Flowers in the Attic

  I tried to see my reflection in the shimmering mirror across the way, yet when I tried to turn my swollen head, it refused to budge. And always before I went to sleep, I spread my hair on my pillow so I could turn my head, and nestle my cheek in the sweetsmelling silkiness of very pampered, well-cared-for, healthy, strong hair. It was one of the sensual things I enjoyed, the feel of my hair against my cheek to take me into sweet dreams of love.

  And yet, today, there was no hair on my pillow. Where was my hairy

  The scissors, they still lay on the dresser top. I could vaguely see them. Swallowing repeatedly to clear the way, I forced out a small cry, uttering Chris's name, not Momma's I prayed to God to make Him let my brother hear. "Chris," I finally managed to whisper in the strangest, gritty voice, "something is the matter with me."

  My whispered, weak words roused Chris, though I don't know how he heard. He sat up and sleepily rubbed his eyes. "What yuh want, Cathy?" he asked.

  I mumbled something that took him from his bed, and in his rumpled blue pajamas, his hair a golden mop, he ambled over to my bed. He jerked up short. He drew in his breath and made small gasping sounds of horror and shock.

  "Cathy, oh my God!"

  His cry sent shivers of fear down my spine.

  "Cathy . . . oh, Cathy," he moaned.

  As he stared, and as I wondered what he was seeing that made his eyes bulge, I tried to lift my leaden arms and feel my swollen, heavy head. Somehow I managed to get my hands up there--and that's when I found a loud voice to scream! Really scream! Over and over again I howled like someone demented until Chris ran to gather me in his arms.

  "Stop, please stop," he sobbed. "'Remember the twins . . . don't scare them more . . . please don't scream again, Cathy. They've been through so much, and I know you don't want to scar them permanently, and you will, if you don't calm down. It's all right, I'll get rid of it. I swear on my life, that today, somehow, I'll get the tar from your hair."

  He found a small red prick on my arm where the grandmother had plunged in a hypodermic needle to keep me asleep with some drug. And while I slept, she had poured hot tar on my hair. She must have gathered it all into a neat bunch before she used the tar, for not a strand was left free of the gook.

  Chris tried to keep me from looking into the mirror, but I shoved him away, and had to stare with my mouth agape at the horrible black blob that was my head now. Like a huge wad of black bubble gum, chewed and left in an unsightly mess, it even ran down my face and streaked my cheeks with black tears!

  I looked, and I knew that he'd never get the tar out. Never!

  Cory woke up first, ready to run to the windows and draw aside the closed draperies and peek outside to see the sun that kept hiding from him He was out of bed and ready to dash to the windows when he saw me.

  His eyes widened. His lips parted. His small fluttering hands reached upward to rub at his eyes with fists, and then he was staring at me again with so much disbelief. "Cathy," he managed finally, "is that you?"

  "I guess it is."

  "Why is your hair black?"

  Before I could reply to that question, Carrie was awake. "Oooh!" she howled. "Cathy--your head looks funny!" Big tears came to glisten her eyes and slide down her cheeks. "I don't like your head now!" she wailed, then began to sob as if the tar were on her hair.

  "Calm down, Carrie," said Chris, in the most ordinary, everyday tone of voice. "It's only tar on Cathy's hair--and when she takes a bath, and shampoos her hair, it will be the same as yesterday. While she does that, I want the two of you to eat the oranges for breakfast, and look at TV. Later on we'll all eat a real breakfast, when Cathy's hair is clean." He didn't mention our grandmother for fear of instilling in them even more terror of our situation. So they sat on the floor close as bookends, supporting only each Other, and peeled and ate orange sections, losing themselves in the sweet nothingness of cartoons and other Saturday morning violence and foolishness.

  Chris ordered me into a tub full of hot water. In that almost scalding water I dunked my head over and over again while Chris used shampoo to soften the tar. The tar did soften, but it didn't come out and leave my hair clean. His fingers moved in a sodden mass of sticky goo. I heard myself making small whimpering sounds. He did try, oh, he did try to take out the tar without taking out all my hair. And all I could think of was the scissors--the shiny scissors the grandmother had laid on the dresser top.

