Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction

J
esi is lying in a coffin and I haven’t the faintest clue why. “Move on, Mama,” Bess whispers, rustling a stack of papers. Why papers? “You’re holding up the line.” Very well. My daughter sees it and she doesn’t seem to question it. My granddaughter, Katy, is beside her and she doesn’t seem to question it. But my great-granddaughter is lying in a coffin and I haven’t the faintest clue why.

At least they’re crying, so they haven’t totally lost their senses. But accepting it is beyond my comprehension. I want to scream,
Someone, somewhere has made a terrible mistake
, but honestly, having the next two generations watching my every move, anything I say is taken the wrong way so I’ll simply clam up and write this down. I clinch my teeth and cling to my handbag with all ten fingers as if its calf leather is Jesi’s arm. I see Bess’ arms extend into the coffin and lay the stack of hand-written pages to the side. I point a trembling finger to question this but my shoulders are firmly pushed and I step forward.

I take one step and then another, forcing my body to turn away from this horrid lure as I might from an automobile accident, its image staying in front of me like a photograph. I turn to see all these faces watching me and I detest having eyes on me, always have. I look down and not a moment too soon, my shuffling takes me out of that stifling room.

My question still hangs there, ready to submit to Bess. Finally I can be still no more. “Are we heading back to the dining room table?” I ask. I should know better than to speak my thoughts. Bess annoys me again by whispering to Katy - about me again I’d wager. Something about an embarrassing old-timer’s disease.

Yes, I’m old. And forgetful. I’ll grant them that. I may not know why we’re here but I remember where we were. Last I recall, the four of us were sitting around the dining room table writing, and I know we haven’t reached the end of our story. I want to go back. But then, what else is new?

And I have another question: Is this how Jesi ends her chapter of our story? She wasn’t very cooperative in writing. Perhaps she wants to show us instead. She’s played tricks before. Why one time not long ago I remember her face painted white, her long hair painted black and blending right in with the wisp of a black dress, its fluttering layers cut like the outline of a spider’s web. Her teeth had looked dingy in comparison to the white around it as she grinned at my hand at my throat in alarm. Did someone die and she was in morbid mourning, I had asked her? “Relax, G-G,” she had said, calling me by my nickname, short for Great-Grandmother. “It’s Halloween.”

What a ghastly holiday, I’ve always thought. What in the world is there to celebrate in being frightened to death?

Could today be Halloween, too?

My mind connects one question to the next until it becomes one long train rumbling so loud, I can’t hear anything else.

Suddenly I find myself outside this monstrosity of a church on the top step. Below me is a sea of black pavement bobbing with black hats and coats and black shiny roofs. I fear I’ll drown in all this black. I stop and won’t budge, like an old mule.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“For God’s sake, to the graveyard, Mama,” Bess says, but I don’t like her tone. She seems exasperated every time I open my mouth. Mercy. I declare I’ll seal my lips and dry my ink well if this keeps up, and then she’ll never get the ending to my story.

White faces surface in front of my eyes and then submerge, always with the same grim expression and glass bottom eyes. “She was so brave … what a tragedy, the papers say … murder really …”

Black … white.

“The world is not black and white,” Jesi has shouted to me, to her mother, Katy, and even to her grandmother, Bess. “If it were,
I wouldn’t have so many bitchy mamas and I’d have a daddy-o.” Well, I wish she was here to see all these ghastly black costumes and white faces bobbing around me; she’d see she was wrong all over again.

But then she does make one point; these “mamas” are getting on my nerves, too. One on each side of me, hands clamped to my elbows, they force me down, one step at a time, leaving my great granddaughter behind. Elbows as bony as wings on a fat-breasted bird, nonetheless I wish to flap and fly away. Well, isn’t that a fitting ending; I’ve been that way my whole life.

I hold my breath and go down for the count.

N
ot a man to our name. In spite of that, or because of that, our four generations of daughters shall meet here each night to write “our year of awakening”. All of us with heads bent, writing diligently, as if our lives depended on it. I suppose it does, with so many sacrifices notched into the lines on our faces like a soldier keeps score of enemy kills. All in defense, of course – I believe we women only act in defense, believing all are good, until offended.

I wish I could capture this dining room circle on a photograph; me in sepia tones I fear, faded with age with my Gibson-girl bun and high lace collar, my series of diaries ready to tweak a recessed memory. In contrast sits my daughter beside me, sixty-four-year old Bess in her no-nonsense starched white blouse and black skirt, as straight and narrow as the Prohibition Days she endured, stacked at her ready are clippings and diaries. Her vivacious daughter, Katy, sits across from me captured in 1940s Technicolor with a cut-short bold red hairdo (where do you suppose she finds this color of dye?), looking older these days than her forty-one years, and a mysteriously pockmarked leather journal by her diaries. Then there’s our rebel Jesi, Katy’s daughter, my great granddaughter, at age nineteen sitting on my right with one sheet of paper in front of her, yet no diary at all. Long hair not pinned up, hanging loose as a noose, all in a quick flash of Polaroid with the colors stirred up in a tie-dyed T-shirt. She rebels against our old-fashioned ways of woes in womanhood. We must look so dull to her in today’s times.

The harsh fluorescent light of nowadays where so much is exposed; no longer the old ways where lives were softened and
shadowed in some secret of mystery and romance in that day’s flickering light of candle and gas lamps. We’re always in daylight these days it seems, tiring my faded blue, eighty-two year old eyes.

Eighty-two years. I’ve outlived my husband and lost four children to war and disease. Only we women remain. This saddens me too, and yet, how do I explain to you in my simple uneducated way that if I had a choice (which thank God we never do) and could see into the future (which thank God we never can) I would choose this same table of company to churn old memories into a solid journal. For only these ladies, my legacy, can branch out from me, understand me completely, can continue my story, painful as it may be. It is for this reason that we gather, each to tell our own personal year of awakening and link to the other, like an intricate braid or necklace; or better yet, a perennial ivy that links and binds, to bud and grow, its stem to curl and link past to future, its glossy leaves living only in the present to have its moment of beauty and then fall away leaving its roots of strength to pass on to the next in line.

As if reading my mind, Bess leans over to me now and says, “Remember, Mama, tell all, exactly as you remember it. And, yes,” she adds to my raised eyebrows, “I shall do the same.”

“Well, mercy, Bess, you can’t start dictating—”

“We all will, won’t we?” she says to the other two, bless her heart, always needing to orchestrate. She narrows her eyes and stares at them intently, waiting for agreement, the only acceptable answer.

Katy laughs easily at her mother and nods with a puff of smoke, saying “Be careful what you wish for!”

Jesi has stopped writing, her arms folded like a mutineer, her leg’s metal brace clanging rhythmically against her chair leg. “Hey, man, you’re not tricking me,” she says to scattered papers. “You’re just doing this to try to get the scoop on my scene. You’re all too prim and proper to have anything juicy to say.”

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