Cynthia Robinson's Blog

Like mother, like daughter. In the saddest, most inevitable of all possible ways. We’ve been out of touch, bad, bad lovers — my bad. I’ve been writer-ing so, so hard, y’all, and work, too–the paid kind–puts a big ole hole in the day. But Venus is back, with just a short li’l Thang, a wee, sad amuse-bouche, to get our toes wet again. Going forward I will try to keep her coming at reasonable intervals (anything beyond a month is unreasonable, agreed) through to the end. Funnily, I’m still, twenty-some years later, writing about mothers and daughters. Because adopted? No idea, you figure that out.

After you look in on Danae, and maybe light a candle or two for her; she could use it. And if you’d like some leftovers to take the hungry edge off so you don’t eat like a pig at the restaurant, you can dig around in the fridge by clicking right here.

~

Danae had known that her mother would leave, but she had thought, had believed, had hoped that Marta would leave with the lawyer, not because of him. On the morning after Cornelia’s dinner—no one knew it yet, but she might have been, at that very moment, purchasing the ticket that would send her painlessly from this life; everyone would later insist on the painless part, as though Marta had lived without any pain, ever—on the way down the stairs to breakfast, Danae didn’t stop. Marta would be there, and the lawyer wouldn’t be coming again anyway, so stopping on the landing didn’t mean anything anymore.

Instead, Danae imagined it. She’d looked in on Marta sleeping so many times, on so many mornings, that she could bring it all up, right down to the last detail. Her mother’s beautiful, disappointed face, turned up toward the hypnotic rotations of the ceiling fan. Her hair, dark like Danae’s, spilling over the yellowed pillowcase Aunt Cornelia had embroidered, years ago when she was young, with very proper yellow and blue flowers.

Marta’s head was always tilted to one side when she slept, one arm flung up like a rainbow above the dark cloud of hair. She looked like she was floating down from heaven on the bedclothes, a snapshot of a falling angel, beauty frozen and captured and held in limbo forever, away from the reaches of the passage of time. Danae had imagined her mother like that as she walked quietly down the stairs to breakfast on the morning after Cornelia’s dinner.

~

And she imagined her mother like that now, as she finished applying the dark lipstick. She no longer needed to look at the photograph, the one beneath the glass on her dressing table, to see the resemblance. They made them at the funeral home, Pearl had told her, for the family. To help them remember. As if Danae would ever forget. As if she could.

Pearl had given the portrait to her on the first anniversary of Marta’s death. Which Livia always said was an apotheosis. Danae had had to look the word up in the dictionary. When she’d found it, she’d liked it.

Her sister was waiting downstairs. One last time, Danae would pretend to want to go out to dinner.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, eventually (this semester is kickin’ my @$$, and the novel chews up whatever’s left).

It’ll happen, though. Promise. And when it does, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

The post Bad, Bad Love in the Way, and the DNA appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Danae, that would be. Always moreso than Livia. In the minds of the two sisters, anyway (Marta would have preferred no baby girls at all). Livia was fine with that, Danae could have Marta all to herself. And so Danae alone adored Marta, and pretended not to mind that she received no adoration in return; all she asked was that Marta let her grow up and be just like her. But if all you wanted for your entire young life was to be exactly like yo’ Momma (a.k.a., Bad, Bad Love Incarnate), and yo’ Momma ended up the way Marta did, then what’s to become of you? Installment XXXI of The Will of Venus doesn’t exactly answer that question but it does make a start.

BTW, nobody would blame you if you needed a refresher — Life is majorly getting in the way of our story advancing at anything other than a poky pace at the moment. But I always keep a plate of leftovers in the oven for my Bad, Bad Lovers. Y’all can dig right in by clicking right here.

~

Years earlier, after the handsome man disappeared, Danae’s daily ritual of visiting the dresses like secret friends had begun. When Marta was about to leave, Danae had known it in her bones and sinews and started touching them like talismans. Mourning their loss at the same time—any day her mother would pack those dresses into her beat-up old suitcase and take them with her to wherever she was headed and Danae would never see them again.

She’d been right, about that. But not in any kind of way she’d ever have wished to be.

~

When they took Marta to the funeral home, they took the suitcase, too. It had flown out of the bus right along with her, flown the same impossible distance as her body; it had landed only a few feet away. One of the clasps had broken open, but only one. A fistful of peach chiffon peeked out, strange in the dusty July field full of grasses and cow dung, like a whispered memory of that cotillion, but with all the humiliation washed out.

The man at the funeral home, with murmured condolences and a grave inclination of his brilliantined head, had handed the suitcase back to Aunt Pearl on their way out the door the afternoon before Marta’s burial. Danae wondered if he had looked inside it. She’d seen him staring at her mother, while the manager and the other waitresses from the diner were kissing Aunt Pearl on the cheek and saying how sorry they were. The man must have wanted to open the suitcase, even if he hadn’t.

They took the suitcase home with them on the same bus Marta had taken just a few days before. Danae had felt as though they were doing something improper, insulting and humiliating the dead (the dead, who was now Marta), almost laughing at her. Try as she might to think about something else, the bus seemed to mock her mother in its rhythmic language of wheels and motor–Marta would never manage to get those dresses to New Orleans. Never, never. Never, never never.

When they got home, Pearl had deposited Marta’s suitcase in the hall, just inside the door, and hurried off to the kitchen to start supper. Fried chicken and collards and corn bread. Pearl’s full lips had smiled encouragingly around the words, the gypsy tooth flashing dully in the early dusk of the hallway. Danae, at first, had been surprised by Pearl’s insensitivity. But Pearl was funny about death; life, she always said, was for the living. Things were supposed to be so much better up there (Pearl would gesture with her chin; her hands were usually busy with sauces or bread dough when she talked about death). The dead didn’t need us remembering them. They were fine where they were.

But Danae’s heart pleaded silently for her mother. Marta was different, why couldn’t Pearl see that? Those dresses were Marta’s soul, all that was left of her. She wasn’t like other mothers, mothers you could imagine floating around between clouds, singing with the angels, maybe taking care of the cherubs while the older angels went about their celestial duties. Marta was of this world, and Danae had had trouble envisioning her in the next one. In any capacity. Marta would just cause trouble there, distract them all with her heavy-lidded eyes and her breasts. She had even bewitched a priest. And Marta wasn’t through yet, not even dead–the silly, besotted man from the funeral home, any fool could have seen it. He’d fallen in love with Marta’s corpse.

No, Marta should be remembered in a special way, a different way. If it weren’t for Danae, Marta would just be forgotten. Everyone in the farmhouse, it seemed, even Livia, had already forgotten her, and she wasn’t even buried yet. Danae would take the suitcase to her room. But she would wait a bit, a day or two, so it wouldn’t look strange. If Cornelia saw her, she would say it was unholy; Pearl would just say it was unhealthy, but neither of them would let her keep the dresses if they knew. Danae would wait (they would probably forget all about the suitcase if it just stayed there long enough), she would choose the right moment, and then she would take the suitcase upstairs. Danae would take tender care of the dresses, hang them in her closet and touch them. Danae would imagine her mother in New Orleans wearing them, wearing them and sipping champagne with a crowd of admiring gentlemen at her feet. Marta deserved that much.

