The Cherry Robbers

by Sarai Walker

Women are raised to be accommodating, so I suppose a woman who draws clear lines that others are not allowed to cross becomes remarkable for that fact alone.

When you live in defiance of yourself, you can adapt to your circumstances, but remnants of who you are at your core remain. A bit of wildness that can’t be tamed.

If you could have sliced the exterior of this wedding-cake house with a knife, you would have found inside six maidens—Aster, Rosalind, Calla, Daphne, Iris, Hazel—each of whom were expected to become a bride one day. It was the only certainty in their lives. Dearly beloved. Dearly departed.

But the bleeding and the heat laid a pall on that summer even in its early acts. If I mixed a palette for June 1950, I’d start with vermillion, then add hematite, then a deep russet brown, the shades of my cotton pad the filter of my memory.

They shared a ripe roundness, which today would likely be described as fat in the negative way fat has come to be spoken about, but in those days, things were different. Aster and Zelie looked as if their skin couldn’t contain what was inside them, as if I could press my finger against Zelie’s arm and the juices would come spilling out. I can taste that juice, a tangy peach.

Our mother told us the story of the naiad Daphne, who had vowed to remain untouched by a man but was pursued through the forest by the amorous Apollo. Daphne ran from Apollo, screaming for her father, a river god, to protect her, so he turned her into a laurel tree before Apollo could catch her. I didn’t think this was fair, that Daphne should become a tree. It was Apollo who deserved to have his greedy hands frozen into scaly branches that would never know the embrace of true love. But even at that age, I knew that it was often women who suffered the consequences of men’s actions.

Belinda professed to hate the wedding cake, yet she rarely left it, staying inside, cut off from the world, roaming the hallways in her long white dresses, living in a world of daughters, flowers, and spirits.

I grew up believing our mother was haunted, and since my sisters and I had each lived inside her for nine months, I wondered if we were haunted too.

Belinda didn’t seem to have any vices—didn’t smoke cigarettes or drink coffee or alcohol; she faced every day head-on, defenseless.

Whenever anyone talked about the wedding, they spoke about it as the start of something exciting for Aster but as an end for Matthew.

“It’s best to ease them into married life.” He slapped Matthew on the back, and the two men exchanged a look and a chuckle that I didn’t quite understand. I thought maybe it had to do with the wedding night when the man made the woman bleed. I wondered why Matthew and Dr. Green would laugh at such a thing. Where there was blood, there was pain, or so I had always thought.

What I remember most about those two days, besides my own grief, was the dizzying mix of the morbid and the mundane. One morning I’d see the maids scrubbing blood out of the floorboards in Aster and Rosalind’s bedroom while downstairs Mrs. O’Connor made dainty éclairs for the postfuneral reception. Blood splatter and pastry, these are the things I remember.

After her dates, she’d swan into the girls’ sitting room, bringing with her a trail of winter chill, crunchy flakes of snow caught in her hair and collar, the smell of pine and smoke (fireplace and cigarette), the leftovers of wine caught on her breath.

We lived in a weird sort of limbo that week, characters at the end of a chapter whose next sentences were being written at a torturously slow pace on an old typewriter that was running out of ribbon.

“Shelley wrote a poem from the perspective of a cloud,” she continued, as she began to powder her nose. “I am the daughter of Earth and Water, and the nursling of the Sky, I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die.”

The Chapel sisters: first they get married then they get buried

My sisters and I had always loved old maid, our deck well-worn. Whoever got stuck with the old maid card at the end of the game would always shriek dramatically in horror. But on that Saturday, when Zelie and I played alone and I ended up with the old maid, I studied what was supposed to be her hideous face, her double chin and splotchy skin, her bulging eyes behind thick glasses, her protruding teeth. She was supposed to be scary; she was meant to frighten little girls. But given what had happened to Aster and Rosalind, maybe the old maid was the lucky one.

Our usual art teacher, Mr. Richardson, had told us that men tended to make art while women were the inspiration. I thought this might explain why so many of the women in the paintings we studied in our textbook were naked—Waterhouse’s water nymphs among the lily pads; Renoir’s voluptuous nudes; and Manet’s bizarre painting of a picnic luncheon with two fully clothed men and a woman whose dress must have fallen off—it was unlike any picnic I’d ever attended.

“It’s easier to say that women like my mother are crazy. Then you don’t have to listen to them. And so maybe in a way she became crazy. Maybe she could communicate only by screaming.”