Ghost Songs

by Regina McBride

  “They’re babies,” she says and smiles up at us.

  •

  In first grade, Sister Maria del Rey teaches us about molecules. She tells us that everything—the desk, the pencil, our clothes, even our skin—is composed of microscopic particles that revolve around one another on tiny orbits.

  It intrigues me that all solid things are made of molecules, but I am astonished when Sister Maria del Rey says light is also composed of waves and particles. When light is switched off, what happens to the molecules?

  At home, as my mother turns the flame down on the Minute Rice and puts a lid on the pot, I tell her about molecules.

  “Even your breath is made of molecules,” she says. “And even a smell that you can’t see is made of molecules.”

  “Even a smell?” I ask. I pick up an orange, hold it a few inches away, and smell it. “So molecules of the smell are on the air now?”

  “Yes, and some are even in your nose.”

  Suddenly there are no boundaries between the orange and me. Smelling the orange, I have taken on its nature. The orange, for a little while, is inside me, and when the smell is gone, the memory of it is so powerful I can conjure it again.

  I marvel at how easily something so different, so separate, can invade me. How seamlessly we can take on the natures of other things.

  •

  For my tenth birthday Mom has bought me a professional set of oil paints and brushes and helps me arrange my easel in a corner of the living room near the piano. Having looked through her book of Degas prints for ideas, I paint a ballerina sitting backstage with one leg in the air as she ties the ribbon on her shoe.

  Flecks of paint get on the piano, the wall, and the floor, and the smells of linseed and turpentine pervade the house. Mom doesn’t mention these things as she comes in quietly to watch me work. Respecting my concentration, she leaves the room just as quietly.

  •

  In group therapy I sit across from the woman in the kimono, whose name I have learned is Bea. I find myself talking, words spilling out of me—about the ghost at the foot of my bed in my uncle’s house. I say that it might have been both of my parents mixed together, or maybe neither of them. “Spirits are drawn to me because there is a door in me that’s open but it shouldn’t be.”

  There is silence. I have said all of this while looking at the floor. I think that I should stop talking but I don’t. I tell them that it is important that I don’t look at the spirits. It is important that I resist, that all I have is resistance. I tell them that I worry that my eyelids will get tired one night and betray me by opening. That is the hard work of getting through the night. Keeping my eyes from opening.

  I tell them that if I open my eyes I am afraid I might end up staying in the ward forever. That I won’t be able to leave.

  I look at Bea. She gives me a tender smile.

  Everyone is still silent, all looking at me, waiting for me to go on. I change the subject and talk about the theater party I attended in Santa Fe this past summer, and describe the two handsome actors who called me Lady Ophelia.

  Tears come to my eyes, but I don’t know why. Mildred crinkles cellophane.

  “You seem like you could be a good actress. You’re expressive,” Patricia says.

  “I was an actress,” I say.

  Mildred crinkles cellophane.

  I continue, “Somehow I lost track of that.”

  “How can you say you were an actress? You’re young. You can still be one.”

  A spark of excitement shoots through me as I talk about playing Heidi when I was nine, how I sang and acted, how I was told that I had a true gift. “My mother was very proud . . .”

  Mildred crinkles cellophane again.

  “Be quiet!” I yell.

  A few people laugh with surprise. Mildred stops.

  Bea beams at me. “You’re just what this room needs,” she says from across the circle.

  I continue to talk about Heidi, about the tiny gold trophy I was given and the bouquet of half a dozen baby red roses. As I speak, I picture myself on a stage, graceful and expressive and urgent. I am performing for Bea and she sees me. But as I continue to talk, I find her looking down and I panic. I’ve lost her, I think. I keep my focus on her until she looks up. My disappointment must be evident because Bea nods apologetically and I forgive her moment of wandering.

