I
Without intoxication or insanity
I put on the rubber glove,
ideal for one time use—
lightweight, tough, disposable, cheap.
It fits either hand—
right or left, good or bad—how easily
it becomes my second skin.
I write with it on—how well
it holds my pen. No one
can read my covered palm—
the past, present, future of
who I am, unknown.
My voice cannot be traced
to the outdoor phone
nor my prints found on the dime-
store paper. My fingers sweat
against the balloony latex.
I’m tempted to take it off,
blow it up—burst open
the situation
that keeps me so hidden.
II
The worm has a simple brain—
just a pair of ganglia,
is large and complex.
I did not remember this.
The pink jellylike ball
inside my skull lost
a considerable amount of blood
when you constricted my body,
hissed into me
causing irreparable damage—
although the EEG and the MRI
could not produce the image
of why I wanted to die.
Demented is what I keep
calling myself, forever
confusing your rage for desire
for me, for Eve, alive
in the garden with all that overripe
passion—the rotten spots
in the vegetation now so visible
with my glasses on—I see
the snake always waiting
for some soft and starving woman.
III
This autumn the leaf-like
bundles of nerve
cells in my cerebellum
brittle and I have
lost my balance. Purposely,
Knowingly, Negligently,
Recklessly, I write
you this poem, send copies
The hard thick bones
of my head that protected
me from the blows
of this world have thinned.
I know evil in advance
and this time do not plead
ignorance. I claim no
extra chromosome or excess
of dopamine or serotonin.
I intend
for something bad to happen.
A YEAR BEFORE Uncle Emmanuel’s colon cancer killed him, he joined an all-female aerobics class. Since he did not have the energy to make his yearly trip to Las Vegas, it was his final effort to watch breasts bob up and down and beyond this to give quick, too-tight hugs to women, who at first found him innocent enough. In the beginning, the women were delighted to have such a lively old man in the class, working so hard to stay fit. They thought him cute and sweet. However, after a few weeks passed, each felt a growing discomfort at the way he fixated on their bodies. How he used the inner parts of his flabby arms to press into the sides of their chests. How his hands would casually touch their exposed flesh—a shoulder or an upper arm, while in over-animated conversations with them—and how he would then wipe their sweat ever-so-nonchalantly around the rim of his lips. Rather quickly they all noticed this. But the day they secretly agreed to gather to talk about his behavior with their instructor after class—about not wanting this stout, elfin man with his thick grin in their class anymore—he collapsed during a “spread your legs, arms above your head, clap, flex, jump—ten times,” exercise and was carried away in an ambulance, never to return.
From then on Manny Slaughter was relegated to a bed where he lay flattened both physically and spiritually, while the morphine drip seeped into him. As he grew thin, then thinner, becoming a sliver of his lusty, round self, his bodily functions forever messier, no narcotic was able to fully alleviate his pain. Consequently, he swore and screamed his way into death, so ultimately all that remained of him for those who had dedicatedly surrounded his bed were the piercing echoes of those last, vile words they heard from his increasingly large mouth, which seemed to overtake his otherwise shrinking face, and the awful names he repetitively called each of them, as if everything that was happening to him was their fault. He clearly wanted to encapsulate them with such language and to take them with him into his hell.
When my mother found out her brother had joined such a class, she laughed and laughed. “How cute he is. Always the imp,” she would say to her other brothers and Samuel and Benjamin would agree, secretly wishing they had his chutzpah at the late dates in their own dull lives. They were mesmerized by the possibilities of the class and could not control their own fantasies of all those women—“all ten of them”—in their skimpy, bright spandex, stretching, bending, prancing, perhaps even galloping to rhythmic music. “The thought of it!”—they would whisper to Abraham, who remained the quietest on the subject. For beyond the others Abraham understood the possible implications of Manny’s behavior, how it would not take the women long to catch on to his brother’s perversities, and the possibility that they would file complaints against him. He thought about how it was becoming a different world, where women stood up for themselves, would not allow certain lines to be crossed and had many more outside safeguards. And then he could not help but think of his own daughter and the pain his brother had caused her.
