Ghost Songs

by Regina McBride

  •

  I have just left the pool in the brand-new complex on Cerrillos Road where I am sharing an apartment with Wendy, who is back from Connecticut for the fall semester. It feels good to be away again from my childhood house. As I near my front door, I spot the white Rambler station wagon approaching on the shimmering tarmac. The car turns and pulls into a parking spot, the chrome around the windshield flashing in the hot sun, hurting my eyes so I have to shield them. Mom, Tracy, and Sheila have come to visit, to see the apartment for the first time. They follow me, almost mechanically, into the front room that still smells of paint and cheap construction.

  I close the door. In the cool, dim interior, the heaviness of their collective mood infiltrates everything. For a moment, we all stand and stare into the mostly empty, carpeted space around us.

  I speak with forceful cheer, offering ice water, but only Tracy accepts. She is wearing one of my cast-off shirts, her thick, wavy hair tied back in a ponytail. She sits cross-legged on the carpet, a baffled openness in her expression as she reaches up and receives the cup.

  Sheila sits on Mom’s lap in Wendy’s new rocking chair, arms wrapped around Mom’s neck, bare legs hanging over the side as her cheek adheres to Mom’s chest. One of her yellow flip-flops falls off her foot and lies overturned on the floor.

  I chatter about the pool. It’s usually crowded with noisy little kids, but if we go at the right hour, it’s almost empty. “You should bring your suits one day soon and we’ll all swim.”

  None of them has anything to share, so I tell them how, at my waitress job in the coffee shop at the King’s Rest Motel, I waited on our old pediatrician, Dr. Harris.

  When Mom says nothing, I add, “He ordered a steak.”

  Mom points to a pack of tarot cards, which are sitting on the side table. They are Wendy’s, I explain. “She’s taught me how to use them. It’s fun.”

  There is a silence.

  “Will you do a reading for me?” Mom’s voice drags like a record being played at too slow a speed.

  I hesitate but she asks again, and then I think that maybe this could be positive, that I could tell her that good things are going to happen.

  I hand her the deck and tell her to shuffle it. When she gives it back I ask her to pick one card from anywhere within and it will be the significator for her reading.

  She pulls one out and turns it over: the Hanged Man. Her mouth falls slack and she raises her eyes to meet mine.

  “This card does not mean the obvious. This is a positive card.”

  My blood rises as I watch Mom sink further. Sheila’s expression, the side of her face pressed to Mom’s chest, matches the subtle change.

  “This card is about renewal,” I insist.

  She doesn’t believe me.

  I tell her to shuffle. I lay the cards in a pattern and read them according to Wendy’s instructions.

  I tell her the reading is positive and that it suggests that a difficult time is coming to an end, but a sad resolve has formed on her brow. She stares at the Hanged Man at the center of the spread.

  Sheila closes her eyes and her jaw goes limp as if she is sleeping. Tracy runs her fingers back and forth in the shag of the carpet.

  “It’s positive,” I tell Mom, trying to hide my anger. “It’s saying that everything will be okay if you try. But you have to try. Do you know what I mean?”

  Her focus is not on me, but past my shoulder, her pupils suddenly tiny as if something incredibly bright has appeared there. I feel dizzy. Is she seeing Dad?

  “Mom,” I call out. “Mom.”

  When she finally looks at me again, she narrows her eyes as if she is trying to remember who I am.

  •

  Coming in to Fatima House one afternoon I notice that there is a light on in the big room where breakfasts are served. I hear soft female voices and walk quietly over. Theresa and her nine-year-old daughter are at one of the tables drawing pictures together. Theresa looks as absorbed as her daughter, coloring something diligently with an orange crayon.

  “Mam, can I have the greenish-blue one, the one like turquoise?”

  “Yes, love.” Theresa picks the crayon from a pile and hands it to her.

  •

  It is Theresa who, having come to my room to tell me her woes, suggests I apply at the Harp on O’Connell Bridge, a popular complex of pubs that also serves sandwiches.