For two days, the suitcase stayed right where Pearl had left it. If it had stayed just one more day, Danae would have had the courage to carry it up to her room, to open it, to touch the dresses. Hang them in her own closet, where she could tend to them properly. But on the third day, when she came down to breakfast, it was gone. Danae, trying not to cry, asked Pearl about it. Oh, honey, said Pearl, putting an arm around Danae’s shoulders, hugging her tight and offering her a cinnamon bun. Oh, honey.

Cornelia had taken the suitcase, without opening it, to Goodwill.

~

Danae had tried to eat, to please Pearl, but the tears and the cinnamon bun–her favorite–stuck in her throat despite the milky coffee. On her way back up the stairs, Danae glanced off to the left at the second-floor landing, toward her mother’s room. No one had been in there since the sheriff had knocked at the front door, to tell them about Marta’s broken neck. There was nothing left to clean out, so there was really no need.

Standing there, by herself, on the quiet landing, Danae had realized that she’d known. Known that something terrible had been about to happen, to Marta, and that she was powerless to stop it. And since she’d known she couldn’t stop it, she’d forced herself to forget.

But she’d known, the morning after the cotillion she’d known.

Marta shouldn’t have been there at all. After the gala event, after the champagne and the dancing, she should have been sleeping peacefully in the arms of the weak-eyed lawyer, between crisp white sheets, a maid silently brewing coffee somewhere downstairs, so that the smell would wake her when she’d slept enough. But there’d been a different smell that morning, there on the landing, a sleeping smell, that had told Danae that Marta was there, behind the door, cracked open a few inches–Marta usually shut it tight–and that something was not right.

Holding her breath, terrified that her mother would wake, she’d stepped closer and pulled the door back just another inch, so she could peek in. The ceiling fan making its monotonous drone-click, the blinds drawn. The windows open behind them in the hope that a breeze might find its way into the sour air. The peach-chiffon dress was in a cotton candy heap on the floor, the gardenias abandoned on the bedside table. Her mother had not put them in water. Their waxy petals already going brown, curling around the edges.

Store-bought gardenias didn’t last. And they barely had any smell. The weak-eyed lawyer should have known that. If he’d cared about Marta at all, he would have.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, eventually (this semester is kickin’ my @$$, and the novel chews up whatever’s left).

It’ll happen, though. Promise. And when it does, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

The post Bad, Bad Love’s Baby Girl appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Or she was. But no matter. If Marta was Bad, Bad Love incarnate, and she was yo’ Momma, oh, woe is you. She’s gone but not forgotten (who could forget Marta?). Installment XXX of The Will of Venus shows you why you never had a chance. Especially if your name is Danae. Unless, maybe, you have a sister, and her name is Livia. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Never a good idea.

Always a good idea, though, to think things over one more time. Have another look. Consider from a different angle. Any and all of which you can do, Bad, Bad Lovers, by clicking right here.

~

Marta left early every morning when the fields and trees along the dusty road were still covered with mists and dews, before Danae was awake, even before the birds invaded that intermediate land between dreams and sleep, grey territory where anything was possible. Even though Danae never saw her before she left, she knew about the candy-cane pink uniform that clung suggestively to her mother’s breasts and hips, so like her own, the cheap fabric that followed the line of Marta’s thighs to just above the knee, about the dark hair wound into a knot beneath a hair-net which, on most women, would have been highly unflattering but, on her mother, simply provided jarring contrast to her starkly beautiful face, a face whose beauty was not marred but, rather, pointed up by the abuses of tobacco and alcohol.

Since the night she’d told them about meeting the lawyer, Marta never got home until after everyone else had gone to bed. Danae suspected that sometimes she didn’t come home at all–she had vague wonderings about what her mother did during all those hours she spent with the lawyer but, in general, she didn’t allow herself to dwell on it very much. An alley you glanced down but never explored until it was time, and for her, it wasn’t time yet. Danae simply knew that if you did those things, and if you were as beautiful as Marta (which she was, or at least she showed every promise of becoming), the men asked you to marry them.

~

At the handsome man’s house, Marta was busy and she went out a lot, and when she got home she was exhausted, like a little girl with an endless succession of birthday parties to attend, too tired to put her clothes away. She left her lingerie and her dresses all over the room–over the backs of chairs, on the floor, on the part of the bed she didn’t sleep in. Silk panties and satin nightdresses, slippery and forbidden-feeling under Danae’s furtive fingers, rough, itchy wool or cool linen suits that Marta wore to sedate afternoon teas in the salons and rose gardens of other Biloxi ladies, ladies who thought she was married to the handsome man. Then there were the evening dresses–billowing seas of chiffon, sheaths of sequins like diamonds and jewels, folds and folds of quiet, secret velvet for winter.

The daily visit to her mother’s room had been one of Danae’s private rituals for as long as she could remember, but the touching of Marta’s garments as they hung, unworn, in the closet (Marta wore her diner uniform every day to work; she had five) had only begun once Danae realized, with a clarity that struck like a lightning bolt straight to her heart, that her mother might be leaving any day.

When they’d lived at the handsome man’s house, Marta probably wouldn’t have cared even if she’d known what her daughter was up to. But at the Aunts’ house, with her dignity and her possibilities worn thin, her mother would have been angry at Danae’s silent invasions of her bedroom.

After the handsome man disappeared, Marta hardly left the big house, but she was almost never in the master bedroom, where the dresses were. She had started sleeping on the couch, late, with the television on and a glass in her hand. During the day, Marta sat at the kitchen table by herself, smoking, with a cup of cold black coffee in front of her.

And the dresses hung on padded wooden hangers, unworn, in the closet in the master bedroom (Marta wore her housecoat a lot in those days). Some of them were draped in plastic and Danae lifted it every day when she went in to touch the dresses, to finger them, to imagine herself old enough to wear them.

Then she opened the bottles and vials of perfume ranked like a collection of grown-up dolls across her mother’s dressing table, one after the other in ritual order, a rosary of scents and shapes her eager senses had memorized. The bottles were heavy glass or crystal, with words on them in foreign languages that Danae couldn’t read. The scents were powerful, heady and overbearing, and if you left two bottles unstopped the smells clashed against each other, fighting to invade your nostrils, each wanting to be the strongest.

Those scents didn’t seem to belong to her mother–they were for someone else. Danae’s mother was the disheveled young woman who drank too much, the tired, pretty face under cheap makeup woven through her memories of early childhood. That mother never wore perfume. The few times her mother had held her or truly embraced her she had smelled of cigarette smoke and sweat. Sometimes, Marta had kissed Danae on the forehead when they left the mansions that Danae had helped her to clean, and then she smelled faintly of bleach and floor wax, and sweat.

Maybe the different mother who lived with the handsome man had worn perfume, but, until the man disappeared, Danae had hardly seen her. She and Livia had had nannies–quite a succession of them–and Marta had faded out of the reality of their everyday activities into abstraction. It was only after the handsome man disappeared that Danae and her mother became re-acquainted.

