"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 kn
ew the secret of love. She couldn't have ever loved, no, not her, the ironhearted, 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?"
N000! 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.