by Jenny Mollen
“The food is horrible here, but I love the ambience. You’re not really into food, are you?” She picked a piece of focaccia out of the bread basket and sniffed it. “Feel my abs. I was a swimmer and I never had children.” I dutifully touched her abs. They were rock hard, like a loaf of French bread that had been left out overnight. “You’re not planning on having children, are you, honey? It’d be kind of pointless to become friends with you if you are. People with infants make the worst friends.”
“I…Not anytime soon,” I said with confidence.
Three months later, I was pregnant. Joan wasn’t thrilled with the idea of me turning into a real-life Russian doll, but she accepted it so long as there was only ever going to be one mini-doll inside me. “You aren’t going to have more than one kid, are you, honey? One is kind of chic but two is a fucking nightmare,” she texted me. I imagined she was speeding down Sunset Boulevard in her black Mercedes G wagon with bulletproofed windows.
“Of course not,” I lied.
After that first foodless dinner, where we bonded over being left-handed Geminis with boozy mothers, Joan and I were spiritually inseparable. No matter how many babushkas popped out of me, I knew Joan wasn’t going anywhere. We texted and spoke on the phone eight times a day, sometimes saying little more than “Honnnnnneeeeey” and then hanging up. The other players in my life were jealous at first and probably even a little threatened, but, like all my obsessions, they assumed this one would pass. It didn’t. Joan was the kind of woman I’d been looking for all my life. In her, I found not only a friend but a mentor. She looked after me. She remembered dates of things. She sent flowers and wrote cards. She threatened to kill people who didn’t help my career. She was the mother I always wanted—only better, because unlike my real mother, I was never going to lose her to a man.
If my real mom wasn’t willing to indulge my haunted-house notions, I knew Joan Arthur would.
“And finally, this is the room that I think it lives in,” I said, slowly leading Joan into Sid’s nursery bathroom.
“Hmm…Honey?” Joan walked up to the antique mirror hanging above the sink and stared into it.
“Yeah?” I replied, worried she was going to ask if I also saw a young Gold Rush widow in mourning attire staring back at us.
“Do you think I look like Garth from Wayne’s World?” Joan teased her bangs in the mirror and cocked her head to the side. “I think I might need to grow out my hair because people are commenting on all my photos that I look like him.”
Joan’s vanity didn’t faze me. I’m the daughter of a man who asked for head shots for his birthday; if anything, it felt like home. In that moment, actually, it came as a great relief. If Joan felt comfortable enough in my haunted bathroom to fixate on her hair, there probably weren’t any ghosts trying to use my mirror as a portal to hell. Soothed, I bid her farewell and we didn’t speak again until five minutes later.
“So I never even asked what your feelings were about the house,” I said, sitting at my computer and avoiding writing by googling pictures of myself with dark hair.
“Oh. It’s definitely haunted,” Joan said. “I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”
“What?” I slammed the keyboard.
“Medium Coke,” she replied.
“Are you talking to me?”
“No, girl, I’m at McDonald’s.”
“Can you refocus? What about the ghost? Do I really have one?”
“Yeah, honey. I smelled him as soon as I walked in,” she said nonchalantly.
“Him?” I asked, looking around the room, panicked.
“I’ve always had a nose for ghosts. I had this angry queen living in my Studio City house. Think he was a writer on some Aaron Spelling show. Clearly threatened. He used to try to break my Emmys while I was sleeping.”
“I cannot believe you left me in my house alone when you knew there was a ghost,” I wailed. I was hurt. I was also disappointed in myself for fusing with yet another nonmaternal mother.
“Honey, he’s a friendly ghost, he’s Jewish.”
Unappeased, I hung up and ran out of the house. I called Jason and told him that Joan confirmed the ghost and that we needed to get in touch with our realtor immediately.
“ ‘Confirmed the ghost’?” Jason’s voice hit an octave I’d heard only once, on our honeymoon, when I bit the tip of his penis as a joke.
