The old family station wagon hiccupped over the chewed-up country road, puffing its way slowly up out of each divot. It adopted a sort of rhythm, and I let the car rock me in the backseat, my eyelids drooping lazily. But then came a big pothole, one that made the car groan like an old dog forced to its feet, and I was roused from my stolen slumber. I clutched tightly to my baby doll, the one toy I was bringing with me to stay at the home of a great aunt I had never met.
Too often we deem children incapable of emotional maturity, as if their little lungs scream with such thunderous strength or that they are particularly cruel toward each other because they lack the experience of an adult. But I believe this overestimates their innocence. Perhaps it was because, I, an only child, was stranded on an island of adults, but I remember feeling uniquely in control of my behavior as a little girl. I knew how to tamp down my anger when it was not prudent to let it flare. And if pouting would be spurned later rather than indulged, I knew how to drum up enough happiness to at least manage a smile. It was not until I met my great aunt that I saw what it was like to completely surrender one’s faculties, to seat oneself deeply in a foolish hope, despair bucking dangerously beneath like a wild horse. And it was during this stay with her that this restlessness began to infect me. Still, while I felt uncertain about staying with my great aunt, I had not felt unhappy, at least not yet. But as I stared out the window, watching the foliage droop lethargically under the southern sun, I donned a look of despondency, if only to see whether I could generate enough pity to earn myself a new doll when I got back home.
“I am sorry, Vita,” my mother said as she caught my manufactured sadness in the rearview mirror, “but I already told Aunt Silvia I was coming, and I told your great aunt you were coming, for that matter—”
My mother let her voice trail as she looked out at one-stop shops and faded state welcome signs that persisted since the time of her youth, nodding to herself as if to confirm that no time had passed at all. But I could see the gray strands of hair springing up like weeds through her black hair, her curls growing limp as we drove deeper into the damp, southern heat.
“I thought Aunt Silvia said she didn’t need help,” I muttered, confused as to why my mother was traveling so far to see an estranged sister who did not want her help.
“This is her first baby,” my mother asserted, raising her eyebrows in a way that suggested infinite pragmatism, “so she does not know yet what she needs.”
“Why didn’t you have more babies?” I asked, turning my doll’s head to look out the window with me, wishing I had a real little sister to stay with me now at this veritable stranger’s house with me. But something seemed to catch in my mother’s throat, and I looked up into the rearview mirror to see a dull pain smolder pop like embers in her eyes. It was not until I was older that I understood that those scattered silver hairs on her head could have been part of the reason.
“Your father and I decided you are enough work as it is,” she said, lacing her voice with as much venom as she could, “and the decision was mutual.” I did not know what that word meant, but I watched my mother shift restlessly in the driver’s seat, trying to make herself comfortable in her present station.
“You will like your great aunt,” she went on, “and I think she will like you. She liked playing with us when we were little girls. She has a good heart, you know,” my mother’s voice grew a bit thinner with each claim, “she takes in old toys and donates them somewhere—to the church, I think.”
“Why didn’t she have kids?”
“Because,” Peggy Ann sighed, letting the air out slowly to keep it from slipping out of her control, “it is just not in the cards for everyone. And enough with the questions. You shouldn’t ask things like that, especially at her house.” Shifting in her seat again, she bit her bottom lip, pulling it up as if by the scruff of the neck to stop it from getting away from her. There was no more talking.
The road leveled out, and the last thing I remember from the car ride was looking out the window with my baby doll at the sun. My tired eyes watched as the mirages formed lapping pools of water, and as I fell asleep, all I could think of was a nice, cool drink.
***
I was woken up by the trembling of the station wagon as we passed from the paved road to the gravel driveway. The tires ate up the little rocks and spat them out the back, finding them unpalatable. Rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands, I watched as the hazy shape of a house took shape in front of me. It was painted a pale, peeling yellow, and the rotten floorboards of the porch sagged into each other. The shutters were barely attached to the wood siding, hanging in a state of malaise as if the whole house were melting under the sun’s ruthless inquisition.
