When We Were Ghouls

by Amy E. Wallen

  Seeds Don’t Grow in a Hotel

  Ambition. Thoroughly immoral and foolishly mortal.

  —Endora, played by Agnes Moorehead, on Bewitched

  In Peru there were no more dead bodies to step over, and even the beggars were less dismembered and infected. From all appearances things on the surface improved. But my anxiety had wound itself around me like a thread pulled tight, pinching my skin. I recall the incongruity of the beggars on the steps of the Catholic churches, which rose in grandeur at the throne of every plaza. The beggars’ hands were cupped upward and their eyes cast downward as the congregants came and went from the solid gold encrusted interiors. But it wasn’t just the outside world. At night I dreamed I showed up at FDR in my white summer culottes—the PE uniform. I dreamed I stepped off the school bus in my gym outfit instead of my gray school skirt and then realized my mistake as the school bus pulled away. I spent every day thinking I was going to get in trouble. That I would break the law without knowing I had. That I could get sent away on another school bus even farther away. Or worse, just not get off at the right bus stop and end up forever far away.

  After a few weeks, my seed chart would be due. Miss Hamlin told the class that we would make seed charts. I had no idea how I would collect seeds, since we lived in a hotel and ate in a restaurant for every meal. In the fruit basket delivered to our room each week we got oranges. That was one seed for my seed chart. I’d asked the hotel waiters, Mario and Xavier, whether they would help me collect some seeds from the kitchen, but it was never clear if they understood me. My Spanish class had covered only animal sounds so far. “Pio, pio, dice el pollito.” Peep, peep, says the baby chick.

  Every day I fretted about the seed chart, but the restaurant waiters had assured me they’d save what they found in the kitchen, and my mom told me to quit worrying, we’d get some seeds over time.

  A week later, I would break the law again and be sent to the office for wearing a blouse that buttoned down the back instead of the regulation white Oxford button-down. Who was it that was reporting me to the office every time? Did Miss Hamlin despise me that much? I didn’t have the insight then to think someone might be intentionally hateful.

  Recalling Miss Hamlin now, I am certain she had an issue with me. What it could have been is hard to say; maybe a pudgy girl was a disappointment to her? In Lagos, though it was a huge metropolis too, I had an element I didn’t have in Lima: staff watching out for Small Sister. There was no one keeping an eye on me from the back of the compound, no one making sure I didn’t get nabbed by the Man Turned Goat, no one idly waiting to catch me if I fell off my bike. No one to say, “So sorry, Small Sister” if I took a misstep. No lunch hut. I had a spread-wide-open school campus and strict-rule environment, a disgruntled teacher, hordes of students all dressed identically, and nary a friend.

  The seed chart was due, and I still hadn’t collected any seeds. My mom had taken me to Sears to buy a piece of poster board, and that was as far as I had gotten with the assignment. I wanted the fuchsia poster board, but Mom insisted white would be more appropriate for a class project. “Your seeds will display better,” she said.

  “What seeds?” I asked, wondering how I would ever get this assignment done properly with no access to seeds in my near future.

  “You’ll figure something out,” she said. Then, seeing my face, she added, “I’ll help.”

  The day before the project due date, I neatly wrote SEED CHART across the white poster board in block letters with a black Magic Marker. To one corner, I Scotch-taped a crisscrossed cellophane patch and wrote “ORANGE SEEDS.” I stared at my blank chart. How was it possible that I had no seeds? The weekly fruit basket delivery to our suite contained oranges and bananas.

  Bananas, I learned from this assignment, didn’t have seeds. I peeled back the yellow skins, broke the perfect white concave meat in half. The tiniest of black spots, a total of maybe five specs circled the center. Not really a seed to speak of, at least not one that could be taped to a poster board. A fruit with no seeds. A conundrum that worried me. How would more bananas grow? I would be an adult before I knew anything about banana republics and the first genetically modified food. But I had a homework assignment, and I did not want to wreck Miss Hamlin’s day. So, to show I had higher expectations, I wrote “BANANA SEEDS,” and I smeared a little banana goo where the seed packet would go. Now I had two seeds.

