Authors: Cynthia Tottleben
“You know what? I’ll face up to the fact that I’m tired of you and all your negativity. Why don’t you go lay on HER bed for a while?” I stood up and tried not to gasp for breath as I pushed Tippy out the door with my feet.
I shut the door myself, from the inside. Listened as her nails clacked on the wood going down the hallway. Lay against the door, exhausted.
I was asleep before I fell across my unmade bed.
When I woke the room was pitch black and fear sped through my veins, directly into my heart. I could feel it throb from toe to temple, a drum cadence to the only word my mind was screaming.
Locked! Locked! Locked! Locked!
My legs were noodles, my arms concrete. If Tippy had been with me I would have forced myself to stand so as not to disappoint her. But alone I was nothing. Alone the darkness consumed me, revealed the truth of Tippy’s words.
Hours later I finally stood. Conquered my terror. Walked to the door.
It opened, with ease.
My friend was waiting for me on the other side.
We tiptoed down to Brandy’s room and curled up in her bed.
“I’m sorry,” Tippy said as she put her head under my chin, her back to my neck. “I forget how young you are sometimes.”
“I missed you. Don’t ever leave me.” I kissed the top of her head and we both relaxed enough to fall back to sleep.
Joan
1836.
Arkansas became a state. The Battle of the Alamo cemented itself in American lore. Samuel Colt developed the revolver.
And your cousin, at least eight times removed, devastated her Mexican village by poisoning the water supply.
Maria wasn’t yet seventeen, was pregnant with her first child and married to a man her father had arranged for her to serve. As a girl, Maria had been well behaved. Her mother and sisters cherished her laughter, the dark features that made her a local beauty. Within a year of marriage, Maria grew harsh looking, the beatings she endured causing her face such visible damage that the same people who had once been so drawn to her now looked away each time she neared.
But of course she didn’t complain. Maria was raised well. She simply survived.
Her husband, Eduardo, had accused Maria of cheating. Again. His repeated kicks to her belly sent Maria into an early labor, during which she lost her baby. This resulted in more violence. The rumor mill went into over drive after Eduardo dragged his wife through the main artery of their village, his filthy fingers like a vise around her hair, pulling her whether she was standing or not. He only took breaks to put his fist in her face. On one occasion it was said that he displayed her to the men in the tavern, let them take turns humiliating her as men are wont to do.
Aunt Evelyn took the time to report on the current atmosphere of this section of Mexico. Apparently the wind itself had set the hairs on Evelyn’s arms on end. She could feel Maria hovering in the area; she could also detect that not much had changed in the hearts of the local men. Watching the women, she understood that they still suffered in their marriages, their eyes silent yet pleading for her to leave. No one appreciated her questions, the interpreter she had hired, the suitcase bringing her modern effects into their isolated home.
The photos depicted a land of scrub and sand, a dryness that extended to the people’s hearts. The odd individual nodded in her direction. Most information was gathered by Evelyn’s hired man, an elder who lived close enough that he was treated as a tolerated visitor and drunkenly shared stories with the men in town as they put back tequila and whiskey late into the night.
Maria was still regarded will ill repute, her name a curse among her people. The villagers despised her and those who held but a vague memory of her in their veins. Women, in their world, did not kill. They capitulated. Women surrendered their will, their passion, their very souls to the more brutal sex.
But not Maria. Since her act of unprecedented carnage, no female in her village was allowed to share her name. She was an outcast even among the women.
Men, much like her husband and father, felt she had wronged her husband when the baby died. They chortled as they discussed her punishments, first at the bar and later when Maria was locked in the outhouse and offered to anyone who used it.
When her confinement in the fly-infested shack had ended, Maria was no longer sane. Her mother came to help her bathe and prepare the house to please her husband. She encouraged her to conceive again, but Maria was unresponsive. Almost comatose. Except for the hatred in her eyes.
