Time for Sweet XIX! The nineteenth episode, that is, of our most delectable, crunchy-on-the-out-side-and-tender-within, serialized novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen). Livia’s still up in the air, the Valium and the bourbon are still mixing fumes, and the grocery list she’s scribbling on the back of her airline cocktail napkin is well nigh illegible. So she just lets the memories take her. Like we all would, and do… a longish flight, you’re a little high, somehow you got the whole row to yourself…
And it’s so easy to find yourself Right. Back. There.
Where Major $**t went down. Major $**t that, whether you knew it or not at the time, would dictate the way your life turned out, right down to the kind of gravy you like on your chicken. If you eat chicken (I do not). $**t you took with you everywhere, and I do mean everywhere, whether you wanted to or not. $**t you’re still hauling all over the place, stuffed into your overweight baggage, it’s a wonder they didn’t charge you extra at check-in.
Livia, like you, and like me, has a $**t-ton of baggage. And over the next few episodes, you get to see what she’s been dragging around…
If you’d like a bite to eat before we proceed to the unpacking, and maybe you want to wet your whistle too, this here link will take you right back to the pre-dinner drinks. Hint: you might want to make yourself a strong one…
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Dinner Then, Dinner Now
Peach schnapps. What was wrong with her? She’d almost forgotten the peach schnapps. Livia added it hurriedly, as though she might forget it all over again, to the cocktail-napkin shopping list. Her handwriting was a mess. She was scattered, distracted. The Valium, and the bourbon. And the memories, hovering like guests who’d arrived early to a dinner party, waiting politely to be acknowledged. She took another sip. She might as well let them in. She might have known Danae’s fortieth birthday dinner would summon up that other dinner, twenty-five years earlier.
Although no one had known it at the time, that dinner had immediately preceded Marta’s apotheosis. Her graceful exit from the stage of her life, grown dusty, jumbled with piles of rickety furniture that needed repairing, even replacing.
But no one ever spoke of the stage once she’d left it. Marta’s graceful exit, when it happened, the hauntingly lovely apotheosis, had made everyone forget about Marta’s rapidly diminishing possibilities.
~
While they lived with the aunts, it had seemed to Livia that her sister was just biding her time, waiting for the right moment to come along. The moment when Danae would show the world what she was made of (Danae would know it when it got there, and when it did, she’d leave). According to Danae, life’s possibilities were infinite, and Livia agreed, especially when she listened to Danae talk about them while they lay in hammocks on the back porch, while the moon climbed up to the top of a dead oak just behind Pearl’s vegetable garden.
Because the oak had no leaves, even in summer, you could see the whole moon through the strangely shaped gaps between the branches. Danae ran lovingly over the litany of her possibilities while the grass was silver, while the bushes wore black velvet robes. Movies, plays, New Orleans, Los Angeles. She would marry a producer. The producer would make her famous. Danae was beautiful.
Livia and Danae talked about possibilities (mostly Danae’s–Livia wasn’t convinced she had any, at least not of the sort her sister had) in whispers, so that their aunts wouldn’t overhear them. The aunts, Danae declared in her older-sister voice, full of confidence in the power of her already-heavy breasts, in her lips that were always moist like she had just finished eating a peach, didn’t have possibilities anymore.
That was why they lived together, that was why they didn’t have any children, and that was why Marta was going to leave, even before Danae did. Danae knew it, Livia should just wait and see.
~
Cornelia was the only member of the household who regularly attended church. Whenever she could convince them, she took Danae and Livia with her–there was an ice cream parlor on the corner, they would go as soon as services were over. Danae could have a new ribbon for her hair, any color she chose; Livia could have one, too. Livia always wondered if they could see it, if the sad-faced statues knew they’d been bribed. Or maybe those other people at church with their starched shirts and dresses, with their hats and gloves.
Livia wondered if they could see the ice cream and the ribbons in her face, or in Danae’s eyes, the wheedling promises with which Cornelia had coaxed them into the solemn space, cool even in summer, that smelled like funerals.
Cornelia had earned the shuffling priest’s esteem through her constant, regular production of knitted garments, sent by the church to New Orleans, where they would be sorted, and then given, along with other homemade offerings, to the Needy. Aunt Cornelia didn’t have the imagination or the curiosity to ask herself about the faces or hands or feet her scarves, socks, and mittens might eventually warm.
The Needy were simply a mass of indistinguishable faces and bodies, inadequately clothed, fed, and washed, to which she was (perhaps a bit self-righteously) happy and grateful not to belong. Father Clanning, a simple man whose accumulated years hovered somewhere between the last gasp of middle age and the beginning of the inevitable descent toward being old, did not analyze the motives or inner psychological machinations of his parishioners; he held Cornelia to be among the finest and most upright of Catholic women.
