“Don’t ever tell me if that’s what it will do. For I don’t want to stop liking you, Arden.”
He turned away then. What did he have to tell me that would make me dislike him? Did Arden too have a secret, just like everybody else?
One early morning I ran to meet Arden so he could teach me how to catch fish and bait the hook with live worms. Vera trailed along behind, though I’d tried to slip out unseen. I didn’t like spearing the worms on the hook, so soon Arden was pulling out his kit of fancy flies and trying to show me how to cast from shore. He stood on a riverbank higher than most to demonstrate the right technique. Seated beside me, Vera leaned to whisper about Arden in his red swimming trunks, giggling and pointing to where all the little babies would come from.
“I don’t believe one word of what you say,” I whispered back, turning red and knowing perfectly well that what she said was true. Why did she make everything about boys seem so vulgar and gross? As much as I disliked Vera, she did have a way of digging up all the facts no one else wanted to talk about. I figured her interest in medical books was teaching her more about life than I’d ever find out on my own.
“I’ll bet you and Arden have already played show and tell.”
Laughing more, she explained what she meant. I slapped at her for even thinking we’d do that. “I hate you sometimes, Vera!”
“Hey, you two,” called Arden, turning to hold up his catch. “This is a really big one. A bass, and big enough for all of us. Let’s take it to Mom and she’ll broil it for our lunch.”
“Oh, Arden,” exclaimed Vera, clasping her hands together and widening her dark eyes with awe. “I do believe that’s the granddaddy fish all the fishing experts around here have been trying to catch for years and years. And to think you caught it. What a wonderful fisherman you are.”
Usually Vera seemed to annoy Arden, but this time he smiled broadly, flattered by her praise. “Gosh, Vera, it just jumped on my line.”
I hated him for falling for her stupid flattery, for not recognizing that Vera would say anything to make him look at her more than he looked at me. I jumped to my feet and ran to where I’d left my sundress. Behind concealing bushes I hoped to change from my swimming suit into my clothes. But my clothes were gone, even my sandals! Already my white bathing suit was on the ground, wet and muddy, and I was looking everywhere, thinking my clothes may have been blown away. “Vera, did you hide my clothes?”
At that instant, as I looked in another direction, I caught a glimpse of a quick hand that snatched up my discarded bathing suit. I recognized the ring on her finger. Vera’s hand. I yelled at her and started to give chase, but Arden was out there and I didn’t have on one stitch. “Arden,” I cried, “stop Vera! She’s stolen all my clothes and my bathing suit, too.” Almost crying, I looked around for something I could use to conceal my nudity.
I heard Arden thrashing around in the bushes, calling Vera—and then he was coming my way, making plenty of noise. “Audrina, I can’t find Vera. She can’t run very fast, so she must be hiding. You can put on my shirt. It’s long enough to cover you until you reach home.”
Daring to peek, I saw him turn to head for where he’d left his clothes. “Hey!” he cried, “my clothes are gone, too! But it’s all right, Audrina. You just stay where you are and I’ll run home and ask Mom to loan you something of hers to wear home.”
At that moment my father came running through the bushes, shoving them aside as he yelled at Arden, “Where’s my daughter?” He looked wildly around, then riveted his threatening eyes on Arden again. “All right, young man—where is Audrina? What have you done to her?”
Shocked into momentary speechlessness, Arden shook his head, unable to say a word. Then, as my father advanced, his huge hands balling into fists, he found his voice. “Sir, she was here a moment ago. She must be on her way home.”
“No,” growled Papa, knitting his thick brows and scowling. “I would have passed her on the way if that were true. If she’s not home, and she’s not here, where else can she be? I know she visits you and your mother often. Vera told me that. Now where the hell is Audrina?”
There was an edge of panic in Arden’s voice. “I really don’t know, sir.” He leaned over to pick up his catch of fish. “I was teaching Audrina how to fish. She doesn’t like hurting the worms, so I was showing her how to cast with flies. Audrina caught two of these big ones, and Vera caught one. Here’s the one I caught.”
