Each day, of course, when Momma was home from that secretarial school, she had to view the day’s accomplishments. “Momma,” gushed Carrie in her breathless bird twitter, “that’s all we do all day, make flowers, and sometimes Cathy, she don’t want us to go downstairs and eat lunch!”
“Cathy, you mustn’t become so preoccupied with decorating the attic that you forget to eat your meals.”
“But, Momma, we’re doing it for them, so they won’t be so scared up there.”
She laughed and hugged me. “My, you are the persistent one, you and your older brother both. You must have inherited that from your father, certainly not from me. I give up so easily.”
“Momma!” I cried, made uneasy. “Are you still going to school? You are getting better at typing, aren’t you?”
“Yes, of course I am.” She smiled again, and then settled back in her chair, holding up her hand and seeming to admire the bracelet she wore. I started to ask why she needed so much jewelry to attend secretarial school, but she spoke instead. “What you need to make now is animals for your garden.”
“But, Momma, if roses are impossible to make, how can we even draw animals?”
She gave me a wry little smile as she traced a cool finger over my nose “Oh, Cathy, what a doubting Thomas you are. You question everything, doubt everything, when you should know by now, you can do anything you want to, if you want to badly enough. And I’m going to tell you a secret I’ve known about for some time—in this world, where everything is complicated, there is also a book to teach you how simple everything can be.”
That I was to find out.
Momma brought us art instruction books by the dozens. The first of these books taught us to reduce all complicated designs into basic spheres, cylinders, cones, rectangles and cubes. A chair was just a cube—I hadn’t known that before. A Christmas tree was just an inverted ice-cream cone—I hadn’t known that before, either. People were just combinations of all those basic forms: spheres for heads; arms, necks, legs, torso, upper and lower, were only rectangular cubes or cylinders, and triangles made for feet. And believe it or not, using this basic method, with just a few simple additions, we soon had rabbits, squirrels, birds, and other small friendly creatures—all made by our very own hands.
True, they were peculiar looking. I thought their oddities made them all the sweeter. Chris colored all his animals realistically. I decorated mine with polka-dots, gingham checks, plaids, and put lace-edged pockets on the laying hens. Because our mother had shopped in a sewing notions store, we had lace, cords of all colors, buttons, sequins, felt, pebbles and other decorative materials. The possibilities were endless. When she put that box into my hands, I know my eyes must have shown all the love I felt for her then. For this did prove she thought of us when she was out in the world. She wasn’t just thinking of new clothes for herself, and new jewelry and cosmetics. She was trying to make our confined lives as pleasant as possible.
One rainy afternoon Cory came running to me with an orange paper snail he’d laborously worked on the entire morning, and half of the afternoon. He’d eaten but a little of his favorite lunch, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, he was that anxious to get back to his “work” and put on the “things that stick out of the head.”
Proudly, he stood back, small legs spread wide, as he watched each flicker of expression on my face. What he’d made resembled nothing more than a lopsided beachball with trembling feelers.
“Do you think it’s a good snail?” he asked, frowning up and looking worried when I couldn’t find words to say.
“Yes,” I said quickly, “it’s a wonderful, beautiful snail.”
“You don’t think it looks like an orange?”
“No, of course not—oranges don’t have swirls, like this snail does—or crooked feelers.”
Chris stepped closer to view the pitiful creature I held in my hands. “You don’t call those things feelers,” he corrected. “A snail is a member of the mollusc family, which have soft bodies without any backbones—and those little things are called antennae, which are connected to its brain; it has tubular intestines that end with its mouth, and it moves by a gear-edged foot.”
“Christopher,” I said coolly, “when Cory and I want to know about a snail’s tubular intestines, we’ll send you a telegram, and please go sit on a tack and wait for it.”
“Do you want to be ignorant all your life?”
“Yes!” I flared back, “When it comes to snails, I prefer knowing nothing!”
