Secret Dreams (54 page)

Fräulein ground her teeth. “How did Î know? Do you think I remember every dirty little thing?” She pressed her fingers to her head. A vision appeared, herself as a little girl. She was reaching for the shelf of china horses. “Yes, I saw them,” Fräulein told him. “I saw them the day the horses died. All Mother's horses died together….”

* * *

The herd of Mothers precious china horses pranced across the high shelf in a frozen imitation of life. Little It picked up one horse. A fiery American Indian war pony at full gallop. She had the delicious feeling of holding on to her potty-go. Holding on and knowing she could release it anytime. Squirming and crossing her legs as she reached toward the shelf. Seeing the brass pot in the corner and knowing it was there. How grand Mothers face would be when she opened the door. Just like Little It waking up bald. Surprised.

And wonderful.

The morning passed slowly. Little It broke every horse. Snapping the hoof off one. Cracking the head off another. She stepped on some with her leather shoes until nothing but colored glass fragments remained. She even dropped one out the window, watching it skitter down the brick wall and shatter on the pavement in the narrow gap below. Horse after horse. Soon all the horses were dead.

When Mother came in to say “Now promise me you'll be good —” her shoes crunched on the broken glass. She had stepped on the head of the white Arabian gelding, which had been neighing fiercely at the sky. All around lay bits and pieces. A hoof. A tail. A glass base of painted turf with a snapped foreleg. The rounded shard of a thundering flank —

Mother came for her, white-eyed, her mouth dripping. How odd to see Mother's sharp fingernails straining through the thin leather of her black kid gloves. A long wail filled the room. Little It fled down the empty hall, calling, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” as the wail pursued her.

Father sat in the parlor chair by the fire.

But not alone.

Instead she saw the shamed face of her brother, pink and sweaty from the heat. Father had yanked down the boy's pants and was slapping his round white bottom, turning it redder and redder. Brother whimpered, eyes glistening with tears. And his round behind showed glowing handprints with each slap. Suddenly Father hauled him around so Brother sat, his bare bottom on Father's thighs. The boy wriggled and squirmed as Father's hands milked his body, and every so often Little It saw the oily worm vanish as Brother whimpered, “No, Father! Please, Father!”

* * *

“Fräulein!” Herr Doktor cried angrily. “Stop this at once! Do you hear me? Stop it now!”

“It's true! It's true!” she shrieked back.

The drapes flew apart with a bang. Sunlight streamed into the dark room. Fräulein hid her eyes. “True! True! True!” she screeched through her hands. Herr Doktor tore them from her face. The blinding light streamed into her head, the shock shutting her mouth. She wrenched her body from side to side in the awful silence.

Herr Doktors hard voice filled the room.

“Fräulein! Listen! You are an
only
child.”

She choked on a sob. Yes, yes, the simple, dirty facts.

“You have no brother.”

Herr Doktor closed the drapes. Fräulein sank into a corner of the couch. She buried her head, muttering, “Yes, alone. My own alone. No brudder. No fahder. No mudder. Just my own alone …” She weakly lifted her pasty white face, imploring him. “Excuse me. I'm very —-1 have to —”

She never finished.

Lurching from his couch, she threw up on his desk in a great bubbling rush like a heaving fountain. Herr Doktor leaped from his chair, barking, “Good heavens!” And at that moment the maid knocked on the office door, informing him that the hour was over and another patient waited in the dining room.

Fräulein stood before his desk, shaking like a leaf.

“Wipe your mouth,” he told her. “Go out the side door. Helga will show you where to wash, or rest if you want. I'll see you tomorrow.”

Fräulein stared vaguely at him. At the mess of his desk with her vomit settling over it — reeking now. “Tomorrow,” he insisted. She turned meekly and left. Gray in the face. Too weak to argue. Helga the maid showed her where to wash up, without so much as a raised eyebrow. She rested for a while on the same divan as on the night of the party. After fifteen minutes she stopped sweating and went home. How Herr Doktor managed the mess on his desk she didn't know and didn't care. At home she put on tea and made toast. She swept a pile of university preparatory books from her table and sat there drinking tea and eating toast, the crumbs going everywhere.

