When We Were Ghouls

by Amy E. Wallen

  I picked up my new guitar and headed to bed. As I passed through the warm kitchen, Dad headed back past the glaring prince’s skull to put away his tools.

  Juana stepped out in front of me. We were alone. I clutched my guitar to my chest.

  “I was listening to you at dinner,” she said, stepping closer, then looking toward the pantry. I knew she’d been hovering behind the kitchen door.

  “Your mama is going to get me to the nine states.” She pulled the plywood guitar away from my chest.

  “No, she isn’t,” I said. I yanked on my instrument, the fishing line taut with two hands pressing. I worried the glue wasn’t dry enough, that she’d ruin my guitar.

  “She said she will do it herself.” Juana had the blackest eyes I had ever seen, before or since. Her whites were dirty yellow as though the black was dried blood seeping into the rest of her eyeball.

  “I don’t have anything to do with that,” I said. “Daddy said you can’t go.”

  “You need to help me.” She gripped the guitar harder. I used the kitchen counter to give myself some heft. “I know magic,” she said, “I know black magic. Do you know of this?”

  I stopped tugging. She dropped her end of the guitar.

  “I am witch,” she said, and I held the plywood against my chest again, fret side toward me, trying to protect the strings. She leaned closer. “I will be watching you,” she whispered. Then she smiled. If I’d seen fangs at that moment, I would not have been the least bit surprised. It was not the first time she had told me she was a witch.

  That night I fought sleep. I lay awake staring at the ceiling, my stuffed monkey, Pinky, wrapped around my arm, staring at me. Both of us were afraid to close our eyes. Eventually exhaustion took over, and I fell asleep. I slept so hard that nothing could have woken me up. I dreamed I had to pee. That I couldn’t find a place to go. I wandered about a dark forest. Fallen logs blocked my path. I finally crouched behind a big log, pulled down my panties and let go. Something warm woke me up, and I realized I was peeing in the bed.

  I cleaned myself up and went downstairs for breakfast. While we ate our papaya and eggs, Juana made the beds. I thought maybe she just wouldn’t notice, that she’d yank the sheets off the bed, wad them up and stick them in the washer, and no one would be the wiser. Instead, as Mom and Dad and I sat on the patio by the pool eating breakfast, I heard her call, “¡Señora!” Juana was hanging over the railing of the upstairs landing when we ran inside to see what was wrong. “Amy wet bed!” She held up the wet sheets as proof.

  “Amy!” Mom turned to me, disappointed. Everyone had a talent, Mom always told me, and I now realized I had a talent for disappointing her.

  “Go help her clean up the mess,” Mom said.

  Upstairs, Juana held up the sheet. “Ruint,” she said.

  “Why did you have to tell her?” I asked.

  “You must grow up,” Juana said, her rose-colored dress swishing around her knees. “You are not good daughter.”

  She would be a better daughter, I knew she wanted to say. And so far, she was winning.

  She eyed the muted red-and-green guitar on the dresser. “You go to school now?” she asked, but I didn’t answer. I slipped the guitar into my book bag and out of her sight. “I will be watching you even there,” she said.

  I got to the bus stop much earlier than usual and watched over my shoulder for any signs of Juana.

  When I got to school, I could tell my guitar surprised Miss Hamlin. That made me puff up even prouder. My instrument was clearly the best in the class, among the drums made from baskets covered in paper sacking, Tupperware filled with dried beans as maracas, and castanets made from walnut shells. When our band went out onto the playground to begin rehearsals, Miss Hamlin let me sit cross-legged up front, my instrument in my lap, like the steel guitar players I’d seen at my grandma’s Wheel Inn Café in Texas.

  Since our homemade instruments didn’t have particular notes to play, we worked on a rhythm. We had learned “Streets of Laredo” in music class, so we tapped out the rhythm and did our best to replicate it. The day was sunny, and for the first time I felt warm in the spot under the flowering pink pepper tree. But I should have known better than to trust that feeling.

