by Suzan Saxman
That house had one of those screen doors where the bottom part is solid metal and the top half is a screen, and I often saw little dark eyes peering back at me through the mesh. The girl had the hopeless expression of one of those starving Third World kids you’re supposed to donate money to. I probably should have let her in. Instead, I told my mother and she told me I was ridiculous. It was just more confirmation that I must be crazy.
On Christmas morning our first year in New Jersey, I woke up excited to open the presents. I remember that I was sitting on the edge of the bed in my mother’s room, waiting for her to get ready to go downstairs, when I heard an odd scratching sound, as if something were scrambling across the wooden floor. And there, scuttling towards me, was something like a giant dog-sized spider, a human spider, in a black suit. That makes it sound kind of cute and funny, but it wasn’t. It was unnaturally weird and unsettling.
I wasn’t frightened of my fever fairies, but this entity was off in a way that they weren’t. What was it? I still don’t know. Perhaps it was the suit. Perhaps it was its size. Perhaps it was the twisted rage of its face. It was ugly, hideously ugly, and I knew instantaneously that it was some entity of absolute evil. It crawled across the room as I watched, transfixed and terrified; and then with a final shudder it disappeared into the closet. I’ve often wondered if it wasn’t a thought form of my mother’s negativity, a being issuing forth from her fury and frustration. It was like that alien monster that bursts out of the astronaut’s stomach in the science-fiction horror movie, but I was the only one who saw it. Merry Christmas. Ho, ho, ho.
I overheard my mother admitting to my aunt Mary a few months later that the house was haunted. But my mother wouldn’t talk about it with me. What if she had? What if just once she had acknowledged that what I was experiencing as a child might be real? But my mother wouldn’t talk about anything.
She did tell Daddy that I needed to go down to Florida for my rheumatism, that the warmer weather would make a huge difference in how I felt. So my mother and I started flying back and forth to Florida … and to Steve. My mother was right about one thing. These trips did make me feel better, especially since I finally got to meet my other grandmother.
Steve’s mother, my grandmother, was a funny little woman from the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania. She looked like Björk, that dark little Icelandic singer, only my grandmother was smaller, maybe only four feet tall, when I knew her. She was the shortest woman I have ever met, and I’m very small, too, so it was hard to take her seriously. She loved to laugh. She’d giggle all the time. She was still very beautiful, with a rosy little face and eyes as dark as mine. Her family had been violin makers, and she used to talk a lot about the old country.
When I had headaches, she would place her hands, very soft, very small, on my forehead and spit over my shoulder, muttering something I couldn’t understand. Every time, the headache would disappear. She told me that her grandmother had been a Gypsy and read the Tarot. I didn’t understand what that meant, and by the time I did, my grandmother was long gone from my life. She told me these things quietly and secretly. They were things you weren’t supposed to speak about. Her husband, a Sicilian, had thrashed her with a strap whenever she mentioned them. He was cranky and unpleasant like my mother.
Whenever there was a thunderstorm, my grandmother would run outside. There she was, a little old lady with bare feet, running through the rain and the lightning. She loved to play outside in thunderstorms, and she told me, when she invited me to join her, that nothing in nature could ever hurt me.
When I was with her, I could relax and be myself in a way that I never was anywhere else. She was the same kind of being I was. Instinctively, I knew that and trusted her.
I loved her house, which was filled with old-world charm and gold goblets and blown-glass figurines. That house had no unhappiness in it, only Florida sunshine.
In the mornings, bright and early, Steve and I would walk along the docks and rescue fish that had been left to die on lines cast out overnight. We’d take the hooks out of their mouths and throw them back in the water. Steve understood how to treat animals. He also taught me to swim and snorkel. “Come on over here!” he’d yell. “I think there’s a shark! You’ve got to see it, Suzan!”
My mother would never go in the ocean. She was frightened of deep water and stayed on the beach.
