The Blank Family Quirkiness

by Pamela Richardson

The next night, it happened … Rose Blank finally had it up to here with Selena and Bondi.

It had been building for months, perhaps years. Selena and Bondi, two of Rose’s daughters, had been at odds from day one. Bondi, third born of thirteen children, closely resembled her father—sturdy, with blocky features, square hands, square body, square face—and a long shock of straw-like hair, wispy, feathering past her waist. Selena, the youngest, bringing the count up to a baker’s dozen … apparently one too many for the father, who disappeared soon after Selena’s birth. The baby of the family was petted and spoiled by all but Bondi, who would forever hold her responsible for Daddy’s abandonment. As children, the two girls had fought like cats and dogs. As adults, Selena loved to tell anyone who would listen how she could remember Bondi rocking her “just a wee bit harder than necessary” in the creaking family cradle, built by their granddaddy out of well-worn pine.

Many changes had come to the Blank family since those days, in the listing old frame house in the tiny, unincorporated community of Thresher, Missouri, nestled spitting distance from the Ozarks. Selena remained at home into adulthood, watching her siblings leave one by one to follow various carrots—jobs, school, love—and, in the case of their brother Leonard, the seduction of an exciting career in the army. He’d run off and enlisted, shipped out, sent two postcards, one letter and a package from Germany, and was never heard from again.

Mama Rose, robust in her youth and tough as jerky, eventually ran out of steam and took to her bed. “Just too many years seethin’ over you children, I reckon,” Dr. Gaugh surmised to Selena, as he scribbled a prescription and handed it to her with a toothy grin. Selena remained at home, watching her mother’s health deteriorate, then she finally called Bondi and guilted her into coming back home to help, at least for awhile. Bondi agreed from a genuine sense of duty and the fact that she had absolutely nothing of promise to hold her in Birmingham.

In the ten years Bondi had been away from the family home, she had forgotten how much she resented her sister—younger, clever, charming, with that infernal long, black hair, shiny and soft like a movie star’s. The only thing that kept Bondi from completely hating Selena was that she, too, struggled with the “Blank family quirkiness,” as folks around town called it (“From your father’s side,” Mama Rose insisted darkly). With Selena, it manifested in fits of scalding emotion, quickly followed by wonder and curiosity at the fearful eyes of everyone around her. Dr. Gaugh once suggested it might be epilepsy; Mama Rose had practically thrown him out of the house, in a temper that complemented her daughter’s rant.

Bondi had been home for about a month when the quiet surroundings and the tedium of caring for her mother took their toll on her. To alleviate her boredom, she began devising tricks to play on Selena, as she had when they were children. After a few minor pranks, she hit upon a winner. Every night, she slipped from her bed, entered Selena’s bedroom armed with a pair of pinking shears from their mother’s sewing basket, leaned down and snipped off a small lock of her sister’s abundant black hair. She took great care the first few times, for fear of waking her, but Selena was a heavy sleeper. So the prank went on, and Bondi waited patiently for the day when her sister would take notice. Her efforts were rewarded one morning when Selena, staring in the mirror at the thinning patch, jolted the household awake with a wail. Perhaps she had some disease! Or a condition, like Mama, something Dr. Gaugh could neither explain nor treat. Bondi buried her face in the pillow to cover her snickering, then left her bed and raced to her sister’s side, offering the kindest sympathy she could muster.

Then one night, Selena awoke in time to see Bondi scrambling from the room. She leaped to the floor in pursuit, and Bondi shut herself in a closet. The still night air crackled with Selena’s oaths, Bondi’s laughter—something between a bull seal’s call and a donkey’s bray—and Mama Rose’s voice, slurred from her medication, “Sizzahs shullna fighdt.”

Now Bondi no longer took pains to keep quiet. Each night, Selena tried with all her might to remain awake, but eventually she dropped off into her heavy slumber, and Bondi went to work, her thick fingers pressing the shears together with force, to produce a loud snip. Selena awoke screaming and chased after Bondi, who always managed to dive into the closet and lock the door in the nick of time. Mama Rose begged them to stop, demanding that Selena tell her where the sam hill she’d picked up such language.

Finally, after a particularly bitter baiting from her sister, Selena picked up a porcelain figurine from a table and smashed it to the floor. The figure, a Hummel knockoff, had been sent from their brother Leonard, in Germany. Mama Rose unleashed a piercing howl, which reduced Selena to cowering and brought Bondi’s head peeking cautiously from the closet door. The girls cautiously approached their mother, who quivered in her bed, furious beyond words. Selena stammered an apology, Bondi dropped the shears to the floor, and they both stole off to bed without another sound. The silence throughout the house the next morning was broken only when Selena tried to pick up the pieces of the figure. Mama Rose ordered her to leave it where it was. Selena meekly obeyed, and for once the family passed the day with no bickering or whining. That evening, Bondi wisely decided she would forego her routine prank. The sisters murmured their “g’nights” to each other shortly after supper, and retired to their bedrooms.

Then it was Mama Rose’s turn.

The horror the sisters experienced late that night can only be imagined—each awakening to the sight of Mama Rose, standing first over Bondi’s bed, then Selena’s, arms held high, hands wielding two butcher knives. Terror knocked the voices clean out of the girls’ throats, leaving the first incapable of warning the second, as the raised knives plunged swiftly downward …

The national news never focused on Thresher, Missouri. Therefore, Dr. Gaugh could be forgiven for his mixed emotions when asked to grant an interview. Being human, he couldn’t help but enjoy the feeling of importance that came from knowing his words would be in print. It was just a pity it came at the price of the lives of the two Blank girls, and what undoubtedly would result in lifetime institutionalization for their mother.

Speaking at the Blank house to the news reporters, the doctor described the scene he came upon earlier that morning when he dropped by to see how Mama Rose was faring. He was surprised to find her out of bed, sitting at the kitchen table, fiddling with shattered pieces of some bric-a-brac. She had shrugged when he asked about her daughters, and he proceeded through the house, heart pounding at the unnatural silence. He found each daughter in her bed, shoulders pinned to the mattress with knives, eyes staring in frozen horror. Died of fright they did, he proclaimed, enjoying the effect of the story on his audience; and he went on to describe how, most times, cats don’t shed the blood of their victims—a mouse usually dies of a heart attack long before its hunter has time to spill its blood.

Two inexplicable points embellished the drama’s intrigue. First, the sisters hadn’t been stabbed. The knives only pinned them down by their pajama tops. Second, both girls’ hair had been completely cut off.

Mama Rose sat at the kitchen table, paying little heed to the reporters, the doctor’s storytelling, the flashing lights of the police car outside the house, the footsteps of the investigating officers overhead. She continued examining the pieces of the knockoff Hummel figurine, her expression placid. She raised her eyes toward the ceiling as she heard a policeman in Bondi’s room exclaim upon tripping over the pinking shears she had dropped beside her daughter’s bed. She returned her attention to the porcelain shards, and she smirked. As far back as she could remember, she never had been able to get either of those girls to hold still for a haircut.