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“Oh, I’ll be back soon,” I said with confidence.
That day Arden again walked me back through the woods.
I was full of admiration for Billie—and wonder, too. I wanted to know just how she managed to clean house and do the laundry when she had no legs. If only I could tell Vera all that Billie could do without legs, when she could hardly do anything with two. I wondered how I’d handle the day when finally I saw Billie without all those stiff, concealing skirts. For surely she couldn’t wear so many clothes in the summer.
At the edge of the woods we said a hasty goodbye. Arden still had to deliver newspapers, and then bag groceries. It was likely he would never have enough sleep until he graduated from college. I watched him turn and race back home. He was so conscientious, so dedicated to his mother and helping her financially that I had less and less time with him. There was a price to pay for everything, I thought sadly, opening the side door and entering our house of shadows.
Sprawled on the purple chaise, Vera was busy reading another of the romances that filled Momma’s closet shelves. She was so deeply engrossed she didn’t pay much attention to me. I wanted to tell her about Billie, but for some reason held back, afraid she’d say something ugly. And it wouldn’t make any difference if I told her how hard Billie worked. Vera thought work was for stupid people who didn’t know any better. “My brains will see me through,” she’d told me many times. As I watched her, and she was unaware of me, I saw the tip of her tongue moving back and forth on her lower lip. Her eyes appeared glassy; her breasts heaved upward and soon her hand was inside her blouse, caressing herself. Then she put the book aside, threw back her head and began to use her other hand under her skirts. I stared at what she was doing. “Vera! Stop that! It looks gross!”
“Go ‘way,” she murmured without opening her eyes. “What do you know about anything? You’re a babe in the woods—or are you?”
Now that I was growing up, Papa would often take me to his brokerage firm, allowing me to watch and listen to learn all about what he did. I was his showpiece, replacing my mother, who’d often sat in the very chair he gave me beside his desk. Old men and women came to talk to me and to joke with Papa before they turned their conversations to financial talk Papa had taught me to understand. “My daughter is going to be my business partner one day,” Papa proudly informed all newcomers who hadn’t heard this a hundred times before. “With my kind of daughter, a man doesn’t need a son.”
He made me feel good on days like this, which ended with dinner in a fine restaurant and a movie afterward. On the city streets I saw legless beggars on little carts they shoved along, sometimes with gloved hands. They used little things that looked like small rubber-bottomed irons to grab at the sidewalks and spare their hands the blisters. And before I’d never noticed them, or if I had, I’d turned my eyes away and pretended they didn’t exist.
The very next day I had to say something to Billie that I’d held back since the day I knew about her lack of legs. “Billie, I’ve been looking at people in the city who have no legs. So I won’t be shocked if you don’t always wear those long skirts.”
She scowled at me, then turned her head. She had a lovely profile, classical and perfect. “I’ll know when you’re ready to see me without my full, long skirts. I’ll tell by your eyes. And you’re not ready yet. It’s not pretty, Audrina. Those men you see on the streets wear trousers that they fold over so you don’t see the stumps. Once I had very beautiful legs; now I have eight-inch stumps that even I can’t look at without feeling disgust.” She sighed, shrugged, then gave me a charming smile. “Sometimes my missing legs still hurt. Phantom pain, the doctors call it. I wake up in the night and feel my legs below me, hurting so badly sometimes I can’t help but call Arden, and he comes running to give me some drug the doctor prescribes. He won’t let me keep it by my bedside, afraid I’ll take too much by accident. It makes my mind fuzzy so I can’t remember if I take one or even two pills. While I wait for the pill to take effect, he sits by my bedside and tells me silly stories to make me laugh. Sometimes that boy of mine stays up all night just to entertain me when the pains won’t go away. God was good to me the day he told me not to destroy the baby that might spoil my career. I thought twice and didn’t have an abortion. If I had known long ago all the children I prevented would have been like Arden, perhaps I’d have had twelve children.”
Did that mean she’d had many abortions? I didn’t like to think she had. I convinced
myself she meant she’d done something else to keep from having babies and giving up her career. I also knew even if she’d had a hundred sons, only one would be like Arden, devoted, responsible, a man even before he finished being a boy. He was never depressed or angry, just even and steady and always there when he was needed. Like Billie.
Overwhelmed with my thoughts, I got up to embrace Billie. I never was able to impulsively show affection to my aunt, when many times I wanted to. I needed Billie to be my substitute mother, especially when Aunt Ellsbeth always held me at arm’s length. “All right, Billie, maybe I’m not ready yet to see you without your long skirts, but one day when I come over here and you don’t have on your dressy clothes, I won’t feel disgust. You’ll look in my eyes and you’ll see nothing but admiration and gratitude for being what you are and giving Arden to the world as well.”
She laughed and put her strong arms around me before she looked deep into my eyes. There was sadness in her voice when she spoke next. “Don’t go falling in love too soon, Audrina. Arden is my son, and I think he’s perfect, but all mothers think their sons are perfect. You need someone special. I’d like to think that Arden is that special, for I’d never want him to disappoint you—but if at some point he does, remember that none of us is perfect. We all have our Achilles’ heels, so to speak.”
Then again, with a great deal of perception she was searching my eyes, and maybe my soul. “What troubles you so much, Audrina? Why all those shadows in such beautiful violet eyes?”
“I don’t know.” I held fast to her. “I guess I just hate being named after an older sister who died mysteriously at the age of nine. I wish like crazy I’d been the First Audrina, who was also the Best Audrina. My papa won’t stop telling me how wonderful she was, and every word he says to praise her tells me I’m not living up to the standards she set. I feel cursed, and doubly cursed now that Momma died on my ninth birthday and Sylvia was born then, too. It’s weird and not right for so much to happen when the ninth day of the ninth month comes around.”
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?”
