Ghostbread

by Sonja Livingston

  “You’re falling,” said my friends, who had waited up for the details.

  “She’s falling,” said the Girls to their mother, who said to be careful with los Cubanos.

  I’m falling, I said to myself as I retraced the places his fingers had been before dropping off to sleep that night.

  Falling.

  And maybe I thought about right and wrong, wondered about his age, where he lived, knew somehow that he was lying. Maybe I was just a little bit scared when he took me to Durand Eastman Park and ran his hands up and down my body while I stared into the sun till it burned. Maybe I felt a certain sting when he told me in harsh tones to close my eyes, got angry if I kept them open with his tongue in my mouth.

  I knew things.

  I had common sense.

  I had seen over and over the way men took what they wanted and left women tending the rubble—but none of that mattered, because there I was, after saying no one thousand and forty-nine times; there I was, him on top of me, tongue in my ear, telling me to let go, promising to catch me. He was lying, but I closed my eyes, ate up the coconut of his voice, and fell back onto the motel-room bed.

  And that is how I fell.

  There.

  In that room, moss-green bedspread crumpled at my feet, the air tangy with sweat and mildew, eyes blinded by the white of stiff cotton sheets, stretched under skin the color of raw honey—fingers on my neck, in my pants, wrapped up in my hair.

  It was there, eyes closed, hands pushed to the sky, reaching out for something to grab hold of, something that was not there.

  109

  My mother never made mention of my late arrivals.

  She had stopped attending church, and her moods had been more jagged lately—the ups and downs of the past seemed like rolling foothills compared to the cliffs she seemed to scale and fall from daily.

  She’d rant about what a pain her children were, how much she wanted us gone. I might come home from school to find all my belongings thrown onto the porch. She’d never say what it was that I’d done, just that she wanted me out.

  I stayed out till morning and missed school, but it was never those things that seemed to bother her. Either way, after I’d stayed with Annmarie for a few days, she’d let me back home, the reason for her change of mind as mysterious as the reason for my dismissal.

  Most of her free time was spent in bed, wishing everything away. I might come home to a dark house, my younger sisters sitting in front of the downstairs TV or off with friends. Or, more rarely, I might find the house full of light and music, my mother singing while scrubbing vigorously in the kitchen.

  This was the case when I arrived after midnight carrying a loaf of French bread, a drunken gift from Ruben. He had insisted on it, pushed his arms round my waist and walked me through the all-night market until I’d chosen just the right thing. I’d pushed away from the beer and cheeses, and headed toward the bakery.

  “Ah, aquí está,” he said, “here we have it!”

  He grabbed a warm loaf of bread and set it in my arms like a baby.

  Walking into my mother’s kitchen carrying my bread, I saw she was awake, and feared she might ask why I’d been out so late. Instead she only looked at the loaf and asked where it came from. She laughed at my response.

  “Ha!” She yelped, and slapped a wet rag to her knee.

  She was clearly high and the loaf of bread seemed like comedic genius to her. “That’s just the guy we always end up with,” she said, “the one who makes a gift of bread.”

  110

  I stood at the living-room window, picking at a thread on a curtain that had begun to unravel, listening to the ups and downs of my mother’s voice across the room. She was not high tonight. In fact, she had sounded so low when I’d knocked on her door, I wasn’t even sure she’d help.

  “Yes,” she said into the receiver, and, “I think so.”

  My gut turned. The pit of my body threatened to twist itself free. I wanted to throw myself onto a bed. But necessity demanded that I stay put, face drawn into the folds of an ugly brown curtain.

  My mother had phoned the doctor on call at the Genesee Hospital on my behalf. What started as a normal period had progressed to pain that made me cry out. The tearing in my abdomen was sharp, the lower half of my body throbbed.

  She’d been on hold for over five minutes, but finally someone was there, pumping her for information while I picked at the curtain and listened. The sound of her saying my name and date of birth soothed some of the pain I felt, and I had to work to suppress a smile.

  My mother’s voice was more pointed than usual, more urgent, but the quality of it remained clear, and with her natural cadence, sounded like water running over rocks.

  Until the last question.

  The energy shifted. She became tentative, her voice lowered as she stretched the cord and ducked into the other room. “Well, I’m not sure,” I heard her mutter, and, “I don’t think so.”

  “Hold on,” she said, “I’ll ask.”

  I turned to face her, but she didn’t meet my eye as she let the words out. “He wants to know if you are sexually active.”

  Her eyes were on the floor as she spoke, and I turned and continued to pull at the thread.

  I’m not sure whether I mumbled or simply nodded, but she stepped into the next room to finish the call, and could not look at me straight for months afterward.

  It was the first and last time my mother and I ever discussed my sexual activity. I was seventeen, just finishing my junior year of high school, and doubled over in pain.

  111

  Seventeen. In that neighborhood, I was practically an old maid. But any victory I’d ever felt for waiting was gone; and all that remained were unanswered questions and my mother’s refusal to meet my eye.

