Essential Charlotte

FLOWER REMEDY OF THE WEEK "For times of extreme stress, Ask the Doctor recommends taking a few drops of Rescue Remedy under the tongue. Carry a small bottle with you at all times." CHAPTER ONE Charlotte would have cried during the funeral service except for her mother's voice in her ear, nudging her to pull herself together, sit up straight, embrace life. The first time she heard the familiar deep voice, she wondered if she was going crazy. 'Come on, Charlotte, get it together, you're my representative.' Charlotte knew she should feel sad. After all, this was her mother lying in the funeral parlor. Her mother had always insisted on being called Corinne, even by her daughter. Surprising everyone, she had left instructions for a traditional Catholic service. Although Corinne was technically half Jewish, half Catholic, she had been a devout atheist all her life, aside from a brief flirtation with Buddhism and a cult or two. But for this final performance, she must have decided that the old-fashioned Catholic service, with its incense and Latin words, was the most dramatic. I'm an orphan now, thought Charlotte. No matter how old you are, when your parents are gone, you are alone--an orphan. Charlotte was thirty-three, the same age as Christ when he was crucified. I am an orphan, Charlotte repeated to herself. She found the word strangely comforting. It reminded her of her favorite book as a child, "A Little Princess," in which young Sara Crewe, motherless and believing her father dead, is forced into a life of humiliation at a rich girls' school. She is moved from her luxury suite up into the decrepit attic, where she is forced to do menial tasks and eat old crusts of bread. As a child, Charlotte used to imagine facing all sorts of indignities, with all the courage of little Sara Crewe. 'Don't be maudlin, Charlotte,' came the unmistakable voice of her mother, much too close for comfort. Charlotte looked over warily into the velvety darkness of the closed coffin, half expecting to see her mother stride out of it in her favorite black suede boots, as if this whole funeral were a new kind of performance art. She looked around to see if anyone else was hearing what she was hearing, but they were all bent over their prayer books, attempting to look somber. If she had tried, her mother couldn't have orchestrated a more theatrical exit, crushed by her own sculpture, a jagged monstrosity whose price had risen astronomically since her death. A whole retrospective was at this moment being planned at the Guggenheim Museum. Actually, the sculpture didn't kill her, as everyone believed. It was her heart. The medical examiner wrote the cause of death "as a sudden cardiac event." What actually occurred was that at the exact moment her heart stopped beating, Corinne had fallen between the two looping figures of her latest sculpture. Her mother was known for huge abstract metal sculptures. Although listed in the catalogue simply as 17 or 23, at certain angles they all looked like the interlocking limbs of sexually ambiguous participants. Charlotte would admire them dutifully but couldn't help feeling vaguely repelled by them. I'm an orphan now, Charlotte thought, touching the soft leather of the prayer book. Her mother was never very clear on the issue of paternity. When pushed, Corinne would say he was dead, but Charlotte didn't want to believe her. Sometimes, it was difficult for her to believe that she had ever had a father, that her mother hadn't hatched her in the studio from sheer creative force of will. Charlotte used to imagine her father sweeping in to rescue her. 'Charlotte is too delicate for this bohemian existence,' he would say. 'I'm taking her to my castle in Austria.' When she used to ask her mother about him, Corinne would say, "It's too painful to talk about, Charlotte," with an eloquent sighSchmais, Libby is the author of 'Essential Charlotte', published 2003 under ISBN 9780312311643 and ISBN 0312311648.