  I groused to Mom, but she would have her Spanish lesson with Señora Albon on the balcony shortly. So we made a quick trip down the street from the hotel to a bodega. No fresh fruit or vegetables were available at the small, dark market. “This will do,” Mom said, and she bought a bag of rice.

  While she had her Spanish lesson I glued a few grains of rice to the poster board. I stared at my pitiful substandard chart propped up on my bed. The banana looked like I’d blown my nose on it, and the tiny packet of orange seeds next to the similar packet of rice looked like I’d not successfully made it past kindergarten coloring books and paste. If I could tell how bad it was, I didn’t want to know Miss Hamlin’s opinion.

  The next day I waited for the bus at the end of the rose bush–lined walkway, the Southern Hemisphere’s late October summer air damp and cold. Mom had told me the night before, “Just explain to Miss Hamlin that you live in a hotel and have no access to seeds.” She went on to explain that it in no way meant I knew nothing about seeds. I wanted her to come to school to explain, but I knew that would never happen. As I stood at the circular drive’s curb, I held my poster board tightly to my chest to hide the disastrous results from the public. I fought the wind that wanted to rip the board from my grip. This, I knew, would be a sad, sad day. Sadder than usual.

  When I stood in front of the class to give my presentation, I decided to do exactly as Mom had suggested. My poster board lettering slanted slightly, but I reassured myself that otherwise the board was tidy.

  I was the only third-grader with white poster board. Shelly, the mean girl at school, had the fuchsia one I had wanted. But again I reassured myself that didn’t matter; I had done plenty, considering my hotel handicap.

  “My seed chart has three seeds,” I began my talk. “I collected the orange seeds from our fruit basket delivered every week to our hotel room.” With my forefinger, I pointed at the dried out and sickly looking orange seeds. My gaping audience waited for me to explain further. They stared at the banana snot. I moved my finger over to the rice.

  “This is rice.” I smiled. No one seemed to see the humor in this.

  “Rice is not a seed,” Miss Hamlin said from the child-sized school chair she sat in. Shiny panty hose strained and shimmered across her knees that poked up practically to her chin.

  I went right to relinquishing blame. “My mother thought it would be a good idea.”

  “You were supposed to make the chart yourself,” Miss Hamlin derided. The giggles among the other students had started their slow creep to the surface.

  “I live in a hotel,” I started to explain again, “so we don’t have any seeds.”

  Miss Hamlin stretched out her legs and said, “Keep going. What else do you have?”

  My voice got quieter. That tiny moment of confidence—poof—gone.

  “This would be banana seeds,” I said, willing my hand to point to the smudge spot on the poster, but I couldn’t look up nor raise my hand I was so humiliated. “But bananas don’t have seeds.”

  We had formed a circle with our chairs. Miss Hamlin stood up from her diminutive chair in the back of the circle “Why would a banana not have a seed? How would it grow if it didn’t have a seed?” She sounded frustrated. This had turned out so much worse than I had expected. It wasn’t just a bad chart, I was also pitiful.

  “I don’t know,” I explained. “I looked for the seeds, but they didn’t have any.” That sounded so lame. This poster board was lame. My seed chart was lame. I was lame.

  “Living in a hotel is no excuse.” Miss Hamlin reached across and lifted my chart in
to the air above my head. “You’re wasting our time. Sit down.”

  Yes, I was a waste of time.

  Mom had said it would be okay, but it was not. Living in a hotel was not an excuse, just as Miss Hamlin said. Why couldn’t we live in a house like other people?

  I remember Mom telling stories about house-hunting while she and I ate dinner in the restaurant of the hotel. We’d be the only two people in the whole dining room, except the waiters. She’d talk about her day while I was at school, about the crazy, good-looking real estate agent who sped down the Panamerican Highway in his Jaguar showing her houses like mansions with wine cellars and swimming pools. “Not us at all,” she’d say. And I’d want to say a swimming pool wouldn’t be so bad.