I was swimming along with my snorkel mask on one day when I saw the pale sand disappear into black depths. I was headed out to sea and didn’t realize it. I heard flute music under the water and was hypnotized by a vision of cobblestone streets and dilapidated buildings on the ocean floor. I wasn’t experiencing myself as drowning, but apparently on the shore my mother and Steve were hysterical when they saw my snorkel disappear under the waves far out from shore.
Steve dove into the water and was swimming frantically out to me, but it was a strange man with dark hair and blue eyes who reached me first and carried me back to the beach. I came to as the lifeguards were pushing down on my chest, giving me CPR. The man with dark hair had disappeared and no one knew who he was when I later asked about him.
I had nearly died, but it wasn’t frightening in any way. I was simply curious about the whole experience as it was happening because it was clear to me that it wasn’t my time to go. The land I was swimming towards was the past, I knew that, but I had forces keeping me in the present. People treat death like it’s some kind of mistake or accident, but it isn’t really. It’s part of nature, too. Everything dies.
Once, we all took a cross-country road trip to Disneyland—Steve, his mother, my mother, and my poor sister. Steve had traded in the Renault and now had an old beat-up convertible filled with five million cigarette butts and old newspapers. If anyone complained about the car, he’d say, “This? This is a classic!” We kept running out of gas, but Steve didn’t care. We stayed in old run-down motels and stopped at every White Castle between Florida and California.
Once, in the desert, we came to a place where everywhere we looked there were cautionary signs that said: “Beware of Snakes!” But Steve stopped the car and started running out across the white sands, calling to me to join him. “C’mon, Suzan, all they can do is bite ya!” He wasn’t scared of anything.
That’s what I needed more than anything, growing up: his fearlessness.
My mother couldn’t stand Steve’s wildness. One afternoon in the flatlands of the prairie, we saw a funnel on the horizon that looked like it had come from The Wizard of Oz. I remember my mother screaming at Steve to get in the car because a tornado was coming. Steve just sat at the picnic table at the rest stop, eating hamburger after hamburger, ignoring her. It was almost as if he wanted the tornado to arrive and sweep him up in it.
“What are you doing? What are you doing!” My mother was getting increasingly hysterical. The wind was rising.
“I’m not going anywhere now!” he announced.
I loved his courage and his defiance. I wanted to be like him.
My mother and Steve fought incessantly. They were always yelling and screaming at each other in public about some other woman he’d been with. He made my mother wild, and she was both repelled and attracted to him. I think the best part of my mother was the part that kept returning to Steve and bringing us to be with him. He was so completely alive and without fear. Some part of her must have known that and wanted adventure and passion.
When I was twelve, though, my mother discovered that Steve had another daughter in Florida. I would find out much later that he had other children, too, but this was the one my mother found out about. She went wild and then she sank into a terrible depression, and we never went to Florida again. Steve called almost every day after that and she would talk to him, but she would never let me get on the phone. I never saw my Transylvanian grandmother again.
My mother told me I couldn’t have anything to do with Steve anymore. She claimed now that he had forced himself on her and that she had gotten pregnant by accident and t
hat he had wanted her to have an abortion.
“Can you imagine? Your father wanted you to be an abortion. You could have been an abortion. An abortion.”
You don’t say that to a child, especially not a ten-year-old. Waves of anger swept through me and I thought I might drown in my own fury. I wanted to scream at her, to hit her, to destroy her, but I couldn’t. I just kept it all inside. I’d gotten good at that. Unlike my father, I didn’t fight back. I didn’t say anything. I just pulled further away from her than I had ever been before.
She tried to make me hate him, but I knew that she was really speaking for herself. She hadn’t wanted me to be born. Steve loved me, and nothing could erase that knowledge. But to my mother, I had always been some kind of mistake. She took her fury at Steve, at herself, at everything out on me.
