She Is Haunted

by Paige Clark

  I know lots of things now that I’m dead. Peter from Apartment Two has a spastic bladder. My former boss Morgan keeps her toenails in a gold jewellery box. My brother and his wife are trying for a baby. I always excuse myself before things get too heated.

  I don’t know much about my mother yet. I am waiting for grief to catch her, but she mostly seems ashamed—of her body, of what it made.

  Neil reassures me this is normal.

  ‘Denial,’ he says. ‘You’ll see a lot of it now that you’re dead.’ I trust Neil because he’s been dead since 2012 and because he’s been to the moon.

  ‘It’s nothing like a brie or a Jarlsberg,’ he says, ‘more of a Grana Padano.’

  ‘I’m lactose intolerant,’ I say.

  I attend my funeral. My brother gives the eulogy.

  ‘To die of cancer,’ he says, ‘is to die a natural death. It is, in itself, an essential part of being human.’ But his hands are shaky. He’s stopped smoking.

  At the funeral, I get a taste for knowing and for seeing. I get a taste for being dead. Mobility is another perk.

  The next day I visit my mother and find her online, taking a quiz to see how long she has left. Her RealAge™ is forty-eight, the same as the test inventor, Dr Oz himself. She grieves the only way she knows how—with extreme self-pity.

  I haunt not so she can see me, but so I can see her.

  My mother was born in Corcoran, California, in 1950. She was named Rebecca after the Alfred Hitchcock film. Her sister was named after Shirley Temple. Corcoran, according to the welcome sign, is the farming capital of California. But the only economy this town really knows is a maximum-security prison. Half of the population is incarcerated. Charles Manson was kept here. When Phil Spector was moved to the prison, Manson sent him a note asking him to join him in his cell for a duet. But in Corcoran, Spector developed polyps in his throat and lost his ability to speak?

  My mother was from the town’s Chinese family. Her parents were butchers who owned the Superway Supermarket—they were rich. They kept their money in the house, hidden in the bottom of closets and fortune-cookie tins. Every Thursday, a man in a white coat delivered beef carcasses to my mother’s backyard. She told me this once when she was making dinner, her nimble hands separating bone from fat.

  Our childhood was different from hers. There were lots of other Asian kids, mostly Korean, whose houses smelt vaguely fermented. To me, their mothers—Yumi, Seo Jin, Kiru—seemed very young and very pretty with names that belonged to models and plump, pale faces. Kenny Cho called me white Chink—it made me feel exotic more than anything. He wasn’t a bully, just the second-seat violinist in the middle-school orchestra.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Neil says. ‘The moon landing didn’t happen in a day.’ I ignore him, even though he is an important astronaut and a good friend.

  I spend my days at my mother’s house and watch her undress and shower. Afterwards, she combs her long, wet, grey hair and coats her entire body in Vaseline. I inherited this body from my mother and I think it is perfect. Even though I’m dead, I long for her touch, for her healing, dewy skin. When I catch her reflection in the mirror instead of my own, I’m startled. There is a woman who finds it hard to be kind—her yellow toad face.

  But then why can’t I stop looking?

  I even listen in on her phone conversations with my brother. Once, he does not speak for fifty-seven seconds straight. I know this exactly. Ghosts have an innate sense of time. ‘Mom,’ he says, ‘I can hear you typing.’

  ‘You weren’t speaking.’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘I was grieving.’

  When you’re dead, you forget yourself. I am remembered as someone who was sick. My brother drinks green smoothies for his digestion and buys the most expensive weed, bottled and given names like Chem ’91, White Widow, Amnesia Haze. My mother surfs the internet, buying turmeric and anti-ageing serums. I had a husband too, but I can’t even recall his name.

  My mother’s life followed the San Andreas fault line. She moved from Corcoran to Thousand Oaks to Northridge before meeting my dad, a Methodist printer-ribbon salesman. They bought a house nestled in the Hollywood Hills and had two children—my brother, an inquisitive pyromaniac with a penchant for homemade fireworks, and me, a brooding, sickly thing who kept detailed logbooks of household expenses.

