Thumbelina: Part One

THE TOAD

In much of the country, cotillions are a thing of the past, remnants of a bygone era that met its violent end at the point of a sword and a cloud of musket smoke. Not so in Paradiso, where the grand old tradition of parading one’s sons and daughters (especially daughters) in public each spring is not only tolerated, but encouraged. From April until the end of July, the younger set are trussed up like dolls and chauffeured from one soiree to the next, where they bow stiffly to one another in their crinoline skirts and starched shirts and bow ties, sweating as they sip punch and nibble finger foods. Dances that haven’t changed in hundreds of years are trotted out and shaken free of dust like last year’s quilts as couples whirl around the parqueted floors of the old plantation ballrooms. In the middle of it all stands the Debutante, a triumph or a failure as the case may be, glorying in his or her success or commiserating with the other wallflowers as they cling to the shadows, trying to escape with as little embarrassment as possible.

This custom persists for several reasons. One, it allows the top tier of society to show off the fact that their genes have not only replicated, but in many cases have done so symmetrically. Two, it provides an acceptable way for young and old alike to blow off steam after a winter that may have contained as much as an inch or two of snow, which in the south is as much a travesty as a generational blizzard up north. And three, it allows the genteel to show off their wealth, which, when you get down to it, is really the only reason that matters. Old money glories in its own existence. Always has, always will.

In one such season I made my own debut, though I remember little of it. I would like to say it’s because those few months were so uneventful, but the truth is that I was well and truly stoned most of the time. The wealthy are privy to a lot of things most others aren’t, including the quality and array of recreational substances at their disposal. Not a day passed between my fourteenth and seventeenth birthdays when I wasn’t high on something, an interval which encompassed my introduction to society. Boys were allowed to wait until they were adults (or close enough), but young women were encouraged to “come out” as soon as possible. That does not mean embracing an alternative sexuality, mind you. It means we are put on display for those same boys and their fathers to ogle and fantasize about as we parade through these tender, formative years like rosy-cheeked geishas.

Only one memory of my season stands out. Before my own ball, Mother came into my room with a long gray velvet box containing Grandmother’s pearls, the first of many such pieces I’d been promised at birth. As a much-desired and long-awaited only child, everything my family had would come to me, though the idea held little excitement by the time I was finally old enough enough to have them. I was already fixated on young adulthood, experiencing life, partying with my friends, and exploring my burgeoning sexuality and unexpected proclivity for illicit substances. When Mother smiled her gentle smile and clasped the triple strand of milky, lustrous beads around my neck, my only remark was, “These are going to look terrible with my dress.” I remember clearly how her smile faded. Even in my strung-out state of mind, I felt a pang of guilt. Then she left me to finish dressing, and I ceased to think of her at all.

A little more of that night comes back to me if I try hard enough to recapture it: sweaty hands beneath my dress, hot breath on my neck, the darkness of the coat closet, the closeness of the musty air. Later, running and laughing in the gardens, where Father’s gardeners had grown an honest-to-goodness labyrinth for my party guests to wander through. It makes me ashamed now to remember how hard they tried to please me, and how little I thought of them for it. In my mind, it was simply my due. I was a princess and the world bowed at my feet.

Though you might not believe me, I alone am not to blame for this. My father was the closest thing this country has to royalty, and my mother wasn’t far behind. From birth, I was treated like a princess, given anything and everything I could possibly want, and denied nothing. In the eyes of many, I was a creature of myth rather than flesh and blood, with a beauty and a privilege not of this world. My diminutive stature had even earned me a nickname that persisted until adulthood: Thumbelina. When I heard it, I felt I was destined for something more than the mundane life so many others lived. I could always tell where I stood with someone based on the tone in which they said it. Mother called me Thumbelina when exasperated and Father when I made him laugh; boys would tease me with it; girls said it jealously. And those who desired me said it in trembling, breathless voices, as if I were something beyond belief, a girl who inspired desire enough to drive men mad.

