The Woman in the Wall (4 page)

To be honest, once I got over the shock of having strangers in the house, I enjoyed having them there. It was interesting, trying to follow their loves and hates and jealousies, and I liked watching them devour the little treats I made for them. But it did mean that I became trapped within the walls, like a fly encased in amber. I could never come out into the house proper except during the small hours when everyone slept, for fear of running into a fledgling musical group in rehearsal, a mixed group of boys and girls painting their fingernails black, or a solitary fifteen-year-old sobbing her heart out alone on a staircase.

Even though Andrea herself never saw me anymore, she seemed at first to be afraid her friends might catch sight of me. Whenever she came into a room with them, she would peer anxiously into the dark corners and rummage among the couch cushions before she'd let them sit down. Perhaps she didn't want them to hurt me, but I think that maybe she was a little ashamed to have such an odd sister.

Silent and unseen I remained, and so I suppose at last I became for her a half-remembered family myth, a strange story that mustn't be told. And since she couldn't share the joke with her friends, she pushed me to the back of her mind and her life.

Mother and Kirsty, on the other hand, didn't give up hope for a long time that I might be coaxed out of hiding.

Kirsty laid little "Anna traps": a box propped up on a stick and baited with a cookie—often one I'd baked myself. It seemed rude to just take the cookie and go away, and even ruder to pretend I hadn't seen it. So I liked to leave something in its place, like a crocheted skirt for her doll Bethany, or a little jar of hard candies tied with a pretty ribbon.

She talked to me often and included me in her games.

"Let's play queens and kings, Anna. You be the queen," she would say, "Bethany can be the king. And I'll be the beautiful princess." Then, even though I never said a word, she would argue with my interpretation of the queen's role.

"Don't be silly, Anna," she'd say. "
Queens
don't do the dishes. The
servants
do the dishes."

In a way I became what Mrs. Waltzhammer had thought I was: Kirsty's imaginary friend.

Mother took a more straightforward approach.

"It's all right, Anna, you win," she said. "I won't make you go to school. You can come out now."

When I didn't come out, she said it again. Sometimes she said it in anger, sometimes in sorrow. But I didn't come out. I knew how much it mattered to her that others see me, so that they would believe in my existence. I remembered how angry she got when she believed that Mrs. Waltzhammer thought she was crazy. I couldn't trust her.

I tried hard to make up for my disobedience. I cooked and cleaned and sewed and kept the house in good repair. I often left them little presents that I had made: toys for Kirsty, a jewelry box of inlaid woods for Andrea, an intricately carved and painted necklace for Mother.

But I wouldn't come out.

Finally even Mother and Kirsty went for weeks at a time without speaking to me. When they did speak it was usually because they needed something. They began to forget that I was a real flesh-and-blood person; they confused me with the house itself. I didn't mind; I often thought of myself the same way. Every night Mother kissed her hand and pressed the kiss to the wall of whatever room she happened to be standing in at the time. "Goodnight, Anna," she would murmur, and then climb the stairs to bed.

Quite often I would be moving silently through my passageways and hear just the tag end of a whispered communication from Kirsty: "...and maroon satin on top. Don't you think that would look great, Anna? But don't bother if you don't have time. Thanks." Or Mother would say, "...fix the washer, Anna? I think it needs to be replaced." They thought of me, you see, as a kind of disembodied spirit, present and listening behind any wall of the house at any time.

I did try to honor these requests as best I could, but of course I often got things stupidly wrong, thinking that Kirsty wanted a ballgown for dress-up when what she actually wanted was a baseball jacket in the school colors. Or that Mother wanted me to put a new washer in the bathroom faucet when really it was the clothes washer that had stopped in mid-cycle and she wondered whether it should be repaired or replaced.

The other reason my family talked to me now and then was because I kept taking things and forgetting to return them. Even Andrea would mutter "Annadammit" under her breath and slap the wall with her hand whenever she missed something.

