Ghostbread

by Sonja Livingston

  Everything in their half of the house shined. The sofa was copper and gold velour, the tables were smoked glass, the air smelled of cocoa butter and marijuana. I baby-sat for Jewel’s one-year-old son and she paid me in gifts of purses, perfume, and Avon holiday edition soaps.

  Jewel’s baby was fat and bronze and had a sloppy wet smile. My baby sister was about the same age but so well-loved that by the time I got hold of her, Rachel had tired of cooing. Jewel’s baby, on the other hand, giggled and drooled, ate up the attention. And so while Rufus and Jewel went out dancing, I held on to his warm flesh while running my hands along cool glass tabletops.

  52

  My bed was in the living room. So was Steph’s. I’d spent years sleeping on floors, of course, and so didn’t know enough to care about sleeping in the living room. All I knew was that suddenly we had beds, and as Steph attempted to divide up the living room with cardboard boxes and crates carried up from the street, I became mesmerized by my sheets. I flapped a worn one with floral edging into the air over my bed and let it fall onto the mattress. Over and over. I loved the bubble of air that formed under the clean cotton. I had a crush on that bed, thinking of it when I was not near it, slipping into its protection whenever I could.

  53

  Despite her wishes to the contrary, Stephanie was pretty. Waist-length hair hung like a thundercloud around a full mouth and cola-colored eyes. She was tiny, and could have been a doll had she been so inclined, but beauty was an unimportant variable to her, a hindrance, if anything—much like being a girl in the first place. She wouldn’t allow anyone to comb her tangle of hair, and howled the time mother told her she was getting too old to go around shirtless. Her favorite outfit was a pair of pants with leopards running wild, up and down the length of each leg. And a matching safari vest. She loved the sleek and handsome James West from Wild, Wild West with his black bolo hat and quiet confidence, and talked often about how fun it would be to shimmy up gutters and jump from rooftops.

  She was a tomboy. I heard people say it, and took note of the admiration hanging in their voices. Hoping some of it might rub off, I followed her around. But it was Steph, not I, who jumped from two-story porches, did chin-ups ten at a time, fought anyone, anytime—even boys. And it was into her ear, not mine, that Terrence let his secrets fall.

  Though he was in her grade at school, Terrence was older than Steph. Eleven or twelve. Tough and quiet, his mother was a hooker whose skin shone with makeup and perspiration. Her doorways sparkled with long strands of plastic beads; red velvet pillows lined a leather sofa.

  Based on the nature of his mother’s work, Terrence was not allowed to play inside, and when he was out on his porch, he was selective of his friends. Steph was one of the few he invited to join him as he hopped fences, cut through back alleyways, and explored neighborhoods beyond our own.

  I was tight with self-pity, couldn’t stand their adventures, couldn’t stand the way Steph began to mimic Terrence, the way she’d taken to saying “finsta” for “fixing to.” Finsta this and finsta that. She and Terrence were always finsta do something.

  Though generally levelheaded, Steph thought nothing of making her hands into fists and fighting. Boys her age and older feared her. Rice lived on Grand, had squinty eyes, and called himself “the San Francisco treat.” As if his self-imposed nickname weren’t enough to mark him, he made the mistake of engaging Stephanie in combat. He’d run up, touch her, or say something whenever he passed. Rice must have been stupid, or simply desperate for attention. No matter. Steph would tackle him, pin his shoulders under her knees, and stuff his shirt with freshly mown grass.

  “Let me up, let me up,” he’d cry, his voice ragged. He would whine and beg and threaten to call the police while we all gathered round, laughing. We hated Rice. For his weakness. His lack of judgment. His mewling. He was always out of school healing from car accidents that people said his mother made him have for the insurance money.

  “Why don’t you stop your crying and go jump in front of a car,” we’d say when Steph finally released him. And he’d run home, grass falling from his sleeves, calling over his shoulder about getting the law involved.

