When We Were Ghouls

by Amy E. Wallen

  Sometimes my siblings’ absence made their earlier presence feel like a slipped memory, a memory so recent the sounds of their voices and laughter still echoed off the walls. The wadded wrapping paper, demolished buche de Noel, and rearranged furniture were all remnants of their having been there. But the sealed and locked doors to the adjoining room and missing suitcases left no signs it was true. Each visit we seemed less like a family and more like visitors. Out-of-town guests. If I were lucky, perfume or a soap smell might linger, a wrinkle on a pillowcase—where an invisible specter’s head lay.

  But as soon as the maids came the next day, every scent, every wrinkle, and every crumb would be gone.

  Gold. We kept upgrading our collection of treasures. Greed? We were wealthy compared to what we were in Nevada. American expatriates. Mom tried to find a smaller house. The Peruvian government tried to share the land. The priests still try to feed the poor while their churches are lined with gold. Maybe a curse was left with that gold Peruvian sole coin framed in filigree, bought by the American who was later indicted and sent to federal prison along with his father, then gifted to my mom. Expatriates. Ex-patriots.

  The Lima Welcome Wagon

  There shall we three meet again in thunder, lightning, or in rain?

  When the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.

  —Shakespeare, Macbeth

  We finally moved into a house in January 1973. I was about to turn nine. I remember well because my birthday present was in our shipment from Miami. Who doesn’t remember their first Big Girl Bike?

  I stood on the flat roof of our new home. Up from busy Avenida del Prado rose a cacophony of horns honking and tires skidding. Across the street sat a doughnut shop wafting the fried pastry scent, next to that a Peruvian public school where the kids’ laughter and screams comingled.

  Waiting for the moving van, I watched the fog roll in from the ocean. “A blanket of fog,” my mom said. I leaned against the cold, waist-high concrete wall bordering the roof. The fog unfurled like the blue-paper-wrapped cotton I’d seen in Mom’s sewing room. A dark dampness mantled our house, stifling the clatter from the street.

  With little precipitation in Lima, the roofs could be flat. Flat-roofed houses used the extra space for laundry rooms, maids’ quarters, and growling dogs. Everyone had a dog on their roof—the Peruvian alarm system. We didn’t have a dog. Instead of flesh-tearing guard dogs, we had Juana.

  Juana lived upstairs, essentially the third story, in a set of flimsy, wooden buildings connected to the laundry room, all built on the roof. A set of stairs led up from the family room to the top of the house. To Juana’s den.

  The day we moved in, Juana showed up on our stoop. The movers were hauling in the beige couch, squeezing it through the front door. Mom inside made sure they didn’t get their greasy black paw prints on her new sofa. I stood outside, tearing open the cardboard container my bike had come in. This skinny Peruvian lady, almost my height, walked up beside me.

  Mom kept barking, “¡Por favor!” and “¡Cuidado!” as the movers tried different angles to get the couch through the door.

  “Is that your mother?” the tiny dark brown lady in a pink cotton dress asked me. She smelled of toilet bowl cleaner.

  “On the other side of the couch,” I said. Mom wasn’t visible. She could only be heard.

  “She need maid.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement. I knew Mom was interviewing housekeepers, as several had already come by, flummoxed by Mom’s Uvalde, Texas, Class of 1950 high school Spanish.

  Juana said she could speak nine languages, didn’t like to cook, and wanted Mondays off. Mom hired her on the spot. Mom said it was like Mary Poppins the way she arrived. I had started to get a pretty good sense of people, and I was pretty sure she was more like Maleficent. Or Juanabane.

  Godzilla, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

  “My darling,” she said at last, are you sure you don’t mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?”

  “I don’t mind at all,” I said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.”

  —Roald Dahl, The Witches

  School didn’t start again until late February in Peru. South of the equator, it was summer vacation and Christmas break. Once we moved in, Mom and Dad hosted parties on the weekends he was home, or they attended parties that other expats and diplomats threw.

  The house didn’t end up being a mansion like the fast-driving real estate agent wanted my mom to rent, but it was bigger than any house we had lived in before. And it had a pool. A pool the size of a billiards table, but still a pool!