Cory tagged behind me as we went to watch Carrie pasting pieces of purple paper together. Her working method was slapdash, unlike Cory’s careful plodding. Carrie used her pair of scissors to ruthlessly stab a hole into her purple . . . thing. Behind the hole she pasted a bit of red paper. When she had this . . . thing . . . put together, she named it a worm. It undulated like a giant boa constrictor, flashing a single mean red eye with black spider-leg lashes. “Its name is Charlie,” she said, handing over her four feet of “worm” to me. (When things came to us without a name of their own, we made their names begin with a C to make them one of us.)
On the attic walls, in our beautiful garden of paper flowers, we pasted up the epileptic snail beside the fierce and menacing worm. Oh, they did make a pair. Chris sat down and lettered a big sign in red: ALL ANIMALS BEWARE OF EARTH-WORM!!!
I lettered my own sign, feeling Cory’s small snail was the one in jeopardy, IS THERE A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE? (Cory named this snail Cindy Lou.)
Momma viewed this day’s accomplishments with laughter, all smiles, because we were having fun. “Yes, of course there is a doctor in the house,” she said, and leaned to kiss Chris’s cheek. “This son of mine has always known what to do for a sick animal. And Cory, I adore your snail—she looks . . . so . . . so sensitive.”
“Do you like my Charlie?” asked Carrie anxiously. “I made him good. I used all the purple to make him big. Now we don’t have no more purple.”
“It’s a beautiful worm, really a gorgeous worm,” said Momma, taking the twins onto her lap and giving them the hugs and kisses she sometimes forgot. “I especially like the black lashes you put around that red eye—very effective.”
It was a cozy, homey scene, the three of them in her chair, with Chris perched on the arm, his face close to his mother’s. Then I had to go and spoil it all, as was my hateful way.
“How many words can you type per minute now, Momma?”
“I’m getting better.”
“How much better?”
“I’m doing the best I can, really, Cathy—I told you the keyboard doesn’t have any letters.”
“What about shorthand—how fast can you take dictation?”
“I’m trying. You’ve got to have patience. You don’t learn things like that overnight.”
Patience. I colored patience gray, hung over with black clouds. I colored hope yellow, just like that sun we could see for a few short morning hours. Too soon the sun rose high in the sky and disappeared from view, leaving us bereft, and staring at blue.
* * *
When you grow up, and have a million adult things to do, you forget how long a day can be for a child. It seemed we lived through four years in the course of seven weeks. Then came another dreaded Friday when we had to get up at dawn and scurry around like mad to rid the bedroom, and the bathroom, of all evidence that we existed. I stripped off the sheets from the bed and rolled them into a ball along with the pillowcases and blankets, and I put the bedspreads directly over the mattress covers—the way the grandmother had ordered me to do. The night before, Chris had taken apart the train tracks. Like crazy we worked to make the room neat, spotless, plus the bathroom, and then the grandmother came in with the picnic basket and ordered us to take it into the attic, and we could eat breakfast there. I had most carefully wiped away all our fingerprints, and the mahogany furniture shone. She scowled heavily when she saw this, and darn if she didn’t use dust from a vacuum cleaner bag to make all the furniture tops
dull again.
At seven we were in the attic schoolroom, eating our cold cereal with raisins and milk. Down below we could faintly hear the maids moving around in our room. On tippy-toes we moved to the stairwell, and huddled there on the top step listening to what went on below, though we were scared every minute of being discovered.
Hearing the maids move about, laughing and chatting, while the grandmother hovered near the closet door directing them to clean the mirrors, use the lemon wax, air the mattresses—it all gave me the queerest feeling. Why didn’t those maids notice something different? Didn’t we leave any odor behind to let them know Cory often wet his bed? It was as if we really didn’t exist, and weren’t alive, and the only scents we had were imaginary. We wrapped our arms about each other and held onto each other tightly, tightly.
The maids didn’t enter the closet; they didn’t open the tall, narrow door. They didn’t see us, or hear us, nor did they seem to think it odd the grandmother never left the room for a second while they were in there scrubbing the tub, cleaning the toilet bowl, scrubbing the tile floor.
