The Murderer's Daughters - Softcover

Randy Susan Meyers spent eight years as assistant director of Common Purpose, a batterer intervention program where she worked with both batterers and domestic violence victims. Previously, she was director for the Mission Hill Community Centers where she worked with at-risk youth. She is the co-author of the nonfiction book Couples with Children. Her short fiction has been published in Perigee, Fog City Review, and Grub Street Free Press. She currently teaches fiction-writing seminars at the Grub Street Writers' Center in Boston, Massachusetts. She lives in Boston with her husband and is the mother of two grown daughters.

1Lulu

July 1971

I wasn’t surprised when Mama asked me to save her life. By my first week in kindergarten, I knew she was no macaroni-necklace-wearing kind of mother. Essentially, Mama regarded me as a miniature hand servant:

Grab me a Pepsi, Lulu.

Get the milk for your sister’s cereal.

Go to the store and buy me a pack of Winstons.

Then one day she upped the stakes:

Don’t let Daddy in the apartment.

The July our family fell apart, my sister was five going on six, and I was turning ten, which in my mother’s eyes made me about fifty. Daddy didn’t offer much help, even before he left. He had problems of his own. My father wanted things he couldn’t have, and he hungered for my mother above all else. Perhaps growing up in the shadow of Coney Island, Brooklyn’s fantasy world, explained his weakness for Mama’s pinup façade, but I never understood how he missed the rest. Her sugary packaging must have kept him from noticing how much she resented any moment that didn’t completely belong to her.

Mama and Daddy’s battles were the heartbeat of our house. Still, until the day my mother kicked him out, my father was the perfect example of hope against knowledge. He’d return from work each night looking for supper, a welcome home kiss, a cold beer. Mama considered his homecoming her signal to rail against life.

“How many hours a day do you think I can be alone with them, Joey?” Mama had asked just days before he moved out. She’d pointed at my sister, Merry, and me playing Chutes and Ladders on the tiny Formica table stuck in the corner of our undersize kitchen. We were the best- behaved girls in Brooklyn, girls who knew that disobeying Mama brought a quick smack and hours spent staring at our toes.

“Alone?” Beer fumed off Daddy’s lips. “For God’s sake, you spend half the day yakking with Teenie and the other half painting your nails. You know we got a stove, right? With knobs and everything?”

Mama’s friend Teenie lived downstairs on the first floor with five sons and an evil husband whose giant head resembled an anvil. Teenie’s apartment smelled like bleach and freshly ironed cotton. Ironing was Teenie’s Valium. Her husband’s explosions left her so anxious that she begged Mama for our family’s wrinkled laundry. Thanks to Teenie’s husband, we slept on crisp sheets and satin- smooth pillowcases.

I dreamed of deliverance from my so- called family, convinced I was the secret child of our handsome mayor, John V. Lindsay, who seemed so smart, and his sweet and refined wife, who I knew would be the sort of mother who’d buy me books instead of Grade B faux-Barbie dolls from Woolworth’s junky toy section. The Lindsay family had put me in this ugly apartment with peeling paint and Grade C parents to test my worth, and I wouldn’t disappoint. Even when Mama screamed right in my face, I kept my voice modulated to a tone meant to please Mrs. Lindsay.

Mama sent us to take a nap that afternoon. The little coffin of a bedroom Merry and I shared steamed hot, hot, hot. Our only relief came when Mama wiped our grimy arms and chests with a washcloth she’d soaked with alcohol and cold water.

Lying in the afternoon heat, impatient for my birthday to arrive the next day, I prayed that Mama had bought the chemistry set I’d been hinting about all month. Last year I’d asked for a set of Britannica encyclopedias and received a Tiny Tears doll. I never wanted a doll, and even if I did, who wanted one that peed on you?

I hoped Mama’s recently improved mood might help my cause. Since throwing Daddy out, Mama hardly yelled at us anymore. She barely noticed we existed. When I reminded her it was suppertime, she’d glance away from her movie magazine and say, “Take some money from my purse, and go to Harry’s.”

We’d walk three blocks to Harry’s Coffee Shop and order tuna sandwiches and malteds, vanilla for Merry and chocolate for me. Usually I’d finish first, wrapping my legs around the cold chrome pole under the leather stool and twirling impatiently while I waited. Merry sipped at her malted and nibbled itsy bitsy bites from her sandwich. I yelled at her to hurry, imitating Grandma Zelda, Daddy’s mother. “Move it, Princess Hoo-ha. Who do you think you are, the Queen of En gland?”

Maybe she did. Maybe Merry’s secret mother was Queen Elizabeth.