I covered my mouth with my hand as I spoke so as not to make the ghost aware of my plans. “Baby. Why are you already so wound up? We just need to relist the house and move back into our old place.”
Due to its unique specifications—namely, a driveway that looked like an X Games half-pipe—our old house was still sitting dormant on the market. If I moved swiftly, I could be packed up and back in it by the weekend.
“YOLO,” I declared proudly.
“I’m gonna kill Joan,” Jason mumbled. “This isn’t like an undisclosed mold problem or something. If you call the realtor, he’s gonna think you’re nuts.”
“He already thinks I’m nuts.” I reminded Jason of how I refused to go into escrow until I camped out at our new home overnight to make sure it didn’t feel like the scene of the Tate/LaBianca murders. Standing outside and looking around the pool, I was now pretty certain it looked EXACTLY like the scene of the Tate/LaBianca murders.
“Yes, and you said you felt fine.”
“That’s because I was pregnant and full of hormones. Now my womb is empty and I’m back to operating from a place of constant fear and distrust.” I walked back inside into the living room to make sure my housekeeper Lita wasn’t shaking Sid uncontrollably.
“We aren’t moving.” He hung up.
I was embarrassed as I explained to Lita why I needed her to sit with me in the bathroom while I washed my hair.
“You don’t sense anything?” I asked, shampoo in my eyes.
“No.” Lita bounced Sid up and down on her lap while sitting on the toilet and trying to avoid staring at the stream of breast milk trailing down my chest.
It was a Tuesday and I was already running late for our Mommy and Me class in Santa Monica. I was excited to get Sid out of the house, but more excited to get myself out of the house. Sid didn’t seem too bothered by the ghost, which meant one of two things: the spirit was benevolent or his soul had already been captured and I was living with a demon seed.
I felt bad about leaving Lita alone in the house, but not bad enough to interfere with my skinny jeans getting washed. I told her to take her time with the laundry, but to feel no obligation to finish the dishes if they started flying around the kitchen.
Baby’s First Session in Santa Monica was one of those super-obnoxious classes you had to sign up for a year before you even planned on being pregnant, so obviously I had to rely on my sister’s connections to get me in at the last minute.
“If you don’t know somebody, you might get in, but you’d never get in with Abby. And if you don’t get in with Abby, you might as well kill yourself,” she’d said. My sister was never one to mince words.
Apparently there was another Mommy and Me class in the Valley, but if you told people you were in the Valley class, they assumed you were over forty, single, and a casting director.
I agreed to take the Santa Monica class mainly because I felt pressured by society to do so. In the past, I’d never been one to cave to convention, but that was before I had someone I really needed to impress: Sid. I knew he wouldn’t remember it one way or the other (until he was old enough for my sister to get him alone and give a detailed account of all my shortcomings), but I wanted to be perfect for him. And according to my peers and strangers I followed on Instagram, being perfect meant socializing with other moms and babies.
I pounded the intercom to get in the locked glass doors of Saint Vincent’s east wing. The introductory e-mail probably included a code I was supposed to memorize, but I don’t read e-mails with the words “Mommy,” “Group activity,” or “Children” in the subject. After sneaking in
behind a more responsible parent, Sid and I made our way to the third-floor classroom.
Class had already started. I unbuckled Sid from his stroller, took my shoes off, and tiptoed in. The class turned and looked at me like I was Satan. I double-checked Sid’s forehead to make sure there wasn’t an emblazoned 666. I then placed him in the circle next to a little girl wearing a Missoni turban. Eight women between the ages of thirty and thirty-five sat cross-legged on the spongy, checkered floor. Some breast-fed and bitched about their bodies. Some bragged about their kids sleeping through the night. One mom that I found particularly fucking irritating was this blond chick, Mirial, who translated everything anyone said into sign language. All of the babies were under six months old, even though two looked like middle-aged Jewish accountants. I was pretty sure none of them understood sign language.
“Does anyone else have any concerns they want to discuss before we sing our goodbye song?” Abby, our instructor, asked.