  On the last day of the semester, an assembly was held in the gymnasium. As the crowd of kids made their ways to the row upon row of yellow school buses parked at the curb in front of the school entrance, I wove in and out of the sea of gray-clad students, wending my way back to my classroom to collect my guitar. The halls were quiet since the gymnasium was across the campus. I didn’t have to worry about missing my bus, because my mom and Mrs. Riley were giving me a ride home when they finished cleaning up the PTA mothers’ sloppy joes final day celebration.

  When I got to my classroom, the lights were dim, but Miss Hamlin sat at her desk. She glanced up as I approached the three steps down into our classroom. She never had a smile for me, and today was no different.

  “You need something?” she asked, never ceasing to intimidate me.

  “I just came to pick up my guitar.” A simple task, the instruments had been kept in the basket under the craft table. When I noticed the basket was empty, I turned around. “It’s not here.” I expected to see it sitting on her desk or maybe on the windowsill along the hallway windows where we had set the white mice or the seedlings we grew in paper cups.

  “I threw it away,” she said. “You were supposed to take it with you yesterday.”

  “You threw it away?” I looked at her face, at her blond hair like a movie star’s. No matter how much I wanted her to like me, it would not ever be. My chest tightened. She glared at me with the same disgust she’d had on my first day of school. I thought I might cry.

  “Did you want it?” she asked.

  Want it? Of course I wanted my guitar. Had she forgotten? “It was the best instrument in the band,” I reminded her.

  She cocked her head. “The best? Is that how you think of yourself?” She was right, why would I want the guitar? It surely wasn’t as cool as I thought it was. How silly of me to figure I could have created something worthwhile.

  “No,” I said, trying one last time to please her, to show her I could be good. I slumped out of the room, down the hall, and then downstairs, careful to walk on the edge near the wall in case there was an earthquake. The previous weekend I had gone to see the movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and I’d heard about the movie theatre stampedes. How an earthquake could strike at any moment in Peru, and the floor would open up, how everyone would push and shove and charge out the doors. A particular story told of a staircase that cracked open to reveal the core of the earth. Two kids fell in. When the crack closed back up the kids were gone forever. No one could retrieve them.

  Miss Hamlin had made it clear I wasn’t center of the universe, and I certainly didn’t want to fall to the center of the earth. While I was certain no one would notice if I disappeared, I walked on the extreme sides of the staircase. I worried the shaking could still toss me into the chasm, so I held tight to the banister, convinced I would end up in the fiery core.

  Once I made it safely down, I ran out the door. Across the campus at the gymnasium doors, I tumbled into my mother.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. I’d tried to stifle my tears, but this time they turned into a gusher.

  “She threw my guitar away,” I said, and flung myself against her again. She rubbed my back with her free hand. In the other, I could smell she carried a bucket of leftover sloppy joe sauce.

  “You can make another guitar,” she said.

  “Not the same,” I said. The guitar had eight slipknots that weren’t just any ole entanglement.

  Mrs. Riley came out of the doors then too. I was embarrassed to cry in front of her, so I tried to snuff my snot back inside my nose.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, Miss Hamlin threw away Amy’s instrument. The one she and Jaime made.”

 
“That’s mean,” Mrs. Riley said. “Let’s go talk to her.”

  I liked this. I liked that I had backup, that we were going to find Miss Hamlin and give her some of her own back.

  When we got to the classroom, the lights were out and the room dark. The only light came from the windows where we had kept the white mice that had given birth to squirming, pink babies with no eyes.

  When we got home, I stood in the kitchen emptying my book bag of my weeks’ of stale lunch trash.

  Juana stepped out of the cold kitchen, her borax smell warning me she was nearby. “You finish school?”

  “For now,” I said, not looking at her. The skull was behind her, keeping its eyes fixed. “Just half-days for parent/teacher conference the rest of the week.”

  She riffled through the empty sandwich wrappers and school announcements on the counter. “You not bring guitar home?” She held up a plastic bag smeared with peanut butter.

  “No—” I started to explain it to her, to tell her the awful story of Miss Hamlin. But when I looked up she was staring at me with her black eyes, her grin saying she already knew. How could she? But I knew.

  Black magic.

