The Woman in the Wall (3 page)

Mrs. Waltzhammer rotated her huge body in my direction. "How do you do, Anna?" she boomed.

There was a moment's stunned silence.

"You mean ... you can see her?" Andrea asked.

"Why, certainly," Mrs. Waltzhammer said.

"You don't think she looks like an old dustrag, do you?" Kirsty asked anxiously.

"Of course not. I think she looks like a very pretty little girl."

"Well, naturally!" Mother said, sounding relieved. She laughed a bit hysterically. "All my daughters are pretty. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I hear the tea water boiling. Mrs. Waltzhammer, will you take coffee or tea?"

"Oh, coffee, coffee! Got to have my daily ration of caffeine," she roared with senseless laughter. "While you're gone I'll get a little better acquainted with your children." She winked at Mother, meaning, I suppose, that Mother should take her time bringing in the refreshments.

Mrs. Waltzhammer lowered herself into an armchair with considerable difficulty and then turned to Kirsty.

"So! I understand from your mother that you are a very shy young lady, Kirsty," she said, smiling genially.

Andrea snorted with laughter.

"No, no!" Kirsty said. "It's Anna who's shy!"

"Ah! It's
Anna
who's shy. I beg your pardon."

Mrs. Waltzhammer sat staring at me thoughtfully for a few moments. "Perhaps Anna would prefer it if I ask the two of you my questions and you can answer for her. Do you think that would make her more comfortable?"

"Yes, I think that's a great idea." Kirsty nodded her approval. I sighed with relief.

"Then tell me, if you would be so good, a little about your sister Anna."

Kirsty spoke up. She told Mrs. Waltzhammer the family legend of our father's shyness, and how much I resembled our father in that respect. Mrs. Waltzhammer seemed to be very interested in our father.

"Tragic," she said, shaking her head weightily over our father's fate. "A disappearance is so much harder on the family than a straightforward death or divorce." She sighed, a great gust of breath that stirred the uneven hem of my tunic. Still, large and noisy as she was, she seemed genuinely sympathetic. Cautiously I began to think that Mrs. Waltzhammer might not be the ogress of my nightmares.

Kirsty went on to tell Mrs. Waltzhammer how clever and hardworking I was. I stuck my fingers in my ears during this speech and murmured, "Exactly the reverse! Stupid and lazy, that's what you are!" to myself.

I unstuck my ears in time to hear Mrs. Waltzhammer say, "I'm sure she is, Kirsty. And she is your special friend, isn't she? More than say, Andrea's?" she smiled kindly at Andrea.

Kirsty nodded vigorously. "Yes, she is! Anna likes me much better than she does Andrea!"

"I
beg
your pardon," Andrea sputtered.

"You're mean to her," Kirsty shrilled. "You say awful things about her."

"I do not!"

"Well, no need to argue about it," Mrs. Waltzhammer said hastily. "Perhaps it's time for me to get to know Anna a little better." She rose from her seat and advanced on me.

Alarmed, I shrank back in my chair. Mrs. Waltzhammer opened her enormous purse and rummaged around in it. She drew out a pair of reading glasses and put them on, dropping the purse on the floor by my chair.

She smiled hugely at me, a jovial giantess.

"HELLO, ANNA!" she bawled. She reached out one vast white hand toward me. I stared in horrible fascination at the hand as it approached.

"What are you doing?" Andrea demanded in a strangled croak.

"Just saying hello to Anna," Mrs. Waltzhammer said in a jolly voice.

The hand gripped me insecurely about the waist, crushing me up against the doll. I was lifted up and—

My mind fell into darkness and I knew no more.

"
That's
not my sister, that's a
doll,
" Kirsty was saying patiently when I came back to my senses again. She sounded as though she'd said it before.

I knew a moment of pure panic. I could hear Kirsty's voice, but I had no idea where I was. I seemed to be lying in a very small padded cell of some kind. I could see the ceiling of the front parlor above me, but all around were flabby, leathery walls. Underneath me were a lot of loose sharp objects that dug into my back.

"Well! Here I am at last!" It was my mother's voice. "This house is so big," she said gaily, "I guess I just got lost coming back from the kitchen!"

"Oh, coffee! Goody!" Mrs. Waltzhammer's voice was mercifully deadened by the walls of the padded cell, but she was standing dangerously near.

