It hurt to rise, though he assisted me up. In his arms I was held close while my cheek was pressed against his heart. And though he would put me from him quickly, I clung tighter. “Chris—what we did just now—was it sinful?”
Again, he cleared his throat. “If you think it so, then it was.”
What kind of an answer was that? If thoughts of sin stayed out of it, those moments lying on the floor when he touched me so tenderly with magical tingling fingers and lips were the sweetest moments since we’d come to live in this abominable house. I looked up to see what he was thinking and saw that strange look in his eyes. Paradoxically he seemed happier, sadder, older, younger, wiser . . . or was it he was feeling like a man now? And if he was, then I was glad, sinful or not.
We walked hand in hand down the steps to the twins, where Cory was plucking a tune on the banjo, while keeping his eyes glued to the TV. He picked up the guitar and began his own composition, as Carrie chanted simple lyrics he’d composed. The banjo was for happy tunes to move your feet. This melody was like rain on the roof, long, dreary, monotonous.
Gonna see the sun,
Gonna find my home,
Gonna feel the wind,
See the sun ag’in.
I sat on the floor near Cory, and took the guitar from his hands, for I could play a bit, too. He had taught me how—taught us all how. And I sang to him that special, wistful song that belonged to Dorothy in the movie The Wizard of Oz—a movie that the twins adored everytime they saw it. And when I had finished singing of bluebirds that flew over the rainbow, Cory asked, “Don’t you like my song, Cathy?”
“You bet I like your song—but it’s so sad. How about writing a few happy lyrics, with a little hope?”
The little mouse was in his pocket, just his tail poking out as he fingered down there for bread crumbs. Mickey made a twisting movement, and then his head was out of the shirt pocket, and in his forefeet he held a bit of bread and daintily began to nibble. The look on Cory’s face as he stared down at his first pet touched me so deeply I had to turn away to keep from crying.
“Cathy, you know Momma, she never said nothing about my pet.”
“She hasn’t noticed him, Cory.”
“Why don’t she notice?”
I sighed, not really knowing who and what my mother was anymore, except a stranger we used to love. Death wasn’t the only thing that took away someone you loved and needed; I knew that now.
“Momma’s got a new husband,” said Chris brightly, “and when you’re in love, you don’t see anyone’s happiness but your own. Soon enough she’ll notice you’ve got a friend.”
Carrie was staring at my sweater. “Cathy, what’s that stuff on your sweater?”
“Paint,” said I without the slighest hesitation. “Chris was trying to teach me how to paint, and he got mad when my picture was better than anything he’s ever done, so he picked up the little pan with red, and he threw it at me.”
My older brother sat there with the darnedest look on his face.
“Chris, can Cathy paint better than you can?”
“If she says she can, then she must.”
“Where is her painting?”
“In the attic.”
“I want to see it.”
“Then you go up and get it. I’m tired. I want to look at TV while Cathy prepares dinner.” He shot me a swift look. “My dear sister, would you mind, for the sake of propriety, putting on a clean sweater before we sit down to eat dinner? There’s something about that red paint that makes me feel guilty.”
“It looks like blood,” said Cory. “It’s stiff like blood when you don’t wash it off.”
“Poster colors,” said Chris, as I left to go into the bath to change into a sweater many sizes too large. “Poster colors stiffen up.”
Satisfied, Cory began to tell Chris of how he’d missed seeing dinosaurs. “Chris, they were bigger than this house! They came up out of the water, and swallowed the boat, and two men! I knew you’d be sorry to miss seeing that!”
“Yeah,” said Chris dreamily, “I sure would have liked to have seen that.”
That night I felt strangely ill at ease, and restless, and my thoughts kept returning to the way Chris had looked at me in the attic.
I knew then what the secret was I’d been searching so long to find—that secret button that switched on love . . . physical, sexual desire. It wasn’t just the viewing of naked bodies, for many a time I’d bathed Cory, and seen Chris naked, and I’d never felt any particular arousal because what he and Cory had was different from what Carrie and I had. It wasn’t being naked at all.
