“Mostly about religion, the hypocrisy of it. He told me about growing up in a family of observant Greek Jews, and I told him about growing up Catholic. We talked about the difference between being agnostic and atheist, trying to decide which one we each were.”
Mary’s mouth is tight and she narrows her eyes. I worry that maybe she’s religious and I’ve offended her. “You better stop dialing the phone so much or they’ll unplug it and take it. A lot of patients aren’t even allowed to have a phone in their room.”
“All right.” There’s a silence.
“Are you in love with him?” she asks, a note of aggression in her voice.
“No,” I reply cautiously.
“I think you are,” she says and closes the curtain in a noisy rush.
I sit on the bed and refrain from dialing the number again. Once, while Max was making a point about something, he leaned across the table and put his hand on my forearm. He smiled at me and my pulse began to toll and my breathing grew uneven.
I told him then about my sisters living in the Bronx and he said he wanted to drive me to see them. Moved, I told him that both of my parents committed suicide.
“You’re the first person I’ve told since I left New Mexico.”
After this he stopped touching my forearm when he talked. The next time after class he invited another student to join us for coffee. I tried to be casual and take part in the conversation, but I ached to be alone with Max. I felt myself sinking.
•
I left a message yesterday with Max’s roommate, saying I’m in the hospital—asking him to please call. I lie on my side and stare at the phone, waiting for its urgent ring to break the silence.
•
We are in a new station wagon, on the road from Albuquerque to Santa Fe; my father is driving and my mother is holding Sheila in the front. In the back, Nanny sits behind my father. Jerry, Tracy, and I crowd together in the two seats to her right.
Nanny is quiet, and the sun through the windows makes the drifting smoke from her Salem look white and soft. On the radio, a man sings, and Jerry and I echo, “And I think to myself, what a wonderful world . . .”
My mother turns and, over the noise of the radio, says to my grandmother, “You can’t tell right now, Mom, but we are actually going up to a much higher elevation. In a sense we’ll be living in the mountains. Santa Fe has four very distinctive seasons. It always snows in the winter and can get very cold. The downtown area is filled with huge old cottonwood trees and there are woods if you drive up a little into the mountains, with giant aspens and pine trees.”
Nanny does not respond. The New Mexico sunlight is a shock. There are no buildings like there were in New York, no two- or three-story houses, few trees and no shade. Dad points out what’s written on the yellow-and-red license plates on every car that passes: New Mexico, Land of Enchantment.
With renewed interest, I peer out the window at the passing desert, a haze of heat and dust.
“Do you hear that, Mom?” my mother asks. “New Mexico is called ‘The Land of Enchantment’!”
Nanny breathes hard out her nose.
Sheila, who has been fussy, starts to cry and Mom says we all need to get out of the car for a little while.
My father drives off the highway and up a high, narrow dirt path, tires crunching over stones, the car rocking back and forth until we reach the top. Hot, dusty air rushes us as we step onto a plateau. The amount of distance on all sides scares me. The silence is enormous.
“Look, Dad!” Jerry says. He’s found a rock with a spiral formation on it.
“It’s a fossil,” Dad says. “A sea creature. There was once an ocean here.” He shows it to my mother, who shakes her head and smiles in amazement.
Maybe this has something to do with enchantment.
Nanny, who has stayed in the car with the doors open, screams, “Ba’bra!” but my mother ignores her and my father wanders to the edge of the plateau and looks down onto the highway we were just on and past that to the mountains far off on the other side of that massive stretch of desert. “Ba’bra!” Nanny screams again. “Ba’bra, for God’s sake!”
I follow my father, but stay a few feet back from the edge. He squeezes his filterless Pall Mall between his fingers, draws hard at it, and throws the burning stub onto the ground. He lifts his head and exhales. The smoke disappears in a wind that stirs dry dirt off the brown land.
