Daughter

[Izabella]

I’m holding my mother’s hand. My uncles and aunts are arrayed behind me, but Jamie is nowhere to be seen. We’re standing outside Coombs’ Funeral Home on the Beach Road, next to the breakwater. The wind smells like salt and fish and life. Uncle Eddie steps sombrely in front of us and opens the door, then steps back to allow my mother and I first entry into the nightmare inside. The second I enter, I know there is no going back, and for a moment I’m frantic, wishing I’d stayed away from this rabbit hole, this trap. The lights inside are dim and the décor is dark; no signs of life are permitted within these walls, except, of course, for the carnations. I smell them the instant the door opens, and the scent turns my stomach. I have attended many funerals in my life, and this odour, hanging heavy in the air, is the smell of death. I think of what my cousin Peter told me at Grand Auntie’s funeral when I was ten, that the flowers are placed around the casket to drown the stink of a rotting corpse. My throat closes up and I take deep breaths, afraid I’ll vomit right there on the floor. My mother squeezes my hand and guides me towards the archway and into the main sitting area. At the front of the room, my father is laying on a velvet cushion, his hands folded over his chest, surrounded by wreaths of carnations.

~*~

My sister came to live with us when I was 16 and she was 13. Up until six days before she arrived, I had no idea that she even existed. The whole town was buzzing about a new scandal, something wonderfully tragic. Jamie’s mother had gone through a profusion of boyfriends after my father left her, and Jamie, of course, had hated them all. They were lounge lizards, walking clichés with cigarettes hanging from their lower lips and hair heavy with brill crème. The last one, Brendon, had gotten drunk and beaten Jamie’s mother until she was unconscious, until she choked on her own blood and died on the kitchen floor. Even now I try to imagine what it was like for her, a 13-year-old girl returning home to find her mother bloody and lifeless. It’s really no wonder that Jamie hated our father as much as she did.

~*~

We’re standing over the coffin, looking down at him. Everyone, at every funeral home, always says that the corpse “looks just like himself.” This thing looks nothing like my father. His five o’clock shadow is gone; his skin is cold and pale, almost hidden under layers of fragrant make-up; his jeans are replaced with what he called his “weddings-and-funerals suit.” He does not look like he’s sleeping, he looks like he’s dead. I wonder why we insist on this parody of life; perhaps it would be better simply to bury him instead of embarrassing him like this. My mother is perched on the kneeler before the coffin, crying quietly. My own eyes leak salty tears, but I don’t offer a prayer begging for comfort, or for the deliverance of his soul. What is done is done, and I can’t change the way he lived his life. Instead, I pray for what he has left behind. I pray for my mother, and Jamie, and for myself. I pray for this absurd trinity; I pray that he hasn’t ruined us.

~*~

My mother and I spent the entire week preparing the spare room for my new little sister. As it turns out, Mom had known about Jamie since her birth, and she and my father had been funnelling court-appointed money to her every month. No one in our town knew that Lloyd Coffee was Jamie’s father; I’m not sure that Jamie even knew until her mother died. As soon as he showed up on her uncle’s doorstep, however, the entire town knew my father’s shame and my mother’s misfortune. But we never saw her that way. I can still remember the first time I laid eyes on her, walking through the door behind my dad, clutching an Adidas backpack that contained most of her belongings. She was thin and pale, almost wraithlike. She looked as though she belonged to another world, one of famine, disappointment, desperation. Any animosity I had towards this usurper of my father’s affection disappeared in that moment. I pitied her. She was alone.

She didn’t say a word to any of us for almost a week. My father insisted that she was in shock, but I could tell my mother thought differently. In Jamie’s mind, she was living with enemies, with the man who was responsible for her life and her mother’s death. My father had not wanted to take her on in the first place. He was content to let her live with her uncle. My mother shamed him into accepting responsibility. “You’d do this to your own little girl?” I heard her shouting the night after Jamie’s mother died. “Thank God I married you before Ally came along, that’s all I can say. You’d have left her high and dry just as fast, would you?”

“Ah, Pearly. Y’ know I wouldn’t.” I recognized this tone; the one he used when he felt guilty about something. It was the same one I had heard the day he refused to buy me the guitar he had promised me; the time he hadn’t shown up to the school play that I starred in; the time he had forgotten my birthday. Guilty, but not repentant.

“By Jesus, Lloyd. That little girl got nowhere else to go. She’s not going living with that uncle of hers in his little shack; God knows what a bachelor fella like that would do to her. You march yourself over there tomorrow and you collect that child, or so help me God Lloyd, I’ll do it myself, you just see if I don’t.”

“Ah Pearl. The whole town’ll know. Do you want dem oul’ bitches mutterin about you behind your back?”

“Hah. We still got to pay that child support, don’t we? Just wait until her uncle figures that out. There won’t be a man, woman, or child in this town who don’t know you’re that girl’s father. And he’ll drink every penny we gives her, you knows that as well as I do. Don’t have me to do this myself, Lloyd. Spare me that much, at least. Now, no more talk. You’ll get that girl as soon as the wake is over.”

