Phantom Strays

by Lorraine Ray

“That Meredith is still up at the park, hanging around with those good for nothing kids up there, that gang of hairy fellows and droopy girls.”

  Mother was talking to Gumm at the same table a year later, 1969, I suppose. “I tell you, I don’t like her hanging around with those hippie kids, and turning into one herself. They haven’t got a clue about the way the world runs and lots of them are old enough to be living on their own, which is a bad mix with a teenage girl, let me tell you. I don’t know what she sees in those kids with their peace beads and nonstop talk about the Vietnam War and Civil Rights and what they want to do about peace and love. Discussing protest actions. Agitating for change. It’s the influence of that Paul character that Meredith is dating. I don’t like him one iota.”

  “I didn’t like those friends of hers,” my grandmother interrupted, “that came over here for her sixteen birthday party? Those two girls who chased her around and gave her…what was it called when they slapped her stomach?”

  “A pinkie. A birthday pinkie for her sweet sixteen. That was Charlaine Gomez and Phyllis Hill.”

  “Yes. They banged into the shower and broke your shower door, didn’t they?”

  “Knocked it off the track.”

  “Well, that wasn’t nice. Practically broke your shower door. Screaming and yelling. Running and around the house and out the front door. That was no kind of birthday celebration that I had ever heard of. Not in Michigan when I was a girl.”

  “Yes, well, Paul is worse. He has too much say in what she thinks. It’s no good to turn over yourself, heart and soul to someone the way Meredith has. He controls everything she thinks now. He’s got her convinced of all sorts of things that are contrary to her own interest. This grape boycott, for example. What is that? I don’t know about grapes being an important issue. Well, maybe that Cesar Chavez has something in what he’s saying about the migrant workers; I’ll grant him that. What are migrant workers? Who are they? Why, they’re a bunch of poor traveling unskilled workers from God only knows where, and they also are about one teeny step away from being hobos. The poor which we shall always have. But what do a lot of high school kids know about grapes and workers? About migrant workers. Pesticides, why we used a lot of them on the farm. I know it’s hard on the poor workers, but I say that these kids don’t really care about those workers. It’s a lot of nonsense. Peace and love. Stop the war. I certainly am no fan of the war in Vietnam, let me tell you. That war is a waste of men and materials and we aren’t going to get a gall darn thing out of the whole rigmarole. But protesting nonstop, well, that’s all well and good, but when are you buckling down and doing your chores around the house? I could use someone to set the table and unload the dishwasher, for example. That’s the kind of workmanship I need, by cracky. These kids don’t know anything about labor. Why they couldn’t do a day’s labor if they had to save their life. How about cooking the pot roast? What’s wrong with mowing the lawn or drying the dishes? Housework, that’s the labor I’m worried about every gall darn day. I gotta get a master degree in library science and take Mrs. Saltus’ cataloguing class this next semester. That’s the labor that interests me. Everybody walks out on their chores around this house and there’s certainly plenty to do here that doesn’t involve protests. Look at the time! Your sister knows she needs to get back here. I’m about to serve dinner. Dinner can’t be held. A roast is done when it’s done and you can’t hold it any more than you can spoonbread. That girl has less than an hour to get back here. She promised to be back half an hour ago. By cracky.”

  “Are we having spoonbread, June? I like your spoonbread,” said our grandmother, trying to kiss up to her daughter-in-law and calm the rampage she was hearing.

  “Yes, we are,” said Mother shortly, taking heed of none of the buttering up. “I made it this afternoon. It’s at the back of the oven behind the baked apples so you can’t see it, Leola.”

  “Well, I can smell it. June’s spoonbread smells mighty good,” she said that to me and stared at me a long time as though she wasn’t sure who I was and what I was doing in her son’s house sitting across from her at the kitchen table.

  Mother’s weary face turned toward the front of the house at the sound of the wooden door sliding over the shag carpet. “There. There she is. Finally.”

  I glanced into the living room where the front door yawned open. A strange angled vision of the twilight desert cool in the November sky, 1969, invaded the dark living room, a slice of sofa, low slung chair and Danish Modern coffee table with colorful candlesticks. Meredith slipped in and the door swished closed behind her. The living room was dark, but Meredith passed two lamps without turning them on. She traveled toward the bathroom that we kids used, past Jack’s bedroom where he was making a model of a Hawker Hurricane at his blue pine desk.

