Authors: V.C. Andrews
“Let’s eat!” cried Carrie, who’d say anything to take us down from this despised attic.
Cory pouted his lower lip and looked around. “I wish we had the garden again,” he said so wistfully it hurt. “I don’t like to swing when the flowers don’t sway in the wind.” His flaxen hair had grown long enough to touch his shirt collar, and it curled in ringlets, while Carrie’s hair hung halfway down her back and rippled like cascading waves. They were wearing blue today, for Monday. We had colors for each day. Yellow was our Sunday color. Red was for Saturday.
The wish spoken by Cory put thoughts into Chris’s head, for he turned in a slow circle, giving the huge attic an appraising survey. “Admittedly this attic is a grim and dreary place,” he mused, “but why can’t we, as a constructive way to use our creative talents, bring about a metamorphosis and turn this ugly caterpillar into a brilliant soaring butterfly?” He smiled at me, at the twins, in such a charming, convincing way that I was immediately won over. It
would
be fun to attempt to pretty up this dismal place, and give the twins a colorful fake garden where they could swing and enjoy looking at beauty. Of course, we’d never finish decorating all of the attic, it was so tremendous—and any day the grandfather could die, and then we’d leave, never to return again.
We couldn’t wait for Momma to come that evening, and when she did, Chris and I enthusiastically told her our plans of decorating the attic, and turning it into a cheerful garden the twins wouldn’t be afraid of. The strangest expression flickered momentarily in her eyes.
“Well, now,” she said brightly, “if you’re going to make the attic pretty, first you must make it clean. And I’ll do what I can to help.”
Momma sneaked up mops, pails, brooms, scrub brushes, and boxes of soap powder. She went down on her knees beside us to scrub in the attic corners, and around the edges, and under the large pieces of furniture. I marveled that our mother knew how to scrub and clean. When we lived in Gladstone, we had a twice weekly maid who came in to do all the hard, dreary things that would redden Momma’s hands and break her fingernails. And here she was, on her hands and knees, wearing faded old blue jeans, an old shirt, her hair pinned up in a bun. I really admired her. It was hard, hot, demeaning work—and she never once complained, only laughed and chatted and acted as if this was great fun.
In a week of hard work, we had most of the attic as clean as possible. Then she brought us insect repellent to kill what bugs had hidden from us while we cleaned. We swept up dead spiders and other crawlers by the bucketfuls. We threw them out of a back window, where they rolled to a lower section of the roof. Later the rain came to wash them down into the gutters. Then the birds found them and had a grisly feast while we four sat on a window ledge and watched. We never saw a rat or a mouse—but we saw droppings. We presumed they were waiting for all the hustle and bustle to calm down before they ventured out of their dark and secret places.
Now that the attic was clean, Momma brought us green plants, plus a spiky amaryllis that was supposed to bloom at Christmastime. I frowned when she said this—for we wouldn’t be here then. “We’ll take it with us,” said Momma, reaching out to stroke my cheek. “We’ll take all of our plants when we go, so don’t frown and look unhappy. We wouldn’t want to leave anything living, and loving of sunshine, in this attic.”
We put our plants in the attic schoolroom for that room had windows facing east. Happy and gay, we all tripped down the
narrow stairs, and Momma washed up in our bathroom, then fell exhausted into her special chair. The twins climbed up on her lap as I set the table for lunch. That was a good day, for she stayed until dinnertime, then sighed and said she’d have to go. Her father made such demands on her, wanting to know where she went every Saturday, and why she stayed so long.
“Can you sneak back to see us before bedtime?” Chris asked.
“I’m going to the movies tonight,” she said evenly, “but before I leave, I’ll slip in to see you again. I’ve got some of those little boxes of raisins that you can snack on between meals. I forgot to bring them with me.”
The twins were crazy about raisins, and I was happy for them. “Are you going to the movies alone?” I asked.
“No. There’s a girl I grew up with—she used to be my best friend, and she’s married now. I’m going to the movies with them. She lives only a few houses from here.” She got up and went to the windows, and when Chris had the lights turned out, she parted the draperies and pointed in the direction of the house where her best friend lived. “Elena has two unmarried brothers, one is studying to be a lawyer. He goes to Harvard Law School, and the other is a tennis pro.”