  Rapt, I listened to her tell the stories, she a little bug-eyed as she tried to find her way in this city the size of Los Angeles. We were together again. When we sat together over dinner in the wood-paneled dining room or ate sandwiches on the patio on the weekends, I felt like I was Mom’s best friend. Who needed a house if we could just be together, ladies lunching.

  My head swims with memories of the adults referring to President Velasco’s Land Reform. I google the seventies Velasco Nationalist government to find out why we had only mansions to choose from. So many articles pop up about the popular new economic strategy in Latin America—rarely put into use—that aimed to find a “third way” between capitalism and communism.

  When I was eight, it sounded so fair. We are all created equal floated in my little brain—who knows where I learned it, as I don’t recall ever reading the Declaration of Independence. But I know I didn’t learn it from listening to the adults—unless they were bashing the expression.

  As I read the articles, this expression, correctly quoted, “All Men are created equal,” is ever present. The Peruvian Land Reform declared country houses would go to the peasants who worked the property unless the owners lived on the land. This law created a mad dash to the country house among all the wealthy Peruvians. To save their deeds meant moving to the country to their weekend homes and renting out their homes in Lima. But my family didn’t need a lavish house, especially since it was just Mom and me most of the time. Unfortunately in a country where there is no middle class, the smaller house selections were thin. Yet the big fancy houses were plentiful.

  Maybe I was socialist at an early age, but I remember asking an adult, or someone taller than me, why we didn’t all have the same things if we were truly created equal. Whoever it was I asked replied that we were born equal, but after that it all fell apart.

  The Land Reform wasn’t successful, but that would be later, after the government also nationalized the oil and drilling companies. Later when we would be asked to leave. Later when Americans were no longer welcome. Except Sears and RC Cola.

  Buche de Noel

  Come in,—come in! and know me better, man! I am the Ghost of Christmas Present. Look upon me! You have never seen the like of me before!

  —Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

  Mom put the house hunt on hold. Suzanne and Marty were coming home for Christmas soon, so for the time being Mom reserved the adjoining room to our suite for them. We would have Christmas in the hotel. Christmas in a hotel was not Christmas. No homemade chocolate pies, no swirling disco lights, no tinsel tree, not even Maurice Chevalier. And this time, not even Santa.

  Along with our weekly fruit basket, a buche de Noel had arrived. And along with Suzanne and Marty came a friend. The Yule Log, a symbol of coming spring, a tradition to ward off evil spirits, sat on the coffee table. The friend slept on the living room sleeper sofa, his feet next to the buche de Noel on its foil-lined tray. The buche was not doing its job.

  Stephen had been Suzanne’s boyfriend in high school when we’d lived in Louisiana. His father had become governor, and he had money to travel. In my opinion, he had no reason to visit her now. But despite my opinion, the three of them went off to climb the Inca Trail, to tour the gold-walled colonial cathedrals, and to visit the city’s underground catacombs, all without me.

  It was as if Suzanne and Marty weren’t even visiting. They showed up then were gone again. Who could tell if they had even been there? Their apparitions didn’t even leave a warm, lingering air pocket I could walk through.

  For one tiny moment, I had their attention. It was Christmas Eve. The buche de Noel sat on the coffee table imploding, everyone having prodded a sampling. In the adjoining room the teenagers hung out, and I sat on the floor among them.

  “Let’s go do something,” Stephen said.

  “You bored?” Marty asked. He flipped through the travel guide.

  I sat Indian-style, pulling on the bedspread fringe. “It’s never boring at Christmas time,” I said. Please don’t go, is what I really wanted to say.

  “What’s Santa going to bring you, Amy?” Suzanne asked.

  Stephen swung his head around to face me. “You still believe in Santa?” Incredulity unraveled from his tongue.

  Time slowed, all sound became deep and hollow. I tried to read his face. He must be teasing me. He must not mean what I think he means.

  Suzanne tried to rescue the situation. “She believes more than anything, so don’t ruin it for her.”

  At this point my head buzzed. I recall Stephen’s head flopping back, his laughter bellowing, and how it made me lose my breath. My rib cage squeezed together as all the air was sucked out. His awful guffaws reverberated off the wallpapered walls. Suzanne and Marty eyed each other, and that’s when I knew I’d been made a fool. I could die from this, I thought. I could suffocate, and no one would care.