  54

  Like flowers in the desert that somehow manage without water, religion flourished on Grand Avenue. A Bible-Baptist couple one block over provided theological instruction in their backyard. They paid in candy for those who brought other kids to them. They gave Bibles, stickers, and Tootsie Rolls to anyone able to memorize and recite the words to John 3:16:

  “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

  I went a few times, memorized and recited the passage to earn the Bible, the candy, their easy admiration. They were nice, though their good manners and concern for my eternal soul seemed out of place in the neighborhood. Still, I liked to read and eat sweets, and so attended their backyard lessons as often as I could, my fervor only dying as their candy supply dwindled.

  A Pentecostal church three houses down held services in Spanish, which didn’t stop our mother from herding us there once a week. We’d been baptized Catholic, but it didn’t matter. The church on Grand Avenue could have spoken in tongues and handled snakes and she wouldn’t have cared. She was still commuting to her job near the refuge and stopping on break to see herons. She was high and light and prone to flights of fancy, and thought the church would be a good idea.

  “It’s so pretty inside with all those windows,” she said, and added, “Maybe we’ll learn some Spanish.”

  Everyone smiled and sang, and we made friends with the Padilla family, who lived next door to the church, whose father wore starched shirts and ties, and whose mother invited us girls to learn to embroider hand towels. With two parents, a house they actually owned, and a fence that circled their front and back yards, closing off their property to the rest of the street, the Padillas were the elite of our neighborhood. Because the Padilla kids were our age and because their parents thought we were somehow different from the other grubby kids on Grand, they allowed us to unlatch the front gate and join them.

  On Sundays, after attending the church service we didn’t understand, we visited the Padillas, played kickball, and ate the greasy foods their mother served. Arroz con gandules. Bacalao. Platanos fritos. We loved playing in their deep green yard, instead of in the street, where we had to stop our game every few minutes to let cars pass. The oldest Padilla girl liked my brother Anthony. His long hair and her flirting with him in see-through pink cotton shirts somehow went unnoticed by Mr. Padilla, and our way of life became almost routine.

  Until I fought with Itza.

  Itza was my age, and must have said something mean about my being white or having mismatched clothes, so I said something back and we fought. Behind the church. The lawn was in need of mowing; we were alone in grass that went to our knees. Everyone else was in church, their thin singing leaking out the windows. Having always relied on Steph to do my fighting, I didn’t even know where to begin.

  It was awkward for that first moment, the intimacy of standing face to face, the tension of the impending fight heavy in the air, my not knowing which hand or leg to push first into combat. Finally, when I realized I had to begin somehow or else stand fixed in starting pose forever, I grabbed hold of the gold hoop hanging from Itza’s right ear and yanked it down. Hard.

  She held her ear and screamed. There was blood on her finger and she cried out so loudly I covered my ears until her crying beat out the singing, and people came running, looking at me with disdain.

  Que mala esa blanca—what a bad white girl.

  Mrs. Padilla wiped Itza’s ear with one of her embroidered washcloths while my mother swiped me in the head and apologized for my behavior.

  “I understand,” Mrs. Padilla said. “Kids will be kids.”

  But after our fight, the Padilla gates closed to us and we stopped attending the church where none of us ever knew what was
being said anyway.

  55

  My mother’s car broke down and changed everything. Unable to afford the repairs, she could no longer make the hour-long commute to Batavia for her factory job, and the green Buick became just one more stopped car in the wide driveway that separated us from the three-tiered apartment building next door. With the car dead, we were as stuck as everyone else.

  Caseworkers appeared in our kitchen from the Department of Social Services, asking lists of questions that my mother answered in a hushed voice. She swatted us away as she spoke, but when I heard the social worker ask questions about fathers, I strained to hear. Except for the oldest three kids, none of us even knew our fathers, and the very word, used in our house, was enough to cause silence. My mother’s voice became quieter with each question, until she eventually refused to answer.

