“We needed to not fall apart, maybe for Evan or for her, for her memory. We, I remembered how it all was when we were pregnant waiting for her and when we had one baby and the money was enough and I still thought I was going to get some great job and you still thought I was a great dad and a great husband. I used to think about her all day. I just wondered idly like, what kind of job would she have when she grew up and what kind of pizza would she like and I imagined golfing with her and going to the movies. I used to wonder if she would be gay and I thought about how cool I would be with that and how she would tell all her friends that I was great. We would hang out together and her friends would like me and we’d all go to Pride together.”
“You thought she was gay?”
“No. I just thought I wouldn’t care. That it might be cool. Her friends would be cool.”
“Do you think gay people are cooler than straight people?”
“Well, maybe. Is that bad?”
“Did you think about Evan that way?”
“No. I didn’t want either of them dating boys.”
“When she was three she used to tell a story about how when she grew up she would have a baby and she would rock the baby and kiss the baby and say, Shhh, sweetheart. And she told me I would come to visit and see her baby.”
“She used to stand on the picnic table and sing and dance.”
“She used to come up to me and say, I like you, Daddy.”
“Why do we come here every summer?”
“It’s like I remember her best when we’re here.”
If they stopped coming I would disappear. I started to try to reach them. I couldn’t move anything or make any noise or change the temperature in the room. I was the most useless kind of ghost. I tried standing on my dad’s feet and holding him around the waist when he walked. I tried breathing in Evan’s ear and tickling him and licking his face. I clutched my mother, sitting in her lap, stroking her face.
“I’m here,” I told her. “I’m here with you. Please don’t leave me.”
I kissed her and a look crossed her face. I thought she had felt my kiss.
“Mommy, I’m here. Please see me.”
She sneezed. It’s impossible, I thought.
That afternoon my dad left to drive into the city for work. I decided to go with him just to see if I could leave the house. I climbed through his door and climbed over him in the car. I waited to see if the car would leave me behind or if I would change in some way when we left the driveway. But nothing happened. We drove along the quiet roads and he fiddled with the radio. When he found a Beatles song he stopped scanning and began to sing along. His voice was so awful and he was really belting it out, tapping his hands on the steering wheel and imagining himself as a paperback writer, it made me laugh until I was doubled over. I could smell the residue of shaving cream on his skin. It was a long beautiful uninterrupted drive.
We took the elevator up to the floor and he farted when the doors closed. I dodged his dithering secretary as she handed him mail and walked in a circle around him talking about calls and memos. In his office he sat down in his big leather chair and he spun around twice, like a kid in a barber chair, before he opened his briefcase on his desk. On top of his papers beside his laptop was the Magic 8 Ball. Of course, I thought. My mother and Evan hated the ball, but my father kept it. It was one of the last things we talked about. It was one of the last things he saw me touch. He put it on his desk and I peered over it into the little window. It read: Definitely not. A tiny movement behind the letters, like a curtain billowing behind a window, made me look more closely. Some angle of the light allowed me to see inside the ball. Behind the floating letters I saw a room with a bed, a sectional couch, and a television set. Against the black wall a curved bookshelf held books. The floor was decorated with a rug. A reading lamp lit the space on one side of the sectional. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have a body and I had been imagining myself the size that I was used to being. I touched the window and found myself in the room.
I tell you all this for a reason. I really feel that it should have been explained to me by the clown I saw sleeping outside our house that morning. A lot became clear to me once I entered the ball. For one thing, the previous occupants had left behind journals. I would have kept them and published them as the Genii Diaries except the lives of geniis are repetitive and dull. But those journals contained the musings of people who suddenly found themselves in a state they presumed to be death. And then they discovered that they were contracted to answer questions. There was no expectation of good or useful answers; there were few expectations at all. I figured out that each one had been inside the ball for about five to seven years. The ball was a kind of time-share situation, professional housing.
My father never asked a question and I was grateful for that. I think he didn’t want to erase the answer I had gotten for a question he would never hear. He stared at the ball and read the words out loud and I loved to see his dear face up close. I stood by the window and I talked to him. I thought about trying to communicate that I was in there. But he never asked a question and, when I thought about putting my name in the window, I was afraid he would be frightened or repelled and would get rid of me.
My father never took the risk of changing the answer but he left me on his desk sometimes and cleaning staff or his secretary or passersby shook me. You learn about people, about what the central questions are. I always gave the answer Definitely Not, to protect my father. That was my answer to the questions they all asked. Should I go back to school? Should I leave my husband? Should I confront my daughter? Should I have this affair? Should I travel to India? Should I go on a diet? Will I get the promotion? Will I ever find someone? Will I be okay? Will I win the contract? Will I be forgiven?
