We rushed to the table to eat.
Chris bowed his head to say a hasty grace that couldn’t have impressed God very much on this day, of all days, when His ears must ring with more eloquent phrasing: “Thank you, Lord, for this belated Thanksgiving Day meal. Amen.”
Inwardly I smiled, for it was so like Chris to get directly to the point, and that was to play host, and dish up the food onto the plates we handed him one by one. He gave “Finicky” and “Picky” one slice of white turkey meat apiece, and tiny portions of the vegetables, and to each a salad that had been shaped in a pretty mold. The medium-sized portions were mine, and, of course, he served himself last—huge amounts for the one who needed it most, the brain.
Chris appeared ravenous. He forked into his mouth huge gobs of mashed potatoes that were almost cold. Everything was on the verge of being cold, the gelatin salad was beginning to soften, and the lettuce beneath it was wilted.
“We-ee don’t like cold food!” Carrie wailed as she stared down at her pretty plate with such dainty portions placed neatly in a circle. One thing you could say for Chris, he was precise.
You would have thought Miss Picky was looking at snakes and worms from the way she scowled at that plate, and Mr. Finicky duplicated his twin’s sour expression of distaste.
Honestly, I felt kind of sorry for Momma, who had tried so hard to bring us up a really good hot meal, and messed up her own meal in the process, making herself look silly in front of the guests, too. And now those two weren’t going to eat anything! After three hours of complaining, and telling us how hungry they were! Kids!
The egghead across the way closed his eyes to savor the delight of having something different: deliciously prepared food, and not the hasty picnic junk thrown together in a hurry before six o’clock in the morning. Although to be fair to the grandmother, she didn’t ever forget us. She must have had to get up in the dark to beat the chef and the maids into the kitchen.
Chris then did something that really shocked me. He knew better than to stab into a huge slice of white turkey meat and shove the whole slice into his mouth! What was the matter with him?
“Don’t eat like that, Chris. It sets a bad example for you-know-who.”
“They aren’t watching me,” he said with a mouthful, “and I’m starving. I’ve never been so hungry before in my whole life, and everything tastes so good.”
Daintily, I cut my turkey into small bits, and put some in my mouth to show the hog across the way how it was properly done. I swallowed first, then said, “I pity the wife you’ll have. She’ll divorce you within a year.”
He went on eating, deaf and dumb to everything but enjoyment.
“Cathy,” said Carrie, “don’t be mean to Chris, ’cause we don’t like cold food, anyway, so we don’t want to eat.”
“My wife will adore me so much, she’ll be charmed to pick up my dirty socks. And Carrie, you and Cory like cold cereal with raisins, so eat!”
“We don’t like cold turkey . . . and that brown stuff on the potatoes looks funny.”
“That brown stuff is called gravy, and it tastes delicious. And Eskimos love cold food.”
“Cathy, do Eskimos like cold food?”
“I don’t know, Carrie. I suppose they’d better like it, or starve to death.” For the life of me, I couldn’t understand what Eskimos had to do with Thanksgiving. “Chris, couldn’t you have said something better? Why bring up Eskimos?”
“Eskimos are Indians. Indians are part of the Thanksgiving Day tradition.”
“Oh.”
“You know, of course, the North American continent used to be connected with Asia,” he said between mouthfuls. “Indians trekked over from Asia, and some liked ice and snow so much, they just stayed on, while others had better sense, and moved on down.”
“Cathy, what’s this lumpy and bumpy stuff that looks like Jell-O?”
“It’s cranberry salad. The lumps are whole cranberries; the bumps are pecan nuts; and the white stuff is sour cream.” And, boy, was it good! It had bits of pineapple, too.
“We don’t like lumpy-bumpy stuff.”
“Carrie,” said Chris, “I get tired of what you like and don’t like—eat!”
“Your brother is right, Carrie. Cranberries are delicious, and so are nuts. Birds love to eat berries, and you like birds, don’t you?”
“Birds don’t eat berries. They eat dead spiders and other bugs. We saw them, we did. They picked them out of the gutters, and ate them without chewing! We can’t eat what birds eat.”