After Daddy moved out, Mama instituted inexplicable new rules. Don’t open the door for your father. When you visit him at Grandma Zelda’s, don’t say a word about me. That old bag is just using you for information. And never tell anyone about my friends.

Men friends visited Mama all the time. I didn’t know exactly how to keep from saying anything about them. Not talking about Mama meant being outright rude and disobedient, since seconds after he’d kissed us hello, Daddy’s questions started:

How’s your mother?

Who comes over the house?

Does she have new clothes? New records? New color hair?

Even a kid could see Daddy was starving for Mama- news.

I felt a little guilty at how relieved I was by Daddy’s absence. Before he left, when he wasn’t demanding or, later, outright begging Mama for attention, he’d be staring at her with a big, moony face.

I sometimes wondered why my mother had married Daddy. Because I was too young to do the math and figure out the time between their wedding and my birth, it had never entered my mind that I was the reason, and Mama didn’t invite girlie mother- daughter conversation. Mama didn’t cotton to anything smacking of introspection. That’s probably why she was so close to Teenie. Teenie didn’t dip into the deeper meanings of life. She’d spend hours and hours judging Mama’s fingernail polish, glancing away from her ironing long enough to pick the tone most flattering to Mama’s pale skin as my mother painted one nail after another.

I flipped the page of The Scarlet Slipper Mystery, sweat dripping from my arms. Since I could take only six books per visit from the library, I had to time it right, or I’d be stuck on Sundays rereading the five Reader’s Digest Condensed Books sitting on our red lacquered living room shelf. Green-bronze statues of fierce- looking Chinese dragons with long, sharp tails bookended the volumes. Symbols of luck, Mama said.

Black onyx boxes in various shapes and sizes with mother- of- pearl inlay covers decorated the living room shelves. They were smooth and cool to the touch. Mama’s father brought them back from the war in Japan. Mama’s mother, who we called Mimi Rubee, gave Mama the boxes after our grandfather died because Mama demanded them enough to drive Mimi Rubee crazy.

Mama was used to getting what she wanted.

Sun snuck over the walls enclosing our gloomy courtyard and blazed into the bedroom. I flipped and rotated my pillow, squashing it into semi-comfortable lumps, seeking a bit of cool cotton to tuck under my head. Merry, cross- legged on her bed, moved her paper dolls into various constellations. She propped them against the wall, folding down the tabs on first one outfit and then another, moving her lips for the silent plays they acted out for her alone.

Merry was supposed to be taking a nap, and I was supposed to be making sure she did. Merry looked all proud and happy wearing her apple green sunsuit, the one that tied on the top with little yellow ribbons. I hated it because I had to help her pull it all the way down, then tie it back up every time she had to go to the bathroom. Merry loved it because it came from Daddy. Grandma Zelda really picked it out, not Daddy, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to ruin Merry’s good times.

Merry was unusually cute, and I was unusually plain. People stopped us every day, bending down to gush over Merry’s black curls or her Tootsie Pop eyes— the chocolate ones— or to stroke her rosy cheek as though her skin were a fabric they couldn’t resist fingering. I felt as though I toted around the Princess of Brooklyn.

Daddy doted on Merry. Aunt Cilla had said that while watching Daddy pop M&M’s into Merry’s mouth one by one. “Does it ever make you jealous?” she asked my mother. Aunt Cilla, Mama’s sister, looked like a puffy blowfish version of my mother.

“Yeah, right. He’s a big shot with the five- year- olds,“ Mama had responded to Aunt Cilla, but really for Daddy’s ears.

Merry made Daddy happy. I never did. He’d make a joke or something, and I’d narrow my eyes, wondering if the riddle or knock- knock joke was funny enough to merit a laugh. Then he’d get mad and say, “Jesus, Lulu, do you have to analyze every single thing a person says?”

I switched position on my bed, leaning on the windowsill with my elbows halfway out, trying to catch some breeze. Music from Mrs. Schwartz’s stereo blasted through the courtyard. Someone had probably told her to shut it off, which usually made Mrs. Schwartz turn it up. “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” played so loud that I missed hearing the first quiet taps on our front door.

“Someone’s knocking,“ Merry announced and hopped off her bed.

“Stop.” I swung my legs off the bed. “Are you nuts? Do you want Mama to kill us? Let me. You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

Merry jumped back on her bed, landing with her feet tucked under her butt. She was skinny and small for her age. In her green sunsuit, she looked like a grasshopper leaping up.

I tiptoed to the door. Mama used our nap time to take her own nap, her beauty sleep, she called it, and she hated waking before her time. I held a finger to my mouth, letting Merry know to keep...