Still Life with Plums: Short Stories

Hand. Me. Down.

1 Hand.Me.Down. Holy Thursday, 1965, I squatted over the heater vent in the kitchen picking knee scabs when my father’s voice boomed from down the hall: “You kids get in the car!” His reverberating diktat roused a pummeling of footsteps up from the dank cement basement where the KKK tortured crickets or mice or my younger brother, Duff. The KKK was an apt acronym for my three older brothers, terrorists all, Kevin, Kieran, and Killian, ages twelve through fourteen. At the top of the stairs, the KKK banged out the back door and skittered and slipped up the muddy hill, their great escape unfoiled since my parents had lost control over them long before. The storm door squealed shut behind them in the April drizzle. Duff started to follow, testing his six-year-old mettle, but Killian roared: “Not you!” Duff slumped there, eyes welling. Mom wiped crumbs from the supper table and recentered the doily and bowl of emerald glass balls, the ones I tried to juggle when no one was looking. Dad thumped down the hall sliding his scary belt through the loops on his waistband. “Where are the girls?” he muttered, though I was crouching right there, one of his girls. I looked too much like 2 hand. me. down. him, a Black Irish reminder of his father’s mean joke: Who’d yer mother bed to squeeze out the black-assed loiks-a-yew? Mostly Grandpa lobbed this insult at my dusky father. The first time he flung it at me, however, when he was out of earshot I whined to my mother: “I’m not black.” “Of course you’re not, Doreen.” She stopped darning a sock and patted her knee, a rare invitation. Once I was settled on her lap, she spun a fantasy about Spanish sailors in a sixteenth-century Armada who set off to invade England. The Armada shipwrecked off the Irish coast, however, leaving a few water-logged survivors struggling for shore. The Irish women took pity on the pathetic crew and soon they married and started a dark-skinned, dark-eyed bloodline. “That’s rubbish,” Grandpa O’Leary snarled from the hall. “She’s kin to Irish colonizers who mixed with those West Indie, Montserrat niggers.” Mom sat there, stunned, and it took her four months to convince me that I was as white as my older sisters, nearly, who were not only twins, but willowy, pale-skinned, blue-eyed fairies like Mom. “Change your shirt,” Mom whispered to me as Dad buckled his belt. I knew better than to grumble in front of Dad, so I scuffed to the room I shared with my ethereal older sisters, my narrow twin bed looking like a lone dinghy beside their luxury liner of a French Provincial queen. Still, it was better than the two sets of bunk beds crammed into the boys’ room, the wall beside Duff’s mattress slathered with dried boogers because that was the KKK’s designated booger wall. My eleven-year-old sisters sat shoulder to shoulder on the upholstered bench in front of the vanity we inherited from Dad’s mother along with the luxury liner queen, combing their golden tresses, the blunt-cut ends skimming their backsides. 3 hand. me. down. “It looks better parted on the left,” Mary said to Meg. They lifted identical combs to re-part their hair and secure the corn-silk locks with matching barrettes. I slid open the closet to dig through the box of clothes I had recently inherited from a neighbor girl three years my senior. Her leftovers would smother my sisters, whose slight shirts and pencil-leg pants would never accommodate me. I found a striped turtleneck, faded from washing, but new to me, and punched my melon head through the taut opening. It only choked a little. Hunching forward, I tried to wedge between the twins and peer into the vanity to see just how unkempt my own wiry mane was, if I needed a brush or my fingers would suffice. My sisters pressed their shoulders together more tightly, a bony gate slamming. “Use the mirror in the bathroom!” they jointly bleated. Mom doled out coats and scarves from the hall closet and we crowded there tugging and grunting, buttoning and zipping. Duff and I stole peeks of Dad’s face trying to decode the pucker of his mouth, the squint of his eye. Dad wedged his Sunday wingtips into slide-on...