  They were topics she had not shied away from. Girls we knew—friends of the family and some in the neighborhood—already had babies. She knew I was taking more time getting dressed, spending less time with my friends, and staying out late most nights—so my having sex could hardly have been a surprise. Still, a line had been crossed. There was reality, and there was innuendo. And the saying of it outright took something from us.

  Sex. Pregnancy. Men.

  What were they to her?

  Failure? Freedom? Power?

  Paths she followed, but did not prescribe. At least not aloud.

  112

  I received a call from another doctor a week later, after I’d been treated for what may have been an early miscarriage. After my mother finished that first call, she was silent on the subject and its outcome, and I went to subsequent appointments to the gynecologist on my own.

  So when the call came, I answered, and listened as the doctor told me the results of some tests he’d ordered. Endometrium. Progestins. Oligoovulation. The medical terms ran together, but I understood it wasn’t good.

  I had problems, it seemed, reproductively.

  If I ever wanted a child, said the cool voice on the other end of the phone, I might want to get started.

  I choked on his words. And a part of me flew away, to the corner of the room, and watched as another girl, a straight-backed stranger, kept her grip on the phone.

  “But,” I sputtered, “I’m still in high school …”

  My voice trailed off. Everything slowed.

  I couldn’t understand why a doctor, of all people, was advising me, a girl from East High School, to have a baby. Was he a purist, simply sharing sound medical advice with a patient, regardless of age and socioeconomic status? Or perhaps he simply did not expect anything else of me.

  He ignored my silence and continued to discuss my body as organism—one I had better make use of soon, he said, if I ever intended to.

  Since meeting Ruben, I’d been playing with fire, having sex without birth control and going through the monthly drama of praying for my period. But despite my actions, I did not want a child in high school.

  I had other plans.

  Or di
d I?

  The future could be wonderful, in theory, but the closer it loomed, the murkier it became, the less I knew how to grab hold of it.

  113

  I didn’t know it then, but Chris was every stereotype of gay.

  It was the summer between junior and senior year and I was living with Annmarie, who was living with Chris while she waited for her new husband to complete basic training. Chris was a friend from her 7-Eleven job, and his apartment was a place to stay.

  At first, I went to the apartment off Monroe Avenue to keep Annmarie company for a few nights. But nights became weeks, then months. Everything was dreary at home, my mother seemed lower than usual, and I couldn’t bear another summer of stagnant ghetto heat.

  I enjoyed the brightness of Chris’s whitewashed walls and Pier One furniture, and couldn’t get enough of Chris himself—his tips on the proper application of eyeliner, his stories of love gone south, his stacks of Wham! cassettes.

  There were fights. How could there not be? Chris stole my blusher; I broke a champagne glass. Annmarie used up Chris’s last squirt of Sun-In; Chris didn’t return the twenty dollars he’d borrowed.

  But for two whole months, I stayed at Chris’s place and pretended I was of the world. We all worked different hours, and many times, I had the apartment to myself, a luxury I’d never known.

  I’d sit on the small deck, stretching my legs on the weathered wood beside Chris’s collection of potted succulents. I’d read in the company of those desert plants until I got bored. Then I’d slip into black harem pants and walk up and down Monroe Avenue, studying people as they left head shops and used bookstores. The neighborhood was edgy and brooding, a perfect mirror for my own mood.

  When Chris was home, we’d slip Madonna into the tape player and spin around the room dancing to “Borderline.” We stayed up late talking about men—what made some good, what made some bad—and when I discovered that Ruben had a live-in girlfriend and thought I would split open from the pain of his deceit, Chris held me in his arms and called me baby doll while I sobbed under a framed poster of Judy Garland.

  114

  I cut school and worked more hours, preferring a bigger paycheck to sitting at a desk all day long. I bought new clothes, new shoes, a new winter coat, managed to save enough for spring trips to Florida and California.

  Skipping school didn’t bother me. Though I’d begged my mother to let me quit Nazareth Academy to attend the public high school in my neighborhood, once there, I found most days at East High uninspiring.

  Originally, I’d miss just a day or two to avoid the stifling classrooms and to pad my paycheck. But when I discovered how easy it was and how little it mattered, I began to miss classes more regularly, and by senior year, I was absent most days.

  When I wasn’t working, I spent my days in bed reading, or riding around glassy-eyed and tired on city busses or strapped into the passenger seat of the banged-up 1968 Volvo that Annmarie had managed to buy.

  “Where to today?” I’d ask. And Annmarie would always have a plan. A trip downtown or a drive miles away, depending on our mood and the amount of gas in the tank.

  I’d always talked about college and my mother had encouraged me. Clearly, she had not read any parenting magazines or considered the power of self-fulfilling prophecy, because in her mind, the futures of her children were easy enough to figure: Steph was a mechanical genius, and would work on circuitry of some sort; Mal, with her long legs and low grades, might make a good model; Rachel was a reliable helper; and I, with my love of reading and words, would go straight to college after high school. What I’d do in college she couldn’t quite say, but that didn’t matter so much. It had, for years, simply served as my understood destination.

