Hierarchy

By: RDV

Katie always got what she wanted. Even the best of littlest things should belong to her. Her siblings, of which she was the second, accepted the bias as the general rule. They were brought up to think that they were inferior to her, thanks to their rarely present father who spoiled her to both his and her hearts’ content.

On her eleventh birthday he gave her a Tagheuer watch. In the succeeding months, he gave her every luxury a girl that age doesn’t deserve. Her cell phone’s model was serially up to date. Once a new one came up, hers would be passed down to her mother, then to her younger brother, then to the eldest child who was born of a different brother. The youngest one was too young to own a phone. At any rate, this was the life Katie came to know.

They were rich, undeniably, but the wealth was all dirty money. Their father was a public official; along with the job comes inevitable corruption. A great deal of it. It follows that he fathered many children, possessed countless mistresses and hence had them all to feed. Katie’s mother, of course, wasn’t the legitimate wife so this family was more often than not neglected. But the father made up by providing for them generously and sating Katie with his gifts. He was his favorite and they loved each other dearly.

The money, until the disaster struck, was sufficient. When the disaster did hit, it hit hard. The father, haply, fell ill. He could no longer work and in time, he had finalized his retirement. Old age had done this detriment. More than that, bad karma did. For once, Katie looked upon the graver aspects of her relationship with her father. Her visits to the hospital where he stayed were strictly limited, since the legal family had full charge. She became depressed for a time, venting it on her mother, cruelly making it plain to her that it was her fault why things were such. She could never forgive her for being his whore only. She called in question her fidelity when she started dating someone else, which at any rate was due her since Katie’s father was a philanderer and they had been separated for four years now and were only on technical terms. But Katie never understood all this. She wrote her a letter, expressing how unfair she had been. But did Katie understand what she had been through? That love for his father blinded her such that she would never come to realize how much her mother suffered for him and for their children, something one could easily realize just by breathing.

“Katie, listen here--“

“No.”

“He’s left us. He left us long before you knew.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re the one who wants to leave this family.”

“Oh, I wish I could.” Her mother paused. “Katie, we’re not number one. We’re not even number two. We’re number three, and there are number four and number five. Your dad left behind him a whole village to feed. He’s near death, and there’s nothing for us in his will. We have no right over it. He left us practically beggars--”

“Stop it! I’m not hearing this!” She covered her ears with both hands. Her mother held them away.

“You will listen to what I say.” She said with a biting austerity. But she knew, knew too well, that she couldn’t be supplicated by mere explanation.

“I’m not hearing your ugly voice--”

Smack.

Her mother slapped her, hard, whereas before she hadn’t the guiding instinct for such cruelty. She hadn’t done it before, even in Katie’s toddler years. Because her father loved her so, her mother was afraid to lay a hand on her. Now that he was to disappear, the mother would be free to regulate their children’s discipline. Nothing would hinder her now.

“You are a mean little bitch. You are a spoilt, useless brat.” Her mother blared. “I was wrong to secretly hope that you’d see through him. Of course you won’t. I could never give you what he gave you. Material shit.”


Her mother was panting as she finished the affected monologue. A part of the weight was lifted off her chest, but the debris was still there. An equal measure of hate and pity was in her eyes, for Katie, for her father, for everything. She went on,


“You never reproached him for his mistresses. You blamed me for your being an illegitimate child. You always saw me as this perverted slut who runs after money. But what about a thirty-year-old man who seduced a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl? Isn’t that something? And a man who has five families to feed, who pitched into his pockets government money, isn’t that disgusting? He left us, Katie, he left me for a younger woman even as he did with the other two before me and even as he did to that younger woman. You have no right to judge me if I go out with another man if you worship a person like that.” There were tears in her mother’s eyes. “I love you but you don’t own my happiness. I’m not gong to let you take it.”


They were both in the chaos of tears now. None dared restrained the flow, and the howling proceeded. After she eloped with Katie’s father, at sixteen, her mother never was a whore. She was a mother, a housewife, a slave to her family at best and worst. She always worked hard to make ends meet, worked like a cow until it hunched her back. There were times when she didn’t do things the way she should have, but like the servile maid she’d take deep care to apologize to her children even if it meant losing her integrity as the head of that incomplete family. She only thought of being romantically involved with another man four years after Katie’s father abandoned her. And Katie was angered beyond words by this. She couldn’t of course understand. He wanted her mother to be loyal to that scoundrel even if there was no recompense.


As they looked at each other, her mother realized how alike Katie was to her father; same eyes, same lips movement, same nose. It pained to look at her thus and she wondered if Katie still looked at her father as a saint, which she apparently had fallen into the mistake of believing as a very young girl. Then as if a glimmer in Katie’s eyes shed the truth, she knew, she just knew that Katie would never love her the way she did her father. She was suspended eternally between love and ignorance, from which she could never recover. Slowly, the mother turned away, retreated to the thought of how repulsive that man was to her and in the bedroom, learned that she had that same hatred for her daughter too.