When We Were Ghouls

by Amy E. Wallen

  But I could pop back in the pub when I needed to. I never went so far in disappearing that I would close both my ears and all my senses to the world. I always had one foot in the real world. I was always ready to return if someone wanted me. If someone called my name, for that’s all I wanted. Always waiting for someone to want me.

  When they walked through the doors, I appeared from behind the row of cloaks. I already had on my coat, as the vestibule wasn’t heated.

  “Lambie, there you are!” Mrs. Betteridge said, as though they had been waiting for me, not the other way around.

  “See, that wasn’t long, was it?” Mom said.

  I shook my head no. How could I disagree? I had no idea how long it had really been, and if I was difficult then I might not be invited along next time. I waited silently for them to put on their coats, but what I really wanted to do was tug at their arms and get them out onto the sidewalk.

  “I wish we didn’t have to go back out there,” Mom said. “It’s so cold.” But I wanted to get back out to wherever we were going next. I didn’t want to be waiting. I didn’t know what the next stop was, but I just wanted to be with them, not waiting for them, no matter how cold. But I didn’t want them to leave me again, so I thought I should say something.

  “I was ascared!” I said.

  “You were afraid,” my mother corrected.

  “Yes, afraid,” I said.

  “That’s better.”

  I was afraid of many things, of being left behind, of being forgotten, of my mother dying, of everyone dying. I knew complete world annihilation was coming, and I would be left entirely alone on this earth.

  Any day now.

  Part 2

  Peru

  We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.

  —Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

  Fig. 3. Summer holiday in Texas, 1973: Marty, Daddy, Amy, Mom, and Suzanne. Courtesy of the author.

  Deer in the Headlights

  My father once explained to me why deer get hit so often on the highway. They have poor vision, he explained, but their eyes have a photographic lens. It’s why they appear skittish. When she hears a bush rustle, a hunter unlock the safety, or a car engine approaching, the white tail deer’s big ears twitch, she looks, snaps the shot, looks away, then looks again. The first image must match the second image; the two images must overlap without any shifts. If she detects an alteration in what she saw on the first take, she intuits change and possible danger. That’s when she takes off running in the opposite direction. When the same deer, standing on the side of the rural highway at dusk, hears a car engine approaching, she looks, then looks again, but the headlights blind her—the photographic image filed first in her brain has been overexposed. She knows the image has changed, but she doesn’t know what is a true image and what is not, and she runs directly in front of the image she can’t make out: the car.

  That is how I remember Peru. I know we were in Peru the longest, but it is the place where I have the fewest memories. I stare into the past, trying to replicate it. It is where we dug up the grave. I telephone my parents to see whether my remnants overlap with their remembrances. Like the deer, I know something moved when I learned my brother was not in the graveyard with me. Like a white light, the memories overtake me. Peru is where I run straight into those damn headlights. Or maybe it’s too late, and my memories have already been overexposed. The figments of my imagination confused by the high beams, the overlapping image just a splotch of white.

  The way a ghost appears in a photograph.

  Arriving at Midnight

  All things truly wicked start from innocence.

  —Ernest Hemingway

  The rose bushes were my first memory of Lima, thorny bushes taller than I.

  Mr. and Mrs. Riley greeted us at the airport. Mom was so impressed that complete strangers would come to welcome us. Mrs. Riley said it just sounded so awful to have to arrive in this horrible country in the middle of the night. “Horrible country!” my mother said, letting the bellman take her suitcase. “Just look at these roses. They are the size of footballs.” All I could see were the silhouettes. But I could smell their pungent sweetness. I was relieved to know the malodorous air of Lagos had not permeated the lining of my nostrils.

  My arms loaded down with my Barbie doll carry-on, my head felt drippy from jet lag. I always perspired when I had jet lag. Even my eyelids seemed to sweat. I slogged up the rose-lined walkway to the Hotel Country Club’s palatial entry—our new home for six months while my mother tried to find us “suitable housing.”