  But as the years of high school passed, and the end came into view, I realized that, for all my mother’s talk, no one in my family had ever gone to college. None of us even knew how. As with Janie and the sex-ed filmstrip, the path to college seemed written in a foreign language.

  I thought about the future, the blank slate promised to those who made it through high school. My older siblings had gone off to the military, as had others in the neighborhood. And though the military seemed an honest option for kids of limited means, it was not for me. I didn’t think I could make it through the physical and emotional rigors of basic training, and had no desire to even try.

  I studied people from outside the neighborhood, teachers and people from church, and wondered how they’d managed to go to college. I asked questions, and began to search for anything that might point the way.

  The future, which had always gleamed like a treasure I’d been promised, became a heaviness in my pocket. I felt like a five-year-old again with that black snap purse, opening and closing, wondering if I’d ever learn to fill it.

  One day while flipping through the pages of a Mademoiselle, I came upon an ad for an International School of Fashion Design in Atlanta. The ad featured well-dressed women leaning together over sketches of skirts and dresses, smiling in agreement on the well-cut clothing they would usher into the world. The sun shined in through a tall window. The women glowed. I looked at them for another second, then tore out the attached prepaid postcard.

  I’d study fashion, I thought. I liked clothes. But when the call came, my mother took it, and I listened from the living room as she chattered to a woman from the school about her background, her interests, and my bad habits.

  “Oh,” she said, “I’m from the White Mountains. I’d never be able to live so far south,” and, “I’m not sure how she’d do; she’s creative, but can be a little touchy.”

  My mother said the word “touchy” in a loud whisper, then laughed so that by the time the phone was handed my way, I was too ashamed to talk. I mumbled something about calling back, but never did.

  Life after high school.

  It seemed impossible.

  Besides putting outfits together, what else could I do?

  I considered nunhood. But while social activism had its appeal, I knew I was not cut out for such selflessness, at least not willingly. And there was the tiny matter of sex.

  Languages were another option.

  I’d studied Spanish and Italian at school. They were the two classes I’d actually liked, so I sent an application to St. John Fisher, a local Catholic college, and found myself with a plan. For a few weeks anyway. Until the acceptance letter came and with it a request for a deposit.

  “Don’t look at me,” my mother said, as though I’d asked her to walk to the moon and back. And I saw that it was a mystery to her, too. Her intentions were good, but as I looked back over the years and replayed her assurances about college, I realized that it had all been talk.

  I began to see just how impossible the whole thing was, and learned to shut down that part of my brain that wanted something different.

  115

  For the first few months at the Genesee Transportation Council, I colored maps. I felt like an oversized kindergartener as I used thick markers to shade certain areas of Monroe County. Yellow for Parma, red for East Irondequoit, blue for Pittsford.

  People would walk by and peek into my workspace, and compliment me on my coloring abilities.

  “Nice job there,” they’d say, “looks like you really know how to stay within the lines.”

  They were trying too hard and were corny, but I didn’t mind. It was a small office, and the people were friendly. Steph had worked there for a year and recommended me when they needed a part-time clerk.

  After the maps were colored, I was handed a counting device, and Steph and I were installed at intersections where we clicked the counter each time a car passed. Then we counted cars in local parking garages.

  The projects kept coming.

  Over time, Stephanie demonstrated her technical skills and began to work exclusively on computer projects, while I gravitated toward the people end of the transportation business, talking for hours with elderly people on the phone, helping them arrange rides to
visit their grandchildren or get to dialysis.

  I knew there would be a job for me after high school if I wanted it. Stephanie had moved away from home earlier in the year, but I was able to see her at work, which made my connection to the place even stronger. We’d huddle in the office she had recently scored, swapping stories and laughing.

  Karen did the books at GTC. Only a few years younger than my mother, she seemed ages away. Her dark hair was cut into a sleek bob and she spoke openly about her prior marriages, current men, and mixed-up siblings. Karen worked out at the gym during her lunch hour, took vacations to Europe, and wrote stories in her free time.

  “I write, too,” I told her, and when she offered to read some of the stories of runaway children I’d taken to writing that year, I typed them up and handed them over.

  Karen was taking classes at the junior college and encouraged me to consider the same after high school. “I never thought I’d go back to school,” she said, “but you owe it to yourself to at least try a class or two.”

  No matter how rocky things were at home or school, I always showed up at work. Even if I never figured out the future, I knew I’d always have work. Work did not frighten me. Work, I knew.

  116

  Even on the days I showed up at school, the walls no longer felt real to me. I began to miss more school, weeks at a time.

  I took to leaving after my first few classes, or at least by lunch. I’d shove my books into a locker and walk out of the building, counting on the fact that I looked like someone who was doing what she was supposed to be doing. At the large urban school, I was better than invisible; I was a white girl who’d never caused a scene. I’d just breeze out the door, and no one ever seemed to mind. Until a drizzly day in March when a sentry noticed and asked me to stop.