Christopher's Diary: Secrets of Foxworth

  “It’s only make-believe,” Cathy reminded him, but that didn’t change their expressions of awe.

  Cathy had found her costume, too. She wore a cage under a skirt at least three sizes too large, pantaloons with lace, large shoes, and a ruffled silk blouse. She found a great Scarlett O’Hara hat, too, and we were soon at it.

  She threw herself into the scene she had created. It wasn’t long, but I thought the way she used the mannequins was quite clever. Naturally, the twins didn’t have the attention span for a long, overly dramatic scene that included Cathy’s desperate pleas for love in front of a mannequin dressed to be Ashley Wilkes. Carrie was soon crying for lunch. She hated being in the attic, even for a show.

  “These clothes stink, anyway,” Cathy declared, the air going out of her balloon of excitement quickly.

  She looked at me with disappointment, but I promised her we’d return. We stripped off the costumes and went to eat our lunch. All through it, Cory complained about not being in the garden outside. The dreariness of our surroundings was wearing on us all. It suddenly occurred to me that another way to divert their attention from our dire situation was for us to dress up the attic.

  “Let’s turn this ugly caterpillar into a butterfly,” I declared. The twins looked astonished again. “We’ll decorate it. We’ll create our own garden the way God creates a real one.”

  They looked to Cathy.

  “It’s too filthy,” she said.

  “We’ll clean it up. We can do it,” I insisted.

  That night when Momma finally appeared, I told her about my plan. She was looking despondent when she came in, but suddenly, she looked at the four of us and considered the idea.

  “Why not?” she declared. “I’ll help. We’ll do it. We’ll show my mother how creative and clean we can be. She’s always saying cleanliness is next to Godliness. Well, we’ll show her we know exactly what that means.”

  Cathy looked as skeptical as ever, but Momma delighted us all by bringing up mops, pails, brooms, scrub brushes, and boxes and boxes of soap powder. She said her mother knew nothing about it. She had sneaked it all to us. That seemed to be the one thing that pleased Cathy about the idea the most. Deceiving our grandmother or doing something behind her back made it more precious and fun. That seemed to be even more true for Momma. And I have to admit, it was what made it fun for me, too.

  However, to be honest, I was very surprised at Momma’s enthusiasm. Suddenly, she was with us daily, scrubbing floors and washing everything in sight. She even brought insect repellent, and we cleared out gobs of dead spiders and ants. I had Cory believing that he and I were great hunters. Both twins now saw it all as a new game and argued about who was doing more and better. For a good week, we were suddenly a family again, people with a common cause and helping and loving one another constantly.

  “You see,” I told Cathy one night that week, “Momma hasn’t lost her love and concern for us. We’ve got to continue to help her fulfill her plan.”

  With reluctance, she nodded and agreed. The only discordant note came when Momma brought real flowers to the cleaned attic, including spiky amaryllis that she said would bloom by Christmas.

  “Christmas! You’re saying we’ll still be here for sure?” Cathy cried.

  Momma looked at me.

  “She’s not saying that,” I said, even though it was obvious to me that she was.

  “What are you saying?” Cathy demanded.

  “When we leave, we’ll take the plants with us for our Christmas celebration somewhere else. That’s all,” she replied.

  Cathy was silent, but I could see it in her eyes. She didn’t believe a word. Maybe she could pretend and do dramatic things like become Scarlett O’Hara for a while, but Cathy was hard on fantasies when she had some skepticism.

  None of this was going to easy for me. I’d have to work even harder to get her and the twins to give Momma the chance and the time she needed. I needed Momma to help me with this as much as possible.

  “Can you come back to see the twins before bedtime tonight?” I asked her.

  “Oh, I’ve already made arrangements to go to a movie with an old girlfriend of mine. I want my father to believe I’m back to my life the way it was.”

  “What friend?” Cathy demanded.

  “Her name is Elena. She has two unmarried brothers, one studying to be a lawyer. The other is a tennis pro,” she said with surprising excitement.

  “You’re going on a date with one of them?” she asked.

  I looked at Momma quickly. Was she?

  She laughed, but I didn’t feel confident about it. It was a forced laugh. She was going to lie to us again. It felt like another needle in my chest. Whenever I knew she was lying to us, I felt that way, but I had to do my best to hide it, or Cathy would go bonkers.

  “Of course not,” Momma said. “I’d rather go to sleep. I’m so tired from the work we’ve done. But it’s better not to have people, especially someone like Elena, ask questions. She was always a busybody.”

  “Then why go out with her?” Cathy asked.

  “I told you. We all have to make some sacrifices,” she said. She gave us quick kisses and left.

  “Sacrifices?” Cathy said the moment she left. “She calls going out to a movie with friends a sacrifice?”

  “I suppose in a way, it is, if you don’t like the friend that much and you’re doing it just to keep your mother and father from becoming suspicious.”

  “If he’s so sick, how does he even know or care?”

  “People as rotten to the bone as he obviously is come alive for a few moments when they think something’s not right. Why chance it?”