It was the eyes. The secret of love was in the eyes, the way one person looked at another, the way eyes communicated and spoke when the lips never moved. Chris’s eyes had said more than ten thousand words.
And it wasn’t just the way he touched me, caressingly, tenderly; it was the way he touched, when he looked as he did, and that’s why the grandmother made it a rule that we shouldn’t look at the other sex. Oh, to think that old witch knew the secret of love. She couldn’t have ever loved, no, not her, the iron-hearted, the steel-spined . . . never could her eyes have been soft.
And then, as I delved deeper into the subject, it was more than the eyes—it was what was behind the eyes, in the brain, wanting to please you, make you happy, give you joy, and take away the loneliness of never having anyone understand as you want to be understood.
Sin had nothing at all to do with love, real love. I turned my head and saw that Chris was awake, too, curled up on his side, staring over at me. He smiled the sweetest smile, and I could have cried for him, for me.
Our mother didn’t visit us that day, nor had she visited us the day before, but we’d found a way to cheer ourselves by playing Cory’s instruments and singing along. Despite the absence of a mother grown very negligent, we all went to bed more hopefully that night. Singing happy songs for several hours had convinced us all that sun, love, home and happiness were just around the bend, and our long days of traveling through a deep dark forest were almost over.
* * *
Into my bright dreams crept something dark and terrifying. Every day forms took on monstrous proportions. With my eyes closed, I saw the grandmother steal into the bedroom, and thinking me asleep, she shaved off all my hair! I screamed but she didn’t hear me—nobody heard me. She took a long and shiny knife and sliced off my breasts and fed them into Chris’s mouth. And there was more. I tossed, writhed, and made small whimpering sounds that awakened Chris as the twins slept on as children dead and buried. Sleepily, Chris stumbled over to sit on my bed, and asked as he fumbled to find my hand, “Another nightmare?”
Nooo! This was no ordinary nightmare! This was precognition, and psychic in nature. I felt it in my bone marrow, something dreadful was about to happen. Weak and trembling I told Chris what the grandmother had done. “And that wasn’t all. It was Momma who came in and cut out my heart, and she was sparkled all over with diamonds!”
“Cathy, dreams don’t mean anything.”
“Yes, they do!”
Other dreams and other nightmares I’d willingly told my brother and he’d listened, and smiled, and expressed his belief that it must be wonderful to have nights like being in a movie theater, but it wasn’t that way at all. In a movie, you sit and watch a big screen, and you know you are only watching a story that someone wrote. I participated in my dreams. I was in the dreams, feeling, hurting, suffering, and I’m sorry to say, very seldom did I really enjoy them.
Since he was so accustomed to me and my strange ways, why did Chris sit as still as a marble statue, as if this dream affected him more than any other? Had he been dreaming, too?
“Cathy, on my word of honor, we are going to escape this house! All four of us will run away! You’ve convinced me. Your dreams must mean something, or else you wouldn’t keep having them. Women are more intuitive than men; it’s been proven. The subconscious is at work at night. We won’t wait any longer for Momma to
inherit the fortune from a grandfather who lives on and on and never dies. Together, you and I, we’ll find a way. From this second on, I vow on my life, we depend only on ourselves . . . and your dreams.”
From the intense way he said this, I knew he wasn’t joking, making fun—he meant what he said! I could have shouted, I felt so relieved. We were going to get away. This house wasn’t going to do us in after all!
In the gloom and chill of that big shadowed and cluttered room, he stared down into my eyes. Maybe he was seeing me, as I saw him, looking larger than life, and softer than dreams. Slowly his head inclined toward mine, and he kissed me full on the lips as a way to seal his promise in a strong and meaningful way. Such a peculiar long kiss, to give me the sensation that I was falling down, down, down, when I was already lying down.
