I see the governor’s wife watching me from across the table, but I feel tipsy and don’t care. I keep wrapping things in napkins and dumping them into my purse, meatballs, canapés, small squares of fruit bread, and cookies.
As I drive home through darkness on the Española highway, approaching headlights blur and multiply.
•
The next morning Sheila and I are eating a breakfast from my purse full of canapés, wiping caviar from shortbread cookies and chocolate from smoked salmon.
I notice that Kerry’s plant looks dead, the leaves almost completely brown. In the past weeks, whenever I meant to water it, I never did. I tell myself to get up and fill a glass with water now and pour it in. But I stay where I am. I do not understand why doing such a small thing feels so hard. I am hoping that Sheila will notice and water it, but I cannot seem even to mention it to her.
•
After learning the Angelus in the first grade, I teach it to Tracy and Sheila and decide to stage the annunciation as a play.
Hands pressed in prayer, Tracy kneels on a folded blanket, a towel on her head as a veil. The room is dark, with a little light coming from the hallway. She whispers very quiet gibberish to make the sound of praying.
I turn on the closet light and she squints. Sheila kneels down before her, arms held out wide like wings.
“The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary!” I say.
Tracy bows her head, taps at her heart with her fist, and responds: “Be it done unto me according to thy word.”
•
I stand with Tracy at the end of the hall, and she tells me that Sheila woke that morning and saw Mom holding a gun in the doorway of her room, staring at her.
I ask her where Mom could have gotten it. She doesn’t know. “Where is it now?” I ask.
“Jerry found it in Mom’s drawer,” she says. “He buried it at the rodeo grounds.”
Tracy tries to stop me but I pull loose and run down the hall to confront Mom, whom I find in the kitchen in her pajamas.
She tries to get away from me, but I block her passage from the room. I am taller than she is by several inches.
“A gun? Don’t you know what a terrible thing that is that Sheila saw you with a gun?”
She tries to push past.
“Listen to me,” I say.
She keeps trying to go, but I keep stopping her. I grasp hold of her shoulders and she doesn’t resist. She stands before me panting, staring past me.
“What’s wrong with you?” I yell, trying to make her react, but there’s no anger in her.
Her shoulders soften and she escapes like she is made of slippery, malleable stuff. It is a strange sensation, not being able to hold on to her.
“Wait,” I scream as she rushes up the hall to her room and locks the door.
My sisters are furious with me. “You make everything worse.”
•
We share the flashlight at the table—Sheila’s doing homework and I’m trying to write a paper for class. Shifting in my chair, I kick a ball with a bell in it from under the table. It rolls across the floor, jingling.
“Layla!” Sheila cries. She jumps up and shoots the beam of the flashlight all over the floor and under the chairs.
But soon she realizes that it is not Layla, only the cat toy dislodged from where it was hidden. She stands still, breathing hard, her jaw tight.
“You didn’t take care of Layla!” she screams. “You’re a selfish bitch!”
She runs into the front room and smashes the oval window on the door with the flashlight, then throws the flashlight against the wall, the batteries dropping out and rolling on the wood. Except for a little light coming in from the street, everything is dark.
“My hand is bleeding,” she cries.
“Let me see,” I say.
“Get away!” she yells and runs out the door, slamming it so more glass falls. She goes left near Cerrillos Road, toward Tracy’s apartment.
•
Tracy comes for some of Sheila’s books and clothes. She has brought her own flashlight. “We’ll come back and get the rest tomorrow. She’s better off with me,” Tracy says. Tracy’s apartment behind Bicycle World is a third of the size of a single room on Manhattan Avenue.
I sit on the floor in the dark. Every time a car drives by, its headlights cause the broken glass to glimmer.
•
I am afraid to read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but I dare myself to look at William Blake’s drawings. I sit in the college library with a large book of his etchings open before me, images composed of gradient shadows and white rays that suggest intense brightness.
In one he depicts God with cloven hooves and a snake wrapped around his body, stretching horizontally on the air over a dreaming man.
•
Sheila’s left some things in the room she’s vacated: an almost empty package of Oreos and a notebook with notes from her world history class. Skimming through the pages, I stop when I read the words: Mom and I are a Venn diagram. Two circles intersect, almost eclipsing each other, with small areas on either side where they do not touch. On the left it says Me. On the right, Mom. The big area in the middle that is both of them is shaded with pencil.
I put the notebook down. I want to leave the room, but my legs won’t move. The window shrinks down to the size of a postage stamp.
•
At noon on a Saturday, Tom knocks on my door. As we walk downtown, I talk about Tracy and Sheila and how mad they are at me. He listens, but doesn’t say very much. He takes me to the Forge, a dark bar on Alameda Street, and we drink beer.
When we get back to Manhattan Avenue, we are laughing, slurring our words, and anxious to get to my bed. We make love, and afterward, just before he falls asleep, he tells me that he won’t be coming back to Santa Fe after this semester is over. I shake him, tell him to wake up, that I want to talk. He stirs himself a little bit, but can’t keep his eyes open. In a groggy voice, just before he goes to sleep, he mentions a drama school on the East Coast.