  I am hired to work six shifts a week for thirty-five pounds cash paid every Saturday. I begin right away. I’m not trained or told where anything is, just put behind the bar and expected to serve. Some Dublin accents are so strong I have to ask people to repeat their orders more than once, and it doesn’t help that people are asking for things I’ve never heard of. I have no idea what a Britvic orange is, or a Babycham, or that white lemonade, often requested, is basically Sprite. If no fellow worker is nearby to ask, some of the customers seem to know where everything is kept behind the bar and direct me themselves. Most seem not to mind, but some are vaguely irritated. I hear one man tell another, “She’s fit to mind mice at a crossroads.” And though I’ve never heard the expression before, I know it cannot be a compliment.

  •

  The postal strike, which has been plaguing Ireland for eighteen weeks, is now over. I gather together the postcards I’ve written for my siblings and consider dropping them all into the box on Gardiner Street. But the Dublin mailboxes have been unused for so long because of the strike that I’m afraid to trust them. I have been warned that the mail will be a mess, most likely, for a while yet.

  I take the postcards directly to the general post office on O’Connell Street. The place is pandemonium, a confusion of shouts and echoes, mountains of letters and papers in vats being rolled across polished tile floors in every direction. Still, in spite of my trepidation, I put all my cards into the proper slot. I leave, hoping I did the right thing, wondering if they’ll all be lost.

  I dream that night that I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ve traveled so far away that there is no possibility of getting back. The nightmare makes me sit up in bed, and it takes twenty minutes or more with the light on for the panic to wane.

  •

  In a bookstore, I find large volumes with beautiful photographs of Yeats country and of County Kerry. There are several taken in Ballyferriter, on Clogherhead Beach with views of Sybil Head and the Three Sisters.

  In one photograph I see a tiny fleck midway up the rise of a hill, and I’m sure it’s the cottage. An itinerant woman lived there for a year or two, Denis said. It would not be impossible.

  •

  I work three consecutive nine-hour days at the Harp and arrive back at Theresa’s around eight on a Saturday night, exhausted and miserable, looking forward to sleeping in on Sunday.

  She greets me at the door and tells me that I have just missed a telephone call from Denis O’Connor.

  “Did he leave a number?” I cry.

  “No.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He just asked for you and I told him you were working.”

  I imagine him somewhere in Dublin with his friends, in a pub where I could be dancing with him or embracing him at that miserable moment. I could be with him. I almost want to run outside and look for him, but that is crazy. Where would I go? He never mentioned a particular street or pub in Dublin. I’ll miss him if he calls back. It’s unbearable.

  Pacing back and forth, I start to cry.

  Disapproving of my urgency and emotion, Theresa begins to lecture me that this is not the way to behave with a man, that I should not wait near the phone, that men don’t like a girl who is too anxious. I cry, though I struggle not to. I tell her I understand but that I am going to wait near the phone. She says all right, but she won’t allow me to leave the light on, that her bills are too high.

  “You can’t treat the electricity as if it’s a birthright.” She brings me a candle and lights it. “Don’t carry it around,” she says. “Don’t bring it anywhere near the c
urtain.”

  I pace back and forth in the candlelight, hugging myself, staring at the silent phone and pleading with it to ring.

  After midnight I blow out the flame and, aided by the glow of a street lamp through the window high above the front door, make my way through the dark to the big Georgian staircase. I fall into a troubled sleep in which I dream dozens of small spiders come out of the lines in my palms and run up my wrists and all over my arms.

  I am off on Sunday and while I sit in the breakfast room having tea, I say to Theresa, “I wish he had said where in Dublin he was staying.”

  “He’s not in Dublin,” she says. “The call was long-distance.”

  I gape at her. If I had known this I’d have spent an easier night.

  •

  I ask Theresa if I can call him at the number in Ballyferriter he’d written in my address book, and pay her whatever the call costs. She says yes, and pretends to go, but I can see her shadow on the floor outside the door, which she has left ajar. I don’t think Denis will answer and it stuns me when he does.

