Other Evolutions, page 3
What Aunt Eshkie Did
29Was grab hold of my child’s elbow and drag me off the steps where I went sailing through the air, light enough to be guided into a swirling flight that propelled me off the upper steps, heavy enough so that gravity disappointingly ended my twirl in a crash and I smashed clumsily onto the carpeted floor. By some miracle I landed like a cat, on my feet. I had avoided being broken. Intact I survived to be dragged again, to the kitchen, at this point squirming with my child’s might against the bruising grip of her bony fingers into my fleshy arm. By this point I knew she had evil intentions, but I was only able to do so much, no part of me a match for an adult woman.
In the kitchen the Marnies and uncle Bobby, all dressed for the funeral, were sitting waiting for the rest of us. Their eyes widened in shock to see aunt Eshkie (snarling) and me (squealing as I tried to wriggle free).
At this point uncle Bobby should have intervened, separated wife from niece and tried to rescue the situation. Instead he gaped like a fish as he tried to work out what was happening, giving aunt Eshkie, one claw still holding me in place, time to reach the other claw into the drawer where we kept the kitchen scissors (for cutting string, unwieldy packaging, and the tips of milk bags). Everyone in the kitchen, including myself, let out a gasp as she brandished the scissors. I had been told enough Nazi stories to know that truly crazed people don’t mind hurting little children. Was aunt Eshkie angry enough to stab the hitherto innocent kitchen scissors through my chest into my beating heart, stilling it forever?
She was not.
The closer the scissors got to me the more aunt Eshkie slowed down. She adjusted her grip, letting go of my arm to grab me by the dress and then, wielding the scissors, took a vicious snip into my white sleeve. Then she dropped the scissors, wedged her hands into the cut 30she had made, and proceeded to rip it further, rending the fabric so that the right side sleeve of my dress was torn from cuff to seam. It was unmendable.
I think everyone in the kitchen was so relieved that aunt Eshkie hadn’t murdered me that there was, at first, a sense of calm. I was aware that previously everyone had been screaming and shouting and arguing only because it was now quiet enough that I could hear my own breath coming in short huffy bursts.
Uncle Bobby and the Marnies pushed their way past aunt Eshkie and formed a semicircle around me, assessing the rent. Marnie lifted one flap of my sleeve and rubbed the fabric between her fingers.
Aunt Eshkie was the one to break the silence.
Almita, aunt Eshkie said, I may have lost my temper a little.
She never called me Almita and the Spanish diminutive sounded wrong in her anglo accent. In that moment I could see she was a small woman. Not just small of stature but small of spirit. A weak, pathetic bully who had taken out her anger on a child. Her face was turning red from the humiliation of being exposed this way and she was already pasting on a smile, trying to act as if nothing had happened.
Marnie (my sister) was the first to react.
She turned away from me and towards aunt Eshkie, her shoulders squared. She had the dignity of a woman, the dignity of my mother, as she walked up to aunt Eshkie and, with no warning, clawed her in the face.
Aunt Eshkie screamed.
She moved away from Marnie and covered her face and when, for a moment, her hands came away I could see there were shaky red scratch marks all down her forehead and cheeks. Marnie hadn’t quite drawn blood but it was impressive nevertheless. It may sound strange but I had never realized before that Marnie loved me. That she, with her teasing and her pinching and her bullying, would move to protect me if someone else took the liberties against me which she took every day.
I had never loved her more.
31Marnie (cousin) began to cry.
My Marnie went back a second time, grabbing aunt Eshkie by the wrist and trying to pull her hands away from her face so she could get at her again.
Uncle Bobby, choosing this moment to become effectual, walked over to Marnie and pried her off his wife, lifting her up by her waist. Propelled by rage and now lifted a good foot off the ground, Marnie started kicking her legs into aunt Eshkie’s stomach, succeeding in getting in at least one kick hard enough to knock the wind out of Eshkie and causing her to double up onto the floor. The backing soundtrack to all this was a stream of curse words which were coming from both aunt Eshkie and Marnie and which up until that moment I had never heard before in my life. My parents had succeeded in convincing me that to tell someone to shut up was the vilest thing that could be said to another human. Now my little ears were awakening to a whole new world.
At this moment my father came in, misty eyed as usual, and took in the disaster that was his family. His sister on the floor clutching at her face, his beautiful and dignified daughter now red-faced and spitting foul language like nails, his other daughter wailing in a long unending wall of noise (at some point I had started and simply kept going). The adults in this situation were clearly incompetent. My father turned to (cousin) Marnie and she, white-faced and frizzy-haired, pointed a finger at her own mother and said, It’s all Mummy’s fault. She cut Alma’s dress.
I had never realized Marnie (my cousin) could be so just. I had never loved her more.
My father might have, at this point, restored calm and rescued the day, only this was now the moment that my mother made her own entrance.
Black was not her colour. She usually favoured the rich jewel tones which she had told me looked so inviting on our warm skin. But even in the black of mourning, a true black, an all-encompassing colour which made her look sickly, she was dazzling.