I heard sounds of slurping as Mrs. Waltzhammer imbibed her favorite beverage. "Good and strong," she exulted.

"And how have you all been getting along while I was doing the tea tray?" Mother asked.

Silence from Andrea and Kirsty.

"Excellently!" Mrs. Waltzhammer said. "I think we have made great progress. And now I'm afraid I must eat and run. I have another appointment. Delicious cookies, my dear."

"Thank you, but Anna made them."

Mrs. Waltzhammer's laugh rang out.

"Oh,
Anna
made them, did she? Clever, good Anna!" She laughed again. "Why don't you walk me to the door, Mrs. Newland?"

"Mom!" I heard Andrea's urgent whisper, "She thinks Anna is Kirsty's
doll!
And we can't find Anna."

"What, dear?" Mother murmured, but then a huge flap fell down over the top of my cell and the ceiling disappeared. The world lurched underneath me. A hail of large, angular objects fell about me. I reached out for something to hold onto, but there was nothing.

"Help," I cried. "Help!"

I thrashed about for a while, unable to get onto my knees. Outside there was a hearty booming that sounded like Mrs. Waltzhammer, and a worried tweeting that sounded like Mother. Thankfully, the movements stopped for a moment, and I struggled into a better position. Then, abruptly, off we went again.

This time, however, I had gotten my head out under the roof-flap and my knees were braced against some hard surface.

A mass of green shrubbery bobbed into my field of vision. I saw a concrete path below me and a green lawn. We were approaching a car parked by the side of the road. I looked up as best I could from under the flap. Far above floated Mrs. Waltzhammer's huge face.

I was in Mrs. Waltzhammer's purse. In a moment she would get into her car and we would drive away. In one convulsive movement I leaped clear of the enveloping purse and landed hard on the pavement.

There was no time to be lost. I scrambled painfully into the shrubbery. Mrs. Waltzhammer made a sound like, "Ugg-gugh!" It sounded like she'd swallowed her tongue. She looked furtively around and then hurried into her car and drove away.

I was out of the house.

For the first time in years and years, I was out of the house. I stood alone under the naked sky with nothing but air and space between me and the huge, barbarously bright sun. I looked up into the sky and grew dizzy. At any moment, I felt, I might fall off the earth, I might be pulled into the greedy heat of the sun. Or I might go flying off into dark, eternal nothingness.

Quickly I looked away, looked at the houses and trees and cars, trying to root myself to the ground. But everything was so far away! I had spent many hours lately inside the wall, and I had grown used to its proportions. Inside the wall all distances are small; all horizons are close at hand. It is easy to forget how large the world is, and how empty.

I bolted into the house, down the cellar steps, up through the trap door, and flung myself sobbing into my secret room. I wouldn't be leaving again in a hurry.

Five years went by.

I did leave my secret room, of course, but only when everyone was out, or by night after they were in bed. Otherwise I lived almost entirely inside the wall.

The night after Mrs. Waltzhammer came to visit I crept out and left a note:

I'm sorry but I can't go to school.
I really am very sorry.
Please don't be angry with me.
Anna

It did no good. Mother was furious.

She shouted and stamped her feet. She
demanded
that I come out and explain myself face-to-face. So, trembling like a blade of grass in a positive hurricane of indignation, I came out and stood before her. It didn't help. Nothing I could say would convince her that I hadn't hidden in Mrs. Waltzhammer's purse on purpose, in spite of Mother's express prohibition. I'm afraid I am not very good at explaining things, or arguing my point of view.

"In her
purse,
Anna! How could you! She might have carried you off with her!"

"I didn't mean—" I began.

"Anna, when I ask you a question I expect an answer. What would you have done if Mrs. Waltzhammer had walked right out of this house with you in her purse?"

"But she did!"

"Where are you now, Anna? Don't you be disappearing on me like that, young lady!"

"I'm right h—"

"And for another thing," Mother said, staring angrily at the draperies, where she apparently thought I was hiding, "Mrs. Waltzhammer must think I'm completely crazy, getting her here to talk about enrolling a doll in Bitter Creek Elementary School."

