Flowers in the Attic, Pt. 11 - or " The Part Where it Gets Weird"

Hey welcome back

See what happens when I get ambitious and recap three chapters a month?
In my (weak) defense, I did attempt to write this several times over the last year, but I never had my book on hand.


As promised, we begin part two with things getting immediately more bonkers.

Clearly Cathy was just as bored with the first half of the book as we were, because the first sentence of part two is that two more years went by. I guess nothing significant happened in that entire time. Whatever, I don't have to read about it, so it's fine by me.

By this time, all the kids have gotten pretty careless about what they do in that room. They have clothes thrown everywhere, and the twins have toys all over the room, they don't always put on bathrobes on and lay around in their pajamas and don't really care when someone of the opposite sex sees them in the bathroom - things like that. Honestly, they've been locked in one (actually two if you count the attic) room for three years. It's bound to happen. I don't fault any of them for that.

I do fault them for this next bit, however.

Cathy's moving into her teen years and has never really gotten a good look at her body.
You can see where this is going.

One day when they others are up in the attic, Cathy goes into the main bedroom (bathroom mirror's too small) and decides to do just that. While she's admiring herself in the big vanity mirror... um... this happens... :

'A rippling sensation on the back of my neck gave me the awareness that someone was near, and watching. I whirled about suddenly to catch Chris standing in the deep shadows of the closet. Silently he'd come from the attic. How long had he been there? Had he seen all the silly, immodest things I'd done?... He stood frozen. A queer look glazed his blue eyes, as if he'd never seen me before without my clothes on - and he had, many a time....

His eyes lowered from my flushed face down to my breasts, then lower, and lower, and down to my feet before they traveled upward ever so slowly.' 

GET AWAY FROM HER - YOU CREEPY, FUCKING FUCK!

She rightfully asks him to go away and stop staring at her... he ignores her. Great. What's worse is when she starts to cover herself he tells her not to and asks when she got so beautiful...and I just threw up a little.

Tell me something - I'm an only child but - people with siblings - how does this kind of thing make you feel? My best guess would be "icky"

And naturally, this is when The Grandmother decides to walk in. I swear, she's got cameras in there or something.

She accuses them of all the usual thing and Chris retorts that they haven't done anything and... listen, we the readers know that's true (at the moment) but I kind of have to side with Gramma on this one. This doesn't look great.

When she's done yelling back and forth with Chris, The Grandmother turns on Cathy and starts accusing her of vanity and whatnot - specifically mentioning her hair, and I think we all can tell where this is going.

When she leaves the room for a minute, Chris turns on Cathy, demanding to know what she was doing and telling her that they all knew The Grandmother spies on them (see - cameras. Told you.) but - excuse me, the real problem here is mostly from you watching her - you creepy fucking fuck! 

I'm sorry about just how many rage gifs are going to be in this post. It's really the only way I can express just how pissed off this makes me...

-ahem- sorry.

The twins wander down from the attic, and I'm only mentioning it because shit starts getting crazy real fast and I don't remember them having any reaction to it -but I could be misremembering.

The Grandmother comes back into the room carrying the world's biggest pair of scissors....

She tells Cathy to sit her ass down (okay she doesn't use those words) and that she's going to cut her hair off down to the scalp. Cathy reacts badly, thinking that it's her worst fear (I find it very hard to feel any sympathy towards this girl) and that she'd rather be whipped because her skin would heal. She's had nightmares about The Grandmother coming into their room and cutting off her hair and her breasts (Okay- yikes) and points out that The Grandmother never actually looks at her completely, she always seems to be glaring at a part of her she doesn't like and wants to remove it.

That's actually pretty insightful - I just wish it was in a better book. 

Chris tries to get Cathy to run into the bathroom and hide, but she's too scared to move. He tells The Grandmother she wont be touching a single hair on Cathy's head, and Gramma takes this about as well as you'd expect, saying that none of them will eat until Cathy cuts her hair off, and Chris will be the one to have to do it. 

Cathy, considering there are three other people in that room with you - two of which are very young children, maybe just cut your fucking hair off and save everyone a lot of grief? 

Still, they're not too worried yet, figuring that their mother will come see them any minute and they'll explain what's going on. Cathy has a bout of nightmares ranging from Hansel and Gretel candy house  ("...the shrubbery of ice-cream cones, seven flavors." ) with The Grandmother as the witch, to their mother turning into some kind of Medusa-style monster strangling them all with her hair so they'll never be a threat to her inheritance. I think Cathy's finally starting to get the big picture. And it only took her three years.