And that mother, who was neither of the mothers Danae had known, but another mother altogether, didn’t wear perfume.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

The post Marta. Bad, Bad Love Incarnate, and She’s Yo’ Momma appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Or she was. But no matter. If Marta was Bad, Bad Love incarnate, and she was yo’ Momma, oh, woe is you. She’s gone but not forgotten (who could forget Marta?). Installment XXX of The Will of Venus shows you why you never had a chance. Especially if your name is Danae. Unless, maybe, you have a sister, and her name is Livia. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Never a good idea.

Always a good idea, though, to think things over one more time. Have another look. Consider from a different angle. Any and all of which you can do, Bad, Bad Lovers, by clicking right here.

~

Marta left early every morning, when the fields and trees along the dusty road were still covered with mists and dews, before Danae was awake, even before the birds invaded that intermediate land between dreams and sleep, grey territory where anything was possible. Even though Danae never saw her before she left, she knew about the candy-cane pink uniform that clung suggestively to her mother’s breasts and hips, so like her own, the cheap fabric that followed the line of Marta’s thighs to just above the knee, about the dark hair wound into a knot beneath a hair-net which, on most women, would have been highly unflattering but, on her mother, simply provided jarring contrast to her starkly beautiful face, a face whose beauty was not marred but, rather, pointed up by the abuses of tobacco and alcohol.

Since the night she’d told them about meeting the lawyer, Marta never got home until after everyone else had gone to bed. Danae suspected that sometimes she didn’t come home at all–she had vague wonderings about what her mother did during all those hours she spent with the lawyer but, in general, she didn’t allow herself to dwell on it very much. An alley you glanced down, but never explored until it was time, and for her, it wasn’t time yet. Danae simply knew that if you did those things, and if you were as beautiful as Marta (which she was, or at least she showed every promise of becoming), the men asked you to marry them.

~

At the handsome man’s house, Marta was busy and she went out a lot, and when she got home she was exhausted, like a little girl with an endless succession of birthday parties to attend, too tired to put her clothes away. She left her lingerie and her dresses all over the room–over the backs of chairs, on the floor, on the part of the bed she didn’t sleep in. Silk panties and satin nightdresses, slippery and forbidden-feeling under Danae’s furtive fingers, rough, itchy wool or cool linen suits that Marta wore to sedate afternoon teas in the salons and rose gardens of other Biloxi ladies, ladies who thought she was married to the handsome man. Then there were the evening dresses–billowing seas of chiffon, sheaths of sequins like diamonds and jewels, folds and folds of quiet, secret velvet for winter.

The daily visit to her mother’s room had been one of Danae’s private rituals for as long as she could remember, but the touching of Marta’s garments as they hung, unworn, in the closet (Marta wore her diner uniform every day to work; she had five) had only begun once Danae realized, with a clarity that struck like a lightning bolt straight to her heart, that her mother might be leaving any day.

When they’d lived at the handsome man’s house, Marta probably wouldn’t have cared even if she’d known what her daughter was up to. But at the Aunts’ house, with her dignity and her possibilities worn thin, her mother would have been angry at Danae’s silent invasions of her bedroom.

After the handsome man disappeared, Marta hardly left the big house, but she was almost never in the master bedroom, where the dresses were. She had started sleeping on the couch, late, with the television on and a glass in her hand. During the day, Marta sat at the kitchen table by herself, smoking, with a cup of cold black coffee in front of her.

And the dresses hung on padded wooden hangers, unworn, in the closet in the master bedroom (Marta wore her housecoat a lot in those days). Some of them were draped in plastic and Danae lifted it every day when she went in to touch the dresses, to finger them, to imagine herself old enough to wear them. Then she opened the bottles and vials of perfume ranked like a collection of grown-up dolls across her mother’s dressing table, one after the other in ritual order, a rosary of scents and shapes her eager senses had memorized. The bottles were heavy glass or crystal, with words on them in foreign languages that Danae couldn’t read. The scents were powerful, heady and overbearing, and if you left two bottles unstopped the smells clashed against each other, fighting to invade your nostrils, each wanting to be the strongest.

Those scents didn’t seem to belong to her mother–they were for someone else. Danae’s mother was the disheveled young woman who drank too much, the tired, pretty face under cheap makeup woven through her memories of early childhood. That mother never wore perfume. The few times her mother had held her or truly embraced her she had smelled of cigarette smoke and sweat.  Sometimes, Marta had kissed Danae on the forehead when they left the mansions that Danae had helped her to clean, and then she smelled faintly of bleach and floor wax, and sweat.

Maybe the different mother who lived with the handsome man had worn perfume, but, until the man disappeared, Danae had hardly seen her. She and Livia had had nannies–quite a succession of them–and Marta had faded out of the reality of their everyday activities into abstraction. It was only after the handsome man disappeared that Danae and her mother became re-acquainted. And that mother, who was neither of the mothers Danae had known, but another mother altogether, didn’t wear perfume.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

The post Marta. Bad, Bad Love Incarnate, and She’s Yo’ Momma. appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Venus is XXIX, y’all! Sweet, sweet twenty-nine (installments, that is). But Danae is XXXIX. Thirty-nine. About to be forty. And, that, as far as she’s concerned, is a problem. And it’s not like we weren’t warned.

Let’s put this another way. When the vainest, most frivolous person you stops wearing perfume, it’s a cry for help. When that person is your sister, who’s pushed away every single one of the (few) female friends she’s ever managed to make, that help is going to come from you. Or it’s not going to come at all.

Do join us, Bad, Bad Lovers, do join us, please. And if you can think of some way to distract Danae from her problems, which are now Livia’s problems, by all means pitch right in.

And if you need catching up, no worries; you can take yourself all the way back to the Beginning Of It All by clicking right here.

~

“Livia! Great to see you!”

Bretton’s voice boomed; it was rich, full. But it was a stage voice; it lacked warmth. Livia, fifteen years earlier, had spent a not-insignificant amount of time dissecting the qualities of that voice on the evening of Danae’s rehearsal dinner. She had conceded, that night, that her sister was right, that Bretton was handsome, even extremely handsome. After conversing with him for some minutes, she had also conceded that he knew his Shakespeare. Extremely well. But there was something about Bretton, she had cautioned Danae—yes, at the rehearsal dinner; no, the timing had not been ideal—that didn’t agree with her.

Bretton was tall, broad-shouldered, with a head of very blond hair, straight and thick (Bretton was of Swedish descent). His eyes were an icy blue, not tempered by gray or green or any of the tints that can give a certain wistful undertone to blue eyes, and his skin was smooth, with the polished, healthy sheen that often accompanies Nordic genes, easily tanned when exposed to the sun. Bretton’s lips were full, his teeth carnivorous, and there were dimples on either side of the heavy, sensual mouth.

Bretton’s demeanor, in sum, was an undeservedly young one; he smoked a great deal and hit his scotch heavy. He had retained most of the blond hair; he wore it longish in front, short over the ears, just grazing his collar in the back. His clothing was what one would expect from a professor of drama (a dramaturge, Bretton would have corrected her)–black turtleneck, dark jeans, some sort of boots. The only flaw was the belly, protruding unmistakably over the black belt laced through the loops at the waist of his jeans. That belly, bigger even than Livia remembered, he must have put on weight. He really should reconsider his position on sit-ups.

