By Brianna Di Monda.
I thought, if Eleanor could just kill me, my dad would see my stepmother for what she really was: vapid, self-obsessed, manipulative. An ex-courtesan who ran the town’s first power plant, she was the last person I would have expected him to marry. I first met her when he invited her to our annual pig roast and the two of us spent an hour by the fire. After talking at length about the moral benefits of reading, she French braided my hair and wiped the dirt off my pants. I was nine at the time and admired this woman deeply—her beauty, her reserve, her manner of speaking. Everything about her contrasted with how I had grown up: days tracking deer and skinning squirrels, hauling water from the creek, sleeping on a straw mattress, dirt stuck under my fingernails, clothes stiff with dried sweat. I even went into town and bought ribbons so I could style my hair the same way, and I wore them every day while I worked.
Her aura hit me again when she waved me through her front door, kissing me on both cheeks as soon as I set foot on the patterned rug in the foyer. The house was lit only by the faint evening glow filtering through the windows, casting the entryway in an orange hue. I took in the winding wood staircase, the balcony overlooking the backyard, and the stone fireplace in the living room. My dad stood beside me, washed and in a button-up shirt, and I realized, despite how taken I’d once been with Eleanor, I missed our one-story cabin, even if it smelled faintly of animal guts and curdled milk. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw four girls standing at the foot of the stairs. That was the first time I met Marisol, Daphne, Ramona, and Sabine: each one short and brunette, with a ruddy, plump face without an angle in it. I remember everything clearly from that moment on, perhaps because the change of scenery jarred me from a deep, peaceful slumber I hadn’t known I’d sunk into for so many years.
Sabine showed me to my bedroom: dusty but ornate, with a large dresser, a claw-foot bed, and a wooden vanity. I pressed my hand against the blue wallpaper, patterned with repeating tulips. It was soft beneath my fingers, unlike anything I’d ever felt before.
They gave me one night’s rest before putting me to work. Eleanor had me sweep the floors, dust the furniture, wash pots, even scrub the sink. I had to take my shoes off at the door and brush my teeth twice a day. Each morning at breakfast, she handed me a list of chores, and if they were not finished to her satisfaction by evening she’d drag me back inside, interrupting my wandering her grounds. Where I once reveled in my solitude, she stole away my most treasured freedom. Not only that: she did it in my favorite month. For it was June, that idle period with the longest of days, meant to be filled only with frivolity and pleasure, beckoning the beginning of summer.
I cornered my dad on his way out the door one morning, blocking the entryway and pleading my case. I screamed for several minutes so that my stepsisters gathered on the landing above us.
“Jess,” he said, “calm down.”
He dragged me outside and shut the front door behind us.
“You ever ask yourself why we had to come here? Why the forest shrunk and game got harder to find?”
“It’s ’cause of the power plant,” I said. “Everyone’s coming for work and taking our food.”
“That’s true. But Eleanor’s giving jobs to lepers and buying the contracts of brothel women. No one else would hire them.”
“This is our home.”
He sighed and rubbed his eyes.
“Look, you can feed a lot more people by cutting down trees and planting grain. And we’re a straight shot to the city. What do you think’ll happen next? It’s time to join the pack.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I refuse.”
But he only shook his head and said he had to go open the shop.
“The other girls got chores too. I don’t know what to tell you.”
When Eleanor and my father announced they were going out, I invited my friend Connie over to see the house. His family was one of the last still living in the woods. When he arrived, he stood in the foyer with his mouth hanging open. I told him not to be afraid. I showed him the parlor, the trimmed trees, the lights—how ridiculous it all was. We sprawled across the grass outside, my head resting on his stomach as he ran his fingers through my hair. He said something about how everything was going to change, and I noticed my stepsisters staring at us through a window, their outlines like toads as they pressed their faces against the glass. Not two hours went by before Eleanor walked outside and called to me sharply. I rose, languid, the heat having dulled my senses. Eleanor looked straight at me, as though Connie weren’t even there.
“I do not want you bringing boys here.”
“Dad?” I asked.
My dad looked at me but kept his head lowered. “I’m sorry, Jess. Really am.”
Eleanor turned to Connie.
“Out,” she commanded, hitting the “t” with such force that I winced.
Connie grimaced, then walked away. That was it. I could not understand what I’d done wrong. Once he was inside, Eleanor put her hands behind her back.
“I signed you up for a private tutor, who will be coming every day at eleven o’clock. No daughter of mine will go without her education. And don’t talk back to me,” she added as I opened my mouth. “I’m responsible for you now, and I will not stand and watch as you throw your life away. Now go clean up.”
