My father’s job takes him away from home for as long as five days sometimes. Whenever this happens, Momma tells me I am the man of the family until my father comes home. She brushes my hair back, smiles, kisses my cheek, and tells me, “As long as I have you, Christopher, I’ll always have a man around the house. Like I told you, some women don’t need men, but I’m not one of them.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I would see Cathy watching us. She wouldn’t be smiling. She’d look almost angry about it. If I told her to do something afterward, she’d say, “You’re not my father, Christopher.” But in the end, she’d do it. That’s Cathy.
She is always the first to greet Daddy when he comes home. She bursts ahead of me as soon as she hears him call out to us when he enters. I know that is important to her, so I always let her get to him first. He winks at me and lifts her and covers her face with kisses, describing how much he has missed her. She always glances back at me with that superior, self-satisfied look to show me Daddy loves her more.
How childish, I would think but never say. Daddy would hug me, too, but he always shakes my hand as well.
“Everything okay here, Christopher?” he would ask me with his slightly tilted head, his eyes a little narrow. Of course, Cathy was afraid I’d mention something bad she had done, some request of Momma’s she didn’t follow, but I never do. I don’t have to. Daddy understands. We almost have telepathy. I once told that to Cathy, and she squinted and raised her nose at me as if she smelled something bad. If I tried to explain it, she’d wave me off and tell me she had something important to do, which she didn’t. She’s getting to be more and more like that, fleeing from anything she sees as complicated or in her eyes unpleasant.
While Daddy greets us and gives us whatever little gifts he has brought, Momma waits behind us. Sometimes she is smiling, basking in the love Daddy shows us, but lately I notice that she looks annoyed at how much time Daddy is spending on Cathy especially. I think Daddy knows or feels this, too. Yesterday, when he put Cathy down and went to embrace our mother, he held her like he had thought he might never have been able to do it again.
Momma always knows exactly when he will return, and she is always perfectly made up, even though he swears aloud that she doesn’t need makeup or pretends to be surprised when he finds out she is wearing any. She’s always wearing something special, like a dress he brought back from a previous trip or something he gave her on her last birthday. If she’s wearing something new that she bought with money she secretly collected, Daddy never complains or asks her how or when she bought it. He simply compliments her.
I don’t know if there is any wife anywhere who knows how to please her husband as well as Momma knows how to please Daddy. I guess I would want to have a wife like that, too. She wouldn’t have to be as intelligent as I am. Momma isn’t as smart as Daddy, but I know how much she pleases him, and I suppose a man needs that sort of comfort. It’s a form of security to know who and what is waiting for you at home.
“You get more beautiful every day, Corrine,” he told her today. “Seeing you makes me think I was in dark, cloudy weather the whole time I lived without you.”
I could never think of things like that to tell a girl. I’m not romantic enough. I don’t know if I will ever be. I guess I’m hoping that the girl I find to marry won’t need me to be that romantic.
I don’t know if there is such a girl.
When Daddy said she was more beautiful every day, Momma’s face brightened, and the glow was so great it was like sunshine for us all.
Well, maybe not as much for Cathy. I’ve watched her carefully during Daddy’s homecomings. I know all about Electra complexes and sibling rivalries. Whenever I read something new about child psychology or something medical, I watch for symptoms. It seems to me that the older Cathy gets, the more she seems jealous of our father’s dedicated love for our mother. It’s as if she wants to absorb all his love, capture all that he is capable of giving to anyone, even our mother.
And yet Cathy will always be the first one to tell me or anyone else how beautiful our mother is. If there is one thing she wants in her life, it is surely to be as beautiful as our mother. Whenever Momma does anything to enhance her looks, Cathy is there listening, watching, and learning.
“Beauty isn’t something you can create with makeup, you know,” I told her yesterday when she was pretending in front of her mirror. “You can improve it, maybe, but don’t think it comes in some powder or lipstick.”
“Yes, it does!” she fired back at me with her eyes. “Momma says a plain woman could look very attractive if someone showed her how to put on makeup and do her hair right.” Then she quickly added, “But she said I’m not plain.”
I smiled at her. “Beauty is a matter of opinion sometimes,” I said.
She squinted and crinkled her nose. “It is not. You don’t know anything about it. You’re just too . . . smart,” she said, and ran to Momma to complain about me.
Cathy can whine and cry better than anyone I know. When she returned to her room, I told her she would win the whining and crying Olympics.
Later, she brought Momma into the living room to tell me I was wrong, but I knew Momma was just trying to get her to stop complaining.
“The man of the house doesn’t tease his women,” she said. She tried to look angry at me, but she wasn’t doing it too well.
Cathy stood there with her arms folded, nodding at me.
I knew Momma was really depending on me to be the man of the house and keep any childish behavior at a minimum. When she looked at me like that, even pretending, I did feel guilty.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tease you, Cathy. Momma knows a lot more than I’ll ever know when it comes to being beautiful.”
“Or handsome,” Momma said, smiling at me. “And I have the most beautiful children. How could I not, with a husband as handsome as your father?”