  Cathy narrowed her eyes and shook her head at me before retreating to read a story to Cory and Carrie. The atmosphere around us was suddenly heavy, foreboding. Darkness seemed very attracted to this place, I thought.

  And for the first time, really, I felt a darkness in my heart.

  Cathy wasn’t wrong to be suspicious. I knew Momma wasn’t telling us the truth again, only this time, I didn’t think it was for our benefit.

  But I wouldn’t show an iota of this fear to Cathy.

  How ironic, I thought. Kane’s mother was infatuated with Gone with the Wind, and Cathy had been, too. Was it because we were all in the South, or was it a universal fantasy, especially for a woman, to be on such a big stage with all its opulence and glamour? What was it Kane had said, everyone liked to play a part?

  What part did I want to play?

  I closed the diary and put it under my pillow. After I turned out my bedside lamp, I lay there staring up into the darkness. Was Christopher upset because his mother was lying and he knew it, or was it that he couldn’t stomach the idea of her even hinting at another romance with another man so soon? To me, it sounded like the latter. I wasn’t about to blame him for it.

  I recalled how I had felt when we were reading Hamlet and the Player Queen said, “A second time I kill my husband dead when second husband kisses me in bed.”

  Did all men and women who had lost their spouses feel this great guilt if they remarried or even just seriously dated someone else? My father couldn’t get himself to go out on a real date even after all these years, not even with Mrs. Osterhouse, at least as far as I knew. From the way Corrine had talked about Christopher Sr. when they had first met and secretly courted, it sounded like the greatest love of all time, a Romeo and Juliet story, because their love was so intense for each other that they’d risk and even willingly lose all family contacts. In Corrine’s case, she was also willing to give up a great fortune. Now that she had lost her love, she wanted that fortune back. Was that something understandable or just plain hypocrisy? Where was the young woman who had been so in love and willing to live a much simpler, poorer life, or was the truth really that she never did live a simpler life, that she always lived beyond their means?

  I turned over and forced myself to stop thinking about the Dollangangers by concentrating on Kane instead and drea
ming of when I might just “cross the Rio Grande,” which was the phrase Serena Mota used for losing your virginity.

  I fell asleep quickly and woke to a surprise. My father had brought me breakfast in bed.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Every once in a while, you have to treat the women in your life like queens,” he replied.

  I sat up quickly. I couldn’t recall another time when he had referred to me as a woman in his life. What had changed? My seriously dating someone? Was this that moment all fathers experience, that awareness that their little girls were starting to shift to edge their fathers further away, gently but firmly? Should I be sad or happy about it?

  I couldn’t help being happy about it, but I also couldn’t help seeing things from his point of view. As long as he had me as his little girl, the gaping hole in his life didn’t expand. There would soon be a time when he was really alone. At minimum, that would come when I went off to college, and then, if and when I did meet someone with whom I wanted to spend my life, he would drift even further back.

  Into what?

  Perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on Corrine, I thought. From what I understood between the lines of what Christopher had written about her, she was really not a very strong person. She craved pampering, comfort, and luxury. Yes, her husband had spoiled her, but maybe he felt guilty about sweeping her off her feet and stealing her away from her legacy. Maybe he felt a great responsibility to succeed in a big way and compensate for all she had lost, and in doing that, he had lost his own sense of balance, put them into vast debt, and left them vulnerable and helpless. Christopher Jr. seemed willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, to continue to think of her as someone who mainly wanted only to please and protect her children.

  Cathy was more reluctant to do that, but thinking back to how she had reacted to Corrine’s pregnancy, I was of the opinion that she was the most spoiled of all. I could be unfair. She was still a young girl but beginning that amazing metamorphosis into full femininity. A young girl couldn’t open herself fully to an older brother, surely. I couldn’t imagine myself doing that. I couldn’t even discuss my womanly things with my father. She had no mother there most of the time, and when her mother was there, her attention was so divided, the twins needed so much, and Cathy had no place to go for her answers.

  I didn’t know for whom I should feel sorrier. I would never reveal it to my father. He would physically tear the diary out of my hands, but I was twisted up inside, my feelings crisscrossing, knotting up, and stealing away my attention from my own world, my own happiness.

  “It looks terrific,” I said, gazing down at the tray. He had made me his pancakes, served them with the delicious maple syrup we bought from the Wilsons, who tapped the trees on their two hundred acres and prepared the syrup to sell from their own garage on Sundays, and the blueberry and blackberry jam Mrs. Wheeler made.

  “But you’ll be eating breakfast alone,” I told him.

  He laughed and nodded at the clock. “I’ve been up nearly two hours, Kristin. It’s Saturday, but I’m putting in a full day at the . . . job,” he said. He was starting to avoid calling it the Foxworth estate. He wanted it buried and gone.

  “Sorry. I didn’t realize the time and . . .”

  “Hey, you’re entitled to sleep in once in a while.”

  “What about you?”

  “Your mother tried to get me to do that, but I was always up ahead of her. I’ll be up early the day I die.” He started out.