When Manny Slaughter arrived here and realized what was possible, the first thing he did was to try to find the path to all of history’s great whores. He searched his small mind, then he asked directions to where he could find Anne Boleyn and her sister—“what’s her name,” as he put it. Even with his limited knowledge, one of his great idols was Henry VIII for all his voracious appetites. For a while he even sought out Anna Karenina—not realizing she was not a real person. With this, I found him far more humorous than I ever did in life—and more stupid. He had remembered Garbo playing her and pictured himself as Vronsky at the time. “Love ’em and leave ’em,” he would grunt to his brothers as if he were the biggest shot of the four—which, in this area, he was. Of course, he had no interest in finding Garbo herself or any other woman rumored in life to have had even a hint of lesbian inclinations. Even in death Uncle Emmanuel is obsessed with homoerotic gossip.
Finally, when he found Tolstoy and bothered him as to where Anna might be, Tolstoy was so startled by this awful little man’s intrusion on his peace and his bizarre question, that he shrieked at him about both his and Anna’s immorality. He then called Manny “the biggest moron in all of history” for thinking she was more than just a mere character in a book and growled that he was “almost certainly too hopeless for any kind of Christian redemption,” which bewildered Manny’s mind even more than the morphine drip. He wanted to shout back at Tolstoy that the Star of David was on his casket, but he did not, feeling for the first time that he was up against an overwhelming force of a man whom he could never come close to managing or manipulating. So he fled.
Cecily never forgot how Uncle Emmanuel would press his chest into hers and cup his hands, seemingly by accident, around the sides of her disproportionately large breasts. After it happened more than once, she realized that this was no misstep—it was all a measured act of feigned innocence, and she viewed it as an evil, too-obvious trick. Consequently, she would distance herself from him at family gatherings by going to the farthest point in the room from where he stood. However, he always sought her out with open arms—and hands.
She envied the flat-chested models in the high fashion magazines, who did not even need a bra, let alone one that was a 38DD. She resented how when her breasts began to grow, almost uncontrollably, at the late age of seventeen, the phone suddenly began to ring all of the time with boys calling, forever calling, wanting to know if she were “free,” in both meanings of the word. But Cecily had already pulled into herself and built a thick, crustacean shell made out of a wrath way before Uncle Emmanuel’s hand stratagem. What he had done to her earlier was far worse.
The fight between Cecily’s father and his brother when she was thirteen started because Abraham worried that Manny had been making arrangements with shady characters to get the lowest prices for the carpets they sold at their store and what was being delivered was stolen merchandise. When he nervously and carefully told Manny of his concern, it inflamed the latter to the point of calling Abraham all kinds of names, including schmuck, schlemiel, and shlub, ultimately landing on the cruelest thing he could think of doing to get back at Abraham, which was to target the thirteen-year-old Cecily with a name that twisted her mind into a Gordian knot. Her disorientation from this was something from which she would never get loose.
Of course, Manny never said the word directly to Abraham. He was far more clever and told of his worry about Cecily—“her possible inclinations”—to the mothers of his daughter Celine’s friends, who were Cecily’s friends, too.
Initially, Cecily noticed that none of her friends were returning her calls and were quick to walk away from her at school. When she told her mother of this and of her confusion as to why this was happening, Aunt Lillian had no choice but to tell her about the calls she had received from concerned mothers in the neighborhood, and then mother and daughter just stood there shaking in their too-bright yellow, 1960s kitchen inside their mid-sized, tract row house—a place where sameness and conventionality were revered and not to be disturbed. However, Aunt Lillian carried a rage from what Manny had done to her daughter straight into the grave. She idealized the lives of her sisters-in-law’s daughters and silently hated them—especially Cecilia for her gifts of beauty and talent, thereby making it impossible that this would not seep into Cecily. So it was better than good for Aunt Lillian when Cecily began plotting something to get back at Cecilia. Underneath the ground, inside the underbelly of herself, Aunt Lillian has stayed stuck.
When Cecily first heard the word and learned of the concept of same sex relationships, she was just getting used to the regular facts of life, which ironically she had learned from Celine way before Aunt Lillian had gotten up the courage to explain such things. Uncle Abraham in his reserve, temerity, and exhaustion wanted no part in this, nor was he capable of outwardly dealing with what his brother had set in motion concerning his daughter. The terror within himself that he brought back from the war was too deeply imbedded in both his mind and body, making it impossible for him to directly challenge another person.
