Ghost Songs

by Regina McBride

  Except for Sheila’s single word, “Wow,” repeated every now and then, we are quiet, listening past the rushing of the leaves.

  Before the sky has gone fully dark, we hear an engine slow and grow louder. When we hear a door slam and the jingle of keys, my sisters breathe a sigh of relief. They go out onto the porch to greet her, but I stay in the near darkness of the living room. I want to go with them, but something holds me back.

  •

  “The great director Harold Clurman used to tell me that I could be standing in a snowstorm and imagine myself in hundred-degree heat. I think you have the same kind of imagination,” Kim says as we sit facing each other in her office.

  She is heavyset with white-blonde hair streaked gray. In her long purple velvet dress, she exudes magisterial grace. Kim was a star in the fifties and sixties, and upstairs on the mezzanine walls there are pictures of her in Broadway plays.

  I have a pressing desire to tell her what a relief it will be for me to inhabit a role, to disappear into it. But I struggle to find the right words, and then I say, “I want you to know both of my parents committed suicide.”

  She watches my eyes. “When?”

  The question stumps me. I have to concentrate. “Last year.”

  She wants to know where I am living and I explain that I am sharing an old house downtown with some friends from high school.

  There’s a silence. “Did your parents die together?” she asks quietly.

  “No.”

  “Who died first?”

  Again, I have to concentrate. “My father.”

  “How much later did your mother die?”

  “Five months later.” There is little affect in my voice.

  For a while now I have not been able to remember my parents’ faces, and I tell her this. She looks at me and a flux of anxiety stirs in my chest.

  •

  I am a plump seven-year-old in white bobby socks and brown loafers, with a pixie haircut and a freckled nose. My jumpers are a little tight around the middle, but I secretly imagine myself as a combination of Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette, a movie my mother loves, and the nun Saint Thérèse. In one picture in the illustrated book of saints, Thérèse stands in a garden, looking at a rose, touching it lightly and smiling. Whenever I find a flower, real or plastic, I touch it the same way and smile at it as if it were a small person.

  •

  Mom gets a record of fast-paced Irish jigs and we dance wildly in our socks, slipping on the wooden floor, to “O’Sullivan’s March” and “The Rocky Road to Dublin.”

  •

  Soon after a family moves into the newly constructed house next door, their dog has puppies, half dachshund and half cocker spaniel. We pick one from the litter and name her Susie. She chases toys and balls and lets Jerry pull her in the back of his red wagon. She’s sweet and docile with reddish-brown fur, and when we croon at her she wags her tail. When I carry her around like a baby she looks up at me with big brown eyes.

  •

  We four kids stand in a little group in front of the house. Dad holds the Brownie box camera at his stomach and looks down into the window at the top, where he sees us reflected. Then he snaps.

  Jerry says that the camera has an eye that’s just like a human eye because the lens turns what it sees upside down. Dad taught him this, he says.

  Later when the camera is on the kitchen table, Jerry calls me over to look at it.

  “It came from the East,” he says. “It’s older than me and you.”

  I peer down into the square window, but all I see is a faceted chamber made of thick glass.

  Jerry says, “When you press the click button, the camera remembers.”

  “It has a memory?” I ask.

  He nods.

  When the Brownie box camera is left for weeks high up on the bookshelf in the living room, I wonder if it is my father’s eye and memory that are in there, separated from him.

  •

  I am almost always in a hurry, my mind on my classes in the theater department, or a play—running lines in my head or out loud over the noise of the car radio as I drive past the Tap Room in Coronado Center, where my father bartended into the small hours of the morning, and the Institute of American Indian Arts on Cerrillos Road, where my mother worked as a secretary. These landmarks are unavoidable, in plain sight along two of Santa Fe’s main roads.

  New Mexico’s harsh sun lights these buildings where my parents worked and died with the same intensity as it does the rest of the buildings: the 7-Eleven, the highway department, the Pizza Hut. Everything is equal in the nearly blinding brilliance, in this supernal light.

  It seems wrong that these places blend in so easily. Sometimes I drive to the Tap Room or the Institute of American Indian Arts, park, and try to get things clear in my mind. I imagine my mother’s white Rambler station wagon, or my father’s brown Chevy sedan, parked beside my used Mustang.

  I imagine my mother inside at her office desk, typing in that clean white adobe interior. Or I picture my father filling glasses with ice in the cool red dark of the Tap Room, dragging a damp cloth over the polished wood surface of the bar. The simple tasks of the living.

  •

  “What’s wrong, Reggie?” Kim asks. She has insisted I come to her office. I could barely keep my eyes open in her class.

  “I didn’t sleep enough last night,” I reply.

  “Why not?”

  I try to make something up, but I’m too tired.

  “I felt something in my room.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something standing near my bed.”

  “A nightmare? A hallucination?” she asks.

  “I guess you could call it that,” I say groggily and smile, trying to lighten things.

  She pauses. “What did it look like?”

  “I wouldn’t look at it.”

  “How do you know then, that something was there?”

  “It’s like when someone’s in the room with you, you know.”

  She waits for me to say more.

