My great-aunt Deirdre grew up in a house in Brooklyn covered with vines. People said she resembled Marilyn Monroe. Pictures attest to this. In one of them, she and my grandmother are sitting on the front stoop, heads touching, arms slung around each other’s shoulders. Deirdre is wearing a lemon-print sundress, smiling like she knows how attractive she is and wants you to know it, too. My grandmother is plain as dough, dressed in a dowdy smock. Maybe she realized she could never outshine her sister and had simply stopped trying.
The two of them worked in a candy factory, wrapping squares of chocolate in gold foil. After work, they stopped off for milkshakes and the meatloaf special at the corner luncheonette. At night, they slept in the same bed, curled next to each other like commas.
You are my heart, my grandmother used to say.
And you are mine, Deirdre answered.
My great-grandparents had died of influenza when the sisters were young, and they had basically raised themselves. Every Saturday evening, one of Deirdre’s beaus would take her dancing or to a picture show. It was assumed that she’d marry and my grandmother would live with her and her future husband.
One night, Deirdre didn’t come home from a date. It was early April. Crocuses had just started poking through the little patch of soil behind their row house. Two days passed. My grandmother spent them on her knees at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, lighting candle after candle.
At this point in the story, she would take out a handkerchief and dab her eyes. Even though I knew what came next, I sucked in my breath and wished for a different outcome – that Deirdre had stayed home, that she and her date had taken a stroll instead of a boat ride, that he’d been less fond of drink, that she would come waltzing up the steps of her house, flushed and shining, with Licorice Snaps for my grandmother in her purse.
I visited my grandmother once a week and nearly every time, she would re-tell the story, taking it out like a precious ring, polishing it, holding it up to the light. Gradually, I added my own details: the straw hat that Deirdre was wearing, the scent of her Shalimar perfume, the way her cheeks had swollen with river water when they fished her out. The memory haunted me. I found myself repeating it to classmates and boyfriends. Even – when I was hungover – to strangers. It was more melancholic, more fabulous, than anything that had ever happened to me. Over the years, it became mine, like a favorite sweater or the freckles on my nose.
Later, in graduate school, I decided to research Deirdre’s death. I had some notion of using it in a story I was writing, though whether it would be a fictional account, or creative non-fiction, was unclear. My grandmother had died by that time and my mother knew nothing more than what we’d been told. I went to the library and sifted through old newspaper accounts, searching for details. I scoured the Internet. I found . . . nothing. No boating accident. No articles about cops dragging the East River. No mention of Deirdre at all.
Our family surname is unusual. Within an hour, I’d located the voting records of a woman from Circleville, Ohio, who was exactly the age she’d be now. I looked up the number that matched the address and dialed what turned out to be an assisted living facility. Then I flew to Columbus and rented a car. Meeting the real Deirdre, weaving the strands of our lives together, would add emotional heft to the story.
She was in the dayroom when I arrived, talking to a middle-aged woman in a wheelchair. The woman’s head was too big for her body. Her spine curved in on itself, her legs jerked spasmodically.
I had called in advance, explained who I was, the story I was writing. I’d even brought the photograph of Deirdre and my grandmother on the steps of the Brooklyn house. When I handed the picture to her, she grabbed it so quickly that one corner ripped.
Spina bifida, Deirdre said, gesturing to the woman in the wheelchair. Your grandmother called her ‘damaged.’ We both were, in her eyes.
I looked from Deirdre to the woman and back again. There was something about the woman’s face that reminded me of my mother, the shape of her nose, that high forehead.
Damaged, I repeated, trying to fit the pieces together.
I was a fallen woman. My daughter didn’t deserve to be loved.
When I tell my own daughter what happened, I change it. I leave out Deirdre’s anger, thick as lard. It reminds me of how I hold resentments close, nursing them, fanning the thin blue flame. I don’t discuss why my grandmother used to cry every time she told the story. Who were the tears for? How did she measure loss? I don’t mention how Deirdre wiped drool from my cousin’s chin or the lies my grandmother told. Everyone lies. That’s how myths were created, after all, to make sense of tragedy. Even in ancient days when lovely nymphs were pursued by satyrs, when the Gorgon sisters had snakes for hair. One look at their faces, it was said, could turn a leaf to stone.
Beth Sherman
Beth Sherman has an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, and is currently getting her PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her stories have been published in Portland Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Blue Mountain Review, Tangled Locks Journal, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Flash Boulevard, Sou’wester and elsewhere.
Beth Sharman can be contacted via Instagram and X/Twitter at @bsherm36.