Second Child (16 page)

Doing her best to shut the words out of her mind, Melissa attacked her steak once again, cutting the pieces as
small as she could, forcing them down one by one. When her father leaned over to kiss her good-bye before he and Teri left for the movie, she wanted to cry, but held back her tears as she heard his murmured words.

“Your mother’s right, sweetheart. I know it’s hard to eat when you’re not hungry, but it’s impolite not to finish what’s on your plate.” He gave her an encouraging hug, and she wanted to throw her arms around him and beg him to take her with him, but knew it would do no good.

Her mother had decided she would stay home, and there was no point in arguing.

Arguing would only make it worse.

Twenty minutes later, under her mother’s watchful eyes, she finally finished her dinner. Around her the other empty plates still sat on the table. She was expected to clear them and then help Cora with the dishes. Silently, afraid that whatever she might say would only make her mother angrier, she rose to her feet.

“What do we say?” Phyllis instantly demanded.

Melissa froze, then remembered. “M-May I be excused?”

Phyllis nodded curtly, and Melissa gratefully began stacking the dishes. A moment later she backed through the door separating the butler’s pantry from the kitchen. Cora, who’d already finished all the dishes except those that had been left on the table for Melissa to clear, took the stack of plates from Melissa’s hands. “I guess dinner wasn’t very good tonight, was it?” she said.

“It was fine, Cora. I just wasn’t very hungry.”

“Well, I know how that goes.” Cora sighed, putting the plates into the sink. “Sometimes I have days when the very thought of food just makes me sick to my stomach. And it seems to me a body shouldn’t be forced to eat food it doesn’t want.”

Melissa picked up a dish towel and began drying the silverware as Cora placed it in the rack on the sink. Melissa cast a longing eye on the dishwasher under the counter, but knew better than to suggest they use it. On evenings like this, when she was being punished, the use of the dishwasher was strictly forbidden, even for Cora.

“She has to learn to work,” her mother had said more than once. “I won’t have a spoiled child in the house.”

Melissa had just picked up the last plate from the drainer
when the door from the butler’s pantry flew open, crashing loudly against the kitchen wall. Melissa jumped, then froze as she felt the plate slip out of her grip and shatter on the floor.

There was a slight gasp from Cora, whose eyes instantly went to the door where Phyllis now stood, staring coldly at her daughter. “It’s all right, honey,” the housekeeper said, stooping down to pick up the shards of china. “Those things happen to us all.”

“Don’t, Cora.” Phyllis’s words, though spoken quietly, held a note of authority that made the housekeeper straighten up before she’d touched the broken plate. “The only way Melissa is going to learn not to be clumsy is to take responsibility for her own messes.” Cora hesitated for a moment, as if she weren’t sure what to do, and Phyllis spoke again. “That will be all for tonight, Cora. Melissa will take care of the rest. You may go.”

Wordlessly, knowing better than to argue with her employer, Cora took off her apron and hung it on a peg by the back door. A moment later Melissa, her heart thumping with fear, was alone with her mother.

Phyllis continued to regard her daughter coldly. “I’m afraid we’ll have to have one of our little talks, Melissa,” she said after a silence that seemed to Melissa to have gone on forever. “Clean up this mess, then wait for me in your room.”

Her eyes blurring with tears, Melissa began picking up the pieces of shattered plate. She worked as slowly as she dared, but finally the floor was clean, as were the sink and counter top.

She could put it off no longer.

She went up to her room, and waited for her mother.

As the door opened and Phyllis stepped into the room, Melissa’s eyes went first to her mother’s hands.

They were empty. But then she remembered. If her mother was going to bind her to the bed, she wouldn’t do it now. She’d wait until later, after her father had already gone to bed.

Phyllis closed the door, leaning against it for a moment as she regarded her daughter, who was cowering on the
bed. She hated using the word, even to herself. And yet she knew that that was exactly what Melissa did.

She cowered.

If the child only had some spirit!

She discarded the thought. Melissa had never had any spirit and never would. But the least she could do was learn to behave properly and stop embarrassing her mother.

“Stand up, Melissa,” Phyllis commanded.

Obediently, Melissa scrambled off the bed and stood up straight.

