The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter by Susan Hahn Read Free Book Online Page B

that they are still being discussed in tiny circles along with the one book I published. I do admit to still liking a small amount of polish on my own ego—something I continue to work on.
    Alan Gross is never talked about except by he, himself to his most naive students, although having sex with them is far more problematic because of recent university rules and the fact that he is now old. Soon he will die and the stars will stare down on him in all his anonymity. He will never have even a moment of the twinkle and shine he still hungers after, unlike my mother, who has enjoyed a long stay in the spotlight of a small space—center stage.
    I am readying myself for her arrival. She will lie betweenmy father and me. My father exhausted himself in life from all his bloat about himself, causing not only his ego but also his soul to fragment from the fatigue of needing to work so hard to keep itself whole, and he remains quite scattered and quiet. I, however, have spoiled well—that awful, thick makeup they smothered me with is long gone and I am left with just sleek bones and a few fibers of the white silk chemise that was slipped onto whatever the doctors did not cut from me—and I have also been quite spoiled by the richness I have found in all the worlds I can now enter and the freedom they bring to my words.
    Here, no one cares to—or can—yank from me my story.

TRICHOTILLOMANIA
    Mother twisted every action
    to suit my father’s mood,
    which ran from sour to bittersweet.
    Mother only had one motion of her own—
    she picked
    her scalp as if searching for the right
    hair would lessen
    all the tension. I’d watch
    her hand curlicue into a question
    mark, tear out the nervous
    answer, examine what
    she plucked, toss her head,
    then pat it
    as she would to soothe
    my cousin’s in the crib.
    Once I brought a tweezers
    to help her
    grab what I thought
    she wanted. She let me explore
    the ruins underneath her beauty
    shop creation. I touched
    the sores and stubble, tried to
    yank out all the trouble
    until she yelled
    to stop. From then I never could.
    I keep looking for the spot
    on my own head, ask anyone
    who will to rub.
    When I’m alone,
    I use two mirrors, struggle
    to see if I can get hold
    of the anxiety. Deep within
    my skull a stem is snarling
    and will split the bone.
    c. slaughter
    I WAS TO BE
the One,
the one great success of the Slaughter family offspring—my parents
had said it
and their word on all matters was considered biblical—so when I was dropped from their world to the one beneath, my cousins and their parents, each with his or her individual agenda embedded in the larger family one, were disoriented as to who would be the flag bearer of the family’s legacy.
    Years later, Celie would come to say, “Cecilia and Cecily have all the talent in the family, because they were given the
extra
syllable.” She meant they had an extra syllable in their names. She considered that maybe because my name, “Ceci,” had just two syllables it had not been powerful enough to hold me to that promise. (Celie is more prone than any of us—even Cecilia—to magical and convoluted thinking, her thoughts often arriving through a side door or the even stranger back door in her mind. But there are reasons for this.)
    By then Cecilia had published five poetry books and Cecily had two plays produced in non-equity, storefront theaters where the plumbing in the bathrooms was fairlynon-existent. Cecilia told me this with some amount of humor when she visited my grave one day, adding, “Ceci, I think there were peepholes in both places with someone snapping pictures or videotaping us. I heard little clicks or a tiny buzz and I saw little ragged openings in the walls and the ceilings. Or maybe they were just made by the rodents living there.” Then she laughed, “Same thing I guess.” Some things deeply bothered Cecilia; some things she could