And that’s exactly what he did.

~*~

The visiting hours for the wake have begun, and I’m surrounded by family and friends, well-wishers and mourners, and those who have come for the free coffee and biscuits. My mother is sitting in the high-backed chair by the casket, the one reserved for widows. She looks very old and thin, as though she is being stretched too far. Like his daughters, my mother has put up with a lot from my father; perhaps his dying was the last straw for her. Jamie is still nowhere to be seen. People have been asking after her since this morning, exchanging knowing looks when I say, “She’s not here yet. She’ll be along shortly.” They’re all wondering if she’ll come. These are the same people who delighted in her misery ten years ago; this is the same town with the same small minds. They would love to see her fall, if only to distract them from their own disappointments, if only to have someone to look down on, someone worse-off than them.

I reach over to pat my mother’s hands, which are gnarled with arthritis. “I’m going upstairs to have a cigarette, mom. Do you want a cup of tea?” She shakes her head and smiles, her eyes darting past my shoulder to the door. “Do you think she got held up on the highway? Maybe the roads are bad.” Her voice is shaky, and for a moment I’m irritated at Jamie for making mom worry this way.

“I’ll call her cell phone and see where she is. She was probably just late getting out of class. You know how she is about that. Never misses a lecture, that one.”

Mom smiles and I squeeze her hand once more before leaving the wake room and climbing the stairs to the kitchen.

~*~

Jamie did not adjust well, or so our school counsellor said. She was an object of gossip for most of her high school career. Those years are hard enough without the distinction of being the illegitimate daughter of a butchered woman and a married man. Everyone knew her story, and they all pitied her. She hated it.

A year or so after she came to live with us, I began my senior year of high school. By April, prom madness had swallowed me whole. The thought of leaving that little town with all its little people was enough to make me jump for joy. I would be something great; I would be successful, and I would give that success, that luck to my little sister. Things are so much easier when someone else has gone before. The fear of getting lost evaporates when you have a path to follow through the woods.

One evening in May Jamie and I sat at the dinner table looking over University brochures. My father, irritated with our excited chatter, looked up from his meal with a foul look on his face. “Make all the plans you wants to, Ally, but I ain’t got the money for that and you knows it.”

“It’s ok, dad. I can get a job and government loans. You won’t have to pay a cent.”

He snorted and went back to his pea soup. But Jamie wasn’t satisfied.

“You know,” she said, staring straight at him, “when I was little my mom always used to tell me that she wanted to be a teacher. She said that she was really smart in high school and all her teachers said that she should go to University. But then she had me and she couldn’t afford to go. She said it was too expensive to live in town with a little girl. She said she wouldn’t have been able to afford daycare, so she had to stay home and get her cousin Ginny to look after me when she had to work. Isn’t that sad, Lloyd?”

Both my mother and I were as tense as cats ready to spring. Jamie had been doing this since she arrived, baiting him constantly. I still don’t know exactly what she wanted from him, perhaps some sort of emotion, some sort of reaction. Perhaps she wanted to know that he really was sorry for what he had done to her, to her mother. Perhaps she just wanted to hurt him.

He looked up at her again, his face grim. His hand clutched his spoon tightly so that his knuckles turned white and his arm shook. They stared at each other, father at daughter, the same angry eyes, the same stubborn will. Finally, my father dropped his gaze back to his soup, to the dough ball that had gone soggy in his bowl. Jamie made a sound in her throat, a noise that reeked of derision, of frustration, and pushed her chair out from the table. As she disappeared up the stairs, I knew with a sickening finality that she would never get what she wanted from our father; he would never feel remorse.

~*~

I’m standing in the smoking room, staring out over the water as it laps against the shore. I reach into my purse, fumbling for my cell phone, but a voice behind me halts my search. When I turn, Jamie is standing in the doorway dressed in a black pinstripe business suit, her weddings-and-funerals suit. She looks tired, but she is smiling. I don’t say anything because I have no idea what to say. Instead, I just hug her. No matter what, no matter what she says or does, she is always my sister. She is thinner than I remember, and she smells of coffee and the orange-scented air freshener she keeps in her car. “It’s about time, James. Have you seen mom.” She nods.

“I got stuck on the highway.” She says quietly. “The roads are nastier than they look today.” I can hear the lie in her voice, but I don’t say anything. Neither one of us has inherited our father’s gift for falsehoods.

Our reunion is interrupted by Aunt Rita scrambling up the stairs. “Girls, the prayer service is about to start. Hurry, hurry!”