32She had arrived in a black skirt and black pumps and a black knit sweater over which lay a simple gold chain, her Guadalupe nowhere to be seen. She was ready to grieve.
Instead she saw me (distressed, ravaged). She saw Marnie (still in the grips of our uncle). My dress was ripped. Marnie’s careful braids, which at my arrival had been neat and tidy, now had wisps of blonde escaping, giving her a frizzy haloed effect.
My mother was, in many ways, not a perfect woman, but the primal way in which she descended into absolute violence, no explanation required, was something close to perfection. She grabbed my uncle by the hair (well, what little of it he had left) and pulled him down to her level. She was at this point letting loose in English and Spanish, a total linguistic loss of control I had never seen before.
Everyone started screaming and fighting and pinching and pulling all over again.
It was chaos.
And I simply chose to evade it.
The First Disappearance
All families have their own private jokes. They also have their own private myths and lore. In my family the joke is that I have a habit of vanishing. The joke originated from the day of my grandmother’s funeral when I disappeared for approximately three hours and sixteen minutes, plunging the entire family into chaos and forcing a delay in the ceremony.
For years I didn’t tell anyone where I went, not even Marnie. This was because when I came back I was so resentful over what had happened to my dress that I didn’t want to tell them. Then, in an act that 33only inflated my sense of importance, my family began deliberately not to talk about it when they talked about my bubbe’s funeral. They would give me glances out of the corner of their eyes and then quickly look away when I caught them peeping. This was a mistake too. It made me feel like the secret of where I had been made me important. I felt as though I had an eerie and uncanny aura about me. I felt like a girl in a fairy tale who had ventured out in the woods and come back changed. And even though I was very much the same, my family could never be sure I was actually still myself, Alma Alt, sister, daughter, cousin, niece, or whether I was a changeling only pretending to be Alma (Alma Alternate), waiting patiently until an inopportune moment when I could finally reveal my truest self.
Later, I realized that no one thought of me as eerie at all.
They thought, as was logical to assume, that a stranger had molested me.
They were just waiting for me to reveal it in my own time. I realized this finally when I was an awkward, lumpy tween. But to admit to my previous pretensions would have been as devastating to me as a revelation that I had been molested would have been to my parents. And later still when I was an adult and finally tried to tell them the truth—well, by that point no one believed me.
Who would hold on to nothing for so long?
A Portal to the Unknown
According to everyone in the kitchen (mother, father, sister, aunt, uncle, cousin) who were all interviewed in a messy clump by the police, I had run through the kitchen, down the hallway, and slipped through the 34front door. This mass interview was a fatal flaw in their detective work. If something had happened to me and I had become one of those little girls on the news (though, let’s be real, I wasn’t a blonde white girl and would never have made it onto the news) THIS jumble of interviews would have been the moment when the investigation, like a Dalí clock, slipped out of shape.
Cousin Marnie was the first to notice my flight and went running after me. When she went through the front door she expected to immediately see me and be able to call me back inside. When she didn’t, she thought she had been mistaken, turned back, and began to search the rest of the house.
After failing to find me, (cousin) Marnie returned to the living room. The physical violence had, for the most part, abated at this point. The men were sitting silently (uselessly) while their wives continued to snipe at each other, panting from chairs situated at opposite ends of the kitchen. Marnie sat in our mother’s lap and wrapped her long child arms protectively around her, punctuating each point our mother made with a nod of her head.
Everyone claimed that cousin Marnie was not to blame for what she did next. But because of this one decision, in years to come my mother would sigh at everything she did and say, You know, your cousin Marnie isn’t very smart.
What cousin Marnie did was sit down on her father’s lap, and in imitation of my Marnie, put her arms around him and listen to the argument.
Minutes, the import of which the family failed to appreciate, passed, each more precious than the last.
Eventually enough time had passed that though everyone was still angry it became necessary to temporarily set aside what had happened and act as a family so they could bury my grandmother who, God forgive us, was at least no longer alive to see her own daughter act like an animal towards her beloved youngest grandchild.
35The bickering started again.
It occurred to my mother that I would now have to wear my navy play dress to the funeral. It was not as smart as the white dress, which conveyed purity and served to make my skin look bronzed and healthy, but it fit me well and was respectable as a second choice. It occurred to my mother to change me. It occurred to my mother I was not there to change.
She began to look for me. I could not be found. My father and Marnie joined in the search. Still I could not be found. Uncle Bobby joined in. Fear began to creep into the thoughts of everyone present. At this point cousin Marnie tugged on uncle Bobby’s sleeve and whispered in his ear that she had already searched the house and she was sure that I wasn’t in it.
Everyone was convinced they had seen me run down the hallway towards the front door. Now they became convinced I had walked through it.
The adults went round the block and then the neighbourhood in increasingly wide loops.
The Marnies stayed behind and held each other and cried.
The adults met up at home, absent one Alma.
My father threw up.
The police were called.
In an act of penance, which still did not negate all that she had done, aunt Eshkie, aware that my father was a wreck and that she would be taken more seriously by the police than my accented mother, handled everything.
