Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2008 02:45:00 -0800 (PST) From: Gale Adams Subject: f'/f incest "She Came to Me" Chapter 5 She Came to Me Chapter 5 (A toast to W.G. who steered these ideas for Chapter 5--the flaws are solely mine) Trina was from the West Indies. She was the servant-girl of the Marsh family. This Saturday morning, she was scrubbing their kitchen floor. The wood was varnished and shiny. The house was full of dark corners and brightly lit windows in the daytime. It was a largish house. She had never seen one this big before. She was 18 and lived with her 12-year-old sister in a small parlor in the back of this house. She and Hebbie had lived in America for 2 years now. They were bright girls, both. Their parents had died on the boat coming over. The world was suddenly larger than large for the both of them. They had had only each other to comfort and to care for. Until they were hired here at the Marsh's. The girls, Ivory and Melody, were so terribly nice to her. Their parents were--distant--it seemed--of course from the servant-girls, which of course was the right thing to do. But the girls' parents seemed distant from each other, from their daughters, and, in a way she could not explain, from themselves as well. The mother seemed as though stillborn inside. The father was a man who seemed to have a small nervous facial tick at times and seemed as though a look over his shoulder were to happen every minute, and in truth did happen some, as Trina had seen. It was past November now, and winter had set in. The snows were blowing, the first of the season, this Friday morning, as Trina scrubbed the kitchen floor, preparing afterwards to do the laundry, to make the beds, to wash the dishes, to gather more wood. Hebbie was at school with as she called them "her adopted sisters." Hebbie and Trina had been alone mostly always when they got to this New Land of Opportunity, so the books said, and had worked where they could, and when, in not the most salubrious of conditions. Here they found nirvana. Here they found luxury of horsehair couches and shiny silver, that of course she and Hebbie made shine. The luxury had an aroma to it. An aroma of propriety and straight angles and a house that had a purpose. Trina was not a virgin. She scrubbed with the bucket and the water and the cloth, on her knees, her back in pain from all the housework, that devolved on her, since Hebbie was, though tacitly a servant-girl as well, the Marshes did not want to pay her and so she was considered just a "free loader" Mr. Marsh said, with a decidedly ugly laugh that shook his well-fed pot belly stomach The house was cold for even all the heat they could muster did not fare well against the shivers even though the house was quite well constructed and free mostly of chins and slivers where wind of winter could get in. Trina wore her heaviest coat, bought for her by Mrs. Marsh down at the mercantile store, heavy and warm and insular with a soft lining and dark blue of color. Trina and Hebbie were not used to winter, though this was the third they had survived here. It always gave Hebbie the sniffles and sometimes it gave her a cold deep so that Trina was always afraid it was pneumonia, along with a hacking cough. Mrs. Marsh provided elixir for both girls if they needed it in the coming months. Trina was actively trying to forget what she had seen last night, this her and Hebbie's second month at this mansion, for they considered it such, with big heavy thick wooden doors and silence that was like the sucking of sound out of the air. The parents were gone to bed some time before, last night. Trina had exited her and Hebbie's parlor, for a glass of milk for she and her sister. In making her way carefully through the dark and the cold, shivering, her nightgown, bought by the Marshes, who were, she felt, good people underneath their distraction and fear and uncomfortable ness for whatever reason she did not know, trying not to stub her foot on any of the heavy furniture, making her way across the warm rugs and the cold wood in-between, she had heard, not so much as a sound, but an absence of sound, from the girl's room, she thought it thus being Melody's. Not that of course, girls were un-allowed to make sounds or non-sounds in their own house, even late at night, because, the parents' room were across a vestibule and then past stairways to the dark attic which scared Hebbie no end, though they had not had to go up there yet to clean, it could wait till Spring, Mrs. Marsh said, for it was nothing but a storage room and far too wintry up there even to stay a moment, which relieved Hebbie and, truth to tell, relieved her older sister too. Trina had been relating a children's story from their home country, to Hebbie; about fairy tale kings and soft seas and bright golden sand and a diamond that the sea brought up from its very depths, out of which dazzled two girls' eyes, as this fairy