She wakes up feeling drugged and her head feeling weighted down. That's probably not a good thing.
In fact, when she tries to sit up her whole body feels pretty numb and useless and she has a splitting headache. I'm really surprised she hasn't mentioned the smell yet...

(For a bit of IRL context here, my apartment complex recently repaved all the roads and everything - everything - stunk to the high heavens for longer than I care to remember. I don't believe that this child could wake up to what's about to happen and not immediately notice something is wrong and/or throw up)

Without all of VC's flowery language building up to it - Cathy's head is covered in tar.
That was the Grandmother's solution. Don't want to cut your hair? Tar.Where did she even get the tar? Who just has hot tar lying around their giant mansion?

For some reason, whenever I read this I seem to forget that tar is, well, tar - and it takes me a minute to think "hey - why isn't that stuff all over the bed instead of just on her hair?" "Why hasn't she been badly burned by said hot tar?" "Why didn't her siblings wake up when they smelled the aforementioned hot tar???" because, really, none of these things are addressed. Cathy acts like it's gum or something - albeit a lot of gum, but still. There should be more questions raised here.

So Cathy is still groggy from whatever the Grandmother drugged her with, but manages to wake up Chris and the twins. Carrie instantly starts yelling and making it about her, saying she "doesn't like [Cathy's] head now" and I want to throw that child into a wall.

What follows is an agonizingly long scene of all the ways Chris tries to get the tar out of Cathy's hair without cutting it. Because God forbid. The conclusion they come to is for Chris to cut off her "front hair" and no matter how many reviews of this book I read, no one seems to be able to figure out just what that means.
But anyway, they cut off her "front hair" and then wrap the rest of her head up in a towel so that The Grandmother will think that Cathy is just ashamed of her horrible baldness (I guess?) and not - y'know - rip the towel off and cut the rest of her hair.

So outside of all of this, they haven't received any food for that day and only have some cheese and crackers left. The Grandmother keeps her word about not letting any of them eat until Cathy cuts her hair - although she never actually comes to check. All I'm saying is, either she really does have cameras in there, or she's fucking with them. 

So days go by and they run out of food down to the cheese in the mouse traps and are living on nothing but tap water. They run out of toothpaste, soap, and toilet paper and have to use the old books from up in the attic. The toilet backs up and they have to deal with that themselves too, hiding the soiled towels and bedsheets from mopping it up in the old trunks. Unfortunately, this is - again - slightly something I can relate to a little too closely, having lived in a few places that just had the worst plumbing ever. 

Too real. 

Days go by as the four of them can barely move and just sleep or lay in front of the TV for hours. At one point, Cathy remembers seeing Chris slash open his arm and start feeding the twins his blood. Suddenly making this a vampire or cannibal story would really improve this entire series. 

Two weeks go by like this and they finally realize that they'll die if they don't get out or if their Mother never comes back. They decide to make a rope ladder and climb out the attic window with the twins tied to their backs, but realize that they're too weak to do so. Y'know you guys might have decided to do something sooner. 

Chris the Vampire Overlord decides they can eat the mice they'd caught in the traps and that will give them energy (ew) and when he goes back down to the bedroom for salt and pepper (no comment) and finds the picnic basket overflowing with food. Along with the soup and milk and sandwiches is a foil wrapped packet containing four powdered donuts.

They go downstairs, Cathy confirming that now they finally realized that they were the only ones responsible for each other and that their mother really didn't care about them anymore. Guys, it's been three years. It took you being starved and neglected for three weeks to finally get that? 

So the first thing Cathy does is go to look in the mirror to see how much of a skinny, weird-haired circus freak she looks like, and low and behold the mirror is gone! ( -insert monotone screaming-) They look in the bathroom and the one on the dressing table and both of those are broken. Cathy goes on to say that she didn't need to wonder why the Grandmother had done all that....and then goes on to explain it anyway. Pride is sinful - blah blah - you know the drill by now. 

So things start going back to whatever they might consider normal at that point - no more hair-tar and starving to death, at least - and there's some awkward, really pointless conversation and a monopoly tournament that I'm ungodly grateful we don't have to hear about, and then Cathy and Chris decide to sneak down the rope ladder and go swimming. 

You mean....you could have left....at ANY TIME?

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