One day, Momma told us why her mother wasn’t keen on going up the narrow stairway to the attic. She said she was claustrophobic ever since she had been locked in a closet when she was a young girl. That was apparently a form of punishment her parents had used on her. Locking us up wasn’t all that unfamiliar to her, then.
Whenever she confronted us, she was obsessed with questions about our sexuality. It had become almost a religious chant for her. Did we touch our private parts? Did we look at each other naked? Did boys and girls use the bathroom together? She asked the questions like a police interrogator, asking quickly in the hopes of catching us lying or maybe one of the twins blurting out something sinful that we were covering up.
“I bet her husband never sees her naked,” I told Cathy. “Not that he would want to.”
“Don’t they share a bedroom?”
“I don’t know, but even if they do, she probably has her underwear glued on.”
Cathy’s eyes brightened. At last, we had something to ridicule. “No, they’re nailed on,” she said.
“How did they have children?” I pondered.
“Blindfolded,” she suggested.
I thought that was clever. The twins thought we had gone mad. They had no idea what was making us laugh so hard.
One time, while I was painting and needed water, Cathy went down the stairs and ran into her. When she came back, she described how angry our grandmother was about her doing my bidding. She warned her about being so obedient and following my commands. Cathy said she told her that I knew what was evil more than she did, because the male of the species was born knowing evil, and I would only lead her to damnation.
“Ha,” I said. “So much for her Bible study. Adam wasn’t the one who listened to the devil in Paradise. It was Eve. She obviously never read Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth,’ either. It was Lady Macbeth who got him to kill the king. Our grandmother has it completely opposite to the truth. Women are a bigger influence on men than men are on women. Look at how much Momma got Daddy to do!”
“You tell her all that, not me,” Cathy said.
“If she says that to me, I will.”
Cathy nodded, but I thought I saw her look at me a little differently. Did she think it was so? Did she expect something evil would come from me? How easy it was to plant a suspicion, I thought. Perhaps our great-grandmother had done that to Grandmother Olivia, and now she was passing it down to us.
I put the diary down and thought about the ideas Cathy’s grandmother was putting into her head about Christopher and men in general. She struck me as being too young to really understand, and yet from the way Christopher described her, I thought she was at that point where she was more aware of her own budding sexuality. How difficult that surely was for a girl her age, being so confined and rarely having her mother available to speak with her privately.
Even though Christopher had made it clear that neither he nor Cathy was ever ashamed of their nudity because their mother wasn’t ashamed of hers, there had to come a point when they would feel differently. Would Christopher reveal that? Would Cathy say something to embarrass him or make him feel guilty?
Lana, Suzette, and I did reveal very intimate things about ourselves to one another. It made the three of us feel better about ourselves, our own bodies, and our feelings to know that we all had similar thoughts and experiences. We didn’t mature simultaneously, but changes began to happen to each of us at about the same time. Lana was the last of the three to have her first period, but both Suzette and I had described it enough for her to know exactly what to expect. Between Suzette’s mother and Lana’s, Lana’s was apparently the more prudish and reluctant to answer questions and discuss things. Lana said she would often say, “You’ll learn about it in school.” I told them most of the things my aunt Barbara had told me. We often compared notes and revealed sexual fantasies, laughing about them most of the time. The point was, we had some self-confidence about ourselves. We were never afraid of what was happening. We never felt we were dangling out there on some kind of wild roller coaster of emotions.
How would it have been to be in an attic with my older brother, my much younger brother and sister, a mother who was practically never around, and a grandmother who wanted me to believe that my own body was a vessel of sin? Nobody who wasn’t there with those children, especially Cathy, and no one who didn’t have this diary would have any idea what exactly her mother had done to her by shutting her up in an attic just when she was about to fly into her femininity.
There were different kinds of tears in my eyes when I picked up the diary again, tears of compassion and pity and tears of rage, so many I didn’t think I could read another word, but I sucked in my breath, wiped my eyes, and turned the page. From the first few lines, it looked like maybe there was some hope.
Later in the afternoon, we all looked up with surprise when Grandmother Olivia came into the room. Except for her spying on us, she rarely appeared any time other than breakfast, lunch, or dinner. None of us complained about not seeing her, but I couldn’t help wondering if we weren’t always on her mind one way or another. I think she felt confident that she had hidden us away well, but even if one of her servants suspected something, I doubted that he or she would ever dare question her about it. She appeared to have control of everything and everyone associated with this mansion.
Of course, that made me ask myself many questions, questions I would never voice aloud in front of Cathy. If Grandmother Olivia had so much power, why didn’t she simply tell her husband we were here and that this was the way it would be? How could a sick old man put up much opposition? She seemed well and strong. He surely depended on her for every morsel he ate and everything that had to be done legally for the Foxworth family.
Maybe that was all true, I told myself, but maybe she wanted to see us suffer, punish Momma, and test us to see if we were as evil as she suspected. How long would it take to satisfy her? Why wasn’t all the time that had passed already enough? What else did she want from us, from Momma? Was this her way of ensuring that we would be doomed after all? What children in our predicament wouldn’t have broken one or more of her precious rules by now? Was she always out there on the other side of that door waiting to pounce? She couldn’t hate us, she didn’t know us, but she surely hated the idea of us.
I really believed all this, which was why I was taken aback when she entered the room this time. She was carrying a clay pot of yellow chrysanthemums, real yellow chrysanthemums! She walked right over to Cathy and put the pot in her hands. Cathy’s mouth fell open. The twins were fascinated. I took a step forward, debating whether to say thank you, or ask her why she was giving them to us.
“Here are some real flowers for your fake garden,” she declared.
Cathy looked at me, helpless for a moment. I mouthed “Thank you,” and she began to thank her.
Our grandmother stared at her as she fumbled one statement of gratitude after another.
Was she studying her, seeing if Cathy had the capacity to be grateful for something, had any manners? Was this whole thing an experiment, another test? I was just as surprised as Cathy was that Grandmother Olivia had even taken note of what we were doing in the attic.
She turned to look at me, and for a second, I thought there was some sign of human kindness in her. It was as if love had come up into her throat like a burp, and she had to get it out, maybe because she didn’t want it to be there. Maybe she hated herself for having even an iota of feeling for us. She marched out without saying another word. A silence fell. We were waiting for a second shoe to drop or something, but nothing happened.
The twins closed in on the flowers. It had been so long since they had seen anything from nature that was real, alive, and beautiful, something that would make them feel they were in the world again. Carrie wanted to hold the pot. Cathy handed it to her gently, and the twins hovered over it as if it were a pet.
“We’ll put it on the east windowsill so it will get morning sunshine,” I said.