What Actually Happened
36The absolute froth of adults kicking and screaming each other blocked me from the hallway, and the front entrance. They were an unpredictable mass and I was, even then, aware of how tiny I was, how easily my body bent to external pressure and manipulation. Even Marnie (my sister), who was not quite adult-sized, could (and sometimes did) pick me up by the ankles and turn me upside down, threatening to drop me on my head when she was annoyed. And hadn’t I just had proof that aunt Eshkie was more than willing to injure me according to her own wicked desires?
So no, the entrance that led to the hallway from the kitchen and then out to the front door was barred to me.
However there were multiple doors in the kitchen. One led to the basement, a dead end they surely would have immediately checked. The others were a set of glass-panelled French doors that led to the back garden.
These doors were very beautiful and filled with a particular kind of bubbled glass which dappled the light. Even though they were impractical, letting the cold bleed inside in the winter and roasting us alive in the summer, and even though my parents were always threatening to replace them with more functional sliding doors, they were too beautiful to be rid of. They were worth their daily inconveniences for the pleasure they gave our family whenever we were in the kitchen.
They were made of a not very thick varnished wood, and though a century of handling had worn them down it was still possible to see the pattern of flowers and unfurling leaves embedded in the original brass handles.
They were tricky, these doors, they often dragged on the floor when opened, and the knobs would sometimes turn and turn uselessly, the 37latch refusing to catch so that the doors would refuse to lock or unlock as the case may be.
The knobs were also smaller than a standard knob and set very low on the door so that adults always found them difficult to handle. It gave the impression that the original occupants of the house were child-sized.
I believed that the doors had been created for me, as if the craftspeople who made them, long dead, with names washed away by time, had known that one day in a moment of desperation I would need to use them to escape the madness of my family and had fitted them with this idea in mind.
It was all over in an instant. One second I was in the kitchen with the anger and the flailing limbs, and the next I was on the patio.
The knobs had turned for me, the lock had unlocked, and for once the door had opened and shut as smoothly as if it were new.
Behind the bubbled glass my family were mere outlines of people. It was amazing how little noise passed through the door, how quickly the sounds of the world, of wind, birds chirping, leaves rustling, my own panting breath, drowned out their angry voices.
I floated mournfully down the steps of the patio into the garden proper.
I could feel the cool of the air hitting my arm on the side where my sleeve was in tatters. The sensation triggered a fresh round of crying.
Although I had not wanted the dress at first, I had been so hopeful when Marnie put it on me that morning. She had braided my curls into neat plaits and tied the sash of the dress in a voluptuous bow and I had imagined that I was, if not as beautiful as Marnie, imbued with the kind of beauty that all newness brought, like fresh untrammelled snow glittering on the sidewalk. But now I was like the dirty grey slush after the snow had been salted and everyone had dragged their boots through it. I was wrecked. I wanted to be more wrecked. I wanted to be low.
38I followed that instinct by going as low as I could. I threw myself on the grass and when that wasn’t enough I went to the edge of the garden where persistent and mysterious bushes grew near the fence. There was almost enough space among the branches for a little girl and I slid in amongst them. When I had situated myself with my front pressed into the dirt, the cool smell of earth invading my nostrils, a branch poking my hip and others tangling in my hair, I began to wail.
The wailing I did for two reasons. The first being that it felt good and the second being that I wanted to be found and petted and comforted. I had visions of someone, preferably my father because I knew my mother simply wouldn’t, crouching outside the bush and taming me slowly, until I came to settle in his lap, like a cat. Perhaps food would be involved as he coaxed me out, one hand extended, offering a treat. Perhaps he would promise me a new dress and I could go back and get the pink one. Perhaps, and here the fantasies in my head began to spin out of control and my little heart beat ever quicker from the sheer lust of the thought, perhaps they would buy me two dresses, a white one to replace the one that aunt Eshkie had ruined and the pink one. The white dress would certainly need replacing now. It was covered in green grass stains and all sorts of dirt and when I tried to rub the marks off I only succeeded in rubbing them in. Now I was as guilty as aunt Eshkie of being bad and destroying the dress. I wailed some more, really pouring my heart into it.
At first the wailing was organic and I was simply obeying the pain which came in waves when I thought of aunt Eshkie, the rip, the stains. But slowly, without wanting to, I began to calm down on my own, my sobs turning into little hiccups, the pain in my heart dulling. Gradually it became difficult to scream. I had to push myself to do so. It became a performance. A performance I was acting out for myself alone because very quickly it became apparent there was no one observing me but me.
Through the bushes I looked towards the house. It seemed unoccupied—at least there were no longer any angry shapes visible through 39the kitchen doors—and it occurred to me that maybe they had forgotten about me and gone to the funeral.
This triggered a fresh round of sincere crying. I could not believe that, aunt Eshkie aside, they had all abandoned me.
I would have to become a feral child now and live in the bushes and eat the little red berries that my father always warned me not to eat because they were poisonous. I would have no one for company but the pampered fluffy cats of the Glebe, who sat on porch steps and occasionally moseyed out to the sidewalk to be worshipped by passersby. None of this appealed to me at all.
