Tzvi laughed. “Why do I get the feeling that that’s all life is for you now: the moments between hookups.” He noticed the ghost look their way, eavesdropping.
“I want to argue with that, because it makes me sound gross.” Gabriel fiddled with the cigarette tucked over his ear. “But, at least for the duration of this trip, it’s kind of true.”
They looked on at the party for a while, feeling the thumping beats deep in their chests. “So what’ve the last few weeks been like for you? Any girls?”
“To tell you the truth, I haven’t really been seeking it out all that much,” Tzvi said. He stole another glance at the ghost, not wanting to give himself away but curious to see if he had picked up on the fact that he could be seen.
The ghost was chewing on his thumb, a far-off look in his eyes.
“What have you been seeking out, then?” Gabriel asked.
Tzvi paused for effect, then smirked. “Human connection.”
A wave crashed behind them, coming up above their knees, splashing at the bottom of Tzvi’s shirt. Gabriel rolled his eyes, then tucked his cigarette back over his ear and nudged Tzvi toward the party. Behind them, the ghost still chewed on his thumb.
“What are you looking at?” Gabriel asked.
“Just a ghost.”
They disappeared into the folds of the party for the rest of their time in Ibiza, and Tzvi allowed himself to forget about ghosts for this last shared portion of his trip. Gabriel and Roni were returning to Israel, Ariela and Daniela off to Australia, Eitan getting a coat and sticking to Europe. Tzvi wanted to be present for his friends, and for the first time since he had discovered how he was different from others, Tzvi was truly able to put ghosts out of his mind. He drank like the rest of them, chased sex like the rest of them, lost himself in beats and sand and all the sensations his body could feel.
Three days later Tzvi was in Cambodia, at a bar called the Angkor What?
It was loud and brash and a gross exploitation of the place that surrounded it, but there Tzvi met Elena. Their meaningless midnight kissing turned into the most fun of Tzvi’s trip, hushed laughter in the balcony of Elena’s home, fingers interlocked. When the tuk-tuk driver she and her friends had arranged to take them to the ruins at sunrise arrived, Tzvi squeezed himself in, already changing the plans in his mind so he could follow her as long as she would let him.
In Koh Rong they dipped their toes into the Gulf of Thailand, the Milky Way overhead. They had nervous, fumbling sex on the beach, and even Elena would have laughed at the cheesy thought he had that holding her after was his favorite part. Their sex got better; their travels extended longer than either of them could have expected. He got to know her habits on planes, how she always waited to be the very last one to board, the little crinkle in her forehead that would form when she slept, her neck drooping an inch at a time until it finally plopped onto his shoulder. He’d watch her take notes about her travels so she could remember the details, and he’d feel a swell of love that he’d be too afraid to give a name to, except for when he spoke to his ghosts.
Some didn’t want to hear about it; some wanted every single detail. He came to yearn for that combination—rare, he now understood—of a ghost that he could communicate with, one that would be just as happy to bear Tzvi’s secrets as they were to unload their own. He took long walks wherever he and Elena went, wanting to give her time to breathe away from him, but also now finding comfort in this gift he had. In Tokyo, word somehow got out among the ghosts, and glowing crowds followed him around, waiting for him to sit and talk with them awhile. In Taipei, one woman talked to him every day at six a.m. about her favorite foods and nothing else.
There were times when Tzvi felt that same urge to confess. Late at night, nestled into the same narrow hostel bed, whispering things to each other. At coffee shops and restaurants and bars and, once, on a boat cruise around Ha Long Bay, he’d wanted to share himself fully with Elena. It had been colder than either of them had expected, but they’d stubbornly stayed out on the deck, huddled close against the wind’s bite. Elena was tucked into the crook of his arm, her hair whipping the side of his face, her warmth seeping into him. “I like this,” she said. “I like you.” And he pulled her close and felt the truth come again. But in the end, he didn’t fully understand why, he swallowed down the confession and kissed the spot below her ear instead.