  There was something horribly odd about the way she walked through the house that night. Though I knew she wasn’t drunk, she didn’t move the way she had when she’d been stoned before either. This night, with shoulders hunched, she lurched in a kind of creeping stumble.

  A light flicked on and I saw Meredith enter the bathroom with her spread hand staying too long, too high on the flowery wallpaper, and I knew something was really wrong with her. As quickly as I could, without drawing the attention of my grandmother and mother, I left the kitchen and snuck to the bathroom door. I lurked in the dark outside, trying to listen for a clue about what had happened, trying to divert anyone who came that way, for I hoped that they hadn’t also noticed that Meredith wasn’t herself. I was as sure as I could be that something awful had occurred; the nature of it was uncertain.

  “Hey, listen, come in,” whispered Meredith in a broken, slushy voice. The light from the bathroom sliced me suddenly (and long hairs of my blonde bangs shone near my eyes) and I saw her beckon me to approach the partially open bathroom door. She must have heard me outside, I thought. I approached and she began to whisper urgently: “Come in. Don’t let anyone see me, though. Hey, it’s so cool, so groovy. I have something to tell you.”

  With that, she dragged me through the doorway and when I was inside I didn’t smell grass on her, like I thought I was going to, like I had a hundred times before, but still she seemed drugged, crazed, as though she was on a kind of trip. Her hair was mussed and her skin pale and glistening. She rolled her eyes around in the sockets strangely. I was dumbfounded by her physical state and her disjointed speech. What could I make of the way she was acting? She’d had some unknown type of trip but I didn’t know what. I didn’t know what I could do safely and what would be unwise.

  “It’s so incredible,” she said, sitting suddenly on the tiled bathroom counter beside the sink. “You won’t believe it, but it’s true. It happened this afternoon at the park. You won’t understand me. I know you won’t. But I have to tell someone. Listen, listen. I saw Jesus. It was him. Actually him. I mean it was so groovy. I couldn’t believe it. There he was. Sitting in the Bermuda grass at our old park where we used to swing. And I met him. Can you dig it?”

  “Meredith—”

  Meredith spoke over my objections hurriedly and in a whisper. “It was incredible. You won’t believe me. I know you can’t see it. What happened was real. So real. I took acid and I saw him!”

  Acid! LSD! Shit, I’d never suspected that; of all the drugs I’d heard of, only heroin would have been worse. The thought of her being on an acid trip with me as her companion terrified me. I wanted to get away and have an adult deal with her, but who could I tell safely without getting Meredith in serious trouble? What would they do?

  This was truly appalling. How could she possibly consider trying such a drug? I frowned. “Jesus? You mean the real guy from the Bible? Or somebody just calling themselves Jesus for the day?”

  “Jesus. The real, true and only one. The son of God one. Can you dig it? It’s such a gas, man. I met him and talked to him. It was wonderful. You won’t believe how kind he was to me. I don’t know if you can dig it or not. I wish you could. It was so far ou
t. I can hardly believe it myself. It was more than real—it was in another plane of reality. I’m just tripping to think that it happened here. To me. And Paul.”

  I thought as fast as I could, though it felt as though my brain was breaking open to try to work out all the possibilities of what might happen next or what Meredith might say or do and to think as quickly as possible what I might say to a person on LSD that would convince them not to tell others about their visions, but it had to be something that would not upset them. I was praying that Mom wouldn’t call us for dinner right away, and I was trying to think how I could to get her to delay the dinner, without making her suspicious. With a little time I was sure I could get Meredith to calm down and not want to talk about her experiences. I was dreadfully upset that I might be about to put her into one of the “bad trips” which we were always hearing about. As glorious as it might appear in her mind, I had to make sure Meredith didn’t tell anyone what she thought had happened to her in the park. Then I had to hope that later she wouldn’t still believe she had encountered Jesus. I had to hope sense would come to her and that she would regain normalcy, whatever that was. If she talked about this again, I wanted her not to remember or believe her impressions when under acid.