Sheila, in my mother’s arms, keeps grabbing the little white hat off her head and throwing it, and Tracy keeps retrieving it.
“Ba’bra!” Nanny continues to scream from the car.
My mother’s refusal to answer makes me laugh, although I know it is not really funny. Far across the highway, tall cliffs blaze red in the afternoon sun, deep shadows filling the crevices. The hair around my face is damp with sweat.
Now and then, as my grandmother calls out to her, I hear my mother snicker. My father points into the distance, showing us two ranges of mountains to the north: the Jemez and the Sangre de Cristos.
I think of inviting Nanny to come see the mountains and the view, but I don’t—I can’t imagine her standing on the dust and rocks.
In the car, parked at an angle on the uneven dirt path, Nanny’s lopsided shadow leans and shifts. The giddy feeling that comes with ignoring her unsettles me. I run to the car and climb in to hug her. I’m surprised when she returns my embrace, holding her cigarette aloft, and—for a little while—she is quiet.
•
The morning of my First Holy Communion, the massive doors open and, single file, we leave the fragrant darkness of Saint Francis Cathedral, my first grade classmates and I, all dressed like little brides and grooms.
Outside the wind is cold and the New Mexico sunlight hurts my eyes.
When we get home, Mom takes my hand. She leads me to her room and closes the door. She smiles and helps me take out the bobby pins that hold the veil to my head. When it’s off, she raises the veil and for a few quiet moments we study the delicate floral intricacies of the lace. She lays the veil carefully in a big, flat box between two crackling sheets of crepe paper.
•
In the hospital I begin to write in a journal. I try to describe what is happening to me, to name the states when I cannot trust the laws of physics.
The word enchantment keeps coming to me. I write it down. I think of fairy tales I read when I was little. Under the dominion of an occult force a girl becomes a withered old woman. Or her feet root themselves into the ground so she cannot leave the yard around her parents’ house. The world goes crooked. Objects become sentient. The air rings with disembodied voices.
I write: I am subject to enchantments.
•
Mary, who has been given an injection of some kind, asks if I will pull the curtain open. I find her against a bank of pillows with the sheet covering her to the waist, her head weighted so heavily back on the pillows that her throat looks arched. She asks in a slow voice, sad and childlike, “Where’s the sun?”
“It went behind the clouds,” I say.
•
While Mary is sleeping, I dial Max again as quietly as I can and let it ring for a long time. There is no answer.
•
Uncle Jack drops by briefly with some of my things. He tells me that Tracy and Sheila know I’m in the hospital. We telephone Uncle Bob’s apartment and I talk to them.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I just started crying and couldn’t stop. I’m not going to stay in here long.”
I hear hesitation in their voices, but I get them to talk about other things, kids in their schools they’ve made friends with. Sheila says she’s going on a field trip to New York City with her class.
Uncle Jack mentions that Jerry, who is back in Santa Fe living in our parents’ house and cleaning it out, doesn’t know I’m here. “We don’t need to call him, do we, Reg?”
“No,” I say. “No reason.”
•
Dad has bought Mom a new camera
. It is small and held to the eye, not to the chest or stomach like Dad’s Brownie box camera. Mom’s eye and the camera’s must be in synch. It sees what she sees.
I watch her on the lawn, watering the trees. After she turns off the hose, she crosses the street and holds the camera to her eye. She does this a few times, and then backs up a little farther.
Later, she comes in, removes the film, and drives away to drop it off for developing. I get the camera and take it outside, cross the street, and stand where she had been standing.
Is it the height of the trees she’s charting? When we first came to this house, the ground was unplowed, unirrigated desert land, dry and hard. My mother worked it until it was rich and black, the hose and sprinklers on for long hours every day until water ran over the sidewalks and down the sloping street. She planted gardens and a lush lawn, a willow tree and poplars that have grown into giants. In the dry desert neighborhood, our house is enclosed in its own forest of shifting shadows.
