The Woman in the Wall

by Patrice Kindl

  I really am very sorry.

  Please don't be angry with me.

  Anna

  It did no good. Mother was furious.

  She shouted and stamped her feet. She demanded that I come out and explain myself face-to-face. So, trembling like a blade of grass in a positive hurricane of indignation, I came out and stood before her. It didn't help. Nothing I could say would convince her that I hadn't hidden in Mrs. Waltzhammer's purse on purpose, in spite of Mother's express prohibition. I'm afraid I am not very good at explaining things, or arguing my point of view.

  "In her purse, Anna! How could you! She might have carried you off with her!"

  "I didn't mean—" I began.

  "Anna, when I ask you a question I expect an answer. What would you have done if Mrs. Waltzhammer had walked right out of this house with you in her purse?"

  "But she did!"

  "Where are you now, Anna? Don't you be disappearing on me like that, young lady!"

  "I'm right h—"

  "And for another thing," Mother said, staring angrily at the draperies, where she apparently thought I was hiding, "Mrs. Waltzhammer must think I'm completely crazy, getting her here to talk about enrolling a doll in Bitter Creek Elementary School."

  "Mrs. Waltzhammer doesn't think you're crazy, not really," Andrea said. "Just a little..." she groped for the word. "Over-tactful, I guess. She thinks it's Kirsty who's scared of going to kindergarten for the first time, not Anna." Mrs. Waltzhammer believed, Andrea said, that Kirsty was using her doll to express her anxieties over starting school. And that Mother and Andrea had simply gone a bit overboard in humoring her.

  "If Mrs. Waltzhammer thinks anybody is nuts in this house it's Kirsty," Andrea concluded. Andrea, always the prettiest of the family, was beginning to show signs of being the cleverest as well.

  This version of events did not please Kirsty, but did cheer Mother up some. In any case, Mrs. Waltzhammer only called back once. She told Mother to please contact her if either Kirsty or "Anna" had any problems in the fall and then hung up without waiting for an answer. The abrupt end to this call surprised Mother, but not me. I suspected that my exit from Mrs. Waltzhammer's purse had considerably unnerved her, and she wanted to have as little to do with the Newland family as possible.

  The result of the whole Mrs. Waltzhammer episode was to make me much more secretive, much more secluded. It proved that my doubts and fears about the outside world were absolutely true. After all, the very first time I didn't hide myself away from an outsider, I was manhandled, kidnapped, and then abandoned. And that took place inside my own home, in front of my mother and sisters. Think what might happen if I ventured out into the wide world!

  It seemed unreasonable to expect that, having regained safety entirely through my own efforts, I would consent to come out again. The crashing and booming of Mrs. Waltzhammer's voice mingled with my mother's angry voice in my mind's ear, and as time went on I burrowed deeper and deeper into the fabric of the house to escape from the memory.

  Year after year I went on building, adding new passages, new secret rooms, until I could go almost anywhere in the house without coming out into the open. I installed a small but usable kitchen immediately behind the real kitchen. My cupboards were simply doors into the back walls of the real cupboards, so I had access to all the kitchen supplies. I had a stove (discarded by Mother and repaired by me) and a sink (a laundry tub rescued from the cellar), but no refrigerator, so when I needed milk or butter or eggs I had to creep out and get them without being noticed.

  Over the years the rooms that Mother and Andrea and Kirsty lived in gradually dwindled and shrank. In one daring acquisition I walled off three entire rooms at the back of the house. They were part of the old servants' quarters and no one ever used them. My family never seemed to notice or care. It was a large house and they were not observant.

  I installed peepholes in every room so that I could see as well as hear my family, placing them in dark corners and under picture frames so that the white of my eye would not gleam when I looked out. I tried to respect my family's privacy; I put no peepholes in the bathroom and rarely used the ones in their bedrooms. These holes gave me a disjointed, fragmentary view of my mother and sisters. Only occasionally did I see them in their entirety; more often they were represented by a hand, an elbow, the back of a head, sometimes a knee or a foot. I learned to read emotion in the lift of a wrist, the angle of a spine, the nervous twitch of an ankle.