Later her mother would recall the tales passed through her family but would deny knowing that Maria was the marked woman. Until the husband told survivors that as he butchered his once beautiful wife, her eyes changed, became possessed.
“One turned black,” one man explained. “He told her to make it stop and when she wouldn’t, took a rock to her face. The witch never stopped staring at him with that vile eye. After she died, he spit on her, told his friends that he wouldn’t have treated a dog so badly.”
As for Maria, she knew her demise was imminent. She was prepared. The woman knew exactly how to avenge her own death and cause many more.
“Mother dreamt of dark water. She wouldn’t even tell us what had frightened her so much, she woke up screaming and spent the entire morning in church, wailing. When she came home she forbade us from drinking anything the animals wouldn’t touch. Several of our goats died, because we stole all their water.” Her sister later admitted. She was among the few who lived once the contaminant was in place. Maria’s family and the men in the bar who had ravaged her. They neither used the local water to bathe nor drank it, preferring their liquor to quench a thirst that never ended.
The sister alone knew what Maria threw in the town’s water supply, passing the information to her daughters one night when she had imbibed too much of the booze her husband bottled and sold to the old men in town. The toxin was fitting. A festering, rotten chunk of flesh that upon birth had resembled her own mother, right down to the spot in her eye that had infuriated Eduardo. Maria chucked her stillborn daughter into the water and let nature take its course, the bacteria building as the baby’s body decayed, the well a source of death for the wives and children of the men who had touched her.
Aunt Evelyn made many notations on her report, including a three-page journal entry describing the women still living in the village. Forlorn, she called them. Their faces disfigured by scars and poorly healed bones. She understood that the only medical help any received came from the other women in town or their families, if they were even allowed to speak to them. A collection of battered women, who had witnessed their own mothers endure punishment after punishment at the hands of their husbands and sons, saw this life as their destiny, their silent acceptance keeping the abuse alive generation after generation.
Evelyn couldn’t wait to escape the village. She had never married and was fiercely independent, unlike the women she encountered in Mexico. Their passivity almost incapacitated her. My aunt, the powerhouse of all women in our family, left her documentary trip and hid for three months in Europe, “redirecting her energy,” as she wrote. She did not seek refuge in the arms of a lover, the cold stone walls of a cathedral, or even the vast libraries that she spent weeks exploring. Evelyn sought the earth, sitting for days on end watching waves repeat their steady trip to land, or hunkering down in the forests, her skin coated in mud to ward off infestations of mosquitoes. I loved reading her passages on wind and rain, how she equated thunderstorms to county fairs and preferred a downpour to sunshine any day of the week.
Evelyn had to heal. She held it all for us: our family’s history, the explosive guilt and fascination that propelled her every day to solve the enigma of our women. She alone could stand up in front of God and defend our ancestors or help Him point the finger and send us all to the burning fires below. I could feel her heartbeat just by reading her words, recognize it in my own chest, the muscle matching the rhythms of the water, my body’s energy ebbing and tiding with each gust of wind as it flowed over my skin while her papers sat still on my lap below.
In my adulthood, Evelyn had crawled back out of her grave, just to distract me. She crept from the photo I kept on my bedside table, rummaged through my dreams. For years she had just passed time, watching, sitting in the background of whatever scenario my REM sleep created. Occasionally pointing me in a direction I didn’t even know existed.
But now I could sense Evelyn sitting beside me, her arms alive as she gestured and clapped and made little movie shows with her hands while relating her stories. Inevitably she turned to me, glared. Demanded to know when I was going to get off my ass and get my work done. Rambled on and on about how she had easily predicted that I would give birth to the final one, the destined child, and how I would never be able to take care of things myself.
I showed her pictures of my dead husband.
Raised my shirt and displayed my left breast, the scar a pale tattoo that forever reminded me of my past. Showed my Aunt how I had once been brave, but that I had given all my courage away in one fell swoop. That horrible night.