* * *
What we needed most was a key to our bedroom door. We knew it was the master key to every room in this house. We couldn’t use the sheet-ladder because of the twins, and we didn’t anticipate, either Chris or I, that our grandmother would be so thoughtlessly careless as to lay aside the key negligently. That just wasn’t her way. Her way was to open the door, and immediately stash the key in her pocket. Always her hateful gray dresses had pockets.
Our mother’s way was to be careless, forgetful, indifferent. And she didn’t like pockets in her clothes to add extra bulk to her svelte figure. We counted on her.
And what did she have to fear from us—the passive, the meek, the quiet? Her private little captive “darlings,” who were never going to grow up and be a threat. She was happy, in love; it lit up her eyes and made her laugh often. She was so damned unobservant you wanted to scream and make her see—make her see the twins so quiet and sick looking! She never mentioned the mouse—why wasn’t she seeing the mouse? He was on Cory’s shoulder, nibbling on Cory’s ear, and she never said a word, not even when tears streamed down Cory’s face because she wouldn’t congratulate him on winning the affections of a very stubborn mouse that would have gone his way, if allowed.
She came a generous two or three times a month, and each time she bore with her the gifts that gave her solace if they gave us none. She came in gracefully to sit a while, wearing her beautiful, expensive clothes trimmed with furs, and decorated with jewels.
On her throne she sat as a queen and doled out the painting sets to Chris, the ballet slippers to me, and to each of us she brought sensational-looking clothes, well suited for attic wearing, for up here it didn’t matter if they seldom fit, being too large, or too small, and our sneakers were sometimes comfortable, sometimes not, and I was still waiting for the bra she kept promising but always forgot.
“I’ll bring you a dozen or so,” she said with a benevolent cheerful smile, “all sizes, all colors, and you can try them on and see which you like best, and fit best, and I can give the ones you don’t want to the maids.” And on and on she chatted vivaciously, always true to her false facade, pretending we still mattered in her life.
I sat, I fixed my eyes on her, and I waited for her to ask me how the twins were. Had she forgotten that Cory had hay fever which kept his nose running all the time, and sometimes his nostrils stuffed up so he couldn’t breathe except through his mouth? She knew he was supposed to be receiving allergy shots once a month, and years had passed since the last one. Didn’t it hurt her to see Cory and Carrie clinging to me as if I were the one who had given them birth? Did one single thing reach out and tell her something was wrong?
If it did, in no way did she indicate that she saw us as less than perfectly normal, though I took pains to name our small illnesses: the way we threw up so often now, and how our heads ached from time to time, and we had stomach cramps, and sometimes very little energy.
“Keep your food in the attic, where it’s cold,” she said without flinching.
She had the nerve to speak to us of parties, of concerts, of the theater, of movies, and going to balls and on trips with her “Bart.” “Bart and I are going on a shopping spree in New York,” she said. “Tell me what you want me to bring you. Make out a list.”
“Momma, after you Christmas-shop in New York, where will you go then?” I asked, careful not to turn my eyes on that key she had so casually tossed on the dresser top. She laughed, liking my question, and clasped her slender white hands together, and began to list her plans for the long dull days after the holidays. “A trip south, perhaps a cruise, or a month or so in Florida. And your grandmother will be here to take good care of you.”
While she chatted on and on, Chris stole stealthily near to slip the key into his pants pocket. On into the bathroom he sauntered, excusing himself. He needn’t have bothered; she didn’t notice he was gone. She was doing her duty, visiting her children—and thank God she had chosen the right chair to sit in. In the bathroom I knew Chris was pressing the key into a bar of soap we kept ready for just this way to make a clear impression. Just one of the many things watching endless hours of television had taught us.
* * *
Once our mother had gone, Chris pulled out the piece of wood he had and began immediately to carve a rough wooden key. Though we had metal from the old trunk locks, we had nothing strong enough to cut and shape it. For hours and hours Chris slaved meticulously, carving that key, fitting and refitting it into the hardened soap impression. Purposefully, he had chosen very hard wood, fearing soft wood might break in the lock and give away our escape plan. It took three days of work before he had a key that worked.