And you were one of those people. I know you must resent me but I didn’t design what we are going through. I’m trying to give you some information to make it easier for you. I’ll always be as grateful to you as you must be the opposite. Ask me anything. Ask me any question you have no matter how weird it seems to you. I’m going back into the world when we finish here and you won’t speak to anyone directly again for years and probably never again to someone who knows what you are talking about. I’m going as fast as I can to walk in the door back into my parents’ lives. I’ll tell them the truth about what happened and they won’t believe me. But they won’t care. They won’t care that I am wearing the same clothes and I look like I will turn nine in a month when I should be a teenager. They won’t care how or why I came back, they won’t even question it too much. I will be theirs again. Ask me what you want to ask me quickly because I am going home.
This Is the Story of a Good Mother. This Is Her Picture
I KNOW; SHE LOOKS LIKE Mary. I did that on purpose. There must be many more mothers out there, who love their kids no matter how crazy they get. This is her story, the one that didn’t make it into the book. This is the story of how as a teenager he leaves her, and takes up with forces she can’t understand, starts wearing clothes and shoes that are completely impractical, and she keeps on loving him. When he comes home for dinner she gives him all the meat even if she’ll have to eat grain for weeks. She listens to him complain about things that no one can change and she listens to all his fancy self-important dreams. She squints and sees the baby that he was, even under all that scraggly hair.
She hears terrible stories from her friends that he says his father isn’t his father, that she never made him the way that other babies were made from bits of her and him and the best moments of a whole difficult marriage. She feels torn between loyalty to his father who is still with her, and to him who left her for another Mary — a whore by everyone’s account. He consorts with lepers and so she worries endlessly about his health. His hubris, she thinks on her worst days, is the only thing about him that is of godly proportions.
She scans the gossip for real news,
always anticipating the thing that finally arrives on her door. He is arrested. He is convicted. He will be killed. Only a child still although she will always think he is a child until the day that he outlives her. But this one won’t outlive her. The other children rally for her attention, but she is drained of love. She becomes a madwoman rushing suddenly to his defense. She doesn’t remember the exact night he was conceived: he could be right, he could be the son of someone better than her faithless husband who tells her to just let him go.
She travels in his shadow trying to walk beside him. Maybe she can still help him maybe she can still offer him her faith. But when she arrives at his side he is already on the cross. No mother ever imagined seeing that precious body stabbed through and hung among thieves in the desert.
She talks to him to keep him company. She hears his feet crack around the nail. What can she do to make him better now? What can she say to make this easier? She finds herself reciting empty verses. She tells him boring news about old friends. She can’t believe she is the only family member at his broken feet. Your father would be here, she says, and makes excuses. Your brother is having a baby of his own — he has to stay with his wife. They all love you. I love you. She prays, even though — well, why not? She sees that he is fading. She feels a miserable fondness for the other Mary kneeling there beside her.
And when he begins to die she thinks, so this is it, the whole thing? These are the last minutes of you and me. Oh dear God, I will give you every ounce of my brain if you stop this. My dear son, do you know how much I love you? I love you until it screams in me.
She helps them take her son down and she washes his body slowly, as slowly as possible because after this she will never touch him again. She combs his hair. (What is it about our children’s hair?) She helps them to bury him in the cave, reasoning that they will send her away if she doesn’t. At least she knows where he is and he is out of pain and safe and they can’t do anything more to him now. She lives in a tent made from her clothes and sleeps by the doorway for as long as she can bear it. She lays feathers at his gravesite every day. She takes them from a peacock some foolish local man keeps. Keeping a peacock out here is as foolish as keeping an elephant. All she can tell her other children is that it would be the same for any of them.
When she goes home she cooks without spice. She cannot listen to any condolences. She asks herself what she might have done differently when she was pregnant. Was it that night she danced or the work or the wine? She asks herself about his childhood: did he know that he was precious just as he was? She asks herself if she should have tracked him down and dragged him home when he first started all this. Should she have said, stop it, stop it, you’re no Messiah. You’re the boy I made, you may not want to hear it, but I had sex with your father. Get a job. Find a girl. Stay near me. I’ll pay your debts. I’ll be your audience. What happens to you out there happens to me in here — right inside of me. Don’t you know I love you? Every imagined conversation ends this way.
And then she hears the rumors of his resurrection. She feels sick. I was there, she tells the neighbors. He died. A mother would know, she falters, if he were alive. Stupid Lazarus, she says, that’s who introduced him to those lepers. And now he’s dead too and they will both stay dead together. I knew that boy when he played with my son. They were both dreamers, but Lazarus needed to mess with everything. Feed one beggar and you will spend the rest of your life hungry, I told him. I’m sure I told him that.
She never tells the neighbors that she liked Lazarus when he was young. He was a good friend to her son. She watched them spin tops and chase each other. They were two boys in love because the sky was bright and she felt back then like a very good mother.
The rumors multiply and soon she sees images on the streets of herself cradling her baby and wearing that blue dress she liked so much. Everyone has a favorite outfit when they are pregnant. It hurts to see him in her arms again. But it does remind her of those sweet warm days. And for a while she enjoys feeling that everyone thinks she is perfect. She stares at an etching until she can almost feel him nursing. She closes her eyes and sways because he will never drink another drop.
