When We Were Ghouls

by Amy E. Wallen

  “Amy!” she said in a tone I recognized—subject ended. If she were well she would have added, “Do you want a swat?” But she had no oomph to give a spanking. I watched her slide back into the bed and disappear under the covers. Anymore all she had to do was close her eyes, and her whole body would sag into a limp resemblance of who she used to be. Her eyes fluttered open momentarily as if to say, you still here? The air conditioner rumbled on and filled the air, corner to corner, with noisy silence. I held the Miss Polly doll in my hands. Miss Polly was locked away behind a plastic shield with cardboard backing. This was a doll worth keeping. A doll I could have hours of fun with. Although she was small, her body had heft. With her slight smile and the way her big eyes looked up wishfully, she was solid. The other, hollow dolls on the Birthday Gift Shelf had smiles painted on that slipped past the rim of the lips, eyes that stared ahead with a zombielike glaze, and their hair was frizzy.

  “Get your dad to help you wrap it,” Mom said with a big sigh. Gray and sleepy, she said everything with a big sigh anymore.

  Dad! I thought. He would see the Miss Polly doll was too good to give away. I rushed downstairs where he was working on setting up the reel-to-reel tape player to record the new music he’d gotten from his friends. Tom Jones sang, “Why, why, why, Delilah!” and then Neil Diamond, Mom’s favorite, sang “Sweet Caroline.”

  “Daddy,” I said from behind him as he knelt on the floor in front of the stereo equipment.

  “What is it, Amy?” He didn’t turn around at first, fiddling with the knobs and buttons on the big silver Akai machines.

  “Look,” I said and held up the Miss Polly doll for him to see. He turned around, and I explained that the other toys in the hall closet on that high Birthday Shelf—the faux Barbies with thin, hollow plastic bodies and nappy yellow polyester hair; the pink-and-green plastic jewelry kit with snap-on jewels; the eggs of Silly Putty; and the water pistols—those were all much better gifts to give to the Italian girls.

  He smiled. “What’s wrong with the Italian girls?”

  I was stumped. I had nothing against the Italians exactly. “They speak only Italian, and I speak only English,” I said, hoping he’d understand. He nodded. But I wasn’t sure he fully comprehended my plight. “They ride a different school bus than I do,” I explained further. “I can’t go to their house after school to play.” Why waste a perfectly good Miss Polly doll, which would fit in quite well with my current Barbie collection, on someone with whom I’d never even get to play with Miss Polly vicariously? He didn’t respond to my idea. He just turned around and began fiddling with the knobs again.

  “You about ready to go?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, wishing I could sound excited. “I gotta pick out something to wear though.” My mom usually did that for me. But since she was napping, my dad helped instead.

  In my room, I set the Miss Polly doll on the end of Suzanne’s bed by the door. Dad and I decided on the red-and-orange plaid overalls and white dress-up blouse that buttoned down the back. While I got dressed, Dad said he’d wrap the gift.

  “You know,” I said, starting off slow, “there’s another doll on the Birthday Shelf that would be just as good and not the Miss Polly doll.”

  My dad looked at Miss Polly through her plastic shield. “This looks like a pretty good gift to me.”

  “But there are others,” I said, “just look.” I struggled to button the blouse in the back, so he helped me and then went to the Birthday Shelf in the closet just outside my room. Oh, I was so elated to think that just like that he might go for it. He might actually put the Miss Polly doll back and give the Italian girl a faux Barbie instead.

  “This looks like the best gift,” he said. “We’ll give this one. I’ll wrap it, you get ready. Hurry up.” And he headed down the stairs.

  “No!” I said. I had no choice now. I had to resort to whining. “Can’t you give her something else? She won’t know.”

  I watched him shake his head no then make his way toward the living room below. “Hurry up,” he said, putting his finger to his lips indicating I needed to be quiet because Mom was sleeping.

  I pulled up my red-and-orange overalls and put on my red Keds. Then I slumped down the stairs where the package sat wrapped in Donald Duck paper on the table next to the reel-to-reel tape player. My dad sat on the modern Danish couch reading the Daily Sun. “Ready?” he asked, lowering the paper, smiling at me.

