Secrets of Foxworth (6 page)

Nevertheless, nothing would stop me from turning these pages, I thought, and began again.

Our lives are full of secrets. Cathy likes to think love is what floats about the most in our home. She thinks this way because she listens in on our parents talking to each other whenever she can. I see how she does it. She pretends to be busy with something and not be paying attention, but she's hanging on their every word, especially the way they express how much they love each other. I know when she comes running into my room to tell me about something they've said that she is probably exaggerating.

Cathy can be very dramatic. I think she believes we live in a movie or something and that our mother and father are famous stars because Daddy is so handsome and Momma is so beautiful.

She came running in this afternoon to tell me that Daddy practically “swooned” over Momma when he saw her. I had the feeling that she got the word “swooned” from our mother, who probably has told her that Daddy swooned over something she did with her hair or clothes. Cathy would never have come up with a word like that on her own.

Our mother had gone to the beauty salon
earlier today and had her nails done. Momma lets Cathy go into her bathroom when she's taking a bath in her perfumed bubble water sometimes. They leave the door open so I can see them. Momma isn't shy about being naked in front of us. I know she is very proud of her figure, which is a figure most women envy, but she also knows I try to think of the human body the way a doctor should. There have been times when she'll ask me to wash her back for her. Cathy stands to the side, watching enviously, so I have to let her do it, too.

Cathy often sits on the edge of the tub and listens to our mother go on and on about beauty tips so that when she's old enough, she'll be ready. On more than one occasion, I've seen Cathy imitating her, luxuriating in her own bath and pretending to put on makeup the way Momma does. She comes into my room when she does her hair and puts on a dress to ask me how she looks. Twice this week, she asked me to wash her back the way I would wash Momma's. Usually, I do it too quickly, and she complains.

“Am I as beautiful as our mother?” she always wants to know.

“No,” I tell her. “Not yet. You're too young to be beautiful like our mother.”

She hates my answers. “You're so correct all the time, Christopher. Ugh!” she cries, frustrated, and charges out to complain about me.

I am correct. It's important to me to be correct, and I don't want to live in some fantasy, some movie. Facts are more important than dreams.

Cathy's a girl. She may never believe that facts are more important. I do know some women who do, especially some of my teachers, like Miss Rober, who teaches math and taps the blackboard so hard to make a decimal point that she often breaks the chalk. Miss Rober is fifty-something and has never been married. But that doesn't mean she doesn't wish she was.

Last week, I told Momma that, and she looked at me funny and asked, “How do you know she does? Some women don't, you know.”

“She's not a nun, Momma. She wears her clothes to attract men, very tight sweaters and skirts. She likes to show cleavage.”

“Christopher Dollanganger! I do believe you're getting too old for your age,” she said, which at first I thought was just a funny misstatement but later understood.

Maybe she won't be asking me to wash her back as much or will close her door whenever she gets dressed. She won't come in on me when I bathe and will avoid looking at me when I get dressed.

There will be something between us that has never been: embarrassment.

I hope it doesn't come to that, but then again, I know it's as inevitable as facial hair and shaving.

I paused to take a breath. I couldn't remember when my father had looked uncomfortable looking at me when I was naked. Until she became ill, Mom would help me bathe. Once I was old enough to bathe or shower myself, even she stayed out of the bathroom. And of course, my father was embarrassed even to see me in my underwear now. In fact, it was Suzette's mother who took me for my first bra. When she volunteered for the job, Dad was visibly relieved. Mrs. Osterhouse was always offering to help me do things when it came to female necessities, but until now, I was pretty independent. Dad trusted me to do the right things anyway.

Still, I couldn't help but envision the Dollanganger household, especially a mother parading around naked in front of a son who was almost ten.

Was Christopher really so adult about this so early in his life? Was this the way young men and young women thought of family members naked when they were destined to become doctors?

I was torn between blushing at the thought of all this nudity and trying to think like they obviously did about one another, thinking that there was nothing about them that they should be ashamed to reveal. I wanted to admire them for that, but I couldn't help thinking about Suzette telling Lana and me about the time she saw her older brother, Jason, exploring himself and what happened as a result. I could never look at Jason afterward without thinking about it. How far would Christopher go when it came to all the sexual questions that were bound to come? Right now, he seemed so . . . indifferent. So like a scientist.

Was he capable of love? Did he ever have a girlfriend?

I returned to the pages, now feeling more like a voyeur, someone peeping in through a window and seeing the most intimate moments in the life of a family. There was a part of me that wanted to close the diary, that felt guilty about it and thought maybe my father was right, but a stronger part of me wanted to go on until I knew and understood what had really happened.

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 ever.

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.