It was the voice, though, that disturbed her, the voice that she’d never trusted. Neither, now that she considered it, had she trusted the gestures. Both were too large, too round. Livia had difficulty imagining Bretton whispering, performing small movements like tying a shoelace, or giving a gentle caress.

Danae looked up. Her face, Livia noted with disquiet, was absolutely without expression. Bretton had paused at the threshold of the front parlor; it was clear that he had no plans to enter. His large hand rested easily against the doorjamb, an acquaintance who had just stuck his head in to say hello. Beside Bretton and just to the rear of his herculean body stood a young woman, short and full-figured, blonde. She was dressed in a short denim skirt, sandals, and a very tight tee shirt.  Her large breasts stretched the synthetic fabric of the shirt that. The young woman’s face was round, innocent. She looked at Bretton as though hypnotized. Livia felt sorry for her; by the time she realized breasts eventually sagged and were not the ticket to anywhere good, she’d have slammed all the other doors shut. The south, the south–what kind of a mother did she have?

“Danae.” Bretton’s voice boomed again, as though he were addressing a full theatre on the opening night of Hamlet. “I’m driving Crystalle into town. Some stuff to take care of at the office, I’ll be late…” Danae gave half a cold nod. Bretton turned to Livia now. “Sure looking forward to dinner tomorrow! Mmmm-mmmmmmmm!” Bretton—Livia could think of no less disturbing way to describe what Bretton did–licked his chops. “Okay, Crys, let’s go.”

Bretton started toward the front door, footsteps echoing as though across a stage. Once his bulk had vacated the doorway, Crystalle’s stood alone, framed as though on the front page of a calendar. Sad, clueless little Miss April.

“Bye, Mrs. Kaplan. See you next week.” Bretton’s lover’s words received no acknowledgement from Danae. Crystalle remained for a beat in the doorway. “Have a good weekend…happy birthday!”

Seconds later, the aggressive grumble of Bretton’s sporty jeep starting, a sharp crackle as the overlarge tires ground over the gravel. The motor sounds soon swallowed by the quiet, genteel suburb–a quick fade into silence.

Livia could think of nothing to say to her sister. One question, though, had been answered without, she was certain, any undue prejudice on her part. She would place the black package of herbs in Bretton’s drawer.

“Let’s go out to dinner, Liv…I haven’t got anything here.” Danae’s voice was still, resigned; she was past caring. Livia would have preferred a tantrum.  “I know this Spanish-Portuguese place, in the old part of town, but it’s on a quiet street. No tourists. I think you’ll like it.”

When Danae rose from the sofa, Livia couldn’t escape the certainty that something else was missing, something even more disturbing than her sister’s indignation. The smell, Danae’s smell. For as long as Livia could remember, her sister’s slightest movement had filled the air around her with the smell of lilacs.

Tonight she smelled of nothing. Nothing at all.

~

Earlier, in her room, which was no longer her husband’s, Danae had chosen the black cocktail dress. She’d been wearing black a lot lately. She liked its dramatic effect against her olive skin, amplified by dark tones of the lipstick she had chosen the last time she’d gone shopping in the city. After she applied the lipstick, she practiced two or three mouth-smiles in the mirror; she still had trouble remembering not to crinkle up her eyes.

Until recently, Danae’s close had been so full she had trouble extracting a garment once she had chosen it. There was another closet, beside the door to her bathroom, full as the first. Two months earlier, Danae had systematically removed every colored garment or accessory from her closets. Only the black ones remained. She had burned the clothes–the flames were violet, blue, chartreuse, soft pink, lilac, emerald green–in the incinerator in the basement.  She could have given them to Goodwill, she supposed, but she shuddered at the thought of some other woman wearing them, of some other woman experiencing pleasure, or even happiness, while those fabrics touched her body.

Danae, after burning the dresses, had stopped using perfume.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

The post Bad, Bad Love Can’t Smell the Lilacs Anymore (not good) appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

You know that sister, the one you’re always having to bail out, buck up, pull along. And maybe she’s not the most brilliant person on the planet, maybe she was born pretty and has been able to coast along, pretty well, on what God and her momma gave her. She’s no feminist, she has no career. She makes you want to tear your hair out sometimes. Delete her number from your phone, unfriend her on FB. But when she’s really in trouble, you rally one last time. Which is what Livia is in the midst of doing in this Installment XXVII of our serialized little guilty pleasure of a novella. She’s come all the way to New Orleans, she’s definitely all in, she is going to help. But that doesn’t mean she can’t be just a little annoyed. And it’s okay if you are too, Bad, Bad Lovers, after reading this. It’s totally allowed. Danae definitely does not think the purpose of bootstraps is for the pulling up of one’s very own self.

And if you’re wondering how in the world we got to this sad impasse, you can take yourself all the way back to the Beginning Of It All by clicking right here.

~

Picture Perfect

Livia and Danae were seated in Danae’s living room. It was after six. There were early evening shadows, blues, bruise colors (Danae, she’d told Livia, had had dark bruises for two weeks under her eyes after her visit to the plastic surgeon’s office). The shadows hovered, waiting to take possession of furniture, paintings, book shelves. Livia suggested they turn on a light.

“Oh, sorry…”  Danae put her glass down. They were drinking gin and tonics. Danae ignored her coaster, depositing her glass right onto the defenseless surface of the teak-wood end table. “I don’t usually turn them on until it’s time for dinner.”

Danae’s hand disappeared beneath the tastefully beige shade of a lamp, her slim wrist executing a precise turn. The result was a soft, hesitant light that threw half of Danae’s expressionless face into shadow. But Danae’s face, since the surgery, was invincible to shadows, from whatever direction they might come. She no longer, to Livia’s relief, strove to present a full-face view to her interlocutor. That particular obsession of her sister’s had been especially trying.

With the aid of the lamp light, Livia saw that the salon had been redecorated since her last visit, mauves and dusty pinks replaced by subtly varied shades of brown, beige, a touch of ochre, the occasional pillow or object of terra cotta. Danae must have a new decorator. “I like the new colors in here, Danae. It’s nice, relaxing.”

Danae looked about her as though seeing the room for the first time. “Thanks. Bretton gave me the money to do it for my last birthday. Thirty nine.”

~

On the last day of each month, when the mail came, there were magazines. Aunt Pearl would stop whatever chore she was performing, plump her round body onto the tattered cushions of the sofa in the sitting room and hurriedly leaf through the glossy pages. If a new idea for window-box gardens or a recipe caught her eye, she would study it intently for several minutes, filing it away in the prodigious archive of her memory. She never saved cuttings–her house was cluttered enough as it was, she had no use for silly little scraps of paper.

Then came the moment Danae awaited with an anxiety that would have astonished her great-aunt, had she known. Pearl would get up from the sofa with a determined little push, as though to announce her decision to return to her gardening or cooking, and carelessly push the magazines aside. And there they would lie, their shiny covers bright against the faded fabric, until Danae, confident that Pearl had forgotten all about them, would start forward from the red armchair, where she’d been watching without, she hoped, appearing to do so, and snatch them up, hugging her treasures to her chest.