Perhaps, he thought, it was a gift to be shared only with the dead.
Finally, a year had passed. Tzvi booked a ticket back to Mexico City while Elena’s feet were in his lap. “Of course I’ll come visit,” she said, though neither one really believed that what they had could extend beyond the confines of their travels. “We’ll figure it out, you’ll see. Give it a year, we’ll be living together.” They spent their last few days together wrapped up in each other, alternating sex and laughter and deep bouts of sadness that they didn’t believe they would recover from. They couldn’t stand not to touch, and then their touching became too much to bear.
Before boarding the train that would take him to the airport in Hong Kong, Tzvi kissed Elena on the forehead, brushed her tears away, whispered a few sweet nothings about how the things that lived in this world never really went away. Then he told her he loved her and returned to his life in Mexico City, where his regular ghosts were waiting eagerly to see him again, and he was happy to return to them.
TWELVE FRAMES
BY NOVA REN SUMA
It’s Saturday morning, and I’ve successfully made myself into something to stare at. We’re headed to the flea market, and the car ride is magnificent at first. It’s everything I wanted and then some.
For anyone who happens to catch sight of our pollen-dotted and dented Toyota with the out-of-state plates and me in all my glory in the passenger seat, I’m the thing to be noticing. I inspire a raised eyebrow. A double take. My eye makeup looks like it took a hundred years, because it almost did—first time drawing wings with the liquid pen. Cars in the slow lane go crawling at the sight of me or else they speed up as if I’m a hallucinogenic fright. The Did I just see what I thought I saw? expressions mixed with a, I suspect, Is she seriously wearing that enormous hat? get me floating, and I stay that way for a solid ten minutes, which is how long it takes my mother to drive us from our new house to the road leading to the weekly flea market I saw advertised online. I adjust the black veil of the hat, parting it a couple of inches and giving myself a window to the window, my black lipstick in the mirror still intact and licorice-slick.
Then something shifts.
“What a freak,” I hear from the next car. I can see out, and there’s a finger pointing.
I sink low in my seat and let the wide brim of the hat create shade.
We’re at a red light, and in the car beside us are some kids about my age, maybe ones I’ll meet on my first day of the tenth grade at my new school. That’s three days away.
Through a peephole in my veil, I can see they’re adorned in such drab, sad colors. Off-white. Barely blue. Beige.
One of them laughs, and then they all follow, like their strings have been pulled. I cover the peephole with my hand (really, it’s the spot where the fabric ripped, but I was trying to make it seem intentional, like a periscope, or a camera lens).
That’s when it all comes into focus. I’ve never dressed like this outside my bedroom (door sealed, knob lock secured, blinds squeezed fully shut). Safe inside my dim room in our new house, I didn’t consider how funny I’d feel in direct sunlight. Or people looking, people being able to see. Or my physical comfort or, worse, my mother’s I told you so. All that’s hitting me, way too late, in the car, with an intense shot of sun straight to the face.
Green light, and the car filled with my future classmates speeds off. I try to strike their sounds and colors from my memory. Here I am in a moving vehicle, trying not to crush my spectacular skirt, which is deliciously bl
ack and encased in spiraling layers of tulle, the edges nice and crinkly. I made it, dyed it in the washer, and safety-pinned it together. I’m not sure I know how to sit in it yet. Or, I’ll admit, how to detach it from my body when it’s time to get it off.
My mother’s driving, politely edging the skirt’s netting over to my side of the car. She’s noticed the dark cocoon I’ve made for myself, and the finger-pointing. She’s an observant woman, not to mention a willing chauffeur.
“Second thoughts, Simone?” she says. “I’m not bringing you all the way back so you can change, FYI.”
I had ten solid minutes of feeling good about being different. Feeling perfectly content and at peace and mostly all right in my own skin, knowing my inside self was expressed in such exquisite detail on the outside, for the first time ever beyond the confines of the house. Ten lone (perfect, precious, gorgeous) minutes.
