Soothingly, she held me, patiently listening until I finished. “Nonsense, that’s all it is, plain nonsense. You’re not haunted and not cursed, though your father should know better than to speak so often about a girl in her grave. From all that I hear my son say about you, if you were more perfect you’d have to wear a halo and sprout wings and stand on a pedestal of solid gold. Silly, isn’t it, how men want women to look like angels and act like … well, never mind. You’re too young to hear more.”
Darn, there she went, stopping just when she was going to say something meaningful. Like Momma, Aunt Ellsbeth and Mercy Marie, too, she grew embarrassed and left me hanging, still waiting for information that would never come.
One afternoon I was in the rocking chair, lazily drifting beyond the boys who waited in the woods to ravish.
I knew now that it was Papa’s presence, even when he stayed in the hall, that had kept me from finding anything from the rocking chair but the terror in the woods. On my own, alone, I could fill the empty pitcher with contentment and peace, but with Papa anywhere nearby, I had to stand behind the rocking chair and pressure it hard with my hands to make the floorboards squeak. Only when he thought it was working would he leave.
This time I bypassed the school and headed toward somewhere wonderful when I heard an argument raging down by my aunt’s bedroom. Reluctantly I gave up the vision of the First Audrina and came back to being only me. My aunt was shouting, “That girl needs to go to school, Damian! If you don’t send her to school, someone is going to report you to the school authorities. You’ve told them you’re hiring tutors to see that she’s educated, and you’re not. And she’s not being neglected only educationally; she’s abused in other ways, too. You have no right to force her to sit in that rocking chair!”
“I have the right to do anything I want with my own child!” he stormed back. “I rule this house, not you. Besides, she’s not afraid of the rocking chair as she once was. She goes there willingly now. I told you that sooner or later the chair would work its miracle.”
“I don’t believe you. Even if she does sit there willingly, which I doubt, I want that girl to go to school. Every day I see her watching Vera, standing at the window, wanting what Vera has so badly I could almost cry for her. Hasn’t she endured enough, Damian? Let her try again to find her place. Give her another chance. Please.”
My heart was doing flip-flops. Did my aunt really care about me after all? Or had Lamar Rensdale found a way to convince her that I needed school if I was ever to grow up happy and normal?
My papa relented. I would be allowed to go to school.
Such a small normal thing to fill me with such overwhelming joy. When I had the chance, I whispered to my aunt while Vera pored over another romance, “Why, Aunt Ellsbeth? I didn’t think you cared if I was never formally educated.”
She drew me into the kitchen and shut the door, as if she, too, didn’t want Vera to hear. “I’m going to be totally honest, Audrina. And truth is something you are not likely to hear in this nuthouse from anyone but me. That man who teaches you to play the piano came here one day and pressured me into doing something to help you. He threatened to go to the school board and tell them about your situation; your father would have been fined or even sent to jail for keeping a minor out of school.”
I couldn’t believe it! Lamar Rensdale had fulfilled his promise, though it had taken him long enough. I laughed and spun around and almost hugged my aunt, but she backed off. I was left to run upstairs and in the rocking chair I began to sing, hoping to find Momma so I could tell her my good news.
Almost a Normal Life
Papa took me shopping so I’d be ready to attend school at the beginning of the midterm in February. All my Christmas gifts were school clothes—coats, shoes, even that raincoat like Vera’s that I’d been wanting for years and years. It was exciting to select skirts and blouses, sweaters and jackets. Papa wouldn’t allow me to buy the jeans other girls wore. “No pants for my daughter!” he stormed, letting the saleslady overhear. “They show too much. Now, you keep remembering to sit with your legs together and don’t even look at the boys—do you hear me?”
His words were loud enough to inform the whole department store. I turned red and told him to lower his voice. Something ugly always came over Papa when he talked about boys.
When February finally rolled around, I was like a small child expecting the circus to keep me forever happy. There was no fear of the woods, for Papa would drive me in the mornings and I’d take the school bus home in the afternoons.