  “It made quiet sounds. And sometimes I could smell it. It’s hard to describe. A sour . . . burning smell.”

  “Darling, I want you to talk to me about what happened in your family.”

  She reaches across the desk and I give her my hand.

  “Start at the beginning.”

  I want to please her but I have no idea what to say. Where is the beginning? Is there a beginning?

  I close my eyes. Everything is white.

  “Darling . . .”

  I don’t want to do this. “My mother,” I say, and pause.

  “What about your mother?”

  “My mother . . . was unhappy.” My mouth and tongue and the back of my throat are numb.

  “Always?”

  “No. Sometimes she’d get really upset when I was little, but then she’d be okay. Things would be fine. It was really the last three or four years she was alive that were . . . bad.”

  “Try to be specific,” Kim says. “About the last three or four years.”

  “She . . . fell apart.” The words are flat and I don’t like saying them.

  “When you say that what do you mean?”

  The past is safer in the blur where I keep it and I don’t want to touch it with words.

  I focus on her hand holding mine, each of us reaching toward the other across the cool, pale wood surface of the desk. She is fifty, but her hand is soft and plump—as graceful as a hand in a Renaissance painting. Her hand wants me to speak. But my mother and father have settled somewhere so deep in me, and anything I can think to say will only reduce them.

  I shake my head.

  “You said she fell apart,” Kim reminds me.

  The words “fell apart” conjure a cartoon reel, a clown figure with wild hair, gesticulating and jumping, then falling awkwardly down and breaking into pieces. I suppress a laugh.

  Kim withdraws her hand and sits back.

  “I’
m sorry,” I say. “I’m very tired.”

  •

  Mom is playing the soundtrack to Hello, Dolly! in the living room, while Tracy and I help her fold clothes on the couch. Barbra Streisand is speaking some of the words in the song she’s singing, in a voice that Mom says imitates Mae West. At one part, Mom drops a towel, puts her hand on her hip, and speaks along, doing her own Mae West imitation. “And on those cold winter nights, Horace, you can snuggle up to your cash register. It’s a little lumpy, but it rings!” Tracy and I giggle along with Mom as she picks up the towel again.

  •

  Early in the semester, I am cast in a comedy, The House of Blue Leaves. I play the role of the Little Nun, and wear a habit borrowed from the Sisters of Loretto. My character has come to New York for the pope’s visit. Two other nuns and I climb a fire escape for a better view over the crowds. The tenants invite us inside.

  I open a kitchen cabinet. “Peanut butter!” I cry joyfully. “They have peanut butter!” I turn to the audience and say with hushed seriousness, “We’re not allowed peanut butter.”

  A loud chorus of laughter rises from the darkness.

  •

  At a party at someone’s second-floor apartment after the show, I stand out on the balcony talking and sipping beer with Tom, another actor from the play. He’s from Michigan, tall with light brown hair and a strong physique. He says he loves the fact that I come from Santa Fe. He lives in the dorms, where everyone is from somewhere else.

  There’s a big crescent moon in the clear sky, and I wonder out loud if it’s waxing or waning. “It’s waxing,” he says and explains that you can tell by the way it’s facing.

  “I’ve heard that a waxing moon is auspicious,” I say and he smiles.

  We leave the party together and walk downtown to the river. It’s late and no one’s there, the park and river lit only by the waxing moon and the lights of houses across Alameda Street.

  We lie down on the grass by the rushing water and kiss.

  •

  A lanky Franciscan friar, Father Godfrey, comes to our fourth-grade class, wanting to know if there are any small saints among us. He wears black plastic glasses, and it’s hard to see his eyes behind the Coke-bottle lenses. He asks everyone to hold up their hands so he can look for the stigmata, the mark of Christ’s suffering.

  A little girl with long eyelashes and very dark skin, Carmelina Bustamante, tells the story of how her uncle, wanting to feel Christ’s suffering, pounded a nail through one of his feet. Father Godfrey nods his head and smiles as if he approves of what the girl’s uncle did.

  He draws a diagram on the chalkboard. In the top box, he lists the venial sins. Below that the mortal sins, the worse they are, the lower on the list. At the very bottom, the worst sin is the sin of despair, or suicide.

  “Do you know what suicide is?” he asks.

  The same girl whose uncle hammered a nail through his foot raises her hand. “When someone hangs himself.”

  Father Godfrey nods. “No one has the right to kill himself in any way at all, hanging or shooting or stabbing himself in the heart. Suffering is fine, good even, as long as you are not trying to die. Only God has the right to end a life. Anyone who does such a thing removes himself from the grace of God.”

  He circles the word despair again and again and puts an exclamation point next to it.

  •

  Every time Mom talks about finding a job, Nanny yells. Mom reminds her that that’s one of the reasons Nanny came with us to New Mexico, so she could help take care of us kids, and now it’s been almost two years since we’ve been here. Mom says she has to work, and she’s not going to fight about it anymore.

  “Your husband should be able to support you,” Nanny says. She slams the door to her room. Hours later, I come in from playing and see that Nanny’s door is still closed. I can hear her muttering. When I knock, she opens it a small bit and looks down at me.

