The Woman in the Wall (12 page)

She looked obstinate. "We should have knocked it down."

Now I asked casually from behind the screen, "Why won't Shana get dressed with the rest of you? Is she—is she malformed, or something?"

Kirsty sputtered. "Malformed? No, of course not. I don't know, we're all like that, sort of. The other day Maybeth William's older brother and two of his friends came by to pick her up after dance class. They got there early and stood there in the doorway staring at us in our leotards and tights. Lisa Applebaum screamed and pointed at them, and everybody
ran
for the changing room. Me too," she admitted. "And it's dumb, because a year ago I would have been showing off like crazy for them. I love to dance. Maybe I'll be a ballerina for Halloween," she reflected, and executed several pirouettes before the mirror. "Only," she gasped, staggering a little and hanging onto the mirror for support, "I've been a ballerina for Halloween like about six times already."

I emerged from behind the screen gripping the sheet insecurely about me and approached the mirror dubiously.

"'Lo, the beautiful one comes,'" Kirsty said kindly.

"I can't go to a party like
this,
" I said, grabbing frantically at various parts of my body.

"Well, no," Kirsty said. "I figured you'd make it into one of those skimpy little nightgown things Egyptians wore."

"I can't wear a skimpy little nightgown to my first party, Kirsty," I said, feeling the panic rise in my throat.

"Okay, okay," she said pacifically. "Let's think of something else." She looked at me sharply. "Anyway, I'd think you'd feel more comfortable with a bra on."

"Oh!" I said, blushing hotly. "You mean—"

"I mean you're getting pretty well developed. They stick out, you know, especially if you get chilled, like you are now."

I clutched miserably at my chest. I had noticed that, too. "I never knew what a bra was for," I confessed humbly.

"Oh, you have to wear one," Kirsty said authoritatively. "Or else when you get older they go all droopy and fall off or something."

I stared down aghast at my newly acquired bosom.

"I'll start making some right away," I said faintly.

"I'll go get you one of mine," Kirsty offered, "and you can wear it until you've made yours."

Half an hour later, feeling very grown-up, but also rather as though I was wearing a dog harness, I sat thumbing through a book called
Lives of Famous Women
, looking for a costume idea.

Kirsty had earlier given me an explanation of my periodic bleeding. She told me about babies and how they come, and provided me with a bag of disposable pads that were to be worn in my underclothing for those days every month. I later found the pad to be useful, even though it gave me the odd sensation of riding a very small horse.

I must tell you, frankly, that the explanation she offered sounded far-fetched, to say the least, and I couldn't help but wonder if she hadn't got it wrong somehow. The part about men and women and what they do to each other in bed I don't even mention; it's too grotesque to be taken seriously.

But that the bleeding was a fact I knew from my own experience. And even though it was a great comfort to think that I wasn't the only one so afflicted, it was hard to believe that every woman in the world had to deal with this monthly embarrassment for the majority of her adult life. The only escape, according to Kirsty, was either old age or pregnancy.

Flipping through the pages of
Lives of Famous Women
, I tried to imagine Jackie Kennedy and Marie Antoinette suffering from such a messy disability sixty days out of the year. Did Queen Elizabeth have a "period"? How about Madame Curie? Strange to think that while these women ruled empires and studied the properties of radioactivity, their bodies were patiently, single-mindedly preparing for pregnancy and childbirth over and over again, despite all previous disappointments.

I looked down at my own body with awe and not a little unease. Perhaps my body didn't want the same things I did; it apparently had plans and schemes I knew nothing about. Perhaps one day it would betray me in some unexpected way. But how could that be? We were one and the same being.

"Hey!" Kirsty interrupted my musings. "Would you make me a cat costume? All slinky and sexy. I love cats and Mom won't let me have one."

I looked at her consideringly. "Y-es," I said. "Black velvet would make a nice cat suit. We'd have to think how to manage your tail so you don't drag it. With a red feather boa around your neck and a golden crown, you could be the Queen of Cats," I suggested.

Kirsty's eyes lit up. "I love it!" she said. "Oh, would you please, Anna? I want to be the Queen of Cats!"

