ear, “Is my Lucy trying to wear a night skirt? Oh, Lucy, Pumpkin, Gramma’s night skirt is very special—not for little girls. Oh no, no, no.” But when Gramma said, “No, no, no,” it didn’t sound like it did when Mother said it (as Lucy slapped down the uncarpeted stairs, her small mouth twisted like she’d just tried to eat a peeled lemon), oh no, not at all....
And hadn’t Gramma shown Lucy how special her long blue-black-purple skirt could be? There was that time in the front yard, in winter (the most special, secret time, when Lucy swore on her heart and hoped to die that she wouldn’t tell Mother or Daddy what she’d seen), and the other time, when Lucy had scooted along the floor while Gramma was napping she’d lifted up the hem of the night skirt and curled up in a little ball under the heavy fabric.
As she made her way down the stairs in the darkness of evening toward Gramma’s room, Lucy remembered how she had been able to see only a faint haze of light, like trying to look through the stacks of screen windows resting against the house, the day Daddy changed the windows in early summer. But the more she’d looked, the better she could see—only through the cloth of the night skirt, things looked different. Colors changed, and the shapes of things, too. At first, Lucy hadn’t recognized Mother at all, for seen through that night-dark fabric, Mother was a horned, angled creature, all hard surfaces and spikes.
That was when Lucy whimpered, and Gramma nudged her out from under the night skirt and had Lucy on her lap before Mother could open her thick lips to scold or complain. But Lucy saw the look in her mother’s hazel eyes, and almost imagined the horns again. And for many a night after that.
Mother told Daddy in the half hour or so before sleep overtook them that she ought to take Gramma’s “damned skirt” out and burn it—just toss it on the trash heap and incinerate it. Lucy wondered why Mother didn’t suggest giving the skirt to the woman who came around every week, but every time Mother mentioned it, all she seemed to think of was destroying it.
Lucy was careful not to make the treads squeak as she went down the stairs, even though she could hear the loose flutter and harsh blap-blap-blap of her parents snoring above. She held onto the big thick railing that was almost level with her shoulders, her slightly damp palm sticking in places to somewhat gummy old varnish of the oak rail. Down below, moonlight came through the shaded and curtained windows in hazy patches, just the way the light had been filtered through Gramma’s night skirt, only different, too. It was hard for Lucy to put into words, but the mind-picture came easily enough along with other pictures, from other times with Gramma. Like last winter.
Reaching the cool first floor, her bare toes feeling cautiously for any sharp things like gravel or splinters on the varnished wood surface, Lucy slowly made her way, hands outstretched, toward Gramma’s room. As she did so, the memory of another walk, this time over snow and cold cement, came back to her.
Gramma said she didn’t like going outside in the snow—she might slip and fall and break her brittle bones—but Lucy’s birthday was coming up next week, and Daddy had forgotten to mail the invitations for her party when he had left the house that morning. Mother was busy ironing clothes, making puffs of whitish steam come up with a hot fabric smell off the ironing board set up in the kitchen, so Lucy begged and begged until Gramma said she’d walk down the street with Lucy to the mailbox, and drop the tiny stamped envelopes into the slot that Lucy couldn’t reach herself.
But Lucy could tell that Gramma wasn’t too keen on the idea, even though she said nothing to Lucy as she held her hand, which poked out of the fur trim on her winter coat. Lucy was so happy to have her invitations mailed that at first she thought Gramma would get over being upset.
And maybe Gramma would have been just fine, but Lucy shook her hand loose from Gramma’s kid-gloved grip and began walking backwards, like Vernilla Nemmitz in school did at recess time. Gramma began to cluck and scold softly, telling Lucy, “Oh, Pumpkin, little ladies don’t walk like that!” But Lucy was thinking that come Monday she’d show old “I’m in-the-second-grade” Vernilla what she could do, and then she looked down at her faint footprints in the sugary dusting of snow, and her grandmother’s, and stopped in her tracks, one tiny gloved hand pointing, just pointing down at what she saw.
That was when Gramma reached out and took her hand and steered Lucy back to the house, leaning down every once in a while to whisper something fast and quiet to the little girl, until Lucy began to nod in awareness. Near the front porch, Lucy solemnly crossed her heart and hoped to die rather than tell anyone, even Vernilla Nemmitz at school, what she’d seen in the fast-melting snow.
Other grandchildren might have been scared after seeing what Lucy had seen, but she loved her Gramma, and the deep, pitch-black secrets of the night skirt, and in return for promising never, never to tell, Gramma had made a promise to Lucy, too.
Her breath billowing out in small, semitransparent white clouds before her gently sagging face, Gramma had whispered with soft popping clicks of her false teeth, “Someday, my little Pumpkin, you’ll get to wear the night skirt, too—not your mother, but you. Your mother doesn’t understand—not like you, my girl.”
And even though Lucy really didn’t understand everything just yet, she’d nodded in agreement. A few weeks later, she’d tried making her own night skirt out of her coat, making Gramma laugh. That was when she’d said the night skirt wasn’t for little girls-at least, not yet.
But as Lucy made her way toward the doorway of Gramma’s room, now keeping her arms at her sides so she wouldn’t knock over Mother’s bric-a-brac stand with a thump and a crunch and a delicate shatter, she told herself that now she could wear the night skirt, that Gramma surely understood, even if she wasn’t alive anymore.
Lucy had been what the neighbors called a “brave little girl” when the doctor came out of Gramma’s bedroom-cum-sewing room that afternoon, closing his black leather bag with a snapping-fingernails click that made almost everyone in the parlor jump in place and twitch their closed mouths before they cast their eyes to the floor and began to pat Mother on the back with gentle hands. Even without being told, Lucy knew what had happened, and without needing to ask, she’d known that the night skirt was now hers.
Gramma had said so, hadn’t she?
For on that day, Lucy had seen footprints that weren’t always footprints trailing out behind Gramma, even though she had been careful not to step on the snow if she could help it, instead searching out the bare spots on the cold cement...but in some places there was nothing but snow, and in others, Lucy had seen the rounded arches of hooves, the four-toed round pads of cat paws, only really big, and the thin skitterings of bird claws, and here and there a regular shoe print, but only here and there.
All the funny tracks in the snow trailed out behind Gramma’s wonderful, terrible, oh-so-thick-and-dark night skirt, dusted here and there by the sweep of the trailing skirt, but not obliterated.
And Lucy had been a good girl, keeping the secret she’d exed into her breast with trembling fingers. And without being told she’d kept secret what she’d seen through the night skirt—that angular place that wasn’t Gramma’s room anymore, with that homed, strange thing that was but wasn’t her mother.
When Gramma had nudged her out from under there, Lucy had felt sharp claws at her back, poking through the wool jersey of her dress, and the lashing curl of a tail whip around her arm, but she hadn’t told about that, either. For even if she hadn’t liked her Gramma, and had run screaming for her mother, begging her to look, Gramma would have had normal feet tucked in normal dark stockings and sensible leather shoes, for that was part of the mystery of the night skirt, that keeper of the dark, and all that crept or crawled or prowled under cover of darkness.
The mystery and magic of the wonderful