  Andrea, I think, almost forgot about me after a while. Although we shared the same initials and the same birthday, we had little in common. Indeed, we were almost opposites; it was as if she had somehow taken all my bloom and assurance for herself, leaving me pale and trembling.

  In any case, she was busy with an intense emotional life of her own, quarrelling and making up with her girlfriends, and later, her boyfriends. Her angular dark looks bloomed into beauty at thirteen and she was suddenly in great demand. She spent her after-school hours in royal procession from the house of one friend to another. I saw her sometimes holding court on the front steps, a queen bee among a swarm of admirers. At first she rarely ever invited any of her friends inside. I liked to think that that was in deference to my feelings, but sometimes I wondered if, like our father, she was engaged in slowly disengaging herself from our family.

  Eventually, though, as I faded more and more into the woodwork, she began to bring her friends home. The house thronged with groups of chattering teenagers. They surged in and out of the house like the tides. They laughed and played guitars and popped popcorn and argued endlessly amongst themselves.

  By this time Mother had managed to get a job at the insurance company which allowed her to work from home in the afternoon, leaving the office for home at one o'clock every day. This meant that she could poke her head out of the library, which she had taken for her at-home office, every now and then to provide some sense of a restraining adult presence in the house.

  "Not," as she said rather fretfully, "that I have the faintest idea what they're up to back there in the old servants' quarters. They could be making bombs, for all I know."

  To be honest, once I got over the shock of having strangers in the house, I enjoyed having them there. It was interesting, trying to follow their loves and hates and jealousies, and I liked watching them devour the little treats I made for them. But it did mean that I became trapped within the walls, like a fly encased in amber. I could never come out into the house proper except during the small hours when everyone slept, for fear of running into a fledgling musical group in rehearsal, a mixed group of boys and girls painting their fingernails black, or a solitary fifteen-year-old sobbing her heart out alone on a staircase.

  Even though Andrea herself never saw me anymore, she seemed at first to be afraid her friends might catch sight of me. Whenever she came into a room with them, she would peer anxiously into the dark corners and rummage among the couch cushions before she'd let them sit down. Perhaps she didn't want them to hurt me, but I think that maybe she was a little ashamed to have such an odd sister.

  Silent and unseen I remained, and so I suppose at last I became for her a half-remembered family myth, a strange story that mustn't be told. And since she couldn't share the joke with her friends, she pushed me to the back of her mind and her life.

  Mother and Kirsty, on the other hand, didn't give up hope for a long time that I might be coaxed out of hiding.

  Kirsty laid little "Anna traps": a box propped up on a stick and baited with a cookie—often one I'd baked myself. It seemed rude to just take the cookie and go away, and even ruder to pretend I hadn't seen it. So I liked to leave something in its place, like a crocheted skirt for her doll Bethany, or a little jar of hard candies tied with a pretty ribbon.

  She talked to me often and included me in her games.

  "Let's play queens and kings, Anna. You be the queen," she would say, "Bethany can be the king. And I'll be the beautiful princess." Then, even though I never said a word,
she would argue with my interpretation of the queen's role.

  "Don't be silly, Anna," she'd say. "Queens don't do the dishes. The servants do the dishes."

  In a way I became what Mrs. Waltzhammer had thought I was: Kirsty's imaginary friend.

  Mother took a more straightforward approach.

  "It's all right, Anna, you win," she said. "I won't make you go to school. You can come out now."

  When I didn't come out, she said it again. Sometimes she said it in anger, sometimes in sorrow. But I didn't come out. I knew how much it mattered to her that others see me, so that they would believe in my existence. I remembered how angry she got when she believed that Mrs. Waltzhammer thought she was crazy. I couldn't trust her.

  I tried hard to make up for my disobedience. I cooked and cleaned and sewed and kept the house in good repair. I often left them little presents that I had made: toys for Kirsty, a jewelry box of inlaid woods for Andrea, an intricately carved and painted necklace for Mother.

