If Only You People Could Follow Directions by Jessica Hendry Nelson

Author:Jessica Hendry Nelson [Nelson, Jessica Hendry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023512
Publisher: Counterpoint

THE DOLLHOUSE

MY FATHER WAS Cynthia’s firstborn and she likes to tell the story of his beginning. I am twelve and sit cross-legged on an Oriental rug inside the townhouse she bought after divorcing my grandfather. She rocks in her rocking chair and works a needle through the hem of my overlong pants. I sit rapt, a blanket over my bare legs, popping cold green grapes into my mouth and chewing like a cow.

“Don’t chew like a cow, child,” she scolds. “You’ll get fat like Helen.”

Helen is my mother’s mother and my love for her is uncomplicated and soothing, like cake. It is different with Cynthia, I am realizing, though I haven’t seen much of her since I was eight and she and my grandfather moved to South Carolina after his retirement. Now she is back in Pennsylvania and I am learning how to please her. I wear the shiny penny loafers she bought for me at Lord & Taylor and call my brother icky because all males, according to Cynthia, are icky. She does not invite Eric over. It is the beginning of a swift and merciless erasure, my brother’s gender relegating him to nonpersonhood. She does not call or speak to him and nobody understands why. Cynthia had four sons and has buried one already, though two more are slouching ever closer and there is nothing she can do about it. Eric, it seems, might as well join them now and without much fuss. “I’m no good for boys,” is all she will say when pressed, though I rarely press. Her wrath is unpredictable and I know, even at twelve, that my abdication would be forever. She refers to me as her daughter and speaks of my mother (once her pet, too, and now, it seems, her competition) as if she is no better than the squirrels digging in her trash cans.

“Well, I was the one who had to pay for all those abortions,” she says to me casually one day. “Oh, you didn’t know? A ploy to keep your father around, that’s for sure.”

But here on her rug, one winter day when I am twelve, crackling heat rushing from the fireplace, the soles of my feet warm and the bursting grapes sweet and pulpy as I chew one and then another, I feel only gratitude for my inexplicable specialness, my new role as the chosen one. I do not yet realize how many have come before me, that each of her sons received this same treatment at one time or another—the shopping sprees and chin-lifting adulations—and that my own mother, whom she now so disdains, was once her “daughter,” too, a thin girl from a middle-class Jewish family who ogled what seemed only opulence and discretion, the new boyfriend’s family like a wealthier version of the Cleavers, practically aristocratic, the very blood in their veins like gilded silk.

Cynthia was an only child from a small town in Illinois and she loved her father with singular ferocity. He sold high-end lawn mowers for a company named Barbara-Greene.

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