my mother, she killed me; my father, he ate me

Everything started because Dad loved his brother.

Aunt Helen ran off with the gardener and Uncle M went off the deep end, just a little bit, because it turned out Paris Whatshisface wasn’t just a gardener, but some long-lost son of Troy Industries, old Priam’s kid slumming it in a post-college haze of indecision and adultery. Paris was young, younger than Uncle M, and he had money and looks and Aunt Helen didn’t need the family anymore, just left Hermione with her dad and packed up the Jag and didn’t tell anyone where she was going. Uncle M drank a lot, after that. Dad helped.

Mom stayed in the background during all of this, helping with this charity and that auxiliary function and generally ignoring Dad’s drunken call for war in the kitchen, sitting at the center island with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows while they drank whiskey out of heavy-bottomed glasses. They were going to steal Troy Industries’ best people, their best clients, all as payback for what Paris did to my uncle. “Sparta won’t take this shit,” Dad slurred, “Sparta – Sparta’s made of fucking warriors. Troy won’t even see it coming.”

Mom brushed past him on her way out the door and didn’t object when he rested his hand on her hip. She was wearing lipstick again, dressing nice, wearing heels. We thought our parents were working things out; we didn’t know that our father’s ridiculous plans for a hostile takeover would actually be put to use, we didn’t know how our mother would react to any of what was to come. We didn’t know she was already drifting away.

 

…

My sister Iphigenia died when she was seventeen. She was hit by a car at the end of our own driveway by a woman who swerved to avoid a deer. She had blue eyes and a long nose and she was always our mother’s favorite; Mom cried for a month straight when she died, starting in the hospital when the doctor turned off the heart monitor and ending in hers and Dad’s bed, wrapped up in blankets and cradling Genie’s baby book to her chest. It rained at her funeral, all of us gathered in black under umbrellas, cold wind blowing through our mourning dress, the sky above us gray and dark. The flowers were falling apart on the coffin and Mom fell over when they started lowering it into the ground, splayed out on her hands and knees on the muddy grass and keening like a wounded animal, wailing over the open grave. Dad knelt down there with her, sinking into the mud, his wide hand white like a moth where it pressed flat against the small of her back. Chrys cried quietly, head up high. Hermione chewed on the cuff of her raincoat and Uncle M kept his hands on mine and Ori’s necks, rubbing his thumbs against our hairlines, holding us in place. Aunt Helen was already gone by then.

We were nine, then. My sister Chrysothemis was fourteen and spent most of the reception locked away with Mom. We were the first to arrive back at the house and Mom had to be carried into the front hall; her grief had paralyzed her, left her unable to do anything but cry. Dad and Uncle M each had an arm around her waist and when they set her on her feet she wobbled, took one shaky step toward the kitchen before dissolving to the floor in a puddle of tears. Uncle M took one look at her and headed toward the liquor cabinet, while Chrys sank to the floor and put her arms around our mother.

Dad shook his head and stepped over them. “Fucking Christ, ‘Nestra,” he said, “Pull yourself together,” and with that he ushered Ori and me into the next room. People were due at the house at any second.

Mom spent the rest of the evening cloistered away in her bedroom and Dad wound up taking the lead in her absence. He shook hands with relatives, family friends, trying to keep the feeling in the room level and calm. Guests picked at the food laid out on the dining room table and milled around the house, looking at pictures and talking in low tones, while I sat at the piano and played the same Beethoven sonata five times in a row. Ori hid underneath it, trying to avoid all the well-meaning aunts, and kept pulling on my foot.

I remember my father the best of that day: more than my mother’s tears, more than the cold wet graveyard. I remember his hands trembling on my shoulders as I played the piano, fingers tripping over the keys, Orestes lying on the floor still tugging at my foot. I finished the song and the notes melted away, dissipating into the noise of the room like mist, morning fog.

“Play it again, Elektra,” he’d said, “You know I like that one.”

I tilted my head back and saw only a broad chest, the underside of a jaw brushed with dark stubble. He squeezed my shoulders and didn’t move until I started the sonata over from the beginning, kissing the top of my head before he left. My father wasn’t a cold man, but he was still difficult to get close to; his heart beat for business deals and closing arguments and I will never forget how in that moment, on one of the worst days in our family’s long and storied memory, the great Agamemnon let his guard down for me, only for me.

…

It started out as a joke, I think; pillow talk, late-night stuff. I’d overheard Mom and her new boyfriend going on some nights after dinner, not long after Dad moved out. In the time between losing Genie and Dad leaving Mom had started acting like she was alone in the house, like my brother and I no longer existed. We were like antique furniture to her, Grecian sculptures, expensive paintings to be admired and ignored.