  “Did you see Yeats country?” he asks.

  “I didn’t get to it,” I say. “I misplaced fifty pounds.” I tell him I had to come back and get a job and that now I am working at the Harp on O’Connell Bridge.

  “Will you be coming soon?” I ask.

  “No, I can’t come straightaway. That’s why I called.” He says that the Johnny Ruth is on its way up to Killybegs and he’s signed on to go with them.

  I struggle to hold back my disappointment. I ask when he thinks he might be able to come. “I don’t know,” he says, pauses a few minutes, then adds, “but I’m going to try.”

  When I don’t respond, he says, “It’s nice to hear your voice.”

  I want to say all kinds of things, to tell him I miss him, to tell him that I hate Dublin and that I want to come to him, but I manage to hold back my hysteria.

  He says that now that the postal strike is over he will write to me and that I should write him. I worry that he’s winding up the conversation.

  “There are some beautiful pictures of Ballyferriter in a bookstore here,” I say. “I think there’s a picture of that cottage, you know the one way up on the hill?”

  “Is there?” he asks.

  “I go by there and look at those pictures, and at pictures of Valentia Island, places where you and I walked together.”

  “It was a wonderful time that we had that night,” he says.

  “Yes, it was.”

  He says again that it’s good to hear my voice and I reciprocate.

  After we say good-bye, I go back upstairs, close the curtains, lie on my side, and weep. He seems to feel none of the urgency I do. I wonder if he is not telling me everything, that maybe it has something to do with what I told him about my parents, that it is too awful for him to accept. I wish I’d never told him.

  I think about the itinerant woman who lived alone in that cottage and imagine myself living there, clearing out the shrubs and the overgrowth and chasing away the birds. I imagine lighting a fire at night and watching for Denis, waiting for him to arrive. I wonder what people said about that woman, if they thought she was a lunatic.

  •

  Searching through the Irish Times, I find a bedsitter flat in Glasnevin, on the north side on a dead-end street called Marguerite Road, for thirteen pounds a week, not a good rate I am told by others, but not obscene, either.

  The building is redbrick, not a big Georgian like Theresa’s, but on a smaller scale, one of a row of connected, nearly identical two-story houses. The foyer and hallway are pervaded by a gamey, fatty odor that hangs in the air and takes up residence in the wallpaper, an odor I will eventually identify as broiled mutton chops, cooked on an almost daily basis by a stout single woman in the flat closest to mine.

  My flat, in the back on the first floor, is a bit worn, but clean. I have to use a communal bathroom in the hallway, and put a five-pence piece into a slot to heat up the water half an hour before I want a shower, but I have my own kitchen in a separate room, which I find out is a big plus. All the other flats in the house are single rooms with hot plates.

  The walls of my main room are papered in gaudy orange and yellow. If it weren’t faded, it would exhaust my eyes even being in the room. A small plug-in heater sits in a tiled half alcove beneath the mantel of a faux fireplace. There is beige carpeting and a big window with stiff curtains on a string pulley.

  The very narrow bed has a white plastic cushioned headboard with a small tear in it, and the mattress, I will discover right away, is home to a peculiar kind of bedbug: tiny, pale, and fragile-looking with tall legs. They do not run away or hide when I expose them, but stand there in stupid defiance. A powder is sold that can be dusted beneath the sheet. It works, but stinks, irritating my sleep, so I sometimes wonder if it isn’t better just to let the funny little bugs bite me.

  •

  “Tracy, wake up!” I whisper across the space between our beds.

  I am ten and she is eight.

  It’s the middle of the night and I’ve had a bad dream. I have to go to the bathroom but I’m afraid to go alone.

  She sits up without protest and gets out of bed, then walks shoulder to shoulder with me in the dark hall, holding my hand. In the bathroom I switch on the light, and covering her eyes with her hands, she sits on the edge of the tub and waits for me.

  •

  I write to Denis and give him my address and the phone number of the wall phone in the hall on the second floor.

