by Judith Frank
His mind cast about for the sweetest moments in his life, the ones where he felt most himself, and most connected to others. Playing guitar, for sure: girls curled up in beanbag chairs in his dorm room, or on his bunk at camp, to listen to him play and to sing with him. He suspected now, although it hadn’t occurred to him back then, that more than one of them had been crushed out on him. He remembered sitting barefoot on his bed in the darkened cabin, practicing a new melody line or picking pattern till the fingers of his left hand became red and tender, then calloused, as the shrill voices of campers rose from the moist New Hampshire heat that blanketed the woods and fields outside.
He grew drowsy, and his mind drifted and played in camp memories. He and Joel had loved Camp Ramah, lived for the chance to be away from their parents for four weeks and be steeped in Jewish ruach. Camp confirmed for them their sense of the soullessness of their manicured, suburban upbringing, where their accomplishments were paraded by their parents and even their bar mitzvahs seemed like just another opportunity to perform. He remembered the bliss of being without parents, the bracing feeling of competence that came over him when he was freed to take care of himself. To this very day he could conjure it. He remembered the beautiful grove where Shabbat services were held—a lovely peaceful shrine as dusk fell and the smells of dinner drifted in from the dining hall—and the Israeli counselors, who worked there in the summer before or after their army service. They were fair and curly-haired or dark-skinned with thick hair cut short, small and soft-spoken, their masculinity different from the masculinity he’d been, till then, making it his business to emulate. They were unspeakably glamorous, with their Ray-Bans, their flat leather sandals, and their throaty accents. Well into his young adulthood, they played a big role in his erotic fantasy life. His counselor, Ilan, a quiet and gentle soul who went everywhere barefoot and who had been a member of an elite infantry unit, loved hearing him play, and Daniel had basked in his attention—because for whom did he endlessly practice if not for Ilan, hoping for his attention and praise?
Where was Joel all day as he was practicing? Probably in the lake, or on the softball field. He thought of the long, thrilling games of Capture the Flag, and remembered one fine day when Joel actually captured the flag. Daniel himself was the kind of player who didn’t imagine he could actually capture the flag. He’d thought of it as a crude, obvious goal, while the less glamorous roles—busting teammates out of jail, drawing a contingent of the other team toward you so another could advance—held risks that were more subtle and complex. Was that true, he wondered now, or was it just the defense of someone who hadn’t wanted to take such a big risk? Or someone stepping back so his brother could shine, because his brother wanted to so very badly?
And then his memory shifted and he opened his eyes. Joel had wanted to be elected something or other—he couldn’t dredge the desired thing from his memory now—and campaigned by going from bunk to bunk and introducing himself and bringing cookies that he’d had their mother make. Then one night, some of the older campers did a skit in which one of them played Joel, whose Hebrew name was Yisrael, bursting into bunks, singing—instead of “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem,” We’ve brought peace upon you—“Hevenu Ugiot Eleichem,” We’ve brought cookies upon you. It was silly and harmless enough, but the guy who played Yisrael mimicked Joel’s ingratiating eagerness, and the slight childhood speech impediment that made Joel’s n’s extra heavy, to a tee. Joel was sitting a few rows ahead of Daniel and to the side, and Daniel could see him laugh and then a cloud of uncertainty pass over his face, and that killed Daniel right then and there, stabbed him right in the heart. That pain returned to him over the rest of the camp session whenever he saw Joel going about his enthusiastic business—but he was also furious at him, because vulnerability that accrued to Joel accrued to Daniel as well.
He pressed his cheek to Matt’s back. Joel had put himself out there, and Daniel, with a mixture of relief and contempt, had let him be the twin who did that. He stayed on the margins, and told himself it was somehow more noble, more interesting, to stay there. Honestly, when it came down to it, he’d just wanted to be distinguishable from Joel. He wanted people to know which one he was.
So who on earth was this man all his friends seemed to miss? Who did they want him to be? Who was the man whom Matt missed? Would Mr. Personality have even looked at Daniel twice if Jay hadn’t died, if he hadn’t had to flee the New York scene to save his own skin?