  “What’s wrong, Nanny?” I ask.

  She lets me in and closes the door again.

  There is noise from a new construction site on the street right behind us, a chainsaw, then a man yelling a string of words in Spanish.

  “Those men!” she says, and makes a face as if she smells something terrible.

  I think of telling her what Jerry told me, that those men look at pictures of naked ladies in magazines. But I can’t bring myself to say it.

  •

  My father is driving and I am in the backseat. Noticing one of his magazines on the floor, I pick it up and begin searching for bad pictures. There are only pictures of buildings and typewriters and businessmen in ties. On one of the back pages I find a very small black-and-white print of a heavyset, naked woman sitting near a river. Quietly, I tear her out and put her into my pocket so I can show Nanny. A sensation that is awful and thrilling fills me. When we get home, I go to her room, close the door, and show her the picture. “Look what I found in my father’s magazine.”

  She peers into my eyes. “He’s disgusting.”

  She stands up and opens her dresser drawer. She gives me a quarter and half a Mounds bar.

  I want to cry. I leave her room and go into the bathroom and rip the little picture up into tiny pieces and drop them into the toilet. Some of the pieces float, but most sink to the bottom.

  •

  On a mild morning, Mom tells us kids that she has gotten a job as a secretary at the Institute of American Indian Arts and will be starting soon. She is nervous to tell Nanny, but she does. Nanny surprises us all by remaining calm.

  •

  I open my bedroom door early on the morning of my mother’s first day of work and see her all dressed up, standing in the hall in her high heels, looking down at my grandmother’s full bedpan, some of its contents slopped out onto the floor.

  My mother gags, covering her nose and mouth with her hand. She stays there, staring like she can’t quite believe it. She knocks on Nanny’s door and says, “You’re as healthy as a horse, Mom. You can make it to the toilet.”

  There is silence from behind Nanny’s door.

  My mother bends down and carefully lifts the bedpan, then takes it into the bathroom and closes the door.

  Every morning that week, my grandmother puts out a full bedpan. I watch from a spot behind my slightly open door. I know on some primitive level that I am witnessing a mystery, something terrible and important, like the moment when the disc of bread in the priest’s fingers turns into the flesh of Christ, and the bread is no longer wheat and water, but blood and skin.

  I go back into my room and lie down on my side facing the wall, imagining my organs as they are depicted in the children’s anatomy book at school: an orange stomach, two pink lungs, and a bright purple liver. They have come loose and are floating and pulsating inside me. I have to keep my mouth closed because if I’m not careful, they will all come up out of my mouth onto my pillow.

  •

  I drive to Albuquerque and visit Jerry, who has transferred to the University of New Mexico and is living in a small house with two other guys. I ring and he opens the door, music blasting on the stereo behind him.

  “Hey!” he says, smiling as he greets me with a hug. He is wearing wire-frame glasses, his hair almost to his shoulders.

  All the curtains in his house are closed, keeping out the daylight, and the air inside is stuffy and reeks of pot smoke. I am acquainted with both his roommates, high school friends of his from Santa Fe. Each says a groggy hello. In the haze, they appear to be sunken into a stained yellow couch with its insides spewing from one arm. Cups, a full ashtray, and fast-food wrappers cover an old coffee table.

  Before the semester began, Jerry came to Santa Fe and visited me at the old house downtown on Manhattan Avenue where I live with four friends from high school. But this is the first time I’ve come to his place.

  He hands me a beer, then lights a joint to smoke with his roommates.

  He tells me that he still has some stuff in boxes from the old house, s
ome books and a few things he didn’t have the heart to throw away. “You’re welcome to look and see if there’s anything you want.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I say. “I’ll look in a while.”

  My eyes have adjusted to the gloom and I find myself looking into a deeper shadow on the other side of the room, a chair covered with clothes and bags, a towel draped over the back. It is the old living room chair, the brown one Mom had always sat in. I see her as she was near the end of her life, sitting in this chair, smoking and staring. I try to push away the image.

  I must have stopped talking, because Jerry breaks the silence. “I kept an old painting you did, Reg,” he says, smoke drifting from his mouth.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, it’s hanging in the hall, but you can take it if you want.”

  I go to the hall, which is much brighter than the main room. There is only one picture hanging, and as I approach, seeing it from the side, the pale wooden frame looks familiar. When I face the picture my stomach drops. It is the watermelon slice and pitcher on a red-and-white checked tablecloth, one of my mother’s paint-by-numbers. In a flash, I see my father standing near this picture, blood on his face after a fight with my mother.

  Back in Jerry’s living room I sit on the floor away from and with my back to my mother’s chair, but I can feel the buzz of it behind me. I break into a sweat. The walls contract and the room becomes dark and close. I worry that Jerry is in danger, cohabitating with relics. I don’t know how to tell him this.

  “Jer, don’t you want to throw everything from the old house away?”

  “I use a lot of it,” he says and gives me a stoned, quizzical look. “Don’t you want the picture?”

  “No thanks,” I reply. I don’t have the energy to tell him that it was Mom who painted it and not me.