  I familiarize myself with the Finglas bus, which takes me to and from O’Connell Bridge, and struggle to make the best of my job at the Harp, even though it pays poorly and the fifty pounds I came back to Dublin with has quickly gone. After paying my rent and buying a few necessary things like a sheet and a towel, a pot, a pan, and a kettle, I have hardly enough to scrape by. I am trying to save money. I tell myself I will go back across Ireland and see Yeats country. But in the end I spend whatever I save on a chicken curry from the chip shop, or cigarettes, or a glass of lager with lime.

  •

  Theresa forwards a package of letters that all came to Fatima House for me, most from my siblings, full of news from their everyday lives. I try to read them in chronological order.

  Tracy has sent two photographs, one of herself on the back patio in the apartment where she is now living. She’s wearing shorts and a UNM T-shirt, looking sideways and squinting in the dusk light.

  The picture of Sheila is not posed. She is caught midstride on the sidewalk, smiling and long-legged in her jeans.

  In one of Tracy’s letters, she tells me that Jerry is going to marry Karen, a friend of hers whom he had started seeing before I left New Mexico. They are all excited. Karen’s parents are going to pay for the reception, which will be in Santa Fe at the Gates of Spain, a beautiful restaurant in the La Fonda Hotel.

  The one letter I have from Jerry is from before he proposed. He mentions Karen, but mostly writes about his new job as a lineman.

  I write to him and Karen right away, congratulating them, feeling anxious and guilty for not being there.

  •

  Dad and Jerry have put up a tent in the backyard so the three of us girls can have a campout. We put down air mattresses and cover them with blankets and pillows. Sheila brings in her stuffed animals. When she falls asleep, Tracy and I lie listening to my transistor radio and whispering.

  The night is breezy, the grass tall and cool. There’s a wild chorus of cricket song. We have left the flap open on the tent so we can see through the zipped screen.

  The porch light switches on and Mom appears, a frenzied halo of moths around her. She comes across the grass to check on us.

  •

  Tracy tells me in a letter that when Jerry cleared out the house, he saved the old photo albums and now she is in possession of them, although no one knows what has become of any of the negatives. I write to her and ask her to send me pictures of our parents, old on
es from when they were happy. There are two in particular that I ask her to try to find from just before they married. They had each taken a picture of the other in what looks like a garden outside a church.

  I dream that my parents are laughing and speaking to me from the two photographs. I have the same buoyant feeling in the dream as I had on the ferry coming to Ireland, that they are proud of me for having come here.

  A few weeks pass and I get a letter from Tracy asking if I received a large envelope she sent with old photos of Mom and Dad and a variety of other family photos. I worry that it may have been lost. Every day I come back to the flat, anxious to see if the envelope has arrived, and my heart sinks each time I find that it hasn’t.

  •

  In makeshift tutus, Tracy, Sheila, and I are dancing in the living room to Swan Lake. Every time the pas de deux ends, I run over, lift the needle, and put it back on.

  There is a rumble in the afternoon sky. Jerry rushes in and calls us outside to show us a massive cloud that is both dark and lit at once, like a lamp wrapped in a gray wool scarf.

  “That’s a thunderhead,” he says.

  We all exchange a wide-eyed look.

  “A thunderhead,” Sheila repeats.

  We sit cross-legged on the unmown lawn and wait for a flash of lightning.

  •

  Weeks go by while I wait for the pictures. I spend much of my time reading novels and sitting in a corner on the bookstore floor looking at images of the West. I’m feeling more comfortable with my fellow workers at the Harp. I am a novelty because I am an American. Some of them talk wistfully about one day moving to America, and all of them, even those who do not want to leave Ireland, are fascinated by the United States, and they are all smitten with Hollywood. Westerns especially are very popular here, and they all get excited when I speak to them with a Texan accent.

  “Howdy pawdner,” I say. “I’ll shoot at your feet until you dance.” I have them all calling their shoes “shitkickers” and crying out, “Eeeeee-haaaahhh.”