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! (30 page)

“What?” asked I, eager to have the male gender share some of the miseries of maturing. When she didn’t answer, I asked, “Chris, he sent you to me with instructions to tell me, didn’t he?” She nodded and said yes, though she had meant to tell me long ago, but downstairs there was a hassle every day to keep her from doing what she should.

“Chris—what does he have to endure that’s painful?”

She laughed, seemingly amused. “Another day, Cathy. Now put your things away, and use them when you have the need. Don’t panic if it starts in the night, or while you’re dancing. I was twelve the day mine started, and out riding a bicycle, and you know I rode home at least six times and changed my panties before my mother finally noticed, and took the time to explain to me what it was all about. I was furious because she hadn’t warned me in advance. She never told me anything. Believe it or
not, you’ll soon get used to it, and it won’t make one bit of difference in your lifestyle.”

Despite the boxes of hateful things I wished I would never need—for I wasn’t going to have a baby, that was a very good warm talk that my mother and I shared.

And yet, when she called Chris and the twins down from the attic, and she kissed Chris and ruffled his blond curls, and played with him in teasing ways, and almost ignored the twins, the closeness shared but a moment ago began to fade. Carrie and Cory seemed ill at ease in her presence now. They came running to me and climbed up on my lap, and with my arms hugging them close, they watched as Chris was fondled, kissed, and fawned over. It bothered me so much the way she treated the twins, as if she didn’t like to look at them. As Chris and I moved on into puberty, and toward adulthood, the twins stagnated, went nowhere.

*  *  *

The long cold winter passed into spring. Gradually the attic grew warmer. We went, all four, up there to take down the paper snowflakes, and we made it bloom again with our brilliant spring flowers.

My birthday came in April, and Momma didn’t fail to come with presents, and the treats of ice cream and bakery cake. She sat down to spend the Sunday afternoon, and taught me how to do crewel embroidery, and a few needlepoint stitches. Thus, with the kits she gave me, I had another way to fill my time.

My birthday was followed by the twins’ day—their sixth birthday. Again, Momma bought the cake, the ice cream, and the many gifts, including musical instruments that made Cory’s blue eyes light up. He took one long, charmed look at that toy accordion, gave it a squeeze or two while punching the keys, cocking his head to listen attentively to the sounds he made. And darned, if he wasn’t soon playing a tune on that thing! None of us could believe it. Then again we were dumbfounded, for he turned to Carrie’s toy piano and did the same thing. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Carrie, happy birthday to you and me.”

“Cory has an ear for music,” said Momma, looking sad and yearning as she at last turned her gaze upon her youngest son. “Both my brothers were musicians. The pity of it was my father had no patience for the arts, or the type of men who were artists—not only those who were musicians, but painters, poets, and so forth. He thought them weak and effeminate. He forced this older brother to work in a bank he owned, not caring if his son detested the job that didn’t suit him at all. He was named after my father, but we called him Mal. He was a very goodlooking young man, and on weekends, Mal would escape the life he hated by riding up into the mountains on his motorcycle. In his own private retreat, a log cabin he had built himself, he composed music. One day he took a curve too fast in the rain. He careened off the road and crashed down hundreds of feet into a chasm. He was twenty-two years old and dead.

“My younger brother was named Joel, and he ran away the day of his brother’s funeral. He and Mal had been very close, and I guess he just couldn’t bear the thought that now he would have to take Mal’s place, and be the heir to his father’s business dynasty. We received one single postcard from Paris, in which Joel told us he had a job with an orchestra touring Europe. Next thing we heard, perhaps three weeks later, Joel had been killed in a skiing accident in Switzerland. He was nineteen when he died. He had fallen into some deep ravine filled with snow, and to this day, they never found his body.”

Oh, golly! I was greatly disturbed, kind of numb-feeling inside. So many accidents. Two brothers dead, and Daddy, too, all from accidents. My bleak look met with Chris’s. He wasn’t smiling. As soon as our mother was gone, we escaped to the attic and our books.

“We’ve read every damned thing!” said Chris in deep disgust, flashing me an annoyed look. Wasn’t my fault he could read a book in a few hours!

“We could read through those Shakespeare books again,” I suggested.

“I don’t like to read plays!”

Gosh-golly, I loved reading Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill, and anything that was dramatic, fanciful, and fraught with tempestuous emotions.

“Let’s teach the twins to read and write,” I suggested, I was that frantic to do something different. And in this way we could give
them
another way to entertain themselves. “And Chris, we’ll save their brains from turning into mush from looking at that tube so much, and keep them from going blind, too.”

Down the stairs we determinedly stalked, and right up to the twins who had their eyes glued to Bugs Bunny, who was signing off.

“We are going to teach the two of you to read and write,” said Chris.

With loud wails they protested.
“No!”
howled Carrie. “
We don’t want to learn to read and write! We don’t write letters! We want to watch
‘I Love Lucy’!”

Chris grabbed her, and I seized hold of Cory, and quite literally we had to drag them both into the attic. It was like trying to handle slippery snakes. One of them could bellow like a mad bull charging!

Cory didn’t speak, nor did he scream, nor did he beat at me with small fists to inflict some damage; he just clung fiercely to whatever came within reach of his hands, and he used his legs to wrap around things, too.

Never did two amateur teachers have a more unwilling student body. But finally, through tricks and threats and fairy tales, we began to interest them. Maybe it was pity for
us
that soon had them carefully toiling over books, and tediously memorizing and reciting letters. We gave them a McGuffey’s first grade primer to copy words from.