Phyllis eyed Melissa’s clothes with distaste. Teri had appeared for dinner that evening in one of the new outfits she’d bought that day, but Melissa was still wearing the same worn pair of jeans she’d put on after her swim that afternoon, together with a T-shirt that had long ago lost whatever color it might have started with.

“Where are the new clothes Teri picked out for you?” Phyllis asked, her voice deceptively even as she tried to control the same anger that welled up inside her whenever she laid eyes on her daughter.

“I-In my dresser,” Melissa whispered.

“What?” Phyllis asked. “Talk so people can hear you, Melissa!”

“I said they’re in my dresser,” Melissa repeated, her throat threatening to close with each word she spoke.

“Why didn’t you wear them tonight?”

Melissa’s tongue ran nervously over her lips, and her eyes scanned the room as if she were looking for some sort of refuge.

“I—They don’t look right on me,” she finally said. “They don’t fit me very well.”

Phyllis’s nostrils flared and her lips tightened. “Nothing fits you very well, Melissa. Why do you think that is?”

Melissa quailed from the words, but knew she had to answer.

“I—I’m too fat,” she said, her eyes blurring with tears once again.

“And?” Phyllis pressed.

Melissa swallowed the lump that was rising in her throat. “And I don’t stand up as straight as I should,” she said, forcing herself to repeat the horrid catechism her mother had drilled into her for as long as she could remember.

Phyllis’s eyes bored into the trembling child. “And whose fault is that?” Melissa stared at the floor, but said nothing. Phyllis took a step forward, and Melissa pressed closer to the bed. “Whose?” Phyllis demanded once again.

“Mine.” The word issued from Melissa’s throat like the dying gasp of a tiny bird, but finally she looked up at her mother. “It’s my fault, Mama,” she went on, the words suddenly tumbling from her mouth in a babbling stream. “I eat too much, and I eat the wrong things, and I spend too much time reading. I should play with the other kids more, and spend more time at the club.”

“And why don’t you?” Phyllis demanded. “Why don’t you do all the things the other children do? Why do you want to make me ashamed of you?”

“I—I don’t know,” Melissa wailed. She felt her tears threatening to overwhelm her now, and wanted nothing more than to throw herself on the bed, curl up, and close the world out. But she couldn’t do that.

Not now.

Not yet.

She had to stay where she was, and keep facing her mother, and try not to let the words hurt her.

Help me,
she cried out in her mind.
Help me, D’Arcy. Don’t leave me by myself. Please …

“Get your new clothes out of the dresser, Melissa,” Phyllis told her.

Silently calling out to D’Arcy once more, Melissa moved to the dresser and took out the stack of new clothes that Teri had chosen for her. As her mother directed, she placed them on the bed.

“The white shorts,” Phyllis finally said. “Put on the white shorts and the green top.”

Her heart fluttering, Melissa stripped off her jeans and T-shirt, then pulled the shorts on and struggled to get the knit shirt over her head, finally managing to pull it down over her chest.

“Now look at yourself in the mirror.”

Melissa hesitated. She already knew what the clothes looked like on her. She’d already tried them on twice, first in the store and then again when she came home.

And no matter what anyone told her, she knew they didn’t fit her.

The bright colors made her look funny, and the cut of them made her look fat.

“Look!” Phyllis commanded.

She moved across to her daughter, her hands closing on Melissa’s shoulders. Jerking her around, she propelled her toward the mirror. “Look at yourself!” she commanded once more.

As Melissa felt her mother’s fingers dig into her flesh, and winced with the pain of it, she suddenly heard D’Arcy’s voice whispering to her.

It’s all right, Melissa. I’m here. You can go to sleep now.

She felt her mother jerk her toward the mirror, and then she was looking into the glass itself.

But instead of her own image reflected there, she saw D’Arcy, her eyes gentle, smiling at her. The image in the mirror moved toward her, reaching out to her. She felt D’Arcy’s gentle fingers on her cheek, and closed her eyes as her friend’s cool touch brushed away her tears.

The familiar darkness closed around her, and the last words she heard before she drifted away into the blackness were D’Arcy’s.
I’m here now, and you can go to sleep. I’ll take care of you. I’ll take care of everything.

Phyllis felt Melissa’s body relax slightly, and eased her grip on her daughter’s shoulders. “Well?” she demanded. “Tell me what you see.”