  •

  Mom registers Jerry, Tracy, and me for a series of weekend theater workshops with a director named Mrs. Hatch, who is in her fifties and wears bright kaftans. Her gray hair curls in a flip at her shoulders. We meet in an old Baptist church that has been refashioned into a theater. Before we begin, we are taken on a tour. A theater, I discover, is filled with mysteries: the hidden backstage where the actors must creep undetected during rehearsals and performances, a deeper backstage area where sets are built and props are kept, and a winding, unlit staircase that leads to the narrow balcony above.

  We all sit in the first few rows of audience seats while Mrs. Hatch stands on the stage. “In our theater we do not have the luxury of elaborate costumes or scenery, but we do have artistic imagination and originality, and you will learn to posture gracefully.” She turns and reaches out her arm as if greeting someone invisible.

  She shows us a picture of Sarah Bernhardt, surrounded by lilies. She tells us about the fourth wall. Walking from one side of the stage to the other, holding one arm before her, she says, “This is the fourth wall, which exists between the performers on the stage and the audience. It is a wall that you cannot see but must feel. When we are on the stage performing for the audience, we must also behave as if they do not exist.”

  •

  “Daddy, what should I change my name to when I become a famous actress?”

  “Boom-Boom Latour,” he says drily, and Mom snickers quietly in the passenger seat.

  “No, come on!”

  “Tondelyo Schwartzkopf,” he says, again without cracking a smile.

  “No! Come on!”

  •

  I decide to approach Bea after group therapy, and follow her to the door. Patricia stops me and tells me that she was once in Taos, New Mexico. “I bought a dress in a store called Martha’s of Taos.”

  “I’ve never been to Taos,” I say, a little flustered. “I don’t know that store.”

  I try to catch up with Bea in the hall, and am almost close enough to tap her on the shoulder when I see her wrists hanging at her sides—both are thickly bandaged. I stop, stare into the white mask of one of the geishas on her back, then turn around and start walking in the other direction.

  •

  The soup is tepid when the nurse brings my tray. Still, I eat it and everything else: a dry, breaded chicken cutlet, peas and carrots, a roll and butter.

  I lie curled up on my side in bed with a full stomach and close my eyes.

  •

  Mary’s things are no longer in the room. It doesn’t seem possible that she could have been released. I think of asking about her but don’t. She isn’t in group therapy that night, and neither is Bea. Bea’s absence chills me and it occurs to me that she might have finished the job she started on her wrists.

  Lily, the girl who was supposed to leave a few days ago, is still here.

  •

  Because my mother always seems happy to repeat the story, I ask her more than once about the bump on her nose and the slender scar that runs out her left nostril and stops at the edge of her upper lip. When she was ten she fell while climbing rocks and broke her nose. She needed sixteen stitches. For a long time her face was black and blue and swollen, and she didn’t know what it would look like when it healed. She heard her father crying at night in the other room, “My little girl’s face. My little girl’s face.” She always laughs a little when she talks about this. Her father never went in and comforted her, just sat alone in another room crying over her face as if it were something permanently lost, as if she would never have a face again.

  •

&nbs
p; In the book of Irish myths I check out from the Santa Fe Public Library there is a drawing of a beautiful woman with long hair wearing a white dress. She stands in a grove of apple trees, an apple cupped in one palm, holding it forward as if offering it. The caption under the drawing says: Tír na nÓg, or the Land of Apples.

  •

  Outside the classroom window, a tumbleweed blows across the rough pebbled tar of the playground.

  “Through Communion you become one with Jesus Christ,” Sister Maria del Rey says. “It is a kind of marriage.”

  The wind blows hard, the tumbleweed rising on air. A fine spray of dust and tiny rocks hit the window and Sister smiles as if there is a message in it for her.

  I look at the image of Jesus on the holy card that she has given each of us, a familiar, fair-haired, bearded figure pointing impassively with two fingers to his heart, which is enflamed and encircled with thorns, cut in places and dripping blood.

  He is a bridegroom. He wears this heart like a corsage on his white tunic.

  •

  The nurse brings me a pill and I take it. I want to ask her about Bea, but I am worried about what she will say.

  Thorazine softens and confuses things.