  On his knees by the tub, Chris finally managed to work his fingers through the mass, but when he withdrew them, they were clogged with sticky black hair. "You'll have to use the scissors!" I cried out, tired of the whole thing after two hours. But no, the scissors were the last resort. He reasoned there must be some chemical solution that would dissolve the tar, without dissolving my hair. He had a very

  professional chemistry set Momma had given him On the lid was a stern warning: "This is not a toy. This box contains dangerous chemicals and is for professional use only."

  "Cathy," he said, sitting back on his bare heels, "I'm going up to the attic schoolroom and mix some compound to take the tar from your hair." He grinned at me shyly then. The light from the ceiling caught on the soft downy fuzz that covered his upper lip, and I knew he had stronger, darker hair on the lower part of his body, the same as I did. "I've got to use the John, Cathy. I've never done that in front of you, and I'm kind of embarrassed. You can turn your back, and put your fingers in your ears, and maybe if you go in the water too, the ammonia might unglue your hair."

  I couldn't help but stare at him in amazement. The day had taken on nightmarish proportions. To sit in boiling water and use it for a toilet and then wash my hair in that? Could it be real that I would do this as Chris streamed urine into the commode behind my back? I said to myself, no, this wasn't real, just a dream. Carrie and Cory wouldn't use the bathroom, too, while I was in the tub, dunking my hair in foul water.

  It was real enough. Hand in hand, Cory and Carrie came to the tub and stared at me, wanting to know why I was taking so long.

  "Cathy, what is that stuff on your head?"

  "Why did you put tar in your hair?"

  "I must have done it in my sleep."

  "Where did you find the tar?"

  "In the attic."

  "Why did you want to put tar in your hair?"

  I hated lying! I wanted to tell her who put the tar in my hair, but I couldn't let her know. Already she and Cory were scared enough of that old woman "Go back and look at TV, Carrie," I ordered, testy and irritable from all the questions she asked, and hating to look at her thin, hollowed-out cheeks, her sunken eyes.

  "Cathy, don't you like me no more?"

  "Anymore . . ."

  "Don't you?"

  "Of course I like you, Cory. I love you both, but I put the tar on my hair by mistake, and now I'm mad at myself."

  Carrie wandered off to sit once more near Cory. They whispered back and forth in that strange language that only they could understand. Sometimes, I think they were far wiser than Chris and I suspected.

  For hours I was in the tub, while Chris concocted a dozen different compounds to test on a bit of my hair. He tried everything, making me change the water often, always making it hotter. I shriveled into a puckered prune as bit by bit he cleared the gooey mess from my hair. The tar came out, eventually, along with a great loss of hair. But I had a lot, and could afford to lose much without making a noticeable difference. And when it was over, the day was gone, and neither Chris nor I had eaten a bite. He had given cheese and crackers to the twins, but he himself hadn't wasted time to eat. Wrapped in a towel, I sat on the bed and dried my much thinned hair. What was left was fragile. It broke easily, and the color was almost platinum.

  "You might as well have saved yourself the effort," I said to Chris, who was hungrily eating two crackers with cheese. "She hasn't brought up any food--and she won't bring any up until you cut it all off."

  He came to me, bearing a plate with cheese and crackers, and holding a glass of water. "Ea
t and drink. We will outsmart her. If by tomorrow she doesn't bring up some food, or if Momma doesn't show up, I'll cut off just your front hair, over your fore- head. Then you can wrap your head with a scarf, like you're ashamed to be seen bald-headed, and soon enough that hair will grow back in."

  Sparingly, I ate the cheese and crackers, not answering. I washed down my one meal of the day with water from the bathroom tap. Then Chris brushed that pale, pale weak hair that had endured so much. Peculiar how fate works things out: my hair had never gleamed more, or felt so much like gossamer silk, and I was grateful to have any left at all. I lay back on the bed, worn out, enervated by emotion torn asunder, and watched Chris sitting on the bed just looking at me. When I fell asleep, he was still there, watching me, and in his hand he held a long coil of my spiderweb, silken hair.