Suddenly I wished I had chosen that idea for myself. An animal costume would call for a mask that covered my whole head. Very well, I would forget about being a famous woman. Just for the moment I didn't want to be a woman anymore. I would unsex myself and be a squirrel, say, or a turtle. No doubt these animals came in male and female varieties, but at least they had the decency not to advertise their differences.

"A moth!" I said aloud. "I'll be a moth." Seeing Kirsty's dubious face, I explained how I had always admired the moth's ability to camouflage itself against a variety of backgrounds.

Kirsty shook her head. "Not a moth, Anna. A butterfly, maybe, but not a moth."

"Well, all right, I suppose," I said, privately resolving to find the drabbest, dullest butterfly in the book.

And so it was decided. Kirsty was to be a cat and I was to be a butterfly. Instead of
Lives of Famous Women,
we pored over books about cats and insects. After looking at the color plates in Peterson's
Field Guide to the Insects,
Kirsty decided to let me be a moth after all.

"Oh, good," I said, relieved.

"But only if you let me pick which one."

I nodded happily. There were little white moths, I knew, and gray ones, and any number of brown ones. I hoped she would pick brown. The color seemed to suit me, somehow.

"A luna moth," she said triumphantly, turning the book so I could see.

I winced. The luna moth was a great gaudy thing with sweeping, extravagantly tailed wings and a regal featherlike headdress. It was colored a brilliant poison green.

"But—" I protested.

"You said I could pick," Kirsty said, and ruthlessly swept on, "Look, over there! That cloth right there's exactly the right shade for the wings."

I studied the illustration and then inspected the bolt of material she'd indicated. "No," I shook my head. "Not that one."

"Now, listen, Anna," Kirsty said bossily, sounding so much like herself as a small child that I had to smile, "don't you go trying to make this costume fade into the background. You're going to be a luna moth, and lima moths don't fade into the background."

"Don't worry, Kirsty," I said a little sadly. "I won't make the luna moth costume fade into the background. As much as I might like to, I couldn't."

"Why not?" she asked suspiciously.

"Because..." I wrestled with the problem. It was hard to say why, exactly, but I really couldn't do it. "It would be wrong," I said helplessly. "It would be cheating. I have my self-respect as a craftswoman to think of. But that color green isn't right. And the texture is wrong."

I looked around myself discontentedly. There were still mountains of materials here, but I was beginning to run out of some things. It was annoying. "I don't think I have anything in that shade. I guess I'll have to hand-paint some silk to get just the right effect," I murmured. "I'd have had to do that anyway, even if I had the proper color. And maybe use some wire boning inside the wings..."

Satisfied, Kirsty left me rummaging about amongst my supplies and began painting whiskers on her upper lip with the liquid eyeliner.

Making the costumes kept me very busy for the two weeks before the party. There was no time for anything; no time even for terror, only a few odd snippets of panic sandwiched in between frenzied bouts of cutting and sewing. Kirsty wouldn't even let me see F. She didn't want him to know what our costumes would be. She said she wanted it to be a surprise. I wrote to him, though, and he wrote back, and I had to be content with that. His father, he said, had hinted at the marriage, but nothing further had developed on those lines. F thought that our mother was still stalling.
Oh, good, kind Mother!
I thought.

I measured every inch of Kirsty, a luxury I had not had for years. Always before I had had to measure by eye through a crack in the wall. Because her cat costume was to fit so closely, however, I needed to have exact measurements; I would be able to mold the cat skin onto her almost as neatly as her own.

Kirsty made an athletic and bouncy Queen of Cats. Noisy as it was, she could not resist pouncing and leaping all over the attic to try out her velvet paws and tiny sharp claws. Her tail was made of velvet-covered wood, cleverly segmented and jointed so that it was self-supporting and writhed with a life of its own.

Her mask-head was constructed of papier-mache over a superstructure of wire. I made it as light as possible, but naturally she complained anyway. At least, she complained until she realized that she could, by pulling one of the whiskers, cause the jaw to drop and reveal the lower half of her smiling face behind two rows of gleaming pointed teeth. Two other whiskers controlled the eyelids so that she could blink or wink at will.