  School soon started again, and I had the stress of Miss Hamlin and the third grade gnawing at me. “Make friends,” Mom said, which sounded to me like she wanted me to find someone else to hang out with. I really didn’t see the need if I had Mom all to myself again. But that wasn’t going so well either.

  Mom had gone to the parent/teacher conference, and Miss Hamlin must have filled her in on what a dullard of a child she had. She came home furious and said I was grounded for life. She thumbtacked a calendar on the front of my new bedroom door and crossed out every day forward, saying that’s how long I’d be in my room. I didn’t even bother to count the days. I just closed my bedroom door, letting the calendar hang on the outside, visible to everyone but me.

  Every day forward I came home and went straight to my room, which wasn’t really any different than what I would do prior to being grounded.

  Attached to my bedroom, a smaller room my mom deemed my “study” became my retreat, with a yellow desk and chair and a small chalkboard bought at Sears. The muted beige and browns, and even the soft blues and grays of my furnishings were too dim for my tastes. I needed brightness. I liked flashy things. One day at the market, I begged my mom to buy a gregariously orange alpaca rug with a giant daisy centerpiece, each petal a different bright color—fuchsia, azure, purple, yolk, and emerald with a polka dot pistil. The rug covered the middle of my study’s floor.

  The week before Christmas, I came home and as usual went straight to my room. I hadn’t seen Mom or Juana when I’d come in the front door, but now, standing at the end of my bed, I could hear the TV in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. My parents’ walk-in closet joined my room to theirs. Sliding doors allowed entry from either side. I peeked through the narrow space where two doors came together. Mom and Juana sat side by side, the television’s glow on their faces as they stared aghast at the dubbed Spanish over Japanese destruction of Toyko. I had watched Godzilla so many times that I knew from the growls and screams what images were flashing on the TV screen. Often Mom and Juana watched telenovelas together, something Mom never would have done before. And now Godzilla. Until Juana, Mom never liked those sorts of movies, dubbed over with fake effects. Juana had that kind of sway over her. I didn’t understand why, just that it took away from my time with Mom. Looking back, I think my mother needed companionship. That she may have been even lonelier than I was, at least for adult friendship. She didn’t see Juana the way I did, as conniving and manipulative. Mom didn’t know I needed her as much as she needed someone.

  “Juana just knows things,” Mom had said to me once. The three of us stood on the roof, hanging clothes on the clothesline just outside the laundry room.

  “I have the eye,” Juana said.

  “You are prescient,” Mom said.

  “I know things before they happen,” Juana said.

  She made things happen.

  “Amy,” Mom said when she caught me staring between the closet doors into her bedroom.

  “I’m just listening,” I said quietly because I didn’t want Juana to hear. But Juana snickered because she liked it when I was in trouble.

  “You know you’re grounded from television,” Mom said.

  I turned and went back through my mom’s closet/dressing room, through the other set of sliding doors to my bedroom.

  Godzilla roared o
n low volume in the background while I tromped with my arms splayed overhead and my claws clenched, growling as I entered my study.

  Since there wasn’t really anything to ground me from, except hanging out with my mom, I did the same thing I’d do after school anyway.

  I played School. Mr. Pinky, a pink stuffed monkey and my favorite, although I wouldn’t let the others know because I didn’t want to have teacher’s pets, sat next to Catsby. Catsby, a flimsy black cat, couldn’t sit up, but only flounced around, his soft furry bean-bag body slumped either forward or backward, no matter how I folded or rearranged him. I decided lying back would be more comfortable and a position more open to learning, although I preferred more order in my classroom. He wouldn’t be able to see the blackboard from that angle, but no matter, he would learn what he could. Velvet, my doll with the broken hair growth contraption, bent easily into a spread-eagle sitting position. My relationship with Velvet had gone awry when my sister broke the hair growth mechanism. I had never been that interested in baby dolls anyway; I preferred Barbie—grown up and steady in what I perceived to be the adult world. WOL, named after the owl in Winnie-the-Pooh, because he was an owl, a tubby owl at that, completed that row of students. The back row consisted of a few smaller animals, my plastic Polly Doll, and metal llamas lined up, posed, and staring at me with their plastic eyes. I lined them up in rows because that’s how classrooms worked. We would have story hour later, I told them, and then we would sit in a circle.