And in the window was a face. Shielding my eyes from the crimson light of the setting sun, I saw that it was pointed—witchlike. Covered in leathery skin, it twitched with an energy I could feel from the car, one that could turn her lips just as easily into a grin as into a vicious snarl. And something unholy smarted in her eyes. Eyes that were trained on me.
The car lurched to a stop, and as I carried in my small bag of luggage in one hand, my baby doll cradled in the other, my mother gathered from the backseat the potted plant she had brought for her aunt. It was an orchid, a flower known for being particularly difficult to sustain. Its white petals flashed with just a hint of purple as my mother held it out towards the figure that was now descending the groaning porch steps to meet us.
“Darling,” a voice rasped, her vocal cords bounded up in barbed wire. Her skin was stretched thin across her pointed cheekbones as if any abrupt movement could start it splitting along its unsteady fault lines.
“It’s been too long,” my mother said, taking the gaunt form into her arms. She hugged my mother with one arm, holding fast her long black shawl with the other.
“You were such a darling little girl,” she croaked, her head fixed low to the ground as if that is where she expected my mother’s eye-level to be.
“Well, I am all grown up, Aunt Mara,” my mother said, letting out a nervous giggle which seemed to go against her claim. She scratched anxiously at her arm as her aunt stood motionless before her, and I got the sense that my mother’s lack of visits had been deliberate. It was silent.
“A darling little girl,” she then repeated, rotating herself so that her lowered gaze was now on me. I held my baby doll tightly to my chest. Her eyes landed on my doll, flaring with a lusty glint. She licked her chapped lips methodically.
“I brought you something to say thank you for taking care of my Vita,” my mother said, rousing her aunt from her stupor as she extended the orchid to her. Stretching out her feeble arms, my great aunt’s dry skin flaked off as it rubbed against the shawl. Everything about her seemed barren.
“Thank you,” she said shakily, holding the plant awkwardly in her arms as if afraid to drop it.
“I hate to be rude, but I must head out to Sylvia’s house now. She is expecting me for dinner, and what with the baby—”
Clutching at her shawl, Great Aunt Mara grimaced, as if a dagger had been plunged deeply into her chest. But as my mother reached out to hold her, she swatted her away.
“We will be just fine,” she said, swallowing the wave of pain, looking at me alone as she spoke. A hasty goodbye to my mother, and Peggy Ann, who hated to be rude, was backing the station wagon out of the driveway as quickly as she could.
“Just fine,” my great aunt repeated, and with the orchid tucked into one arm, she draped that itchy shawl over my shoulder, shrouding me in that dark veil as we climbed those groaning steps into the house.
***
It is the cruel nature of isolation that makes man more accustomed to looking to himself alone for answers. With nobody else to consult, we turn inward, confirming in our own heart what we think the answer is, or what is most often the case, what we wish the answer to be, treating reality as a plant that will bend to the light of our will. I found his to be true of my great aunt not long after taking my first steps into that jaundiced house.
If outdoors had been a bit too hot, then inside was unbearable. As soon as I stepped inside, the dense, stuffy layer of heat rested on me like a fever. Taking my luggage upstairs to where I would be sleeping, I noticed the thick film of dust coating the banister. The mattress had no give as I tossed my bag onto it, crashing into it like a rock. And the walls were utterly bare, adorned only with fingerprints and grease smudges.
“Can I get you something?” the voice grated again, wavering from down below as if on the verge of a dry, unsatisfying cough. I brushed my tongue against the dry roof of my mouth.
“Water,” I said meekly from upstairs, the first word I had spoken to her sounding foreign to myself in the echoey house. I could hear her fumbling around in the kitchen, the glasses clinking together as she searched for the cleanest one. I tucked my baby doll into the bed sheets and crept into the hallway to walk downstairs. I am still unsure how I failed to notice then the soft pink light pulsing from the room to my right—the room where Great Aunt Mara mourned her losses, licked her wounds, and tried to remold her life in a way that might finally stick.
