Ghostbread

by Sonja Livingston

  Annette was sharp. And in pain, brought on by the frequent absence of the husband whose job had carried them to the artless vacuum of western New York—the very same husband whose attention was lavished all too obviously on any number of other women in the parish.

  Annette was alone, with all that poetry and tomato sauce stewing in her head. So she made room. For me. And I followed.

  In Annette’s kitchen, I opened my eyes and ears, felt the limits of what I knew begin to stretch. I kept my eye on her hand as she chopped parsley into green frill, took notes on which utensil to use as she stirred sauce, noticed the way her eyes closed, as if in love, as she read poems in Italian.

  She was brilliant. And hard. Like cut glass. Centuries-old verse, modern thought, and words I’d never heard fell from her mouth like tiny flames. I was entranced. And for as long as I could, I stood nearby, watching.

  83

  Five girls, five fathers.

  And only one of us from the man my mother actually married. The rest were reactions to that man—the one in the wedding photos, the dark-haired man with black eyes, slim build and a navy uniform, who sat and stood and laid himself next to my mother long before I ever knew her. The man whose face could still be seen in those of my oldest sister and my brothers. Mr. Livingston. A man I did not know, but whose name I wore like a skin, a man I cursed each time people asked if I was English or Scottish, and whether I was related to so-and-so, or felt compelled to share their slight historical knowledge with corny offerings of “Dr. Livingston, I presume.”

  “No, I’m not related to your cousin in Poughkeepsie,” I’d answer, and when they persisted, I’d continue, “It’s just a name—from my mother’s husband, not my father.”

  They’d smile politely while squinting their eyes and trying to make sense of what I’d just said.

  I played it cool, but in truth, I was jealous of Mr. Livingston, and of my three oldest siblings, whose last name actually matched a father, offspring of the man who had exchanged vows with our mother over at St. Mary’s.

  My mother said he was cruel, that I really had nothing to envy. She’d chosen him back when she didn’t know any better, back when she was new to the city, new to the state, new to men. So new, she had thought his neatly parted hair and military uniform guaranteed her something. Back before she understood that there are no guarantees.

  Despite his neatly parted hair, he kept her inside, blamed her when other men noticed the bend of her waist, the blue of her eye. He hit her. Wanted her pain to equal his own, she said, and made it so until, when she could take it no more, she gathered up her three children and left.

  “Don’t trust the first man you love,” was my mother’s frequent love advice to her daughters, the nugget of wisdom she’d gleaned from her time with Mr. Livingston, the pearl she passed on to her girls.

  84

  My mother refused to reveal our fathers’ names. It must have struck her as personal information, too personal for us; indeed, it smacked of treachery even to request such details. Their names were like eggs in a basket, my mother sitting upon them while arranging and rearranging her feathers. She’d tell us their names when we were older.

  “When you’re fourteen,” she said.

  For my mother, fourteen was a golden year, the appropriate age for eye shadow, pierced ears, and apparently, the naming of fathers.

  No matter how I begged and cried, she’d fold her arms and look away. No makeup. No earrings. No father. Not until I was older.

  I learned not to ask.

  Only she was allowed to bring them up. She spoke of our fathers rarely, and when they were mentioned, it was only to share their various ethnicities and eccentricities. Our fathers were her stories. Hers alone. And she delighted in her handling of them.

  Steph’s father was an Italian so crazy with grief for his dead momma that he kept a slice of cake from the last event they’d attended together (a wedding or a funeral) when she was still alive. I grew up imagining a slice of frosted cake under his pillow, its buttercream stuck to the inside of Stephanie’s father’s ear as he slept.

  Mal’s father was a Stanley Kowalski of sorts—Polish, blond and tall—a fine specimen really. He was hardworking and kind, but had some sort of meningitis, which had ruined his brain—a brain, my mother said, that had never been at peak performance to begin with.

  Rachel’s daddy was from the reservation, and sadly, everyone except Rachel remembered him. To her, he was simply a dark man who wore feathers and banged on drums in a faraway land.

  My father was a sweet-talking liar. A salesman and opportunist, who preyed on women and was married to more than one of them. A bigamist of French extraction, but with a good pair of hands and a soft heart underneath it all.

  Those were the stories she gave us.

  That much, we could know.

  85

  “Who’s your father, anyway?”

  Kids wanted to know. Not many kids in the neighborhood had fathers at home, but most had memories, at least—knew who their fathers were, what they had looked like, why it was they’d gone away.

  My oldest brothers and sister took their father’s lead and enlisted in the military, one at a time. With just the four remaining girls and my mother at home, we seemed complete. We rarely thought about fathers.

  Until someone asked.

  I became an expert at changing the subject. In school, I made up names for certain branches of the family tree exercise that came with painful regularity each year. I fashioned Father’s Day cards from blue construction paper and thick glue, then tossed them into the trash on the way home from school.

  Mostly, I tried to forget fathers altogether.

  86

  When she was feeling especially generous, my mother would bless me with a detail, a description, a fragment from her time with him. She told about a visit when I was a toddler. He’d stopped by for something. She didn’t say exactly, but I could guess what my father had come for. What else, after all, did the two share?