Everywhere I went, eyes followed me, whether they belonged to my schoolmates or strange men on the street. My father’s work colleagues–many of them the fathers of my own friends–would buy me expensive gifts of jewelry and perfume in the hopes of stealing a kiss or a caress when no one was looking. Sometimes I let them, listening curiously to the moans of men three or four times my own age as their rough hands pawed at my young breasts, fondling the stiff nipples through my thin tank top as they grew hard and demanding against my belly. Their wants and desires fascinated me. It was so easy to turn them about with a look or a sigh, a toss of my hair, the sight of my tongue running across my lower lip. Were all men such simple creatures? I wondered. Would they truly throw away their good sense–nay, their lives–for a few moments of pleasure? Were these clumsy beasts really the ones who ruled the world?

There were many who wanted me, but few, if any, that I wanted. Inevitably I would grow bored with their eager clumsiness, and after a minute or two I would pull away, flashing a smile I knew would drive them wild. Though they wanted to, not one ever dared go further than I would let him. They all knew who held the power, and even at that age, so did I.

This strange odyssey of exploration began immediately after my coming out, when I was fourteen, and ended just as abruptly on the first day of my senior year of high school three years later. That summer and autumn brought about two events destined to tear my dream-like existence apart, leaving it so broken I would never be able to put it back together again.

The first was the death of my father, whose heart attack at age forty-nine killed him as swiftly and mercilessly as an assassin. One night he went to bed hale and hearty, a successful man from a blue-blooded family–one of the most respected men in the country, in fact–and the next morning, Mother found him bloated and cold, lips blue, eyes bulging, thanks to the massive coronary that had robbed him of air for several minutes before it killed him. Rather than calling for help, she reacted in true Southern fashion and fainted dead away on the floor, where her maid found her an hour later and finally summoned the doctor. Not the ambulance–the doctor. People of our stature do not fuss with things like public health care. We have our own staff on retainer, both medical and legal, and make use of them regularly. Less than twenty minutes after Lupita called him, Doctor Griegson pulled up in his Bentley, elegant in a gray suit and solemn gray tie. He pronounced Father dead within minutes, and promptly prescribed a bevy of anti-depressants and painkillers for Mother. I suppose that was the day I lost both my parents: Father to his heart, and Mother to hers. She never emerged from that drug-induced fog again.

As for how I felt, what can I say? What words can describe the sudden absence of the sun from a child’s life? My father was the man I loved most in all the world, and is still the standard against which I measure all others. After he left us, I was as lost as Mother, though I hid it deep inside myself, as I did with all other things. When he died, part of my heart was ripped away, forever lost to me. Of this, I cannot and will not say any more.

The other event that occurred was, in its way, even more unexpected and devastating than Father’s death. On September the first, a little over a month after we buried him in the family mausoleum at Saint Lucia’s Cemetery, I and twelve hundred other students attended our first day of classes at the Stonebrook Academy of Paradiso, the city’s most elite private school. Already flying high on a few lines of coke, my friends and I laughed and teased one another as we entered the building, oblivious to everything and everyone around us. I didn’t look like a girl mourning her father, and I have always wondered if that was the reason fate saw fit to punish me. Perhaps it was. Perhaps not. Regardless, that was the first time she saw me, the woman who would turn my life upside down and rob me of my birthright; a woman who is still the most ruthless person I’ve ever known.

I refuse to speak her name. You would know it if you heard it, although you might not believe me. She has a son whose name you might also know, an angry, abusive son who wasn’t much to look at, and whose anger at that misfortune radiated from him like a contagion. Boys like him were supposed to have it all: money, influence, and a perfectly chiseled jaw. Having only two out of three was an ever-present thorn in his side. It rankled him endlessly, and poisoned every interaction he had with the world.

I didn’t notice either of them that morning. Not the malevolent woman in the Chanel suit that made her look like a squat marshmallow, and not her son, who stood at her side watching me with his hungry eyes. Among the genteel faces of my friends, I stood out like a beacon, with my masses of golden hair and wide sky-blue eyes, the voluptuous figure I could never quite hide, even if I’d wanted to. For the first seventeen years of my life, beauty was my gift. For the last ten, it has been my curse. And all of it–every terrible thing that has happened to me since–started on that day, September the first, in the year my father died and left me on my own.