  My mother gave me the kind of advice Marilyn Monroe did in films.

  ‘Always date Catholic men,’ she said. ‘They’re the easiest to guilt into doing what you want.’

  Before I died, I married a Catholic. His being Catholic was only a coincidence. I’ve heard he visits my grave every day. He is steadfast in his grief, and for this reason I cannot see him yet. Sometimes, I am grateful to my mother.

  In Chinese culture, the dead wear white. Neil wears white too. It’s his uniform. I introduce him to my grandmother, my po po, and she teaches him how to make rice, washing the grains until the water runs clear.

  My mother and brother drive up the 99 to visit my aunt Shirley in Corcoran. They take the Tipton exit and drive through town, past New China restaurant, Pirate Pizza and what is left of the Superway Supermarket. It is a twenty-minute detour but you don’t have to pass the prison. I beat them there and drift through the valley, eroded by cotton and by corn.

  At Aunt Shirley’s, there is proof my mother used to be beautiful. My mother stores all of her most precious mementos at Shirley’s house, and I imagine that her trip there with my brother is a trip to catalogue the past. I envision her pulling out my fluffy cotton baby sweater with the pom-poms and parading it in front of my family as they applaud and cry, thinking, what a brilliant mother!—keeping these things all these years.

  Instead, she goes on her own to a closet and finds a newspaper clipping that is falling off its page in the photo album, the glue gone brittle. It is a cutting of the Corcoran High School Homecoming Court, ‘from L. to R.: Priscilla Clay, Sandra Sawyer (Winner) and Becky Loo’.

  My parents were married in an intimate ceremony at the Tulare County Courthouse for the reason most couples get married quickly and secretly. My grandparents gave them a generous dowry, enough to buy that house in the hills. None of their friends made the drive up the 99. Beside my mother’s parents, Aunt Shirley was the only witness.

  In a colour photo my grandfather, my gung gung, took, my mother wears red. My brother shows in the roundness of her face. She is, I think, proud of what her body can do.

  When I was young, I saved up all my birthday and Christmas money for three years and bought my mother a diamond. She wore it around her neck like a medal. Now I am a photo in the corner, hidden behind her Steinway grand piano. It is a photo of my wedding day. I am in radiant, feathery white. Father Joseph hovers above me, infused with blessing. I was very kind to her; I remember that about myself. I was capable of being very kind.

  My mother wore white to her first wedding, but not to her wedding to my father.

  Neil tells me he had the same barber for twenty-nine years until he found out the barber had been saving his hair and selling it on eBay.

  ‘Some people,’ he says, ‘will do anything.’

  Neil and I feast with Po Po and she talks about the funny things that happen when you’re dead.

  ‘The night before your wedding,’ she says, ‘I was up the whole night cooking. I forgot none of the guests would be able to eat my food.’

  Eventually, we get bored to death with each other and decide to all go and visit my family. My brother grieves around my mother the way the earth orbits the sun. My aunt Shirley fusses, swirling the rice water and making faces. She repeats the same tired Chinese saying she started repeating when I got sick.

  ‘Black hair has to send white hair,’ she says.

  Neil says we all take after my po po. We have her shape exactly. Hers is a body that carried Aunt Shirley through China while being chased by the Japanese. Hers is a body that could break down a cow carcass whole.

  My mother excuses herself and returns to her cl
oset where she rummages again. This time, she finds a different photo of herself. In it, she is a bride, as young and pretty as any of the Korean moms. A handsome white stranger hangs off her arm. He resembles the young astronaut Neil Armstrong.

  I get it suddenly. She had a whole life that I’ll never know.

  Because I have this body too. We are all babushka dolls of each other; my mother is the outside. She has the most ornate details, the brightest colours. God made her good. He painted her perfect to the last mole. I am the tiny inside, a grain of rice with a smiley face.

  Before my mother was a mother, she was an accountant at a high-rise in downtown Los Angeles. She wore tailored pantsuits with shoulder pads and painted her nails every other night, rubbing off the previous days with ethyl acetate. After we were born, she wore loose cotton clothes. She lived her life as if each day were the same day. My father was a decent salesman, but the market for printer ribbons was finite. She never forgave him for that.