Ori was at practice and I was trying to do homework. I could hear them in the living room, see their profile through the open archway leading from the kitchen. Mom and Ag were curled up in front of the fireplace, Mom in her slip and her fur, sharing a bottle of wine. “Poison his whiskey,” she’d said, nuzzling his neck. “Let him choke on it.”

“Hit him with the car – put a nice big dent in his Mercedes.”

“Cut out his heart and feed it to the dog.”

“Slice him up very slowly, Pit and the Pendulum-style.”

They went on for hours – carving up my father in every way imaginable, rending the woman he was living with into imaginary pieces. It was sick, how easily it came to my mother, rolling off her tongue like conversation filler, mindless chatter.

“Hang her from the ceiling fan in his office by her hair,” she said, drinking deeply from her wineglass, and he just laughed, tilting her face toward his.

“Cut them all up,” Ag said, and Mom snickered, cuddling up against him. “Get the bitch and the kids and feed them to ‘Memnon. Just cut them up and stuff them into pie.”

The fire crackled in the hearth and I pressed my hand over my mouth. “How Shakespearian,” she’d giggled, and I couldn’t listen anymore.

…

Chrys remembers it like this: Dad strayed first. After a year of mourning Mom was starting to climb out of her sinkhole of depression, but neither she nor Dad could connect like they did before. Mom threw herself into her charity work and Dad hooked up with some woman from the office, a redhead named Cass in the PR department they’d poached in the huge aggressive merger they’d made with Troy Industries. Mom only started seeing Ag on the side when she figured out what Dad was doing – maybe to even the score, maybe just to make herself feel good, who the hell even knows anymore?

“It was Dad’s fault to begin with,” Chrys said, “He should have just kept it in his pants.”

Talking about it with Chrys makes me want to pull my hair out, scream in her face that it wasn’t just Dad. I remember a few weeks after the funeral, Dad’s cousin Ag coming around with the charity packets, the binders full of hopeless cases. Mom had been a social worker before she married Dad and it was like catnip to her: the possibility of putting pieces together, of making something broken whole again. Aegisthus was charming and handsome, dark and sharp and lean in a way that echoed the pictures I’d seen of Dad in his youth, back before college lacrosse was replaced by the remote control and late dinners alone. Dad was focused on the merger, throwing all his energy into it the way Mom did with the charity stuff, and it’s not like he was the only one spending all his time at the office: Mom and Ag spent a lot of late nights going over the plans for the foundation they were building in Genie’s name, there were a lot of long weekends spent far away from home.

It takes two to tango, is all I’m trying to say.

…

Ori and I were sixteen when everything went sour: I was a budding theatre geek, Ori had made junior varsity wrestling. Chrys was finishing up the last year of her undergrad and Mom nearly destroyed the house when she found out Dad had gotten the new head of PR pregnant.

“She’s trying to push over the china cabinet,” I whispered into the phone. I was hiding on the stairs, watching her rage. Ori was at practice. “Chrys, she’s throwing everything, I don’t –”

Chrys was patient. “Elle, she’s angry. She has every right to be angry.”

Another crash came from downstairs, this time from the kitchen – Mom screamed and I dropped the phone, flying down the stairs and over the broken glass, terrified of what I was running into and unable to stop myself from moving forward. Mom was backed up against the fridge with a bread knife in her hand, slashing the air with it so that the blade shone bright in the fluorescent lights overhead. Dad was standing at the island with his hands held out in front of him, watching her carefully, cautiously, the same way you’d eye a feral dog.

“Clytemnestra,” he said, low, authoritative. I’d never heard him use her full name before. “Clytemnestra, stop it.”

She slashed the air again. He hadn’t even moved. “If you think I’m letting your whore get all I’ve worked for,” she spat, “If you think one goddamn penny is going out of our daughter’s fund and into her pocket, then you are going to be very sorry.”

Dad regarded her strangely for a moment, his expression cold and unreadable, and then lunged forward so quickly that it took everyone by surprise. Mom shrieked and tried to get him with the knife but he had grabbed her by the wrists, twisting them in his large hands, bending them backwards as he tried to break her grip. Mom swore and shook and struggled and slashed at his face with the hand not holding the knife, dragging her nails down his cheek hard enough to draw blood. He grabbed her by the hair and started forcing her to the ground, twisting the blonde curls around his fingers while Mom scratched at him, still holding onto the knife.