Despite the monthly and entirely predictable repetition of this sequence of events, each time her fingers touched the cool, slick paper, each time she felt the hard, slim rectangles bend in her tight embrace, Danae was jubilant, and breathless with guilt, as though she’d just robbed a jewelry store. Running up the stairs to her room, she saw open before her an endless vista of the hazy hours she would spend looking at the magazines (hours that Pearl said should be spent outside drinking the fresh air into her lungs). She read the magazines on her bed, with its comforter splashed with daisies, diffused sunlight filtering lazily in through the thick leaves of the oak. The articles were about important topics, such as how to keep your husband interested in your marriage. She did read the articles, they might be useful in the future, but most of her time on the bed with the stolen magazines was spent drinking in the images. Perfectly appointed sitting rooms and luxurious baths, recipes made of things whose names she couldn’t pronounce, cointreau, roux, bouillon, bouillabaise, crème-de-mênthe. Ideas for flower arranging, even origami–all part of the shiny-paper elegance of the life she would have when she grew up.

Danae had a special pair of scissors with her name engraved in cursive script on the inside of one of the handles, a gift from the Aunts on the first birthday she’d spent on the farm. She kept her scissors wrapped in tissue paper in the top drawer of her night table. They were only for the magazines; she didn’t want to dull their edges.  They were alone in the drawer, except for a cut-out photograph of a handsome, dark-haired man dressed in an expensive suit. He was drinking coffee out of a tiny cup, sitting at a tiny table. There were other tables too, with other well-dressed people sitting at them, but as the image moved away from the handsome man, the other figures became blurry. It was night and there had been a beautiful lady sitting next to him, dressed in furs and jewels, but Danae had cut her out of the picture.

After contemplating the images on each page, Danae chose her favorites and painstakingly cut them out, taking care not to make any nicks or tears along the edges. She then pasted them into the scrapbooks Aunt Pearl brought her from the Five and Dime in town, no questions asked. Danae grouped the images into rooms–the rooms of the house where she would live with the handsome man in the photo. The rooms would be so beautiful, so perfect, that he would never want to leave.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

The post Bad, Bad Love Has a Sister appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

We all get old, Bad, Bad Lovers, it happens to us all. But for women, it’s different. There, I said it. Funnily, I thought I would come back to this passage with twenty years of distance and find it no longer relevant, or less so. You know, girl power and STEM-girls and you can be anything you want to be. Yep, all that, but you’d damn well better be pretty too, or this culture has no use for you. And you’d damn well better stay that way. So that’s what Installment XXVI is all about. Don’t believe me? Spend ten minutes watching TV.

And if you’re wondering how in the world we got to this sad impasse, you can take yourself all the way back to the Beginning Of It All by clicking right here.

NB: What follows is in no way intended to be judgy about anything any woman has done, or had done, or will do, or intends to, in the privacy of a cosmetic surgeon’s office. We all do what we have to, ladies, and no one knows better what that is than you.

~

Shelf-Life

On the occasion of Livia’s last visit to her sister five years earlier (guilt twinged as she made the calculations), she’d stepped into Danae’s dressing room to borrow a brush; she had forgotten to bring hers. Danae’s dressing table was disorderly and dusty (she’d shuddered; she could never live with such chaos), and it had taken some time to locate her sister’s brush. She’d pushed the jumble of makeup, necklaces, powder puffs, and earrings to one side; perhaps the brush was hiding beneath all the clutter. Only then had Livia noticed that her sister’s dressing table was glass-topped, and that Danae had slipped several photographs between the sheet of glass and the costly wood of the table.

One photograph had been taken, Livia had judged, just after her sister’s wedding; possibly even on her honeymoon. A very young Danae, standing next to a much younger Bretton. Danae’s face was turned upward, toward Bretton, but Bretton’s was turned self-consciously toward the camera, fists shoved hard into the pockets of his navy blue trousers. Danae’s hand wrapped around her husband’s arm, squeezed painfully into the tiny space between Bretton’s left tricep and his big body, as though he might float away if she didn’t tether him firmly.

She’d found the brush; she’d picked it up. Just beneath the brush, a photograph which had, at first, puzzled Livia. A woman, dark-haired, olive skinned. A pillow. Danae asleep? Danae in one of her roles? She’d bent forward to examine the image more closely. No, it was Marta. The lush lashes, the still mouth, the blue dress. She’d been visited by unwelcome images of that afternoon in the funeral home. She’d hurriedly buried it once more, beneath the clutter.

 ~

Danae’s house (Danae’s and Bretton’s, but Livia preferred, for obvious reasons, to think of it as Danae’s) was a two-storied mansion, with tall, graceful columns along the length of the deep front porch. It stood amid an abundant tangle of cypresses, weeping willows and evergreens. There were gardenia bushes on either end of the porch. The scent met Livia insistently as she climbed the shallow steps. They were tall, those bushes, their stems thick like they’d been there for decades. Livia pondered for a moment, certain they hadn’t been there the last time she’d visited Danae.

Danae opened the door before she could knock (Danae’s doorbell didn’t work; it hadn’t, for as long as Livia could remember), and Livia, uncharacteristically remiss, forgot to ask about the gardenia bushes. The hallway was dark. Danae must have been sitting in the front parlor, watching out the window, quiet and still, waiting for the sound of her sister’s rented car in the driveway. Danae, Livia knew, wouldn’t have been reading while she waited. Danae didn’t read any more. When she had read, the material she chose had been limited to drama, and only those plays in which she herself might hope to have a part. But the simple activity of waiting now sufficed for Danae. Waiting was something at which her sister had become a consummate expert during the past fifteen years of her life. Waiting for parts, waiting for Bretton, waiting to age.

Danae’s smile only engaged her mouth. Livia, however, was not offended by the resulting distance. She knew that her sister had spent long hours in front of her dressing table mirror, beside the print of Ophelia and the tiny bottle without a label, practicing smiling with her mouth, without wrinkling the newly tightened skin at the corners of her large, dark eyes. The intention was not to offend, it was protective. Of herself.

~

One year and two months before her sister’s fortieth birthday, Livia had received a telegram from Danae asking permission to pay her a visit in New York. Danae had, she said, some business to attend to.

Livia had shuddered at the prospect of what would happen to her sister’s face in the plastic surgeon’s office. She had only recently begun to study her own pale skin for the tell-tale signs of aging; she had found none, however, and, returning to a perfunctory application of hand-lotion to her face at night (when she happened to remember), had given the matter no further thought. And now Danae was talking, quite seriously, about having tiny cuts made into the delicate flesh around her eyes so that minute portions of excess skin could be snipped off, like taking in the waistband of a pair of pants after you had lost weight.

Danae had made the appointment from New Orleans; everything was taken care of. Before Danae’s appointment, Livia had sat for an hour with her sister in a cafe on the Upper East Side, around the corner from the plastic surgeon’s office.

A woman had been seated at the table closest to the window, visible only in profile. Danae and Livia had seen her at precisely the same moment. The woman appeared to be around fifty; there were lines at the eyes and mouth, incipient folds beneath the chin, made apparent in almost grotesque fashion by the tenuous light of late winter, that seemed ready to turn to dusk at any second, though it was early afternoon. The light entered the window obliquely, hitting the face at an odd angle, decomposing it in a way that would surely have horrified the woman had she been aware of it, opined the pitiless Danae.