  That night I fretted in and out of sleep, restless, tormented. I felt helpless, angry, frustrated.

  And then I saw Chris.

  He was still in the clothes he'd worn all day. He'd moved the heaviest chair in the room so that it was against the door, and in that chair he sat and dozed, while in his hand he held the pair of long and sharp scissors. He had barred the way, so the grandmother couldn't sneak in again and use the scissors. He was, even in his sleep, guarding me from her.

  As I stared over at him, his eyes opened, jolted, as if he hadn't meant to doze off and leave me unprotected. In the dimness of that locked room, always rosy at night, he caught my gaze, and our eyes locked, and ever so slowly he smiled. "Hi."

  "Chris," I sobbed, "go to bed. You can't keep her out forever."

  "I can while you sleep."

  "Then let me be the sentry. We'll take turns."

  "Who's the man here, you or me? Besides, I eat more than you do."

  "What's that got to do with it?"

  "You're too thin now, and staying awake all night would make you thinner, whereas I can afford to lose weight."

  He was underweight, too. We all were, and his slight weight wouldn't keep that grandmother out if she really wanted to shove the door open. I got up and went to sit with him in the chair, though he gallantly protested.

  "Ssh," I whispered. "The two of us together can keep her out better, and we can both sleep." Embraced in each other's arms, we fell asleep.

  And the morning came . . . without the

  grandmother . . . without food.

  The hungry days passed by endlessly, miserably.

  Only too soon the cheese and crackers were gone, though we ate most sparingly of what we had. And that was when we really began to suffer. Chris and I drank only water, and saved what milk there was for the twins.

  Chris came to me with the shears in his hand, and reluctantly, with tears, he cut off the front top hair close to my scalp. I wouldn't look in a mirror when it was done. The long part that was left, I wrapped about my head, and over that I formed a scarf into a turban.

  Then came the irony, the bitter irony of the grandmother not coming to check!

  She didn't bring us food, or milk, or clean linens, or towels, or even the soap and toothpaste we had run out of. Not even toilet paper. Now I regretted throwing out all the tissue our expensive clothes came in. There was nothing left to do but tear pages from the oldest books in the attic and use that.

  Then the toilet bowl stopped up, and overflowed, and Cory began to scream as filth flooded over and filled the bathroom. We didn't have a plunger. Frantically, Chris and I wondered what to do. As he ran for a coat hanger made of wire to straighten out and push down whatever clogged the drain, I ran to the attic to fetch old clothes to mop up the flooding mess.

  Somehow Chris managed to use the wire coat hanger, and the commode worked normally again. Then, without a word, he got down on his knees beside me, and we both mopped up the floor with the old clothes from the attic trunks.

  Now we had filthy, smelly rags to fill up a trunk, and add to the secrets of the attic.

  We escaped the full horror of our situation by not talking about it much. We just got up in the mornings, splashed water on our faces, cleaned our teeth with plain water, drank a little water, moved about a little, then lay down to watch TV, or to read, and the devil to pay if she came in and caught us rumpling a bedspread. What did we care now?

  To hear the twins cry for food put scars on my soul that I would bear for the rest of my life. And I hated, oh, how I hated that old woman--and Momma--for doing this to us!

  And when mealtimes rolled by with no food, we slept. For hours on end we slept. Asleep you don't feel pain or hunger, or loneliness, or bitterness. In sleep you can drown in false euphoria, and when you awaken, you just don't care about anything.

  There was one hazy, unreal day when we lay listless, all four of us, with the only life going on confined to the small box over in the corner. Dazed and tired, I turned my head for no reason at all just to look at Chris and Cory, and I lay without much feeling at all as I watched Chris take his pocket knife and slash his wrist. He put his bleeding arm to Cory's mouth, and made him drink his blood, though Cory protested. Then it was Carrie's turn. The two of them, who wouldn't eat anything lumpy, bumpy, grainy, too tough, too stringy, or just plain "funny look- ing," drank of their older brother's blood and stared up at him with dull, wide, accepting eyes.

  I turned my head away, sickened by what he had to do, and full of admiration that he could do it. He could always solve a difficult problem.