  I tried to smile back, but I just couldn’t with the Miss Polly doll all wrapped up, ready for her sacrifice.

  He dropped me off at the Italian families’ compound. A long gravel driveway led up from the front gate to the five houses. The Marcellis lived in the house at the back of the circle. I rang the bell. A cacophony of little girls and boys echoed all the way out onto the marble front porch. “Buongiorno!” Mrs. Marcelli said to me upon opening the big wooden front doors. Peeking around the front entrance, I could see all the kids gallivanting around the spacious living room decorated in black leather furniture and fur rugs. The mothers all had tall hair and wore tight blouses and hip-hugger pants with high-heeled shoes. The little boys wore suits and ties, and the girls wore frilly dresses like I had never owned in my life. Crinoline and taffeta crinkled and swayed as the girls ran giggling around me. One mother lifted a strap on my plaid overalls and said something in Italian, making all the other mothers laugh. Mrs. Marcelli swiped the gift from my hand, and I knew then it would take all the will I had to keep from crying in the next few hours. Maybe my dad would return early, I hope, hope, hoped.

  But he didn’t. We, or I should say they, played games as at any birthday party, only not like any birthday party I’d ever been to. No pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey for me to cheat at. Instead there was some game where words were called out, and the fastest kid to raise his or her hand won a prize. I didn’t understand any of the Italian words blurted out, so I didn’t raise my hand once. I considered raising it randomly just to be the first, as I was a pretty quick draw, but since I wasn’t sure what the word was, and I still hadn’t recovered fully from the humiliation of my red-and-orange plaid overalls, I changed my mind. A little boy in a pinstriped suit sat next to me at the black lacquered dining room table. He kept kicking at my red Keds.

  “Cut it out,” I whispered.

  He kicked harder.

  “Stop it.”

  He smiled wickedly and hauled off a good wallop into the side of my foot. I moved my feet to the other side of the chair and stuck my tongue out at him. An adult hand, a mother’s hand, but thick and burly like a man’s, swooped down and slapped the back of my head. I looked up and a tall-haired mother smirked at me. I crossed my little arms so tight I thought they’d pop out of their sockets. If my mother wasn’t sick she would have come with me to the party. Make friends, she’d say. That was her answer to everything, and a choice I usually made reluctantly. I looked around the room. I felt none of these kids wanted me as their friend, nor did I really want to be theirs. Not if it meant I had to wear a dress.

  Cake! Now that I understood, Italian or English. Cake was being served. The kicking boy got in line behind me, and so I went to the end. I watched as the kids ran by with their cake. For my own birthday, my favorite and first choice was always chocolate. White cake was a waste of time, and any other flavor, that just seemed silly and a missed opportunity for chocolate. But what these kids carried on their plates looked like a slimy mush. Like pudding cake. Not really even cake. “Tiramisu,” Mrs. Marcelli said as she grinned at me and handed over my mush-on-a-plate.

  I took mine to the leather living room. I liked scooting my rubber-soled Keds across the fur rugs. The other kids had gone out to the backyard. They ran around the mango trees, and the kicking boy, I could see through the sliding glass doors, shook a yellow warbler’s nest out of the giant red hibiscus. I finally got up the nerve and tasted my mush cake. Like chalky baby food. Worse than baby food. Gerber’s chocolate pudding baby food that my mom used to buy in the States in l
ittle jars and let me have for snacks after school, that wasn’t so bad. But this pudding was twangy and smelled like Dad’s scotch bottle when opened on a Friday night. I couldn’t even swallow the piece of tiramisu I’d put in my mouth.

  While everyone else was in the backyard, I slipped out the front doors. With my mush cake, I went out to the gravel driveway. The kids in the backyard could be heard over the roof of the big two-story stone house. I squatted at the edge of the driveway by the red azalea bushes and low-lying geraniums. With my spoon I dug a shallow grave in the gravel, scooped my tiramushu in, then spit out the bit I still hadn’t swallowed as well. Bumblebees flirted with the azaleas. I remembered what my dad had told me that morning about the bees. They knew my secret, and they wouldn’t tell.