  “Oh. Kane was thinking of taking me to dinner tonight,” I said.

  He paused, looked at me hard for a moment, and then smiled. “Okay.” I could see his mind spinning. He was debating whether to voice his next thought. He decided he would. “Don’t go too fast. I know your mother would say that.”

  “And then she’d tell me she got a speeding ticket riding your smile,” I replied.

  His lips quivered, but his eyes brightened. “Wear your safety belt at all times,” he concluded, and left.

  That was the closest he would ever come to warning me not to “cross the Rio Grande” too soon. I couldn’t imagine a harder thing for a father to tell his daughter. His face was probably still red with embarrassment when he got into his truck.

  I laughed to myself and dug into my delicious breakfast.

  Usually, I scheduled myself to do my homework calmly on weekends, taking long breaks and not finishing up until Sunday evening, but the diary was in charge of my life at the moment. I didn’t want to rush anything, especially the math and my English essay, but I couldn’t help thinking that if I had my other responsibilities out of the way, I could read more of the diary and get to the answers faster perhaps. Not that I wanted to rush through it. It was both infuriating and fascinating. Finishing it would be more like regretting the last lick of a delicious ice cream cone.

  I did the best I could on my math. Around ten thirty, my girlfriends began to call. I was impatient with them all, especially Suzette, who insisted on knowing not only how long I had remained at Kane’s house after they had all left but how far I had gone.

  “Did he take you up to his bedroom? Don’t say he didn’t,” she followed. “Theresa Flowman said he did the first time she was at his house and his parents weren’t home.”

  “Good for her.” In my heart of hearts, I knew Theresa was a liar. She, more than any of the girls, fantasized aloud and tried hard to make what she said sound like fact.

  “So?”

  “He showed me the house when I first arrived, and his bedroom was part of the tour.”

  “The tour? That’s it?”

  “I’ve got to go. I promised to give the house a complete once-over today, and I have homework and a date with Kane.”

  “Where?”

  “Dinner, probably. I’ll call you tomorrow,” I added. “ ’Bye,” I said, and hung up before she could take another breath.

  Lana called ten minutes later. I got rid of her quickly, but then Tina Kennedy called and really got me angry when she said Steve Cooper had told her I had slept over at Kane’s house and did it like a pro. She claimed Kane had called Steve to brag.

  “That’s a stupid lie. You had better not spread it,” I warned.

  She laughed. “Everyone said you’d deny it. That’s okay. Your secret’s safe with me, as safe as those cousins of yours in the attic,” she added, and I slammed my phone shut so hard that I thought I had broken it. It took me almost an hour to calm down. I was in no shape to return to my math.

  Kane called an hour later and heard the tension in my voice. “Did your father think I kept you out too late?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “What’s wrong? You’re forcing me to put antiseptic salve on my ear.”

  “Antiseptic?”

  “I thought I’d impress you with my expanding vocabulary.”

  I laughed and told him about Tina’s phone call.

  “I haven’t even spoken to Steve Cooper today,” he said. “And the last thing I would tell him is something that was personal to us. I might as well post it on Facebook.”

  “I thought so,” I said. Of course, I meant I hoped so.

  “I think survival of the fittest applies more to women than to men.”

  He had me smiling. “We’ll see,” I said.

  “I’d like to take you someplace special tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “The River House. My parents practically own a table there.”

  I knew it was one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. “That is special. I don’t know if I have the right clothes for it.”

  “Whatever you wear will be right,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at seven, okay?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Seven’s fine.”

  What was my father going to say? I wondered. Would he be impressed or even more concerned, thinking I might get swept off my feet? It was one thing for your father to have confidence in you being responsible when it came to your schoolwork, the house, and d
riving but another when it came to romance.

  After I hung up, I did think about what I would wear, and it suddenly occurred to me to do something I had never done. I would go up to the attic and look through my mother’s clothes. I was just about her size now. Naturally, my mind went to Cathy sifting through the clothing in the Foxworth attic. Maybe, like her, I was preparing myself for a role in a play.

  From the way Christopher had described the Foxworth attic, I imagined ours was a tenth of the size, if that, and ours had areas dedicated to wires and pipes. The need for a great deal of attic space wasn’t there when our house was built, and few people I knew actually used their attics for anything more than storage. Because my mother’s things were still up there, my father took care of the space. He wouldn’t permit it to become “a reservation for insects or bats,” nor would he permit it to be too dusty. Once a month, he went up (I would often go with him now) and do the two windows, vacuum the floors and stored furnishings, and be sure my mother’s things were not “moth food.” Everything was kept as neat and as organized as it had been in their bedroom.

  I wondered why the Foxworths had kept all their ancestral things, pictures, clothes, old Victrolas, and the like. From the way Christopher had described the condition it was all in, including the insect-ridden books, it was clear they had no emotional ties to anything. Maybe in their fanatical religious way of thinking, it was sinful to throw away anything. Or maybe they were clinging to those dying memories, the way my father said most people did in the houses he refurbished.

  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.