That Friday did something strange to all of us. I believe we shriveled in our own estimations of ourselves, for afterwards we couldn’t find words to say. We didn’t enjoy our games, or our books, and so silently we cut out tulips and daisies and waited for Momma to come and bring hope with her again.
Still, we were young, and hope has strong roots in the young, right down to their toes, and when we entered the attic and saw our growing garden, we could laugh, and pretend. After all, we were making our mark in the world. We were making something beautiful out of what had been drab and ugly.
Now the twins took off like butterflies, fluttering through the mobile flowers. We pushed them high on the swings and created windstorms to shake the flowers madly. We hid behind cardboard trees no taller than Chris, and sat on mushrooms made of papier-mâché, with colorful foam cushions on top, which were, honestly, better than the real thing—unless you had an appetite for eating mushrooms.
“It’s pretty!” cried Carrie, spinning around and around, holding to her short pleated skirt so we just had to see the new lace ruffled panties Momma had given her yesterday. All new clothes and shoes had to spend their first night with Carrie and Cory in their beds. (It’s terrible to wake up at night with your cheek resting on the sole of a sneaker.) “I’m going to be a ballerina, too,” she said happily, spinning and spinning until she eventually fell, and Cory went rushing to see if she had hurt herself. She screamed to see the blood ooze from a cut on her knee. “Oh—I don’t want to be a ballerina if it hurts!”
I didn’t dare let her know it hurt—oh, boy, did it hurt!
* * *
Yesterdays ago, I’d ambled through real gardens, real forests—and always I felt their mystical aura—as if something magic and marvelous was waiting just around the bend. To make our attic garden enchanted, too, Chris and I crawled around and drew white-chalk daisies on the floor, joining them in a ring. Inside that fairy ring of white flowers, all that was evil was banished. There we could sit cross-legged on the floor, and by the light of a single candle burning, Chris and I would spin long, involved tales of good fairies who took care of small children, and wicked witches who always went down in defeat.
Then Cory spoke up. As always, he was the one to ask the most difficult questions to answer. “Where has all the grass gone?”
“God took the grass to heaven.” And thusly, Carrie saved me from answering.
“Why?”
“For Daddy. Daddy likes to mow the lawn.”
Chris’s eyes met with mine—and we’d thought they’d forgotten Daddy.
Cory puckered up his faint brows, staring at the little cardboard trees Chris had made. “Where are all the big trees?”
“Same place,” said Carrie. “Daddy likes big trees.” This time my eyes took wild flight. How I hated lying to them—telling them this was only a game, an endless game they seemed to endure with more patience than Chris or me. And they never once asked why we had to play such a game.
Never once did the grandmother come up to the attic to ask what we were doing, though very often she opened the bedroom door as silently as possible, hoping we wouldn’t notice the noise of the key turning in the lock. She’d peer in the crack, trying to catch us doing something “unholy” or “wicked.”
In the attic we were free to do anything we wanted without fear of retaliation, unless God wielded a whip. Not one time did the grandmother leave our room without reminding us that God was up above to see, even when she was not. Because she never went even into the closet to open the door of the attic stairwell, my curiosity was aroused. I reminded myself to ask of Momma as soon as she came in, so I wouldn’t forget again. “Why doesn’t the grandmother go into the attic herself and check to see what we do? Why does she just ask, and think we’ll tell the truth?”
Tired and dejected looking, Momma wilted in her special chair. Her new green wool suit looked very expensive. She had been to a hairdresser, and the style was changed. She answered my question in an offhand manner, as if her thoughts were dwelling on something more appealing, “Oh, haven’t I told you before? Your grandmother suffers from claustrophobia. That’s an emotional affliction that makes it difficult for her to breathe in any small, confined area. You see, when she was a child, her parents used to lock her in a closet for punishment.”
