Aphrodite
Letters from the Dead
1 I am sure you will remember this always.
I am sure you will remember that summer afternoon. A storm was coming but we didn't know it yet. The sun was out when I plucked you from that tree—that tree where'd you always sit, your eyelashes practically brushing the pages of a book… you were always reading. I took you from a sacred place, some place deep inside of you that day.
I am sure you will always remember where. In a humid shed. I was groggy in there—I am sure you felt smothered by me. I was intoxicated. I don't know by what. But I had to have you. I knew there was a bees nest in the top corner of the shed. I could hear the buzzing around my head as I took you. The sun was filtering through the cracks at the shed. It smelled like sawdust and….
I didn't hear you cry.
You were eight, I think. I was nearing the end of my sad life. What a fitting end to such a life. What a way to betray everything my life gave me. What a way to betray a child, my dead sister's only daughter. What a way to betray everything your life gave you. I'm gone now. I am sure you are glad. I'm sure you have moved on. But you'll always remember.
Love,
Uncle Rodney
2
Every summer, boys would come back from college. There was one summer when I suddenly realized I was old enough to make it with these guys. When I realized I caught their attention. My sisters already had boyfriends, but I was young, single, free.I started talking to a boy named Charles. He was twenty-two, a senior at some Kentucky state school. He was really tall, with perfect blonde hair you'd almost never see on a guy. His eyes were about a million colors. And the best part about them was the way they looked at me. He convinced me that we were in love. I don't think I ever loved him, and I know he didn't love me. That's the sad truth.
And then you happened.
“Charles,” I said, “I'm pregnant.”
He told me I was just a little slut, and he hung up the phone. He didn't care. He didn't return my calls.
You came along, finally, and I gave you a name and I guess I gave you some kind of a life… I guess I'll never know because I never lived my own life to see it. I didn't want to know. Everyone around me seemed so much happier than I was. I was the only one who had fucked up my life. Everyone else had done right by themselves. I convinced myself that my whole life would just repeat this same pattern.
Mabelle and Megan have told you it was an accident. But it wasn't.
I hope you turned out okay anyway.
Love,
Mom
Pieces Stitched Together
1
The best part of the year was when the azalea in our backyard would start to flower. It wasn't an incredibly spectacular bush—it was small, and it sat near the base of a red maple tree, and together they'd turn bright colors in the spring. The little bush was bright magenta, and the red maple offered a dark burgundy that almost clashed. Nevertheless, despite nature's little flaws, this was my favorite spot in the world.
It was the only place where I could find privacy; it was the only place I could trust. It was always there, my little spot. It was far enough away from my family's ancient farmhouse to feel that I was alone, yet close enough that I could still hear Aunt Mabelle calling me to supper. The tree was just the right size and shape that I could sit in its branches with a book.
Every year, before the azalea was about to shed its radiant flowers, I would pluck one of the flowers off of it and keep it in a little jar. The jar was a clay pot, an art project that my mother had made when she was in third grade. It was deep and round, with bumpy, undulating outsides and a lid that didn't fit so much as it just sat atop the opening. I put a new flower in the jar every year I lived there in that small town in Kentucky.
That was where I spent my childhood… but like all childhoods, it ended eventually.
. . .
Sometimes I think back on what Uncle Rodney would say to me about what he did. I like to think he'd apologize, that he'd break down and cry and hate himself for it. But there's a difference between reality and whatever people hope for. I'd hope, in the event of an apology, that I'd be able to forgive him.
But would I?
He wouldn't apologize, I know that. But I can't say he didn't know any better, either.
The truth is, I'll never really know. Because he died less than a year later.
I was mad when he died. I was mad because I didn't get to kill him myself. I knew exactly what he had done to me there in the shed. I don't think he was aware that I knew. He was lost inside himself.
I learned to get lost inside myself quickly. Maybe I learned before he did. I was always lost inside myself—there was no where else to go, before the day in the shed. And after that, it was the safest place to go.
I refused to go to his funeral. I claimed that I felt like I was going to throw up. Aunt Mabelle chalked it all up to my emotions. She thought that I was so distraught that I made myself sick. I agreed with her.
“You loved Uncle Rodney, didn't you?” she asked sweetly, pushing a strand of light brown hair back behind my ears.
I didn't say anything. I probably looked angry. She just kissed my forehead and everyone piled into the truck and left. I was alone in the house after that, and I feared briefly that his ghost would come after me and try to hurt me again in his undeath. But I decided defiantly that if he even tried, I would kill myself then and there. I took a knife out of the kitchen and waited. I waited there for a few hours, and finally the truck pulled back into the driveway and I put the knife away. Nothing had happened.
Uncle Rodney was gone, but of course there was the aftermath.
. . .
Nights in summer were the worst. We would have so many thunderstorms there, and every time a storm came, the memory of that day came back to me.
After Uncle Rodney was done, the smell of him was only washed away by the aroma of an oncoming storm. He tried to look me in the eyes, rubbing my cheek and kissing me on the lips, telling me it was going to be okay, that I was such a good and beautiful little girl, that I had made him so happy. He was panting all over me. He was sweating all over me. I tried to fix my dress but I felt trapped in it. Everything smelled disgusting and I felt sticky. Places of me that I barely understood were in stinging pain and felt uncomfortably wet, like I had wet my pants. But the breeze blew through in the cracks in the shed and I was instantly freed.
“You'll never tell anyone, right, Lynette? It can be our secret. Like best friends.”
I didn't look at him. I ran out of the shed. He called after me, but I ignored him and ran around to the front of the house.
The sky was dark and those familiar and impressive clouds glared down at me. The wind was gusting and I knew the rain was on its way. I scrambled under the dilapidated front porch, in between the jutting splinters of broken lattice and into the moist dirt underneath.