“Shut up and eat,” said Chris, with a mouthful.
Here we were with the best food (even if it was almost cold) since we’d come upstairs to live in this hateful house, and all the twins could do was stare down at their plates, and so far hadn’t eaten a single bite!
And Chris—he was demolishing everything in sight like the prize-winning hog at the county fair!
The twins tasted the mashed potatoes with the mushroom gravy. The potatoes were “grainy” and the gravy was “funny.” They tasted the absolutely divine stuffing, and declared that “lumpy, grainy, and funny.”
“Eat the sweet potatoes, then!” I almost yelled. “Look at how pretty they are. They’re smooth because they’ve been whipped, and marshmallows have been added, and you love marshmallows, and it’s flavored with orange and lemon juice.” And pray to God they didn’t notice the “lumpy” pecans.
* * *
I guess between the two of them, sitting across from one another, fussily stirring the food into mishmash, they managed to put away three or four ounces of food.
While Chris was longing for dessert, pumpkin pie, or mincemeat pie, I began to clear away the table. Then, for some reason extraordinaire, Chris began to help! I couldn’t believe it. He smiled at me disarmingly, and even kissed my cheeks. And, boy, if good food could do that for a man, I was all for learning gourmet cooking. He even picked up his socks before he came to help me wash and dry the dishes, glasses, and silverware.
Ten minutes after Chris and I had everything neatly stored away under the table and covered over with the clean towel, the twins simultaneously announced, “We’re hungry! Our stomachs hurt!”
Chris read on at his desk. I got up from the bed after laying aside Lorna Doone, and without saying one word, I gave to each of the twins a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich from the picnic basket.
As they ate, taking tiny bites, I threw myself down on the bed and watched them with real puzzlement. Why did they enjoy that junk? Being a parent wasn’t as easy as I used to presume, nor was it such a delight.
“Don’t sit on the floor, Cory. It’s colder down there than in a chair.”
“Don’t like chairs,” said Cory. Then he sneezed.
* * *
The very next day, Cory came down with a severe cold. His small face was red and hot. He complained that he ached all over and his bones hurt. “Cathy, where is my momma, my real momma?” Oh, how he wanted his mother. Finally, she did show up.
Immediately she became anxious as she viewed Cory’s flushed face, and she rushed away to fetch a thermometer. Unhappily, she returned, trailed by the detested grandmother.
With the slim stem of glass in his mouth, Cory stared up at his mother as if at a golden angel come to save him in his time of distress. And I, his pretend mother, was forgotten.
“Sweetheart, darling baby,” she crooned. And she picked him up from the bed and carried him to the rocker, where she sat down to put kisses on his brow. “I’m here, darling. I love you. I’ll take care of you and make the pains go away. Just eat your meals, and drink your orange juice like a good little boy, and soon you’ll be well.”
She put him to bed again, and hovered over him before she popped an aspirin into his mouth and gave him water to swallow it down. Her blue eyes were misted over with troubled tears, and her slim white hands worked nervously.
I narrowed my eyes as I watched her eyes close, and her lips move as if in silent prayer.
Two days later Carrie was in the bed beside Cory, sneezing and coughing, too, and her temperature raged upward with terrifying swiftness, enough to panic me. Chris looked scared, too. Listless and pale, the two of them lay side by side in the big bed, with little fingers clutching the covers high under their rounded chins.
They seemed made of porcelain, they were so waxy white, and their blue eyes grew larger and larger as they sank deeper and deeper into their skulls. Dark shadows came under their eyes, to make them seem haunted children. When our mother wasn’t there, those two sets of eyes pleaded mutely with Chris and me to do something, anything, to make the misery go away.
Momma took a week off from the secretarial school so she could be with her twins as much as possible. I hated it that the grandmother felt it so necessary to trail after her every time she showed up. Always putting her nose in where it didn’t belong, and her advice, when we didn’t want her advice. Already she’d told us we didn’t exist, and had no right to be alive on God’s earth, save for those saintly and pure—like herself. Did she come merely to distress us more, and take from us the comfort of having our mother to ourselves?
