Seeing Ghosts

by Kat Chow

  You can solve math problems faster, my father insisted, though I didn’t understand what this meant.

  When my sisters and I each turned five, he took a ruler to graph paper and sketched grids that we were to fill.

  As my father tells the story, Steph was the most dutiful. She learned the multiplication tables in minutes with a genuine enthusiasm that my father recounts with awe. She sang out equations throughout the day: Four times four is sixteen! Nine times eight is seventy-two! Twelve times eleven is a hundred and thirty-two! When her first grade teacher asked the class if they’d heard of this thing called multiplication, Steph raised her hand. The teacher began to quiz her in front of the class.

  Two times one?

  Two.

  Three times two?

  Six.

  With each answer, her teacher grew more excited. Steph remained calm.

  Fourteen times seven?

  Steph blurted out ninety-eight! Later that evening, her teacher called home to congratulate my parents on the bright child they raised. When my mother relayed this to my father, he had said: Good. How it should be.

  When our father set the empty multiplication grid in front of Caroline each summer morning, she leapt from her seat and dashed away. She hid under her bed or behind the couch, until he dragged her back to the table.

  You have to memorize this. His voice was stern, and he straightened the paper in front of her. Eventually, she filled the grid, pressing her pencil so deep into the worksheet that it scarred the table.

  Nearly a decade later, when it was my turn, I didn’t run. I wailed in front of him. By now, Steph and Caroline were in middle school. They were exemplary students, and Steph was already taking high school–level algebra. I was inconsolable.

  I don’t want to, I told my father.

  Your sisters do it, he said. You need to also. It’s good for you.

  At five, I did not have the vocabulary to say how overwhelmed I was by this way he constantly invoked my sisters when talking about my future. Just because they did something did not mean I could, too. I filled out some of the grids, then resisted until my father left me to sulk at the table.

  Laan chung, he says. Gum sui pei.

  In my father’s eyes, this story is one of the best examples of his daughters’ personalities. I don’t disagree. He must have always known that I would be the most defiant one.

  Stephanie will just sit patiently and learn the multiplication tables. Caroline will try to run away but learn eventually, he says when sharing these anecdotes. And then his voice melts into incredulity: And Katelin, wow. Katelin will just sit there and refuse. His laughter here is like vinegar. I don’t know if my stubbornness is the joke, or if it’s how impossible it seems that I could be his daughter and feel this way about math. Or maybe this joke was really on me, because I was only hurting myself.

  9.

  Fresh out of the shower, I crouched in front of a portable heater in the bathroom. A towel hung around my shoulders, and I fanned it out to trap the heat.

  Outside, the thermometer that my father nailed to the deck hovered somewhere in the teens—not out of the ordinary by Connecticut standards, but it was enough to turn our house into an icebox. Whenever I returned from school, I clicked the thermostat dial inside to sixty-five degrees or warmer, and my father returned it to the lowest setting.

  Heat is too expensive, my father said.

  I think it’s broken, I said. It can’t be fifty-five degrees if we still have to wear our winter jackets and hats inside.

  I knew what he was about to say before he said it.

  If you’re cold, just wear more clothes.

  What if I give you some money? I said, thinking about the couple of hundred dollars I had saved from a summer job. I already had on multiple layers: several pairs of socks, long underwear, a T-shirt, sweatshirt, fleece zip, the occasional winter coat. What if I help pay for the heat?

  He leaned further into the couch. At the time, I didn’t understand why my offer to subsidize the electric bill seemed like such an unreasonable suggestion, or why he didn’t take me up on it.

  In a couple of winters, a cold front would blow through Connecticut. There would be weather advisories, but as usual, my father would not turn the heat higher. Our pipes would freeze. I would watch my father head to the basement, where he’d stand in a corner for a few minutes, holding a blowtorch to a pipe before giving up.

  We just have to wait, he would say when he returned to the kitchen. Nothing you can do.

  Nothing you can do? I would repeat.

  Hey, he would say. Nothing you can do. He dove into a rant about how, when the house was built, the developers didn’t properly insulate that side of the structure. He claimed that he caught the crew removing insulation.

  In this moment, I wouldn’t say anything. I’d retreat to my room. I would be a senior by then, weeks from hearing back from colleges, the act of moving out of this house both a promise and a solution that was so close. For the next few days, neither of us mentioned the temperature. My father took cold showers. I washed my hair in the sink, rubbed baby powder all over myself, and later in the week, asked my friend Kiah if I could shower at her house. It was all so mundane. My father was right; there was nothing we could do besides live with it. It felt as though I was trapped in my father’s car with him behind the wheel. We were spinning out on a patch of ice in the middle of a winter storm. We knew we never should have been on the roads in the first place. And yet.

  * * *

  On cold days, I used the portable heater to turn the bathroom into a sauna. Leaning against the tub, I worked on class assignments or painted my nails, which were long and round, just like my mother’s. I sometimes napped, a lethargy settling.