opened the diamond up from the inside, and in her tiny sprite hands, delivered golden doubloons to the two girls so they would be poor no more, and would always be living in comfort and style, so this night Trina was trying to forget by throwing herself almost bodily into her chores, she had gone to Melody's room. Though she knew it wrong, and had opened the door very slightly indeed, for fear was in her, of being caught, and she and her sister being put out in the cold like in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" though she for sure hated that book, though she and Hebbie were readers, for their parents taught Trina at an early age--they had told her once, and she passed this along to Hebbie--friends will let you down sometimes, things are not always as they appear, sometimes people will lead you astray and use you---but books will always be your friends-they will never harm you nor betray you nor leave you feeling the fool--there are bad books certainly--but read the ones that commune with you, that minister to you, and you will have happiness all your days. There was candle light in Melody's room and Trina, her head still filled with the fairy story, thought the two girls were indeed yin and yank of that diamond fairy, making up gold doubloons from their own bodies, wearing odd looking nightgowns and being so close together in apparently each other's arms as though one or the other was crying, which touched Trina's heart, for she had a very generous one, which made her start in to see if she could help and succor, but something pulled her back and hiding more into the comfort of the safe shadows of the hall way, the door only a sliver open, as she realized the reason the nightgowns looked odd and out of place in this very proper world was that they were not nightgowns at all, but the sisters' naked bodies. It roiled her heart when she realized, with a start, like a lightning bolt inside her, as though her mouth made a whoosh of an O for the air to rush out of her, as she leaned cantilevered against the wall and closed her eyes for a moment or two. But she could not close her ears. How she wished she and Hebbie were back home, there on the beach in the forever-warm nights and the hot days, where skies were blue and you could run for miles on the sand and through the grass and lie on the grass or beach and hold each other and feel the very life rushing through sister to sister. As though they were one. And because Trina blinded herself to what she was seeing/what she was not seeing, she pictured herself and Hebbie on that golden sand, close together, in raggedy beach clothes, her sister not wearing a shirt, Hebbie's chest like a boy's, Trina's chest very womanly already and, save for baths, always clothed. She saw her sister's nipples, there on the beach a million years and a million miles away--differently she saw them now, not as just part of her younger sister, not to be even noticed or thought of in any particular way, but at this particular moment, she somehow wanted to---touch them--to remind herself what hers had looked like, before they became breasts. NO. But she now saw Melody and Ivory in candlelight that was far too bright, as it seemed to her scalded eyes. The girls were naked and they were doing things to each other--forbidden things---things that were above all else, wrong, things that tingled her in a way, that made her want to rush to her parlor room, awaken Hebbie and thus get dressed, and flee this dreadful devil suddenly here place. Instead she watched and she heard inviolate words from them, she heard pantings and sighs and words from a book she had read parts of one time, then spent it far away from her as though it were filled with dreadful loathsome spiders crawling from it, and hopping on her, she actually brushed the invisible spiders away. Books do not always commune. Books can sometimes slap you and hurt you and make you ashamed of yourself as though you were the writer, writing these odorous things, o Mama dear, you were so right about their being good books as well as bad. Words between covers can shake you to the core. So this morning of Saturday, Trina finished the kitchen floor, she washed and soaped and dried her hands, then went to the dishes to be cleaned. Her hair was tangled in back and in front with the sweat of her exertions even though the house was cold and she needed to wear that heavy coat. The heat came from inside her, and when she managed to pull away like adhesive to a horrible bad wound that taking place that late night in the room of Melody, she lay in bed with her sister who slept always deeply and profoundly. When Hebbie curled to Trina and put her arms and body next to her, Trina for the very first time pulled away from this usual way the sisters slept together. Though not far enough, for their single bed was very narrowsome. Trina had gotten out of bed and had looked at the moon for the rest of the night as she huddled