  “Sure. I think that’s great,” I replied almost quaking visually in fear. “I can dig it, man. It is so groovy. Listen, though. Just don’t tell anyone else besides me, Meredith. About Jesus. You can tell me. All about it again. You can tell me everything again later tonight when we’re in our bedroom. And I’ll listen to you, to every bit and you can tell me all the details that you left out, but don’t tell anyone else, because they won’t be happy about it. I’m really interested and I’m really happy for you. I can’t wait to hear it, but tell me. Don’t tell anyone else.” I tried to muster a lopsided grin. That was supposed to portray happiness, that grin that gripped painfully onto sanity.

  I wished so much for childhood again; no matter how hard that had been, this was much worse. I wanted Meredith to be making up things about Indians and Freon in their blood. I wanted her to be telling strangers...what was it she had told them? It was there and not there, gone with time and something else that swept away that time and I didn’t have access to it anymore. Something that she used to tell people when we met them, a big story or lie. You need big lies when you write. They call them hooks and if you don’t have a hook you might as well write your stories in invisible ink. Sure, that was really true and I knew it. Only I didn’t have access to the big lie of Meredith’s and I didn’t have time.

  That, that something. Once years ago I was so proud of her for something, which I could no longer remember. What was the thing? What was it that I felt so proud of? I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was elusive, as though it were flirting, coming near and flitting away. Something so close, but which I couldn’t pin down. A lie. A big lie that she told, boldly, freely. You need big lies when you’re a writer. Those are important to a writer. You don’t have much of anything else but lies to work with. The truth hides in the lies. The truth is either too painful or you don’t remember it properly, so you have to manufacture something. Something bigger and better. I know that now. And the big, best lies are the hooks and you have to know your big lies, the really big ones that can bring in the reader right from the beginning. The writer has to round up the reader with the big hooks, lasso them and pull them into the plot. Make them fret and worry and wonder. And the writer can’t forget the big lies. If you get one, you have to remember it and you have to love the people who can give you the big hooks and the big lies. Meredith gave me one. That was a good enough reason to be loyal to her forever and never forget her, and to use her. She was the source of the big lie I needed to write in my style of writing that overflowed with lies. I had to forgive her for taking LSD and leaving me to figure out how to manage it. All that didn’t matter, because she was the source of the good hook.

  But now she wanted to tell me about LSD and her trip. Sure, I thought in resignation, tell me everything, every damn disgusting thing that no one knows about your LSD trip. Tell the writer; maybe she won’t forget it, maybe she won’t be able to forget it, maybe she’ll need it for another story, maybe she’ll need to use it as a lie, or a truth, to bend it and shape, to distort the bad acid trip and make it something it wasn’t for a time in the future that wants to know what it was like to be in the times of every teen dropping acid like it was nothing. Tell me everything and don’t tell anyone else, because I have to know the truth always and no one else does. They stay ignorant until I, burdened with the secrets around me, have to let it out in whatever form it has evolved into. God, I have to be left alone knowing it because that’s my burden. I have assignments, things I must do that no one else has any knowledge about, ever. Secret missions, searching for, what was it…yes, I remember the desert’s treasures! I promised the large out-of-breath lady in the car. Her name was…Peg—that that was it! I had promised her that I would be the girl who collected the desert’s treasures. I had to hunt for the desert’s treasures. What was I doing about that?

  I was seeing the underbelly, the slit, and the dripping disgusting guts, the gears, the fears, and the tears. Damn it, show it all to me and I have to hold it and collect it. What was it I said, yes, I was the…the damn roundup, the stupid cowboy analogies coming from, somewhere, where, I wondered. I knew the cowboy thing was real, important, and mysterious. The strays, the stampede of images all the stupid ideas I had of how to relate writing to cowboy crap. All this mechanism around my writing, the defining stupidity of my place that I thought would open it to others.

  Shit, shit.

  The medicine cabinet. It opened with a tinny high pitched squeak, like a protest at being touched. I imagined for a moment that Meredith thought of taking more drugs, something to fix this trip, but, no, she only wanted to play with the mirrored door. Meredith opened and closed the cabinet so that she could see the mirror on the medicine cabinet front approach the other larger mirror on the adjacent wall. The closing created a crazy house effect in the wall mounted mirror. She giggled stupidly into the mirrored eternity.

  “Wow. This is so cool.”