The whisper of her menacing gray dresses, the sound of her voice, the tread of her heavy feet, the sight of her huge pale hands, soft and puffy, flashing with diamond rings, and spotted brown with dying pigment . . . oh, yes, just to see her was to loathe her.
Then there was our mother, rushing to us often, doing what she could to help the twins back to health. Shadows were under her eyes, too, as she gave the twins aspirins and water, and later on orange juice, and hot chicken soup.
One morning Momma rushed in carrying a big thermos of orange juice she had just squeezed. “It’s better than the frozen or canned kind,” she explained, “full of vitamins C and A, and that’s good for colds.” Next she listed what she wanted Chris and me to do, saying that Chris and I were to give orange juice often. We stored the thermos on the attic steps—as good as any refrigerator in the wintertime.
One glance at the thermometer from Carrie’s lips, and a frenzied panic blew away all of Momma’s cool. “Oh, God!” she cried out in distress. “One hundred three-point-six. I have to take them to a doctor, a hospital!”
I was before the heavy dresser holding to it lightly with one hand and exercising my legs, as I did each day, now that the attic was too cold to limber up in. I threw my grandmother a quick glance, trying to read her reactions to this.
The grandmother had no patience for those who lost control and made waves. “Don’t be ridiculous, Corrine. All children run high fevers when they are sick. Doesn’t mean a thing. You should know that by now. A cold is just a cold.”
Chris jerked his head up from the book he was pursuing. He believed the twins had the flu, though how they had caught the virus he couldn’t guess.
The grandmother continued: “Doctors, what do they know about curing a cold? We know just as much. There are only three things to do: stay in bed, drink lots of liquids, and take aspirins—what else? And aren’t we doing all of those things?” She flashed me a mean look. “Stop swinging your legs, girl. You make me nervous.” Again she directed her eyes, and her words, at our mother. “Now, my mother had a saying, colds take three days coming, three days staying, and three days leaving.”
“What if they have the flu?” asked Chris. The grandmother turned her back and ignored his question. She didn’t like his face; he resembled our father too much. “I hate it when people who should know better question those who are older and far wiser. Everyone knows the rule for colds: six days to start and stay, and three days to leave. That’s the way it is—they’ll recover.”
As the grandmother predicted, the twins recovered. Not in nine days . . . in nineteen days. Only bed rest, aspirins, and fluids did the trick—no perscriptions from a doctor to help them back to health more quickly. By day the twins stayed in the same bed; by night Carrie slept with me, and Cory with his brother. I don’t know why Chris and I didn’t come down with the same thing.
All night long we jumped up and down, to run for water, for orange juice kept cold on the attic stairs. They cried for cookies, for Momma, for something to unstop their nostrils. They tossed and fretted, weak and uneasy, worried by bothersome things they couldn’t express except by large fearful eyes that tore at my heart. They asked questions while they were sick that they didn’t ask while they were well . . . and wasn’t that odd?
“Why do we stay upstairs all the time?”
“Has downstairs gone away?”
“Did it go where the sun hides?”
“Don’t Momma like us no more?”
“Anymore,” I corrected.
“Why are the walls fuzzy?”
“Are they fuzzy?” I asked in return.
“Chris, he looks fuzzy, too.”
“Chris is tired.”
“Are you tired, Chris?”
“Kinda. I’d like for you both to go to sleep and stop asking so many questions. And Cathy is tired, too. We’d both like to go to sleep, and know the two of you are sleeping soundly, too.”
“We don’t sound when we sleep.”
Chris sighed, picked up Cory, and carried him over to the rocker, and soon Carrie and I were seated on his lap. There we rocked back and forth, back and forth, telling stories at three o’clock in the morning. We read stories on other nights till four in the morning. If they cried and wanted Momma, as they incessantly did, Chris and I acted as mother and father and did what we could to soothe them with soft lullabies. We rocked so much the floorboards started to creak, and surely below someone could have heard.