  She laughed as she told how she and her friend Mar tricked him out of his wallet. They’d locked him outdoors without his pants, and while his chinos were in their possession, the women had picked his pockets for money.

  “Diaper money,” she reported, her eyes wet with pride.

  87

  Sometimes, I’d indulge myself.

  I’d close my eyes and imagine him coming for me. And when he came, my father was elegant. I ignored the lying salesman part of my mother’s stories, and instead made him loving and rich. Filthy rich. And handsome as a TV actor, with spice in his voice and a sleek black car that would glide down our dead end and steal me away on nights I tossed and turned and could not sleep.

  A fantasy.

  He was the endless possibility that came with questions unanswered, space left unfurnished.

  All of our fathers were fantasies. We’d use the one or two known facts as rough sketches, subtract what we didn’t like, and color in the details that best suited us. We’d create the man we most wanted, the man we most needed.

  Rachel needed an Indian chief. She’d push her cheeks into a fat scowl, force Asiatic eyes into a heavy ghetto stare, and serve out a helping of indignation when other kids asked if she was adopted or Chinese or something.

  “Chi-neeese? I don’t know what you’re talking about. My father’s an Indian. He’s as big as a tree and plays drums in a band.” If the kids who’d gathered were suitably impressed or at least listening, she’d continue.

  “And he’s a chief, the leader of the whole tribe. I’m an Indian and so is he, and I ain’t adopted.”

  Then those kids would see that her eyes were not just brown slants, but bits of earth on fire; her hair not a plain black wrapper, but a flag of fine silk. Once she’d set them straight, Rachel’s skin dropped its yellow tinge altogether. Once she’d had her say, my sister was gold.

  But she was just acting. She didn’t know her father. Rachel had been only a baby when we’d packed the Bui
ck and made our way from the motel room back to the city. She had no recollection of our reservation days and wouldn’t have known a Seneca from a Turk. It was just the line she used to explain.

  We each had our lines. Sensible but soggy sentences used to respond to the inevitable questions about how and why none of us looked even remotely alike. The lines were often repeated and intended to hide our shame. Shame that our faces didn’t neatly match. Shame that our very existence was evidence of our mother’s numerous sexual transactions. Shame that, despite so many daddies, we’d somehow ended up with none.

  88

  Stephanie and I used the mystery of our fathers to torture each other.

  I’d point out the garbage-picking homeless man we saw downtown as a possibility. Long hair curled about his face like a halo of frizz. His black eyebrows were caterpillars taking a slow crawl along the expanse of his lined forehead. He looked like pictures we’d seen of Einstein, except that our Einstein wandered up and down Main Street, picking through trash cans every chance he got.

  “Oooh, he looks just like you,” I’d say. “He has to be your father.”

  Steph fought back with accusations of her own. The most disgusting options were offered. The old man at church whose hooked nose became a dead fish against our skin as he kissed our cheeks each week at Mass. Or Banana-Face, the neighborhood crazy, known to chase people with a rusted butter knife, who was said to have murdered his wife and even in the heat of summer, wore a heavy fireman’s coat. Artemis Gordon, the second-rate fathead from Wild, Wild West (Steph claimed the more capable and handsome star of the program, James West, as her own Hollywood father).

  Fathers. They were just a game. But a question mark hung in the laughter, and uneasiness sat in the pit of our bellies.

  Like greedy baby birds, we waited, beaks stretched, longing for some clue to our existence.

  Everyone was a candidate. The time Father Shea blew air into my face while trying to dislodge a bit of dirt from my watery eye, he became a suspect.

  “So pretty and blue,” he’d said, “You know, your eyes are actually kind of like mine.”

  He should have known better. Should have understood that those few reckless words made him my father.

  I shared my conviction with Steph that night.

  After sopping up the evidence, letting it soak her system like the strawberry Faygo she liked to pretend was wine, she announced her verdict: “No way,” she grumbled lazily as we lay in bed. “First off, he’s a priest, and besides that, he’s too young.”

  My sister’s sleepy appraisal did nothing to dissuade me. He was young, sure, but not technically too young to have had a child over a decade prior. I pressed my face into my pillow and replayed the eye-blowing incident in my mind. The closeness of our faces, the tenderness with which he held my chin. Why would he have said that about our eyes being so alike? It was some sort of hint.

  He wanted me to know.

  And what about his hair? Flat brown made copper by the sun. Wasn’t that shade remarkably similar to my own? And didn’t he always treat me like I was something? Hadn’t he reinstated me as altar girl after my firing? How about the convenient fact that I already called him “Father”?

  I shook Steph awake to share this more convincing line of thinking with her. She pulled tangles of dark hair from a face that remained sensible even in sleep. She considered my words.

  “Yes,” she finally whispered, “but you really think Ma and Father Shea could have done it?”

  The question was bold. We squealed with delight at the badness of her suggestion. The giggles came in uncontrollable waves, and we smothered our laughter with pillows, so that our guts wrenched until sleep finally reclaimed my sister. I stayed awake and tackled the largely unimaginable task of picturing the handsome priest twisted around my solid paddle-bearing mother in a room draped with beaded curtains and red satin pillows.