Wow! How difficult to think that large old woman had once been young, and small enough to punish. I could almost feel sorry for the child she’d been, but I knew she was happy to see us locked up. Every time she glanced our way, it showed in her eyes—her smug satisfaction to have us so neatly captured. Still, it was a peculiar thing that fate would give her such a fear, and thus give Chris and me reason enough to kiss the dear, sweet, close walls of that narrow passageway. Often Chris and I speculated on how all the massive furniture had been taken up into the attic. Certainly it couldn’t have been maneuvered up through the small closet and then up the stairway, which was barely more than a foot wide. And though we searched diligently to find another larger doorway into the attic, we never found one. Maybe one was hidden behind one of the giant armoires too heavy for us to move. Chris thought the largest furniture could have been hauled up to the roof, then passed through one of the big windows.
Every day the witch-grandmother came into our room, to stab with her flintstone eyes, to snarl with her thin, crooked lips. Every day she asked the same old questions: “What have you been up to? What do you do in the attic? Did you say grace before today’s meals? Did you go down on your knees last night and ask God to forgive your parents for the sin they committed? Are you teaching the youngest two the words of the Lord? Do you use the bathroom together, boys and girls?” Boy, did her eyes flash mean then! “Are you modest, always? Do you keep the private parts of your bodies from the eyes of others? Do you touch your bodies when it’s not necessary for cleanliness?”
God! How dirty she made skin seem. Chris laughed when she was gone. “I think she must glue on her underwear,” he joked.
“No! She nails it on!” I topped.
“Have you noticed how much she likes the color gray?”
Noticed? Who wouldn’t notice? Always gray. Sometimes the gray had fine pinstripes of red or blue, or a dainty plaid design, very faint, or jacquard—but always the fabric was taffeta with the diamond brooch at the throat of a high and severe neckline, softened a bit by hand-crocheted collars. Momma had already told us a widow-lady in the nearest village custom made these uniforms that looked like armor. “This lady is a dear friend of my mother’s. And she wears gray because it is cheaper to buy material by the bolt than by the yard—and your grandfather owns a mill that makes fine fabrics down in Georgia somewhere.”
Good golly, even the rich had to be stingy.
One September afternoon I raced down the attic stairs in a terrible hurry to reach the bathroom—and I collided smack into the grandmother! She seized hold of my shoulders, and glared down i
nto my face. “Watch where you’re going, girl!” she snapped. “Why are you in such a hurry?”
Her fingers felt like steel through the thin fabric of my blue blouse. She had spoken first, so I could answer. “Chris is painting the most beautiful landscape,” I breathlessly explained, “and I’ve got to get right back with fresh water before his large wash dries. It’s important to keep the colors clean.”
“Why doesn’t he come for his own water? Why do you wait on him?”
“He’s painting, and he asked if I’d mind fetching him fresh water, and I wasn’t doing anything but watching, and the twins would spill the water.”
“Fool! Never wait on a man! Make him wait on himself. Now, spill out the truth—what are you really doing up there?”
“Honest, I’m telling the truth. We’re working hard to make the attic pretty so the twins won’t be afraid up there, and Chris is a wonderful artist.”
She sneered and asked with contempt, “How would you know?”
“He is gifted artistically, Grandmother—all his teachers said so.”
“Has he asked you to pose for him—without clothes?”
I was shocked. “No. Of course not!”
“Then why are you trembling?”
“I’m . . . I’m scared of . . . of you,” I stammered. “Every day you come in and ask what sinful, unholy thing we’re doing, and truly, I don’t know what it is you think we’re doing. If you don’t tell us exactly, how can we avoid doing something bad, not knowing it is bad?”
She looked me over, down to my bare feet, and smiled sarcastically. “Ask your older brother—he’ll know what I mean. The male of the species is born knowing everything evil.”
Boy, did I blink! Chris wasn’t evil, or bad. There were times when he was tormenting, but not unholy. I tried to tell her this, but she didn’t want to hear.
Later on in the day she came into our room bearing a clay pot of yellow chrysanthemums. Striding directly to me, she put that pot in my hands. “Here are real flowers for your fake garden,” she said without warmth. It was such an unwitch-like thing for her to do, it took my breath away. Was she going to change, see us differently? Could she learn to like us? I thanked her effusively for the flowers, perhaps too much, for she spun around and stalked out, as if embarrassed.
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 14