  As I shoveled gravel over the cake’s grave, I heard, “Emmmmiii!” Mrs. Marcelli stood at the front doors waving at me to come back. She was smiling, but so far every Italian I had met smiled when they kicked or swatted me. She motioned harder. I glanced down the other end of the driveway to see whether my dad might be coming to get me. The other families had Nigerian drivers, but my mom and dad had a Ford Escort with the steering wheel on the right side and no driver. The white Ford Escort was not coming to get me yet. “Emmi!” Mrs. Marcelli tried again. “Geefts!” she said in the best English I’d heard in a few hours. This meant I got to go watch Angela Marcelli open the Miss Polly doll and claim it as her own. I’d rather be at home watching my mother die of malaria. But I crunched across the gravel and handed my now empty plate to Mrs. Marcelli, hoping she wouldn’t notice the slimy skid marks where I’d slid the cake over the edge into its interment.

  Inside I found a place in the back of the circle of kids where I could watch as Angela ripped the paper off the packages. Her black Mary Janes swung under the black lacquered dining room chair as she sat like a queen. She went through each gift with oohs and aahs like the Fourth of July in the States. Then she came to mine, and my nose twitched. This could quite possibly be the moment when I finally cried. Angela ripped the paper off, flinging Donald Duck and his pals to the side, and held up the doll for everyone to see. I blinked. Was I seeing what I thought I saw? It was the faux Barbie. The doll with the smile painted on lopsided. The doll with the red sequined dress who was an inch too tall to fit into Barbie’s clothes. I found myself applauding, sitting up on my knees, taking notice of what the next gift might be.

  When the party ended, I stood outside at the edge of the gravel driveway while the other kids were picked up. I stood on my tiptoes looking frantically through all the cars for our white Ford Escort. I could hardly wait to tell Daddy what happened. As if he didn’t know! But he’d get a kick out of how it all happened, how I was surprised. I would tell him all the details, even about the mushu cake. I pictured us laughing about it. I pictured his big smile.

  My dad didn’t pick me up.

  I spotted the blue Renault in the line of cars. The sting of spitting gravel hit my shins. Pious, the Griffins’ driver, waved at me from the driver’s seat a few cars away. Pious maneuvered the little blue Renault among the black Mercedes Benzes and green Peugeots and red Fiats driven by other Nigerian chauffeurs. I didn’t want it to be Pious. I wanted Dad to pick me up, just as he dropped me off. I wanted to sit in the car and tell him my story. I wanted to laugh with him; after all those hours of wanting to cry at the party, I wanted to laugh with Daddy. Pious pulled up, and I climbed in the front passenger seat and slammed the door behind me.

  “Small Sister have good time?” Pious asked. Unlike Philip, Pious dressed in a navy blue suit, pants, and a Nehru jacket. His hands rested with confidence on the steering wheel.

  I nodded. “I did,” I said. “I had fun.” But something was missing. Something that I wanted more than a doll. I was missing my dad. I was missing my mom. I didn’t want to be picked up by a driver. I wanted my family. And I knew Pious would want me to go to church. That’s all he ever talked about.

  Pious pulled out of the big stone gates behind two Fiats.

  I’d gotten what I wanted—Miss Polly didn’t go to live in the house with the Italians. I could surmise that she would maybe be mine, probably at Christmas, which was coming up. But sitting in the car with Pious, I didn’t feel what had transpired was worth it. I had had a glorious moment of my parent acknowledging me with what I had said I wanted. But what about what I needed? At seven, all I knew was that I’d gotten my doll, but it felt like I’d somehow traded my dad for Miss Polly.

  Next to me Pious was talking. “This Sunday, I will take Small Sister to mass at Christ the King?” Every chance he got Pious asked me if I wanted to go to church with him that Sunday. He attended the Catholic Church, but I didn’t want to attend any church. We had been Methodists when we lived in the States. All five of us, the whole family, scrambled every Sunday into the Buick to get to church on time. I didn’t want to go with just Pious.

  “Maybe next week,” I told Pious, watching the coconut vendors climb the palm trees as we traversed the side streets.

  “Ten thousand people attend mass at my church every Sunday,” he told me.