I sit up and stare at him, studying the smoothness of his skin as if I’m trying to memorize it. With the sunlight through the window, his hair has a gold cast to it.
•
At the Stuckey’s roadside store near Camel Rock, Mom and Dad buy us each a small souvenir in the gift shop. Sheila picks a lucky rabbit’s foot.
Riding home in the car, she lets me hold it. I feel bones under the fur.
“They must have killed a real rabbit to get this,” I say.
A shadow comes over her little freckled face and I regret saying it. She takes it back from me. “That’s okay,” she says. She thinks about what I’ve said and I know she doesn’t like it. “That’s okay,” she says again, clutches it in one hand, and looks out the car window.
•
When my social security check comes I cash it and pay the electricity bill, then wander into Woolworth’s on the Santa Fe Plaza. I run out of money every month way before I should, and I’ve told myself to be more practical, but right now I don’t care. I am intent on buying gifts for my sisters.
Feigning interest in an eyelash curler, I stand eavesdropping in the cosmetics aisle as a plump Navajo girl, about fourteen, tries to persuade her mother to buy her a silvery white lipstick. It feels like a tease the way the mother stays there looking at it but keeps saying no.
In other aisles in the store, I search for things for my sisters.
I stand in line at the cash register with a bottle of Wind Song for Sheila, a new watermelon Lip Smacker for Tracy, and two cotton blouses with eyelet at the necklines, one for each of them.
The woman in front of me is buying a small plaid dress and a package of hairclips with ducklings on them.
I am also buying gifts for my daughters, I say to myself as I dig out a twenty-dollar bill and wait to pay.
•
When I bring them the gifts, my sisters allow me to stay.
Tracy tells me that she’s called Uncle
Bob and told him that Sheila is living with her.
“He’s fine with it,” she says.
“Even though you’re only seventeen?”
She shrugs. “Yes.”
The apartment behind Bicycle World is as small as a closet.
•
Tracy has bought a used VW Bug and drives Sheila to school every morning before she drives to Santa Fe High. Tracy organizes things for them with an efficiency that stuns me. She manages to keep a little food in their refrigerator: a bowl of tuna fish, a loaf of bread, some cheese. On the narrow kitchen counter there’s a cutting board and a heavy wooden rolling pin. Sometimes when I come over, Tracy makes good, thin tortillas in a cast-iron pan, perfectly browning them.
•
I hate going back to the empty apartment on Manhattan Avenue and hesitate before the door, which looks taller than usual and seems to lean slightly toward me. The knob is cold, and the door creaks as I open it. After I’ve closed the door and taken a few steps into the apartment, I hear it creak again.
I sit doing homework and feel something observing me.
•
Nanny reads to me, Jerry, Tracy, and Sheila from a picture book, while we stare at the illustration. A tall lady all in white with white light all around her is suspended on the air, while the children of Fátima kneel on the ground looking up at her, afraid.
“Fear not! I will not harm you,” Nanny reads. “I am from heaven!”
•
When Tracy graduates, she and Sheila move to Albuquerque. Tracy registers at UNM, and she registers Sheila for Highland High School. I visit them a few days after they move. They have a furnished two-bedroom apartment not far from Jerry’s. Tracy has hung a poster of Al Pacino as Serpico over her bed, and Sheila has one of a hermit holding a lamp, the words Stairway to Heaven written on it in calligraphic script.
In the bathroom, they have a collection of dime-store lipsticks and perfumes.
•
I am cast as Cassandra in The Trojan Women. At the first rehearsal I stand downstage with my hand on my throat, and prophesize my own murder.
•
Rehearsals prevent me from waitressing at night after classes. The rent is too high living alone on Manhattan Avenue, so I go to see a studio apartment in the back of an old house on Galisteo Street.
Large windows and a cement floor give the main room a bright chill. The walls are grayish-beige linoleum with a faux wood grain, and peeling at the corners near the ceiling.
As I go up the two heavy cement steps into the kitchen, a shadow looms to the left. For the split second before I turn, I am certain a man is standing there, but sigh with relief when I see a doorless closet with a few planks of wood as shelving.
The bathroom, with mustard-yellow walls, is through the kitchen, just beyond a narrow, archaic-looking oven standing crooked on short iron legs. There is no shower, only an old, deep, claw-footed tub, paint peeling inside. A window with casement and latch still visible and a cabinet with its lock still in place are both sealed shut and painted over. Everywhere is evidence of crude room divisions, forcibly executed. In the narrow confines of this bathroom, the air is heavy and hard to breathe. I sense hopelessness and imagine a mistreated girl dying here.
I decide against moving in, but as I am leaving, I run into a friend, Penny, from the department. She lives in a tiny house just behind and shares the long driveway that runs right past the entrance to the apartment. She encourages me to move in. She knows I have occasional trouble with my car. “I can always give you rides to the college if you need them,” she says.
She goes in with me to look at the place again. While she’s with me, it doesn’t feel so awful. It is ninety-five dollars a month, and I decide that the main room, spacious and filled with light, and Penny being nearby make everything okay.