At some point I could hear Aunt Mabelle and Uncle Rodney calling me, but the thunder and the rain drowned them out. The storm was huge—the rain came down hard, pounding loudly on the porch, and the thunder came right over us. The flashes of lightning were the worst, because every time, I would have to anticipate nervously the peal of thunder to follow. Soon water began to flow under the porch, and before long I was sitting in mud. But it felt better than being under Uncle Rodney's sweat. The rain and the mud made me feel clean again.
Before the storm passed I ran out into the rain, and the mud washed off. The rain was surprisingly cold, and the gusts of wind didn't help. When the storm had passed, Aunt Mabelle came around from the back of the house.
“Lynette!” she scolded. “What the hell are you doing? Get in the house and get in the tub.”
In the bath, Aunt Mabelle seemed to realize that something was wrong with me.
“What's all this blood? Don't tell me you got your period,” she said as she came in to check on me. The water had turned slightly pink and brown from all the mud. “You're pretty young for that.”
“No, Aunt Mabelle,” I responded grimly. “Just got scratched up here and there.”
“Don't see no scratches on your leg or anything,” she responded, but she didn't seem to want to ask any more. She turned on the shower so that the dirty water could run off, and she helped me scrub the especially dirty spots.
She couldn't reach the spot that felt the dirtiest, but it was okay. I didn't want anyone to ever touch me there again. I didn't want anyone to see or think about it. I wanted it to shrink away and hide and become nothing so that no one could ever hurt me with myself again.
. . .
When I thought he was done, I opened my eyes. He was hunched over me, panting hard and whispering words I couldn't understand. The sun had stopped filtering through the cracks in the roof—outside, I knew it was growing darker. I didn't look at him, but out of the bottoms of my eyes I saw him raise his head, and I knew he was looking right at me.
His breath came out erratically. I could feel his heart beating. It was sporadic, struggling. He had never been a very healthy man.
“You… you will make a man very happy someday” was the first thing out of his mouth in my new life.
If what he had just done to me was the only way to make a man happy, then I decided, at that moment, that I'd never get married.
. . .
I had filled the pail too high; water sloshed out left and right as I tried to lug the heavy metal bucket across the yard. Aunt Mabelle was arranging still more plants of cucumbers in her ever-growing garden, and as usual, I was promptly recruited to help. She had the idea that I loved gardening, because I spent so much time out in my maple tree over my azalea. In truth, I would rather be staring at the pages of a book… but I would not tell her that.
Panting a little, I set the pail down and brushed my hair out of my eyes. It was always in my eyes or clinging to the sweat on my cheeks; it always grew in unevenly after each time my cousin Beth chopped it short.
“Thanks, hon,” Aunt Mabelle said. She looked up from her plants and gave me a slight grin. Her brown hair jutted out from its messy bun piled on top of her head, and her blue-green eyes looked ever greener among the plants in her gardem. “You mind watering some of these plants while you got the pail here?”
I nodded—I didn't have anything better to do. As carefully as I could in my clumsy eight-year-old body, I poured water over the edges of the pail. It splashed over the leaves of the tomato plants, dribbled over the small heads of lettuce forming atop the dirt mounds, and what wasn't absorbed right away gathered in muddy puddles in between the rows.
“You know,” said Aunt Mabelle suddenly, “that azalea over there? Your mama planted that a long time ago.”
I looked over at it, shading the sun that was in my eyes. I shrugged.
“The worst thing for me is that you never knew your mama,” my aunt continued, standing up and wincing—her back was bothering her again. She rested her hands at the small of her back and looked around. She was, in some ways, an intimidating figure—tall and broadly built, her very body and the way that she held it demanded attention and respect.
“I never mind that I had to care for you all your life, or anything,” she told me. “I just wish she was still around.”
“How did she die?” I asked innocently. I knew I had asked before, but I always forgot.
Aunt Mabelle stared out at the road—Kentucky Route 846. Practically no one traversed the road, other than the few neighbors of ours who lived along it.
“Car accident,” my aunt answered.
That's why I never could remember, I thought at the moment. It seemed so boring, so ordinary.
But over the years I began to wonder what the truth was. Sure, a car accident was likely, but I had a different feeling about it. That's all it was, though—a feeling, an intuition. Something told me that my mother had driven the car right off the edge of the abyss.
“Grab that pail; we're done for the day,” Aunt Mabelle said. I obediently followed her to the shed. I hated to go anywhere near that pathetic and horrible building, but I never said a word. “You know,” my aunt continued, “your mom wanted to name you Aphrodite.” She was smiling, like it was a joke.
“That's a funny name,” I said. “What does it mean?”
“Aphrodite is the goddess of love,” Aunt Mabelle responded. “Mary Ann—I mean, your mama used to love mythology. That's what Aphrodite was, a myth. It would have been a pretty silly name, huh?”
I nodded as I hosed the dirt off my hands. “So why didn't she?” I inquired further.
“Well, your mama stopped believing so much in love. Plus, we told her it was a silly name and you'd be made fun of forever. So she called you Lynette. It's still a pretty different name, but it's real nice, too.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I looked over at my friends—my maple tree and my azalea. I had felt, for some time, that my little bush needed a name. I had named the tree Joanna, but nothing had ever seemed quite right for the beautiful, flowering bush. But now, it clicked, and I named this friend of mine Aphrodite.
That night I flipped the jar of dried up flowers upside down—holding the lid on tight, of course—and wrote, with Aunt Mabelle helping me spell, “APHRODITE” on the bottom of the jar my mother had made… right under where she had carved her name into the clay so many years ago.