“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.
I continued my lessons with Lamar Rensdale, even though I didn’t have much time to practice. I knew he was preparing to go to New York. This time he was planning to stay to teach music at Juilliard. “It’s better than eking out an existence in a place that treats any artist with scorn,” he’d explained. He’d called to tell me his good news the night before, sounding terribly excited. “I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone of my appointment, Audrina. And you must swear to go on with your music study. Someday I know I’m going to sit in an audience and say to myself that I was the one who started Audrina Adare on the road to fame.”
I hadn’t told a soul except Arden, that I’d decided to drop by Mr. Rensdale’s to say goodbye. In my pocket I had a small farewell gift, a pair of gold cuff links that had belonged to my maternal grandfather.
Once Lamar Rensdale had seemed the neatest man possible. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Now his once impeccable lawn and garden was untended and cluttered with junk. The grass needed mowing, the weeds needed pulling, and beer cans were rolling in the wind. He hadn’t even raked the leaves or torn down the old bird nests over his door. I started to knock at the back door, but at the slight touch of my knuckles, it swung open, helped by the strong gust of wind that blew in behind me.
Whenever I entered his home I’d hear him at the piano, and if he wasn’t there, he’d be in the kitchen. Since the house was very quiet, I presumed he’d gone into the city. I decided to just leave my gift with a note and then sit on the porch and wait for Arden to come round and pick me up. I began to scribble a note on his kitchen memo pad.
“Dear Mr. Rensdale,” I’d written when I heard a noise coming from the living room. I parted my lips to call out when I heard a familiar girlish giggle. Stiffening, I shuddered to think that all those lurid tales Vera had told me might be true. I tiptoed to the kitchen door and eased it open just a bit. Mr. Rensdale and Vera were in the living room. A lively log fire was crackling in the fireplace, spitting sparks up the chimney. November had just turned cold enough for fires. This afternoon was dreary, but with the fire it seemed very cozy and cheerful in that small room as Lamar Rensdale moved to put a record on the player. Sweetly it filled the house with Schubert’s “Serenade,” and now I knew I was secretly witnessing a scene of seduction.
I stood there, unable to decide what to do. It would be an hour or more before Arden came for me. It was such a long walk home and the highway was dangerous on foot. I couldn’t be so foolhardy as to hitchhike. No, I’d go sit on the back porch, despite the cold. Instead of moving, I debated back and forth as a good reason to watch what was going on in the living room.
“You see,” said Lamar Rensdale, “you can dance just fine. I told you your limp is hardly noticeable. You make too much of it, Vera. When a girl is as pretty as you are, and has your kind of figure, no man is going to notice one small flaw …”
“Then my limp is a flaw? Lamar, I was hoping you’d see me as perfect.” Her voice had a plaintive, sweet tone, reproachful yet touching. Did she really love him? How could she? She’d only just turned sixteen last week.
“Really, Vera, you are very pretty, and very appealing, and very seductive. But you’re too young for a man my age. For two years we’ve had wonderful times together and I hope you never regret one moment. But now I’m leaving. You should find a boy your own age, a boy who’ll marry you and take you away from that house you seem to hate.”
“You said you loved me, and now you’re talking as if you don’t,” wailed Vera, tears beginning to streak down
her cheeks. “You never did, did you? You just said that so I’d go to bed with you … and now that you’re tired of me, you want someone new. And I love you so much!”
“Of course I love you, Vera. But I’m not ready to get married. You know I need that professor’s assignment. I told them I wasn’t married, and they liked that. They thought I’d be more devoted to teaching. Vera, please remember that I am not the only man in the world.”
“For me you are!” she wailed louder. “I love you. I’d die for you. I gave myself to you. You seduced me and swore to me you’d always love me, and now that I’m pregnant, you don’t want me!”
Deeply shocked, I cringed backward.
Mr. Rensdale forced a controlled laugh. “My dear girl, you cannot possibly be pregnant. Don’t try that old trick with me.”