•
After moving in, I sit up at night with the lights on bright, trying to read. I hear a soft hiss and smell a vaguely sulfurous odor, like someone has just lit a match. I worry that this place is a tinderbox for enchantments.
•
There is a high wall outside along the driveway. From over that wall I have heard two female voices speaking Spanish. Between words, one warbles like a bird and sometimes whistles, while the other, in a hoarse, low-pitched croak, spits her words and makes grunting sounds.
When I ask Penny about this, she tells me that a strange mother and daughter live in that house. She shakes her head. “One would be lost without the other.”
Their proximity makes me feel worse. I worry that their insanity is infectious, and that I might breathe it in through the air from the open window. But there are times when I feel a fascinated revulsion. I sometimes stand quietly near the screen of my open door and listen for sounds from them. There is something I might understand here if I listen hard enough, a knot I might unravel.
•
For Nanny’s funeral card, my mother chooses a picture of the child martyr Saint Agnes embracing a lamb. There are four or five copies of the card left in different places in the house. On the back they say: “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
•
On the yellow pad, to the side of the grocery list, my mother has written: Queen of Mercy.
•
Besides dolls dressed as nuns, Tracy and I have statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary, little gifts Mom brings home. They are all over our room: between two books on a shelf, on the nightstand or windowsill, facing in random directions, mixed into a box of toys and Barbies. We use them in sacrilegious ways, to play the roles of neighbors to our other dolls. They always play lonely women. They are sometimes mean. We feel a little guilty using them this way.
•
I knock a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary off the shelf and one of her hands breaks off at the wrist. I look all over the room for the hand and cannot find it and wonder if there has been an assumption, the assumption of the hand of the Virgin into heaven.
She becomes my favorite, the one with the missing hand.
•
One of Nanny’s funeral cards is on the floor near the nightstand. My mother is bleary-eyed, weaving, barely sitting up straight in her bed. She is using the pillow as a typewriter.
•
I ask my father once, when I am eleven or twelve, if we will ever visit Ireland.
“No,” he replies, taken aback. The impression I have from the silence that follows is that it is too rarefied and unreachable a place.
•
Every Easter Sunday, Mom roasts a leg of lamb. It has a particular pungent smell that fills the house, a smell I associate with resurrection.
Mom has read about a way to make potatoes bake faster by driving a big nail lengthwise through the center. When the potatoes are finished, it is dangerous to take out the nails. I watch as Mom, holding each potato with an oven mitt, extracts the blazing nails with the tines of a fork.
While we eat, the nails lie on a plate on the counter, heat rising from them in little gusts.
•
As the prophetess Cassandra I come onstage each night in absolute darkness, carrying a burning torch. The part that burns is fashioned of rags soaked in kerosene. A prop man stands backstage with me before my entrance and lights it on fire. I enter in a trance, holding the heavy thing aloft. Downstage I stand gazing up high into the great dark gulf of the universe, and pray to Apollo, describing the vision of my death.
To my right, my mother, Hecuba, stands weeping because she believes I have gone mad. She sends the herald Talthybius to take the torch from me and he carries it away.
“Mother! My mother!” I call out to her. “Crown my triumph with a wreath.”
•
I’m sitting at the table trying to write a paper for school when I sense that something, someone, is lying very still on my mattress. I know it is a she. The air feels silky with this fact. She does not want to hurt me. She doesn’t threaten me.
I sit frozen, unable to move, and as i
f to snap me out of my paralysis, the refrigerator in the kitchen shifts on and hums, a low, steady rumble.
I know who she is. I stand, but I won’t look at her. She is me, deflated and tired with her eyes closed, lying on her back under the covers. I would go to her and smooth her hair and tell her that everything is all right, as if she were a younger sibling, except that I might discover that she is cold, that she is not breathing. Or even worse, she might be cold, not breathing, and then suddenly open her eyes.
•
“A lot of help you are!” Mom screams at the framed picture of the Blessed Mother in her room and throws an ashtray at it. The glass cracks and the picture slides off the wall onto its side near her nightstand.
Susie’s license tags jingle as she waddles out of the room and finds a table to hide under.
Mom hasn’t slept for two nights.
There has been a story in the news of an actress who tried to kill herself by drinking Drano. Mom threatens to drink the Drano kept in the kitchen cabinet. Tracy, Jerry, and I run ahead, trying to prevent her from getting to the cabinet. While Sheila moves in circles, fretting and crying in the kitchen doorway, Mom keeps fighting us, pushing against us.
“Your father doesn’t have the guts to kill me, so I’ll have to do it myself!”
We yell at her that we love her. We don’t know if hearing this helps her or upsets her.
She is strong for someone so tired, someone who can barely walk. I grab her arm as it strains, reaching for the Drano, but she clutches my hand with her other one, so hard I hear something crack, and I struggle to get away from her. Sheila grabs hold of Mom and pulls her.
“Mommy!” she keeps crying.
Jerry blocks her, but even he can hardly hold his own against her, even with the three of us trying to keep her back. I think of calling Dad at work, but I’m afraid to move away, and I wonder if Dad being here would help or make things worse.
It goes on. It goes on and on, until she lets out a strange, broken sigh and retreats to her room.
Ghost Songs Page 8