  I am emailing with my mother about a memory of Peru, Granja Azul, a restaurant with a play area for kids we used to frequent. Juana used to take you on the ponies, she writes. Juana told me I was too fat to ride the ponies, I tell her. I’m sorry if she was mean to you, Mom writes, I wasn’t aware. I explain that I believe none of us was aware of so many things in those days. I always include myself as though I was in collusion with the adults. As though. I describe the messed up deceit and mistreatment that Juana delivered. She told me she was a witch, I write back to my mom. Yes, she used to say she was a witch, Mom writes. But I thought she was joking. That teacher you had, she was a witch, or that thing that rhymes with witch.

  Phantom Limb

  One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do . . .

  —Harry Nilsson, songwriter

  “Make friends,” my mother kept nudging me. How to go about this when I had become a recluse, a solitary introvert, was beyond me. But I got desperate, and desperation will make a person, especially a chubby nine-year-old, do completely irrational and dangerous things like try to make conversation.

  My fourth grade teacher, Mr. Wilson, was a fresh start.

  At FDR we ate lunch outside on picnic tables, similar to the lunch hut in Lagos, only here there was no hut, and the sun didn’t come out from behind the clouds. And no janitor and cook chased each other with knives. In other words, uninteresting.

  I sat alone, as usual, waiting for lunch hour to be over so I could go back to desks that all faced forward and not have to make eye contact with anyone. I’d wandered off inside my head, making up scenarios much more interesting and certainly humorous than the current one in which I picked at my lunch sack’s brown paper wrapping. The backdrop of sound was the girls’ voices at the table next to mine.

  Before I could think about which way to run, a group of girls dressed in their Bluebird uniforms sat down at my picnic table. The pocked concrete bench pinched the backs of my knees. The girls ignored me as they opened their lunches. I’d never heard of Bluebirds, but the bright cerulean skirts caught my attention. The only time you could get away with not wearing your gray school uniform was when you had Girl Scouts or some other club requiring a uniform.

  “What’s Bluebirds?” I asked. They seemed friendly enough.

  The group of girls looked at one another, giggled, and one finally said, “Like Girl Scouts only better.”

  “We’re like Brownies,” another girl answered. “We’ll be Camp Fire Girls in two years.”

  I’d been a Brownie in Nigeria for about twenty minutes. I made a potholder with the word “Mom” embroidered at a diagonal across the square of quilted fabric, which Philip used and eventually singed, leaving crackly, black edges. Our Brownie troop made beads from some sort of plaster concoction. While the other girls all ended up with strands of colorful plaster gems around their necks, I never got the chemistry down right, and mine crumbled into powder when I tried to paint them. I asked my mother if I had to keep going. She had gone to so much trouble to get that size 7 brown uniform from another American family, but she figured that if I really hated it that much I didn’t have to go. That would be the beginning of my inability to participate in anything that involved groups.

  I scooted over to the very edge of the bench to allow another Bluebird in. Shelly, the meanest girl in my class and the palest girl I had ever met, said, “Do you want to be a Bluebird?”

  “Sure,” I said, not believing that I might become part of this popular clique, even though I didn’t know what popular clique meant yet, and never really would. I tingled thinking maybe, just maybe—

  “Well, you can’t,” Shelly said, “because only pretty girls can be Bluebirds, and you’re a gordita.” They all howled in laughter. In truth, I probably didn’t give a damn about those lousy Bluebirds, but when she called me gordita to my face the hurt was both physical—a tug at my binding waistband—and in my heart, because for one tiny moment I thought I’d made a friend.

  Silly, silly fool.

  I knew Shelly was mean, but I carried with me always an inordinate amount of trust. Her reputation inspired both popularity and fear among the other girls in my class. Then one day, all that changed. For reasons unbeknownst to me, she’d been ostracized from the regular kids. I surmised they’d grown tired of her cutting ways, but all I really knew was she started making gestures at being my friend.

  “Wanna play jacks?” she asked when no one else would play with her. She sat next to me at the lunch table when no one else did. “They’re stupid,” she said when the other girls looked in our direction and laughed. Maybe she figured I was better than no friend.

  When she invited me over to spend the night, I so badly wanted her to like me, anyone to like me, that I said yes, even though I was afraid to spend the night someplace that wasn’t my own home and was also afraid of her. I’ll be friends with anyone—a good and bad trait.