Cecily’s own fantasies had been of the popular, athletic boys who never spoke to her in those seemingly unending years of her body’s flat fallowness. Interestingly, at least to Cecily, when she began to rapidly bloom, almost uncontrollably during an especially hot summer in the season of her seventeenth year, the boys did not seem to care at all about the rumors. In fact, with “that body” it only made her more attractive in mysteriously wild ways, which most boys at the time could only imagine. Only a few had seen pictures of such encounters in the magazines that their fathers thought they had carefully hidden. Cecily, however, by then had emotionally shut down, so all the attention she began to receive from boys—no matter how popular—had come to mean little to her. Her silent disorientation from the words Uncle Emmanuel had carefully planted grew into a brittle fury—an anger carefully and slowly turned outward in canny, clandestine ways which would continue to thicken and harden throughout her years. Ironically, it would be she who would come to most resemble Manny Slaughter in her ability to wound others.
When Cecily heard the most recent talk, which confirmed that Cecilia was in fact raped and how others were raging over it, she could not stop thinking about how to best use this. Cecilia herself was talking more and more about it, but only to very specific people, one of them being Michael, who Cecily learned had come back to live with Cecilia—to protect her—and was planning some kind of revenge against Herr M. Cecily hates the way Michael is always there for Cecilia, even in divorce—how no one ever really abandons Cecilia.
She thinks about how no one protects her. Even at thirteen, how no one rescued her from the gossip, from the only path at the time she knew to take—that self-imposed isolation which felt like it was coming more from the outside in, which in truth it was. No one set the record straight, no one grabbed Manny Slaughter by the throat and tried to choke him, or had even the impulse to cut off his viperous tongue—not her hesitant mother, not her frightened father. Cecily thinks about this a lot. And now with Michael coming to Cecilia’s rescue and planning God-knows-what for Cecilia’s honor and her sanity, Cecily finds herself almost out of control with fantasies as to how to hurt Cecilia.
In her barren apartment, where the only sign of some life is a tall, half-sick ficus tree next to an extra-long couch that has never come close to being filled with visitors, she sits and ruminates about calling Herr M (whose real name, as everyone knows by now, is Ivan Durmand)—all the time hating Cecilia’s nickname for him and yet also becoming too attached to it, which she finds annoying within herself. She looks him up in the phone book both at the university and at his home and when she discovers it twice under “I. Durmand” it makes her both smile and feel a little fearful. “I. Durmand, I. Durmand, such an easy pun,” she says out loud as a quick, adrenaline rush branches inside her body.
She wonders if he would agree to meet with her and thinks perhaps he might, if he believes she has information that would be of benefit to him. She even fantasizes about him becoming attracted to her with the same uncontrollable lust it is rumored he had—perhaps still has—for Cecilia.
Everything Cecilia has or had, Cecily wants and wants more of—as if she is smart enough to pick out the good from the bad, distinguish it and handle it. Her hubris and her envy are that great even though having it all over-stimulates her. She feels as though she might explode either way—if she gets nothing or gets too much.
In her play Cecily clearly sides much more with the “critic” than the “poet,” as if the poet deserved whatever happened to her that wintry night. The stage directions are to make the lights go “ice white” with a long pause of cold silence, like something one would find in a Russian novel. She thinks of Boris Pasternak. She really likes this effect, is quite proud of it. The only sound and image on the dimly lit stage at this moment would be that of the wind forcing a branch to scratch at the critic’s window—made to look like a witch’s claw also trying to grab at the poet. However, she is not quite sure what she has written will be a good enough defense of the critic, for it is hard to defend a man against even a highly manipulative woman, if something intensely brutal happens.
She is also worried Herr M will not agree to meet with her now that he is living with a woman with a pristine reputation. The gossip is that this makes him feel reborn and unsoiled—cleansed—although his legacy of damage to women is long, and to think of himself in this way would make anyone with any knowledge of him wince, or at least smirk. Cecily knows this.
At night alone in her bed she fantasizes about killing Herr M, then having the police arrive only to find Cecilia standing over him with a gun in her hand. She dreams of this a lot, but upon waking, she can never figure out how, in reality, she would be able to pull this off and this causes her great frustration. Yet of all my cousins—actually, all the people I know who still walk on the earth’s fractured shell—it is Cecily who is the most capable of such an act.
Cecily also imagines variations of how this might happen. In one, it is Michael who kills Herr M and Cecilia completely breaks apart upon hearing what he has done for her. Cecily then writes a book—creative nonfiction—about Cecilia and beyond this, about the entire Slaughter family and she becomes even more famous than she could have been as a playwright, because creative nonfiction is becoming the hot new thing. She sees herself composed and well-dressed and on television.