  WOL was distracted by the sound of the whoosh crash of Godzilla’s tail wiping out a small fake village. He was sensitive to sounds and peculiarities. Sometimes he picked on Mr. Pinky about his skin/fur rash. The rash was acquired after going through the washing machine when I’d thrown up on Pinky one night. I didn’t have favorites in class, but Pinky was my overall favorite stuffed animal. I slept with him, his little monkey arms and legs wrapped around my bicep, his bulbous face tucked in, fitting perfectly snug under my chin.

  I heard the Japanese ladies scream as I told my classroom what our lesson would be. I vowed that I would be a more benevolent teacher than Miss Hamlin and that my school would be safer than Franklin Delano Roosevelt American School. My seed chart had been returned with a large C− scratched in red Magic Marker across the upper-right corner.

  The crackling of flame and panicked Japanese fleeing filtered through the double layer of closet doors. I stood up at the small blackboard hung over my desk. I would teach my stuffed animals the times tables. Times tables were what got me grounded in the first place. Miss Hamlin had told Mom at the parent/teacher conference that I knew only up to eight times. It wasn’t true. My cousin had taught me the secret to nine times when we visited last summer. He said you took one less than the number you’re times-ing, and then you add what it took to make nine. I also knew ten and eleven, which were so easy Pinky could do them. Ten you just added a zero to the multiplier, and eleven times was just the same number twice. Like 11 × 2 was 22. The multiplication got trickier at 10 × 11. And I still couldn’t get twelve times, so that was what my class sitting on my study floor would learn.

  Pinky and WOL stared at me. Catsby was still lying on his back, so I had no idea what passed through his mind of fluff. Velvet stared at the closet doors, where now a screeching roar could be heard, as Godzilla was zapped by the giant electrical tower in Tokyo. I couldn’t teach the 12 times tables because no one was paying attention to me. I feared I would never learn my times tables, that I would be in this room forever. Alone.

  Like Godzilla, I wanted to roar in agony, I wanted to growl and shriek. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I had to be good. Like Godzilla, that giant electrical tower shock buzzed through my body. Only mine said everyone has left you! Everyone is gone! No one wants you! But no one would hear me over the TV.

  I made my class recite the twelve times I wrote on the board. I tried to memorize them too as we kind of sang the list. “12 × 1 equals 12, 12 × 2 equals 24, 12 × 3 equals 36,” and I started to see a pattern. The first number was equal to the multiplier and the second was its double. Then my mind started to wander, and though I came close to figuring it out, I got to 5 × 12 = 60, and it was not so easy again.

  Godzilla had stopped. The monster was quiet now. Outside my window the screech and whoosh of the traffic on Avenida del Prado sounded like ocean waves. Mom and Juana’s voices faded off down the stairs. I decided Catsby had the right idea, so I went to my bed to lie down.

  I fiddled with the music box Suzanne had brought me from Switzerland when we were in Nigeria. I’d already broken the plunker that drummed out the notes with the teensy brass cylinder pins. I just had to touch the levers; I had to know what it felt like to make music. So now instead of soft, pianolike plinks, the box thunked out a flat “The Wanderer.” I still liked the music box because Suzanne had picked it out for me, so I listened carefully to the slow, flat notes.

  I began to think I might really be grounded for life because it didn’t seem like I would ever learn my times tables. My tears had begun to wet the bedspread around my temples, so I climbed off my bed and snatched Pinky from the classroom setup. Just once I needed to show favoritism. Supine on the bed, with him wrapped around my arm monkey-style, we stared at the ceiling until it was time for dinner.

  My stomach growled like Godzilla. Mom had said I was always hungry, and I needed to ignore it. I considered sneaking downstairs. Who would know? Juana would. She would hear me. She would tattle.