  But I wouldn't come out.

  Finally even Mother and Kirsty went for weeks at a time without speaking to me. When they did speak it was usually because they needed something. They began to forget that I was a real flesh-and-blood person; they confused me with the house itself. I didn't mind; I often thought of myself the same way. Every night Mother kissed her hand and pressed the kiss to the wall of whatever room she happened to be standing in at the time. "Goodnight, Anna," she would murmur, and then climb the stairs to bed.

  Quite often I would be moving silently through my passageways and hear just the tag end of a whispered communication from Kirsty: "...and maroon satin on top. Don't you think that would look great, Anna? But don't bother if you don't have time. Thanks." Or Mother would say, "...fix the washer, Anna? I think it needs to be replaced." They thought of me, you see, as a kind of disembodied spirit, present and listening behind any wall of the house at any time.

  I did try to honor these requests as best I could, but of course I often got things stupidly wrong, thinking that Kirsty wanted a ballgown for dress-up when what she actually wanted was a baseball jacket in the school colors. Or that Mother wanted me to put a new washer in the bathroom faucet when really it was the clothes washer that had stopped in mid-cycle and she wondered whether it should be repaired or replaced.

  The other reason my family talked to me now and then was because I kept taking things and forgetting to return them. Even Andrea would mutter "Annadammit" under her breath and slap the wall with her hand whenever she missed something.

  Well, I needed things. I naturally had a full set of sewing and carpentry tools inside the walls, but there are always times when you really, truly, have to have a nutcracker, for instance, or Volume II of the encyclopedia (AUST to BLIZZ). Or else sometimes I would start to mend something and get distracted halfway through. Then whatever the thing was would sit there in some dark corner until one of my family yelled for it. I might add that I often got the blame for taking things I had never touched.

  It got pretty crowded in my rooms and passageways, to tell you the truth. I installed hooks and racks and shelves to keep things off the floor, but frankly, the dusting got to be kind of a nightmare.

  Twice a year I did a major cleaning job. I put everything back in its proper place in the main house and swept and scrubbed the empty passageways. But you know how it is; you like a thing to be handy when you want it. Little by little one object and then another found its way back into my burrow. Two weeks after spring cleaning I'd be moving snakewise through the passageways again.

  I was not entirely cut off from news of the great world. I saw snatches of television when I passed through the back parlor passageway and the set was on. It was never really comfortable watching it standing up, though, so I didn't make a habit of it. We also had a large library of books which I read and reread, and occasionally I rescued the odd magazine or newspaper before it was thrown out.

  I even got some formal education, of sorts. Kirsty enjoyed playing school. She was always the teacher, and I was always the pupil. Besides delivering some rather silly lectures about a country she called Double Pink Ponyland, and scolding me for imaginary misbehavior, she insisted that I do the same homework that she did.

  "I'm leaving my social studies and math books right here on the hall table, Anna," she would announce loudly. "Do the problems on [>] and read Chapter Six."

  I didn't want to hurt her feelings, so I did what she asked, even though the work was ridiculously easy. Sometimes I would see her studying my answers and then furtively changing her own paper to match mine.

  Every once in a while I let Kirsty see me. It pleased her and did me no harm. I'd creep up behind her as she brushed her brown hair in the full-length mirror in the bathroom, and then slip away when she turned around. If she was sad, I would reach out and touch her hand. Kirsty hardly frightened me at all. I loved her.

  In its way it was a good life.

  But then I turned twelve.

  Five

  That was a terrible time, the years between twelve and fourteen. I, who was never unwell, got sick. Or sort of sick; I was wounded in some mysterious way. I don't really want to go into the details of exactly what was wrong with me. It's kind of personal.

  The, um, injury wasn't the only problem. I got two little pink bumps on my chest and hundreds of big red bumps on my face. I gained weight in unexpected places. Hair grew where no hair should grow. I—

  Oh, never mind. I can't believe I'm telling you this. It's funny, you know? I feel that I can tell you, a perfect stranger, things I wouldn't dream of mentioning to Mother, or Kirsty, or Andrea. Or even my long-lost father. Or especially my long-lost father, come to think of it.