A lot of psychics are bliss ninnies. They don’t want to talk about evil. They act like if you don’t notice it, it’ll go away. The white light is everywhere! But there’s evil everywhere, too. It’s not just in the murderers and the psychopathic killers and the torturers; it sneaks into everybody’s life. Everybody’s got a little evil in their daily planner. We’re all stepping on spiders and eating our pork chops and wearing sneakers little kids in China have stitched together. I’ve done readings for hit men, who kill for a living, but I’ve also had the nicest-seeming people ask me if I could predict when their mother-in-law was going to die, if maybe, just maybe, through my psychic powers I could make it happen a little faster than nature intended. Is the medical researcher who kills dozens of rats each day in the name of science really any different from the serial killer? And what about the mother who tells her daughter she should have been an abortion? That sure felt evil to me.
Steve used to tell me that he didn’t believe in God, that if he went into a church he’d be struck dead. Whenever my mother got pious, Steve would upset her by telling her, with a twinkle in his dark eyes, that he prayed to Lucifer. But Steve just said that for shock value. In reality he walked along the docks each morning, his heart wide open to the fish in need of rescue. He loved life and he celebrated it, and I would never forget that, even though it would be a very long time before I would see him again.
She was a sweet, gentle-voiced girl, but she was having horrifically violent dreams. That’s why she came to me. Every night, she was seeing people bludgeoned, stabbed with kitchen utensils, force-fed, injected, and tortured. Nothing in her life seemed to be connected to these vivid nightmares, and she felt oddly emotionally detached from them. She wondered what was the matter with her. “It’s like they’re not even my dreams,” she said.
They weren’t.
She lived in an old building in New York City in what had once been terrible slums, and at night while she was asleep she was tuning in to long-forgotten horrors. She was very sensitive, and she was picking up on hundreds of years of secret terrors that lingered in the whitewashed bricks.
Our dreams aren’t just a way of making psychological sense of what’s happening in our own lives; they can also be journeys into the past and into the future and into other people’s memories and lifetimes.
“When you move, the dreams will stop,” I told her.
And they did.
5
The Artful Dodger Steals My Heart
Other than Steve, the only real friend I had growing up was Jack Wild. Except he didn’t know it yet.
When I was eight years old, the movie Oliver! came out on my birthday, and I’ll never forget my first sight of the little English boy playing the Artful Dodger. He had a round face, sparkling brown eyes, and a mop of long dark hair. He was small and agile as he danced along the cobblestone streets. My eyes widened as I watched him. My heart opened.
I felt a deep joy watching him, like nothing I had ever felt before. He was a magical being, a being from between the worlds just like me. I knew it. I wasn’t alone after all.
Part of it was how much the movie spoke to me. I related to poor, unloved Oliver, shuttled from the poorhouse to the coffin maker’s and finally adopted by a troupe of street urchins. I wanted to be taken in by Fagin’s gang. I wanted the Artful Dodger in his tattered top hat to wrap an arm around me and consider me part of the family.
But it was more than that. I felt like I was falling through a time warp or a wormhole as I watched the movie. I was flooded with memories of garret rooms with faded flower wallpaper, damp to the touch. I smelled dark coal smoke. I knew that’s what it was. I also knew Jack Wild. I recognized him. We were deeply, profoundly connected in some way I could not begin to understand.
He even affected my mother, who otherwise seemed to be resistant to anything sentimental. I would always drag her to Jack Wild’s most recent movies, and it was only during Flight of the Doves, a tale about two Irish orphans on the run together, that I ever saw her cry. She was usually bored or distracted in movies, but during this sweet film she was riveted to the screen. It wasn’t a very good movie. It was about children and she hated children. Still, I saw tears in her eyes, and for a moment I felt an effortless swell of love for her. She could feel the magic, too, of Jack, of Ireland, of the two children alone together in the wilds. I held on to that moment for years. How bad could she be, really, if she, too, loved Jack?
Many years later, I would meet Jack Wild in person and discover that we had had a strange bond and, strangely, he had one to my mother as well, but as a little girl in New Jersey I didn’t know that one day we would be friends. I only knew that without him, my childhood would have been unendurable.