  In the end, I learned nothing, but we began to receive rainbow-colored money for food. Meanwhile, my mother started a series of lower-paying jobs and the perpetual search for something better—a job with more pay, fewer hours, less strenuous work.

  I had never seen my mother’s spirits so low. Her mood sagged, and she spent any time away from work in bed. Like a bird with a broken wing, she circled quietly around us, and became hard to look at.

  We began to fight.

  Our living space had been more modern at the motel, but on Grand, for the first time in years, all of us were under one roof. Counting my baby sister, there were seven kids now—all growing, all clawing for space.

  The bird sanctuary was out of reach. There were no gravel roads to walk up and down until we were worn out, no fields to sprawl out into, no giant birds or hiking trails to lighten moods. On Grand Avenue, whether we walked east or west, everything looked the same. Neighborhood men bubbled on porches, and even the youngest of boys pushed their legs into pimp walks, and forced their mouths into tough talk.

  Lisa took to wearing a light blue T-shirt with the word BITCH spelled out in sparkly letters. The glittery word stretched the width of her shirt and expanded gradually and in direct proportion to the development of her bust. Lisa wore that BITCH shirt like a badge. She was surly, talked back to my mother, and once, after getting slapped for something she’d said, Lisa hit back. My mother’s mouth hung open. Lisa hit again. My mother grabbed a broom and tried to hold Lisa back. Though only ninety pounds, Lisa was tight as a fist. Both were red in the face, unwilling to give. Lisa was all backbone and pushing forward. And my mother, for her part, was stunned and trying to hold onto something she’d already lost.

  The rest of us girls cried. No one had ever hit my mother. Everything seemed changed. Broken. We knew Lisa’s anger and my mother’s stubborn pride and were sure it would end in death.

  We screamed for them to stop, and when neither listened, Steph shepherded us into the bathroom where she sat us on towels she’d rolled into cushions and told us it would be okay. We bit our lips and tried to block out the sounds of fighting while she ran to the kitchen and came back with cans of creamed corn and wax beans.

  “Don’t worry,” she said to our bent heads, taking time to look into each of our faces, “we’ll stay in this bathroom for as long as we need to, even live here if we have to.”

  56

  She must have felt it happening.

  The way she couldn’t keep us in line anymore.

  My mother did what she could, even designed and implemented a behavior modification program. She used poster board and felt-tip markers to create a chart with columns and rows, said she wanted us to share in the housework. Things were different now, she said, and she needed our help. Washing dishes. Sweeping floors. Scrubbing the bathtub. Next to each name was a list of tasks and corresponding rewards. She took great care in drawing the lines and explaining the rules. We earned points for doing a job. We traded points for treats. But after a few days of working to earn the same hot chocolate packets and cookies we got for free at Mar’s house, we abandoned our chores, and the chart became a silly flag flapping on the inside of the kitchen cabinet.

  57

  In late January, snow whipped in from Canada, gathered strength over Lake Ontario, and landed like a hard and heavy hand on western New York.

  A blizzard.

  One that people would talk about twenty years later. Snow covered the city with a blanket so thick, people couldn’t move, and the schools had no choice but to release early. I forgot my mittens, or never had any to begin with, and kept my hands stuffed in my pockets and eyes lowered to the ground to minimize the impact of the wind. I pushed through snowdrifts more than half my height as a group of neighborhood kids walked home. They were excited by the blizzard, happy the schools had closed. All I could think was that my birthday was the next day, and I’d miss the balloon the teacher tied to each child’s desk on her birthday. I had managed my envy over the last few balloons only by counting the days till I’d turn ten and have one of my own. And now I’d miss it.

  Then I saw it.

  Sifting in and out of snowdrifts in slow powdered swirls, the money seemed more dream than reality. A ten, some fives, and a few ones were covered and uncovered by snow as I watched. I called out to the other kids, but the wind was crazy and snow was everywhere and no one heard. I removed a hand from my pocket and reached into the snow, but my fingers were frozen and any bills I managed to get hold of slipped from the hook of my numb hand.