Apparently, class started at ten-fifteen, not eleven-fifteen as I’d thought. Abby looked over at me and faintly smiled, as if my sister had already warned her I was a total flake. “Let’s go to Starbucks and have our own class,” I whispered to Sid, who was getting his imaginary taxes done by one of the accountants.
Before the singing could commence, Mirial, the annoying blonde, started desperately rambling, as if once class was over she was going to be thrown back into solitary confinement until her husband came home from work and beat her over the head with his dick. “Hi, guys, Mirial again.” She signed her name twice, as if she was waiting for us to mirror it back to her. “Anyway, my ‘area’ has just been so sore since having little Jagger. I’m so tight, my husband can barely fit inside me.” The only thing I found more annoying than a mom who unnecessarily uses sign language was a mom who pretended to still care about sex.
Abby explained that her estrogen levels were low because of breast-feeding. She recommended a cream.
“Does anybody in here have a ghost problem?” I said. I looked at Sid, worried he might start shrieking like a vampire at the mere mention of the word.
“You mean like a phantom pain?” Abby replied.
“No, more like a literal phantom. Not of the Opera, more of the underworld.”
The room went silent. Mirial’s signing fingers twisted into horns on her head. The accountants started crying.
Class was dismissed on that note. As I tried to strap Sid’s flailing body back into his stroller, Abby walked up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. She was an extremely petite woman with pale skin and a neck full of birthstone charms.
“I didn’t want to say this in front of the group, but I do believe in ghosts and I have a great psychic who specializes in this kind of thing, if you’d like to speak with her.” She told me she’d text me her clairvoyant’s number and not to worry.
Before I exited the building, I rolled past a small marble fountain and sprinkled what I assumed was holy water on Sid’s face. He didn’t burst into flames, but he also didn’t look happy. I tried to lighten things up on the drive home by playing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” on the stereo on repeat. Every stoplight, I’d look in the rearview mirror to check if he was awake. He was always awake. Part of me wondered if he might be one of those people who slept with their eyes open. The other part suspected he was an incubus.
It’s a strange feeling to both love and fear something in equal parts. I didn’t know if I made him happy. He couldn’t tell me. I didn’t know if he wanted to kill me. He was strapped in a car seat. All I knew was that I loved him violently—to the point of madness. But the intimate serenity of pregnancy, that weightlessness that can be replicated only by a muscle relaxer and a tall glass of wine, had vanished and in its place grew a thundering, inexorable terror.
Just as I pulled up to our well-appointed albeit demonic home, Sid fell asleep. I scanned the upstairs windows of the house, sure I’d see the kid from The Omen peering out through one of the curtains, but everything looked calm. Lita’s car was gone. She usually worked later, but knowing there was a greater chance of her being deported than apported, I tried not to read into it. I parked and waited for Jason rather than disturb Sid.
I looked around at the lush greenery cascading off the hillside. I watched the sunlight cut through the fanning palms above. I scanned for unmarked Indian burials. I told myself that I should be happy, that everything was good. But not even the half-eaten Quest Bar in my glove box could suppress my pangs of discomfort.
I looked at my phone and found a text from Abby. Her psychic’s name was Elenor. I called right away.
“Hi, my name is Jenny Mollen, er…Biggs, and—” Before I could finish leaving a message, my other line beeped.
I clicked over and it was Elenor.
Her voice was soft and sympathetic and slightly less “Come to the light, Carol Anne” than I’d anticipated. Part of me wanted to hang up before she told me anything that might make me check into a hotel; the other part waited with bated breath for the gory details.
Torn between what I wanted and what I needed, I blurted out, “Do you think my house is haunted because I totally think it’s haunted oh my God I’m scared.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone, followed by what sounded like a cockatiel being shoved into a microwave. Finally, Elenor spoke.
“It’s a little haunted.”
“A little haunted? What does that mean? How can something be a little haunted? Is it haunted by a little person?” I looked at Sid in the backseat and flashed to the little boy who kills his mother in Pet Sematary.