  The wide staircase to our hotel suite curved up and around to a long hallway. The wooden floor creaked under the plush runner carpet. The hallway was wide enough to carry a casket with pallbearers side-to-side. The high ceiling arched with thick, dark, carved wooden beams. Crystal wall sconces scattered shadows. At the end of the hallway a set of French doors had a small brass plaque that read “Presidential Suite.” Our room was just to the right of those doors.

  No president was ever in residence while we were. The hotel was more like a mausoleum than a hotel. The economic crisis in Peru meant we pretty much had the entire hotel to ourselves. Like the Torrance family in The Shining.

  The long hallway created the perfect spot to kick the soccer ball Mom bought me at the downtown Sears. No more Jankara Market, now it was Sears. I had no one to kick the ball back to me, so I whacked it against the Presidential Suite doors. It would ricochet back to me. This was how I was certain no president stayed there during our tenure. My adroit soccer skills can be credited to this hallway. But soccer would be the only thing I got right at my new school.

  Every student in Peru was required to wear the same uniform. The only difference was male or female. Girls wore a white blouse, dark gray wool sweater, and dark gray skirt of a polyester fabric that pilled badly, with a hem no higher than the middle of your knees. Fashionistas we were not, with thin gray kneesocks that ran like my mother’s hosiery. The whole ensemble was finished off with basic black round-toed shoes. Boys wore slacks instead of skirts, and in the coldest months girls donned a lumpy red wool poncho, and boys wore blue. Pinned over our hearts, a plastic badge with the school crest distinguished us. All I remember of ours was red, white, and blue. I would venture to guess the badge had stripes and an eagle, since it was an American school.

  Other than Samson’s little blue-and-white VW microbus, I had never ridden a school bus before. My new big yellow school bus had “Colegio Franklin Delano Roosevelt” painted in black letters along the side. At first I relished the idea of riding a REAL school bus, yellow and all. When it pulled up along the hotel drive, and the glass folding doors creaked open, the bus driver at the wheel was no Samson. I never learned his name, but it easily could have been “Lurch” from the Addams Family. His scowl made me feel he was always pissed off.

  This first morning Mom stood curbside waiting with me. Since she spoke no Spanish, she hoped for the best and spoke to everyone in English.

  “We are new to Lima,” she told Señor Lurch through the bus doors. “This is Amy.” Her hands on my shoulders, she positioned me in direct line with his angry puss. She nudged me up the two steps into the rumbling, diesel-smelling vehicle. She tried to initiate a response. “Will you be the driver who brings her home too?” Her Southern wiles in this Spanish-speaking metropolis didn’t work. Nor did anyone say, “Yes, Madam,” put their hands in prayer and bow.

  I don’t know if my mom got it, but I could tell the driver didn’t understand a word, nor did he care. And once I was on that bus, I was certain I would never return to my mother.

  The glass folding doors creaked shut, and I nabbed the front row seat, afraid to glance to the back. The inside of the bus had gone silent—all the other kids busy staring at the new kid. I didn’t even have to witness it. I could feel it. I felt their eyes on my skin like creepy crawlies. In my hair like spiders. My ears picked up low-level whispers. I had never been a s
hy kid until now. I had never been afraid. I had never been so afraid of the new and unknown. I learned over and over in Nigeria that we were all clearly mortal. Now all I had to do was wait for mortality to arrive, to pick any of my people.

  Philip, Alice, Samson, Pious, and James, none of them were here. Anyone I became attached to never stayed for long. I was solidifying my fear of attachments to people or relatives. I had also garnered that it wasn’t just Death that took people, but Fate. Everyone eventually left. All I could do was try to prolong their presence.

  In my peripheral vision, my mom waved goodbye on the curb. I focused straight ahead. I would not be a crybaby on my first day of school. Mom’s image became just a blur of a wave, then disappeared completely. If eight-year-olds can have panic attacks, I was having one. My heart raced, my breathing became shallow and echoed in my ears. My focus dimmed and didn’t want to see what might be coming at me. I just looked where I was going, not at what was possibly following me. Like a racehorse wearing blinkers, I limited my distractions to where I had to go.