Papa’s back was to me. If I dared, I might be able to sneak away and perhaps he’d never even see me. Scrunching down, I began to steal away. Suddenly I was shoved from behind. I screamed as I fell face forward, directly into a briar bush.
Papa bellowed my name. He came charging my way, thrashing through the heavy underbrush, yelling to find me naked, screaming out his rage as he tore off his expensive summer sports jacket and threw it over my shoulders. Spinning on his heel, he raced back to where Arden stood and seized him by the shoulders. Then brutally he began to shake him.
“Stop it, Papa!” I yelled. “Arden hasn’t done anything wrong! We were only fishing, and wearing bathing suits so we wouldn’t ruin our clothes. It was Vera who stole my sundress, and when I had my bathing suit off, she snatched that and ran.”
“You took off your bathing suit?” roared Papa, his face so red he seemed ready to explode.
“Papa!” I screamed as my father made another menacing move. “Arden hasn’t done anything wrong. He’s the only friend I’ve ever had, and now you’re punishing him for liking me!” I ran to where I could put myself between Arden and my father. He glared at me and tried to thrust me aside, but I clung to his arms, weighing him down. “I was changing clothes behind the bushes; Arden was still fishing. When Vera stole my clothes, and even my bathing suit, he offered to give me his shirt to wear, but she’d stolen his clothes, too. Just before you arrived he was going to run home and bring back something his mother would loan me to wear—and now you want to punish him for what Vera did.”
Behind me, Arden jumped to his feet. “If you feel such a need to punish someone, punish Vera. Audrina has never done one thing to make you ashamed of her. It’s Vera who plays the dirty tricks. And for all I know she may have been the one to tell you what we planned to do today, hoping you’d presume the worst.”
“And what is the worst?” asked Papa sarcastically even as he held me close at his side. His jacket almost slid off my shoulders to the ground. I made a desperate grab to hold it in place. I was trying to hide a bosom that didn’t exist.
Papa’s anger began to simmer down, but only a little. His fingers uncurled, though he kept tight hold on my shoulder. “Young man, I admire you for trying to protect my daughter, but she’s misbehaved just by being here. Vera told me nothing. I haven’t seen that wretch since last night at the dinner table. All I had to do was watch my Audrina’s eyes this morning. They were shining so much at the breakfast table I immediately became suspicious.” His smile was charming and evil too, as he turned to me. “You see, my love, there are no secrets you can keep from me. I can guess what’s going on even without a tattletale like Vera. And if anyone should know better than to meet secretly with a boy in the woods, it should be you.”
Papa grinned, put his hand flat on Arden’s chest and thrust him away. “As for you, young man, if you want to keep that nice straight nose of yours unbroken, leave my daughter alone!”
Arden staggered backward from the hard shove, but he didn’t fall.
“Goodbye, Arden,” I called, tugging on Papa’s hand and trying to move him along before he pushed Arden again.
Papa chose the most overgrown and difficult paths home, where everything clawed at my face, my legs and feet. After a while, he let go of my hand in order to protect his own face from being whiplashed by the low branches.
I was having great trouble keeping his jacket in place. The neck was so large it kept slipping off my shoulders. When I reached to pull it up on one shoulder, it slipped off the other. The sleeves dr
agged on the ground, and several times I tripped and fell. Impatiently he waited for me to stand after the third fall, and then he took the sleeves and wrapped them about my neck like a heavy scarf.
Helplessly, I stared up at him, wondering how he could be so mean to me. “Are you feeling sorry for yourself now, darling? Do you regret your hasty actions—deciding to risk your papa’s disfavor to see a boy who will only ruin you in the end? He’s only a bit of trash, not worthy of you.”
“He’s not trashy, Papa,” I wailed, already beginning to itch and burn. My feet were full of cuts, my legs scratched. “You don’t know Arden.”
“You don’t know him either!” he bellowed. “Now I’m going to show you something.” Again he seized my hand and pulled me along in a different direction. On and on he dragged me until I gave up trying to resist. Finally he came to an abrupt halt.