“You’re going to loathe it,” proclaimed Vera. “You think it’s going to be fun, that the teachers will care if you learn, but they won’t. You’ll sit in a class with thirty or thirty-five others, and soon enough you’ll find it’s nothing but boredom—plain, dull monotony. Without the boys there I would run away from home and never come back.”
Not once had she ever said this to me before. When I couldn’t go to school, she’d had glowing reports of all her fun activities. Her friends she’d numbered by the hundreds—now she was telling me she had none. “Nobody likes a Whitefern, even if they hide behind the name of Adare.”
Papa told Vera to keep her big mouth shut. Hurriedly, I said good night, racing up the stairs and into the playroom, where I could rock and tell Momma about my life. Somewhere up there I was sure she was listening, happy for me. And as I rocked, again the walls seemed to dissolve and become porous, and the First Audrina was running wild in a field of flowers, laughing as a boy of about ten chased her. She whirled to confront him when he tugged on her sash and it came off in his hands. Who was he? Why did he stare at the First Audrina like that? The scene faded and the other Audrina was again in school, with a huge, ugly boy with pimples seated behind her, and again, lock by lock, he was dipping her long hair into his India-ink bottle. It was during art class, and she didn’t even notice.
“Aud … dreen… na,” chanted a frightening, singsong voice that made me bolt back to myself. Vera was in the doorway, glaring at me. “Get out of that chair! You’ve got enough! You don’t need her gift, too! Get out, and never sit there again—it’s mine! I need her gift most.”
I let her have the chair, thinking she was right. I didn’t need that unknown gift. It hadn’t kept her alive until she was eleven, like me. I was surviving, she hadn’t, and for now that was gift enough.
Nervously I dressed for my first day in school the next morning. My skirt was deep periwinkle blue, made of some lightweight wool that would need dry cleaning. My hands trembled when I tied the black ribbon at the throat of my white blouse. “You look beautiful,” said Papa at the door, smiling his approval.
Behind him Vera was standing, envy on her face. Her dark eyes scanned me from head to toe. “Oh, Papa,” she said with scorn, “nobody dresses like that anymore. Everybody’s going to laugh at overdressed Audrina.” She glanced down at her outfit—faded blue jeans and a sweater. “I’m the one who’s in style.”
What she said did little to give me the confidence I needed. I wanted to fit in, not stand out like some oddity, yet Papa refused to let me wear anything but skirts, blouses, sweaters or dresses.
While Vera boarded the yellow bus for her high school, Papa drove me to my grade school and came with me to the principal’s office. My entry into school had been prearranged, so there was nothing to it except I had to be shown where to go and told how to behave. The principal seemed to believe I’d been sick a long time. Sympathetically, she smiled. “You’ll be just fine once you’ve learned your way around.”
Panic seized me in a tight grip when Papa turned to leave. I felt six years old. Then I panicked more, for I didn’t remember being six years old. Papa threw me a glance over his shoulder. “This is what you wanted, Audrina. What you’ve begged for, so if you can, enjoy it.”
“You’re a lovely girl,” said the principal, striding off down a long corridor and indicating I was to follow. “Most of the children here are very well disciplined, but
a few aren’t. Your father says your aunt was a schoolteacher and has kept up your assignments. You should fit right into the fifth or sixth grade with no difficulty. We’ll start you in the fifth so you won’t feel overwhelmed, and if you do well there, we’ll advance you higher.” She gave me another warm smile. “Your father is a very handsome man and he thinks his daughter is absolutely brilliant. I’m sure he’s the one who knows, too.”
I looked around at all the children, who stared at me. Their clothes were very casual, just as Vera had warned. And yet Vera had told me the day before we shopped that the clothes I had on now were right for grade school. I should have known Vera would lie. The girls were all in jeans. None had ribbons in their hair. Furtively, I untied my ribbon and let it fall to the floor. “Hey!” called a boy from behind me. “You dropped your ribbon.”
Several students had already dirtied it with their sneakers. Now I didn’t know what to do with it but hide it away in my little purse.