  My brothers and sisters had moved on and one of them was turning back, yelling for me to come on. I tried to take hold of the money, but the more I grabbed, the more it fell back into the snow.

  “Hey,” someone called, “we have to go.”

  I settled for one final dip, came up with a few bills, and shoved the frozen clump of hand, money, and snow into my coat.

  When we got home, I told everyone about the money and pushed into my pocket for the evidence. I dug deep into the orange lining of my parka but came up empty-handed. I dug. Further and further, each time producing nothing but snow. No one believed. They laughed while I blew on my hands and tried to remember the exact spot to return to when things thawed out.

  58

  Corpus Christi was our church. Despite our forays into the Pentacostal church on Grand and visits to the Bible-Baptists’ backyard for candy and praise, Corpus was the Catholic church we’d attended for years. The place my mother had worshipped saints while practicing free love before leaving the city; the old brick building on the corner of Main and Prince where each of us had been baptized.

  Someone from the church found out we were back in town, poorer than ever, and the parishioners swelled with generosity. They organized and collected, and a few days before Christmas, a nun with a raw face delivered two green garbage bags full of gifts. Steph and I watched as she and a helper lugged the bags upstairs, but hid as the front door was opened. We wanted the gifts, but couldn’t bear the pity. We listened from another room, emerging only as we heard our mother thanking the givers one final time.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like cocoa?” she said, and when they refused, “Well, thank you,” and “Merry Christmas,” no trace of shame in her voice.

  Steph and I came out from hiding to find that our mother had locked the bags away in the closet where she stored private things. The closet was in the living room, and took on a new power once the donated gifts were stashed inside.

  Unable to resist the closet’s mystique, we took to playing with the lock as we talked. We’d sit on the floor, fingers on the lock, turning it back and forth as we laughed and exchanged stories. We sat there for hours, twirling that lock like a strand of hair.

  When we were alone, we tried to pick it. With hairpins, clothes hangers, the caps of pens. Nothing worked. Until I pried the thin silver key from a can of donated Spam and rushed it over to Steph, hoping she’d be impressed, but she only looked at me flat-lipped and said she didn’t think it would work. Still, she took the tiny key into her hand, and when she tried it, the lock popped open.

  The Spam key was a rare success
for me, but I checked my loopy smile. I needed Steph, after all, more than I needed triumph, so I tucked my pride away and congratulated her on opening the door.

  Inside, we found the bags of donated gifts along with the items our mother had managed to purchase on layaway—an assortment of things we had asked for and things others imagined poor children might like. Pushing through the gifts, we tried to decide who would get what. Rachel was the baby, so naturally she’d get the Gloworm. Will would get the tube socks; Anthony, the puzzle; Lisa, the perfumed lotion; and either of us could get the package marked “Girl, Aged 9-12.”

  59

  My mother stopped cooking most days, and meal planning became beside the point. She wasn’t around, and even when she was, she’d lost interest. Not counting holidays—when large feasts were prepared, the table set, and prayers read—we were essentially scavengers when it came to food.

  Except when my mother baked.

  Making something rise from flour seemed a comfort to her. She pushed thick strands of auburn hair into a rolled bandana and used her freckled hands to fashion cakes, cream puffs, and biscuits. Sifter and rolling pin in hand, my mother came alive as the air around her sweetened a bit.

  There was a record player in the kitchen and my mother gave Anthony money to go to Record Theatre and buy Mallory a few 45s for her birthday. But he chose all wrong. My mother had wanted “Purple-People Eater” but Tony brought back Paul Simon and the Bay City Rollers for a five-year-old girl. Though disappointed, my mother said nothing and it became the thing to do to listen to Paul Simon go on about slip slidin’ away while she steamed up the windows with her baking.