When I arrived home from school, Lupita informed me that Mother was waiting for me in her private drawing room. She and Father each had their own wing of the house, not because they didn’t get along–they were, in fact, the only couple I knew among the fashionable set that had actually loved one another–but because my family’s home is so massive that they could. I had my own wing, too, a suite of rooms on the third floor I claimed all for myself. Of everything on that estate, they were mine, and I loved them fiercely. I can still see the baby blue wallpaper in my bedroom, paper that matched my eyes to a tee, and the girlish white wicker furniture I refused to throw out even when Mother insisted I was far too old for it. I can feel the plump downy pillows on my massive four-poster bed, and hear the sigh of the wind in the great oak tree outside the window, hear it scratch-scratching against the glass. Those are the nights I awake crying, when it all seems so real I forget I’m not there anymore, and then reality comes crashing down on me and I can hardly breathe for the pain of it.

On that day, I remember dragging my feet as I went to see Mother, reluctant because I feared she was going to ask me to have dinner with her. At the time, making ridiculous small talk for an hour seemed like the worst punishment imaginable, especially since one of my friends had gotten it in her head to sneak out to a club that night. In those days I was desperate not to remember. I wanted to set aside Father’s death and Mother’s empty eyes for as long as possible. I wanted to get out of the house, which I felt was suffocating me, and drown my sorrows in alcohol and cocaine and mindless sex with strange men, and for an hour or two, not feel like I was dying, myself.

“There you are,” Mother said as I entered the drawing room. “I want you to meet some friends of mine.” Her eyes were as vacant as ever beneath her smooth auburn hair, and her pink lips wore a small smile. I will never forget that smile, the one she wore as she threw me to the wolves. It will haunt my dreams until I die.

I sensed movement out of the corner of my eye and recoiled instinctively. A nasty laugh rang out. “No need to be so tetchy, my dear. That’s no way to treat an old friend of your parents’.”

The woman had the face of an old toad, wide and flat, with lips that stretched from ear to ear even when she didn’t wear her jack o’lantern grin. Her thin, graying hair sat flat atop her head, as if it had been beaten into submission by the pudgy hand that encompassed mine, shaking it vigorously. The cold, clammy feel of her skin made me shudder, a reaction I couldn’t completely suppress. Her vicious eyes narrowed. “So she thinks she’s too good for us, does she? My dear, I will have you know my ancestors came over on the Mayflower nearly four hundred years ago. There is no blood in this city bluer than mine.”

“Oh, I’m sure she didn’t mean to offend,” Mother said worriedly, her hands fluttering about like little white butterflies. She radiated fear, something I had never seen before. My hackles rose further.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” said another new voice. I looked past the woman in surprise, for I hadn’t noticed him standing near the mantel, blocked by her massive frame. I disliked him on sight: the smirk he didn’t bother to hide, the naked lust in his eyes as he looked me up and down in my school uniform, the arrogance seeping from every pore. He came toward us with his hand outstretched, slightly less toad-like than the woman, though not by much. Mother and son, I realized.

“Who are you?” I said. Mother gave a slight gasp behind me. She abhorred rudeness, though I couldn’t imagine why she cared about this ugly boy and his even uglier mother. They weren’t part of our circle. As far as I knew, they’d never even visited Paradiso before. They were interlopers, albeit wealthy ones, and I had no use for them, especially when the boy announced their names as if he expected me to be impressed. Why should I? We entertained people more famous than them all the time; it was part and parcel of being who we were. Confused and irritated, I looked at Mother, whose eyes pleaded with me to behave. Not wishing to upset her further, and against my better judgment, I gave in for harmony’s sake. What could it hurt? I reasoned. Like all our other unwanted guests, they would chat with Mother for a while, enjoy Lupita’s tea and refreshments, and then leave, never to be seen or heard from again.