I take Jamie’s hand and lead her down the stairs, leaving her with no opportunity of escape. When we enter the wake room, however, I am drawn to my mother’s side, losing my sister in the crowd around the coffin. My mother is shaking, and as soon as Father Roache begins to sing “Amazing Grace” she lapses into deep sobs that make her entire body tremble. I’ve never seen her like this before. I’m afraid she’ll have a heart attack and I’ll have to bury both parents instead of one. I stare at my father, lying cold in the coffin, and I wonder if God really does exist. If He does, is my father with Him, or with some other? I shiver and close my eyes and hug my mother and wish my life were different.

When it is all over, when the Priest has gone upstairs for tea and cookies, when my mother is surrounded by a cluster of Aunts wielding Kleenex and cold cloths, I go in search of my sister. She is in the family room, a small cubbyhole designated for immediate family who don’t wish their grief to be a public affair. She is sitting in a plush chair, her back to me. I hurry into the room and close the door behind me. I rush to sit with her on the ataman before her chair, to provide comfort, to ease her tears, to finally see her cry.

She is shaking. Shaking and holding her stomach, laughing hysterically, silently, until the salty tears run down her cheeks and splash on her pinstripe suit.

[Valdar and Astralis]

Yay! you posted!

 

You paint a very vivid, if sad picture. Jumping back and forth between past and present presents a somewhat confused state of mind with enough background to make the whole thing cohesive.

[WrenWind]

Well Done.

[Katzaniel]

I loved it.

 

It made me immensely interested in the family and the background that you presented, and it made me cry (at least tearful) at the sad spots. I got very wrapped up in the story and although I did get a little confused trying to piece together everyone's relations to each other at first, I don't think it detracted from the piece. For example, in the first section I was trying to figure out how old all these people were supposed to be, and then whose funeral it was, and then how he had died. But it made me want to keep reading.

 

I also like your style of prose. I can't think of a proper way to describe what I like about it. I feel a sort of intimacy with the protagonist at the same time the writing seems detached... whatever it is, I liked it.

 

I look forward to reading more from you.

[Wyvern]

This was a nice story, Enitharmon, thank you for sharing it. I particularly liked your excellent uses of significant and original details throughout the piece, as small details such as Jamie's smelling like "coffee and the orange-scented air freshener she keeps in her car" really helped keep the story vivid. Jamie's ambivalent final reaction in the piece was also powerful, as it demonstrated her conflicting emotions very well.

 

One thing that I didn't like as much about this piece was the favoring of telling over showing in it, as I felt that the extensive uses of telling detracted from the excellent details at times. To improve upon this, you might want to show more of the details and allow the reader to determine what they signify rather than telling them what the details are there for. For example, in the afforementioned sentence, where Jamie "smells of coffee and the orange-scented air freshner she keeps in her car," you might want to show the readers that Jamie keeps a freshner in the car rather than telling them, or perhaps drop the reference to the car altogether. Another example of a moment of telling is when the narrator looks over the coffin of the father, and notes "He does not look like he’s sleeping, he looks like he’s dead." Rather than telling the reader how the father looks, you could show it to them through the details of his appearence and let them reach the conclusion of how he looks themselves.

 

Once again, I think that this is a nice story... but personally, I also think that it could be made much more powerful if you used more showing and less telling. Just my -50 cents...

[Katzaniel]

I don't know, Wyvern. I think that at least in the two examples you gave, "telling" gave a much more vivid imagery, because it lets you see how the protagonist views it. The air-freshener is a detail, but it pops into his mind because he probably associates Jamie with that smell, and if were mentioned simply as something that's in her car, we lose the whole sense of the smell and its importance. Also, the description of the body. Perhaps "showing" wouldn't hurt, but I wouldn't delete or alter the line you mentioned for anything, because it shows exactly what it means. I felt the same way looking at my grandfather - why does he look so different from real life? Why do they have to put him in a suit, and put makeup on his face to make him look "real"? When the protagonist notes that he looks dead, it conveys more to me than a whole paragraph on the subject could have done, because it would have to compare past and present descriptions and get into gritty detail that really isn't needed.

 

Then again, I have a bad habit of not describing settings at all, so I might not be the best reference on the subject..

[Regel]

Dear Enitharmon,

 

Congratulations on your first post. It made a huge impression on me. To this day Lillies and heavy floral aromas make me seriously ill. What a powerful piece.

This is a very eclectic group that you have walked in on. Each story we post exposes a little bit about ourselves. It may not be all that comfortable at first but believe me it does get easier. I quite enjoyed your work. Welcome to the pen.

[Izabella]

Thanks a lot for the input, you guys. I really appreciate it.

 

This was actually a piece I did for Creative Writing 3900; it was my mid-term. The comments I got there were pretty much the same as the ones I got here, so now I know what I need to alter, which is fabulous.

 

I think the "he looks like he's dead part" is staying, though. The class liked it and, more importantly, I like it. I wanted to make Ally seem a little cynical, and also show a little of how she feels. I wasn't really trying to describe her father in that sentence; I was trying to describe her.

 

Thanks a lot, guys.

 

Take it easy.