Eventually, Chris could do the waltz and the foxtrot. When I tried to teach him the Charleston, he refused: "I don't need to learn every kind of dance, like you do. I'm not going to be on stage; all I want to learn is how to get out on the dance floor with a girl in my arms, and not make a jackass of myself."
I'd always been dancing. There wasn't any kind of dance I couldn't do, and didn't want to do.
"Chris, there's one thing you've got to know: you cannot waltz your whole life through, or do the foxtrot. Every year brings about changes, like in clothes. You've got to keep up with the times, and adapt. Come on, let's jazz it up a bit, so you can limber up your creaky joints that must be going stiff from so much sitting and reading."
I stopped waltzing and ran to put on another record: "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog."
I raised my arms, and began to gyrate my hips.
"Rock 'n' roll, Chris, you've got to learn how. Listen to the beat, let go, and learn to swivel your hips like Elvis. Come on, half-close your eyes, look sleepy, sexy, and pout your lips, for if you don't, no girl is ever going to love you."
"Then no girl is ever gonna love me."
That's the way he said it, dead flat, and dead serious. He would never let anyone force him to do anything that didn't fit his image of himself, and in a way I liked him for being what he was, strong, resolute, determined to be his own person, even if his kind of person had long ago gone out of style. My Sir Christopher, the knight gallant.
.
God-like, we changed the seasons in the attic. We took down the flowers and hung up autumn leaves of brown, russet, scarlet and gold. If we were still here when winter's snowflakes fell, we'd then substitute lacy white designs that we were all four cutting out in preparation, just in case. We made wild ducks and geese from white, gray, and black craft paper, and aimed our mobile birds in wide-arrowed skeins, heading them south. Birds were easy to make: just elongated ovals with spheres for heads, teardrops with wings.
When Chris wasn't sitting with his head stuck in a book, he was painting watercolor scenes of snowcovered hills with lakes where ice skaters skimmed He put small houses of yellow and pink deeply buried in snow, and smoke curled from the chimneys, and in the distance rose a misty church steeple. And when he was done, he painted all around this a dark windowframe. When this was hung on the wall, we had a room with a view!
Once Chris had been a tease I could never please. An older brother. . . . But, we changed up there, he and I, just as much as we altered our attic world. We lay side by side on an old mattress, stained and smelly, for hours on end, and talked and talked, making plans for the kind of lives we'd live once we were free and rich as Midas. We'd travel around the world. He would meet and fall in love with the most beautiful, sexy woman who was brilliant,
understanding, charming, witty and enormous fun to be with; she'd be the perfect housekeeper, the most faithful of devoted wives, the best of mothers, and she'd never nag, or complain, or cry, or doubt his judgment, or be disappointed or discouraged if he made stupid mistakes on the stock market and lost all of their money. She'd understand he'd done his best, and soon he'd make a fortune again with his wits and clever brains.
Boy, did he leave me feeling low. How in the world was I ever going to fill the needs of a man like Chris? Somehow or other, I knew he was setting the standard from which I'd judge all my future suitors.
"Chris, this intelligent, charming, witty, gorgeous woman, can't she have even one little flaw?"
"Why should she have flaws?"
"Take our mother, for instance, you think she is all of those things, except, perhaps, brilliant."
"Momma's not stupid!" he defended vehemently. "She's just grown up in the wrong kind of
environment! She was put down as a child, and made to feel inferior because she was a girl."
As for me, after I'd been a prima ballerina for a number of years and was ready to marry and settle down, I didn't know what kind of man I wanted if he didn't measure up to Chris, or my father. I wanted him handsome, I knew that, for I wanted beautiful children. And I wanted him brilliant, or I might not respect him. Before I accepted his diamond
engagement ring, I'd sit him down to play games, and if I won time and again, I'd smile, shake my head, and tell him to take his ring back to the store.
And as we made our plans for the future, our pots of philodendron drooped limp; our ivy leaves turned yellow before they died. We bustled about, giving our plants tender loving care, talking to them, pleading with them, asking them to please stop looking sick, and perk up and straighten up their necks. After all, they were getting the healthiest of all sunlight--that eastern morning light.
In a few more weeks Cory and Carrie stopped pleading to go outside. No longer did Carrie beat her small fists against the oak door, and Cory stopped trying to kick it down with his ineffectual small feet, wearing only soft sneakers that didn't keep his small toes from bruising.
They now docilely accepted what before they'd denied--the attic "garden" was the only "outside" available to them. And in time, pitiful as it was, they soon forgot there was a world other than the one we were locked up in.
Chris and I had dragged several old mattresses close to the eastern windows, so we could open the windows wide and sunbathe in the beneficial rays that didn't have to pass through dirty window glass first. Children needed sunlight in order to grow. All we had to do was look at our dying plants, and register what the attic air was doing to our greenery.
Unabashedly, we stripped off all our clothes and sun-bathed in the short time the sun visited our windows. We saw each other's differences, and thought little about them, and frankly told Momma what we did, so we, too, wouldn't die from lack of sunlight. She glanced from Chris to me and weakly smiled. "It's all right, but don't let your grandmother know. She wouldn't approve, as you well know."
I know now that she looked at Chris, and then at me for signs to indicate our innocence, or our awakening sexuality. And what she saw must have given her some assurance we were still only children, though she should have known better.
The twins loved to be naked and play as babies. They laughed and giggled when they used terms such as "do-do" and "twiddle-dee" and, enjoyed looking at the places where do-do came from, and wondered why Cory's twiddle-dee maker was so different from Carrie's.
"Why, Chris?" asked Carrie, pointing at what he had, and Cory had, and she and I didn't have.
I went right on reading Wuthering Heights and tried to ignore such silly talk.