  My mom dropped me off at Shelly’s house in our pretty new tangerine-colored Toyota Corona. Shelly lived in Miraflores in a one-story with two front windows, curtains drawn. I stood on the curb with the same overnight bag that had carried Barbie around the globe. Something didn’t feel right to me. The house’s exterior was a dull gray like the Lima sky. From the street it looked quiet, as though no one was home.

  My mom leaned over to the passenger side window and said, “What are you waiting for? Go on.” As I walked up to the front door, she drove off—that orange car the last spot of color in my vision. I wondered what I would do if no one was home. That would be the kind of trick that Shelly would pull—invite me over and then not be there to answer the door. My mom, as far as I knew, didn’t know Shelly’s parents. I heard the putter of our Toyota in the distance, and I wanted to run after it and wave my mom back. I hated the idea of spending the night away from her but was torn. “Make friends,” Mom was always saying, but I sensed I didn’t know how.

  When the door opened, Shelly grabbed my hand and pulled me inside quickly. “Shhh,” she said. I hadn’t even uttered a word yet. The interior was dark with the curtains closed, but I could see an outline of a couch on one side of the room and a wingback chair on the other. A beam of dim light came from what I gathered from the linoleum to be a kitchen. “Wanna come see my baby sisters?” she asked. I didn’t really have much choice as she dragged me by the arm. My other arm still hugged my overnight bag.

  We stopped in the dark hallway before her baby sisters’ closed bedroom door. “Shhh,” she said again. “They are sleeping. We have to be quiet.”

  I nodded, afraid to make a sound.

  “Don’t wake them,” she said, blond eyebrows curved in. She sounded as though she were imitating her parents. Opening the door, she leaned in closer to me. Her bologna breath warm on my face, she said, “They are Siamese.”

  My Aunt Gen
e in Houston had a Siamese cat. And my mom and I had watched The King and I, the movie with Yul Brenner and Deborah Kerr. That’s all I knew of Siamese. I must have shrugged, because Shelly sighed like I was ignorant.

  “They’re stuck together. See.” Then she yanked me inside the nursery. A tiny line of light peeked out from around the shades above the baby girls’ crib. The hall’s dim light cast a small amount of yellow light so I could see two babies lying like a tent, not on their backs and not on their sides, but with rear ends caressing and supporting one another.

  Shelly still held my hand and pulled me closer. I feared we’d wake them. Although I couldn’t see where they were attached, Shelly explained that “Siamese” meant conjoined. I noticed how dark brown they were, unlike Shelly who was so blond and fair. They didn’t look like they were part of her missionary family.

  Shelly watched me watching the babies. I’d never been around babies much, and whenever I was I had no concept of what you were supposed to do.

  “What do you think?” she said, and I detected she really wanted to know but was a little afraid to ask.

  “I think it’d be cool to be Siamese,” I said.

  “Come on, let’s go play,” she said and wrenched my arm in the other direction, dragging me and my overnight bag out of the room. “We’re friends now,” she announced, as though I had passed the test.

  Had she had other friends over and not had as good a reaction to her sisters? My curiosity and lack of affect seemed to please her, but only to an extent. Maybe I didn’t make fun of her, but pulling me out of the room, it was clear she didn’t want me to give her twin sisters too much attention either.

  “The doctors say they will separate them, then they will be normal,” she told me in the kitchen while her maid set out empanadas on paper napkins for us. “They’re just attached at the butt, so it’s easy to saw them apart.” One would get one kidney, and one would get the other two.

  I didn’t want the doctor to separate them. Something inside me longed for them to stay together. I wanted to know what would happen instead if they grew up attached and had to get around as one. I wondered what it would be like to have someone who was always there. To never be alone. To have another me. I pictured the two of them making decisions on which direction to walk, and how did they sit in a chair? And I wondered about eating and who sat facing the table while the other one had to look at the person sitting next to them? Could they take turns? Or could they even sit? How did it all work and how did they work together? Was it hard being a Siamese twin? I wondered what was it like having someone you had to always consider who considered you at the same time. Was it more of a bother, would we always be craving to be alone? I wanted to be a Siamese twin! I wanted never to be alone.