Cecily will never come to understand Lao Tzu’s words:
There is no greater sin than desire,
No greater curse than discontent,
No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself,
Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will have enough.
I know when Cecilia recently searched out his sayings to calm her shaky self down and found
Too much success is not an advantage,
Do not tinkle like jade
Or clatter like chimes
she sighed and nodded. She feels she is living proof that a fairly high profile in the low world where much of American poetry resides, is definitely not worth it.
Now, in most of Cecily’s waking hours, she plots out ways to accomplish Herr M’s death, forever focusing on how to trace it back to Cecilia. She remembers her father’s gun—the one another World War II private picked up in the chaos from the boiled mud ground where her father was dragged away. How the man secretly brought it to her mother along with Abraham’s dog tags and Lillian made a shrine of them and prayed there on her knees to bring her Abraham back. The rabbis at the temple, of course, knew none of this, a mezuzah on the door being the only acceptable amulet deserving such reverence.
Cecily only learned about the gun’s existence and the shrine her mother made, after her father died and Aunt Lillian brought a box down from a high shelf in the closet and wept over it. Abraham had survived the gruesome battle of Tarawa in the Pacific. All the adults in the family knew of this and had talked in an agitated and excited fashion about it to anyone who would listen. But when they learned he had ended up on one of the Japanese “hell ships,” as they were called, which were attacked by the Americans because no Red Cross flag was flown, they were speechless. “Friendly fire” was the term the Slaughters were told and they grew sick and silent on the subject to outsiders at my parents’ instructions.
When Abraham was finally rescued—one of the few—and returned home mute on everything he had been through, the only grief Aunt Lillian ever heard from him was years later when he would lock himself in the bathroom and weep the chant, “My own brother, my very own brother, attacking my only child with friendly fire. Friendly fire.” Aunt Lillian would listen to this over and over, getting as close as she quietly could to Abraham’s locked door, her arms folded, rocking herself back and forth, silently repeating her husband’s words.
The effect of what Manny had done reignited Abraham’s fragile, fevered self and this event gnawed at him for the rest of his years, and although he was the youngest, he became the second child of Idyth and Cecil to pass away. Manny preceded him by two years—a very small justice. Though for Abraham—unlike Manny—he was more ready for his journey to this place and found the passage far less painful, even a relief, for it proved to be a permanent escape from Manny. Here, he has successfully cleansed his mind of this brother.
A “prisoner of war” were the words Cecily overheard, as she got older. “And yes, it took all of us to paste him back together,” the adults would tell their friends with more than a touch of arrogance—my parents being the worst offenders. Although at the time Cecily did not know everything, she found what they said condescending. “Why didn’t they see him as brave?” she would think. “A man who tried—forever tried—to keep going. A man who, given all he’d been through, still had enough faith in people and their goodwill to have a child, no matter how vicious the world.”
By the time Cecily learned of her father being on a hell ship, he had died. Unfortunately, when Cecilia, after Uncle Abraham’s death, also found this out, she, too, made the comparison between friendly fire from his country to that of his own brother’s known awful behavior toward him, saying to Cecily, “The pain of this has to be excruciating.” Even though she said this with great mournfulness, all it did to Cecily was to increase her furor toward Cecilia. If I had not been dead, it would have been the first, and the only, time I would have covered Cecilia’s mouth with my hand to stop her words.
Now, while Cecily waits to hear from the theaters about her play, this storm toward Cecilia builds, always with the nagging feeling that it shows—which could make her even more unappealing a person to take on—and, alone on her couch, she worries out loud, while waiting for the phone to ring, “Perhaps they have just forgotten about me, or they know—know that the play is about Cecilia and no one wants to hurt Cecilia—Cecilia with her large eyes, pale skin, and long, thick hair. Snow White Cecilia, whom no one would hurt and get away with it. Except Herr M.” And for Cecily this is only a gift for it raises all kinds of possibilities both in her creative life and in the reality she has been forced to live in since that day so many years ago when Uncle Emmanuel raped her—however metaphorically—at thirteen and she did not know what to do or to whom to run. Unlike now, where her imaginings of the possibilities of what to do and where to go are becoming endless and almost unmanageable.
When even Deidre, after their lunch, is unresponsive to her calls, her rage and loneliness overwhelm her. She calls her (she vows) one last time. Finally, Deidre decides to pick up the phone when she sees Cecily’s number and listens, listens carefully to Cecily’s latest plan.