Jubilance was ours! We threw our arms about each other and danced around the room, laughing, kissing, almost crying. The twins watched us, amazed we were so happy with a little key.
We had a key. We could open our prison door. Yet, strangely, we hadn’t planned our future beyond the opening of the door.
“Money. We must have money,” reasoned Chris, stopping in the middle of our wild dance of triumph. “With lots of money, all doors are open, and all roads are ours to travel.”
“But where can we get money?” I asked, frowning and unhappy now. He had found another reason for stalling.
“There is no way but to steal it from Momma, her husband, and the grandmother.”
He said this so pronounced, exactly as if thieving were an old and honored profession. And in dire need, perhaps it was, and still is.
“If we’re caught, it will mean the whip for all of us, even the twins,” I said, casting my eyes on their fearful expressions. “And when Momma goes on a trip with her husband, she could starve us again, and God alone knows what else she would do to us.”
Chris fell down on the small chair before the dressing table. He propped his chin in his hand, thoughtful and considering for minutes. “One thing for sure, I don’t want to see you or the twins punished. So I will be the one to steal out of here, and I alone will stand guilty if caught. But I’m not going to be caught; it is too risky to take from that old woman—she’s too observant. No doubt she knows to a penny exactly the amount of money in her purse. Momma never counts money. Remember how Daddy used to complain about that?” He grinned at me reassuringly. “I will be just like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the needy poor—us! And only on the nights Momma and her husband tell us they are going out.”
“You mean when she tells us,” I corrected. “And we can always watch from the window, on those days she doesn’t come.” When we dared, we had a fine view of the curved drive to watch the comings and goings.
Soon enough Momma told us she was going to a party. “Bart doesn’t care much for the social life; he’d rather stay home. But I hate this house. He asks then why we don’t move into our own home, and what can I say?”
What could she say? Darling, I have a secret to tell you: upstairs, hidden away in the far northern wing, I have four children.
* * *
It was easy enough for Chris to find money in his mother’s grand, splendid bedroom. She was careless about money. Even he was shocked at how casually she left tens and twenties scattered over the
dresser. It made him frown and put suspicions in his head. Wasn’t she supposed to be saving up for that day when she could take us all out of our prison . . . even if she did have a husband now? More bills were in her many pocketbooks. Chris found change in her husband’s trousers pockets. No, he was not as careless with his money. However, when Chris searched under the chair cushions, a dozen or more coins were there. He felt like a thief, an unwanted intruder in his mother’s room. He saw her beautiful clothes, her satin mules, her negligees trimmed with fur, or marabou feathers, making his trust shrink even smaller.
Time after time that winter, he visited that bedroom, growing ever more careless since it was all so easy to steal. He came back to me, looking jubilant, looking sad. Day by day our hidden cache was increasing—why did he look sad? “Come with me next time,” he said in way of reply. “See for yourself.”
I could go with a clear conscience now, knowing the twins wouldn’t awaken and find us gone. They slept so soundly, so deeply, that even in the mornings they woke up blurry-eyed, slow, reluctantly coming into reality. It scared me sometimes to look at them asleep. Two small dolls, never growing, so sunken into oblivion it seemed more a small death than normal nighttime rest.
Go away, run away, spring was approaching, we had to leave soon, before it was too late. A voice inside, intuitive, kept drumming out this tune. Chris laughed when I told him. “Cathy, you and your notions! We need money. At least five hundred. What is the terrible hurry? We have food now, and we aren’t being whipped; even when she catches us half-undressed, she doesn’t say a word.”
Why didn’t the grandmother punish us now? We had not told Momma of her other punishments, her sins against us, for to me, they were sins, and not justified in any way. Yet, that old woman stayed her hand. Daily she brought up the picnic basket, filled to the brim with sandwiches, with lukewarm soups in thermos bottles, with milk, and always four powdered-sugar doughnuts. Why couldn’t she vary our menus and bring brownies, cookies, slices of pie or cake?
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 32