Great Aunt Mara must not have heard my request, or else she decided that water was not what I truly wanted. While I could not find my aunt in the kitchen, I found a glass of cold milk waiting for me on the kitchen counter. Some white drops pooled together by the side of it, a testament to her shaky hand. I always felt sick after drinking milk, and my stomach curdled just looking at it. But I thought of how cool my lips would feel against the drink, and I was too nervous to ask for water instead. So, I gulped it all down as quickly as I could, wiping my lips with the back of my hand as the milk sat stagnant in my stomach.
“That will be good for you,” rasped the voice without an explanation, and the subsequent chorus of coughs and labored breaths signaled to me where she was stood, waiting by the window in the living room. A bead of sweat rolled lazily down my face as her eyes burned into me, taking stock of me as if to gauge my measurements. Then, with her pointed chin sticking out like a ledge, she looked back outside the window. Her jaw moved up and down, chewing the cud of something unsavory.
“I have some fingerpaints and some paper over by the counter,” she said without moving her head from thick, clouded glass as she stared at her neighbor’s house. Grateful for something to, I rummaged through a pile of toys and diapers which I figured was the start of a collection she would take to the church. Next to the pile was the orchid from my mother. It had already seemed to suffer from the house’s intense heat, its stem hunching the way Great Aunt Mara’s spine did as she stood at the window.
Squeezing the paints onto a plastic palette, I sat at the table, glancing up every few seconds to see if she was still at the window. Not feeling particularly creative, I recreated my signature drawing. Slathering my fingers with the different colors, I drew a family holding hands. And it was not a three-person family like mine but one with as many little stick-figure children as the paints would allow.
“Just don’t use the white paint over any mistakes—I am saving some,” my great aunt spoke suddenly. Then she wheezed, coughing again into her arm before turning back to a new family portrait emerging beyond the glass.
Outside her window, her neighbors were pulling into their driveway, and three children came tumbling out of the car. The youngest, a little girl, was racing her brothers to the front door when she tripped over her own feet, falling hard on the concrete. She looked at the scarlet color spilling from her knees to her parents’ panicked faces. Her mother frantically gathered her into her arms right as the tears started, and her father struggled with the keys as he tried to get his family inside.
“Why have so many kids if you can’t even take care of them?” Great Aunt Mara muttered, as if there were a predetermined number of children in the world and that that family had deprived her of one. Then with a quick pull of a string, she closed the slats of the blinds, and the dust rained down upon her patched brown dress. Shuffling over to the table, she then loomed over my shoulder. Her smoky breath rustled my paper, and I looked up at her to see her glaring at my drawing, the twin emotions of envy and desire flashing in her eyes. I shoved the paper away from me, but her eyes followed it like a cat’s. A ding from the oven finally tore her away, and I reached for a napkin, trying to rub off the stains of paint the best I could.
She said she would make a special breakfast in the morning, but that night she pulled out an aluminum tray from a massive stockpile of frozen meals she had shoved into the freezer.
“You never have to worry about it going bad,” she said as she shoveled grayish bricks of lasagna onto two plates. I took a few bites out of politeness, but the idea of the clay-like food mixing with the milk made me queasy, so I took to mashing up the layers into mealy mess to give the illusion I had eaten more.
I was typically silent at the dinner table at home while my father told my mother about work that day, and I was not about to initiate a conversation now. But while I felt uneasy, I knew I was not alone. Whenever I caught my great aunt looking at me as we ate, her eyes jumped up above my head, suddenly fascinated by the same grease-stained wall behind me that she must have stared at every single night eating alone. Her lips would part sometimes, preparing themselves to give life to words that she never delivered. After a few failed efforts, she backed away from the table, digging the wooden chair legs into the floor as she went. She put her food in the sink before shuffling over to her sitting room, collapsing onto her corduroy couch as she opened a book to read. I followed suit, taking my time as I washed my plate before I made my way over to her. I stood at attention by the couch, but a few awkward seconds turned into a painful five minutes as she refused to take her eyes away from the pages. And yet she never moved her eyes. She never even turned the page.