  I knew nothing about LSD trips, except for the dramatic way they were depicted on crime shows on TV in which people ran screaming into the night, threw glasses, giggled and leered during their trip. Psychedelic colors spilled out of spinning orbs and a vile man stumbled forward, laughing fiendishly. I hoped I wasn’t about to have to deal with that. At least Meredith wouldn’t be able to jump out of the window of a multi-story building. I was afraid she was in an active part of her LSD trip, the way she delighted in mirrors. I didn’t know how you would deal with a LSD trip, for I was twelve years old. She sat on the counter and laughed into the mirrors at herself. Giggling and making googly eyes, sticking her tongue out. I sat on the toilet lid and watched in horror, in fascination, in disgust, in terror of what other people were going to do to her if they had any idea of what she had done.

  Here was the sister who’s knowledge of the world, whose bravery, was more inspirational than anything in the world. She was raw courage as a child, now she was damned stupidity.

  Hell, hell, disintegration and hell. I felt that the gates of hell themselves should open wide and take me in.

  “Jesus was grrreeeeattt to talk to. He understood everything. It was incredible. I wanted him to try the swings, but he said no.”

  Magical thinking, damn, everywhere this magical crap, denying the impossibility of the extraordinary.

  I peeked out the door and could see our grandmother, seated at the kitchen table wiggling her foot, the one that she kept in an ace bandage under her nylons and telling how she was born in the prior century on a farm in Michigan, born premature, and fed with lamb broth and proud of it, telling that tale again, the long story of her own birth and lamb broth.

  “Meredith, please, you’ve got to pull yourself together. You can’t tell anyone but me about this. Listen, don’t tell anyone at the dinner
table. Think about what you’re doing. You can’t tell them. They won’t understand and you’ll get in big trouble. Listen to me.”

  “Don’t keep saying ‘listen to me.’ But listen to me, yourself. I really saw Jesus. I’m telling you the truth about it. He was just there sitting in the grass in the park under a big tree. Right up the alley at our park. A small group of us got to see him. He called us to him one by one. We were all together taking acid and we turned and he was there under the tree. Can you see what I’m saying? Can you believe it? It’s wonderful. When all these people all over the world are probably looking for him to come back to earth and here he was on our street in our old park where we played as kids. I talked to him for a while, not by myself, of course. He was so good and thoughtful. It was wonderful. I might have seen him anyway, without the LSD. LSD only helped me to see him for sure and be strong and brave enough to sit near him and talk to him, but he was real. He was so real.”

  “Sure. I’m sure he was.”

  “I really talked to him.” She giggled and the giggles devolved into choking coughs and she hugged herself to stop. She rolled her eyes around to gape out of the corners and she appeared to see something significant in odd places around the room. Maybe she saw Jesus in the mirror, or in the multitude of reflections; I knew she didn’t see me, or sense my horror at what she claimed.

  I blinked a few times to take it all in, and then thought up as smooth an answer as I could summon. “I’m sure you did. We can talk about it later, but Meredith don’t say anything about this at the dinner table. They’re not going to understand.” I told her this hurriedly, hoping I could intervene and curtail the disaster that might be if our father had any idea that Meredith had done LSD. He wouldn’t hesitate to have her committed; he had said as much before and I wanted to make sure he had no idea that she had done what she’d done.

  “I want to tell them, though. I want to tell all of them. It was so wonderful. They deserve to know, don’t you think? It’s something great I know about the world and I ought to tell the whole world. I want to tell everybody about what happened!”

  I thought fast again. “No. Don’t tell them. It would be too much greatness for them to understand. I know you want to, but you can’t. They aren’t going to understand, you see. I think this is something you’ll have to keep to yourself for a while and of course I’ll know. So you have told someone. It’s very special.”

  When Mother called us to the table we listened to the story of our grandmother’s birth in Michigan again, the broth that her father prepared after sacrificing a lamb, a broth which saved her life all those years earlier and which saved her life again for all of us at the dinner table for perhaps the hundredth time. Also, she received again the gift of small china dishes and thought they weren’t for her until she discovered that they were. We’d heard that story before, too. With dessert she regaled us with her story about the horseradish business with her older brother and the crash of the buggy outside her house. Her complete story cycle.

  But it was good to hear it again nearer to the time when I could write it and tell you the tales which I heard so many times before.

  And no one guessed that Meredith had taken LSD.