Mathilda Savitch

Da gets up to go and he pats my dirty hair and I suppose I should be ashamed, but what do I care about anything anyway.  That’s part of being awful, not caring.  And then what’s part of it too is the thought that suddenly jumps into my head.  The thought that it could be a person’s own mother who might make a doll with her daughter’s hair and throw it into a fire.  She’d watch the flames eat it up and then she’d dance off to bed laughing and having sex and bleeding little drops of perfume all over the sheets as if there was nothing to it.  I wouldn’t put it past her.

But don’t get me wrong.  I love her.  This is another one of my secrets.

The thing is, I can’t love her, not in the real world.  Because this would be degrading to me.  To love someone who despises you, and she just might.  You should see her eyes on me sometimes.  Plus she’s not even a mother anymore, she’s just a planet with a face.  Da at least has hands.

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Helene was going to be a singer.  She was a singer.  There are recordings.  Da made them on his old tape recorder.  No one can listen to them now, they’re the most dangerous thing in the world.  On one of the tapes it’s Da singing some stupid song with Helene.  Both of them are laughing as much as singing.  If you listened to it now, it would be Da singing with a ghost.  The laughing would kill you.

Mathilda’s parents are so deep in mourning following the death of their eldest daughter, Helene, that their younger daughter, Mathilda, compares them to zombies. Her father is absent and withdrawn into himself. Her mother can’t bear to talk or think about Helene, and her way of coping is to stay drunk as much as possible. Neither of them are there for Mathilda, because they are too far gone themselves to be able to help her. They make cursory efforts. They feed her, they take her to a therapist, they are doing their best. But what they are unable to do is what Mathilda needs, which is to talk about what happened to their family, talk about Helene and how much they loved her. Talk about Mathilda and how they still love her, and how, even with Helene gone, they are still a family. Mathilda has had just about enough, one year in, and is starting to fight back. She is at turns cruel, wry, and sensitive. She wants to know what happened to Helene, how she ended up in front of a train in a station. So she starts sleuthing.

But this is no mystery story, though there is certainly the question of what happened and why. Instead, Mathilda Savitch is the story of a seriously dysfunctional family, full of pain and suffering, and Mathilda’s erratic and questionable attempts to do something about it.