  ‘Get a job,’ she said, as if he didn’t have one.

  It’s hard to get going when you’re dead.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Neil says, ‘a small step can be a giant leap.’ I keep this in mind when I get frustrated observing my family.

  My mother stays in bed with a heating pad on her back, watching the Home Shopping Network or YouTube videos in which an ageless woman demonstrates facial exercises. She sips cups of hot water with lemon. At dusk, she takes a brisk walk. Some days she calls my brother, who remains mostly silent on the phone.

  When I was young, my mother didn’t want me around much except when she was taking a nap.

  ‘Come lie down,’ she’d say, and then hold me as a child cradles a teddy. If I was lucky, The Price Is Right would be on. I’d lie as still as possible, watching the prices of laundry detergent flash across the screen, hoping this peace would last.

  Knowing her like this, I long to go home to the dead. Po Po is waiting for me there with steamed spareribs in black bean sauce and rice burnt to the bottom of the pan.

  ‘Hou mei?’ she will ask. Is it good?

  My mother was a stay-at-home mom until I left for college. She cooked three meals a day. We visited her family in Corcoran twice a year for two weeks at a time, but spent special occasions with her accountant friends at their mansions in the Hollywood Hills. When I was ten, she hurled a mug—a Christmas mug we used as an everyday one—at me for no reason. She was making dinner, mixing a packet of taco seasoning into ground beef, and threw it at me. It ricocheted off my arm and onto the tiled floor, where it shattered.

  I scrambled to put that mug back together, the porcelain sticking to my hands like sand to wet skin. My mother just kept stirring, as if she couldn’t see me at all.

  Before I died, my aunt Shirley told me that when my mother was a little girl, she accidentally walked past the prison on the way to visit her friend Priscilla’s farm. The guards threw rocks at her.

  ‘Get lost, Chink,’ they said. ‘Go home, Jap.’

  This was 1958. My mother ran and ran without stopping until she got home and fell headfirst onto the asphalt of her own driveway, her tiny moon face dotted with blood and with gravel.

  My mother told me she was popular and good at math.

  She said, ‘All the boys fantasised about me even though they weren’t supposed to.’

  See, I was naive and I still am. When I was in the hospital, bloated with morphine, I imagined being dead. I felt my heart cold, my body sunk in the ground.

  I thought I could forget it all.

  Part II. Daughter Universe

  Christians have a word for this place. The Chinese have our own version of it, but we know it’s where you end up when you’re dead but still starving. But hadn’t I, my whole life, wanted nothing? Left others wanting for nothing? Didn’t I let them scoop out my insides with a spoon?

  That is to say—I don’t belong here.

  Hell, it’s hot. They call us hungry ghosts, but the truth is we’re parched. Even without a body, I’m dry as a bone. There’s not much to look at here, but I prefer it to Earth. It’s quiet. The ghosts are preoccupied. They all have their own, well, ghosts.

  Also, I do not have to look at my children, who shamed me into this place.

  I was born in a house with no flowers. Long beans climbed a chain-link fence and kumquat trees dotted the yard. In the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, we still put our faith in farming. Corcoran was a town where everything had a purpose. I escaped as soon as I could.

  My mother worked that garden until the week she died. I gave her to the undertaker with dirt beneath her fingernails.

  See, I am the good daughter. I came home, even though I was busy at work. Even though it is a three-and-a-half-hour drive depending on the traffic. My mother was the daughter of the tallest man in her village in China, an importer/exporter who did business in Canada. Didn’t she deserve the best?

  I convinced my sister to let me buy her a canary-blue coffin and dress her in her wedding gown, teal with fine silver stitching. Every guest got a paper envelope with a five-dollar note, never mind the cost. I left plastic flowers at the cemetery. They never wilted and they never died. I am paying respect to her still, from beyond the grave! Because if I wore clothes, I wouldn’t wear red.