She bites her lips until they bleed. Her eyes are sore. Her brain is dry. She dreams of him coming home — of life itself being dispelled as the dream. She dreams of watching him become a carpenter and make a chest to hold his children’s toys. She dreams about sharing her parenting secrets with his wife. She dreams about making cakes and dolls and dresses. And holding little hands to help little legs walk. She dreams of how devoted she could be. If only, if only she could be so devoted that time itself could run backwards and they could enjoy each other again like they did when he was still too small to speak.
From Klara
I’LL COME BACK IF YOU need me. I’ll know if you are feeling lost. And now it is night and you have left my bedside for the brief hours you agree to sleep. Dr. Bloch says he has never seen a boy sob so, be so stricken with grief. Today you scrubbed the floors and walls and washed the drapes and my clothes and sheets and then you cried on my stomach because it still stinks of the iodoform. I saw you in the hallway holding Dr. Bloch’s hands and praising him and thanking him for allowing you to press the suppurations on my body with the poison in your own dear hands. He is a good doctor and a good man. He will try everything because you beg it of him. Only your devout eyes on me keep me from screaming like a demon all the hours of the day.
My living son, I hate to leave you when I’ve given you so little, but I long to hold little Gustav, Otto, and Ida. I never saw their faces; I only saw their cheeks and eyes and wondered what kind of children they would make. At five years, Edmund broke me in half, sweating all over my arms and breasts and neck and shaking and covered with spots and then still, so still, so stiff, so silent. I rocked him well into the night after his death. He was so much bigger than the others and still so small against the world and there were too many more faces that he never got to wear, that I never got to witness.
Alois looked at you children as if you were too far away to make out your individual features. He was, as you know, angry about being illegitimate and what family he did have was half-mad and half-simple. He had no way to know what loving families do. They were all wild animals living in the forest. I was in danger of becoming a wild animal too, until you. Often, even after you were walking and running, he called you by the name of one of the dead ones, not out of grief I’m sure, but that he was lucky to remember a name. I looked at you and Paula as if the entire world winnowed down to just two faces, one boy, one girl, all that was left, and all that still mattered. I knew that in you was some of the same material as in them I lost, and I wondered if the way you walked or the sad look, the bitter voice you sometimes had, was familial. I never felt that way. I felt powerless, but I never felt the way I saw you and your father feel. The way you leveled your whole selves against forces that hadn’t attacked you to get even for the injuries you had sustained elsewhere.
Those eyes, which are as light as mine, but different. I missed the dead ones so much I even fantasized about the things that they might hate. I imagined them hating your father as you did. I imagined them brooding and plotting and nursing their tempers until they went flying free and the group of you stood together burning down his bee houses. I wanted you to be free of hate, but I couldn’t get it all out of me and I also wanted to be close to you. Your tenderness and obedience for me was the only respect I felt worthy of. I failed the others; my body failed them; my brain failed them; my heart failed them. I didn’t make them strong enough and then I didn’t protect them. Paula skipping, cooking singing, you doing everything — relentlessly painting, reading, arguing — left in me a thousand half-formed images of what they might have been. And we, the larger family, might have overcome your father and tempered you. Six children: Gustav, Otto, Ida, Edmund, Adolf, Paula, and only two at my bedside now.
You must take care of your little s
ister. She is feeble, like me and she will not be able to support herself alone. She isn’t ugly, but I feel that seeing how life was in our house that she will not marry. She loves the garden; always let her have a garden. Your half-sister, Angela, will go against you, but you must love her too for she is only capable of soft feelings no matter how strongly she expresses them. I have a premonition you will conquer her somehow and it fills me with confusion.
I know you hate this monster in my cells. Don’t blame the doctor for poisoning me when I am gone. I want to go. The pain will shut down when I die, this pain that is so intolerable. There are dozens dying by me with this same pain and thousands more across the city, across the planet, millions in pain. I think, So this is what it feels like to be dying. Did my children hurt like this? I know that you are angry and more full of anger than I understand. I look at your paintings, my beloved, and the sketched glass windows shimmer with thoughts I can barely decipher. I am so proud of you and you will have everything that you desire. You will be a great artist; isn’t it obvious now that you have been accepted into art school? Isn’t it obvious that your talents will save you from the menial work that is your experience and our legacy? Be proud, Adolf, be ever proud of who you are. I gave you shadows in your father and your grandfather; I know that. I called your father “uncle” too long into our marriage. I let him beat you and I gave you sweets to make it better. I taught you nothing about money or people because I knew nothing. I was poor and because I was poor my life was so narrow and I still felt overwhelmed by it. I combed your hair and I tried to picture what an architect does and I couldn’t. I only knew that it meant you would draw buildings and someone would make them. This seemed to me to be an ideal.
How I Came to Haunt My Parents Page 2