“Momma!” I cried. “Are you dating one of those brothers?”
She laughed and let the draperies fall. “Turn on the lights, Chris. No, Cathy, I am not dating anyone. To tell you the truth, I’d rather go right to bed, I’m that tired. I really don’t care for musicals, anyway. I’d rather stay with my children, but Elena keeps insisting I get out, and when I keep refusing, she keeps asking why. I don’t want people to wonder why I stay home every weekend; that’s why occasionally I do have to go sailing, or to the movies.”
* * *
To make the attic even pretty seemed highly improbable—to make it a beautiful garden soared over the rainbow! It was going to take an enormous amount of hard work and creative ability, but that darned brother of mine was convinced we could do it
in no time at all.
He soon had our mother so sold on the idea that
every day she went to secretarial school, she came back to us bearing coloring books from which we could cut out pre-drawn flowers. She brought us watercolor sets, many brushes, boxes of crayons, huge amounts of colored craft paper, fat pots of white paste, and four pairs of blunt-nosed scissors.
“Teach the twins to color and cut out flowers,” she instructed, “and let them participate in all you undertake. I nominate you their kindergarten teachers.”
* * *
She came from that city an hour’s train ride away, glowing with radiant good health, her skin fresh and rosy from outside air, her clothes so beautiful they took my breath away. She had shoes of every color, and bit by bit she was accumulating new pieces of jewelry which she called “junk” jewelry, but somehow those rhinestones looked more like diamonds to me from the way they sparkled. She fell into “her” chair, exhausted, but happy, and told her of her day. “Oh, how I wish those typewriters had letters on the keys. I can’t seem to remember but one row. I have to look up at the wall chart everytime and that slows me down, and I’m not very good at remembering the bottom row, either. But I do know where all the vowels are. You use those keys more than any others, you know. So far my typing speed is twenty words per minute, and that’s not too good. Plus I make about four mistakes in those twenty words. And those shorthand squiggles . . .” She sighed, as if they, too, had her baffled. “Well, I guess I’ll learn eventually; after all, other women do, and if they can, then I can.”
“Do you like your teachers, Momma?” asked Chris.
She giggled girlishly before she answered. “First, let me tell you about my typing teacher. Her name is Mrs. Helena Brady. She’s shaped very much like your grandmother—huge. Only her bosom is much larger! Really, hers is the most remarkable bosom I’ve ever seen! And her bra straps keep slipping off her shoulders, and if it isn’t her bra straps, then it’s her slip straps, and she’s always reaching into the neckline of her dress to haul them back into place, and the men in the class always snicker.”
“Do men take typing classes?” asked I, very surprised.
“Yes, there are a few young men there. Some are journalists, writers, or have some good reason for wanting to know how to type. And Mrs. Brady is divorced, and has a keen eye for one of those young men. She flirts with him, while he tries to ignore her. She’s about ten years older than he is, at least, and he keeps looking at me. Now don’t get any ideas, Cathy. He’s much too short for me. I couldn’t marry a man who couldn’t pick me up and carry me over the threshold. I could pick
him
up—he’s only five feet two.”
We all had a good laugh, for Daddy had been a full foot taller, and he had easily picked our mother up. We’d seen him do that many times—especially on those Friday nights when he came home, and they’d look at each other so funny.
“Momma, you’re not thinking of getting married again, are you?” Chris asked in the tightest of voices. Swiftly her arms went around him. “No darling, of course not. I loved your father dearly. It would take a very special man to fill his shoes, and so far I haven’t met one who measures up to even his outgrown socks.”
* * *
To play kindergarten teachers was great fun, or could have been, if our student body had been the least bit willing. But as soon as we had breakfast finished, our dishes washed and put away, our food stashed in the coldest place, and the hour of ten had come and gone with servants from the second floor, Chris and I each dragged a wailing twin up into the attic schoolroom. There we could sit at the student desks and make a grand mess cutting flower forms from the colored craft paper, using the crayons to glorify the colors with stripes and polka-dots. Chris and I made the best flowers—what the twins made looked like colored blobs.
