Aunt Maria Read Free Page B

toast, dear. The noise wakes Chris up and he comes forth like the skeleton in the cupboard. Snarl, snarl!
    Chris is not usually like this. The first morning, I asked him what was the matter and he said, “Oh, nothing. There’s a ghost in my room.” The second morning he wouldn’t speak. Today I didn’t speak, either.
    Mum has just time to drink a cup of coffee before Aunt Maria is thumping her stick again, for us to get her up. We have to hook her into a corset thing which is like shiny pink armor, and you should just see her knickers. Chris did. He said they would make good trousers for an Arabian dancing girl, provided the girl was six feet tall and highly respectable. I thought of Aunt Maria with a jewel in her tummy button and was nearly sick laughing. Aunt Maria made me worse by saying, “I have a great sense of humor, dears. Tell me the joke.” That was while Chris and I were helping her downstairs. She was in full regalia by then, in a tweed suit and two necklaces, and Mum was trying to make Aunt Maria’s bed the way Lavinia is supposed-to-do-it-but-it-doesn’t-matter-dear.
    She comes and sits in state in the living room then. It is somehow the darkest room in the house, though sun streams in from the brown garden. One of us has to sit there with her. We found that out the first day when we were all getting ready to go shopping for the things on Mum’s huge list. Chris was saying sarcastically that he couldn’t wait to see some of the hot spots in town, when Aunt Maria caught up with what we were talking about.
    She said, in her special urgent scandalized way, “You’re not going out !”
    â€œYes,” said Chris. “We are on holiday, you know.”
    â€ Mum shut him up by saying, “ Christian! ” and explained about the shopping.
    â€œBut suppose I fall!” said Aunt Maria. “Suppose someone calls. How shall I answer the door?”
    â€œYou opened the door to us when we came,” I said.
    Aunt Maria promptly went all gentle and martyred and said none of us knew what it was like to be old, and did we realize she sometimes never saw a soul for a whole month on end? “You go, dears. Get your fresh air,” she said.
    Naturally Mum got guilty at that, and, just as naturally, it was me that had to stay behind. I spent the next three hundred hours sitting in a little brown chair facing Aunt Maria. She sits on a yellow brocade sofa with knobs on and silk ropes hooked around the knobs to stop the sofa’s arms falling down. Her feet are plonked on the wine-colored carpet and her hands are plonked on her sticks. Aunt Maria is a heavy sort of lady. I keep thinking of her as huge and I keep being surprised to find that she is nothing like as tall as Chris, and not even as tall as Mum. I think she may only be as tall as me. But her character is enormous—right up to the ceiling.
    She talks. It is all about her friends in Cranbury. “Corinne West and Adele Taylor told Zoe Green—Zoe Green has a brilliant mind, dear: she’s read every book in the library—and Zoe Green told Hester Bailey—Hester paints charming watercolors, all real scenes, everyone says she’s as good as van Gogh—and Hester said I was quite right to be hurt at what Miss Phelps had been saying. After all I’d done for Miss Phelps! I used to send Lavinia over to her, but I wonder if I should anymore. We told Benita Wallins, and she said on no account. Selma Tidmarsh had told her all Miss Phelps had said. Selma and Phyllis—Phyllis Forbes, that is, not Phyllis West—wanted to go round and speak to Miss Phelps, but I said ‘No, I shall turn the other cheek.’ So Phyllis West went to Ann Haversham and said…”
    On and on. You end up feeling you are in a sort of bubble filled with that getting-a-cold smell, and inside that bubble is Cranbury and Aunt Maria, and that is the entire world. It is hard to remember there