“Go to bed if you are tired,” she finally said, laying the opened book across her face, covering up the red shame that began to creep across it. I was confused, and yet I was also too glad to escape the palpable feeling of unease for the night to care, and I mounted the steps upstairs as quickly as I could.
But almost as soon as I got under the covers, my sweat started to seep into my pajamas. I felt like a neglectful mother for having left my baby doll in the sweltering heat of the covers all day as I kicked them off to the base of the bed. My insides felt all knotted from the milk, and so I lay tentatively on my side, waiting for sleep to take away the dull pain. But then stifled wheeze and a furtive knock came from outside my door, and that slight, fragile form entered my room. She turned on a lamp, and within the feeble spotlight it cast, she looked smaller than ever. Her eyes were wide like those of a child who had a bad dream. Wrapping her twitching lips around the words, she finally uttered what she had been wanting to ask all night.
“May I braid your hair?”
Her husky voice trailed at the end as if she wished she could gather the words back into her mouth. I was startled by the question. My own mother was a bit too busy drinking and smoking to ever worry about my hair, and I had learned to do my braids myself. But the mere thought of doing so seemed to iron out her face a bit, and she stood up straighter than I had seen all day. But that fury I had seen swirling in her eyes from the window when I first got out of the car was bubbling somewhere inside of her, ready to erupt if the wrong answer were given.
“I—I guess so,” I stammered, and she floated with a newfound grace towards me, hopping onto the concrete mattress with unparalleled elegance. But I cringed as her long, brittle fingernails scratched against my neck. And then she would start the braid only to stop, feverishly unbraiding it and cursing under her breath as she mixed up the three strands again. She nearly tugged my hair out of my scalp trying to get rid of any lumps, and I could barely keep from falling back into her. And as she got to the end of my hair, she tied it off with a rubber band she had put around her wrist. She held onto the ratty mess of a braid for a while, passing it from one hand to the other as she admired her handiwork. But then she let out a long sigh, sending regret and heartache down my back with it. She slid off the bed, turned off the light, and left the room, closing the door without another word. My fingers traced the braid as I lay back down, feeling the years of private misery she had woven into each strand.
***
A sputtering sound entered my dreams that night, and I imagined the overworked engine of the old station wagon puffing its way back over the gravel driveway to come take me back home. But when I opened my eyes, I found myself lying on top of a mound of blankets with a rubber band in my hair and sighed. I rolled over only to realize that my baby doll was missing, scooped up somehow from the nest of blanket material I had tried to make for it. And the mechanical sound from my dream had only intensified, whirring rapidly from what sounded like upstairs. Patting around on the floor in search of the doll, I could not ignore the swelling sound, and I gave up for the present moment to investigate.
Great Aunt Mara’s bedroom door was barely ajar, yet her entire frame could be seen through the tiny sliver of an opening. There she sat at her electric sewing machine, feeding sheet after sheet of fabric through it. First went the light pink cloth, blushing nervously as it awaited the needle. Then came a layer of white lace, fluffed like cotton candy as it began its way through the machine. But then it bunched up around the needle, and out came a litany of curses from my great aunt’s mouth. She tugged viciously at the fabric, and I reached protectively for my braid. But then the sound abruptly stopped, as if the needle had been playing a record that had now run out of grooves. She could see me. But unlike the fearsome look she gave me from the window yesterday, she looked sheepishly at me now, as if I had just read an entry in her secret diary.