Once upon a time I knew how to study
, she thought. Did I actually sit in a classroom with other children, at a wooden desk, with books and pencils, and a teacher standing at the blackboard? But with gravelly toast in the corners of her mouth, she didn't want to think how far off that had been, in what lost lifetime. And she didn't feel like studying now anyway. She could still taste the sour tang on her tongue. She reached into the pile of books, into the mess of papers, searching for the ugly picture book. The book of the Black Time. Would she see its title correctly now? She had, once upon a time….

Why couldn't she have just stayed a safe little egg without a cen^ ter and never given birth to herself?

Why?

Because seeing things clearly was what being sane meant. That's why she never saw her precious book's title right. Because she herself was still not seeing right. And when she saw it long ago, first as a bee egg and then in her ancient dream tale, she had stepped into a sealed room in the mansion of her mind, where she found the stored belongings of her past life under sheets and cobwebs. Now she knew for certain no Burghive Bee Hospital existed. No Gurgler to strangle in the room next door. No horses having bowel movements between her parents' dummy heads. No people talking in blocky, hollow phrases at dinner parties. No ancient dream time where the People of the Wood tore a stag to shreds. No Hunt-hers. No Hag. No Mother of Stone. And no brother buggered on Father's lap.

Mere shades on a cave wall in the hospital mountain. Dayroom faces in the People of the Wood. A bloody sacrifice in the remnants of Mother's china horses, cast down long ago. Dummy faces in the dimly remembered conversations of a lonely little girl named Ninny Blue Toes talking with her dolly and velvet rabbit.

With a deep sigh that sounded like
I'm almost sane
, she tried to see that last memory as it really happened. Little It had smashed all Mother's china horses. And Mother meant to kill Little It, stomp her and mash her for the terrible thing she had done. Once again she was a little girl and fled down the empty hall, crying, “Daddy! Daddy!”

Father was reading from his favorite picture book, with the pretty color drawings inside. Looking up, surprised, he caught her as she leaped into his arms. Then kissed her, cooing, ‘There now, there now …”

His voice trailed off. Little It tried to burrow into his big man's body. Mother's sneering face floated in the air. Then, contemptuously:

“Why, if it isn't my dear Herr Küssen, Herr Kiss-Kiss and his Kitty Kat.” Little It felt a bubbling gas pain inside — not the delicious hold-on-to feeling but a cold and hungry pressing, crawling around the slow corners of her bowels, forcing its way out. She held on tight as Mother glided into the room, reaching with both hands to take her away. “Give her to me,” Mother said politely, as if nothing were wrong. “Now, if you please …”

“What do you want with her?” he snapped. But suddenly, as if Mother knew his very thoughts, Father's arms began to tremble.

“You
will
hand her over,” Mother said with a smile. “Because I know about you two. I'll tell our maid. I'll tell the shop people. I'll tell your business associates. And if only one person believes me, you'll still be ruined. The police will come to the house. With their questions. I'll give them the hairbrush and say I saw you doing it to her —”

Mother licked her lips, savoring the sick taste of her words. “I own you. From the second I let you touch her, I
owned
you. And the little beggar too.”

Father's arms squeezed tighter and tighter. She struggled to break free, but the more Mother sneered, the stronger the arms held on. She felt the slow fear bubbling in her guts come pressing out. She was letting loose, going all warm and juicy down Father's leg. And when Mother saw, she clutched her sides and leaned weakly on the doorframe for support. There was only the warm juice, Mothers terrifying soft laughter, Father quaking with rage. And Little It alone. Ashamed …

Rough hands hoisted her in the air, then threw
⁷
her across the big man's knees. Panties ripped down. The hot strike of pain. Father spanked her wet, runny bottom, while deep inside a clutching mouth spastically opened and closed. Silently screaming each time the burning hand struck. The smell of her potty-go everywhere. While the man cried, “You don't own me! No one owns me!”