Assured in my mind that everything would soon be normal, I put away my revulsion, smiled contritely, and told our guests how lovely it was to meet them in as polite a tone as I could muster. Then I turned to Mother and told her I was going upstairs to start on my homework. To my dismay, she shook her head.

“You will sit and have refreshments with us, and then we’ll all go dine at the club. You must show respect to our guests. I’ve told you that a thousand times.”

I frowned, because she had never told me any such thing. Out of sight, out of mind was the dominant parenting style in our set. As long as I didn’t cause a stir, I was allowed to do as I pleased. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I went and sat on the wing chair, pulling my skirt over my knees as far as it would go, dazed by this strange turn of events. Toad-boy’s eyes never left me, his gaze sticky and slimy on my skin, the smiles he threw me when our eyes met–which wasn’t often–making me shudder again and again. I was used to being watched and desired, and until now it had never upset me. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I now stood on the auction block, naked and chained for all the world to see, measured and assessed for some unknown purpose.

Worse even than her son, though, was Toad-woman, whose eyes were full of a desire unlike her son’s, but even more unsettling. I saw a hunger there that made no sense to me at the time, though I understand it now. She wanted what I was, what I had, what I represented. She envied my youth and beauty. Most of all, she wanted to destroy me, to grind me under her heel like the first flower of spring, leaving me crushed and broken in the red clay. On this count, she succeeded admirably.

After an awkward dinner that consisted mostly of Toad-woman talking condescendingly at us while Mother giggled and fluttered about like a useless thing, we finally said our goodbyes. Our chauffeur, Henry, drove us home in one of Father’s Town Cars, his sturdy, dependable presence a balm to my troubled soul. I sat facing Mother in the back, anxious beyond what I could explain, and watched her gaze unseeingly out the window. “What’s going on?” I said at last. “I’ve never seen you act that way before. Why are you trying so hard to please those vile people?”

At first I thought she hadn’t heard me. She continued to stare out the window, her eyes as blank as a new chalkboard on the first day of school. I repeated the question. Suddenly her lower lip trembled, and she covered her mouth with her hand, closing her eyes as a tear rolled down her cheek. The sight of it enraged me for reasons I couldn’t explain.

“For God’s sake, Mother, tell me! Who are they to you? Why did we have to entertain them like monkeys dancing for their amusement? You’ve never acted that way before, and you’ve certainly never made me act that way. Please tell me, so I can understand. Does it have something to do with Father?”

Mother shook her head. “We’ll speak later,” was all she would say, no matter how angry I became. She instructed Henry to leave her at the garage and take me up to the house, despite my many protests. As soon as the car rolled to a stop, she leaped out of it, not even bothering to shut the door. Moments later, one of Father’s cars screeched down the driveway in a flurry of tires and a cloud of red dust. She liked to drive when she was upset–probably not ideal, considering how doped up she often was–and I could only watch as she drove away, confused and angry and afraid. She stayed away for hours that night, and I, having my own plans, didn’t wait around for her. Anger simmered inside me, anger I had never before directed at my gentle, unassuming mother. Her behavior puzzled me, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t seem to put it together in a way that made sense. The mystery drove me to distraction. So I went out with my friends, and by my third drink Mother no longer seemed as important. By my fifth, I’d managed to put that horrid Toad-woman and her son out of my mind. Just as I’d started to have a good time, a hand clamped brutally around my wrist and spun me about. To my horror, I found myself face to face with Toad-boy himself.

“Well, well, well, what have we here?” His sneer matched the unholy glee in his eyes. “Looks like the little flower has a wild side. Who knew? Oh yeah, this is much better. Here I thought you were just another genteel dullard with too much money. Don’t tell me you’re a party girl, too?”

I snatched my hand away, battling down the flutter of panic as he refused to let go, pressing me up against the wall. “Leave me alone,” I told him, wondering why he frightened me so. No one else had ever been able to do that; not the boys at school, not my friends’ fathers, no one. I shoved him away with all my strength. “I don’t care if your mother is friends with mine, I don’t want anything to do with you.”