  My own children were born in Santa Monica, first my son and then my daughter. From the hospital, you could smell the beach. My husband and I brought them home to a house with stucco ceilings and a yard of grassy weeds. We lived in a place he called Rock’n’Roll Hills, not for the music but for the stones. It was a landscape of old teeth, jagged to the touch. This was the valley in the early nineties. Every day was earthquake weather. Every day we waited for the big shake.

  We didn’t plant anything that had deep roots, more out of fear than anything. Once, my husband planted strawberries, my daughter’s fruit of choice. He spent two weeks shovelling out the gravel bed in the backyard. As I predicted, all but one fragile plant died by early June. It never bore any fruit.

  ‘I don’t know why you ever doubt me,’ I said.

  ‘I tried,’ he said.

  Well, I tried too. But I couldn’t make anything grow. I planted birds of paradise and their sour sap made my fingers stink for weeks. Los Angeles was a mirage. The sand I thought was the end of the ocean was really the beginning of the desert.

  The weather is no different here. Plastic flowers would melt. I remember my son brought carnations to the hospital. Maybe if I had been a strict Chinese mother, he would have been a better son. My daughter wouldn’t be so ungrateful. She would wear white instead of red.

  Still, I am not one to be demanding. This is my only mistake.

  My son calls the undertaker. His voice filters down the line and rings in my ears, another perk of the afterlife.

  ‘When you hear pancreas,’ my son says on the phone, ‘and then liver, forget treatment. Splurge on the walnut coffin right then and there!’ The undertaker laughs. He makes a living out of things that aren’t funny.

  I make friends with the devil, a very hungry ghost himself. He has a voice like Elvis and reminisces about peanut-butter sandwiches. If he had a form, it would be rotund. He smells sweaty and chemical, but I am known for being understanding. It’s boiling down here. He died in 1977 and returns infrequently.

  ‘Why don’t you forget the past,’ he says. ‘Your future is burning bright.’

  ‘Don’t be cruel,’ I say.

  I’ve seen him change shape on occasion, his eyes wide and blue. I’ve seen him slink back to Memphis, as starved as the rest of us. And although he is a father, with a grown daughter of his own, he does not know what it is like to be a mother—to give your body and not just your soul.

  The Chinese call the place where I was born by the same name as the place where I live now—dei yuk, Earth prison. It stinks like pigs, apparently. You can’t be sure after living in a place too long. The smell, like anything, you accept.

  I worked the cash register in my parents’ supermarket after school
so my father could butcher the next day’s meat. We sold hot dogs and soft-serve ice cream too. When the girls from high school came in, arms entangled, I would try to hide behind the counter. They lingered, eyeing off candy bars and toiletries.

  ‘Too bad you always have to work, Becky,’ they said, spotting me.

  ‘If you don’t buy anything, leave,’ said my father. ‘Nothing for free!’

  His arms waved, glistening with blood and fat. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a sign he’d made and hung from the front of the store.

  Long Dog Are Here! With Ketchup 15 ¢

  ‘So long, Becky,’ they said. ‘So long, dog.’

  These girls were the Greek chorus of my tragedy. Every day I slaved away while they window-shopped. So I ask, where’s the good in being the good girl?

  My daughter was born with music in her head, I could tell. She had a halo of black hair and eyes like a cow, two irises with no whites. We put her wicker cot with clean cotton sheets in a room with peeling wallpaper. Of course I wanted the best for her. But there were things that needed to be fixed—the air conditioner, the front porch, the Mercedes my husband drove into the ground. Damn her if she holds the wallpaper against me.

  Because I was there. I watched as she slept and her cheeks turned the colour of a fresh peach. I said a prayer. Don’t let anything happen. Don’t let anything happen. Don’t let anything happen.

  Whoever I was talking to then, I still haven’t met.

  The devil is listening today. I fret to him about my funeral. Blue flames flash beneath him and for a second, I forget. I mistake the flames for feet—two suede shoes.

  ‘My friends,’ the devil says, ‘don’t even believe I’m dead.’

  ‘Should I return as a bird or as a cat or as a dog?’ I ask.

  If I go as a dog, my daughter will give me a pat and I’ll lick her face. I’ll taste her salty tears and know she loves me although she does not honour me.