“But I am,” she wailed. When this seemed to have no effect, she moved, pouted, then snuggled closer in his arms. She pressed against him so tightly they seemed welded together. “Lamar, you do love me, I know that you do. Make love to me again, right now. Let me prove again how much I can thrill you …” I gasped to see how she ran her hands all over his back, then down to his buttocks even as she parted her lips and kissed him with such wild passion I felt giddy just watching. She did something then that I couldn’t see while the music still played, and the fire still burned.
“Don’t…” he pleaded as she became more aggressive and tugged at the zipper of his trousers. “Audrina mentioned something last night about dropping in to say goodbye …”
“Are you teaching her what you’ve taught me?” asked Vera in a sultry low voice. “I’ll bet I’m ten times better, better than—”
He grabbed her then and shook her by her shoulders as he shouted, “Stop saying things like that! Audrina is a lovely, innocent girl. The Lord alone knows how the two of you could turn out so different.”
As he continued to scold her, Vera lifted her green sweater to show her naked breasts. They bobbed as he kept shaking and she kept laughing. Even as he shook her, she unfastened her skirt and let it fall to the floor. In another second her thumbs were hooked inside her panties and off she snatched them. Lamar Rensdale couldn’t resist staring at her nudity. It seemed silly for her to keep that sweater pulled up under her armpits as she taunted. “You want me, want me, want me … so why don’t you take me—or do I have to do what I did last time… Mr. Rensdale?”
Oh! She was imitating the way I spoke. Suddenly he seized her in his arms and kissed her ruthlessly hard, bending her backwards until I thought she might break. They both fell to the floor, and there they wrestled and kissed, breathing hard with passion, even as they said ugly things to one another. Over and over rolling …
Petrified, as if seven years old and trapped in the rocking chair again, I watched until their violent sexual act was over and Vera was lying naked on top of his long, very hairy body. Tenderly she stroked his cheeks, caressed his hair, kissing his eyelids and nibbling on his ears as she murmured with a certain vicious tone, “If you don’t take me to New York with you, I’ll tell everyone you raped me—and Audrina. The police will throw you in jail, for I’m only sixteen and Audrina is only twelve. They’ll believe me, not you, and never again will you find a decent job. Please don’t make me do that, Lamar, for I love you. Really love you so much it hurts to even say mean things like that to you.” With those words she sat up, turned and began to play with the most intimate parts of his body. His moans of joy followed me out the back door, which I closed softly behind me.
Outside I breathed the cold November air deeply, trying to cleanse my lungs of the musky odor of sex that permeated all those small rooms. I was never going back. No matter what happened, I was never going back.
Silently I sat next to Arden all the way home. “Is everything all right?” he asked. “Why aren’t you talking to me?”
“Everything is fine, Arden.”
“Of course it’s not fine. If it were you’d be babbling away, telling me about Lamar Rensdale and how wonderful he is. But you’re not saying any of that—why not?”
How could I tell him what I was thinking? Vera had boasted only the other day that she’d had sex with Arden, too.
That very evening Vera jumped on me. “You were there, Audrina! You spied on us. If you tell Papa you’ll pay—I’ll see that you pay. I’ll tell him you do the same thing with Arden, and with Lamar, too!” She hurled the gold cuff links I’d left for Mr. Rensdale at me. “I went into the kitchen and found these where you left them on the kitchen table.” Menacingly she limped closer. “I’m warning you right now, if you dare to tell Papa I’ll do something so dreadful you’ll never want to look in a mirror again!”
I hated and despised her so much then that I wanted to hurt her as she threatened to hurt me. “You wanted to be my friend. What a wonderful friend you make, Vera. With you for a friend I don’t need any enemies, do I?”
“No,” she said with a slow smile that lit up her dark eyes with a sinister glow. “With me for your friend you have the best of all possible enemies. I wanted you to love me, Audrina, so you’d be hurt more when you realized how much I hate you! How much I’ve always hated you!”
The vehemence of her shrill words left me quivering. “Why do you hate me so much? What have I done to you?”