“You see that tree?” he said, pointing to a splendid one, lush with golden leaves that trembled in the gentle summer breeze. “That’s a golden raintree.” There was a small mound under the tree, covered with clover over which honey bees hovered, hummed and fingered for nectar. “That’s where we found your older sister, sprawled there stone-cold dead. Only it was raining that day in September. Raining hard. The sky was dark with thunderclouds, and lightning flashed, so at first we thought she might have been struck by lightning. But there was evidence enough to prove it wasn’t the work of God.”
My heart was a wild frantic animal in my chest, thudding hard against my ribs, screaming and wanting to get out. “Now you listen to me, and listen carefully. Learn from the mistakes of others, Audrina. Learn before it’s too late to save yourself. I don’t want to find you dead there too.”
The woods were closing in on me, smothering me. The trees wanted me, wanted me dead because I was another Audrina they wanted to claim for their own.
His lesson still not complete, heartlessly Papa dragged me onward. I was crying now, completely defeated, knowing he was right. I should never disobey, not ever. I should never have forgotten the other Audrina.
He was leading me to our family plot. I hated this place. I tried to sit down and resist, but Papa picked me up by the waist. Holding me rigid before him like a wooden doll, he stopped in front of the high, slender tombstone that seemed symbolic of a young girl. He said it again, as he’d said it a hundred or more times in the past, and just as before, his words made my blood chill and my spine turn mushy.
“There she lies, my First Audrina. That wonderful, special Audrina who used to look up to me as if I were God. She trusted me, believed in me, had faith in me. In all my life I never had another who gave me that kind of unquestioning love. But God chose to take her from me and replace her with you. There must be some meaning in all of this. It’s up to you to make her death meaningful. I cannot bear to live with the knowledge that she may have died in vain. Audrina. You have to take on all the gifts of your dead sister, or I’m sure God will be angered, just as I am angered. You don’t love me enough to believe I am doing the very best I can to protect you from the very thing that happened to her. And certainly you must have learned from the rocking chair about the boys in the woods on the day she died.”
Staring up into his handsome face, which soon streaked with tears, I twisted in his arms so my arms went around his neck, and my face tucked down on his shoulder. “I’ll do anything you want, Papa, as long as you let me see Arden and Billie once in a while. I’ll sit in the rocking chair, and really try to fill with her gifts. I swear I’ll cooperate as I never have before.”
His strong arms embraced me. I felt his lips in my hair, and later he used his handkerchief to clean my dirty face before he kissed me. “It’s a bargain. You can visit that boy and his mother once a week as long as you keep Vera with you, and make that boy escort you through the woods, and never go there after dark, or on a rainy day.”
I didn’t dare to ask for more.
Competition
The cemetery and the rocking chair had taught me their lessons. From now on I’d be the kind of girl Papa had to have in order to gain wealth and live happily. I knew he believed his way was the best way, and I couldn’t judge for myself the right and wrong of most situations. And I wanted Papa to love me more than that hateful First Audrina that I wished had never been born, just as I’m sure Vera wished that I’d never been born.
“You’ll never be as wonderful as your dead sister,” stated Vera so firmly that it seemed indeed she must have known her. She was trying to press Papa’s shirt to show him she could, but she was only managing to ruin it. The iron kept sticking and left burned places shaped like the iron. Even the steam holes showed. “The First Audrina could iron shirts like an expert,” she said, bearing down hard on the iron. “And she was so neat with her hair. Your hair is always a windblown mess.”
Vera’s hair wasn’t exactly terrific looking, either, the way it fell down into her face in wispy strings. The sun through the windows shone through her apricot hair and turned it gold on the ends and red near her scalp. Sun hair. Fire hair.
“I can’t understand why they’d name someone as stupid as you are after such a brilliant girl. You can’t do anything right,” she went on. “What fools parents can be. Just because you happened to have her coloring, they thought you’d have to have her brains and personality, too. And you aren’t nearly as pretty. And you’re moody and dreary to be around.” She turned down the heat on the iron, but it was already too late. Worry puckered her brow as she studied the burn marks and tried to figure out what to do. “Mom,” she called, “if I burn Papa’s shirt, what should I do?”