  I could smell the top of Pinky’s smooth, silky, pink-washed-to-gray fur on his round monkey head. Like cheap, starchy laundry detergent and polyester, that’s what he smelled like. Like Juana’s cotton dresses when she walked past me. I rubbed my hand over his noggin to erase the smell.

  Each day that I was grounded, I was not to leave my room until Mom came to get me for supper. But I wondered whether she might forget about me. I didn’t hear anybody at home right then. Avenida del Prado whooshed, but no voices murmured, no floors creaked, no monsters roared. I wished Godzilla was still on, so I’d know where my mom was.

  High on the wall, close to the ceiling across from my bed hung a black box the size of a transistor radio. On the face of the box clicky numbers flicked over if the doorbell button on the wall next to my bed was pushed. It connected to the bigger main black box in the kitchen. All the rooms had a clicky numbers box. Originally, the system was created so the maid of the house could be “rung for,” and she’d know which room to tend to. Mom told me I was NEVER EVER allowed to ring it.

  “We don’t want Juana to think she’s a maid.”

  “Then what is she?” I asked. I got a swat on my behind for that. I thought, Juana is a witch , but didn’t want another swat, so I didn’t say it out loud. But now as I lay on my bed with Pinky, I thought, What if I ring it so the family knows where I am? Not Juana. I couldn’t care less if she knew where I was. So it wouldn’t be for the same snobby reasons that Mom said I wasn’t allowed to ring the bell. But I didn’t have the guts. I didn’t want Mom to be mad at me.

  I heard my father come home first. Then other voices traveled up from downstairs. Suzanne and Marty had come home excited from wherever they went for the day. They were home from boarding school. Juana must have gone out or back up to the roof to her chambers. From the sound of the voices I could tell my family was all in the den at the bottom of the stairs. The bamboo bar my dad bought in Nigeria had been set up in that front room, the bamboo half-circle with red upholstered stools. He’d be mixing drinks. Suzanne and Marty were drinking with Mom and Dad. My brother and sister were grown-ups now. They were all having fun.

  I decided to open my door a crack and call out. Just a reminder.

  I left Pinky on the bed. When I opened the door, voices and laughter became louder and clearer. My father and Marty recounted their day, and their stories were always ribcage-smarting funny. I heard Marty’s laugh—a big guffaw. My dad had told a joke with a straight face. I couldn’t see it, but I knew in my mind’s eye. “No, no, wa
it,” Marty said, as he did when he had something to say that was even funnier.

  “Mom?” I called out. Quiet, too quiet at first. Then again louder. “Mommmmy?” I waited. They kept talking and laughing. Maybe they were too far away to hear me from my bedroom upstairs across the vestibule. Now I could hear Marty tell another story. He’d gone to the market. He said something about live chickens.

  “Mom!” I called louder. “Mom!” My family talked all at the same time. Then Marty stopped midsentence. “Wait,” he said. “Shh.” I heard a soft mumble of Mom’s, probably telling him I was grounded. A pang of shame from her to me. “Oh, oh,” Marty said as he was taking it in. Then Suzanne’s smart voice. She was always serious. They were talking about me. Discussing the situation.

  “Mom!” I yelled quick, so they wouldn’t forget I was waiting.

  Marty didn’t wait, he yelled out up the stairs, “Amy, come join us. Amy, what are you doing up there?” Like he didn’t know, like he thought I was innocent.

  Mom said something else I could barely hear from my doorway where I still stood. Where I strained my ears to catch everything each person said. Then I heard Marty’s deep voice: “Oh let her, it’ll be okay.”

  I escaped. I ran out before someone said I couldn’t. I left behind my room, my toppled classroom, my crumpled bed. At the top of the stairs I paused. I waited to hear if they were still talking about me, but my dad had started telling another anecdote, and Suzanne was arguing. But Marty was at the bottom of the stairs looking up. He called to me, “Amy!” He smiled. I smiled back at the broken front tooth. “What are you doing up there when we’re all down here?” he said.

  “I was grounded,” I said.

  “Grounded? What for?”

  “I don’t know my twelve times.”

  “Aww, nobody does. Get on down here.”