He blinked into the dark night, his mind throbbing, his heart choked.
CHAPTER 14
THERE WAS A skeleton hanging from Cam’s front porch. Gal caught a glimpse of it swaying, antic and ghoulish, through the backseat window one windy gray Saturday afternoon as they pulled into the driveway. “Ma zeh?” she asked, whipping around to follow it from the back window.
But by then Noam was crying and the uncles were arguing, as Daniel wrestled him out of the car seat, about Matt driving too fast. She shouted, “I’m going over to Cam’s house!” and crossed their lawns and marched up Cam’s porch steps, keeping her distance from the skeleton, suddenly determined not to look at it, but not trusting herself to keep her eyes averted, as if in spite of her best effort, they might swivel in their sockets and look.
By the time she rang the doorbell she was terrified of it, could feel it behind her and hear the clicks of its bones as it moved. She heard Xena’s wild bark get louder as the dog rocketed toward the front hall, and she took a step back, although she knew that by the time Cam opened the door, Xena would be at a polite, attentive sit-stay by her side.
The door opened and Cam said, “Hey, buddy, how’s it going?” She was barefoot, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, and her thick dark hair was smashed in one direction, as though it had been fiercely blown and then frozen. “Okay,” she instructed the dog, and Xena came forward with a gently wagging tail, thrust her muzzle into Gal’s hand. Gal pulled off the new mittens the uncles had bought her for the coldest weather she’d ever known, so Xena could smell her, and she could feel the dog’s fur and wet nose.
“Why do you have bones hanging up on your porch?” she demanded, her mind fumbling for the word even in Hebrew but not finding it.
“What? The skeleton? That’s James.”
“Who’s James?”
“The skeleton, that’s his name.”
Gal stared at her. Was Cam making fun of her? Sometimes Cam played jokes on her, like knock-knock jokes that made her say, “I eat mop who?”
Behind Cam a woman was coming to the door; she had short frosted-blond hair and held a cup of coffee in two hands. She poked out a friendly freckled face. “Hi, cutie!” she said. “Crikey, it’s cold out here.”
“Don’t treat her like a baby,” Cam said gruffly. “This is Gal. She’s mature.”
“Hi,” Gal said.
“You can play with him if you want,” Cam said. “It’s fun to make him dance.” She stepped out onto the porch in her bare feet, and as she approached the skeleton Gal let her eyes drift that way too, let them take in the legs and the long, intricate hand bones and move up to the frozen gape of a face. Cam started moving the skeleton’s arms and legs around in a grotesque jig. “I’m freezing, give me some skin!” she piped in a high squeaky voice. “Poor James,” she sighed in her normal voice. “His eating disorder got out of hand.”
Gal reached out and touched a bone of the hand, but she was too embarrassed and too repulsed to play with it, or even to examine it, in front of Cam. Had it really once been a real person named James? She was dying to ask, but feared risking one of Cam’s jokes.
Cam smacked him fondly on the shoulder blade. “I got him on Craigslist, from a former yoga teacher who used him to show her students their pelvic floor.”
“Okay,” Gal said.
Over the next few days Gal began to see skeletons and witches and bloody faces everywhere—in shop windows, on TV commercials, in the front of people’s houses. The people in one house on her block hung a spiderweb made of
string between two oak trees, a hairy plastic spider the size of a dishwasher suspended inside it. On the front lawn of a house on her school bus route, a headless scarecrow in faded overalls and a checked flannel shirt held his head—a pumpkin with a very surprised expression—under his arm. She didn’t know what to make of the gruesomeness that had burst out all over; she could tell that it was supposed to be fun and make her laugh, but it didn’t feel fun to her; instead it cast a shadow over her mind and made her move through her days with a sense of foreboding, as if anything she looked at might be gross and terrible. She studiously avoided looking at those houses as the bus passed by, busying herself with her backpack or her shoelaces, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that her eyes might look inadvertently, or—and this fear grew and festered over the span of a single afternoon—that her mind would see them even if she managed to keep her eyes averted. At recess, one of the boys told a story about going into a haunted house and putting his hand in a bowl of squishy eyeballs, and several other kids yelled, “It’s just peeled grapes!” The image of a bowl of eyeballs tormented Gal.