“I think the spirit is actually a large dog.”
“A dog?” I exhaled for the first time in two minutes. I knew that dogs, unlike people, were inherently good.
“Yes.”
Now that I thought about it, a dog ghost made a lot of sense. Ever since we moved in, Harry and Teets had been marking the walls incessantly. What I thought was just a simple game of dueling penises was probably a concerted effort to establish dominance over the former tenant. Having a ghost dog seemed kind of fun. Jason always wanted to adopt a bullmastiff or a standard poodle, but we traveled too much and didn’t have the space in the old house. Maybe a large ghost dog was exactly what we needed. Husky, low maintenance, omnipresent.
“Like a Clifford the Big Red Dog? That’s how I’m picturing him. Because I have three small dogs and none of them are strong enough to open bathroom doors.”
“He’s more the size of a cocker spaniel.”
“Teets hates cocker spaniels,” I said, hoping to at least steer her toward a bichon frise.
“Oh, and he has an old-man partner.” Elenor’s microwave beeped. No sound from the cockatiel. “Somebody who lived near the property. He’s going to teach your son historical facts.” I envisioned a man in a tricornered hat floating over Sid’s crib, quizzing him about the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. Now I wasn’t just scared of the ghost, I was a little bit offended. Had the universe assigned me this apparition because it assumed I’d be a shitty history teacher? Would Sid also be visited by ghosts tutoring him on other topics I was deficient in, such as industrial arts and arithmetic?
I moved the baby monitor to Jason’s new side of the bed (my old side) to ensure I wouldn’t see any floating old-man hands swipe through the frame when I least expected it. The monitor was always wherever Jason was, because even before I had confirmation of a ghost, baby monitors scared the shit out of me. Like all surveillance cameras, if you watch them long enough, something usually levitates. The room felt colder than normal, a sure sign that we weren’t alone.
“Who do we know with a midsize dog that was recently murdered?” I asked, crawling into bed next to Jason. I’d read online earlier that the number one reason a ghost haunts a place is because it doesn’t know it’s dead. “What was the name of Jerry and Mike’s Lhasa apso?”
A guy at Jason’s gym had accidentally killed his six-year-old dog two months earlie
r. The dog had sneaked into the backseat of his car one morning before work and was found “sleeping” on the dashboard later that afternoon.
“Jenny! NEVER MENTION THAT EVER. I’m serious. That was the most devastating thing that ever happened to Jerry. And the dog was a Pekingese. Seymour, I think.” Jason paused, contemplating the name.
“Seeeeymour?” I called out, dangling my head off the end of the bed and looking under it.
Jason looked at me, incredulous. “Jenny, you are an adult. I need you to act like an adult. Ghosts aren’t real. This is our home. You need to stop being afraid of it.”
The notion sounded so simple. And I wished deeply that I could. I didn’t want to be afraid of my new house. I didn’t want to be afraid of my new life. But I was. Desperately and utterly afraid.
Everywhere I went for the next month I found myself talking about the ghost. Business meetings, television pitches, the dog groomer. I bought a three-pack of sage smudge sticks from Whole Foods and walked through each room making smoke triangles. I opened all the windows and doors and chanted the words “If you are not of this realm, you need to leave.” I even made Lita spend the night in Sid’s room to see if anything would happen to her. I was sleeping less as Sid was sleeping more. I knew something had to change.
My therapist, Chandra, whom I’d recently sent Joan Arthur to for a full psych eval, suggested that I might be projecting other woes onto the house. I agreed that it was possible. But what was equally possible was that the ghost was reaching out to me because it had unfinished business in this lifetime.
One afternoon, Jason took Sid to the park and I sat in the front yard doing a phone session with Chandra. I preferred phone sessions because Chandra’s office was on the other side of town and because if I got bored of whatever she was talking about I could look at Twitter. Teets sat on my lap, tuning out, as Gina and Harry scavenged around for pieces of petrified deer poop.