Livia had decided ten years earlier that she didn’t give a shit about what she would look like when she was old; old men, she reasoned, were no treat to look at either. She imagined that, when old men got randy, they often had recourse to old women. Livia wasn’t worried about it. Livia, therefore, had been unaffected by the woman’s face, by the strange light. She’d contemplated both with a purely clinical interest.

But Danae had stared at the woman, at the light, with an intensity that had embarrassed her sister almost to the point of a reprimand.  An intensity not un-tempered by disgust. After several minutes of Danae’s intense staring, the woman had changed the position of her head and the fold and wrinkles had disappeared. You wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow if she’d told you she was thirty. But Danae had seen what she had seen. And she had seen her own face like that. Danae was obsessive about not letting herself become complacent in her beauty. That was why she had come to New York to do what she had come to do. There were certain lights under which she (and anyone else) would swear she was twenty, rehearsing La Dame aux Camélias, flirting with Bretton, not even using moisturizer yet. That was under certain, favorable lights.

To flatter a face, Danae had informed her sister, stirring low-fat Half-and-Half into a third cup of coffee, a light must hit it directly, without beating around the bush; Danae had deduced that the same was true for a spectator–in order to view you at your best, anyone who might be looking at you should look you directly in the face. After the obsessive afternoon on which she had made that discovery , Danae had endeavored never to allow Bretton to see her at a three-quarters’ angle. It had been challenging, but Danae was confident that she’d managed it, with the exception of one or two slip-ups, and even then, Bretton had probably not been paying attention.

The light in Danae’s bathroom was flourescent. Danae had chosen it herself. Whenever any friend asked to use the restroom to repair her makeup, Danae always directed her to the guest bathroom downstairs; she was tired of having to defend her choice of lighting.

The effect given by the flourescent light was an unfortunate one, even cruel. Flourescent lighting, Danae had explained to her sister, is definitely the worst, especially when placed above its subject, as was the case in Danae’s bathroom–the light was in the ceiling.  Danae, because of the bathroom light’s refusal to pardon even the vague tiredness occasioned by a late night, could be scrupulously vigilant, could spot the beginnings of any fold or crease, however incipient. Danae, thanks to her bathroom light, would catch any suspicious sagging beneath her lovely eyes, or along the perfectly sculpted line of her jaw, and could thus do something about the problem before anyone else had even noticed its existence.

Besides, Danae had announced to her sister, that woman, the one seated at the window table, had never been beautiful. It was obvious. Attractive, yes; beautiful, no. Oh, it was probable that she still occasioned desire in the members of men of her age, or perhaps a bit older…she still had a ways to go before her possibilities would be all used up.

Danae had dwelt on the stranger’s possibilities while the woman stood and gathered her belongings, preparing to leave.  Possibilities for getting a man, of course, or for keeping him if she already had one–what other kind were there for a woman, really? Once masculine approval, desire, stopped coming your way, you stopped existing, for other women as well as for the men who didn’t desire you any more. Danae didn’t know which was worse; she’d sighed as she extracted a cigarette from the nearly-full packet in front of her on the table (she, as did her sister, parsimoniously rationed cigarettes to herself–no more than three a day). Then she’d put the cigarette back–she wouldn’t waste one of her precious three on such a worn-out topic as aging; they were much more delicious after a meal.

That was the worst part of the whole thing, the betrayal of other women, Danae had said, through her sigh, their exclusion of the ones who are no longer desirable. “Maybe”, Danae had mused, “it’s because they make the rest of us uncomfortable. Maybe it even scares us. No one wants to meet an old woman’s eyes.”

Livia had had to concede that her sister was right. No woman wanted to be forced to divine her future in the folds of tired skin pleated about those eyes, making them small, however large they may once have been, closing them. They all want to deny the sadnesses which have occasioned the cruelly etched rictus of the mouth, a mouth which, like theirs, had been, in its moment, full, moist, like fruit sprinkled with dew.

But Danae–she’d stood, abruptly, banging her thigh against the table–was doing something about all that. Her appointment was at three.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

The post Bad, Bad Love Has a Sell-By Date appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Strange things, Bad, Bad Lovers, strange things are happening in installment XXV. Maybe certain things you thought were finished up and done with…umm…aren’t. If you’re a recent arrival, you can take yourself all the way back to the Beginning Of It All by clicking right here.

Oh, and NB: Pay-phones are a Thing in what follows. If you’ve never seen one before, ask your grandmother. And yes, I know a lily is not a gardenia, but I no longer live in the land of gardenias–gotta work with what you got.

~

The Scent of A Woman (is that gardenia?)

A firm hand was shaking her shoulder. Livia resisted; she was asleep, the hand was bothering her. She tried to brush it away, the Valium and the bourbon had a powerful pull, but the hand insisted.

“Miss…” More shaking. “Ma’am…” Livia was at the age when neither of the two respectful terms of address seemed entirely appropriate; the steward appeared to have settled on “Miss” as the more diplomatic choice. “We’re in New Orleans, Miss, wake up…”

Livia mumbled a thank you, and the shaking stopped. When she opened her eyes, the steward was already a good distance away, moving briskly up the aisle. She managed a slow stretch of her limbs while still seated. She would wait a few more minutes before removing the clumsy black canvas bag from the overhead compartment; a long line of passengers still had to pass her seat. She looked out the window, the tiny, ship-like porthole which separated the safe cocoon of the plane’s interior from her difficult weekend. From Danae and Bretton. From the laudanum. From Wanda’s package.

It was sunny. The men occupied in discharging the plane’s belly of its cargo wore tank tops. She would change into the black cotton trousers; Livia thought there might also be a black tank top in her bag.

As she waited, memories of the previous night, that morning, made her straighten her spine. The roses, the chocolate, the strange, lovely aromas in her apartment. Livia raised a cautious hand to the hollow at the base of her throat, where a kiss had connected another soul to hers. She waited for her fingertip to sizzle. But the skin was smooth and cool. She even had difficulty locating a pulse point. The Valium, theorized Livia.

The line was much shorter now. Livia stretched her long arms, prepared to open the overhead compartment and extract her bag. She must have stood up too quickly. Lightheaded, Livia steadied herself, breathed deeply. Then inhaled again, a much sharper intake of air than had been the first breath. Deliberate this time. Yes, there it was. A faint but most definite scent of gardenias had reached Livia’s highly trained nose.

The back of the aircraft was empty; there was only the steward who had woken her some minutes earlier, collecting the compact, dark blue pillows used by some of her fellow passengers (midnight-blue, like the rice paper she wrapped around her chocolate tarts. Livia, perturbed, felt a vague but most definite throbbing in the shadowy hollow at the base of her throat). She waited, engaging her hands in the ostensible task of opening the overhead compartment, until she caught sight of the front of the steward’s uniform. There was no gardenia.

She breathed in again as she extracted her bag from the compartment. Definitely gardenia. But she seemed to be the only person, besides the steward, left in the plane. She would dwell no further on the gardenias. Livia shouldered her bag and began to traverse the length of the aisle toward the front door of the aircraft. As she did so, the scent increased in intensity.