“Run for the woods,” called back my aunt, who was glued to her TV set, which was showing an old movie.
“Stupid,” Vera said to me, “go ask your mother what can be done to take out the scorched place on Papa’s shirt.”
“I’m too stupid to know what you mean,” I said, still stirring my cereal around, sure that Papa would put me in that rocking chair again tonight, as he’d been doing two or three times a week, hoping the gifts were coming my way.
“Poor second-best Audrina,” Vera continued. “Too dumb to even go to school. Nobody here wants the world to know how idiotic you are with your senile memory.” She took from the cabinet a huge bottle of bleach, poured a little onto a sponge and dabbed at Papa’s new pink shirt. The shape of the iron made an unsightly burn right where his coat wouldn’t hide it.
I went over to see what she was doing. The bleach seemed to be working.
Papa stalked into the kitchen, bare-chested, cleanly shaven, his hair styled and ready to go. He paused near the ironing board to stare at Vera, who looked extremely pretty now that she was shaping up and slimming down in her waist. Then he was looking from me to her, then back again. Was he comparing me to her? What did he see that made him look undecided?
“What the devil are you doing to my shirt, Audrina?” he asked, catching his first glimpse of the ironing board.
“She was pressing it for you, Papa,” spoke up Vera, moving in closer, as if to side with him. “And the silly girl was so busy picking on me she left the iron flat on your new shirt—”
“Oh, my God,” he cried, grabbing up the shirt and inspecting it closely. He groaned again as he saw something I hadn’t noticed until the light shone through it. Holes were appearing in the fading scorch mark. “Look what you’ve done!” he roared at me. “This shirt is one hundred percent silk. You’ve just cost me a hundred dollars.” He saw the huge bottle of bleach then and groaned again. “You burn my shirt, then pour on bleach? Where was your common sense, girl, where?”
“Don’t get excited,” said Vera, running forward and snatching the shirt from his hands. “I’ll repair this shirt for you, and you won’t know it from new. After all, Audrina doesn’t know how to do anything.”
He glared at me, then turned doubtfully to her. “How can you repair a shirt that’s been eaten by bleach? It’s gone, and I had planned to wear that to an important meeting.” He hurled do
wn his wine-colored tie, looked down at his light gray trousers, then started to leave the kitchen.
“Papa,” I began, “I didn’t burn your shirt.”
“Don’t lie to me,” he said with disgust. “I saw you at the ironing board, and the bleach bottle wasn’t a foot away. Besides, I don’t think Vera would give a damn if my shirt was wrinkled. I naturally presumed you would be the one who knows how much I like to be turned out to perfection.”
“I don’t know how to press shirts, Papa. As Vera says all the time, I’m too stupid to do anything right.”
“Papa, she’s lying, and what’s more, I told her to turn on the steam and use a press cloth, but she wouldn’t listen. But you know how Audrina is.”
He seemed ready to flare back when he noticed my look of despair. “All right, Vera. That’s enough. If you can salvage this shirt I’ll give you ten dollars.” He smiled at her crookedly.
True to her word, that evening when Papa came home, Vera showed him his pink shirt. It looked brand new. He took it from her hands, turned it over and over to look for patch stitches and could find none. “I don’t believe my eyes,” he said, and then laughed as he pulled out his wallet. He handed Vera ten dollars. “Honey, perhaps I’ve been misjudging you after all.”
“I took it to a silk-mender, Papa,” she said demurely, bowing down her head. “It cost me fifteen dollars, so that means I lost five of my savings.”
He was listening attentively. If there was one kind of person my papa admired, it was one who knew how to save. “Where did you earn the money to save, Vera?”
“I run errands for old people. Help by shopping for their groceries,” she said in a small, shy voice. “On Saturdays, I walk all the way to the village and do what I said. Sometimes I babysit, too.”
My mouth gaped. Sure, once in a while Vera disappeared on Saturdays, but it was hard to picture her walking fifteen miles to and another fifteen fro. Papa was triply impressed, and pulled out another ten and gave that to her. “Now this shirt cost me a hundred and twenty, but it’s better than throwing it away.”
My Sweet Audrina Page 10