LITMIR.BIZ

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I heard her down below having a furious argument with my other half-sister, Zabrina. As far as I could gather Marietta was being her usual imperious self, and Zabrina—who keeps out of everybody’s way most of the time, and when she does encounter one of the family doesn’t say much—was for once standing up for her own opinions. The gist of the exchange was this: Marietta had apparently brought one of her lovers into the house the previous night, and the visitor had proved to be quite the detective. Apparently she’d got up while Marietta was asleep, had gone wandering around the house and seen something she should not have seen.

      Now she was apparently in a state of panic, and Marietta was quite out of patience with her, so she was trying to cajole Zabrina into cooking up some spiked candy that would wipe the woman’s memory clean. Then Marietta could take her back home, and the whole untidy business could be forgotten.

      “I told you last time I don’t approve—” Zabrina’s voice is normally reedy and thin; now it was positively shrill.

      “Oh Lord,” said Marietta wearily. “Don’t be so highhanded.”

      “You know you should keep ordinary folks away from the house,” Zabrina went on. “It’s asking for trouble, bringing somebody here.”

      “This one’s special,” Marietta said.

      “So why do you want me to wipe her memory?”

      “Because I’m afraid she’s going to lose her mind if you don’t.”

      “What did she see?”

      There was a pause. “I don’t know,” Marietta finally admitted. “She’s too incoherent to tell me.”

      “Well where did you find her?”

      “On the stairs.”

      “She didn’t see Mama?”

      “No, Zabrina. She didn’t see Mama. If she’d seen Mama—”

      “She’d be dead.”

      “—she’d be dead.”

      There was a pause. Finally Zabrina said: “If I do this—”

      “Yes?”

       “Quid pro quo.”

      “That’s not very sisterly,” Marietta groused. “But all right. Quid pro quo. What do you want?”

      “I don’t know yet,” Zabrina said. “But I’ll think of something, don’t worry. And you won’t like it. I’ll make sure of that.”

      “How very petty of you,” Marietta observed.

      “Look. Do you want me to do it or don’t you?”

      Again there was a pause. “She’s in my bedroom,” Marietta said. “I had to tie her to the bed.”

      Zabrina giggled.

      “It’s not funny.”

      “They’re all funny,” Zabrina replied. “Weak heads, weak hearts. You’re never going to find anyone who can really be with you. You know that don’t you? It’s impossible. We’re on our own, to the very end.”

      About an hour later Marietta appeared in my room. She looked ashen; her gray eyes full of sadness.

      “You heard the conversation,” she said. I didn’t bother to reply. “Sometimes that bitch makes me want to hit her. Hard. Not that she’d feel it. Fat cow.”

      “You just can’t bear to be in anybody’s debt.”

      “I wouldn’t mind with you,” she said.

      “I don’t count.”

      “No, I guess you don’t,” she replied. Then, seeing the expression on my face. “Now what have I said? I’m just agreeing with you, for God’s sake! Why is everybody so damn sensitive around here?” She went to my desk and examined the contents of the gin bottle. There was barely a shot remaining. “Got any more?”

      “There’s half a case in the closet in the bedroom.”

      “Mind if I—?”

      “Help yourself.”

      “You know we should talk more often, Eddie,” she called back to me while she dug for the gin. “Get to know one another. I don’t have anything in common with Dwight and Zabrina’s been in the foulest mood for the last couple of months. She’s so obese these days, Eddie. Have you seen her? I mean, she’s grossly fat.”

      Though both Zabrina and Marietta insist that they’re completely unlike—and in many regards this is true—they have some essential qualities in common. At their cores they’re both willful, stubborn, obsessive women. But whereas Marietta, who’s eleven years Zabrina’s junior, has always prided herself on her athleticism, and is as lean as a woman can get and still have a lushness about her body, Zabrina gave into her cravings for praline brittle and pecan pie years ago. Occasionally I’ll see her from my window, wandering rotundly across the lawn. At the last sighting she was probably three hundred and fifty pounds. (We are, you’ve doubtless begun to grasp, a profoundly wounded group of people. But trust me, when you better know the circumstances of our lives, you’ll be astonished we’re as functional as we are.)

      Marietta had emerged with a fresh bottle of gin, and, unscrewing the top, poured herself an ample measure.

      “Why do you keep all those clothes in the closet?” she said, knocking back a mouthful. “You’re never going to wear most of them.”

      “I presume that means you have your eye on something.”

      “The smoking jacket.”

      “Take it.”

      She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “I’ve underrated you all these years,” she said, and went back into the bedroom to fetch the jacket in case I changed my mind.

      “I’ve decided to write the book,” I told her when she emerged.

      She tossed the jacket at Nicodemus’s chair and fairly danced with excitement. “That’s so wonderful,” she said. “Oh my God, Eddie, we’re going to have such fun.”

      “We?”

      “Yes, we. I mean, you’ll be writing it most of the time, but I’ll be helping. There’s a lot you don’t know. Dirt about Cesaria that she told me when I was little.”

      “Maybe you should keep your voice down.”

      “She can’t hear me. She’s always in her chambers these days.”

      “We don’t know what she can hear,” I said. There was a story that she’d had Jefferson design the house so that it funneled sounds to her chambers (which I’ve never entered, by the way; nor has Marietta). The story may be apocryphal, but I wonder. Though it’s many, many months since I caught sight of the woman I don’t have difficulty believing she sits there in her boudoir listening to her children, and her husband’s children, conniving and weeping and slowly losing their minds. She probably enjoys it.

      “Well if she can hear me, so what? She should be happy we’re going to all this trouble. I mean, it’s going to be a history of the Barbarossas. It’ll make her immortal.”

      “If she isn’t already.”

      “Oh no…she’s getting old. Zabrina sees her all the time and she says the old bitch is failing.”

      “I find that hard to imagine.”

      “It was her saying that which started me thinking about our book.”

      “It’s not our book,” I insisted. “If I’m going to do it, it’s going to be done my way. Which means it’s not going

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