  I had recently started seeing a therapist at the youth services center across the street from the high school. After I’d sat in my guidance counselor’s office, not understanding why I so often broke into tears, she had arranged the sessions, despite my father’s protests.

  There is no point in things like therapy, my father had argued. Being sad is just in the head.

  That’s exactly the point, I had said. Therapy is for stuff in the head.

  My father and I didn’t have the vocabulary for what our loss had generated inside of us. We were equipped only with words like sad and mad, which we attributed to living with one another, instead of any other circumstances.

  My guidance counselor told me that for a few sessions, I would not need my father’s permission to see this therapist. And so, twice a week, I walked across the street to the youth services center to chat with a woman named Carol.

  In the beginning, I told myself I was only meeting with Carol to skip class. She had a soft, gravelly voice and seemed close to my father in age. She asked questions about my classes, which I answered with gusto. I told her about what books my English teachers had lent me, and dove into long rants about how I was terrible at chemistry and geometry, and how my father’s reactions to my grades were disproportionately irate, and how frustrating I found it every time he quoted Thomas Edison.

  Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, he would recite when I brought home failing test grades. I would insist that I didn’t want to be a genius, anyway, and we would further devolve into another layer of argument. He claimed I needed to listen to him because he was the father and I was the daughter, but what did that matter when he didn’t act like one?

  In retrospect, talking about school to this therapist was easier than talking about anything else.

  In retrospect, I must have understood not to describe the house in too much detail; not to mention the frozen pipes; not to make it seem as though the house was anything but messy.

  In retrospect, she mostly listened, which was good, because I wouldn’t have wanted another adult trying to tell me how the world worked. Though once, when I was on a lengthy tear about my father and how he kept insisting that I complete every problem in my geometry textbook b
ecause I had a C in that class, and how I kept insisting that wouldn’t help me anyway because my brain had broken since Mommy died and could he stop being so controlling when none of it mattered and couldn’t he just be more understanding of that and also wouldn’t it be great if he helped me clean the house for once, she interrupted.

  You can’t change your father, she said. Why not, I said, and she had replied, You can only change yourself. That quieted me. I knew we were no longer talking about my father and our arguments about grades and the house.

  In retrospect, I learned then a new vocabulary for our grief.

  * * *

  The heater in the bathroom pitched the smell of cigarette smoke toward me. A sweet musk. Yours.

  I froze, afraid that if I moved, your scent might vanish. It perplexed me; you had been dead for months, and I was certain you hadn’t smoked in this bathroom or anywhere near that heater.

  Each morning you pulled a Marlboro from a pack and smoked it on your drive to work. Each night after you mopped the kitchen floor and you thought we were all asleep, you crept down to the basement for a fix. You reviewed your day and thought about your bank accounts; about our most recent report cards; about the attitude I gave you and how, like you always said, whenever I was in a bad mood I had to put everyone around me in a bad mood, too; about what your husband did or didn’t do for you or the family that week; about how untidy the house was becoming; about your job and its never-ending projects. There was so much you could not control.

  Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I tiptoed downstairs and called for you. You emerged from the basement.

  What were you doing down there? I said. I sniffed around you.

  Nothing, you said. Cleaning.

  You pulled me to your chest. I knew enough to be suspicious, and I could identify the earthy yellowed odor that meant you’d smoked. The next day, and the next, I begged you to quit. I crumpled your cigarettes and I whined for you to try Nicorette gum each time a commercial came on the television. Sometimes you said you would. But most nights, you didn’t say anything. You just kept smelling like smoke.

  I pulled my jacket around me and stole downstairs to the closet where your handbag was still in its usual spot, your wallet and loose change and old napkins tucked inside. I shoved a hand into your purse. I still didn’t know, don’t know, if your cigarettes killed you, but one by one I pinched them between my fingers until they disintegrated.

  How was it that after your death, I was still trying to change how you had lived?

  I crept back to the bathroom, my fingers reeking of sweet tobacco.

  10.

  We were at the cemetery where your body was buried. Nine months had passed since your funeral.

  You popped up in front of our car as soon as we parked. I forced myself not to flinch in surprise. Was I the only one who could see you? You gestured for us to follow. You muttered something that I couldn’t hear. My father did not react, and so I shut my mouth and filed behind. You ran your hands over your tombstone, which we’d finally had installed.

  So gaudy, you said. The corners of your mouth drooped.

  All these months that you waited, you paced somewhere nearby, maybe in our garage, maybe at the cemetery gates, wondering when we’d get our act together so you could rest.

  You took months to make this? You jabbed a finger at your stone as if we could have missed it. I waited so long for this?

  My taxidermic ghost-mother wasn’t wrong. It was an unfortunate headstone. Back when we’d buried Gung Gung, my mother had pointed out which granite she’d liked in the catalogue. India Red. We took note. But the color she wanted was too expensive. Something about the vibrant reds that flecked the stone lifted it out of my father’s budget.

