"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 e
at 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-mache, 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 card- board 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."