“Go downstairs for breakfast,” she said weakly, and so I again followed orders, sliding the rubber band off my hair as I went. Raking my fingers through the knotted braid, I saw a new glass of milk waiting on the kitchen counter for me. Its wrinkled yellow top suggested it had been poured the night before, eagerly waiting to be drunk by daybreak. I recalled my bellyache from the night before and nearly bent double. To my left I saw the fingerpainting that had sparked such rage the day now on the fridge, the crusted paint globs making up the stick figure family now put proudly on display.
“Why did you undo your hair?” I heard, my great aunt standing behind me now, her shawl pulled around herself so tightly that the tension vibrated through its strands.
“I—it got messy as I slept on it,” I said, and her face at my supposed critique of her braiding skills. A veil of resentment started to cloud her eyes.
“And,” I quickly added, “I thought you could do it again tonight.”
At that, the anger evaporated from her eyes, and her cracked mouth contorted into a sort of crooked smile. The grin had unsealed her lips, and she began to speak more readily.
“Sit here at the counter while I make the pancakes,” she said, “and be a good girl and drink your milk.” Afraid to spoil the one bit of levity I had felt with her since arriving, I forced down a few sips of the lukewarm drink, trying not to retch in the process.
“I used to make pancakes for your mother and your aunt when they were little girls,” she said. The memory brought a rosy glow into that sunken face of hers. It was the most she had spoken to me yet without a harrowing coughing fit in the middle of it.
“Sweet little girls they were,” she went on as she added the dry ingredients to the wet ones, unaware of the bits of eggshells infiltrating the batter, “and I would watch them play dress-up and read them stories and play dolls with them. And their mother—your grandmother—she never had enough time for them, but I did.” She stabbed at the orange yolks with her spatula, watching as they bled into the batter. Blending the ingredients into each other, she spooned two big circles onto the griddle. One looked much too big, the other painfully small. She placed the bowl with the rest of the batter by the edge of the countertop.
“Then they were not little girls anymore,” she muttered, her back to the stove, “and they did not want to play with any dolls anymore, and God forbid they let me even touch their hair. Selfish, if you think about it.” Grinding her teeth, she spat into the sink, the bitterness too sharp for even her own mouth. I stared down at the linoleum countertop and watched as the first of the orchid petals, dry and shriveled, fell meekly next to the pot.
“And to think that I, who paid more attention to these girls than their own mother, would not be seeing them anymore,” she said, waving her arm in the air, brandishing the spatula an in her flailing hand, “is an utter trav—”
And as her hand met the bowl, she swept it off the countertop. It landed with a thud, rolling around in smaller and smaller circles, vomiting its own batter out on the floor. A tight squeal came out of her throat. Then came the curses, uttered in such quick succession, the words melding into an indistinguishable incantation. Then the coughing, and I turned by face as she leaned onto the counter, trying to hack some type of sludge up from her lungs that was too settled inside her to ever come out.
“I will clean that up later,” she wheezed, turning back to her only hope, the two pancakes on the griddle. But the tiny had begun to hiss and smoke, and when she flipped it, it was completely charred. Only a few moments of cooking on the other side had it sputtering again, forcing her to take the griddle off the heat. Before her were the two failures—one a tiny, lifeless rock, the other a big, lumpy half-cooked blob. She bowed her head in silence before them.
“I can help you make more,” I said, but she could not stop staring at the two mistakes in front of her. She must have seen something in those doughy messes that I did not, for as soon as she had scooped up the batter from the floor, pulling the clumpy mess up like strings of entrails into the sink, she slinked back upstairs, wiping at her leaky eyes.
Hopping off my stool, I dumped my milk in the sink and watched as it rolled over the gray guts now clogging the drain. I ate greedily at a few rice cakes left on the table and wondered at all the emotion that could be folded into a couple of pancakes.
to be continued…. Part 2 on 28/02/2025
[Image Credit : Photo by Amit Rana on Unsplash]
Marlene Elaine Brasco is an undergraduate student at the College of William & Mary. She seeks to highlight the rich nuance found within everyday life in her work. Aside from writing, she loves reading, baking, and spending time with her family and her chocolate Labrador retriever.