“Girls, boys,” said the principal, who strode to the front of our classroom. “I want you all to meet Audrina Adare. Do what you can to make her feel welcome.” She smiled at me, gestured toward an empty desk and left the room. As yet the teacher of this room hadn’t shown up. I sat there with my notebook and new pencils and didn’t know what to do. Somewhere far back in my brain was a hint that I needed books—the other students had books. In front of me sat a pretty girl with dark hair and blue eyes. She turned to smile. “Don’t look so scared,” she whispered. “You’ll like our teacher. Her name is Miss Trible.”
“I don’t have any books,” I whispered back.
“Oh, they’ll give you books. More books than you’ll want to lug home from school every day.” She hesitated and looked me over again. “Hey, haven’t you been to school before?”
For some reason I just couldn’t say I hadn’t been. I lied and said, “Yes, of course, but I was out for a while … when … when I broke my leg.”
At last Vera had served some useful purpose. I could use her injuries and report on them faithfully. Soon all the girls were turning to hear about my broken bones that had kept me out of school until I was eleven years old.
When Miss Trible came into her class, she gave me the longest, strangest look. Her smile was tight. “Let us all stand to salute the flag,” she said. “Then we’ll have roll call, and each of you will answer ‘Present.’”
Some boy behind me giggled. “Boy, what’s wrong with her? She acts like we don’t know what to expect.”
I was excited, yet puzzled, worried, tense and not too happy. I didn’t think Miss Trible liked me. I thought groups of children in the halls at lunchtime were whispering about me. I didn’t find it nearly as wonderful to talk to girls my own age as I’d thought. I felt so much older than all of them. And then, contrarily, I was like a first-grader, terrified of what to do if I needed the bathroom. Where was the bathroom?
The more I thought about the problem, the worse it became. Soon I needed to go so desperately I was in agony. I began to cross and uncross my legs. “Audrina, is something wrong?” asked the teacher.
“No, ma’am,” I lied, ashamed to say what was wrong in front of the boys.
“If you need to be excused, the girl’s room is at the far end of this wing. Turn left as you leave the room.”
Blushing and miserable, I jumped to my feet and ran. I left the whole classroom laughing. When I came back, I was too embarrassed to enter. “Come in, Audrina,” called Miss Trible. “The first day in a new school is always somewhat traumatic, but you’ll soon find out where everything is. What you don’t know, ask.” Then she was tapping her pointer on the blackboard, calling for attention.
Somehow I managed the first terrifying days of school. I did what the other girls did, fading into their shadows. I smiled when they smiled, laughed when they did, and soon I was feeling completely false. Some of what those girls whispered in the restrooms shocked me. I didn’t know girls talked like that. Little by little I found out what made Vera the way she was. She conformed. I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to laugh at jokes that seemed gross and not funny. I didn’t know how to play the game of tease the boys and then run, for I had too many visions of the First Audrina’s rainy day in the woods. I made one friend, the girl who sat in front of me.
“It’s going to be all right,” she told me when the long first week of school was over. “But don’t try to out-dress the rich girls from the city … unless you, too, are rich.” She gave me a troubled look. “You are rich, aren’t you? There’s something different about you. Not just the clothes you wear, and your hair, which I think is the prettiest hair I’ve ever seen, but you seem to come from another century.”
How could I tell her I felt like I came from another world? The nineteenth-century world, old and antiquated as the house I lived in.
My class wasn’t large like Vera had predicted, but small. My school was a private school. That made Vera dislike me even more, since her school was a public one.
Faithfully I attended music classes every day after school. Someday I would be a fine pianist if I kept on as I was. Lamar Rensdale treated me with special kindness.
“Are you grateful you’re in school? Do you wish now I’d minded my own business?”
“No, Mr. Rensdale, I’ll forever be grateful for what you did, for I’m beginning to feel real, and I never did before. I owe you for that.”
“Goodbye, good luck and may your music live on forever,” he called as I ran out the door, hopping into the old car Billie had bought for Arden.