  Chris came to my side of the bed and perched on the edge, and looked at me for the longest moment, then his eyes lowered to the cut on his wrist that wasn't bleeding as freely now. He lifted his pocketknife and prepared to make a second slash so I too could be nourished by his blood. I stopped him, and seized hold of his jack-knife and hurled it away. He ran fast to get it, and again he cleaned it with alcohol, despite my vow never to taste his blood, and drain from him more of his strength.

  "What will we do, Chris, if she never comes back?" I asked dully. "She will let us starve to death." Meaning the grandmother, of course, whom we hadn't seen in two weeks. And Chris had exaggerated when he said we had a full pound of cheddar cheese stashed away. We baited our mousetraps with cheese, and had been forced to take back the bits of cheese to eat ourselves, when everything else was gone. Now we'd been without one bit of food in our stomachs for three whole days and four days with only a little cheese and crackers. And the milk we saved for the twins to drink--gone ten days ago, too.

  "She won't let us starve to death," said Chris as he lay down beside me and took me into his weak embrace. "We'd be idiots, and spineless, to allow her to do that to us. Tomorrow, if she doesn't show up with food, and our mother doesn't show up, we'll use our sheet-ladder to reach the ground."

  My head was on his chest and I could hear his heart thumping. "How do you know what she'd do? She hates us. She wants us dead--hasn't she told us that time and time again we should never have been born?"

  "Cathy, the old witch is not dumb. She'll bring food soon, before Momma comes back from wherever she's been."

  I moved to bandage his slashed wrist. Two weeks ago Chris and I should have tried to escape, when both of us had the strength to make the perilous descent. Now, if we tried to make it, surely we'd fall to our deaths, what with the twins tied to our backs to make it even more difficult.

  But when morning came, and there was still no food brought up to us, Chris forced us into the attic. He and I carried the twins who were too weak to walk. It was a torrid zone up there.

  Sleepily, the twins sagged in the corner of the schoolroom where we put them down. Chris set about fashioning slings so we could attach the twins securely to our backs. Neither of us mentioned the possibility that we could be committing suicide, and murder, too, if we fell.

  "We'll do it another way," said Chris,

  reconsidering. "I'll go first. When I reach the ground, you'll put Cory into a sling, tie him in fast so he can't kick free, and then you'll lower him down to me. Next, you can do that for Carrie. And you can come down last. And fo
r God's sake, put forth your very best efforts! Call upon God to give you the strength-- don't be apathetic! Feel anger, wrath, think of revenge! I've heard great anger gives you superhuman strength in an emergency!"

  "Let me go first. You're stronger." I said weakly.

  "No! I want to be down there to catch in case anyone comes down too fast, and your arms don't have the strength mine do. I'll brace the rope about a chimney so all the weight won't be on you--and Cathy, this is really an emergency!"

  God, I couldn't believe what he expected me to do next!

  With horror I stared at the four dead mice in our traps. "We've got to eat these mice to gain some strength," he said to me grimly, "and what we have to do, we can do!"

  Raw meat? Raw mice? "No," I whispered, revolted by the sight of those tiny stiff and dead things.

  He grew forceful, angry, telling me I could do anything that was necessary to keep the twins alive, and myself alive. "Look, Cathy, I'll eat my two first, after I've run downstairs for salt and pepper. And I need that coat hanger to tighten up the knots-- leverage, you know. My hands, they're not working too good now."

  Of course they weren't. We were all so weak we could barely move.

  He shot me a quick appraising glance. "Really, with salt and pepper, I think the mice might be tasty."

  Tasty.

  He sliced off the heads, then skinned and gutted them next. I watched him slice open the small bellies and withdraw long, slimy intestines, little bitty hearts, and other miniature "innards."

  I could have vomited if there had been anything in my stom ach.

  And he didn't run for the salt and pepper, or the coat hanger. He only walked, and slowly at that-- telling me in this way he wasn't too eager to partake of raw mice, either.

  While he was gone, my eyes stayed glued to the skinned mice that were to be our next meal. I closed my eyes and tried to will myself into taking the first bite. I was hungry but not hungry enough to enjoy the prospects.