"Mrs. Waltzhammer doesn't think you're crazy, not really," Andrea said. "Just a little..." she groped for the word. "Over-tactful, I guess. She thinks it's Kirsty who's scared of going to kindergarten for the first time, not Anna." Mrs. Waltzhammer believed, Andrea said, that Kirsty was using her doll to express her anxieties over starting school. And that Mother and Andrea had simply gone a bit overboard in humoring her.

"If Mrs. Waltzhammer thinks anybody is nuts in this house it's Kirsty," Andrea concluded. Andrea, always the prettiest of the family, was beginning to show signs of being the cleverest as well.

This version of events did not please Kirsty, but did cheer Mother up some. In any case, Mrs. Waltzhammer only called back once. She told Mother to please contact her if either Kirsty or "Anna" had any problems in the fall and then hung up without waiting for an answer. The abrupt end to this call surprised Mother, but not me. I suspected that my exit from Mrs. Waltzhammer's purse had considerably unnerved her, and she wanted to have as little to do with the Newland family as possible.

The result of the whole Mrs. Waltzhammer episode was to make me much more secretive, much more secluded. It proved that my doubts and fears about the outside world were absolutely true. After all, the very first time I didn't hide myself away from an outsider, I was manhandled, kidnapped, and then abandoned. And that took place inside my own home, in front of my mother and sisters. Think what might happen if I ventured out into the wide world!

It seemed unreasonable to expect that, having regained safety entirely through my own efforts, I would consent to come out again. The crashing and booming of Mrs. Waltzhammer's voice mingled with my mother's angry voice in my mind's ear, and as time went on I burrowed deeper and deeper into the fabric of the house to escape from the memory.

Year after year I went on building, adding new passages, new secret rooms, until I could go almost anywhere in the house without coming out into the open. I installed a small but usable kitchen immediately behind the real kitchen. My cupboards were simply doors into the back walls of the real cupboards, so I had access to all the kitchen supplies. I had a stove (discarded by Mother and repaired by me) and a sink (a laundry tub rescued from the cellar), but no refrigerator, so when I needed milk or butter or eggs I had to creep out and get them without being noticed.

Over the years the rooms that Mother and Andrea and Kirsty lived in gradually dwindled and shrank. In one daring acquisition I walled off three entire rooms at the back of the house. They were part of the old servants' quarters and no one ever used them. My family never seemed to notice or care. It was a large house and they were not observant.

I installed peepholes in every room so that I could see as well as hear my family, placing them in dark corners and under picture frames so that the white of my eye would not gleam when I looked out. I tried to respect my family's privacy; I put no peepholes in the bathroom and rarely used the ones in their bedrooms. These holes gave me a disjointed, fragmentary view of my mother and sisters. Only occasionally did I see them in their entirety; more often they were represented by a hand, an elbow, the back of a head, sometimes a knee or a foot. I learned to read emotion in the lift of a wrist, the angle of a spine, the nervous twitch of an ankle.

Andrea, I think, almost forgot about me after a while. Although we shared the same initials and the same birthday, we had little in common. Indeed, we were almost opposites; it was as if she had somehow taken all my bloom and assurance for herself, leaving me pale and trembling.

In any case, she was busy with an intense emotional life of her own, quarrelling and making up with her girlfriends, and later, her boyfriends. Her angular dark looks bloomed into beauty at thirteen and she was suddenly in great demand. She spent her after-school hours in royal procession from the house of one friend to another. I saw her sometimes holding court on the front steps, a queen bee among a swarm of admirers. At first she rarely ever invited any of her friends inside. I liked to think that that was in deference to my feelings, but sometimes I wondered if, like our father, she was engaged in slowly disengaging herself from our family.

Eventually, though, as I faded more and more into the woodwork, she began to bring her friends home. The house thronged with groups of chattering teenagers. They surged in and out of the house like the tides. They laughed and played guitars and popped popcorn and argued endlessly amongst themselves.

By this time Mother had managed to get a job at the insurance company which allowed her to work from home in the afternoon, leaving the office for home at one o'clock every day. This meant that she could poke her head out of the library, which she had taken for her at-home office, every now and then to provide some sense of a restraining adult presence in the house.

"Not," as she said rather fretfully, "that I have the faintest idea what they're up to back there in the old servants' quarters. They could be making bombs, for all I know."