But it’s not over yet.
My mother makes a hard turn and stops the car. The flea market, there in the distance across the gravel lot, is a couple of tents flapping in the wind and a line of rickety tables. Maybe half a dozen people are milling around. It was so much bigger in my imagination.
My mother turns to me, only halfway. I swear she’s shielding her eyes as if my jewelry spikes could scratch her corneas.
“You’re the one who refused to bring a change of clothes,” she points out.
“I’m not even hot or anything,” I say as I peel the bare patches of my thighs off the seat. The complex knots in my knee socks keep rolling down, so I have to curl them back up. So much black lace will trap the heat, and if the veil attached to the hat is down over my face, the hat will create a vaporous compartment, like a steam room. I’d planned the outfit from the safety of an air-conditioned studio (my bedroom) without regard for seasonal weather patterns like sticky, slimy summer heat. What was I even thinking?
I tell myself to suck it up. There’s a reason I’m headed to the flea market. A purpose.
I lift the contraption I’ve come to sell onto my lap, and the weight of it makes me sit there longer, keeping me in place. That’s the only reason I don’t get out of the car. It’s not the anxious burnt-rubber taste in my mouth, not the way the collar of my dress smolders in a ring of fire around my neck.
“I can really keep the money?” I keep checking to be sure. “If I sell Pop Pop’s camera? You mean it?”
She nods. “It’s depressing to even have it around. He was such an unhappy man. I told you: do what you want with it.”
She knows what I want to do with her grandfather’s camera: sell it so I can buy more clothes. I never knew the man. My new look can’t be fully expressed by what I scrounged from the attic when we were packing up the old house. I can’t conjure a closet full of clothes with safety pins and old tablecloths. My wardrobe needs expanding. Enhancing. Experimenting—if only I could leave the car.
“You’ll make friends,” my mother says, completely unbidden. “It’ll be easier this time. Just don’t wear that costume to school on Tuesday, and you’ll be fine.”
“It’s not a costume,” I snap. The contraption in my lap feels like a rock, but maybe something about that steadies me, as if my great-grandfather, a man who understood discomfort and that itchy, squirmy feeling of never fitting in, is right near the car, listening.
“I know, I know,” she says, though that’s the third time she’s used the C-word this morning.
“It’s who I am,” I say weakly, fiddling with the fingerless lace gloves that probably were a part of some 1980s Madonna costume and not meant for actual daily wear out in the world.
“Moving to a new place is the perfect time to reinvent yourself,” my mother says. “But you know, my pop pop reinvented himself when he changed his name, our name—”
“I know,” I say, cutting her off.
“And none of it made him happier,” she says.
“You told me all that already.”
“Maybe you’ll be happier here, even if you dress like you did back home. You don’t have to try so hard, Simone.”
“Stop talking,” I say. Then, because she’s a human being with feelings, and is also my ride home, I add, “Please?”
My mother thinks she’s got me nailed down, but it has nothing to do with the way things were back home. Not entirely.
I used to carry around this fantasy, this cold, hard ball of wax in my chest. I used to not want people looking at me. I didn’t want people talking about me or to me. I didn’t want to be different. I wanted to be the same.
But I never was, really, was I?
I could be sitting in a chair, say in the food court at the mall where I worked my job at the juice bar, and a whole table of girls from school could sit with me, unaware or uncaring that one chair was already taken. Sometimes, when this happened in actual life, I waited to see if someone from the group would speak to me, to ask for a napkin or suggest I move to another table. When no one did, when they ignored me completely, it was the strangest thing. I tried so hard to fit in with them that I blended in to the wall.
I make myself busy so I don’t think about how things were where we used to live. My great-grandfather’s camera is ancient and weighs as much as a small child. It says Rolleiflex on the front and has two closed bug eyes, one on top of the other, a few random knobs, and a winding crank on the side. If you pop off the lens caps and peer into the hood on the top, you see a blurry square, like a windshield dirtied up with smashed gnats. That’s what I see now when I look through—yet somehow it’s even better than the hole in my veil. The photographs would come out square. The crystal-clear photos my phone takes would probably make these look like Civil War–era daguerreotypes.