The next day, Ms. Wheeler told them to come to school next Friday in a costume for Halloween. Gal mouthed the word, her hands tingling. It was a holiday, like Purim. “I’m going to be a ghost!” someone hollered. “Whoo,” he said, waving his fingers in the air to express how spooky he was.
She didn’t know what a ghost was, although she reasoned that it must be part of Halloween. She thought of waiting till she got home and asking the uncles, but now that she knew a little bit about what she was dealing with, her curiosity became urgent, and she risked sidling up to Hannah as they were waiting for the bus. Hannah was the smartest girl in the class, and asked the best questions during show-and-tell. While most kids asked, “Where did you get it?” Hannah asked things like, “If you lose it do you think your parents will get you another one?” or, if someone brought in a book, “Do you like it better or worse than Charlotte’s Web?” She was nice to work next to on a project, although she never went out of her way to make friends with Gal. She was friends with Sophia and Lexi and sometimes Ava.
“Hi,” Gal said. Hannah greeted her and they stood for a few minutes before Gal mustered her courage and asked, “What’s a ghost?”
Hannah turned to her with interest. She had pulled up her hood, and her nose was pink from the cold. “You don’t know what a ghost is?”
Gal shook her head, her face growing hot.
“It’s someone who died, and then came back. They can move through doors and walls.”
Gal’s eyes were moving in quick darts as she furiously thought. “What do they look like?”
Hannah pondered that one, her eyes cast up to the sky and blinking hard. “Well, when people dress up as a ghost for Halloween, they sometimes wear a white sheet, with the eyeholes cut out so they can see.”
There was a pause. “But I think that’s stupid,” Hannah said.
“Me too,” Gal said.
“Because that’s not scary, and a ghost haunts people. A ghost looks like—” She screwed her face in thought, and Gal waited, tense with anticipation. “Well, I don’t actually know what a ghost looks like, except that you can see through their body.”
Gal had never heard of such a thing.
She tried to tell Matt and Daniel about the bowl of eyeballs during dinner, and they frowned and tried to understand as Daniel picked out for her the red peppers, her favorite part, from the salad. “What on earth is the child talking about?” Matt asked Daniel. He turned to Gal. “What is this ‘bowl of eyeballs’ of which you speak?”
“He was in a special kind of house,” Gal persisted, her temper rising.
Daniel’s face lit up. “A haunted house?” he asked.
“Yes!” she cried.
“Oh!” they exclaimed. Then Matt leaned forward urgently over his plate and said to Daniel, “Good God, has no one told her about Halloween?”
They looked at each other. “We are pathetic excuses for parents,” Daniel said. “Not to mention for gay men.”
“Why?” Gal asked.
“Why are we pathetic excuses for gay men?” Daniel asked. “Because many gay men have a special place in their hearts for Halloween.”
“Why?”
Matt scratched his face. Since Jay’s death he had stopped celebrating Halloween, cold turkey. It was just too painful. He’d buried Halloween deep in his mind, back in some spot near his spine that thoroughly numbed him. It surprised him every time how even that time of year could make him so very heavy and blank; how the sharper cold and the shrill caw of geese moving south, the early dusk, could strip away all the sustaining illusions that made it possible to do things like, say, move his legs to cross the street.
“Because . . . ,” he said, and faltered.
“Gay men like dressing up,” Daniel said. “We have a really good sense of humor, and we like to make funny costumes.”
“People in Israel make funny costumes, too,” Gal said in the argumentative tone that could drive Daniel off the deep end, “and they not gay.”
“Okay, first of all, some of them are gay,” Matt said.
Noam took a piece of the cheese slice he’d been eating and rubbed it in his hair. “Honey, just put it down on the tray when you’re finished,” Matt said, lifting him out of his chair and carrying him to the sink to wash up. Then he set him down on the kitchen floor, and Yo-yo came to clean up inside and under his high chair. The arrival of the kids had been a windfall for him, and Daniel had already put him on a diet.
