Baby girl. 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 cornbread. 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.
~