Melissa said nothing, and Phyllis’s anger rose again. “Look at yourself!” she screeched. Her grip tightened on Melissa’s shoulders again and she began shaking the girl violently.

Melissa’s head jerked back and forth, but no matter how hard her mother shook her, she uttered no sound.

“You look terrible!” Phyllis hissed. “You’re fat, and you’re ugly, and you don’t even care! Dear God, how can you be my daughter?”

Phyllis propelled Melissa away from the mirror, slamming her into the chair in front of the small vanity. “You could be as pretty as Teri, if you’d just try! But just look at you. Look at your hair! It’s a disgrace!”

She reached out and pulled open the top drawer of the vanity, snatching up the scissors that lay there. A moment later she began cutting off Melissa’s hair, hacking at it with the scissors. Slowly, as Melissa watched in the mirror with
a strange detachment, her hair fell away until all that remained was a ragged bob.

“There!” Phyllis snapped when she’d finished her work. “Look! Isn’t that better? Isn’t it?”

Melissa said nothing, and Phyllis, her whole body trembling with rage and frustration now, abruptly leaned forward. “Answer me!” she screamed. “Why won’t you answer me!”

Melissa remained silent, sitting quietly on the chair in front of the vanity, her eyes fixed on the image in the mirror.

“Fine,” Phyllis said, her hands again clamping down on Melissa’s shoulders. “If you don’t want to talk to me, then you don’t have to. But I suggest you listen to me very carefully, young lady. If you want to spend your entire life all by yourself, I don’t really care. But I will no longer tolerate you being rude to my friends or their children. Do you understand?”

Melissa said nothing at all, nor did she acknowledge her mother’s words with so much as a nod of her head.

Phyllis’s fingers dug deeper into the flesh of her daughter’s shoulders. “I know you can hear me, Melissa. You’re not deaf. So keep listening. I am not going to let you spoil Teri’s life the way you’ve spoiled your own and tried to spoil mine. So tomorrow night, whether you want to or not, you are going to the bonfire. It was very kind of Mrs. Van Arsdale to invite you, and you are not going to insult her by refusing to go. And you are going to be friendly, and polite, and you will not do anything to embarrass me. Now, tell me if you heard what I just said.”

Melissa remained silent and impassive, staring into the mirror.

“All right, Melissa!” Phyllis hissed. “If you want it to be difficult, so be it.” She jerked Melissa to her feet once more and propelled her across the room to the closet. Opening the door, she shoved Melissa inside, then closed the closet again, locking it. “I suggest you think about it,” she said through the door. “I’ll come back in an hour. Perhaps by then you’ll have decided to start behaving the way I raised you to behave.”

She started out of the room, but then her eyes fell on the jeans and T-shirt that were still lying on the floor
where Melissa had left them. Picking up the scissors once more, she cut the offending clothes into pieces, then flung them on the bed.

At last, her frustration with her daughter finally vented, she left the room.

It was nearly ten o’clock when Teri and Charles got back from the movie. Only the light in the foyer was on downstairs, and upstairs they found Phyllis lying in bed, reading. She put her book aside as they came into the bedroom and smiled up at Teri. “How was the movie?”

“Great,” Teri replied. “It was a horror thing, and I’ve never been so scared in my life. But at least I sat through it—Daddy had to go out to the lobby.”

Charles smiled wryly. “I’m afraid cutting people up with machetes just isn’t my cup of tea. But Teri loved every minute of it.”

“Well, I’m certainly glad I didn’t let Melissa go,” Phyllis observed. “She’d have had nightmares for a month.”

“Is she in bed already?” Charles asked, glancing at his watch.

Phyllis nodded. “We had a nice little talk, and then both of us decided to turn in early,” she said. “I think she went to sleep an hour ago.”

The three of them chatted for a few more minutes, and finally Teri kissed her father and stepmother good night and went to her room. She paused in front of the mirror on her closet door, admiring her new clothes once more, then took them off and carefully hung them up. Pulling on her robe, she went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. And then, just as she was about to turn the water on, she heard Melissa’s voice.

“What am I going to do, D’Arcy? What’s Mama going to say? Now she’s going to be mad at me again.”

Going to the door, Teri pressed her ear against it, listening. She could still hear Melissa’s voice, but the words had become indistinct, and it sounded as if Melissa was crying.