“Hmmph. Get over it. How many years are you going to milk that wound?” She waved her hand.
Her written words kept me rooted, gave me purpose. Aunt Evelyn’s spoken words just plain hurt.
I shut the journal, put her to bed. Didn’t bother answering her question as she disappeared beside me. Yes, I struggled with my chore. But at least I was brave enough to live. Evelyn had chased the past, escaping the future; even my dead mother had seen through her bravado and understood that by not marrying, and presumably dying a virgin, she never had the opportunity to spit out an ugly female child of her own that she would hold and love and then a few years later have to kill.
Better not to love them in the first place.
Lucy
I was barely off oatmeal and bouillon when Mom woke me one morning, told me to take my shower and put my hair up in a bun before coming downstairs.
Tippy and I exchanged worried looks, but neither of us had a clue what she wanted. I hurried to avoid any accusations of dawdling, which would instantly send Mom into a rage that I didn’t want to witness. My shower was momentary, my hair dried in three minutes flat. My bun was efficient and secured with two elastic bands, not a hair stylist’s idea of beauty but quick and easy and mother-pleasing.
My legs had gotten steadier, but my hips hated the stairs, and I struggled with my balance while descending.
“Showered and bunned.”
“Good. Have a seat.” She pointed at the kitchen chair centered in the room.
“And take your sweater off. You won’t be needing it.”
I gave Tippy a sideways glance, for I had lost so much weight that I had stopped wearing a bra. Neither of us knew how Mom would react to my lack of undergarments.
But I did as told. I stripped off my heavy wool sweater, oozed into the wooden chair, wincing at the cold.
Although I was afraid Mother would think I was hiding something, I wrapped my arms around my bare chest anyway. I didn’t want her to see me this way. Naked. My flesh vulnerable.
Mom walked to the counter by the sink. From my days cooking with Brandy, I recognized the smell of the sage before I saw it. She had mashed some in a bowl with a whitish paste and had a big bundle of it sitting in a pan near the stove.
“God hates you, Lucy.”
My heart plummeted. Mothers, by definition, were supposed to be encouraging. Hopeful. Confidence builders.
Mothers weren’t supposed to drop such shrapnel-laden bombs on their children, even if it were true. Even if God Himself had come to tell Mom that He despised me, she should have sugar-coated it. Taken His words and spun them toward the positive. Not dumped this news like it meant nothing.
“He’s always hated you. Ever since you took your first breath.” Mom knelt in front of me, the bowl on the floor at my feet. “Probably long before.”
I gave way to the shakes as she put her hands on my kneecaps, bowing her head in prayer.
“God, please forgive my child. We have discussed her for years, and now her time has come to be cleansed. To open herself up to You. So that You will finally accept her as Your own.”
When she stood, Mom scooped some of the sage from her bowl and rubbed it across my forehead, in what felt like a cross.
“Forgive her her sins.” Another line of the herbal mixture coursed down my cheek. “And the sins of those before her.”
I dared not move. Tippy sat silent, her eye wide. I imagined mine looked about the same, the fear I felt more from Mom’s instability than her antics. Why wouldn’t God love me? I had never been anything other than good. I had tried so hard to make her tolerate me that I wouldn’t chance her affection for even a moment’s glory of being bad.
Mom ranted on. Talked to her version of God, a deity that despised me, while decorating my skin with her balm. The smell was overwhelming, the sage crushed and close to my eyes and nose. I had no idea what else she was putting on my face, just that it burned slightly and made my eyes water.
My face covered, Mom moved on to my neck, arms, and shoulders. When she finished, she went to the bundle on the stove and turned on the burner.
I sat, perfectly still, although I desperately wanted to run. Kick out the windows and flee.
Jump off the chair and declare that God did not hate me. How could she say that? How could she believe that?
With the blue flames dancing around the burner, Mom lit the sage and fanned the heavy smoke it created. She held it like a cigar and for a second I was afraid she was going to make me smoke it.