Letters to Wednesday Addams

by Haley Cullingham

Wednesday, fearest,

I hope you’ve had a haunting first week of studies. I can’t tell you how much we miss you at home — -the mansion feels far less creaky without you looming in the corridors.

How are things in your dormitory? Have you found a way to poison that loathsome residence advisor? Seeing the enthusiasm glint behind her eyes made my stomach drop. How can parents be expected to feel comfortable leaving their children so far from home under the care of someone so maniacal? Honestly, these institutions grow less and less reliable every year. It’s nothing like it was when I was a young girl away at embalming school.

Please ensure that you connect with the young woman your father told you about. Only in third year, and she’s already been threatened with expulsion for perverse experimentation three times! I know how eager you are to live your own life, but your father and I would never forgive ourselves if you fell in with the right crowd. You know how anxious we were about sending you to a secular school and I would feel more comfortable knowing someone had it out for you. These sororities are cutthroat opportunists, and some of them even have charitable affiliations! A young girl like you doesn’t want to get mixed up with something like that.

Focus on your séances and everything will be fine.

How are things with your roommate? She seemed like a reasonable young woman. I’m not familiar with the “Anaconda” song she was speaking of, but it sounds like fodder for some very rich cultural horizon-broadening! Now is the time to connect with peers outside of your realm of experience! And you have so much to give. Picturing the two of you, sitting around, listening to LPs of funeral durges, it takes me right back to when Clarice and I stole Judith Wright’s brassiere and tied it to a live bat! We called her Flaps for an entire year before she dropped out to work the concession stand at her family’s “haunted” shack back home. (We all knew her father was making the walls bleed with dyed corn syrup, but she refused to admit it. So embarrassing.) I only hope you and this young Victoria end up with a similar bond. Maybe one day you can even visit her at home in California! It’s not the kind of thing I would usually encourage, but your father reminds me that the tar pits are very educational, and a state with that many serial killers must be doing something right. I’ve also done a quick search on the PC and discovered they do something there called “ghostriding the whip.” Now that’s something I would be proud to hear my daughter telling her grandparents about at the next solstice!

If you’re feeling cold in the dormitory, I packed some extra shrouds in with your pillows. Are you sure you don’t want Thing to come back with you after Hallowe’en vacation? I’m sure the other girls would all be VERY jealous! You could even have him take notes for you in class!

Must go now. Those charming fellows from American’s Most Haunted are coming by again this evening and I haven’t had any time to marinate the rat’s eyes for Arsenic Martinis.

We’ll send the hearse for you on the 27th.

Love,

Your mother, Morticia

Wednesday,

It’s your mother.

I’m very disturbed by your decision to spend Hallowe’en in your dormitory. I understand that you felt obliged to attend a ritual called “midterm examinations,” and I can tell you that this is the exact sort of thing I was worried about when you left for college. Prioritizing your education over the gruesome awakening of your ancestors to strike fear in civilian hearts is a cruel and inexplicable affront to everything your father and I raised you to respect.

I wish you had been there to see your father, reaching out instinctively over your uncle Mortimer’s unconsecrated burial site for you to take his hand and perform the Rites of the Undead. He just stood there, grasping at the cold air, and then collapsed. It took Pugsley an hour to wrestle him from Uncle Mortimer’s cold, undead fingers. He tore his favourite ceremonial robe and broke one of Mortimer’s teeth. You’ll remember your aunt Eileen was a vampire and Mortimer felt ashamed enough of his small canines to begin with. And now he only has one. Because of you!

It seems to me like you have an interest in “finding yourself” but let me suggest you find yourself back here in six weeks. You know what a difficult time the holiday season, with its barrage of cheer and good will, has always been for your father. If you don’t intend to make the trip back and think I’m going to be the one to tell him, you’ve got another thing coming!
You also have Thing coming. I was a fool to think I could trust you to suffer adequately away from home, unsupervised.

Your mother, Morticia

Wednesday,

At the risk of sounding hysterical, you are no longer dead to me.

What, exactly, is a “Blaine?” Where, precisely, is “Patriot Hills, North Carolina?” How, in the name of all that is unholy, could you possibly think it was appropriate to inform your father and I that you plan to engage in a disturbing display of anti-Pagan ritualistic cheer with some family we’ve never even had the displeasure of meeting? And why have you delivered this news in a card decorated with an obese gnome in red pajamas?

I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is your way of trying to give your father a coronary as an anti-Christmas gift, but I have very real concerns that you are, in fact, serious about all of this.

You’ve left us with no other option. Lurch will be arriving in the hearse to take you home tomorrow at midnight. Please ensure you’ve packed your things and Thing has packed his things, but tell him to leave that ghastly hat with the runes on it behind. I foolishly thought Slosh the Frosh was a charming torture device, but I have recently been enlightened by your Uncle Fester that this is not the case. And if my shroud got stained when you wore it to that vile toga party, you’re spending the rest of the holiday in the belfry reading the paper to the mounted head of your Mad Aunt Louise.

I had hoped you would set a better example for your brother Pugsley, but as it is, you’ve proven to be a grave disappointment.

Morticia

Haley Cullingham is the editor-in-chief of Maisonneuve, an award-winning Montreal-based quarterly of arts, opinion and ideas.