She spread her hands wide, indicating the entire house and everything in it. She told me I’d stolen everything that was rightfully hers. “You idiot! How can you be so blind? Can’t you look at me, at my eyes and see who’s my father? I am the First Audrina, not you! Your papa is my father, too! I’m the eldest and I should come first, not you! Papa dated my mother before he even knew your mother, and he made my mother pregnant. Then he saw your mother, who was younger and prettier. But he didn’t say one word to my mother until she told him she was pregnant with me. He refused to believe he was the father and forced my mother to leave town. And that stupid mother of mine did just what he wanted. And all the time she kept thinking that when she came back and he saw me and how pretty I was, he’d want to marry her then. I was only one year old and she had me all fixed up so he’d be impressed—but he wasn’t impressed, for he’d married your mother in the meanwhile. Oh, Audrina, you just don’t know how much I hate and despise him for what he did to both of us. I was just a baby and rejected by my own father. He has never given me any of the things that are rightfully mine. He plans to leave you this house, and all his money, too. He told my mother that—and it belongs to me! Everything here should belong to me!” She sobbed and struck out at me. Quickly I dodged and sprang away. Whirling around, Vera, in her insane rage, hit out at Sylvia. Down flat on her face Sylvia sprawled, screaming at the top of her lungs.
That’s when I ran to tackle Vera, yelling as I did, “Don’t you ever hit Sylvia again, Vera!”
I was on top of Vera, holding her down as she writhed and kicked and tried to scratch out my eyes. She fought me wildly, trying to rake my face with her long, sharp nails. Sylvia was still screaming. I sprang to my feet and ran to pick her up. Using a chair to pull herself up, Vera was finally on her feet. She stumbled toward the bedroom door and the hall outside. She didn’t notice a small prism that Sylvia had been playing with. She stepped on it, lost her balance and fell again to the floor.
Sylvia howled in great distress, but it was Vera who screamed the loudest. When I looked, I was amazed to see great pools of blood on the floor.
With Sylvia in my arms I ran for my aunt. “Aunt Ellsbeth, come quickly! Vera is bleeding all over my bedroom floor!”
Indifferently my aunt looked my way, flour smudged on her chin.
“She’s really bleeding, and the blood is running down her legs …”
Only then did my aunt stride to the sink to wash the flour from her hands. She dried them on her spotless white apron. “Well, come along. I may need your help. There’s a wild, destructive side to that girl, and no doubt she’s managed to get herself in trouble.”
We arrived in time to see Vera crawling on the floor
, drenched with her own blood by now and still bleeding as she pawed through the congealing pools of blood, crying out, “The baby … I’ve lost my baby …” Wild and distraught looking, she raised her head when we entered the room. I hugged Sylvia closer.
“Were you pregnant?” asked my aunt coldly, doing nothing to help her daughter.
“Yes!” screamed Vera, still feeling around in the blood. “I’ve got to have that baby! I’ve got to! I need that baby! It’s my ticket out of this hellhole, and now it’s gone. Help me, Momma, help me save my baby!”
My aunt glanced down at all the blood. “If you’ve lost it, better so.”
Demented looking, Vera’s eyes went wild and her fingers curled around one huge clot of blood that she hurled at her mother. It struck my aunt’s apron and fell to the floor with a sickening clomp. “Now he’ll never take me with him,” Vera wailed.
“Clean up the mess you’ve made, Vera,” ordered my aunt, seizing me by the hand and trying to drag me away. “When I come back I want to see this room as spotless as it was this morning. Use cold water on that rug.”
“Mother,” cried Vera, looking weak now and ready to faint. “I’ve just miscarried—and you worry about the rug?”
“The Oriental is valuable.”
Closing the door behind us, my aunt shoved me in front of her as Sylvia continued to whimper. “I should have known it would happen this way. She’s no good, like her father.” She paused, seeming to reflect before she added, “And yet he made other children without her flaws …”
Feeling sick, I still managed to find a voice. “Is Vera really Papa’s child?”
Without answering, my aunt hurried back to the kitchen, where she immediately washed her hands again, scrubbing them with a brush. She hurled her soiled apron into the laundry sink, which she filled with cold water, and then took a fresh apron from a cabinet drawer. The apron was white with sharp, ironed creases. Once she had the apron strings tied, she began to roll the pie pastry she’d abandoned.