  The school campus sat on twenty-five acres of lush green grass. Once at the school, the yellow bus disgorged me, and I had to find my classroom. The day before Mrs. Riley had driven my mom and me to the school in her station wagon. A woman from the office had given us a tour of the auditorium/gymnasium with Olympic-sized swimming pool, the high school buildings, the elementary school buildings, the sports field, and the administrative offices. Clusters of palm trees swished above us as we walked around the green campus. We had walked past the music room, and I recognized “Marching to Pretoria.”

  Introduced to my third-grade class and my teacher, Miss Hamlin, I thought she had to be the most beautiful blond American woman after my mom. She acted perturbed her class had been interrupted, but shook my hand and pointed to my cubbyhole along the wall of cubbies to store my book bag. She turned in a circle for a moment, then she waved toward an empty desk in the middle of the classroom. “You can have that seat,” she said, disenchanted. I stared at the abandoned seat, while the roomful of kids stared at me. Miss Hamlin seemed to be waiting to get back to what she was doing. So we left.

  Today would be different though. Meaning today would be even worse. Today I was alone, other than the three thousand other students getting off the line of buses simultaneously. And today I would have to stay the whole day. My heart pummeled my chest as I stepped into the melee of gray uniform–clad students. The sidewalks heading off toward all the buildings we’d been shown the day before were now a sea of gray-and-white uniforms.

  I did find my classroom on the first building’s second floor. The modern architects hired to build Franklin Delano Roosevelt School had created an open floor plan of hallways and three-walled classrooms. I put my book bag in the cubicle that now had my name written on masking tape above it. In Ely we had cubbyholes where we kept our blankets for naptime. In Nigeria, we just had water bottles, and we kept those slung across our chests. Here in Lima, I placed my new leather book satchel into my cubby. It didn’t matter that the satchel was empty, I liked the buckles and soft feel of the leather. Mom had bought it for me at Sears when we’d gone to get my uniform with Mrs. Riley the day before.

  A couple of girls behind me giggled as they walked toward their desks. I heard the word “gordita” exchanged in whispers. Why couldn’t I have the seat in the back of the classroom, a nice out-of-the-way invisible seat in the corner?

  Before lunch, one of the junior high kids whom I had seen in the office the day before delivered a note to Miss Hamlin. Miss Hamlin didn’t even read it. She just walked over to my desk and handed it to me. “You’ve been called to the office,” she said. “The vice principal wants to see you now.” Miss Hamlin was so beautiful with her thick blond hair and svelte figure like Samantha Stephens on Bewitched. I admired her natty clothes and chic high-heeled pumps like my mom’s, but she found me instantly disagreeable. She never smiled. Not once. At least not at me. Not even to wiggle her nose to cast a spell. A spell would have at least been interesting, something her plain, cold-blooded meanness was not.

  I had never been sent to the office before. Not in all eight years of my life. Getting sent to the office meant Big Trouble. Getting sent to the office was a great sin for a kid like me with an overdeveloped superego. I could think of nothing I had done wrong other than just existing. I walked slowly, hoping I’d get lost and never find my way. But I made it down the staircases and through the twenty-five acres to the administrative offices. The cool wind blew, as I would learn it always did. I’d left my gray pullover on my classroom chair, and my thin cotton blouse did nothing to absorb what little sunshine leaked out from the overcast sky. I shivered from the cold. And impending doom.

  Up another set of stairs and inside the principal’s offices, I handed the note to the secretary. She opened it, read it, looked at me from head to toe, then opened the swinging gatelike door to allow me behind the counter. Down the sterile hall we went, and then she handed the vice principal the ominous note. The VP opened it, read it, then looked at me from head to toe. What could it possibly say?!

  “Have a seat, Amy. We’re going to have your mother come and pick you up.”

  Not my mom! That meant even bigger trouble. Oh, to have my mother by my side was what I wanted more than anything, but not under these circumstances. She didn’t have a car, and she didn’t have any way of coming to get me. She didn’t want her day interrupted. She had a hair appointment in the hotel’s basement beauty shop.