  I conjured him clearly: ruddy skin, body lean, teeth gleaming as white and clean as the Roman collar wrapped around his neck. My mother’s face was full, her body spread before him.

  “I love you, Therese,” he whispered.

  She stared into his face, her lips parted as if to receive his kiss, but instead of touching him, she turned, looked at me, and hurled an awkward grin my way. I shrunk with shame at having been caught spying. I tried to squeeze the image from my mind, but like the Cheshire Cat’s, my mother’s smile was disconnected and loomed large.

  Steph was right.

  They could not have done it.

  The parish priest was not my father.

  89

  I was not yet thirteen when I gave my ears to Anna Torres’s sewing needle. My mother had decreed fourteen the proper age for the piercing of ears, but I was unable to manage my longing. I tried to sit up straight while Anna pressed chunks of ice against my lobes, then ran a threaded needle through my skin as her long black ponytail swished about my face, making me sneeze.

  “Be still,” Anna said as she pressed her large body into me, but it was too late, and my holes were crooked from my sneezing.

  My mother had forbidden earrings countless times, but on that night, in my neighbor’s kitchen, I was sick of her rules. So arbitrary, and binding. On that night, with Anna’s needle running through my flesh, I felt practically grown. And so, feeling the rush and swirl of power, I walked home, with lopsided strings looped through my lobes, found my mother, and demanded more.

  And like magic, my mother gave.

  DesJardin.

  George.

  She told me my father’s name as though it were a gift, and handed over the one remaining photograph of him.

  The setting was 1960s decor, drab olives and dark mustards. Two men and two women stood together in the picture, and I saw immediately that he was mine. My father had a thick red smile and clutched at the woman to his right with corn-silk hair and paper-thin features unlike those of anyone in my family. The woman had the face of a rosebud—sweet, but tight, almost shiny in its eagerness to please. Her eyes were an infant’s, the pupils overtaking the irises entirely. She looked frozen somehow, as though she might have guessed what was to come.

  His wedding picture, my mother told me as she handed me the photo, and the tea cookie of a woman, his wife.

  My father’s deeply set eyes looked adolescent, his smile forced—so that he seemed more boy than man on his wedding day. The sight of his clumsy arm grabbing at the pink of his stiffened wife was enough to make me stop looking.

  That, and the mathematically impossible inscription on the photo’s back side.

  George and Lorrie married November 6, 1964,

  Separated March 18, 1964.

  What an idiot, I thought. Didn’t he know that March came before November of the same year? I imagined him penning out the words while parked in my mother’s driveway, congratulating himself for his quickness and wit.

  “Ha!” he must have thought. “This will prove to her that I’m available.”

  And maybe my father’s salesman skills were not so great after all; perhaps my mother exaggerated just how convincing he could be, since he seemed to have had no clue about what she wanted. He did not understand his customer. Anyone with sense knew my mother hardly cared about availability. She collected babies, not men.

  And though he was my father in only the most distant of ways, I felt shame for him, for his dumb wanting, his miscalculations.

  The photograph, the name, and the often repeated facts that he was a liar, a bigamist, and a door-to-door salesman with all the plasticity and charm that men who sell Kirby uprights are capable of having were all I knew of my father.

  And that I had his mouth. A certain look sometimes crossed my mother’s face as she took in mine.

  “Your smile reminded me of someone,” she’d say when asked, something swollen in her voice.

  And I’d know.

  90

  Though I made up stories about my father and left plenty of room to imagine new mothers in my head, in the end
, I was always left with reality.

  My mother.

  The endless chatter, the up and down moods, the small freckled hands. And though I was given to imagining new ones, I never said anything against my real mother—not outside of the house anyway.

  Inside the family, I had no such loyalties. Anything she said, did, or wore was up for attack. I railed against the “mountain woman” T-shirt she’d taken to wearing. I snorted and sighed as she spoke about the splendor of New Hampshire to anyone who would listen. I couldn’t even look her way when she took up bowhunting and climbed into a van with a group of camouflaged men and headed south to hunt deer or pheasant.

  I attacked my mother’s projects—her desire to carve an eagle into the shellacked coffee table in honor of the long-gone bicentennial, her habit of ordering bulbs from a mail-order catalog in an attempt to beautify our yard, the murals she painted on our walls—the way the swan and lily pad scene that had started in the bathroom had grown larger in stages until it threatened to turn the whole of our house into one murky swamp.

  I sucked on a cherry Popsicle and sat on the porch rail with my sisters watching as my mother worked the small bit of yard in front of our house. One side had been made into lawn with roses, but the patch directly in front of the porch was hard from years of use as a makeshift parking space.

  Her face was pink and wet as she pushed into rock and stone. We swung our legs and slurped on frozen treats and asked her what she thought she was doing.

  “Making a rock garden,” she said, and went on about her plans to plant succulents and make something pretty of the dirt. The Popsicles colored our lips and we laughed and cawed and kept our legs swinging while she bent into the ground before us.