  Outside the car, on the main road heading back home, the car horns honked incessantly, passersby walked elbow-to-elbow, and beggars—in handmade sandals, with stained and scarred faces and missing limbs—crammed in with those dressed in both Western and traditional wear. It was the kind of scene where someone could ask, “Where is God in this picture?”

  “Ten thousand people who know Jesus Christ as their Savior,” Pious continued.

  Ten thousand people. One church. Eight million people. One city.

  In Ely we had climbed into the Buick on Sundays because that’s what we did as good Americans. We went to church on Sundays. That was the only church I knew. We had slipped out of that habit easily. The belief in God was not innate, and we each went our own way. Me, I didn’t want ten thousand people. I wanted four. I may have prayed for the Miss Polly doll, if whining counts as prayer. My dad was no savior. So who was I to believe in?

  When I reached home, more news had come from the streets about the man who attacked the little girl. Philip stood in the kitchen filtering our drinking water, and my dad stood on the back porch, just outside the screen door. On the concrete chopping block by the door sat the long stalk of bananas that Anthony, our gardener, had just cut from the banana tree. Each banana was no bigger than Dad’s thumb but sweeter than pudding. My dad pulled a dark pink banana from the ripe stalk.

  “The little girl screamed,” Philip continued, “and when the police chased the man around a corner he turned himself into a goat.”

  “Turned himself into a goat?” my dad asked through a mouthful of soft banana.

  “Yes, Master, he turned himself into a goat to escape the police.” Philip poured the large heavy kettle of boiling water through the top of the drinking water filtration.

  “You don’t really believe that, do you, Philip?” My dad swallowed the banana in two bites.

  Philip nodded a quick nod. “Oh yes, Master. They have the goat in jail to prove it.” Steam curled around Philip’s head from the kettle’s spout.

  “Jail?” My dad’s laugh floated out of the compound.

  “Yes, Master. The police constable insist the goat turn himself back into a man before they execute him.”

  I looked in the fridge while they talked. I wanted to tell my dad about the Miss Polly doll, but this discussion, I was certain, meant I wouldn’t be able to ride my bike outside the compound, and I had plans to go next door to Lynn Marie Tudge’s house.

  “Come on, Philip, how could he turn himself into a goat?” My father pulled another banana off the stalk, peeled and popped this one whole into his mouth.

  Philip put the kettle down on the stove, his back to my dad. “With the juju, Master.” He stood tall in his white suit, very handsome and proud of himself and his position.

  Finding nothing in the fridge except the bowl of potato skins soaking in water that Philip would later fry into hom
emade potato chips, I turned to see what Dad would tell Philip about the juju.

  “They should just barbecue the goat.”

  Grandaddy barbecued goat in Texas. All the cousins gathered at the little house with the big barbecue pit. Cabrito, potato salad, and pinto beans. I’d stuff myself and then stuff myself again when the churned homemade peach ice cream made the rounds. No one in that little house in Texas with the barbecued goat thought of executions or juju or even malaria. I waited for Philip to laugh at the barbecue comment. No one was funnier than my dad, except Marty.

  Philip didn’t laugh, but he was used to my dad’s bad jokes. He lit another fire under the kettle filled with water.

  “Madam doesn’t want dinner, and I’ve been invited to the Dels’ for a party, so you can have the evening off,” my father told Philip. “Keep me updated on the goat.” He walked through the kitchen, patting me on the head as he passed through, his sticky fingers on my hair. “And I’ll be heading back to the bush tomorrow.” Gone as quick as he came.

  “Yes, Master,” Philip nodded and watched my father walk back into the main house. “Small Sister must not leave compound,” he said to me, his voice lowered. I shrugged a disappointed okay.

  Because of the Man Turned Goat incident, I figured Philip was keeping an extra eye out and might say something, so I snuck around the back instead of taking my bike. I climbed over the back fence of the compound to get to Lynn Marie’s house. How safe was it for me to be out of the compound on my own? I never went far, just in the neighborhood, but I never had anyone ask me where I was going or where I had been. Yet I always had a sense the staff had an eye on me.

  The next week Philip asked for the day off so he could go to the execution of the goat. Because the executions were held on Bar Beach on Victoria Island near our school, and because tens of thousands of people made the trek to view to the public executions, the route became impassable, so we got the day off from school.