Well, I
needed
things. I naturally had a full set of sewing and carpentry tools inside the walls, but there are always times when you really, truly, have to have a nutcracker, for instance, or Volume II of the encyclopedia (AUST to BLIZZ). Or else sometimes I would start to mend something and get distracted halfway through. Then whatever the thing was would sit there in some dark corner until one of my family yelled for it. I might add that I often got the blame for taking things I had never touched.

It got pretty crowded in my rooms and passageways, to tell you the truth. I installed hooks and racks and shelves to keep things off the floor, but frankly, the dusting got to be kind of a nightmare.

Twice a year I did a major cleaning job. I put everything back in its proper place in the main house and swept and scrubbed the empty passageways. But you know how it is; you like a thing to be handy when you want it. Little by little one object and then another found its way back into my burrow. Two weeks after spring cleaning I'd be moving snakewise through the passageways again.

I was not entirely cut off from news of the great world. I saw snatches of television when I passed through the back parlor passageway and the set was on. It was never really comfortable watching it standing up, though, so I didn't make a habit of it. We also had a large library of books which I read and reread, and occasionally I rescued the odd magazine or newspaper before it was thrown out.

I even got some formal education, of sorts. Kirsty enjoyed playing school. She was always the teacher, and I was always the pupil. Besides delivering some rather silly lectures about a country she called Double Pink Ponyland, and scolding me for imaginary misbehavior, she insisted that I do the same homework that she did.

"I'm leaving my social studies and math books right here on the hall table, Anna," she would announce loudly. "Do the problems on
[>]
and read Chapter Six."

I didn't want to hurt her feelings, so I did what she asked, even though the work was ridiculously easy. Sometimes I would see her studying my answers and then furtively changing her own paper to match mine.

Every once in a while I let Kirsty see me. It pleased her and did me no harm. I'd creep up behind her as she brushed her brown hair in the full-length mirror in the bathroom, and then slip away when she turned around. If she was sad, I would reach out and touch her hand. Kirsty hardly frightened me at all. I loved her.

In its way it was a good life.

But then I turned twelve.

That was a terrible time, the years between twelve and fourteen. I, who was never unwell, got sick. Or sort of sick; I was wounded in some mysterious way. I don't really want to go into the details of exactly what was wrong with me. It's kind of personal.

The, um, injury wasn't the only problem. I got two little pink bumps on my chest and hundreds of big red bumps on my face. I gained weight in unexpected places. Hair grew where no hair should grow. I—

Oh, never mind. I can't believe I'm telling you this. It's funny, you know? I feel that I can tell you, a perfect stranger, things I wouldn't dream of mentioning to Mother, or Kirsty, or Andrea. Or even my long-lost father. Or especially my long-lost father, come to think of it.

Perhaps I can talk to you like this because you can't see me or touch me or speak to me. You are like the house, that way. You listen without comment, or at least without any comment that I can hear. Whatever you may think of me, even if you think I'm a fool and a worm and a disgusting object, you can never, ever tell me so. I find that soothing in a confidante.

I didn't tell Mother about my troubles. If only it had been a less embarrassing affliction, I might have. I could have left a note, asking for advice. But these things were happening in the most private, secret parts of me, and I couldn't bear that she should know about it. I imagined her reading my note aloud to Kirsty and Andrea, and the shock and horror on their faces. No, I couldn't tell her.

Sometimes I thought I would probably die, and then again sometimes I thought that I probably wouldn't, and that almost frightened me more. Because you see, if I wasn't dying that meant I was changing, changing beyond any hope of recall.

I don't think I like change very much.

After a few months when I didn't die, I decided that I was being transformed into an altogether different kind of animal. In punishment for my eccentric lifestyle, I was turning into some sort of fat, hairy, bleeding monster with skin eruptions.

Accepting my doom, I began to stoop as I walked and let my hair fall over my face. I had always been fastidious in my hygiene, but now I washed myself less often so that I wouldn't have to witness any more changes in my body. And immediately my suspicions about my new nature were confirmed: when I didn't wash I smelled horrible. I smelled much worse, I mean, than I had before when I didn't wash. My perspiration now had a rank odor that appalled me.

