In the Blood
If anything in this world is going to screw you up, it’s your family. It’s sort of their job, in fact. And you can’t get away from it: it’s in the blood. I’ve alluded to my dark and strange family history and the people who fill it here, the fortune tellers and the insane and the cockeyed dreamers.
One of those people is my Great Grandmother Hartley. I barely remember her; to me she is just a faint perfumed shadow sliding by in a swish of seamed pantyhose. She would make rag dolls for me and my little sister, big, floppy things with hideous faces that must’ve been sewn in the dark, or by a demented mind. Dolls that made children cry, and wonder if you ought to burn them before you threw them away.
Great Granny Hartley’s favorite past time in the entire world was attending funerals. Not of people she knew; just any funeral that happened to be in town. She didn’t attend to pay respect, or to ponder the deeper meanings of life and death. For my grandmother, this was first rate entertainment. Every Friday she joyfully set her hair into hundreds of tiny old-lady curls and lay out her second best dress with its print of tiny green flowers in anticipation of the weekend to come. She loved funerals, my granny. She was renown for having a wall full of ‘dead baby’ pictures, the kind people took of their dead infants way back when people did things like that, lying pale and still in a silk coffin. These pictures followed the staircase banister all the way up to the second floor of Granny’s house, and in the deepening summer twilight, their pale, blob-like faces floated eerily in the dark.
One day, Granny Hartley made my sister and I dresses. Unlike the dolls, they were beautiful things: all silk and satin, puckered on the top and coming down to just above the knees in a skirt of pointed pleats. Best of all, they were full of rainbow colors: shimmering white, deep blues, pale lilacs, dreamy greens. They were the most beautiful dresses little girls could wish for.
Then we found out what she made them of. Funeral ribbons. The kinds that adorn the giant frothy displays–and small bouquets–of flowers offered in sympathy, laid on graves and tilted against coffins during viewings. My granny had collected those ribbons for years, resulting in these masterpieces of dresses. My sister refused to wear hers when she found out, terrified that the dead people would come after and seek revenge for the stolen ribbons. I just twirled and twirled in the sunlight, admiring the way my skirt flared out, the light shooting ribbons of gold through my gruesome finery.
How did that shape me into what I am today, I can’t help but wonder. Family will get you, all right. It’s in the blood.
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2 opinions for In the Blood
Deb L
May 15, 2006 at 2:45 pm
OMG, *giggles*
I would have worn the dress too! Do you still have it?
Rhys
May 20, 2006 at 10:49 pm
I’m glad you liked it, Deb!!! No, I don’t know what happened to it. :)
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