•
One summer afternoon, we are zooming home on the highway, sweaty and mosquito-bitten after a visit to the river in Villanueva. Mom turns the radio up when a song we love by Ed Ames comes on. Dad knows the verses and starts singing, and we join in with the chorus, loud and in unison, imitating the deep-throated sincerity of the singer:
Muh-rye-ahhhhh!
Muh-rye-ahhhhh!
They . . . call . . . the . . . wind . . . Muh-rye-ahhhhh!
•
I am in the backyard dancing. Mom is hiding behind the curtain, watching me through the window of her room. I pretend that I don’t know she’s there.
•
The phone rings and I jump, heart pounding. I try to calm my breathing. Mary opens the curtain just as I lift the receiver.
“Hello?” My voice trembles.
“Who is this?” a woman asks. “Where’s Mary?”
•
Nanny does not like our house in New Mexico. It is in a development on desert land just off the highway to Albuquerque. New houses are being built around it; construction workers yell at each other in Spanish between the deafening sputter of a power saw.
I like visiting Nanny in her room, where she sits on a chair most of the time with her door ajar, smoking Salems. She gives me Mounds bars and Hershey’s Kisses, sings to me, “I love you, a bushel and a peck! A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.” She calls me sweetie and tells me what a good girl I am. She praises my drawings and tapes them to the wall under her crucifix. I can close my eyes when I hug Nanny and feel the hard drum of her heart against my arm, and traces of my mother are there.
•
Dad takes Jerry and me to church. Mom stays home with my sisters and Nanny. I stare up into the colored glass windows as the priest talks in a droning monotone. He captures my attention when he utters the phrase “banished to the desert.” “Banished” sounds just like “punished.” “Punished to the desert,” I whisper to myself.
After church Dad drives along a dry stretch of mesa and pulls into a gas station. While the car is being filled he digs two dimes out of his pocket and goes in and buys Jerry and me each a Coke. We wait in the car with our Cokes while he talks to the attendant, who points up a dirt road.
The car climbs up the bumpy earth and stops at a square adobe building where five or six cars are parked. There are no windows, just a big sign with a black-and-white cartoon bear I recognize from a television commercial. The bear is going down a river on a boat, holding a bottle of Hamm’s beer.
Dad tells us to stay inside the car, and we kneel on the seat, looking out the back window, watching a cloud shaped like a spider slowly break apart, the legs moving off in different directions.
When Dad comes out later, he squints and shields his eyes from the sun. He slams the door and fumbles with the key in the ignition. His face is flushed and his eyes are damp. Jerry asks if we can stop and get another Coke but Dad doesn’t answer, as if he hasn’t heard him.
“Daddy!” I say. “Does banished mean punished?”
“Yes,” he replies.
When we get home, Dad walks up to my mother and smiles as he touches her arm. He weaves slightly on his feet. Looking at his face, she recoils, turns back to the dishes. I sense that there is something different about my father, but I don’t understand why my mother doesn’t like it.
He goes to the living room, but my grandmother gives him a warning look. He turns and heads out into the backyard, where he stands for a while, then settles into a patio chair, crossing his legs. I press my face against the mesh of the screen door and watch him as he stares at the ground.
•
Hours go by slowly in the hospital.
I keep thinking of the gentle figure at the foot of my bed in my uncle’s house. When I close my eyes I can see it. Though the face is generic, unidentifiable, the eyes are full of shock and a nervous desire.
•
In the high school library in Santa Fe, I look at a big volume about alchemy. I turn the pages and come to a series of etchings that depict the alchemical process. In the first, a man and woman get into a bath naked. In the second, they have intercourse in the water. In the third, they die together in that same water, arms around each other. My eyes dart through the text on the page: marriage and death; union is a manifestation of the mystery; they dissolve and lose their discriminating state.
•
Mom wants to watch a romantic movie on television.
