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“Yes, she was,” disagreed my aunt. “Audrina was always painfully aware of being messy. She trained herself as Lucietta read nursery rhymes and showed her pretty pictures and rewarded her with cookies when she performed well.”
Papa scowled disapprovingly, then proceeded to ignore her. “And you will have to keep her cleaner, Audrina, or she’ll end up with a red, raw bottom that will be the devil to heal—that’s why she cries out in the night. That diaper rash hurts.”
“Damian! Stop it! You cannot expect a young girl like Audrina to take full responsibility for a retarded child. Put her back in that place or hire a nurse.”
“I can’t afford a nurse,” added Papa sleepily, yawning and stretching out his long legs, ready to nap on the porch chaise. “I’ve got you, Ellie, and that daughter of yours to support. That takes all my cash.”
I stared at Papa, hating the way he could take the truth and twist it.
Half an hour later I tried the potty seat again, tying Sylvia to it so she wouldn’t wiggle off. For an hour I read to her from Mother Goose, but to no avail. The moment I had Sylvia dressed again in clean diapers with plastic panties over them, she was soiled. Vera came in just in time to see me change her again. She laughed scornfully. “Boy, I’m glad she’s not in my charge, or she’d stay filthy.”
“A fine nurse you’ll make,” I said angrily. Then I snapped my head around to glare at her. “Where’ve you been?” Sometimes when I thought Vera was in her room reading, she wasn’t there at all. She wasn’t anywhere where I could find her. Usually she’d show up just before six, when Papa was due home.
Yawning sleepily, she fell into one of my bedroom chairs. “I hate summer school. I hate winter school. I know school ends at twelve, but I do have a few friends in the village, even if you don’t …”
Smiling and mysterious looking, she tossed a Hershey bar my way. “A gift. I know you like chocolate.”
Something was going on in Vera’s life, but I didn’t pry. Though she no longer openly tormented me, she still didn’t help with the housework, or the dishes, or with Sylvia. “I’m pooped, Audrina, really pooped.” She yawned and curled up in the chair like some slinky, sensuous cat. I could almost hear her purring.
As my aunt and I prepared the meals and cleaned the house and changed bed linens together, some kind of closeness developed between us as we worked, doing all the many things Vera refused to do. Occasiona
lly, now, she even let me call her Aunt Ellie. Oh, how she struggled to cook as well as Momma had cooked. It was her desire (though she never said this to me, I sensed it) to cook even better than my mother. She wanted Papa to have all his favorite dishes. Sometimes it was two o’clock in the morning before she went to bed.
Perhaps it was six months after Sylvia came before finally one day Papa smiled after he wiped his mouth and put down his napkin and said, “Well, Ellie, you really outdid yourself this time. No one could have done better. That was a superb meal, really superb.”
Who would have ever thought I’d be happy to hear him say my aunt could match my mother in anything? I appreciated his compliment so much that tears came to my eyes—perhaps because they came to hers, too.
A different kind of life developed for me. A frantic life that stole my summer; stole three afternoons a week from taking music lessons, leaving me little time for Billie and Arden. In the fall it forced me to race home from where the school bus let me off, arriving to search breathlessly for Sylvia, who had the worst habit of wanting to hide herself away somewhere.
It was a thankless task I’d set for myself, truly an impossible task to try and train Sylvia in the same way you would a child of normal intelligence. Her attention span was exceedingly short. She couldn’t sit still. She couldn’t focus her eyes or her mind on anything but movement. The worst of it was that no sooner did Papa drop Sylvia into my lap than he forgot her existence. Desperately I turned to my aunt and pleaded for help. “All right,” she agreed reluctantly, “I promise to do what I can while you’re in school, but the moment you come home and on the weekends and school vacations, Sylvia is yours—all yours.”
Many times I rescued Sylvia from some horrible punishment my aunt felt perfectly justified in delivering. “No!” I yelled, racing into the kitchen and throwing down my schoolbooks, “don’t use that switch on Sylvia! She doesn’t know it’s wrong to pull up all the chrysanthemums. She thinks they’re pretty, and she likes pretty, colorful things.”