  I lie on my back and stare up at the white of the ceiling. I concentrate, trying to feel my mother watching me now. Her face is hard for me to recall, a face of only air. Today, my mother is a feeling that takes up the entire room, a weather condition. She is something I am constantly breathing, but cannot see.

  •

  I stir between sleep and waking, sensing Bea’s presence. I think it’s Bea’s ghost, already an itinerant among others. Opening my eyes, I see Bea standing in the doorway, wearing pants and a dark blue coat.

  “Good-bye, Regina,” Bea says. “Good luck with everything.”

  “Good-bye,” I say without energy and turn over. I stare at the window, groggy and partially numb, trying to understand what has happened.

  •

  I imagine that Bea has gone off to begin her new life. I promise myself that this was only a stopping point for her. A time to rest after a terrible mistake. She never belonged here and maybe neither do I. When the doctor comes I tell him I want to leave and he says I have only been here four days and should stay, at least, a few more. I tell him I don’t want to be here. I don’t tell him I have realized something important, that I am an actress and that everything might be all right in my life if I go to college in Santa Fe and become part of the theater department.

  “I am suffering from grief,” I say in a tired voice. “And I have an overactive imagination. That’s all. I don’t think it’s good for me to be here anymore.”

  He seems startled but, to my surprise, agrees to let me leave. “But you have to keep taking Thorazine. If you don’t take your pills, you’ll end up back here.”

  •

  On the spine of one of the books on my father’s shelf glows a title engraved in gold: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

  •

  I draw for Nanny: a picture of Saint Thérèse all in white, lying in her sickbed. With a red pen, I make the dribble of blood at her lips. I keep adding to it, a little bit at a time, until it pours down over her chin, neck, and habit.

  •

  From the ward, I call Tracy and Sheila and tell them that I plan to go back to Santa Fe. They tell me that they do too, and that Uncle Bob has said that at the end of the school year he will make arrangements for them to live with the families of their friends.

  •

  As she pushes me down the corridor, the nurse explains that it is routine—that all patients leave the psychiatric ward, or any part of the hospital, in a wheelchair. I wear the clothes and coat I arrived in, and hold my purse on my lap. I glance into the rooms I pass. Everything is off-white: the walls, the curtains, the nightgowns, even the faces. I tell myself that I am no longer one of these half-dressed figures.

  Lily steps out of her room and watches me. I wave but she tightens her mouth and frowns. I start to worry that someone’s going to stop me and make me stay.

  I take a few deep breaths as I wait with the nurse in front of the elevator. The doors open and she pushes me on. Lily stands, watching as the doors close.

  •

  From my uncle’s house I call Max, who answers, and we meet in downtown Hartford. We go into a store to look at posters, and I thumb through a box of postcards, most with images of great paintings on them. I stop on a print of a young, haunted-looking woman in rustic clothes, standing in green foresty bracken, one hand touching a vine. Barely discernable among the branches stand angels wearing armor. I turn it over. Joan of Arc.

  “Look at this,” I say to Max. His fingertips inadvertently brush my hand as he takes the postcard, and I feel an electric current move over my skin.

  He holds and studies it, then says, “She reminds me of you.”

  “She does?” I ask, leaning in for another glimpse of her face.

  “She’s yours,” he says and purchases the card for me.

  We sit in a café sipping hot coffee, looking at the postcard.

  “What is that,” he asks, “in the tree?”

  “An angel.”

  “I didn’t notice that earlier.” He takes it and focuses on it. “Joan of Arc is hearing voices,” he says lightheartedly. “You can tell by her expression.”

  “She wouldn’t be out of place at the psych ward in the Hartford Hospital,” I say.

  He puts the card down, then stares past me through the window of the café. I wait a little in suspended silence, and then say his name. He looks at me again, something closed about his face. I wanted to ask him why he never came to the hospital, but a little wall has erected itself between us.

  •

  Waiting for the school bus at the end of the day, I stare at the mural on the wall outside the principal’s office. It pictures Jesus, all lit up, having come out of the tomb. He is see-through, trees visible behind him. In a few moments, he will rise into the sky and dissipate like smoke.

