Page 29 of Persephone's Curse
“It’slovelyto see you,” Aunt Bea said, pulling away and lookingearnestly into my eyes. Everything she said was said earnestly. Everything she said, you got the feeling that she really meant, with every fiber of her being.
“It’s nice to see you, too,” I said. We stepped into the foyer and Aunt Bea shut the door. “Is Bernie awake?”
“No, sound asleep,” she said. “Are you tired? Or will you have a cup of tea before bed?”
“I’ll have some,” I said.
“Great! Sissy, what about you?” Aunt Bea only ever called MomSissy,a remnant from their childhood, when she couldn’t pronounce Mom’s name—Anastasia.
“Sure, sure,” Mom said. She was rummaging in her suitcase for something; she pulled out a cardigan and slipped it on. “It’sfreezingin here, Bea.”
Aunt Bea rolled her eyes at me. “It’s Vermont, Sissy. You grew up here. Surely your blood hasn’t thinnedthatmuch.”
“Just because it’s freezing outside, doesn’t mean it has to be freezing inside,” Mom said, thensherolled her eyes at me, because when the two of them were together, they regressed about thirty years each.
I wanted to see Bernadette. I wanted to wake her up, crawl into bed with her, peer into her eyeballs and make sure she was okay, but I knew I shouldn’t. She needed her sleep, and I needed to not give her a heart attack by jumping into her bed in the middle of the night. (Plus, you couldalwayscrawl in bed with Evelyn; you couldsometimescrawl in bed with Clara; you couldnevercrawl in bed with Bernadette.) I went and sat at Aunt Bea’s kitchen table, repurposed wood from a barn that used to be on my grandparents’property. One of the professors at the school had made it for Bea. He taught woodworking or architecture or something.
“Why do men always bring you gifts?” Mom had asked her once.
And Bea had smiled and said, “Not just men.”
There was a large painting hanging on the wall above an old record player, because of course Aunt Bea played actual vinyl records at one in the morning. The painting was one I’d always loved. It showed a naked woman reclining in a rural field, a river running alongside the left of her and a creepy old man peering around a tree on her right. The woman was Persephone; she wore a languid, sultry expression on her face and her body was all glowing skin and supple curves. The man was Hades, spying on Persephone right before he steals her away to the Underworld. The original painting was by Thomas Hart Benton and hung in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Bea’s copy had been painted by one of Benton’s students and was, in my opinion, just as good as the original.
I had seen Aunt Bea talking to this version of Persephone, telling her about the day, our plans, keeping her abreast of the goings-on of the Farthing girls.
“As long as she never talks back,” Mom had said once.
“Of course she talks back, Sissy. You just have to know the right way to listen.”
Aunt Bea caught me looking at the painting now, and she put an arm on my shoulder as Mom settled down at the kitchen table. “Did I ever tell you about the time I fell out of a tree?”
“Here we go,” Mom said, but her eyes were twinkling, and she sat up a little, listening. You always listened to Aunt Bea’s stories.
“I should have died, honestly. Must have been fifteen, twentyfeet up. Broke my arm in two places. And I swear, Iswear,as I was lying there on the grass waiting for your mother to run and get help, I saw this face…” She trailed off, her eyes unfocusing, letting the moment breathe, letting the image of her lying on the grass really take shape. She was anexcellentstoryteller.
“Persephone?” I asked, expertly delivering my line (I had of course heard this story a hundred times before; we all had).
Aunt Bea shook herself out of her trance and smiled at me, shrugging her shoulders. “I know it sounds like a tall tale, kid. But stranger things have happened.”
Stranger things have happenedcould have been the slogan for a show about the Farthing girls, I thought to myself as Aunt Bea set mugs of peppermint tea in front of Mom and me and then slid into her seat.
One thing I loved about Aunt Bea is that she never asked boring questions likehow was the drive,instead she went right from a story about how Persephone saved her from the clutches of death to looking at each of us for a moment, clearing her throat and saying, “Is there a reason you both sort of look like shit?”
I burst out laughing, but Mom just took a careful sip of her tea and said, “I’m sorry car travel doesn’t agree with us as it does with you, Beatrice.”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” she said. “There’s something… going on.” When she saidgoing on,she waved her hand in a circle in front of my face. It felt vaguely ritualistic.
“What do you mean?” Mom asked.
“An energy,” Bea said.
“Please don’t bring out the crystals.”
“I’m considering it.”
“We’re just tired,” Mom insisted. “It’s been a long day. A few long weeks.”
“Isn’t life just a series of a few long weeks, over and over and over until we die?” Aunt Bea mused, and she seemed almost chipper, even when talking about our inevitable deaths. It was hard to dampen Aunt Bea’s spirits. That was one thing I didn’t think any of us Farthing girls had gotten from her, unfortunately. One wrong look could pretty much dampen the spirits of any of us.