  “How do all those presents appear during the night?” I asked, trying to get my grip on the concept.

  “It’s Mommy and Daddy,” Suzanne said. She was always the logical thinker, the truth teller, the one who wanted to get the facts straight. She was studying psychology at college. Marty shrugged, but nodded his head in confirmation. My gut tightened while I pulled in all my muscles to keep from crying.

  “Come on, let’s go check out the San Francisco Monastery,” Stephen said, the guidebook now in his hands.

  “What’s there?” Suzanne asked, sitting on her twin bed.

  “Catacombs,” Marty replied. Piles and piles of dead bones. Once again, they took off without me. Gone to the graves under the city. I sat on the couch, alone in the hotel suite. I thought about Santa. I had heard rumors before. Other kids said he didn’t exist, but I considered that a foolish consideration. Who wouldn’t want to believe in Santa? But now I was the foolish one.

  My face scrunched, trying to hold back a cry. Why hold back when there was no one to see me cry? No one to say, “What’s the matter?” To hold me, to rock me in their arms like Alice would. No one to say it would be okay. No one was there to even say I didn’t have anything to cry about. No one was there.

  I went into my bathroom. I looked in the medicine cabinet mirror. I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to be caught crying. I watched the tears well up then spill over. I didn’t want to feel all those achy feelings, those racking sobs like my lungs have been sucked of all their air. I hated that familiar crush of ribs. I watched my face turn pink and swell up into a mess of tears and snot. A face that made me look like the blubbery fool I was. In the blur of spilling tears, I said to myself, “There is no one.” I watched myself bawl, how it all poured out. I watched through swollen eyes, I watched my cheeks and eyelids puff. I watched with fascination, not tenderness. I watched because no one else was there to see me cry. I had become a crier.

  If I had known how to comfort myself, maybe my reflection could have relayed solace. Maybe watching proved I existed. Maybe on the other side of the aluminum coated float glass, there was somebody there.

  After I examined the details of my breakdown, I cleaned my face, removed all traces of my cry, and returned to the living room sofa to wait. I poked my finger into the uneaten, but beaten buche de Noel. Poke, poke, poke. At first it looked like a fat-beaked woodpeck
er had attacked the chocolate icing bark.

  Eventually the buche turned into a pile of gooey crumbs.

  Even with the extra person, Christmas morning felt ten times smaller with the most important spirit gone. At breakfast, the waiter in the restaurant had even tried to tease me about Papa Noel, but I didn’t respond.

  Around the tiny tree in our room, we, the whole family and Stephen, opened our gifts in our usual tradition. My father took turns giving us each a wrapped present, but I felt the presence of bad juju.

  Didn’t Stephen have his own family to spend Christmas with in Louisiana? His own family Christmas to ruin?

  As my dad passed a tiny maroon satin-covered box to my mom, all our eyes shot open. Inside the box lay a 24-karat gold sole coin in a gold mounting. My mom held the brooch up by the thick gold setting. “Oh my, Stephen,” my mother said. “This is too expensive.”

  “Yeah, incredible,” my dad said. “You don’t need to buy us with—.” Mom shot him a look, so he stopped.

  The yellow metal twisted into filigree to impress my mother. Gold, gold, gold. The treasure of pirates. Stephen had already stolen my brother and sister, had swiped Santa right out from under me. Did he really think he could get away with my mom too? I wished he would leave even before his scheduled departure time the next day. Braniff couldn’t get him out of Lima fast enough.

  Everything in Peru was about gold—the jewelry, the Inca, even the interior walls and icons of all the Catholic churches were made of solid gold, while those bedraggled beggars sat on the front steps. How, I wondered, did the priests justify the discrepancy? Didn’t they know all men are created equal? Everything seemed so unfair.

  Suzanne and Marty returned to their schools. My family now existed on three separate continents, in two different hemispheres. My father returned to the piranha-infested waters of the Amazon jungle.