“Don’t we all?” asked my aunt acidly. “I like to put them on the table for your father. What’s more, Sylvia trampled down my vegetable beds, too! Everything ready to harvest she’s ruined. Sometimes I think she’s deliberately trying to drive me as crazy as she is.” Tears of self-pity made her eyes sparkle.
Sylvia’s room was like a padded cell. In that small, pitiful room was a small low bed from which she could fall to the floor without injuring herself when she hit the thick carpeting. Truly, sometimes it seemed my aunt was right: Sylvia should never have been born. But born she was, and there wasn’t much I could do about it and still like being me.
Sylvia was three years old now, and unlike other children who liked to play with building blocks and balls and small kiddy cars, Sylvia wasn’t interested. She didn’t know what to do with herself but roam about endlessly. She liked to climb, to eat and drink, to prowl, to hide away, and that was all. I didn’t know how to begin her education when pretty picture books couldn’t capture her attention and toys were meaningless objects to her. Even when I tied her in a chair, she could still loll her head about and avoid seeing anything I tried to show her.
Then one wonderful day when I was rocking in the chair in the First and Best Audrina’s playroom, I had a vision. I saw a little girl who looked somewhat like me or the other Audrina playing with crystal prisms, sitting in the sunlight and catching sunlight, to refract it on the walls, into the mirrors that shot the colors back again, and all the room turned into a kaleidoscope. On the toy shelves of the playroom I found half a dozen beautifully shaped crystal prisms, two like long teardrops, another like a star, one a snowflake and another like a giant diamond. I gathered them together, then opened the draperies wide, tore back the sheer curtains and sat on the floor to play with the prisms myself. It was Sylvia’s habit to follow me around when I was home, such a close shadow that often when I turned abruptly, I bumped into Sylvia and knocked her down.
The sunlight through the prisms shot rainbows about the room. I saw in my peripheral vision that Sylvia was interested in the colors. She was staring at the rainbows that danced about the room. I played them over her face, made one cheek red, the other green, then briefly flashed the light in her eyes. It dazzled her and blinded her, and for some reason she cried out. Stumbling forward, she moaned as she grabbed for the prisms, wanting them for herself.
I’m sure to Sylvia the things in my hands were hard, iridescent flowers. She took them and went to crouch in a corner, as if to hide from me, and there she tried to make the colors dance. They wouldn’t. I watched her, mentally telling her to move into the sunlight. Only in the sunlight would the colors come alive.
Over and over she turned the prisms, grunting in frustration, a wailing noise coming from deep inside her, and then she began to crawl with a prism clutched in each hand until she was in the largest patch of sunlight. Immediately the crystals came to life and filled the room with beams of color. For the first time I saw her eyes widen with surprise. Sylvia was making something happen. She knew it. I could see her joy as she made the colors move about the room.
I sat up to hug her close. “Pretty colors, Sylvia. All yours. I give to you what used to belong to her.” A faint and fuzzy smile visited her gaping lips. It seemed those prisms might never leave her hands now that she’d found one thing she could do easily.
“Oh, God, take those things from her,” complained my aunt the next morning as Sylvia sat in her highchair and dropped one prism in her cereal even as with another she beamed rays of light to dazzle everyone in the kitchen. “Did you have to give her those?”
“Leave her alone, Ellie,” said Papa. “At least she’s found something to do. She’s fascinated by the colors, and who knows, maybe they’ll teach her something.”
“What?” asked my aunt cynically. “How to blind us?”
“Well,” said Papa thoughtfully, buttering his third slice of toast, “how to keep her fingerprints off the walls and furniture, at least. She’s holding onto those things like they’ll run away if she lets go … so leave well enough alone.”
While I cared for Sylvia and Vera continued to be sweeter than sugar to me, I tried like crazy to find time to practice at least once a day on my mother’s piano. Sylvia didn’t like me to practice on the piano. She sat in the sunlight and threw colored beams on my sheets of music, and if I shielded them in some way, she beamed the lights in my eyes so I couldn’t read the music.
