave in to his request—a birthday present to him, of sorts. That day Morris arrived with some rope and he bound her wrists so she was helpless. Then the woman did all kinds of things to her. The only thing Morris told Celine to do was to suck the woman’s breasts. She thought it best not to admit to Morris how much she had enjoyed it, how much it had aroused her. Afterward, however, she worried a lot about what her father, Emmanuel, would have thought of her participation in this, given his issues with such behavior. Then, she pushed this idea out of her head because of the fact that he was dead.
She is fairly quiet about such goings-on that Morris continues to increasingly insist upon and especially about how much she looks forward to each excursion, just pretends she is doing him an enormous favor for which he greatly rewards her with another eighteen-carat object.
With all these items surrounding her, Celine smiled as she wondered whether any of her cousins were capable of such adventures and concluded they were not, no matter how violent and strange the language sometimes was in Cecilia’s poems or how reckless—in a mannered way—Cecily tried to make herself look. And, of course, thinking about Celie in any area of experimentation was hopeless.
“Poor, frightened, nervous Celie,” she thought as she looked over at her cousin. But as she stared at her, Celine was stunned. For the first time she could remember, Celie looked rather lovely and calm—almost euphoric. It made Celine even happier that she had so willingly agreed to go on this adventure. That among these weapons and items for bondage, both of them had found some pleasure. And being Celine, she saw no problem in any of this.