I was frozen in the doorway: unable to move, unable to speak. I squeaked out something, my voice small, nearly inaudible, but it was enough to make both my parents look up in muted shock. They parted quickly: Dad released her wrists and Mom sprang up from the floor, dropping the knife in a way that the blade sliced into the linoleum floor. They retreated to their separate corners like boxers at the bell and Dad came toward me, arms outstretched, the ensuing hug stiff and reassuring at the same time. Mom glared at us from her place at the sink, fumbling through the purse she’d left on the nearby counter for her keys.

“You’re scaring her,” Dad said, hand on the back of my head, holding me to his chest. Mom narrowed her eyes at the both of us, ignoring his words as she leaned down and picked up the knife, tossing it casually into the sink like nothing had happened. The knife scraped against the sides of the metal basin as it fell, briefly filling the room with its sharp metallic ringing.

“You’ll regret this,” she said to Dad, and with that she swept out of the room, storming past the both of us and heading to the garage. The sound of the door rising, the car starting, was deafening in the silence that pooled between us. She drove off into the unknown and didn’t come back until morning.

Dad rented a condo downtown after that, a nice place near his office. He and Mom never officially separated.

Cousin Ag moved in a week later.

…

Months passed. The Foundation went public and Cass passed her due date, Ori and I made the honor roll. Hermione started coming by a lot – Chrys used to tease that she had a crush on Ori, which made us both laugh and gag, respectively. She was fourteen, just starting to get into makeup and boys, and liked to drape herself over my bed like a sweater and flip through the old magazines that had once been Genie’s, all the glossy-paged copies of Cosmo no one had the heart to throw away when she died.

“My mom called yesterday,” she said one night, leaning back against the headboard with her knees bent. Ori was doing crunches on my bedroom floor and Hermione was pretending she wasn’t watching him over the top of her magazine. I painted my toenails at my desk, my foot propped up on the lid of the little trash bin, and we could all hear the sounds of my mother and Ag going through their nightly routine floating up the stairs.

“What did she want?”

Hermione shrugged. “What does she ever want? Money, probably, and to drive Daddy crazy.” She flicked to the next page and added, bitterly, “Not like she ever wants to talk to me.”

“I’m sure she does,” Ori said from the floor, hands tucked behind his neck. He was huffing a little with the effort, he was always trying to be helpful. “Maybe she just doesn’t know what to say to you? Like, she feels bad you don’t get to come out that often, so she doesn’t want to bring it up, but everything’s just –”

“It’s not like that with them,” Hermione interrupted, “She didn’t want kids, did you know that? She got pregnant by accident.”

“How do you know?”

She glared at Ori and closed the magazine. “My birthday’s at the end of October. Do the math.”

Ori stretched out, breathing heavily, with his arms flat above him, fingers curling into the shaggy fringe of my pink throw rug as he counted nine months backwards, to February. We shared a look and Hermione set the magazine to the side, sliding down from the headboard and putting her hands over her eyes. It was terrible being stuck in the middle – Ori and I knew from experience.

“He gets – he gets meaner when she calls.” Hermione rolled over onto her side, her back to us, and spoke to the wall. “But I think he likes it. He likes the fight, you know? Daddy doesn’t like losing, and so long as my mother keeps calling, it’s like he still thinks there’s a chance.”

Downstairs, Mom and Ag were finishing up with financial blackmail and working their way through physical dismemberment. We could hear them kissing. I shut the door.

…

The last time Dad attended one of the Foundation’s functions, Ori and I sat up on the dais, alternating between playing tic-tac-toe on an expensive cloth napkin with one of the souvenir pens and picking at the chocolate gateau heaped onto our fine china plates. Chrys kept lamenting the lack of people her own age to talk to and texted her roommate all night. The rented ballroom smelled like money and red wine and Mom was in her element, sweeping through the ballroom with all the lightness of a hummingbird, flitting from table to table with such quickness and grace that her feet barely seemed to touch the floor. Her eyes were bright, her laugh was loud. Cousin Ag couldn’t stop watching her. Genie’s picture was plastered up behind us, her face the size of a Cadillac and her gaze looking out into the middle distance, seeing nothing.

Dad was with us at the beginning; he’d sat at the opposite end of the table from my mother, elbow to elbow with me, and had left to mingle in the crowd almost as soon as Mom finished her speech. Chrys watched him leave and leaned onto her elbow, playing with her phone. “Mom’s not going to like this,” she’d muttered, her sing-song tone cryptic enough to make me look up from my game. Ori ran a line through his three O’s and I scanned the ballroom for our parents. Mom was talking to several of her hangers-on and Ag had disappeared into the crowd; Dad had found himself over by the bar, chatting with a woman in a high-collared green dress that showed off her legs, the hourglass of her waist. When he moved to tip the bartender I could see more clearly that the woman was Cass: Cass with her long red hair pinned up, Cass cradling her elbow in her palm, Dad’s whiskey held to her lips.