And all the while we heard the wind blowing through the hills. It scraped the skeleton tree branches, and squeaked the house, and whispered of death and dying, and in the cracks and crevices it howled, moaned, sobbed, and sought in all ways to make us aware we weren’t safe.
We read so much aloud, sang so much, both Chris and I grew hoarse and half-sick ourselves from fatigue. We prayed every night, down on our knees, asking God to make our twins well again. “Please, God, give them back to us the way they were.”
A day came when the coughing eased, and sleepless eyelids drooped, and eventually closed in peaceful sleep. The cold, bony hands of death had reached for our little ones, and was reluctant to let go, for so tortuously, slowly, the twins drifted back to health. When they were “well” they were not the same robust, lively pair. Cory, who had said little before, now said even less. Carrie, who had adored the sound of her own constant chatter, now became almost as truculent as Cory. And now that I had the quiet I so often longed for, I wanted back the bird-like chitchat that rattled on incessantly to dolls, trucks, trains, boats, pillows, plants, shoes, dresses, underpants, toys, puzzles, and games.
I checked her tongue, and it seemed pale, and white. Fearfully, I straightened to gaze down on two small faces side by side on one pillow. Why had I wanted them to grow up and act their proper ages? This long illness had brought about instant age. It put dark circles under their large blue eyes, and stole their healthy color. The high temperatures and the coughing had left them with a wise look, a sometimes sly look of the old, the tired, the ones who just lay and didn’t care if the sun came up, or if it went down, and stayed down. They scared me; their haunted faces took me into dreams of death.
And all the while the wind kept blowing.
Eventually they left their beds and walked about slowly. Legs once so plump and rosy and able to hop, jump, and skip were now as weak as thin straws. Now they were inclined to only creep instead of fly, and smile instead of laugh.
Wearily, I fell face down on my bed and thought and thought and thought—what could Chris and I do to restore their babyish charm?
There was nothing either he or I could do, though we would have given our health to restore theirs.
“Vitamins!” proclaimed Momma when Chris and I took pains to point out the unhealthy differences in our twins. “Vitamins are exactly what they need, and what you two need, as well—from
now on, each one of you must take a daily vitamin capsule.” Even as she said this, her slim and elegant hand rose to fluff the glory of her beautifully coiffed, shining hair.
“Does fresh air and sunshine come in capsules?” I asked, perching on a nearby bed, and glaring hard at a mother who refused to see what was wrong. “When each of us has swallowed a vitamin capsule a day, will that give to us the radiant good health we had when we lived normal lives, and spent most of our days outside?”
Momma was wearing pink—she did look lovely in pink. It put roses in her cheeks, and her hair glowed with rosy warmth.
“Cathy,” she said, tossing me a patronizing glance while she moved to hide her hands, “why do you incessantly persist in making everything so hard for me? I do the best I can. Really I do. And, yes, if you want the truth, in vitamins you can swallow the good health the outdoors bestows—that is exactly the reason so many vitamins are made.”
Her indifference put more pain in my heart. My eyes flashed over to Chris, who had bowed his head low, taking all this in, but saying nothing. “How long is our imprisonment going to last, Momma?”
“A short while, Cathy, only a short while longer—believe that.”
“Another month?”
“Possibly.”
“Could you manage, somehow, to sneak up here and take the twins outside, say, for a ride in your car? You could plan it so the servants wouldn’t see. I think it would make an immense amount of difference. Chris and I don’t have to go.”
She spun around and glanced at my older brother to see if he were in this plot with me, but surprise was a dead giveaway on his face. “No! Of course not! I can’t take a risk tike that! Eight servants work in this house, and though their quarters are quite cut off from the main house, there is always someone looking out a window, and they would hear me start up the car. Being curious, they’d look to see which direction I took.”
My voice turned cold. “Then would you please see if you can manage to bring up fresh fruit, especially bananas. You know how the twins love bananas, and they haven’t had one since we came.”
The Flowers in the Attic Series: The Dollangangers: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and a New Excerpt! Page 17