cold in their unheated room, with only the warm covered stone iron in their bed to keep them warm, though the coal fired iron lost much of its heat by the middle of the night. She thought the sisters were so alabaster. While she and Hebbie were the color of cocoa. She thought Melody and Ivory were cold looking, like the moon, cold looking like cats without fur to protect them on a wintry night. She had looked at the all of them, and unwillingly, unwittingly, had compared them to she and her own sister. She thought of the preacher back home of the barrel chest and the huge laugh and the wise eyes and his sermons of sin and wickedness, of which she and her sister had seen some, the saloons they passed by, the occasional school fights, a boy trying to kiss a girl in class before the teacher walked in, the smell of poverty, the heinousness of some of the people they had stayed with for a small time, the offal of the grunty dirty work they had to do, and the terrible horrible squalor, but that was for them, this was not for the oh so respectable oh so can't be separated from each other for a moment--and now, thought Trina, I can see very well why. She drifted off into day dreams, washing the dishes and finishing, then on the cleaning and washing the cupboard doors, and in the day dreams, the preacher was telling her to take clean tongs, put the tongs into the hot fireplace in the living room and burn out her eyes with them because she had seen--- "We know you were looking." Trina turned round so swiftly she almost lost her balance and had to hold onto the sink to regain it. It was Melody who thus ran to Trina and put her arms around the servant-girl who wanted to pull back, to forever pull away, but Melody was crying and looked up at Trina with doleful doe eyes. "Please don't tell mama and Father Daddy, please don't. Ivory and I are lovers. We've done nothing wrong. Please don't." "I have chores to do, child," Trina said as she pushed the girl like a puppy dog from her, and feeling so guilty of doing that to Melody. Trina could not stop looking down at Melody who was dressed in a wool skirt of dark hue and a blouse of glaring white, with rich girls shoes and stockings. Trina looked down at her and remembered vividly, frantically the girls naked and--say it-at least think of it--having sex with each other. God protect me, and God protect Hebbie, she thought, wondering if the girls were like Varny the Vampire or like Camella plus one. Might these polite, seemingly God-fearing seemingly normal-girls--attack her and Hebbie one late night? Might they fall on their very necks and suck out the blood and make themselves young forever on virgin's blood? Then Ivory was standing beside her sister. Trina had been looking at Melody for so long and for such a disjointed time that she had not seen Ivory there at all, till the older girl spoke. "Be kind, please," Ivory said. "Do not tell. Do not worry. It's all right." Which was when Trina threw down the washing material and accidentally kicked water out of the bucket next to her left foot that had sent the bucket spinning and falling, perplexed and over-laden with so many whirls of thoughts and conflicts of feelings, and bafflements, and remembering her sister in bed with her and half naked as they had lain on the beach in the West Indies, and thus losing all sensibilities about her, she threw up her hands and simply began to helplessly weep. The sisters as if sharing by osmosis, knew not to come closer to her, knew not to comfort her, for that would make it far worse. Hebbie was still asleep. Master was at the bank, working. Missus was still abed. Trina and her friends, as she had thought of them during this term of employment, Melody and Ivory never treating them as inferiors, and standing by them when unruly children at school called Trina and Hebbie names, even Ivory socking one boy with a pasty ugly smart mouth in the jaw when he would not let Melody's and Ivory's friends alone, and was it a lead up to this? Was this seduction? Being used? Lead along? As their mother had told them, and Trina always having prided herself on reading people, on knowing people easily, behind their words, behind their smiles, and she had failed, here, Hebbie and herself too, utterly. She ran to her room. Parting with her arms the sisters she ran between and to the bed where Hebbie was just awakening and stretching her arms as Trina fell into them, weeping, frightening Hebbie who had never seen her protector, her level-headed sister in such a state before, for in the past it had always been the other way around. Heebie brushed the hair and the back of Trina as Trina completely broke down into her, feeling the warm breast, hearing the beating heart of her sister who suddenly was even more precious to her than before, and she had always been precious beyond words and real worth. "Sister, sister," Hebbie said, holding her little arms round Trina, "whatever is the matter?"