Willow Read Online Free Page A

the chief psychiatrist of a world-famous mental clinic as my father did put pressures on me that other girls my age could never even begin to understand.
Daddy was a handler. He rarely raised his voice or chastised me as would the parents of my friends. Now that I intended to become a student of
psychology myself. I understood his techniques. My childhood relationship with him was built on questions, questions he wanted me to answer immediately or search inside myself to find the answers to, even at the ripe old age of four.
"Why is your mother angry at you. Willow?"
"Why do you think we're displeased with what you've done, Willow?"
"Why am I upset with what you've said to your mother. Willow?"
I could paper the walls of my memory with his questions.
My girlfriends worried about my father's psychological expertise from another point of view.
"How can you get away with anything?" they complained to me. "Your father would know immediately if you lie to him or cook up some phony excuse."
"I don't lie to him," I said, and they shook their heads at me with pity drooling from their eyes and lips, as well as some worry that I could get them into trouble, "However," I added. "I can fool my mother and often do."
That they not only understood but appreciated. It was as if getting past your parents was the initiation we all had to undergo to become full-fledged teenagers.
Somehow, lying to my adoptive mother on occasion didn't weigh too heavily on my conscience. Either the lies were too light or my conscience was too thick, whereas lying to Daddy would have been like stepping on a paper-thin sheet of ice.
Often. I thought my A.M. welcomed lies as long as the lies helped her to avoid some conflict or some disappointment. She was terrified of
unhappiness because someone sometime in her life had convinced her that sadness was what aged people the fastest and the most. Her belief was reinforced by the faces of some of Daddy's patients, especially the women. Depression, she was persuaded, aged them twenty to thirty years, especially around their eyes-- red, sunken and sad.
Anger was second on the list of youth killers, even though she succumbed to it more often than she would have liked. Scowling not only created wrinkles where there were none, but it deepened any that were naturally there. Thus, when offered the choice of following a deception or facing an ugly or unpleasant truth, my adoptive mother lunged for the lie the way some drowning person would stretch and jump for a life preserver.
She was truly a very beautiful woman, elegant and always in style. She often traveled to Paris. without Daddy, to shop for the newest fashions. Nearly as tall as Daddy, she had the figure of a runway model: to her way of thinking, being overweight was just as much an agent of age as anything. Women who gained and lost weight on a regular basis, she once told me, stretch their skin and create wrinkles, not only in their faces but also on their leas and even on and around their breasts.
"What's uglier than a woman in a V-neck gown with ripples of skin around her cleavage? Why, even a drop of perspiration flowing down from the base of her throat would get discouraged and evaporate," she told me once while she turned each and every way in front of her full-length mirror, scrutinizing her figure for any signs of imperfection.
All of my girlfriends were in awe of my adoptive mother, but that was because they didn't live with her. They saw her only from afar, looked at her the way they would look at some beautiful celebrity. From the things they said. I understood that their mothers were quite envious of mine. too.
I worried that I could never have her sort of figure. I was five-foot-six. I had hair the color of a tarnished penny, whereas my A.M. had hair a shade lighter than fool's gold which actually glittered in the light. She kept it quite short, but she had a shelf of wigs in her closet so she could change styles at a whim.
One feature I had that neither