Cathy was beaming. Her mood quickly changed. She complains about me correcting her all the time and proving I’m right about things because she loves to be right even more than I do. I know winning is very important to her, and more often than not, when we play a game, I will let her win. I do it well. She really believes she has won. Whenever I do this, I glance at Momma, who is usually watching us, and I see that soft, angelic smile on her lips, and I know she loves me more than she could love anyone or anything.
I remember that when Daddy gave me the medical books, Momma said, “There’s no doubt. We’ll have a famous and wonderful doctor in our family. He’ll take care of us when we’re old and feeble, and he’ll never let his sister get too sick, even when she’s married and has a family of her own.”
Cathy squinted and looked like she would regurgitate. She was still too young to think of herself as a married woman with children of her own, especially since I’d taken her aside and explained how children really come to be, not just children of animals but people, too.
“You’re making it up, and you’re as disgusting as poop,” she said, and ran off.
Maybe I was wrong to explain it to her while she was still so young. I’m making that mistake often with her and with other kids my age. I just assume they are as ready as I am to learn what is real and what is fantasy. I can’t help it, I guess. I feel I have an obligation to protect Cathy, and protecting her means teaching her important things. What is more important than knowing about sex?
Sometimes . . . sometimes I think Cathy believes we’ll never change; we’ll never get older; we’ll never be anything more than the Dollanganger children.
I would never tell anyone this, but writing it in the diary right now is all right.
Sometimes I go to sleep fantasizing about that, imagining us forever and ever, the perfect little family who couldn’t be changed by time, by bad weather, by sickness, or by anything, for that matter.
But almost as soon as I do this, I snap myself back to reality and berate myself.
You can’t be a child, Christopher, not now, not eve
r.
Is that good or bad?
I’m still not sure.
I put the diary down to think about what he had written. After my mother died, my father would have preferred the human species to be asexual. At least, that was how I saw it now when I recalled the way he would react to any questions I had when I was nine and ten. It wasn’t until I was eleven that he asked my aunt Barbara to have a more intimate conversation with me. I overheard him talking to her on the phone.
“I’ve seen some of the other girls in her class, Barbara. Maybe something’s changed in the air or something, but some of these sixth-graders have the bodies of older teenage girls. Kristin can’t be far behind. I think she and her girlfriends are already talking turkey, if you get my drift. I mean, I know they teach them stuff in school, but it can’t be the same as what goes on outside the school, right? I’d just like it to be someone in the family.”
My dad wasn’t a prude, but he was quite shy when it came to what went on between men and women. There were so many times when I saw him redden after one of his workers or someone else made a remark he considered R-rated, especially if it happened in front of me. Usually, however, it was something that went over my head.
Anyway, he impressed Aunt Barbara enough with the need for my special talk even at my age that she made a quick trip to Charlottesville to see us, or me, I should say. She pretended she had come just to visit, but I knew and anticipated our tête-à-tête. It happened the second night she was there. After dinner, when I went up to my room to do my homework, she knocked on the door and came in.
Aunt Barbara was not an unattractive woman by any means. She had been engaged when she was in her mid-twenties, but her fiancé was in the army and was shipped to Afghanistan, where he was fatally wounded in a roadside bomb explosion. I know it took her years to get over that, and from the way my father talked about her, she had trouble with every date she had afterward. None of the men who asked her out wanted to be compared to her fiancé, and apparently, she let them believe they would be.
She did have another steady boyfriend for almost two years, but they broke up when he cheated on her. Most of her energy after that went into her work and taking care of my grandmother.
She sat on my bed and smiled at me. “You are growing up fast,” she began. “Your father says you’re thinking about boys already.”
I shrugged.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Not really,” I said.
“But there’s a boy you like?”
I nodded.
“I was a little older than you when my mother talked to me about all this. You know how she began?”
I shook my head.
“She said, ‘I’m going to tell you about yourself and how you will be when you get close to a boy, and I’m going to warn you about things, but you know what, Barbara? You’re going to do what you want anyway,’ ” she said. “Every girl does, and any mother who thinks differently is just fooling herself to make herself worry less. So let me tell you how it was for me the first time I did more than kiss a boy,” she began.
I don’t think I ever paid stricter attention to anything anyone had ever said. When I looked back on that evening and the way she followed up with me often, I thought that even though Cathy had a mother and a brilliant older brother, I was the luckier one for this part of life. At least, that was what I suspected, but I knew I had to keep reading to see if I was right, to see if Cathy ever paid any attention to her brother Christopher’s information about men and women or if her mother gave her the education my mother couldn’t.
Today, Cathy and I were both surprised but for different reasons. I should write that Cathy was more shocked.
We learned something I was beginning to suspect.
I noticed some physical changes in Momma and went to the “Merck Manual” to confirm my suspicions.
When we came home from school, I knew immediately that something was very different. Momma wasn’t at the door or even moving about the house. She was sitting in her favorite chair by the fireplace and knitting what looked like a tiny sweater.
She put it aside to hug us both. Cathy’s eyes never left the sweater. I knew she was thinking it was probably for one of her dolls.
“It’s freezing out there today, Momma,” I said, and moved to the fireplace.