She snuck in, I think. Or came on the coattails of someone else’s invitation – Dad was only supposed to be there for appearances’ sake, and Mom had given strict instructions on how “that bitch” was not to be within 300 feet of her precious charity dinner. It was hard not to notice the incoming hurricane: people stared from all directions as Dad and Cass moved closer toward the center of the ballroom floor, closer than close as the band struck up a new song. Ori nudged me in the side and we looked as one toward our mother, whose grip had tightened considerably around the stem of her champagne flute.

Mom’s eyes never strayed from Dad while he danced, and I thought of the pictures I had seen of my parents early in their marriage, before the business, before Genie, before everything went wrong: a dinner party in college, their honeymoon in Greece, stuck under mistletoe at Sparta Tech’s first holiday party. They’d been together twenty years, they’d had four children together – there must have been some point where they had gotten along, some point where they loved each other. Mom came back up to the dais and took her seat at Chrys’s left, smiling thinly at a group of well-dressed acquaintances across the room. Ag practically flew to her side and took the empty chair beside her, his hand resting right between her shoulder blades as they watched the couple spin across the room with painfully calm expressions.

“Are you alright?” Chrys asked, and Mom didn’t look at her.

“Of course, darling,” Mom whispered, still smiling across the room, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

…

My father was murdered less than a year later.

Uncle M found him; Dad hadn’t been to work in two days, wasn’t answering his phone.  My father wouldn’t miss work for anything – he broke his collarbone skiing one Christmas and was back at the office almost as soon as the plaster set. My uncle left the office before a meeting and found the condo door unlocked; I don’t know why he went in, what he expected to find, but I doubt that it was my father spread out on the living room sofa with a knife through his heart. It wasn’t Cass on the floor of their kitchen, lying face-down in a pool of her own blood. It wasn’t the boys strangled in their cribs, not the boys…

My half-brothers were twins: Telly and Pelops, old family names on Cass’s side. They were babies, barely six months old, all chubby legs and round faces. They had Dad’s hair, Cass’s nose. They were still learning how to walk. Chrys and Ori cried for a week when we learned what happened to them. I didn’t fare much better.

They didn’t deserve this. None of them did.

…

Mom was eerily calm the night the cops came to give us the news. She sat in the living room, my father’s ring still on her finger, and she took the news as graciously as she would if it had been the Homeowner’s Association at the door, telling her the grass needed to be cut. They didn’t ask her where she’d been, who she might have thought had done it. She made some noise about Troy Industries, anyway.

At the funeral, she sat in the front row with Ag and Chrys on either side, her head high, her eyes empty of tears and strife. At the funeral, she wore red.

Uncle M and Hermione came to the house afterwards, Uncle M quiet and brooding in the corner with his tumbler full of Macallens’s and his daughter at his side. Hermione was studying for the SATs, Aunt Helen was in Hawaii and had stopped returning his phone calls. Mom played the good hostess, greeting mourners at the door with Chrys and Ag, and everything felt like the worst kind of déjà vu: I sat at the piano during the reception, listening to the room move around me. Ori sat beside me, this time, taking up space on the bench and watching me plunk out the same three notes. No sonatas this time, no minuets or concertos. There was no one here who would want to hear it.

“I think Mom did something,” I said, and Ori put his hand over mine. “I think – I think she might have –”

“Elle. Elle, she couldn’t. She couldn’t.”

“How do you know? She said – you heard all the awful things she said, and you know she wasn’t the same after Genie, she might – she might have –”

I lifted my head to look at him and saw my own grief mirrored in his eyes; he was taller than me, now, and we could no longer pass for twins, but we still matched in the ways that counted – dark humor, green eyes, long-fingered hands good for piano, for palm reading. Of all our siblings, we looked the most like Dad. His mouth twisted with uncertainty and he balled his hands into fists against the keys, letting sour notes ring throughout the room; he couldn’t deny the strangeness of the situation, the damning nature of circumstance. Our mother had something to do with this – somehow, some way, she was involved in this, involved from the beginning. As far as I was concerned, her hands were as bloody as if she’d stabbed my father herself.

“If you’re right,” he said slowly, “If you’re right…Jesus fuck, Elle, what does it mean?”

I closed the lid of the piano, careful not to snap them shut over my brother’s resting hands. He drew them back in to his lap and looked at me, and I stared back, lifting my chin defiantly. Sparta’s made of warriors, I thought, and I felt like my father’s daughter.

“It means we do something about it.”