Some ten feet ahead, a woman walked in the direction of the exit. Her steps were short, decisive. Livia wondered how the woman had escaped her attention earlier. The front of an aircraft usually emptied before the back, and the woman was in front of Livia. She must, therefore, have been seated in the front of the aircraft throughout the flight, possibly in first class. Livia, though, was certain that she would have remembered seeing the woman as she entered the plane; she had an infallible memory for faces. The woman must have been the very last passenger to board, because she herself had been among the last.

The woman wore a well-made lilac suit, redolent of costliness. Both jacket and skirt hugged the generous but perfectly proportioned curves of the woman’s body snugly, like a glove tailor-made to fit a hand. The skirt had a discreet slit in the back and reached to just above the woman’s knees. Her collar-length hair was stylishly coiffed, dark, almost black, but with warm chestnut lights made warmer by the contrast with the lilac color of a small pillbox hat. The hat was tilted, Livia judged, somewhat forward; perhaps the front of the hat reached the base of its wearer’s hairline.

Livia’s steps were longer, freer, than the woman’s short ones. She overtook her and would have passed her, had it not been for the narrowness of the aisle. Livia’s nostrils quivered–the gardenias again. The woman must be wearing gardenias, maybe a corsage.  How quaint, a corsage; it had been a long time since she had seen anyone wearing a corsage. She associated them with grandmas.

Livia and the woman had reached the exit. The woman murmured something, perhaps a thank-you, to the steward, and stopped a few feet further on. Livia saw her open a small, squarish handbag–patent leather–and extract a pair of white gloves from inside. Livia couldn’t see the woman’s face; it was bent over the open handbag, and she was wearing an overlarge pair of very black sunglasses.  But she saw the gardenias, waxy and creamy, like whipped Chantilly against the secretive green leaves. The woman wore her gardenias pinned on the left lapel of her lilac suit.

The humid heat of the Louisiana afternoon invaded even the air-conditioned passageway that led into the terminal.  Livia’s legs sweated inside the leather pants; she would definitely change. When she emerged from the restroom, she saw the woman in the lilac suit again.  She was making a telephone call from one of the pay phones just to the side of the rental car desks. She still wore the sunglasses, and her face was turned toward the telephone, away from the noise and confusion of the airport; her conversation must be private. Livia noticed, as she passed her, that the woman was quite short, despite her high heels. The heels were spiked. The toes were pointed, the cut of the pumps low. They were dyed lilac to match the suit.

It was strange, mused Livia, as she waited for the harassed car rental attendant’s attention, that there had been no luggage next to the woman’s lilac-shod feet; perhaps she hadn’t collected it yet. But the baggage collection area was near the place where they had exited the plane. Then Livia smiled to herself; she was perfectly aware of the game she played.  While her brain was occupied with the eccentricities of the woman in the lilac suit, there would be no room for Danae, or the laudanum.

Which were a waste of mental energy anyway–Danae was beyond thoughts. The day of her fortieth birthday loomed less than twenty-four hours in the future. The contents of Wanda’s package represented the only force which might still bring something wonderful (or at least irrevocable) into Danae’s world before the midnight she had pinpointed as the end of the time during which she would wait for happiness to find her.

Livia smelled the gardenias for the first few of the frustrating minutes during which she made arrangements for a car. Halfway through the unnecessarily complicated process, she forgot about them. When she passed the pay phones on her way to the parking lot, the woman was gone.

 ~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

The post Bad, Bad Love Had a Favorite Fragrant Flower appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

It’s been a minute. But we’re back, Bad, Bad Lovers, with a new installment. XXIV. And it’s a sad one; doesn’t feel right to make comic chit-chat as an aperitif, so let’s just serve it up. Perhaps best savored if you heat up number XXIII and have a little of that first. And if you’re a recent arrival, you can take yourself all the way back to the Beginning Of It All by clicking right here.

~

Apotheosis

Marta’s absence was palpable.  Even the house seemed to acknowledge it. At the breakfast table, only phrases absolutely necessary to passing, handing, and pouring were exchanged, and even those parsimonious articulations were made in hushed, almost reverent tones. No one said it, but they all knew. Marta had left.

As soon as breakfast was over, without a word as to her intentions, Aunt Cornelia marched up the stairs, followed by Pearl, Livia and Danae. Her sister’s face was a bilious, uncertain yellow; Livia was afraid she might throw up.

Cornelia opened Marta’s bedroom door with more decision and authority than anyone recalled ever having seen her display, only to find the sheets rumpled in exactly the same patterns they’d manifested the day before–she had surreptitiously visited her niece’s bedroom each morning for the duration of her stay, and had registered that Marta never made her bed. Cornelia then announced, unnecessarily in Livia’s opinion, that it looked like Marta had cut and run, confirming her deduction with an examination of the empty chest of drawers, which Marta had not even bothered to close. Cornelia, outraged at the sight of so much bare, vulnerable wood (the insides of the drawers were much paler than the outsides), slammed them shut. “She might as well have marched stark naked out the front door right before our very eyes.” Cornelia sent her own birdy little eyes around the group in search of some solidarity, but everyone else was looking at the floor.

Livia took the news in silence and, after a deferential minute or two, excused herself politely from her aunts’ presence, as though she were leaving the table, and slowly climbed the stairs to her room. She stopped on the third floor landing and held her breath.  She could hear Cornelia’s self-important tread descending the stairs, followed by Pearl’s lighter, more irregular footfalls. They only went into the parlor together when a serious conferral was in order. She wouldn’t be observed if she returned to Marta’s room. But she continued toward her own door; she could look at her mother’s empty room later.

Once inside, she closed the door carefully behind her and approached the mirror above her dressing table. The face that stared out at her was definitely her own, but the features were somehow sharper, more severely drawn; something had happened to the eyes.

~

Cornelia, Danae, and Livia were finishing their supper, the leftovers from Cornelia’s dinner. They ate in the kitchen. It didn’t seem right to eat in the dining room any more. Livia noticed that Danae was wearing makeup, a fact on which neither Pearl nor Cornelia commented. The food was not as delicious as it had been the night before.

Just as Pearl was asking, halfheartedly, if anybody would like some peach cobbler (“anybody”, yesterday, would have meant Marta, too), there was a loud knock at the front door. Pearl went, since she was already up. No one said anything during the several minutes Pearl was away. Livia couldn’t hear any voices; Pearl had stepped out onto the porch, the screen door clacking shut behind her.

When Pearl returned, her pumpkin face was pale and there were tears in her eyes. That had been the sheriff. A bus accident earlier that afternoon. The bus had been heading to New Orleans. Marta had been thrown from the bus, thrown an inexplicably long distance, into a field beside the road where the bus had turned over.  Marta’s neck had been broken, instantly, the sheriff said.  Necks were always broken instantly. Marta hadn’t felt a thing. Marta had been the only passenger killed in the accident.

Cornelia, her face a sickly white, went straight to her room.

Pearl cried. She cried, and she cried. She cried while they washed the supper dishes, while they dried them, while they put them away. Danae and Livia kept a shocked silence. After they finished the dishes, Pearl, Livia, and Danae sat back down in their accustomed chairs at the table.  Aunt Pearl wordlessly offered Livia and Danae each a glass of mulberry wine. Between the three of them, they drank the bottle.

