I opened the large wardrobe and began sifting through my mother’s dresses. Her more expensive ones were on the right. I had only very vague memories of her wearing any of them, but one stood out for me. I knew it was a classic black, something that seemed never to go out of style. It had an asymmetrical neckline and was sleeveless, with a pencil skirt. I stripped down to my bra and panties and put it on. My breasts were as large as hers had been, and my waist and hips were almost identical. It had a concealed zipper. I thought our shoe size would be dramatically different, but when I slipped on her peep-toe platforms, I found them to be comfortable.
Excited about the dress, I took it off, put my clothes back on, and went down to hang it out in the fall sunlight and cool crisp air to give it some freshness. It really didn’t need anything else done to it. I pondered what jewelry I would wear, what purse I would take, and how I would wear my hair, and then I tried to return to my homework. That was nearly impossible to do. Having been up in my attic and thinking about it all, I felt an even greater desire to return to Christopher’s world. I thought I would bring the diary downstairs, have some lunch, and read for a few hours in the living room.
When I sat at the kitchen table, I poured some lemonade, bit into my ham and cheese sandwich, and turned the page.
Momma was excited about my plan to dress up the attic, but I had no illusions about why. She saw it all as another way to occupy us all and distract us from the situation we were still wallowing in. Every time she came to see us after her secretarial school classes, she would bring more materials, crayons, paints, anything to encourage us to continue with “this major project.” As always, she added the fact that what we were doing would impress our grandmother and go far toward not only helping her win back her parents’ affections but also convincing her mother that we were not “the devil’s spawn.”
Oh, how Cathy hated it whenever she said those words. How could our own mother let her mother call us those names and describe us as evil? What had we ever done that was sinful? “Especially Christopher,” she would say. “He wouldn’t even cheat on a school quiz!”
Momma would take on that mournful, sympathetic look and describe how it was more painful to her than it was to us. “It tears at my heart and the memory of your dear departed and wonderful father whenever she utters those ugly words. You should see the way she glares at me sometimes. It’s enough to make anyone’s heart shatter into pieces.”
Cathy was skeptical. How come she was wearing beautiful new clothes? Who bought them? She had such a variety of shoes. How could they still hate her so much and yet spend so much on her?
“It’s only because I’m applying myself,” she told us. “My father respects hard work and ambition. Of course, I hate the schoolwork, but I tolerate it for us all.”
“Do you have a good teacher? Are you at least fond of him?” I asked. There was something about the way she described those classes that made me think he might be flirting with her.
“Oh, I have this old biddy for a teacher,” she declared. “Not that she thinks of herself as that. She has a bosom that enters the room two minutes before she does, and she’s not shy about putting it into the faces of her male students, especially this one particular man. I think it annoys her that he looks more at me than at her, even with all her flaunting about. She’s actually a bit messy about her looks. I could teach her a thing or two about makeup and hair, if she let me.”
Cathy was surprised she was in classes with men. Why would men want to be secretaries? Momma described them as writers, journalists, who needed to master typing skills. From the way she described how some of them leaned on her for help, I wondered just how much she was concentrating on her own work. If there was one thing I knew would capture my mother’s attention, it was a man’s attention on her. I often wondered why that didn’t make my father angry. It made me angry.
“Are you thinking of dating any of them?” I came right out and asked.
Cathy looked surprised for a moment and then nodded to herself.
“No, no, of course not.” She described one of the men as so tiny and short that she could carry him out of the room. She went on and on about Daddy again, about how handsome and tall he was and how he was still so alive in her memory. She told me she spent most of her nights crying and thinking about him and how cruel he was to die so soon.
“He should have been more careful, and he should have provided a safety net of financing. He should have been thinking about me,” she moaned. All of us stared at her. She realized it and quickly added, “I mean about all of us.”
“He couldn’t help being killed,” Cathy said angrily.
“No one really can,” Momma said. “I’m not blaming him for that. I’m just . . . upset with what I’ve had to do. But don’t worry. I have it under control. We’ll be fine. We’ll all be just fine.”
None of us said anything. She put on that smile mask I hated to see her wearing and then left after kissing the twins, kissing me, and hugging Cathy, who kept her arms limp at her sides.
For a few moments, I couldn’t think of anything encouraging to say after she left. Cathy looked at me.
“What?”
“Nothing, Christopher. I have nothing to say that you want to hear,” she said, and turned back to dressing up the attic. Soon we were all back to it.
To make us even more excited about our decorating work, Momma began bringing books on arts and crafts. It was my job to run the work as if we were all in a kindergarten classroom, with me as the twins’ teacher and Cathy as my assistant. At first, the twins began to rebel. They didn’t like sitting for long at desks and getting instructions. Then, with all the added materials and Momma’s suggestion that we do animals, too, they became more involved. I began to think we just might get through this, giving Momma the time she needed to master the secretarial skills and get a job after all. But as Cathy began questioning her more and more about her school progress, skepticism started to infiltrate my wall of hope and put holes into my optimism.
Something wasn’t right, but I wasn’t about to suggest it to Cathy. She was hanging by a thread the way it was. Besides not being able to be outside and at a school where she could mix with other students, have girlfriends, and flirt with boys, she had to be a surrogate mother to the twins and join with me to fulfill our mandatory tasks. Every Friday, we had to strip down the room and clean the bathroom at dawn and then drag or carry the sleepy twins up into the attic to wait and have our cold breakfast cereal while the maids under our grandmother’s barking orders cleaned below.
Cathy wondered why they never realized we had been there. “Don’t they sense us? They should smell us. They should have heard something. It’s like we really don’t exist anymore,” she said. “We’re all ghosts.”
Actually, I thought that was an interesting idea. After all this time alone with my brother and sisters and not being able to pursue my own interests the way I used to, even when we were struggling after my father’s death, I wasn’t above some fantasizing.
None of this existed in the real world, I told myself. What if when we entered Foxworth that night, we had crossed into someone else’s nightmare? We were invisible to anyone else. Our grandmother was a powerful witch who waved her hands over us and made us little more than ghosts of ourselves. She had life-and-death power over all of us, including Momma. We had fallen down a much darker tunnel than Alice in her Wonderland.
“What are you thinking so hard about?” Cathy asked me.
For a moment, I felt like I had been caught doing something I shouldn’t. Then I smiled. “All the wonderful things we will have and do once we are out of here,” I said.
She looked disappointed for a moment and then said something that hurt me more than she could ever realize. “If there was anything I believed for sure—for sure, Christopher—it was that you weren’t a dreamer like me. Or more important, like Momma. I was depending on that. Now I really feel alone.”
How sad for her, I thought, but Christopher’s fantasy about becoming invisible was interesting, not because I was a science-fiction fan or anything. I didn’t take him literally, but I could understand why children, especially children who were once the objects of so much attention, would feel like they were disappearing in their severely imposed isolation. All they could do was try to keep happy in their make-believe world, a decorated stuffy old attic filled with forgotten people and forgotten things. It wasn’t hard to believe that they were beginning to feel like they could be forgotten, too. In a sense, they were living in a graveyard.