Chapter I. 2007 #5
“Yes, sir,” Camilla said, and her stomach cramped around everything she’d not eaten that day and the anger she’d swallowed instead.
He gave a little wave once he got to the top of the stairs, and then she was alone.
The silence of the house bore down on her.
It seemed as if the lunch Angela had prepared would go uneaten by the women in the Burson house.
She waited a beat and then followed her father.
Upstairs, the hallways branched left and right.
Left to her father’s office, the library, her parents’ bedroom.
Right to her own bedroom and the other fully furnished, but unused rooms. When she was younger, she sometimes swapped rooms, experimenting with sleeping in a different bed for the night, imagining she’d wake up someone else only to rush to the bathroom mirror the next morning and see the disappointment of her own face with its pale, nondescript features, the sloped nose she still felt was too large.
Her father had offered to make her an appointment with a renowned plastic surgeon in Buckhead, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
Not yet. She feared the pain. The recovery. The blood.
She closed her bedroom door behind her and tugged off her dress, her pantyhose, and kicked her shoes across the room before wrapping herself in her ivory silk robe and collapsing on the canopied bed her father had custom-ordered from France.
He’d been the one who decorated his daughter’s bedroom in the subtle complexity of French provincial elegance as a gift for her sixteenth birthday.
In spite of her irritation that Daddy had been the one to decorate her bedroom, she loved the gilded antique mirrors and calming tones of gray and blue her father chose.
The bed enveloped her, the duvet velvet soft, and she wished, as she had when she was young, that she would wake to find she’d transformed overnight into someone who wasn’t constantly watched and evaluated for any possible misstep.
She ran her fingers over the duvet, watching the blur of her lavender fingernails.
She was surprised her father hadn’t noticed that morning, how the color clashed against the dark skirt she wore.
The color had been her own pathetic rebellion against the years of pale pinks and creams he suggested.
What she wanted was to sleep. Wrap herself in the duvet and follow whatever darkness would come down into a deep blank erasure.
But no. There was Pilates with her mother and Vera Stephens, her mother’s oldest friend. Aunt Vera to Camilla despite the lack of a blood connection and the age gap that could have made her Camilla’s grandmother. Vera had been there her entire life, woven into the fabric of her family.
Sighing, she sat up and pushed herself off the bed. Pulled something made of Lycra from her closet and tugged it over her hips and chest. Felt how it molded to her skin and contained all the ugly parts of her. Smooth. Tight.
Even as she pulled her hair back, she felt the fatigued protest in her muscles. A ghost memory of the thousands of other movements made in the name of someone else’s standards of beauty.
She could skip it. But that would mean seeing her father’s pursed lips over the dinner table.
His admonishments that if she wasn’t going to take the classes along with her mother, he may as well stop paying for the private instructor.
He thought she’d be a little more appreciative of how he provided for them. He only wanted them to be healthy.
Before she could find all the reasons not to go, down the stairs she went and then down again into the subterranean hallway that led to the workout studio where her mother waited.
With any luck, her mother and Vera would have already started on the Reformer, and Camilla would only have forty-five minutes of agony rather than the full hour and a half.
But when she rounded the final corner, she didn’t hear the thumping bass line of whatever classical music the instructor typically blasted through the speakers, and the studio door stood open.
Normally, they kept it closed with the lights off.
Warm and humid and dark as a womb as they transformed themselves into something sharper. Harder.
“Even now, I’ve told him I don’t want her at the Ball. But Henry insists. Says it’s strange that his daughter is the oldest of all the girls. That he’s indulged me. Indulged.” Her mother’s voice went hard. “That was the word he used. Like I’m a child who wants extra dessert.”
Camilla stopped and pressed herself to the wall, hoping they’d not seen her and that the instructor wouldn’t happen along at that exact moment and reveal her hiding place.
Her mother had spent years keeping Camilla from participating in the Purity Ball, and the excuses were flimsy at best. The Ball was going to overlap too closely with a planned trip to Rome.
There wasn’t time to plan the dress the way she wanted to.
She wasn’t ready for Camilla to grow up quite yet.
She still saw Camilla as her little girl and wanted to hold on to that for a bit longer.
If there was an actual reason, Camilla wanted to hear it.
“My dad said it was a dream.”
“A dream so many of the other girls have had?” Vera snorted. “That’s not how dreams work. How many times have we had this conversation, Ada?”
Camilla inched forward. Her blood pushed through her with such force it made her head light.
Another step and she could see into the studio.
Her mother on the floor, one leg extended outward as she stretched.
Vera, seated on her left, mimicked her movements.
Both fluid. Both graceful. Both wearing frowns.
“I still dream about it. My Purity Ball. Everything’s so heavy, and I can’t move.
Like I’m being swallowed. Someone’s laughing, but I can’t see.
I can’t see, and it hurts. And I wake up with this dread.
Like this cold running through me that won’t stop, and I think about Camilla, and what if that feeling is right?
What if something bad happened that night?
What if it’s still happening? How would we ever know?
It’s not for us anymore. The moms. Just the fathers and church leaders and the girls while we sit at home with whatever these memories or dreams are.
” Her voice broke as she folded into herself. So small. Like a child.
Her hands scrabbled at her thighs and the bodysuit she wore, but the material was strong. Expensive. Tearing it would require a strength not even Pilates could grant.
“These fucking scars,” she said. “My father said I was dizzy. Hadn’t eaten all day to make sure the dress fit. That I fainted that night, but I would remember that, wouldn’t I? Something like that?”
“Of course you would.” Vera scooted closer to Ada and put her arms around her. “Of course.”
The fear her mother described seemed to bloat outward like an infection. It wrapped sharp fingers around Camilla’s heart and squeezed.
She shrank backward into the hallway, not wanting to see her lovely, perfect mother broken in such a way.
She didn’t want to wonder if her mother’s memory of her own Purity Ball was accurate or a childish misinterpretation.
The Purity Ball was just another sermon.
A ritual wrapped in silk and gold, sure, but there was nothing insidious about it. Nothing that would inspire this fear.
Her mother’s voice dropped to a whisper, but Camilla could hear her all the same.
“And that sound. Running under the laughter. Horrible. Wet. Like someone eating.”