“You kids won’t like this,” she says, smiling as the credits roll over cityscapes of Paris. The others go to their rooms or to do other things, but I remind her that I’m eleven, almost twelve, and I want to see it with her.
“All right, sweetie,” she says and smiles at me.
The dark-haired elegant woman in the movie has large ironic eyes and a small, ever-present coy smile. The tall handsome man in a suit seems to follow her lead moment to moment. They end up in her hotel room.
“I’ll sleep on the balcony,” he says to her.
“You could, you should, and you shall,” she replies in an enigmatic French accent.
“I love this!” I say.
Mom laughs. “You’re saying that to please me, sweetheart.”
“I do like it, though,” I say and we smile at each other.
The man in the movie stands on the balcony, lights a cigarette, and looks out over the lights of Paris glistening on the Seine.
•
The curtain is open. I am attempting to write in the journal.
“How tall is Max?” Mary asks.
“He’s really tall,” I say. “Six two, maybe six three.”
She’s quiet a few moments. “And his hair is black?”
“Yes.”
“What color are his eyes?”
“Brown.”
She nods. “I hope he calls you.”
Her tone heartens me. I want to tell her that he loves Bob Dylan, that he sang me a verse from “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and that he knows all the words to every song on Highway 61 Revisited.
I turn back to my journal and write:
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I put them by your gate
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
•
It’s a Saturday afternoon and we leave Nanny at home and drive along the Española highway, stopping at Camel Rock, a hill on a dry red stretch of desert with big slabs of rock on it that look like a camel’s neck and head. We climb the hill, but the head is too high up on the neck for even Dad to climb on.
On the way home, Dad teaches us to sing “Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder.” He sings the verses and we all sing the chorus boisterously over the noise of the wind coming in the car windows:
It’s an Irish trick, it’s true,
I can lick the mick who threw
The overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder.
The sun breaks in flashes into the car, sun-shade-sun-shade, as we pass along a tree-lined dirt ro
ad through the village of Tesuque.
Jerry wants to tell a joke. “What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence?”
“What time is it?” we all ask.
“Time to get a new fence!”
Everyone laughs, even baby Sheila.
“What is black and white and gray all over?” Mom asks, a mischievous smile on her face as she peers around at us in the backseat.
“What? What?” we all call out.
“Sister Mary Elephant.”
We roar with laughter.
•
I leave my room to walk in the hospital hallways, but I’m restricted to the seventh floor. I press my forehead against the cold glass of a window and look down at dirty snow banked along the sidewalks, cars passing on the wet street.
A quiet man with a pockmarked face whom I’ve seen in group therapy walks by, avoiding my eyes. He stops in the middle of the hallway, hunching, standing still. When I pass him I see that he is staring, captivated, at the floor. He mouths a few words then smiles widely, a stiff, joyless smile, his entire body held in a kind of contraction.
He is communing with someone he is afraid of. Someone I can’t see.
•
Nanny’s window faces the backyard, which looks west. I peek in from the hallway. Nanny is sitting in her chair. The sun sets and red light leaks in through the venetian blinds, igniting the mirror, the edge of her dresser, and parts of the floor. I come in and stand near her. She squints against the red light and tries to wave it away like an insect. A slender line of red brightness hits a picture on the wall of a dove with its wings spread wide, a delicate silver halo over its head. Nanny tells me that the Holy Ghost is the most mysterious part of the Trinity because it is a dove, but also it is a beam of light and sometimes nothing but air. Still it is filled with the power of God.
I say that in our house there is also a trinity: the mother, the father, and the holy grandmother. I sit on the floor and draw her a picture: the holy grandmother first, then the holy mother and then the father, not “holy” because I know she will like it better this way.
•
“Girls. Girls, come here, I want to show you something.”
Tracy, Sheila, and I follow Mom out and she squats down near some of the plants, lifts a leaf, and shows us tiny strawberries, mostly white, a faint blush of pink on their tips.
Ghost Songs Page 3