Cathy never stopped staring at the knitting.
“I have news for you both,” Momma began. “I was at Dr. Bloom’s today.”
“You’re not sick,” I said. If anything, she looked healthier. After reading what I had, I suspected what she was going to say.
“No. I’m pregnant, children. Here, Christopher,” she said, and urged me to feel her stomach. She watched me carefully. I think I realized what she was waiting to hear me say.
“There’s a lot of movement in your womb.”
“What’s a womb?” Cathy asked.
“A room for a fetus,” I said, looking at Momma.
She smiled. “Very good, Christopher. They heard two heartbeats,” she said.
“Twins?”
I looked at Cathy, who was acting very strangely now. She began to back away as if Momma might explode. She looked angry, too.
“Do you understand, Cathy? Momma is going to have at least twins. I hope two boys,” I said. “Identical twins, and not simply fraternal.”
“You’ll be a wonderful older brother, no matter what they are,” Momma said, and looked at Cathy. “And you’ll be a wonderful older sister.”
Cathy didn’t say anything. She continued to back away and to shake her head as if she was looking at a ghost.
I rose. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked her.
“I don’t want twins!” she cried. “I don’t care about being a good older sister. I don’t want any more babies.”
“Cathy?” Momma said as my sister turned and ran out of the room and to her own. “What’s wrong with her?” she asked me.
“Sibling rivalry,” I declared, and Momma looked at me as if I was speaking Chinese.
Slowly, she rose. “This is ridiculous,” she muttered, and went off to Cathy’s room to speak to her.
I went to mine to start my homework.
Because of how I acted afterward, Cathy thought I was as upset about Momma getting pregnant as she was. I’ll admit here that I wasn’t overjoyed. I would describe it more as being disappointed in both our parents, especially Daddy.
I thought Daddy was a very smart man, even though he wasn’t what anyone might describe as rich or the top man in his field at the moment. Actually, I was under the impression that he was getting ready to make some very brilliant move. Whenever we were alone lately, maybe watching the news, which usually bored both Momma and Cathy, and there was a story about someone who had done something very important or made a lot of money, he would say things like, “That’s the way it will be for us someday, Christopher. Someday we’re going to live in a really nice house, a big house, and your mother will have all of the things she spends hours admiring in magazines or reading about in one of her romance novels.
“Cathy will train with the best to be a dancer, and you’re going to attend one of the better medical schools. We won’t have to worry about the cost of anything. We’re going to travel a lot, too. I always wanted to do a lot of traveling.
“You get your curiosity about life from me, you know, even though I was never interested in medicine. Oh, I always respected doctors and still do, but I want to take us all on European trips and trips to Asia and safaris in Africa. The nicer ones, of course. Your mother won’t stand for camping out in tents. Nothing like that. We’ll always go first-class.
“We’ll even go on the ‘Queen Mary,’ ” he said.
Sometimes, when I sat with him and listened to him talk like this, it seemed to me he was just thinking out loud. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was just going on and on about owning a boat or a very expensive automobile and a wardrobe of the finest custom-made clothes.
I wo
uld never think of him as a dreamer. I thought he was voicing real plans. Someday soon, he would come walking into the house and announce that we had it. He would either have a bigger, more important, very high-paying executive position or have made a wise investment, and we would be very rich.
Why wouldn’t I think this about my father? Until now, he had never made a terribly foolish mistake. At least, as far as I knew.
So even though I had my suspicions, when Cathy and I came home from school today, the furthest thing from my mind was that Momma would tell us she was pregnant. Maybe I had snuffed out my suspicions because I didn’t want to believe them.
See? No matter what Cathy says about me, I am not Mr. Perfect, and I will admit when I make a mistake. I don’t need to go to a therapist to know why I snuffed out the truth that was as plain as day, and it’s not because of sibling rivalry. I’m far above that.
First, I don’t want to think my father is that careless, and second, I don’t want to see my mother worn down by caring for babies.
Just think of it. I am nearly ten, and Cathy is nearly eight. That’s a long time between children. Momma isn’t used to being up all night and changing diapers and doing feedings, and with Daddy’s travel schedule, he won’t be that much of a help.
What I know in my heart is that if Momma starts looking dragged out and sees her beauty being sacrificed, she will be one very, very unhappy woman.
Daddy cherishes his private time, too. He loves going with his friends to play tennis when he’s off or to play golf with his business associates. He doesn’t have all that much time off. There have been many weekends when his travel has taken him into Sundays, too. It’s not hard to imagine Momma telling him she is working seven days a week, so when he is free, he is going to have to lend more than just a helping hand now. He is going to have to give her free time to do her window-shopping or have lunch with her girlfriends, not to mention taking us shopping.
At this point in their lives, why did they decide to take on new children? I didn’t think they would have sexual accidents. I thought Daddy would be more careful, or if he wasn’t, my mother would certainly be. There is something going on here that I don’t know. Did Daddy promise our mother something if she would agree to have more children? Our lives are too cluttered with secrets, and I don’t like thinking that whatever they are, they are deliberately being kept from me.