  Perhaps I can talk to you like this because you can't see me or touch me or speak to me. You are like the house, that way. You listen without comment, or at least without any comment that I can hear. Whatever you may think of me, even if you think I'm a fool and a worm and a disgusting object, you can never, ever tell me so. I find that soothing in a confidante.

  I didn't tell Mother about my troubles. If only it had been a less embarrassing affliction, I might have. I could have left a note, asking for advice. But these things were happening in the most private, secret parts of me, and I couldn't bear that she should know about it. I imagined her reading my note aloud to Kirsty and Andrea, and the shock and horror on their faces. No, I couldn't tell her.

  Sometimes I thought I would probably die, and then again sometimes I thought that I probably wouldn't, and that almost frightened me more. Because you see, if I wasn't dying that meant I was changing, changing beyond any hope of recall.

  I don't think I like change very much.

  After a few months when I didn't die, I decided that I was being transformed into an altogether different kind of animal. In punishment for my eccentric lifestyle, I was turning into some sort of fat, hairy, bleeding monster with skin eruptions.

  Accepting my doom, I began to stoop as I walked and let my hair fall over my face. I had always been fastidious in my hygiene, but now I washed myself less often so that I wouldn't have to witness any more changes in my body. And immediately my suspicions about my new nature were confirmed: when I didn't wash I smelled horrible. I smelled much worse, I mean, than I had before when I didn't wash. My perspiration now had a rank odor that appalled me.

  I hung my head in shame and wished with all my heart that I could just peacefully pass out of life, that my flesh would wither away into air and darkness, and my bones become one with the bones of the house.

  But that didn't happen. My thirteenth birthday came and went and I was still eating and drinking and breathing. In fact, I was eating like a horse. My appetite had always been delicate; I normally consumed less than a tenth of what Kirsty or Andrea or Mother did. Now I ate constantly, trying to dull the ache in my stomach.

  Once or twice I tried to stop eating altogether, thinking that I could in this way put an end to my unhappy existence, but I always ended up i
n the main kitchen at two in the morning, steadily stuffing the leftovers from dinner into my mouth.

  One night I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the toaster. I had formed a habit whenever I passed the refrigerator of opening the door and staring moodily inside, and that was what I was doing now. I was gnawing ravenously on a cold chicken leg. My hair was matted and greasy. My skin was a flat, dingy gray with angry red pustules scattered across it. I had not changed or washed in a week or more.

  It was true. I had become a monster, and a dirty, disgusting monster at that. If Andrea or any of her friends had seen me, if Mother or even Kirsty had seen me as I was now, they would have been horrified. They would have pointed at me and screamed in terror.

  I stared at myself in the toaster. I straightened my back and pulled my hair out of my eyes.

  Was I really a monster? Or was I just plain dirty? If I washed and combed my hair, cleaned the dirt out from under my nails, and changed into clean clothes, would I not be recognizably a human being? I thought that perhaps I would. Even though I knew that deep inside I had changed forever, maybe it didn't have to be so obvious.

  I closed the refrigerator door and climbed up on the kitchen counter. I would take a bath right away and see. That was a problem, though. I was finding it harder and harder these days to squeeze myself into the kitchen sink.

  Ever since I moved inside the wall, I had washed myself in the sink, either in the laundry tub on my side of the wall or in the main kitchen sink when the rest of the household had gone to bed. I couldn't use the bathtub because I had no entrance into the bathroom through the tiled walls. So once I got into the tub, I was trapped in the bathroom, naked and vulnerable. The kitchen sink, on the other hand, was right next to the broom closet, which led directly into my own kitchen on the other side of the wall.

  But I didn't seem to fit in the kitchen sink anymore. My arms and legs hung out over the counter tops and my elbow kept getting in the way of the faucet. Even the laundry tub on my side of the wall was much too small.