Henry's Sisters. Cathy Lamb
opening paragraphs she graphically describes murdering her supercilious, condescending, snobby boss who makes her feel about the size of a slug and how his body ends up in a trash compactor, his legs spread like a pickled chicken, one shoe off, one red high heel squished on the other foot. That was the murderer’s calling card.
No one reports his extended absence, including his wife, because people hate him as they would hate a gang of worms in their coffee.
Janie was fired that day, even though she protested her innocence. That afternoon she sat down and wrote the rest of the story, nonstop, for three months. When she emerged from her apartment, she’d lost twenty pounds, was pale white, and muttering. At four months she had her first book contract. When the book was published, she sent it to her ex-boss. And wrote, “Thanks, dickhead! With love, Janie Bommarito,” on the inside cover.
It became a best-seller.
She became a recluse because she is obsessive and compulsive and needs to indulge all her odd habits privately.
The recluse had received a flowery lemon-smelling pink letter, too. So had Cecilia, whose brain connects with mine.
The rain splattered down on me, the wind twirly whirled, and I raised the Kahlúa bottle to my lips again. “I love Kahlúa,” I said out loud as I watched the water river down my body, creating a little pool in the area of my crotch where my legs crossed. I flicked the rain away with my hand, watched it pool again, flicked it. This entertained me for a while. Off in the distance I saw a streak of lightning, bright and dangerous.
It reminded me of the time when my sisters and I ran through a lightning storm to find Henry in a tree.
I laughed, even though that night had not been funny. It had been hideous. It had started with a pole dance and ended with squishy white walls.
I laughed again, head thrown back, until I cried, my hot tears running down my face off my chin, onto my boobs, and down my stomach. They landed in the pool between my legs and I flicked the rain and tear mixture away again. The tears kept coming and I could feel the darkness, darkness so familiar to me, edging its way back in like a liquid nightmare.
I did not want to deal with the pink letter that smelled of her flowery, lemony perfume.
2
S he was wielding a knife.
It had a black handle and a huge, jagged, twisty edge.
If evil was in a knife, this was evil incarnate.
She rotated it in front of my face, wearing a fixed, contemplative, detached expression. I whipped my head back, my breath catching.
“I think she’ll use this,” Janie said, poking it into the air. “This would do the job.”
I rolled my eyes and pushed past her into her houseboat, being careful to avoid the evil one.
“You need to smile when you come through my door, Isabelle.”
“I smiled.” I had not smiled. I wiped rain off my face.
“You did not.” My sister stood by the door, her arms crossed, that shining blade pointed toward her ceiling.
“I smiled in my heart, Janie. Behind the left ventricle.”
She tapped her foot four times.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this.” I stalked past her, opened the door, slammed it behind me, knocked four times. More rain dive-bombed down on my head. She opened it. She smiled.
I smiled with my teeth only, like a tiger in menopause, and sidled by her. She was playing a Vivaldi CD.
“Thank you,” Janie said. She patted her reddish hair, which was back in a bun.
Cecilia and I are protective of our younger sister, Janie, and her… quirks. As she said one time, “The whole planet does not need to know that I have to touch each one of my closet doors in the same place with the same amount of pressure before I go to bed each night and if I do the wrong amount of pressure on one door I have to do it again. And again. Sometimes a third time.” She’d let a little scream out and buried her face in her hands when she’d told me that one.
“What do you think of this knife, Isabelle?” she asked me.
Janie’s eyes are bright green. I mean bright green. Luminescent. As usual, she was wearing a prim dress with a lace collar and comfortable (read: frumpy) shoes. She wore sensible beige bras that a nun might wear if she was eighty and blind. She was also wearing a white apron.
“I think that knife is sharp and twisty.”
She sighed. I had disappointed her.
I headed toward her great room. Janie’s houseboat is located on a quieter part of the Willamette River, although you can see the skyscrapers in Portland from the front decks. The windows are floor to ceiling, and the river rolls right on by, as do storms, ducks, Jet Skis, canoes, and drunk boaters.
The rain made the view blurry and gray.
“But do you think it offers up a sufficient amount of blinding fear?”
I turned around. “Yes. I’m blindingly scared to death of it.”
Janie uses white doilies and has plastic slipcovers over all her pink chairs. She has pink flowered curtains and has tea —tea with scones and cream and honey and sugar—every afternoon, like the British; listens to classical music; and reads the classics, like Jane Eyre. If she’s feeling wild, she listens to Yo-Yo Ma. She takes one bite of food, then four sips of tea. One bite of food, four sips of tea.
When she’s done with her tea she goes back to wringing people’s guts out of their stomachs with cattle prods.
“You know, the next killer in my book is a grandma. She goes after mothers,” Janie said. “She hated her own mother. Her own mother made her work all the time, locked her in closets, and schlepped her around the country in a dirty white trailer. She worked in a bar. The kid got lice.”
I stopped at that. “Now that’s special, Janie. Special. Think she won’t recognize who that is?”
“I’ve changed her name.” She said this with not a little defiance. “And we were never locked in closets. We chose to go there all on our own. To hide.”
I put my hands on my hips and stared at the ceiling, imagining how bad things would get once she got her hands on it. Oh, it would be ugly.
“And!” Janie said, stabbing the knife in the air. “The grandma in my book has white hair, she volunteers at the hospital in the gift shop, and at night—whack and stab, whack and stab.”
I groaned. “Must you be so graphic?”
Janie put the knife back in a case on her kitchen counter, slammed the lid, and tapped it four times. “Well, then. Fine. Fine. ”
I ignored the tone.
Janie patted that bun of hers. “This grandma scares me. Last night, after I finished writing at 2:02 A.M . I went in my own closet and hid.”
“The woman that you created scared you? ” Gall. “So, even though she’s only in your head, you hid in your own closet from her.”
She stared off into space. I knew she was waiting four seconds to answer my question. Why the obsession with the number four? I had no idea. Neither did she. She told me one time it was the “magic number in her head.”
“She’s so uncontrollable. I can’t even control her when I’m writing about her. She does things and says things and I follow her around and write what I’m seeing and hearing and smelling. She’s a sick person. I don’t like her.”
“Me, neither. Maybe you should embroider her out of your life.” Janie has to embroider flowers each night or she can’t sleep. When she’s done, she sews a pillow up—always white—and gives them to a group that counsels pregnant teenagers.