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“Now,” I began when he was seated across the table in our bedroom, “they will give you several kinds of tests to judge your reading ability and comprehension of the written word. Then comes your verbal agility, and you’ll have to understand what you’re saying, which goes without saying.” I smiled at him and shoved his roving foot away from my leg. “Answer, please, would you rather paint a picture, look at a picture or sell a picture?”
“Paint a picture,” Arden answered quickly.
Frowning, I shook my head. “Second question. Would you rather read a book, write a book or sell a book?”
“Write a book … but I guess that’s wrong. The right answer is sell a book, sell a picture—right?”
After three failures came the passing exam, and my husband became a Wall Street Cowboy.
One day when my work was through, I wandered into the room where my mother’s piano was. I smiled ironically to myself as I pulled out Aunt Mercy Marie’s photograph and set it on the grand piano. Who would have ever thought I’d do such a crazy thing on my own? Perhaps it was because I was thinking about my aunt and how I’d missed her funeral. To make up for that, I went often to the graveyard to put flowers on her grave, and on my mother’s grave, too. Never, never did I bring any flowers for the First Audrina.
In memory of them, I began my own “teatime.” As I began the routine once performed by two other sisters, Sylvia crept into the room and sat on the floor near my feet, staring up into my face with a look of bewilderment. A weird sensation of time repeating itself stole over me. “Lucietta,” said the fat-faced woman I was speaking for, “what a lovely girl your third daughter is. Sylvia, such a beautiful name. Who is Sylvia? There used to be an old song about a girl named Sylvia. Lucietta, play that song again for me, please.”
“Of course, Mercy Marie,” said I in a good imitation of how I remembered my mother speaking. “Isn’t she beautiful, my sweet Sylvia? I think she is the most beautiful of all my three girls.”
I banged out some tune on the piano that was pitifully amateurish. But, like a marionette controlled by fate, I couldn’t quit once I’d begun my act. Smiling, I handed Sylvia a cookie. “And now you talk for the lady in the photograph.”
Jumping to her feet with surprising agility, Sylvia ran to the piano, seized up the photograph of Aunt Mercy Marie and hurled it into the fireplace. The silver frame broke, the glass shattered, and soon the photo in Sylvia’s hands was torn into shreds. Finished, and a bit scared looking, Sylvia backed away from me.
“How dare you do that?” I yelled. “That was the only picture we had of our mother’s best friend! You’ve never done anything like that before.”
Falling down on her knees, she crawled to me, whimpering like a small puppy—and she was ten years old now. Crouched at my feet, Sylvia clawed at my skirt, allowing her lips to part, and soon spittle wet her chin and dribbled down on her loose, shiftlike garment. A small child couldn’t have looked into my eyes with more innocence. Billie had to be mistaken. Sylvia couldn’t focus her eyes but for a second or two.
In my dreams that night while Arden slept peacefully at my side, it seemed I heard drums beating, natives chanting. Animals howled. Bolting awake I started to wake up Arden, then decided the animals’ howling was only Sylvia screaming again. I ran to her room to take her into my arms. “What’s wrong, darling?”
I swear I think she tried to say, “Bad … bad … bad,” but I wasn’t truly sure. “Did you say bad?”
Her aqua eyes were wide with fright—but she nodded. I broke into laughter and hugged her closer. “No, it’s not bad that you can talk. Oh, Sylvia, I’ve tried so hard, so hard to teach you and at last you’re trying. You had a bad dream, that’s all. Go back to sleep and think how wonderful your life is going to be now that you can communicate.”
Yes, I told myself as I snuggled
up close to Arden, liking his arms about me when he wasn’t passionate, that’s all it was, a bad dream Sylvia had.
Thanksgiving Day was a week away. I was more or less happy as I sat with Billie in the kitchen and planned the menu. Yet I still treaded the long halls like a child, still taking care not to step on any of the colorful geometric patterns the stained-glass windows cast on the floor. I’d stop and stare for long moments at the rainbows on the walls, just as I had when I was a child. My memories of childhood were still so hazy.
As I left the kitchen and started for the stairs, with the notion of visiting that playroom and evoking the past, challenging it to reveal the truth, I turned to find Sylvia trailing me like a shadow. Of course, I’d grown accustomed to her being my constant companion, but what surprised me was the way she managed to catch a random sunbeam with that crystal prism she clutched and flash the colors directly into my eyes.
Almost blinded, I staggered backward, for some reason terrified. In the shadows near the wall I dropped the hand I’d used to shade my eyes and stared toward the huge chandelier that caught all the colors already on the marble floor. The mirrors on the walls refracted them back to Sylvia, who directed them again at me, as if to keep me from the playroom. Dizzy and unreal feeling, visions flashed in my head. I saw my aunt sprawled face down on the hard foyer floor. What if Sylvia had been downstairs in the foyer and had used that prism to blind my aunt’s eyes with sunlight colors? Could that have made my aunt dizzy enough to fall? Was Sylvia trying to make me fall, too?
“Put that thing down, Sylvia!” I yelled. “Put it away. Never flash those lights in my eyes again! Do you hear me?”
Like the wild thing Papa compared her to, she ran. Stunned for a moment I could only stare after her. Feeling frightened of my own violent reaction, I sat on the bottom step and tried to pull myself together—and that’s when the front door opened.
A woman stood there, tall and slender, wearing a smart hat of many shades of green feathers. A mink cape was slung casually over one shoulder, and her green shoes matched her very expensive-looking green suit.
“Hi,” she said in a sultry voice. “Here I am, back again. Don’t you recognize me, sweet Audrina?”
A Second Life
“What are you doing?” called Vera as, much in the manner of a very young child, I began to back up the stairs without standing up. “Aren’t you a bit old for such childish behavior? Really, Audrina, you don’t change at all, do you?”
Striding into the foyer, Vera hardly appeared to limp. But when I checked I saw that the left sole of her high-heeled shoes was an inch thicker than the right sole. Gracefully she approached the stairs. “I stopped off in the village and they told me you really did marry Arden Lowe. I never thought you’d ever be adult enough to marry anyone. Congratulations to him, the fool, and my best wishes to you, the bride who should have known better.”
The trouble was, what she said could very well be true.
“Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“Your mother is dead.” How cruelly I said that, as if I wanted to even the score and dish out pain for pain.