  I was seated on the cold plastic potato chip chair just outside Vice Principal Macintosh’s glass office. I was too afraid to ask why I was there, what I had done wrong. Obviously I had done something too heinous to mention. Something so awful that it was unspeakable. I would wait a long time for my mother to arrive. I was too scared even to cry.

  Why couldn’t I have stayed in Nigeria? I had just started Mrs. Mbanefo’s third-grade class. She’d even thrown a Bon Voyage party for me. I didn’t know what “Bon Voyage” meant, but to have someone throw a party for you, well, who doesn’t want that? We had just started learning cursive and the times tables. And in the afternoons I had gone to a Quonset hut classroom across the dusty courtyard where I took French lessons. Now I’d have to learn Spanish instead. The Spanish class took place in yet another building. I hadn’t even figured out where it was yet. Someone said it was on the “west side,” but where was west?

  When my mother did finally arrive she looked nervous and harried, but she often looked like that, so I didn’t know whether it had to do with my predicament.

  “What happened? What did you do?” my mom asked, grabbing my hand tight inside her hard knuckles. I shrugged. The secretary escorted us both to Mrs. Macintosh’s desk.

  The vice principal sat across her big desk. She held the folded note in her fingers. “Your daughter’s shoes are patent leather.”

  I loved my black patent leather shoes. Square-toed, black-and-white striped laces, and silver eyelets. I loved anything patent leather and shiny.

  “Yes,” my mother replied. She was no idiot; she could see they were patent leather. In fact, she had bought them in the States specifically for me to wear with my school uniform. “Black patent leather,” my mother pointed out to the VP, in case she was the idiot. I looked down at my feet, at the shoes everyone else was already staring at.

  “And the laces are striped,” the VP said, making another obvious point.

  “Are you saying something is wrong with that?” my mother asked.

  “Yes, all laces must be plain black to match the plain black leather shoes. The regulation shoes are for sale at the Sears in Miraflores.”

  “I see. Well, I bought these shoes for Amy in the States.” My mother sounded like she still needed to catch her breath from the trip to the school. Her hair hung limp from being shampooed but not styled. The cab waited at the curb where the long line of buses had rumbled earlier. “Surely you didn’t call me here just because of her shoes?”

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nbsp; “She cannot have something that the other kids don’t have or can’t have. It’s the Peruvian government. If you disagree, you’ll have to take it up with the president and Congress of Peru.” Now Mrs. Macintosh’s voice turned surly.

  “Can’t she at least wait until we get a chance to get to the store?” my mom pleaded.

  Mrs. Macintosh wasn’t a mean person, just a rule follower, as Peru’s Nationalist government was wont to insist. “Sorry, it’s not allowed. Amy will have to stay home from school until she has the proper uniform.”

  “Stay home?!” My mom’s surprise sounded a bit more like the idea of me being home was more of a bother than the ludicrousness of the order. “You expect me to go now and get her new shoes?”

  “It’s the law,” Mrs. Macintosh said.

  The law! I had broken the law!

  “Yes, I understand.” My mother had been sitting, but now stood, pulling me up. “We will go buy the plain black leather shoes with the plain black laces.”

  “Thank you,” replied the VP.

  I knew my mother was mad, the thing I feared almost as much as her death. I never wanted her to be upset. “I’m not mad,” she always said when I asked, “I’m just disappointed.” Heavy sigh. My disappointing her seemed to take so much energy, energy she needed to live. Still there was an upside—now I got to spend the day with her, and I didn’t have to go back to my classroom. I would get to go shopping at Sears, even if it was to dig in a big barrel of cheap Communist-era black leather shoes looking for the right size, in both a right and a left.

  Everything about Peru seemed disgruntled. My memories, the few I have, the ones that get washed out by headlights, they are all angry and in black and white. It’s a mood, not a fact. A Truth, not a truth.

  I wonder if this time, under this anti-American government, is when we started to become entitled. Or did I pick up a juju curse from the streets in Lagos?