My teachers seemed to be very careful with me, and I appreciated that. They smiled encouragingly and gave me the books I took home each day. After two months in school, I found there was some hidden source of knowledge within me that made it seem I had been to school before. Maybe I had really absorbed all the First Audrina’s memories, or else my mother and my aunt had taught me very well while I sat at the kitchen table. Those other tutors that Papa kept saying he’d hired (and I couldn’t remember) must have contributed, too.
For the first time, Arden was allowed to visit and sit down at our table on Easter Sunday. I’d pleaded and begged and cried and threatened, wanting Billie, too, but Billie had refused. “Come to see me after your dinner. We’ll have that chocolate mousse you say your aunt doesn’t know how to make right for dessert.”
Easter Sunday dinner was a miserable meal because Papa kept questioning Arden about who his father had been and what his occupation had been, and why he had left his wife and son. All through the meal Vera flirted with Arden, batting her long eyelashes, twisting and turning to show off her breasts that clearly showed she didn’t wear a bra. Arden seemed awed by the size of my home. He glanced around uneasily, as if thinking he’d never be able to afford anything half as grand.
When summer came, Arden and I spent every spare minute together. He taught me how to swim in the River Lyle, really swim like he did. The river bottom was muddy and layered with oysters and crabs; mullets swam, jumping and frolicking mostly during the twilight hours. Their little splashes came to me in dreams, waking me sometimes so that I’d drift to the window and gaze down on the glittering moonlit water. Something wonderful was happening inside me this summer, making me eager to wake up and escape the house; but try as I would to leave Vera behind, she always came trailing after.
Vera was demanding that Arden teach her how to drive his old car. I was hoping he wouldn’t want to, but he did teach her to drive the country roads without much traffic. One day, after such a lesson, we hurried back to the river and tore off our outer clothes. All of us wore swimsuits beneath our shorts. The temperature was soaring near a hundred degrees. I turned to see Arden staring at Vera in her skimpy bikini. The three little triangles were bright green and very flattering to her hair color. Her pale skin had tanned to a light copper shade, and even I had to admit she looked extremely pretty. Already she’d developed a woman’s figure, with high, full breasts that jutted out that little-nothing green bra. My c
hest was still flat as a pan bottom.
Vera strolled closer to Arden with a lighter green towel thrown casually over her shoulder. Her hips undulated. Apparently the fascination of watching them move like that made Arden forget all about me. “I’m terribly tired after all that driving, and the long hike here. Arden, would you mind helping me down the incline?”
He hurried to assist her down the gentle slope, which I knew she could manage perfectly well. For some reason he couldn’t seem to let go of her waist or arm. His fingers on her upper arm just brushed the swelling contours of her new bosom. I flushed with anger when she smiled up into his eyes. “You grow more handsome each year, Arden.”
He grew nervous, flushed, then snatched his hands away and looked guiltily at me. “Thank you,” he said with difficulty. “You seem prettier each day yourself.”
My eyes widened as I watched Vera lie on her stomach in the bright sunlight. Arden hovered above, seemingly unable to move away. “Arden, would you mind smoothing on some of my suntan lotion? With my kind of light-sensitive skin, I have to be very careful or I get a terrible burn.”
She had the palest skin I’d ever seen. Even as I stared at her pretty copper tan, I was wondering when she’d acquired it. Then, to my amazement, Vera was asking him to untie her bra in back. “I don’t want pale string marks. Stop glaring at me, Audrina. I won’t show anything if I don’t move too quickly. Not that Arden hasn’t seen naked boobs before.” She grinned when he jerked away and looked surprised—and guilty. Still he knelt down to untie her bra, and even if he looked embarrassed and awkward, he managed to smear some of that oil on her back—and a darn long time it took him to do it, too.
It was taking too long. I thought his hands lingered unnecessarily long in certain places. He appeared so excited his hands trembled. Furious with him, with Vera, I jumped up and ran all the way home, hating them both.