“I want to have a costume of a ghost,” Gal said. “I’m supposed to wear one for school.”
“That’s not hard,” Daniel said. “We’ll just get you a white sheet and cut out holes for your eyes.”
“No,” Gal said decisively. “That’s stupid.” She paused. “How you say ghost in Hebrew?”
“Ruach refa’im,” he said. “And you don’t have to call me stupid. But I don’t think it’s the same thing. I don’t think you have ghosts in Israel the way we do here. Do Israelis have ghosts?”
“How could you not have ghosts?” Matt asked.
“I wasn’t calling you stupid,” Gal said.
“Well, how do you want to do it, then?” Daniel asked.
“I supposed to be invisible,” she said.
“That’s the big problem,” Matt said, scratching his head in mock perplexity. “How do we make a visible child invisible?”
“Maybe I won’t go to school!” Gal shouted.
“Great idea!” Daniel laughed. “ ‘Dear Ms. Wheeler, Gal couldn’t be seen in school today, because she came dressed as a ghost. But I want to assure you that she was present, because Gal is a serious student who takes her attendance very seriously.’ ”
“I have to look like I died and then came back,” Gal said.
Matt and Daniel studiously kept their eyes away from each other. Daniel thought: What the hell is she supposed to do with that information? He said carefully, “You know that there’s no such thing as a real ghost, right?”
“Okay,” Gal said.
Later, Daniel said to Matt, “I don’t love this new compliant okay of hers. What does it even mean? It sounds as if she’s saying that she’ll play along with whatever horrible or confusing thing you throw at her.”
“God, that’s so true!” Matt said. “It’s like you say, ‘There’s no hope left, there is no God in heaven or goodness in the world,’ and then she says”—he made his eyes go blank and slackened his face in a spot-on imitation of her—“Okay.”
“So what do you think a ghost would look like?” Daniel asked her now.
She thought of Cam’s skeleton and then her mind stalled out and she looked at him, finding angry tears gathering between her eyes. “I don’t know!” she cried. “You tell me!” She stood, knocked her chair over, and ran out of the room. Noam looked up, startled, and began to wail.
“Here we go,” Daniel said, sitting down heavily and patting his knees for Noam
to come over.
Matt rose to clear dishes to hide the tears stinging his eyes. “I don’t know if I can do this, Dan,” he said.
“Let’s think it through,” Daniel said, lifting Noam onto his lap and grabbing the long transparent plastic tube with the tiny plastic beads that clattered down through a maze, and turning it vertically so Noam could watch them drop. “She needs a costume for school. That’s the very minimum. And we should probably count on trick-or-treating, which means a costume for Noam, too.”
“I don’t think I can handle this,” Matt said.
“I heard you,” Daniel said.
“So can you take this one?” Matt asked.
“Sure,” Daniel said.
“Thanks, honey,” Matt said, his voice thickening as he loaded dishes into the dishwasher.
“Are you crying?” Daniel said. “Don’t cry.” He turned the toy upside down and inhaled sharply in mock surprise as the beads cascaded down again, making Noam laugh. “It’s just such a huge bummer,” he burst out. “She’s totally weird and unpredictable, and now she’s being totally morbid. What are we paying the damned therapist for?”
“It’s Halloween,” Matt said gently. “She’s supposed to be morbid.”
They were quiet, aside from the sounds of clattering beads, as Matt filled the dishwasher with soap and turned it on, lifted the tray off the high chair and brought it to the sink to wash off the tomato slime and seeds, and the warm, gunky cheese plastered to it. He wanted to thank Daniel more profusely, Daniel who wasn’t good at crafts and preferred to leave that stuff to him, but he didn’t want to press the volatile Jay issue. He ran the tray under the water, rubbing off the cheese with his fingernails, then shook it off and wiped it with a towel. He looked at Daniel and Noam, who were watching the tube toy with lazy eyes and the same faint smile, Daniel barefoot in jeans and his Oberlin sweatshirt, the baby slouched against him. Noam’s wispy brown hair was darkening, coming in the color of Daniel’s, and his eyes, too; they’d become the chocolaty color that Matt had fallen in love with in Daniel.