I hung my head in shame and wished with all my heart that I could just peacefully pass out of life, that my flesh would wither away into air and darkness, and my bones become one with the bones of the house.

But that didn't happen. My thirteenth birthday came and went and I was still eating and drinking and breathing. In fact, I was eating like a horse. My appetite had always been delicate; I normally consumed less than a tenth of what Kirsty or Andrea or Mother did. Now I ate constantly, trying to dull the ache in my stomach.

Once or twice I tried to stop eating altogether, thinking that I could in this way put an end to my unhappy existence, but I always ended up in the main kitchen at two in the morning, steadily stuffing the leftovers from dinner into my mouth.

One night I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the toaster. I had formed a habit whenever I passed the refrigerator of opening the door and staring moodily inside, and that was what I was doing now. I was gnawing ravenously on a cold chicken leg. My hair was matted and greasy. My skin was a flat, dingy gray with angry red pustules scattered across it. I had not changed or washed in a week or more.

It was true. I
had
become a monster, and a dirty, disgusting monster at that. If Andrea or any of her friends had seen me, if Mother or even Kirsty had seen me as I was now, they would have been horrified. They would have pointed at me and screamed in terror.

I stared at myself in the toaster. I straightened my back and pulled my hair out of my eyes.

Was I really a monster? Or was I just plain dirty? If I washed and combed my hair, cleaned the dirt out from under my nails, and changed into clean clothes, would I not be recognizably a human being? I thought that perhaps I would. Even though I knew that deep inside I had changed forever, maybe it didn't have to be so obvious.

I closed the refrigerator door and climbed up on the kitchen counter. I would take a bath right away and see. That was a problem, though. I was finding it harder and harder these days to squeeze myself into the kitchen sink.

Ever since I moved inside the wall, I had washed myself in the sink, either in the laundry tub on my side of the wall or in the main kitchen sink when the rest of the household had gone to bed. I couldn't use the bathtub because I had no entrance into the bathroom through the tiled walls. So once I got into the tub, I was trapped in the bathroom, naked and vulnerable. The kitchen sink, on the other hand, was right next to the broom closet, which led directly into my own kitchen on the other side of the wall.

But I didn't seem to fit in the kitchen sink anymore. My arms and legs hung out over the counter tops and my elbow kept getting in the way of the faucet. Even the laundry tub on my side of the wall was much too small.

I quickly found a solution. I took a shower instead. Standing up, I hosed myself down with the spray nozzle. This worked beautifully. I scrubbed and soaped myself all over, and soon I was pink and sweet smelling again. I trimmed and cleaned my nails. I massaged a little conditioning oil into my hair and, working patiently, combed out the knots. Then I climbed into a clean nightgown Kirsty had outgrown. All of my own clothes had shrunk mysteriously. They were painfully tight around the chest, and the bottoms of the leggings had climbed halfway up my shins.

Once again, I studied my reflection in the toaster. It was a little hard to see myself, but on the whole, I thought I looked more human than monstrous. In any case, I smelled much nicer. I resolved not to let myself get into such a state again. If I
was
a monster, I would be a clean, self-respecting monster.

The next day I began work on several new sets of clothes. Kirsty's nightgown was too big for me, of course, but not nearly as big as I would have expected. Evidently I had grown, which explained the difficulty I had been having recently in navigating through some of my narrower passages. I very much hoped that I wouldn't grow much more, or I'd soon be in serious trouble.

Once my new wardrobe was complete, I looked around myself for something else to do. During the whole of that dreadful time, I had sat sluggish and slothful, my hands idle in my lap. I had let things drift, and the house was beginning to show the signs of my neglect.

I had stopped baking and sewing. My workshop sat empty, gathering dust; I had only done repairs when absolutely necessary. No longer did I spend hours making mechanical toys for Kirsty or creating stylish hats for Mother or hand-painted vests for Andrea. I had withdrawn entirely from family life. I never watched them any more, or Andrea's friends either, although the walls vibrated with their music and hummed with their lives. All that had simply faded to noises heard from behind a wall, laughter from a party to which I had not been invited.