During one of the most memorable moments of Cornelia’s life, he very cordially accepted her long-rehearsed invitation to dine at her and Pearl’s table the third Thursday evening of the following month.
~
Another event, closely related in importance and sequence to Cornelia’s long-awaited dinner. The evening preceding Cornelia’s dinner, Marta had a date. She’d been invited to a cotillion at the Baton Rouge Country Club by a lawyer, a handsome lawyer with white teeth and a very square jaw, with whom she had been spending a noticeably large amount of her free time. Marta had fretted over her dress for the better part of a month before Pearl found the peach chiffon in the attic, but once she’d seen that, it all fell into place and she did nothing but smile.
The day before the cotillion, she had her hair done. Since they’d left the handsome man’s house in Biloxi, Marta never had her hair done. Both Livia and Danae were conscious that something momentous, even irrevocable, might happen that night.
Livia now knew that this event, Marta’s date, was (or would be) inextricably intertwined with the dinner being prepared for Cornelia’s priest. Whatever had happened at the cotillion (and after it) had influenced the tone Cornelia’s dinner had taken and had, irrevocably, dictated the course of events leading up to Marta’s apotheosis.
But that was all knowledge gleaned from hindsight, the most useless kind, the nearsighted Cornelia had often declared while seeming to enjoy some misfortune that had befallen someone else. And it was true, Livia was forced to acknowledge, at least in the case of Marta’s apotheosis. None of the wisdom she had gained since then (sometimes it felt like a lot, others like very little), none of it, would really do Marta any good now. But maybe it would help Danae.
~
On the night of the cotillion, Marta was perfect. Her hair looked almost black and her eyes were wide and bright. Gazelle, fawn. Venus. The lawyer had brought her a large bouquet of hothouse gardenias when he came to pick her up. Pearl’s gardenias, Livia thought, were a thousand times more lovely, more fragrant. She didn’t understand why the lawyer hadn’t saved himself some money and picked a bunch of gardenias off the bushes next to the back porch. Pearl certainly wouldn’t have minded.
Marta’s face was delicate and young against the billowy peach chiffon, her shoulders were bare, dusky shadows around the tops of her breasts. Marta was a prom-queen, a debutante, and her family, dressed as though they themselves were going to the cotillion, was seated and motionless in the salon, waiting to inspect her date. Aunt Pearl was even wearing shoes.
The lawyer’s eyes—although it must be said, again, that he was very handsome—were the color of weak tea. He would need glasses soon; he spent a lot of his time scrutinizing small print. The weak eyes gave him a vulnerable air, defenseless before Marta’s deadly beauty. He had a slight paunch. Livia noticed it, even though it was clear he was trying to suck it in; the paunch made her, for some reason, feel squeamish.
But the lawyer smiled and laughed and showed his white teeth as he produced red roses for the aunts and a box of candy for Danae and Livia. Filled chocolates; Livia didn’t like them because you never knew what flavor would spurt into your mouth when you bit one. Danae could have them all as far as she was concerned. Danae took the box of chocolates to her room.
But anybody could see that the man, Clive, was crazy about Marta. Pearl pronounced the verdict with satisfaction–for Pearl was truly capable of being happy about the good fortune of others–as soon as the front door clicked shut behind the departing couple. Marta, clearly, still had possibilities.
~
The day of Cornelia’s dinner, the morning after the cotillion, was inexplicably hot (suffocating, and it was only June). Marta had stayed home from work that day; she didn’t come down from her room until after lunch. When she did, she had barely a word for anyone. Only a terse good morning, well, good afternoon, to Pearl. She didn’t speak to Cornelia, or to Danae, both of whom were at the kitchen table finishing their lunch. She made coffee for herself and took it into the sitting room.
Livia was on the back porch reading. She didn’t feel like lunch; it was too hot. She had helped Pearl for most of the morning with the beginning stages of the dinner, but just before noon, Pearl had gently asked Livia to leave her alone for the rest of the process. This was a very important occasion, and she couldn’t afford to have anything, anything at all, be even the slightest bit off. Livia had been a bit hurt, but she supposed she understood.
Pearl had been in the kitchen all day, since the cool hours before breakfast, when the darkness was just deciding whether or not it should give way to the new day. Now she was completing the sauces and glazes, the part that separated the wheat from the chaff in cooking terms. The priest would be coming in a few hours. Livia wondered whether he’d be wearing his cassock. Maybe priests didn’t wear anything else.
~
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.
~
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