She Did It to Herself by Hobie Bender
“cuffed my right hand to the back leg of the chair”
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She did it to herself.
48 years ago when I was just 7 years old, my Aunt Cioban shot herself. She did it with my Uncle Carl’s serve-and-protect gun at the dining room table while he showered off the stink of a day’s work on the beat.
I’m fifty-five now, but I remember the day Aunt Cioban told the story of how she and my Uncle Carl got together. Down at the Seal Beach Bakery where all the moms with their kids met for coffee, my Aunt Cioban opened herself up and told us this story. Weird how people sit down in coffee shops and say things about themselves like they’re in their own houses, sitting at their kitchen table.
This is how she told it the time before the last time it happened to her. When she was still alive, before she shot herself.
My Aunt Cioban, Raquel Welch-gorgeous with her heavy eyeliner, sucked on her cigarette like all the other moms did. “I was only fifteen and dating Carl when he was twenty-five,” she said. “My parents went out for dinner and Carl came over right after work, still in his cop uniform.” The smoke came out with her words.
That night, my Aunt Cioban said she started up a game of chase. Up a staircase at one end of the house, her fluffy circle skirt bounced down the long hallway past three bedrooms and a bathroom to the other stairway at the other end of the house. Down that staircase, through the kitchen, the foyer, the living room, then back up the stairs. Over and over.
“I was laughing. It was fun,” she continued, the drop-you-dead gorgeous smile on her face. “Carl was only twenty-five, but he was already a little heavy and was having a hard time catching me.”
The way Aunt Cioban told it, she slowed down there by the kitchen table so he could catch her. “He pushed me into a chair at the kitchen table, cuffed my right hand to the back leg of the chair, and my left ankle to one of the front legs. I was all hunched over, looking up at him, laughing.”
Until she wasn’t laughing.
“He looked down at me with a mean in his eyes I’d never seen in him before and lit a cigarette. That’s when I saw the shake in his hand. I quit laughing when I saw that cigarette shake.” My Aunt Cioban was pretty, even with a pinch of frown at the top of her nose. Her closed lips pushed together in a straight line across her face, she said, “He paced back and forth in front of me, took long drags off his cigarette, not looking at me.
She took a breath and then she said, “I was already scared. He stopped right in front of me and looked at me with all that mean. The way his eyes looked, I knew this wasn’t the game I thought it was.”
Me, I imagine how Uncle Carl looked right then because that’s what I do when there aren’t any details. Everyone does it. We make our own story. Try to make sense out of things we’ve never seen, or don’t understand. Uncle Carl was teaching my aunt something the same way my grandparents taught him. His rock hard eyes, his ‘this is no joke’ mouth, his cop badge, the poof of belly over his belt buckle.
I know how my aunt felt. Fear and rage, but mostly fear. She shoulda’ kicked that fucker like she was fighting for her life.
“I was cuffed there until he was down to the butt of that cigarette.” Tears started in the corners of my aunt’s eyes when she got to this part of the story. “He blew smoke in my face, and held the butt of his cigarette up to my cheek.
And then Carl said, “I should put this out on your face.”
My Aunt Cioban, she said, “I started crying so hard.”
I know the sound of that kind of crying. Helpless crying. The kind of crying where the sound gets inside you and tears you apart from the heart out.
Aunt Cioban pushed a tear up her face with one finger, drying the trail of it back up to her eye. Perfect how she did that so her mascara didn’t smear. “All I thought about was how I was going to get out of that chair and never see Carl again,” my aunt said. The pinch between her eyes, deep. “I didn’t know I was already pregnant. Instead, I ended up married to him.”
Her sitting at the dining room table with that gun in her mouth, with the shower running upstairs. That’s when she did it to herself.
Ten years and four kids into that marriage, he didn’t need cuffs to keep her in that chair when he came home from a day on the beat.
I know what her crying sounded like, sitting at the dining room table. How my baby brother’s crying sounded, how my mother’s crying sounded, probably how Uncle Carl’s crying sounded before he became like his parents.
My grandparents tortured their children. That kind of crying is just a part of our history.
The family mantra after my Aunt Cioban did it to herself: She did it to herself, my mom said. She did it to herself, my aunt Jamie said. She did it to herself, my grandma McClintock said.
Filling in the gaps, I make up my own story. Aunt Cioban sitting in that chair cuffed to the table, this time by her marriage to Carl and their four children. Uncle Carl coming home to her crying that kind of cry I know he liked to hear come out of her, how my Aunt Jamie liked to hear that kind of crying coming out of me and my brothers, how my stepfather liked to hear that kind of crying come out of my mom. People who torture enjoy hearing and seeing that kind of pain. Pure cruelty.
I can see him unsnap the gun in the holster at his hip, pull the gun out slow and deliberate, and set it on the table close to her.
And I can hear the sound of the shower, too. Uncle Carl washing off his stink, the stink of his being a cop, and the stink of his life.
Aunt Cioban sat there in that kitchen chair with all that dead-end despair.
And I know why she did it to herself.
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If you liked this piece of writing, then might also like "Blue in Green" by Kirsten Larson, here.
Header image courtesy of Jay Torres. To view a gallery of his drawings, go here.
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Hobie Bender is a Portland, Oregon fiction writer who studies Dangerous Writing with Tom Spanbauer and the Dangerous Writers. She manages and loves the staff at the Bipartisan Cafe like only a stern mother could. And, she's made a few pies.