  So when we came across a gravestone in the catalogue that was a soft salmon color, my sisters and I turned to one another.

  This will do, we said. Close enough.

  When it arrived, it was Pepto-Bismol pink.

  You examined your name in Chinese and English, then rolled your eyes when you noticed your gravestone claimed that your birthday was April 20, 1956.

  My sisters and I knew that April 20 wasn’t really your birthday; it was something your father had selected at random when filling out paperwork to leave China for Hong Kong. We knew that you preferred to base your birthday on the lunar calendar instead of the Gregorian one, but as we designed your gravestone, we didn’t have the correct one. We were sorry about that.

  So lazy you couldn’t have figured it out? you said. It looks so cheap. What am I, a beggar?

  These were the things my mother used to shout at my sisters and me when we hadn’t cleaned our rooms or she didn’t like how we dressed or she thought we were being ungrateful. We knew her temper well. If Steph or Caroline took too long getting ready for bed, or if they left their rooms messy, it wasn’t uncommon for our mother to chase them from the house. Once, while I was already asleep, she stormed into the bathroom while they were getting ready for bed.

  I thought I told you to go to sleep an hour ago, she said. You were just faat mung’ing all night?

  My sisters brushed their teeth faster.

  You don’t need a mother or something? So ma fan. Get out! She sent my sisters skittering out the front door, brushes still in hand, mouths still foaming with toothpaste. My sisters sat on the steps until they worked up the courage to sulk back inside through the garage door, our mother ignoring them. They knew that the next morning, their friend who lived across the street would ask why they were outside so late. Our mom was just playing a game, Steph would offer weakly while Caroline blushed. This was the second part of my mother’s intended punishment.

  When I infuriated my mother, I refused to let her herd me from the house. While she hollered that I was sui pei or laan chung, I dropped onto the floor and grabbed at her calves so she couldn’t push me out the door.

  So many stories about her are like this that after a while, they barely register: Her, flinging my elementary school geography textbook on the floor while shouting that I am gum laan and never going to get into a good college or find a good job afterward and that I’ll grow up a loser, jabbing at my head with her pointer finger or swatting at me with her palms.

  As my father and I stood by my mother’s tombstone for the first time, I squatted to examine the stone.

  What is this? I asked. I traced my fingers along the curved edges of my mother’s name. The engravers had chosen a font that resembled Steph’s handwriting, which was neat and had tall, rounded, sans serif letters. It was a cross between Tahoma and Comic Sans, and even as a teenager I knew it was inappropriate for a tombstone. My mother’s date of birth and death were both engraved in Courier New. It looked cartoonish, and the heart, fish, and bamboo resembled clip art.

  What is this? I started to sob. This is awful. I waited for my father to disagree. Wrinkles slid across his forehead.

  He reached into his pocket for a tissue. It was easier for me—for us both—to pretend he was sniffling because of his allergies.

  * * *

  On a fall afternoon some weeks later, my father and I returned home from school. We had a new message on our answering machine.

  This message is for Mr. Chow, the caller said. It was the owner of the company that had installed my mother’s gravestone. We needed to pay our bill and he’d been trying to get in touch with us for weeks about the missed payment. Could we call him back?

  My father looked so small in this moment, shoulders stooped in his red down vest, the same one he’d worn for decades. I recognized it from my sisters’ baby photos. His hair had the beginnings of silver. He was a thin man and had shaped new angles into his body by eating healthier and exercising more after Yi Ma’s husband died of a heart attack half a decade ago. But grief had wilted him, and the skin on his face sagged, the bags under his eyes casting downward. I’d never thought of my father as frail or old until my mother died, but seeing him standing there, I noticed how little space he occupied. Next t
o my mother, he’d always appeared tall.

  I opened my mouth, but my father had retreated to the family room, where he would spend the next few hours before dinner. He kept the same routine before my mother died. He sat on a couch in the near dark, the glow of an old floor lamp barely giving off any light. His laptop rested on a TV tray. A man’s nasally, tinny voice emerged from his computer droning about the NASDAQ and Dow Jones average. Occasionally, my father jotted numbers in a spiral notebook or on the backs of torn envelopes. I often came across these scraps of paper scattered around the house. Knowing he wouldn’t want them discarded, I stacked them in neat piles where I found them to form little cairns in the overstuffed wilderness of our home. For hours, my father remained safely cocooned by his belongings. Behind him, a row of bookcases stacked with decades-old National Geographic magazines and dusty statues of Guan Yin and the Buddha watched over him.

  Are you going to call him? I said eventually. Are you going to pay the guy for the headstone?

  I wasn’t sure what I wanted my father to say, but I knew my tone held an accusation. I leaned against the doorframe and waited for his response. Anything would do, really. I would’ve taken his anger. He closed his eyes like he was willing this situation to disappear. He must have wondered how he’d become saddled with a child like me, his youngest daughter, who thought she was an adult.

  Did you hear me? I asked. Are you going to say anything? You need to pay for the stone, or do something about all of this.