“It doesn’t matter what you want,” he said, leering at the cleavage visible above my plunging neckline. At the time, I thought he was putting on a show, that it was all false bravado to try and impress me, a display of machismo if you will. I know now that he was only stating a fact. It didn’t matter what I wanted. They had already decided my fate; I simply hadn’t been told. How naive I was. How utterly, stupidly naive. Other traditions still thrived in Paradiso, far darker and more insidious than the relatively innocuous cotillion. Traditions left over from a time when a woman was not her own. When she belonged to those around her to use as they saw fit; body, soul, and mind. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After escaping Toad-boy’s clutches, I tracked down my friends and told them I wanted to go home. They sat at a table with several thirty-something financiers who’d bought them a round of drinks before breaking out an 8-ball of coke. When they saw me, they quickly made room at the table, but I’d had enough. I said good-bye to the girls and called a cab, instructing the driver to drop me off at the edge of our long, meandering driveway. He looked dubiously at my shimmering red cocktail dress and stiletto heels, but I’d made this trek many times before and knew I could handle it. Besides, the walk always sobered me up. I enjoyed it.

I’ll never forget the way the stars looked that night, how close they appeared in the crisp air of approaching autumn. Our suburb sat far enough from the city proper that the light pollution wasn’t as bad, and I became engrossed in trying to pick out the constellations my father had taught me years ago, back when he was less busy and had more time to spend with the daughter who worshiped him. There was Vega, and Aquarius, and Father’s favorite star, Formalhaut, or “The Solitary One,” a reddish speck sitting all by its lonesome in the barely visible constellation of Pisces. I wondered now if he’d felt an affinity with it, drifting through life all alone in a sea of acquaintances, with little family and even fewer friends. He and I had always been close, and I realized now that I was the only real relationship he’d had, apart from Mother. The thought made me sad. He deserved so much better than us.

So lost was I in the memories that I didn’t hear the approaching car until the headlights washed over me, painting my startled shadow in the red clay. Whirling, I raised my arm to shield my eyes from the harsh glare, squinting as I tried to make out the car and its driver. Was it Mother, just now coming home? Or Henry, out on an errand? Neither worried me too much; Henry had no power to punish me, and Mother wouldn’t bother, numbed as she was from all the pills. I tried to look contrite as the lights finally died and plunged me into darkness, blinking away the spots burned into my retinas. I heard a door open, and then another.

“So my son was right,” said a voice I already knew well. “You’re quite the little party girl, aren’t you?”

I went cold and then hot all over as I recognized her squat form standing next to the car. Her son stood on the other side, chuckling. How had they gotten here so fast? He must have left the club when I did, gone to get his mother, and raced over to our estate. But how? Why? I couldn’t understand why they refused to leave me alone.

“Why are you here?” I asked, frightened and angry and tired. All I wanted was to lie down in my bed and forget this strange day. “If you’re looking for my Mother, I’d advise you to call during the day like a normal person. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m headed home.”

“But this isn’t your home anymore,” Toad-woman said. Her smile, invisible in the dark, came through clearly in her voice. “Your mother signed the papers this afternoon. You and my son will be married tonight, and the fortune you inherit will be his–and mine.”

Before I could process this monstrosity, the car’s front doors opened, and two mountains of muscle emerged. I couldn’t see the men’s faces, but I didn’t need to. My instincts had already taken over. I kicked off my shoes, turned, and sprinted barefoot up the red clay drive, while my mind screamed at me to run faster, run faster, damn it, RUN! The house was still a good half-mile away, but I was an avid rider and co-captain of the Stonebrook swimming team, so I was in excellent shape. Had they pursued me on foot, I might’ve had a chance to reach the house and salvage my life.

Instead, they did the smart thing and jumped back in the car. Three hundred horses screamed up alongside me and then pulled ahead, screeching to a halt as I tried desperately to shift my momentum and slip past. The man in the passenger seat jumped out of the car, surprisingly quick for someone his size, and wrapped his massive arms around my waist. He lifted me up effortlessly as I screamed and screamed and screamed.