~

“Only thirty four years old.”

At the funeral home in Baton Rouge, Livia and Danae learned how old their mother was. Pearl hadn’t said it. It had been the priest.

Father Clanning had come to comfort the family, to be with them, to represent God’s presence while they took their leave of the loved one. Priests did that, Pearl had explained when Livia asked, with a vehemence that mildly surprised her great-aunt, what he was doing there.

“Only thirty-four years old.  Such a waste.”

Father Clanning shook his head sadly. “Such a pity.” He said nothing about the fact that Marta had died in a bus accident, or that the bus had been heading for New Orleans. Pearl was grateful for his discretion. Livia wouldn’t look at him.

But she looked at Marta. Danae and Livia stood side by side, Danae, suddenly the youngest, clutching her sister’s hand. Marta’s eyes were closed, but it looked as though they might flutter open at any moment. Her hair was natural (Pearl had had a serious discussion with the undertaker over the phone early that morning), and she was dressed in an elegant dress, dark blue, that neither Livia nor Danae had seen before. Marta was breathtaking, perfect. Marta didn’t have possibilities any more, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t need them. Marta was dead.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

The post Bad, Bad Love Exits Stage Left appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

The moment is here. The one where you know, in your gut, that something very, very bad is about to happen. It’s just that you don’t know what the Bad Thing is, and so you couldn’t stop it even if you wanted to, but you know it’s coming. They are all assembled–Pearl, Cornelia, Danae, Livia; the tipsy Marta and the drunk priest. There is silverware, and linen, and crystal, and more mulberry wine, a whole bunch more. A nice breeze has kicked up, to flirt with the curtains and chase off some of the humidity. It looks like a nice dinner. But we know better, Bad, Bad Lovers, we do, we do… and we’ve seen breezes cause trouble before. But it won’t happen all at once–remember: slow burn. And with that admonishment, herewith, Installment XXIII (finally, finally, we’re about to get some food on the table) of The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen).

Stop picking at the cornbread. We can all see you, and you won’t have any room left for this fancy feast Aunt Pearl has slaved over all the livelong day. Refill your glass, that’s fine. Fill it right on up, there’s more where that came from (Pearl and Cornelia have a big cellar). And if you need a little refresher before the wine takes hold of you completely, you can sneak off back to the Beginning of it All by clicking right here.

~

Aunt Cornelia bustled into the velvety dusk of the hallway. She was wearing the dress she reserved for Sundays, and parties, though she hadn’t been to a party in more than a decade. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright. Livia wondered if she might have a fever. She had done her hair differently–the severe, uncompromising bun had loosened. Tendrils curled at her temples, winding around the too-large ears. It seemed as though the hallway had somehow swallowed up the years and the bitterness that made Cornelia stoop. Her hair looked brown instead of gray in the early nighttime, fitful light from somewhere picking up highlights and making it shine. Cornelia looked young, vibrant, and Livia knew that it had something to do with the priest–and maybe with the undercurrent of excitement that laced through her mother’s voice as she spoke in low tones out on the front porch.

“What y’all doin’ sittin’ there like bumps on a log?”

Cornelia’s voice was too loud and shrill in the half dark. Livia was afraid their mother would hear.

“I declare…come on in here and help Pearl…she’s doin’ this all by herself…”

Livia and Danae (the latter with a roll of her eyes) followed Cornelia down the hallway to the kitchen. The two figures on the front porch did not change position; not a stitch was dropped from their conversation—she hadn’t heard them after all.

~

Out on the porch, the cooling darkness received the clear, crystalline sound of two glasses clinking into its velvety depths and turned it back into silence before anyone heard. The darkness, and only the darkness, witnessed the conspiratorial glance exchanged as the sound was made. Then Marta and Father Clanning tipped their heads back in unison and drained the last drops of mulberry wine from their glasses.

The bottle was empty.  Marta shoved it carelessly under her chair, along with the glasses. They couldn’t show up at the table with wine glasses in their hands, Cornelia would have a fit… Father Clanning smirked and laughed, a stronger, more vibrant sound than he had made before; he felt more comfortable with the lioness now, or maybe it was the wine gone to his head. He hunched his shoulders like a guilty school boy and followed Marta into the darkened hallway.

~

The dining room was long and narrow, a space that almost exactly contained the heavy oak table with its ornately carved legs that terminated in clawed feet. Covering the length of it was a white linen tablecloth, onto which had been laid every eating utensil and serving implement imaginable. The floor-to-ceiling windows were open, but shielded by leafy branches layered so thick by the years that barely any breeze made it through.

The tablecloth glowed strangely and Father Clanning’s eyes had difficulty distinguishing one place setting from another, the cutlery swimming together, dancing like a picket fence when you drive past it fast in a car. He hoped his rusty table etiquette would pass Cornelia’s undoubtedly difficult scrutiny. After all, he was her guest. Marta could eat with her fingers, or even sink her lovely face into the mounds of succulent food on her plate and no one would say a word. Even after decades of not thinking about women in the way he had begun to think drunkenly about Marta, Father Clanning knew that. Marta could do whatever she liked, and no one would lift a finger to stop her.  More probably, though, she would simply eat with the same fork, the same knife, throughout the entire meal, not giving a fig for etiquette. She would be conscious of her victory–Father Clanning had drunk wine on the porch with her for an hour before setting foot into the house; he was going to give her money so that she could leave. She might even stare a contemptuous challenge into Cornelia’s cataractic eyes if caught licking her knife or not cutting her meat into small enough pieces, and then keep right on doing whatever it was that offended Cornelia. She was leaving anyway.

Livia stood at the corner of the table closest to the door. Dressed in olive green, she was a somber, discordant note against her sister’s brilliant blue, against her mother’s beauty and the priest’s flamboyant drunkenness, amid the brilliant riot of flowers in window boxes, on the table, on the commode at the back of the room, where even more serving utensils awaited summons.

Livia stared gravely back at the befuddled priest; her blue eyes looked black. Danae was already seated, and the priest’s questioning gaze fell next on her. Marta’s bright voice, in answer to Father Clanning’s incredulous stare, raised eyebrows. Marta’s head tilted back, her lips opening like a split plum around the words,

“These are my daughters.”

Father Clanning was astonished, and intrigued. He had difficulty imagining wonderful, strange Marta as anyone’s mother.

Cornelia was seated herself ceremoniously at the head of the table, trying not to look at the two unopened bottles of mulberry wine.  Pearl had put them at the center, but Cornelia had picked them up and moved them as far away from her place as she could. The sheer white curtains moved guiltily back and forth in the leftovers of the early breeze, as though Cornelia had invoked their support in her indignation over the offending bottles, and they were undecided about whether or not to give it. Crystal wine goblets stood beside every place except Cornelia’s, including Danae’s and Livia’s. Danae’s eyebrows rose, her smile a grown-up’s.

Livia was probably the only one who remembered much about the dinner. Cornelia, offended, had walked out of the dining room, up the stairs, and into her bedroom halfway through it (they had heard her shut the door). She had not come back down. Even Danae had been drunk, and had had to be escorted to the bathroom, and then put to bed, by Pearl.

But that had happened later. Much later.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

The post Bad, Bad Love Sits Down to Supper appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.