After that, she became a bit of a trial. She was a mass of twitches, winking and rolling her eyes, waving her tail, butting me skittishly with her crown, hissing and swatting at dust motes as they fell through the lingering beams of an autumnal sunset. Still, I could not help but laugh at her; she was enjoying her costume so much.

She turned stubborn again over my mask. I had planned to make a mask-head like hers, which would completely cover my whole head, but she refused to let me do it.

"It'll get hot and uncomfortable after a while, and you'll want to take it off," she protested. "And then where will you be, without makeup or anything to hide your face?"

I shook my head. I had long ago schooled myself not to mind discomfort. So long as my disguise remained intact, my hiding place undiscovered, I didn't much care about anything else.

"Well, it won't look right," she argued, shrewdly realizing that this was the better line of attack. "Look at the picture. The animal hardly even has a head; it's just a bump without a neck. No mouth even. You couldn't get the right look unless you cut your own head off. And that," she said hastily, seeing my speculative eyes, "is going way too far for the sake of accuracy.

"You'd be much better off wearing a circlet on your head with those feathery antennae things attached. And then we'll slick back your hair and paint your face kind of like you did for Cleopatra." When I still looked hesitant, she said, "And you could carry a little green sequined eye-mask with a stick on one side so you could cover your eyes when you felt shy. It'd look
good,
you know it would, Anna."

"Well-I..." She might actually be right, I decided. "I suppose I could," I said grudgingly.

"Anna! Oh, Anna, you look wonderful," Kirsty whispered.

It was the night of the Halloween party.

I stared straight into the eyes of the young woman in the mirror. She was dressed in brilliant poison green, a clinging, slithery gown of painted silk, with dramatic floor-length sleeves. Her small, regal head was supported by a slender white neck, her hair sleeked back into a shining knot at the nape and crowned with a silver circlet adorned by two huge barbaric featherlike antennae.

"You'd never guess a moth costume could be so
glamorous.
"

Kirsty came and stood next to me in her cat suit. "Look," she said. "I think you've grown two inches in the last two weeks. We're the same height now. Anna, you really do look gorgeous. You're going to knock 'em dead, kid."

I continued staring at my reflection in the mirror.

"I think I'm going to throw up," I said finally.

"Oh, Anna, don't be so silly."

"No, I really think—"

"Anna, stop that right now. You're fabulous, a knockout, and you know it."

"I
know
I'm going to—"

"Eeeuuw! Here! Here, take this old pot thing. Not on your new dress, you idiot! Oh, Anna, how gross."

After an interval I said, "Thank you. I feel much better now. I'll just go dispose of this and rinse out my mouth and then I'll be quite ready."

"Really? I mean—are you sure you're okay?"

"No," I said steadily, wiping my mouth, "I am not sure I'm okay at all, but I promised F, and I promised you, that I would do this thing and I am going to do it."

"Well," Kirsty said dubiously, "if you say so..."

"I do say so."

"You promise you're not going to do that again?"

"I can't promise a thing," I said grimly. "Now, Kirsty,
please
—"

"Okay, okay," she said hurriedly. "Let's go."

Kirsty unlocked the attic door, and I stepped out onto the stair. The attic was my territory; the attic stair was not. I was now out of the wall and into the great world. Oddly, I felt no panic. I felt nothing. I was numb all over, except for a small cold spot in the pit of my stomach.

We walked down the stair to the second-story hallway. I paused a moment to look around me. I had been here often, of course, but only at night, in the dark, while everyone around me slept. It could not be said to be very brightly lit now. Kirsty had argued that a Halloween party should be a little shadowy and dark, and she had gone around replacing the sixty-watt bulbs with forties. Then she had festooned every wall, window, and doorway with artificial cobwebs. It occurred to me that some people might say she had gone a little overboard on the cobwebs.

"What do you think?" she asked eagerly. "There's lots more cobwebs downstairs. I used bags and
bags
of the stuff. It started to run out by the time I got up here. Isn't it spooky? And dark. I knew you'd like that."

I rummaged around in my mind for something to say. "It's probably exactly like the inside of a luna moth's cocoon," I said, pleased to have found a comment that was both flattering to her and comforting to me.