“Shut the fuck up!” he said, covering my mouth with his hand. I tried to bite him, but it was about as effective as gnawing on an elephant. He carried me back to the car and shoved me into the front seat between him and the other brute, effectively cutting me off with his body when I tried to scramble past him. When I screamed again, he back-handed me, a feat I wouldn’t have thought possible in such a small space. I slumped against the seat as the car turned around and headed back down the drive.

“There’s no need to fight, my dear.” Toad-woman’s simpering voice sounded pleased as punch. “What’s done is done. It’s all quite binding and legal, I assure you. Resisting my men will only get you hurt.”

I wanted to scream at her, to rail against the outrage being inflicted on my person, but the blow had rendered me mute and immobile. My head lolled to the side as we turned onto the street and drove away. Cheap, musky cologne filled my nostrils, and then the brute’s meaty hand slid past my knee and up my thigh. When I didn’t move or resist–because I couldn’t–it slid up further, disappearing under my dress, brushing against the lacy red thong I’d put on earlier. I felt my underwear being pushed aside, and then he jammed his finger inside me so hard I cried out with the pain. Immediately, the hand disappeared.

“What’s wrong with her now?” Toad-woman leaned forward and yanked my head back by the hair, peering into my eyes. “I told you, fighting will only get you hurt. Now sit back and be a good little girl. Your mama told us you were, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want to make a liar out of her.”

Tears leaked from my eyes. “Yeah,” the man beside me murmured. “Be a good little girl.” I felt his hand on my leg again, but this time I summoned my strength, grabbed his finger, and bent it backward so hard he cried out. Toad-boy and his mother both demanded to know what was happening, but he made up some excuse about his gun holster pinching his skin. After that, thankfully, he left me alone.

We drove for a long time. Hours, it seemed. After we left the city behind, we turned off the highway and entered a forest as impenetrable as night itself. I fantasized ways to escape, such as diving across the driver, opening the door, and hurling myself out onto the pavement, or jamming my elbow into his eye so we crashed, but such plans were more likely to get me killed than to succeed. For the moment, it seemed, I was trapped.

After an interminable length of time in which not a single word was spoken, the eastern sky began to lighten. We pulled onto a bumpy dirt road that climbed a low mountain through a series of switchbacks and trails so steep I thought the car would tip over backwards and send us tumbling to the bottom. Of course, it didn’t–I’m not that lucky–and eventually we pulled up next to a small log cabin with lights blazing from the windows and a thin curl of smoke floating lazily from the chimney. Two cars sat out front, cars far too luxurious and expensive to be parked outside such a rustic, remote place.

“Time for your wedding, my dear,” Toad-woman said, and that was when I turned my head and vomited all over the man who had hit and groped me. It was only through Toad-boy’s intervention that I wasn’t hit again, but the thug was less than gentle as he yanked me from the car and shoved my head down onto the grass to finish heaving out what little remained in my stomach.

When I was able to stand, the brutes each grabbed one of my arms and half dragged, half carried me inside. Toad-boy and his mother followed. I had the impression of a small, drafty place with a smoky fire in one corner and a ladder leading up into a loft. Two men stood in the middle of the room, one of them a priest. “Please,” I begged him. “Please help me.” But he was as cold and implacable as the rest. It didn’t seem to matter that I never said, “I do.” The ceremony was performed, the liberties taken, and when I refused to sign the certificate the brutes took turns pummeling me in the stomach. I retched and shivered, moaned and cried and pleaded for mercy, but I found none in that horrible place that soon stank of my vomit and blood. I had no choice, if I wanted to live. I signed the paper. After that, we piled into the car for the next leg of our journey, and my poor, bruised body sank into a restless doze interrupted incessantly by hypnic jerks and nightmares.

It is here I must stop, for telling my tale comes at a great cost. I do it only at the behest of another, one who wishes to heal me, to right the great wrongs that have been done to me by the greed and lust of others. I’m not at all certain I can live up to his lofty expectations, but for his sake, I must try.

So farewell for now, dear reader, and remember: be good to those close to your heart. For there is nothing so bitter as a hatred borne of love, and no betrayal so devastating as that which comes from an unconditional trust. Believe me.

I know.