My desires meant nothing to her; they had been forced into a cage like an untrained beast. I walked back to the house in a daze, numbed. I watched as if outside myself as I fumbled with the handle on the back door. My stepsisters sat at the top of the landing, staring at me from above.
“Is this stupid girl to study with us?” asked Daphne. “I wonder how well she reads.”
When I didn’t come down for dinner, my father brought me a bowl of rice and sat at the foot of my bed. He shook his head as I cried.
“Nothing I can do,” he said. “I know you didn’t want to move into town, but this is what’s best for us now. And we haven’t even been here a week. You know better. Don’t think I don’t know you know better. Give it a chance. She expects you to come down for dinner tomorrow.”
Eleanor made tea while I swept the kitchen floor. As she lectured me about the virtues of an orderly home, and how discipline was what had allowed her to leave behind her life as a courtesan, I tried to tune her out. I stopped sweeping and silently begged for mercy.
She looked at me with pity.
“I’m sorry to have to push you so hard,” she said.
Then she surprised me by appearing at my elbow and steering me to the chairs by the table. I almost tripped over the broom as she led me there. She poured me a cup of tea.
“How you must hate me. We’re doing this for your own good, you know. Your father knows your way of life is ending.”
“We’ll go back.”
“I know what it’s like to be consumed by rage. Did you know I learned to hunt after my mother died? I took pleasure in shattering the bones of deer and digging my arrows deep inside them. Life is suffering.” She put her hand over mine. “You must find a way to keep living.”
I pulled away and spat on her.
My first attempts to rebel were in vain. At mealtimes I maintained a steadfast silence unless directly spoken to. I stared at my potatoes while Marisol talked about learning to work at the powerplant with the other women, or Daphne played the latest song she was learning on piano, or Ramona mumbled about her difficulties with arithmetic, or Sabine begged to be let to have friends over. No one cared that I was silent; they even seemed to prefer it. Only my father occasionally asked a tepid question or two about my day, to which I responded with curt answers, a simple “yes” or “no” if possible. Most of the time, though, he was ensnared in conversation with the other girls. Whenever there was a lull, he’d turn towards me, open his mouth to speak, then stop as Daphne tugged on his arm and regaled him with a new anecdote about her day. And I, forgotten at the end of the table, would go back to staring at my plate.
I starved myself to get my father’s attention. For days, I took only a bite or two—one carrot, a spoonful of rice—and spent the rest of dinner diligently cutting my food into small pieces, lifting them to my mouth, and then putting the bits back on the plate. I’d been doing this for nearly a week, pushing peas around and trying not to give into the urge to eat them, wondering how I would possibly make it look like I was eating when there was nothing to cut. The room faded out of focus, and I wondered, vaguely, if I wasn’t about to pass out from the heat. Then Eleanor brought up Ramona’s birthday. The party, it seemed, was set for mid-August, right before she would host a town dinner to celebrate three years of the powerplant.
I looked up. “Here?”
“Yes.” My dad placed his hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be fun.”
“Great,” I said, my mouth full of peas. “I can’t wait.”
Eleanor slapped my forearm and told me to eat like a lady. For the first time in weeks, I met her gaze and gave her a wide grin, the peas half-mashed between my teeth. She recoiled and looked away.
It was so easy to provoke her.
I longed for the days before she entered my life, when I spent hours lying on tree branches, disappearing into the canopy, or kissing Connie under the cover of the ferns. I’d return home in the evening with dead squirrels strapped to my back, and my father would skin them. I had a right to that life. I had a right to spend my youth as I wished, helping provide food and spending the rest of my hours in the ease and abandon of the forest. Eleanor had confined me to the house. Before living with her, I had no idea that a home could require so much maintenance, that it could take up the entirety of a summer. What do we want from life if not to bask in its promise of endless freedom?
In the weeks leading up to the party, I did everything I could to upset Eleanor. I ate bread in the living room and spilled crumbs. I left dirty dishes in the sink. Each time she discovered some new vandalism, she’d storm into my room, her hair in a perfect bun, and order me to clean up after myself because the party planner was coming, an engineer was coming, her sister was coming. Someone was always about to arrive. It was perfect.
On the evening of Ramona’s birthday, Eleanor put my dad up at a pub with friends. She said he didn’t need to burden himself with hosting. A buffet table was set up on the back porch, with a triple-layer cake, all pink and purple, and an ice-sculpted swan as the centerpiece. I stood by the table, smoothing out the skirt Eleanor had chosen for me. I thought of how fashionable I once found her and how suffocating it was to live under her roof. How much it involved her trying to mold me. I ran a finger across the neck of the frosty swan and sighed.
“We’re the same, you and me,” I said.