  •

  Dad places the biggest firecracker, the star rocket, on the dark backyard lawn. “Stand away!” he says, and we all crowd against the wall near the gate.

  He puts a match to it and steps away fast, instructing Jerry to turn off the porch light.

  In a sudden blast of bright blue and phosphorescent green, it shrieks, shooting up into the night sky, then divides into six explosive starbursts.

  “Oh, Vincent!” Mom’s voice comes from behind me. “Wow!”

  “Oh, Vincent!” Sheila says in a small, enraptured voice.

  After an exuberant display, each starburst dwindles, breaking into blue and green particles, which, for a few moments, remain in shimmering suspension in the sky, before fading as they come back to earth.

  •

  On the morning after my father dies, I come home from the dorm room at the nearby college where I have been living the past three months. Tracy and I stand in the hallway hugging, both of us crying.

  “Last night,” Tracy says, “before Dad left for his shift at the bar, he sat in your room for more than an hour.”

  She tells me that Dad often sat in there, sometimes for hours, at night. I imagine her peeking her head in and seeing him, a big man with graying hair, out of place before the yellow floral curtains and other things I left here—bright cellophane flowers taped to the wall, a black-light poster of a turquoise bear holding a tulip. Sometimes he’d just sit on the bed, she says. Sometimes he read by the light of the plastic egg-shaped lamp on the nightstand.

  “But last night he sat in the dark.”

  I walk into my old room alone and stare. The bedspread is rumpled where he sat. I try to persuade myself that he sat in here only because the room was vacated. Not because he missed me. Not because there were things he wanted to say.

  A volume of Yeats lies on my nightstand. For a long time, I am afraid to open it.

  When I do, I read the words:

  Do you not hear me call
ing, white deer with no horns?

  I have been changed to a hound with one red ear.

  I close the book. I do not touch it for days.

  •

  I am in the air. I look out over the clouds, the sky getting brighter the farther west the plane moves. Halfway to New Mexico, I go into the bathroom, and pour my pills down the toilet.

  PART TWO

  As I climb the three steps onto the stage, I am still not certain what moment from my life I want to re-create.

  My new college acting teacher, Kim Stanley, has called on me in class. She’s told me to perform a “private moment.” I am supposed to imagine myself in a particular place at an emotionally powerful moment in my life when I was alone. I am to try to relive the experience by recalling the sensory environment. She’s told us that it is not important to show the audience anything or to act anything out. It is about trying, through our senses, to bring the moment back. It is about the state of being, and about believing in the reality of the experience.

  I stand in the middle of the stage and begin to sob. I struggle to concentrate, remembering what Kim asked us to do. I am afraid to find myself back in my childhood house, so I think about Uncle Jack’s house in Connecticut and see flashes of the bedroom, late afternoon light coming in the window. I try to think of something else, but the room in Connecticut persists.

  Kim’s voice breaks through. “Thank you.”

  I lift my head.

  “Come to my office after class, Regina,” she says.

  •

  I find my sisters at the window in the living room, watching the trees lean and bend in a strong wind.

  Dad has been dead three months.

  “What are you guys doing?” I ask.

  Tracy looks at me as if I am interrupting. She says nothing, and when I ask again, her mouth tenses and she gestures to the trees. But I know there is something more to what they are doing at the window. The same soft expression is on each of their faces. I also know that I am not part of what is between them.

  Sheila glances at Tracy with wide green eyes. The wind intensifies and the trees go wild. At first I think my sisters are thrilled, but then sense they are frightened. I step back and sit down in our mom’s brown chair in the gradually darkening room and watch them. I am closer to adulthood, while they are both stuck between childhood and adolescence. Studying their profiles, I see them tense at the hum of an approaching car, and then sigh when it passes. I understand now. They are waiting for Mom’s white Rambler station wagon to pull into the driveway, worried that—like our father—she won’t come home from work.