“Modern art,” Chris named the flowers they made.
On the dull and gray slat walls we pasted up our goliath flowers. Chris ascended the old ladder with the missing rungs again so he could dangle down long strings tied to the attic rafters, and
to these strings we fastened colorful blossoms that constantly moved in the attic drafts.
Our mother came up to view our efforts, and she gave us all a pleased smile. “Yes, you’re doing marvelously well. You
are
making it pretty up here.” And thoughtfully she moved closer to the daisies, as if considering something else she could bring us. The next day she came with a huge flat box containing colored glass beads and sequins, so we could add sparkle and glamor to our garden. Oh, we did slave over making those flowers, for whatever occupation we pursued, we pursued it with diligent, fervid zeal. The twins caught some of our enthusiasm, and they stopped howling and fighting and biting when we mentioned the word attic. For after all, the attic was slowly, but surely, turning into a cheerful garden. And the more it changed, the more determined we became to cover over every last wall in that endless attic!
Each day, of course, when Momma was home from that secretarial school, she had to view the day’s accomplishments. “Momma,” gushed Carrie in her breathless bird twitter, “that’s all we do all day, make flowers, and sometimes Cathy, she don’t want us to go downstairs and eat lunch!”
“Cathy, you mustn’t become so preoccupied with decorating the attic that you forget to eat your meals.”
“But, Momma, we’re doing it for them, so they won’t be so scared up there.”
She laughed and hugged me. “My, you are the persistent one, you and your older brother both. You must have inherited that from your father, certainly not from me. I give up so easily.”
“Momma!” I cried, made uneasy. “Are you still going to school? You are getting better at typing, aren’t you?”
“Yes, of course I am.” She smiled again, and then settled back in her chair, holding up her hand and seeming to admire the bracelet she wore. I started to ask why she needed so much jewelry to attend secretarial school, but she spoke instead. “What you need to make now is animals for your garden.”
“But, Momma, if roses are impossible to make, how can we even
draw
animals?”
She gave me a wry little smile as she traced a cool finger over my nose “Oh, Cathy, what a doubting Thomas you are. You question everything, doubt everything, when you should know by now, you can do anything you want to, if you want to badly enough. And I’m going to tell you a secret I’ve known about for some time—in this world, where everything is complicated, there is also a book to teach you how simple everything can be.”
That
I was to find out.
Momma brought us art instruction books by the dozens. The first of these books taught us to reduce all complicated designs into basic spheres, cylinders, cones, rectangles and cubes. A chair was just a cube—I hadn’t known that before. A Christmas tree was just an inverted ice-cream cone—I hadn’t known that before, either. People were just combinations of all those basic forms: spheres for heads; arms, necks, legs, torso, upper and lower, were only rectangular cubes or cylinders, and triangles made for feet. And believe it or not, using this basic method, with just a few simple additions, we soon had rabbits, squirrels, birds, and other small friendly creatures—all made by our very own hands.
True, they were peculiar looking. I thought their oddities made them all the sweeter. Chris colored all his animals realistically. I decorated mine with polka-dots, gingham checks, plaids, and put lace-edged pockets on the laying hens. Because our mother had shopped in a sewing notions store, we had lace, cords of all colors, buttons, sequins, felt, pebbles and other decorative materials. The possibilities were endless. When she put that box into my hands, I know my eyes must have shown all the love I felt for her then. For this did prove she thought of us when she was out in the world. She wasn’t just thinking of new clothes for herself, and new jewelry and cosmetics. She
was
trying to make our confined lives as pleasant as possible.
One rainy afternoon Cory came running to me with an orange paper snail he’d laborously worked on the entire morning, and
half of the afternoon. He’d eaten but a little of his favorite lunch, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, he was that anxious to get back to his “work” and put on the “things that stick out of the head.”
Proudly, he stood back, small legs spread wide, as he watched each flicker of expression on my face. What he’d made resembled nothing more than a lopsided beachball with trembling feelers.
“Do you think it’s a good snail?” he asked, frowning up and looking worried when I couldn’t find words to say.