The camera was left to my mother when her grandfather died, along with a lamp. He’d been a photographer, though not near the level he’d dreamed of reaching, and at some point he gave up the dream; he simply stopped. The camera was cursed with disappointment, my mother told me; when her grandfather retired, it sat on the shelf near his recliner, where he spent the last long decade of his life lording over the remotes and watching Turner Classics on TV. It watched him live out his last years. Then it went to our house, to watch his granddaughter, my mother. The lamp tipped over on the tile and shattered, but the camera stuck around, gathering dust. Now I have it in my lap, and I have the distinct feeling it’s watching me.
When I try to wind the crank on the side—it’s stuck, I’ve tried turning it every which way—I guess I’m thinking of this man I never met and never will, of how what one person does generations ago can ripple forward and catch the rest of us in its current. Something like that. In reality, he probably never even imagined me.
We have my great-grandfather’s name. We’ve all got it, tacked on to our own names like it’s a real last name from a real family. But in fact, our family name used to be Cohen. It was the name we had a century and an ocean ago, the name we carried with us on the boat to Ellis Island and spoke at the gate and settled with and had etched in our family books, before it was dropped, discarded, crossed out, written over. He chose to change it after the war. He wanted to be a photographer, in Hollywood. He wanted to assimilate, to blend in. He stopped paying his dues at the temple, and he went to the city clerk’s office and reimagined himself as someone who didn’t sound so Jewish. When he married, he gave his wife the last name Jonathan and his children the last name Jonathan, and my mother had it (lost it when she married, gained it back when she divorced), and now here I am, carrying the name like some kind of New World invention. Did he imagine that?
The man who used this camera wanted to hide. But I’m done hiding.
“Simone, are you getting out of the car or what?”
My mother doesn’t wait for me to fully embrace my intention, which I am about to do and am in the process of making happen. She reaches over my body and shoves open the passenger-side door.
>
“You did this to yourself,” she says. “Own it.”
I step out of the car and stare out at the flea market. No resident of this town has ever laid eyes on me before this morning in traffic, since I slept straight through the arrival of the moving truck, then entered our new home flanked by cardboard boxes under cover of night. I spent the first series of days getting the lay of the land (aka the interior of our house—room lights, hallways, door creaks, window drafts). I ventured into the backyard, once. But now I’ve emerged. Even if my legs are a bit shaky.
“I’ll pick you up in an hour,” my mother says.
“Wait,” I say, leaning back in. (Note: I have left the car, but I have not yet let go of the door, which is still open.) “Aren’t you coming with me?”
She looks me up and down, makes some excuse about errands at the hardware store and the market, even though we’re stocked up on almond milk and own three hammers, and then drives off with tires churning up gravel dust. My own mother is embarrassed to be seen with me. She peeled off so fast, she almost knocked me over.
With that, I gather myself together. I pull up my knee socks, arrange my veil, adjust my skirt, hitch up the camera on its worn leather strap, and imagine heading for the flea market as my newly minted, reinvented self.
* * *
***
I don’t make it all the way. Not at first. Venturing out as a whole new person isn’t so easy when you’ve got platform shoes on.
Before I reach the flea market (all I see are old antiques splayed out on tablecloths and a few people milling about—so ordinary), my new self has an uncomfortable itch she’s got to take care of. She needs some privacy to do it. I’m behind a tree, safely shielded by the leaf covering, scratching at the folds of my skirt, when I catch sight of the table I want and home in on my destination. I lift the veil and steady the camera to scope it out. A tall black hood on the top of the camera’s box offers a single eyehole out into the distance. I feel protected, looking through it, at ease in a way I haven’t maybe ever felt. It’s almost as if I’m supposed to take a photograph with it, as Pop Pop once did. My finger is on the shutter button. Right there. Where his was.
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