Once, I came home after school with yet another misfit. When I came up the walkway, I saw my mother standing at the front door with her arms crossed, tapping her foot. She was insanely furious.
“I have been waiting for you all afternoon.”
She was so weird and neurotic. She was panicked, I think, that I might reveal her adulterous affair to some little girl who would tell her mother. The neighbors might find out. The nuns at my school would condemn my mother. By the time I was home, she had worked herself into a panicked rage about where I might have been and what I might have said. I would do anything to calm her down.
I thought that I was afraid she would burst a blood vessel and die if I stayed away too long, and that was true. But there was also a part of me, completely unacknowledged until I was much older, that actually wanted her to die, I think. I wanted to be an orphan like Oliver. If I were an orphan, then my real family could rescue me and I might know what it was to be part of a family that loved me. I was frightened of how much I wanted that. I never admitted it to myself when I was young. Instead I devoured stories about pitiful orphans and worked my way through every novel Charles Dickens had written. On Saturdays I would either sit in the library, alone and reading, or go to the movies by myself.
After seeing Oliver!, I became Jack Wild’s most devoted fan. I collected every photo of him that I could find, wrote him fan mail, and got the form letter back with more photos. Jack became the star of a psychedelic sixties kids show called H.R. Pufnstuf, and every weekend I was glued to the television watching it. I ordered all the books, the cards, the plates, and the collectibles that featured Jack. I read celebrity magazines avidly for any news of him. After his Oscar nomination, Jack made over thirty films and I went to them again and again, often on the same day. When PBS aired Our Mutual Friend by Dickens, it was on every night of the week and I watched Jack Wild in it every night of the week. I was thrilled when Donovan, the folk musician from England, helped Jack with a music album. Donovan had composed the soundtrack of Brother Sun, Sister Moon. Jack’s music now reminded me of Saint Francis.
Jack and I were connected to each other. I was sure of it.
One day in 1973, when I was thirteen, my mother took me to a local store to pick up some new clothes. It was called Nice Stuff, as if you might not know this unless they told you so. My mother had a lot of opinions about what I was supposed to wear. When all the kids were in jeans and sneakers, I was still wearing pleated
slacks and patent-leather shoes. She insisted on laying out my clothes the night before school and she expected me to wear whatever she put out. If I came downstairs in something else, she’d say, “I don’t know those clothes,” and I would be expected to go upstairs and change.
This day in Nice Stuff, however, I fell in love with a pair of mod bell-bottomed overalls. They were green. And to be fair to my mother, they were truly hideous. But I loved them, and I insisted on buying them. We actually had a fight about it and I ended up paying for them with my own money.
I put them on as soon as I got home. I was cool. I was hip. I was thirteen, and I was going to fit in at last.
That night, Jack was scheduled to be a guest on a British variety special with singing acts and funny skits. I couldn’t wait. I was jumping up and down in the TV room in my overalls.
We were all in the TV room, even my sister, who was living at home and commuting to graduate school to study teaching.
Jack bounded onto the set, his long dark hair waving around his cheerful face. He joked with the host. But I don’t remember a thing Jack said, because all I could see were the green overalls he was wearing. They were just like mine.
My mother’s head swiveled around from the television to me, from me to the television, like she was in The Exorcist.
Jack’s black hair was shoulder length, just like mine, we both had the same dark brown eyes, and we were both wearing the same overalls.
“You could be his sister,” said Daddy, stunned.
Even my mother couldn’t believe it. “My God, Suzan, you look exactly like him.” She turned to my sister to see if she agreed.
“It’s uncanny,” said my sister.
The older I got, the more intense my connection to England and Jack Wild became. I’d see a photo of the flag and feel this rush of almost alarming patriotism. We’d be saying the Pledge in school and I’d want to shout out, “God save the Queen!” It was kind of nuts.