From behind me Marisol cried: “Get your hands off that.”
I turned to see her pointing at me, baring her teeth.
Around midnight I saw a boy walk into the kitchen. I picked up a half-eaten piece of cake and followed him: he who had expressed so much interest in my body all evening, his eyes burning with desire, soaking up my legs in long, indulgent gulps, as though I was not aware of my fantastic power as a girl. In the darkness, I pushed him against the sink and kissed him. I learned a lot about love in those few minutes, how despicable and brutal it can be. Marisol walked in, a champagne bottle overflowing in her hand, newly popped for the celebration. She screamed and dropped the glass and sent shards across the floor.
I wiped my mouth.
“Oops,” I whispered.
Daphne followed behind her. When she saw me with the boy, she put a hand to her cheek and fled upstairs to her room. Then the rest of the guests flooded the kitchen and someone turned on the lights, temporarily blinding me as my shame became the center of entertainment for the small crowd. Eleanor grabbed me by the wrist and began to lead me out, and for dramatic effect I turned to the guests, with wide, pleading eyes, and let my lower lip tremble and whispered: “There was no one here to stop him.”
I was locked in my room for a week after that. I sat in semi-darkness, watching the sun’s rays move across the wall, elongating, reddening. I thought about the time before we came here, when, just three months ago, my father and I would go on long walks together and stargaze at the top of the mountain. I had warned him, before we moved to town, that the stars would be dulled by the light, but he wouldn’t hear it. This memory returned to me in a way that caused me to sit upright and pace my room: it told me, without words, that I was stupid, monstrous, unfit for the new world—a dim-witted girl who wouldn’t survive.
My dad, I knew, had been with Eleanor for years before we moved. I had taken a quiet pleasure in the knowledge that he could seduce such a beautiful woman, but I’d never thought he would go so far as to marry her. Whenever he came home with a fashionable set of boots for me, or a new hunting jacket, or fresh orange juice, I knew the gifts had come from her. I thought of her as my fairy godmother. But that was where she belonged: in the background, as an invisible woman who appeared only when called upon.
I hadn’t known that Eleanor would try to break me. I imagined how easily everything must have come to her, how simple it must have been for her to wake up and betray the forest, to command a girl to manage her household, to force the girl to grow accustomed to the new era that was making her stepmother rich. I scratched my wooden bed frame and stared out my bedroom window. I wondered, if I failed to convince my father of her wrath, if this misery would be with me for the rest of my life. At night, I closed my eyes and recited what I could remember of my favorite songs. This was the only thing I remembered of my mother: that she had hummed me lullabies before she laid me to bed.
I was let out for the town dinner and put into a rag of a dress that added ten pounds to my hips. Eleanor braided my hair and commanded me to wash my face. When I walked downstairs, the house was bustling with caterers. I slipped out back and sat with a few who were smoking before they started their shifts. They offered me a glass of champagne, which I accepted with a shy smile. In the end I drank three glasses with them, so I was already nice and drunk by the time the guests arrived. When Sabine saw me, she told me my hair looked nice. I smiled and giggled and twirled her, and I almost fell over, but steadied myself against the wall. I felt someone’s eyes on me and turned to see Connie standing in a suit and tie. He blushed and walked away to stand next to Daphne. Maybe that was the final straw.
I took another glass of champagne from one of the caterers and knocked it back. I hiked up my dress and climbed the stairs. I met my stepmother on the landing, and whispered to her, asking if she thought her money had anything to do with my father’s decision to get married. And that did it. She turned abruptly, and in doing so, knocked me down the stairs with the back of her arm. We were so close to the top step, and I can be, when it’s convenient, quite clumsy. I tumbled down the curved staircase and landed on the stone floor. My left arm cracked under my weight. I screamed, and my dad rushed to kneel beside me. I saw it then: the doubt that had been building in him, the fear that he could lose his only daughter. I tried to lift a hand to touch his cheek, but cried out as I moved my arm.
I shifted from one kind of pain to another, slipping in and out of consciousness, my thoughts scattering under the panic and dislocation. The room tilted, and I heard voices somewhere above me. I had the sense that the room was being shrouded by a dark tide that would sever my connection to the living world. But beneath the agony shooting through my arm, I felt something else. The corners of my mouth pulled upward and my lips spread wide. I thought, before I passed out, that my dad’s face might be payment enough for having been ripped from the woods.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brianna Di Monda is the editor-in-chief of the Cleveland Review of Books. Her fiction has been published in Prairie Schooner, Forever, Worms Magazine, Annulet, and The Summerset Review. She is a recipient of the Glenna Luschei Award for fiction and a semifinalist for the American Short(er) Fiction Prize.