She thought it would never end. Sweat ran down her face as Mother snarled gleefully, “Go on! I'll tell them anyway! The whole neighborhood! The world'“

Father's hand came and came. Her behind turned into a warm, wet throb, growing larger and larger, swelling to the size of a pumpkin, then the size of a horse, then filling the room. Little It thought it would never stop. She did not feel her Father's single slaps any longer but only the dull hugeness of her behind. Yet when he struck she felt a distant pulse, throbbing like the beat of a muffled drum. Mother's face had turned into that of a donkey, braying, “Herr Küssen and the Kitty Kat! Herr Kiss-Kiss and the Kitty Kat!”

What did those silly words mean? The last thing she saw was Father's picture book, which had fallen on the floor. The open pages calling her. Beckoning her to leave the awful room and vanish safe inside. And then her huge rear end finally filled the universe, throbbing into infinity with a light of its own.

“Behold the Queen of Sparta with the hot rear end!” Fräulein sat once more in Herr Doktors dark office. “Really two people all along. My M-mother as the Queen. And ! … I the hot rear end.” She pushed her precious book across his desk. She saw the title clearly. No mutations. No mistakes:

THE EVIDENCE OF ANCIENT POTTERY

Artifacts from the

Prehistoric Peoples

of the

Péloponnèse

Herr Doktor looked silently at the cover.

“Inside is everything we talked about. The Queen who rules the earth and the sky at night. The killing and the sacrifice. How they lay with their women in her temple under the moon …”

Clearly the book had seen much wear. The corners were frayed, ragged edges along the binding. Slowly, he opened it. Inside even worse. The title-page gone. The frontispiece in tatters. Page after page: contents, introduction, the first few color plates. Herr Doktor flipped faster and faster, looking for something to lock his eyes onto. But the book contained nothing but ribbons.

The entire volume, it seemed, had been ripped to shreds.

“But I wasn't crazy then. Not yet.” Fräulein took a handkerchief from her sleeve and patted her damp face. “Mother created me. Like a story or a painting. And it took all her ingenuity and effort. She never quite terrorized me into blind obedience. I was terrified, yes — but never obedient. And time passed….”

Her younger childhood and middle childhood. They tried giving her an education, as parents were supposed to do. On many days the maid dressed her for school, brought her to the schoolhouse, and sat her at a wooden desk. The other children stared at her but kept away,-they seemed afraid. And the teacher who stood at the front largely ignored her too, approaching her desk only to open her workbook to the proper spot. Little It managed to turn the pages and follow along, closing her workbook when the lesson had finished. But she rarely spoke in class, and the teacher seldom asked her questions. At the end of the day the maid came to the schoolhouse door to bring her home…. Years dripped by like drops from a rusty pipe…. She grew too big for her clothes, which she wore till they faded, became tattered, then fell apart. Mother never bought her new ones to wear, except for appearance's sake, so as not to arouse the attention of her schoolmates or strangers on the street.

“Until I was nine or ten, she crammed me in a beat-up high chair.” Little It towered awkwardly over the kitchen table. Having to lean down to reach her food. Never eating enough. Too cramped. Too crushed to run away. A mannikin. “But always a secret part of me safe from her.” Fräulein lowered her voice. “What I did in private.”

She touched the handkerchief to her mouth in dread, then kneaded it into a ball as if to wring some strength from it. Time and again she stole into Mother's bedroom to steal precious moments with that lovely hairbrush and its lovely handle. And when Mother caught her, which was often, she chased her, dragging her by the hair, slinging her into the high chair, where she tied her down with cords. And when Mother left the kitchen, she forgot Little It existed. In time she learned to wriggle free. Fleeing to the toilet, locking herself in. Then sitting in the dark for minutes or hours until Mother tired of her shouting and left Little It alone. Then later, in the safe and quiet, she would come creeping out.

“She used to do something to make my bottom sore. Concoctions spooned down my throat while I sat strapped to the chair.” The spoonfuls gagged her and burned their way out as she shivered over the chamber pot or the toilet.

“Delicious brush. Slapped thigh. Gagging on the choke spoon. Sore red bottom. Pleasure and pain all mixed up between my legs until I didn't know one from the other. Then hiding in the pages of the book. Forgetting who Î was. Or where …”

Fräulein unwound the knotted handkerchief, searching its folds for answers. “Father's picture book was my escape. Begging the pages to take me away. I found a place to be alone with the book, where no one could find me….”