Not acquainted with other children the same age as our twins, Chris and I thought our six-year-olds did remarkably well. And though Momma didn’t come every day now as she had in the beginning, or every other day, she did show up once or twice a week. How anxiously we waited to give her the short note Cory
and Carrie had printed, making sure each had the same amount of words to print.

They printed in letters at least two inches high, and very crooked:

Dear Momma,

We love you,
And candy, too.

Good-bye,
Carrie and Cory

Such sweating diligence they used to concoct their own message, not coached by either Chris or me—a message which they hoped our mother would get. Which she didn’t.

Tooth cavities, of course.

*  *  *

Then summer was upon us. And again it was hot and sweltering, so horribly stuffy, though, strangely, not as unbearable as it had been the previous summer. Chris reasoned our blood was thinner now, so we could tolerate the heat better.

Our summer was filled with books. Apparently Momma just reached in and took books from the shelves downstairs without bothering to read the titles, or wondering if they would be of interest to us, or suitable reading for young minds so easily impressed. It didn’t really matter. Chris and I would read anything.

One of our favorite books that summer was a historical novel that made history better than that taught in school. We were surprised to read that in the old days women didn’t go to the hospitals to have babies. They had them at home on a small, narrow cot, so the doctor could reach them more easily than on a large, wide bed. And sometimes only “midwives” were in attendance.

“A baby swan bed, to give birth to an infant child,” mused Chris aloud, lifting his head to stare off into space.

I rolled over on my back and smiled at him wickedly. We were in the attic, both lying on the old stained mattress near the open windows that let in soft warm breezes. “And kings and queens who held court in their bedroom—or bedchambers, as they called them—and having the nerve to sit up in bed entirely naked. Do you think everything that’s written in books can be entirely true?”

“Of course not! But much of it is. After all, people didn’t used to wear nightgowns, or pajamas to bed. They only wore nightcaps to keep their skulls warm, and the heck with the rest.”

We laughed, both of us, picturing kings and queens who weren’t embarrassed to be naked in front of their nobles and foreign dignitaries.

“Naked skin wasn’t sinful then, was it? Way back in medieval days?”

“Guess not,” he answered.

“It’s what you do when you’re naked that’s sinful, isn’t it?”

“Guess so.”

For the second time now, I was coping with that curse nature sent to make me a woman, and it did hurt so much the first time that I stayed in bed all day, and made a big to-do about feeling crampy.

“You don’t think it’s disgusting, what is happening to me—do you?” I asked Chris.

His face lowered into my hair. “Cathy, I don’t think anything about the human body and the way it functions is disgusting or revolting. I guess this is the doctor in me coming out. I think like this about your particular situation . . . if it takes a few days a month to make you into a woman like our mother, then I’m all for it. And if it pains, and you don’t like it, then think about dancing, for that hurts, too, you’ve told me so. And yet, you think the price you pay is worth the rewards.” My arms closed tighter about him when he paused. “And I pay a price too in becoming a man. I don’t have a man to talk to, as you have Momma. I’m all alone in a sticky situation, full of frustrations, and sometimes I
don’t know which way to turn, and how to get away from temptations, and I’m so damned scared I’ll never get to be a doctor.”

“Chris,” I began, then stumbled on quicksand, I knew, “don’t you ever have any doubts about her?”

I saw his frown, and spoke again before he could fire back some angry retort, “Doesn’t it strike you as . . . as
odd,
that she keeps us locked up for so long? She’s got lots of money, Chris, I know she has. Those rings and bracelets, they’re not fake like she tells us. I know they’re not!”

He had drawn away when first I brought up “her.” He adored his goddess of all female perfection, but then he was embracing me again, and his cheek was on my hair, his voice tight with thick emotion, “Sometimes I am not the eternal cockeyed optimist you call me. Sometimes I am just as doubting of what she does as you are. But I think back to the time before we came here, and I feel I have to trust her, and believe in her, and be like Daddy was. Remember how he used to say, ‘For everything that seems strange, there is a good reason? And everything always works out for the best.’ That’s what I make myself believe—she has good reasons for keeping us here, and not sneaking us out to some boarding school. She knows what she’s doing, and Cathy, I love her so much. I just can’t help it. No matter what she does, I feel I will go right on loving her.”

He loved her more than me, I thought bitterly.

*  *  *

Our mother now came and went with no regularity. Once, a whole week passed with no visit. When she finally arrived she told us her father was very ill. I was overjoyed to hear the news.

“Is he getting worse?” I asked, feeling a little pang of guilt. I knew it was wrong to wish him dead, but his death meant our salvation.

“Yes,” she said solemnly, “much worse. Any day now, Cathy, any day. You wouldn’t believe his pallor, his pain; soon as he goes, you’ll be free.”

Oh, good-golly, to think I was so evil as to want that old man
to die this very second! God forgive me. But it wasn’t right for us to be shut up all the time; we needed to be outside, in the warm sunlight, and we did get so lonesome, seeing no new people.

“It could be any hour,” said Momma, and got up to leave.

“Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for t’ carry me home . . .” was the tune I hummed as I made the beds, and waited for the news to come that our grandfather was on his way to heaven if his gold counted, and to hell if the Devil couldn’t be bribed.

“If you get there before I do . . .”

And Momma was at the door, tired looking as she poked only her face in. “He’s passed the crisis . . . he’s going to recover—this time.” The door closed, and we were alone, with dashed hopes.

I tucked the twins into bed that night for seldom did Momma show up to do this. I was the one who kissed their cheeks and heard their prayers. And Chris did his share, too. They loved us, it was easy to read in their big, shadowed blue eyes. After they fell asleep, we went to the calendar to make an “X” through another day. August had come again. We had now lived in this prison a full year.