Shelf Discovery

by Lizzie Skurnick

  Chapter 7

  She Comes by It Supernaturally

  Girls Who Are Gifted and Talented

  Second Sight-geist

  Let’s first get the reason there is a preponderance of the supernatural in girls’ literature out of the way: It’s fun. It’s fun to know what the future holds, it’s fun to be able to float forks around the room, fun to go back in time, fun to inhabit someone else’s body, fun to know what people are thinking, fun to talk to animals, fun to see ghosts—fun, fun, fun, fun. Even the official terms used to discuss the powers—Second Sight! Precognition! Telekinesis! Astral Projection!—are, in their grandeur and glory, fun.

  But why, thus bewitched, one must ask, with exactly this type of fun? Providing the definitive verdict on why your average girl spends hours in front of the bathroom mirror chanting “Bloody Mary” and intently thinking of trees, squares, and ovals while a friend across the room attempts to channel them in the correct order on a scrap of paper and a third girl serves as a control in the hall may be beyond my puny powers. But I think looking at a few other times fork-floating exists in literature is helpful.

  One of the classic conceits of the poltergeist, a house spirit that bangs ominously in rooms and, depending on your vengeful spirit—think The Exorcist—makes blood slide down the wall and sets heads to spinning, is that the upheavals are caused not by a ghost but by a resident girl going through puberty. (Her hormonal upheavals, apparently, yank their diminutive host roughly along like a dog on a choke chain trying to escape a puny captor.) Authors like Stephen King take the problem directly to the source with characters like Carrie, whose special powers arrive alongside a gushing menses—a rush of blood that morphs into a crimson deluge by the end. (Throw a tampon at me now, motherfucker!)

  As amusing as these scenarios are, they are not, to say the least, ones to which your first-time feminine-product buyer can, or wishes to, relate. But traditional boys’ fantasies—say, The Hobbit, or The Chronicles of Narnia, both of which, by the way, I am extremely fond—are almost aggressively bloodless, each fantastic species stuck in ageless eternity, the only sex sublimated in lightning-swift elfin arrows and the like. They also take as their setting the entire world—underworld included!—in stark contrast to the books in this chapter, in which the supernatural occurs when one is doing something as ordinary as setting the table or brushing one’s hair.

  And therein, I think, lies much of their appeal. As opposed to Bilbo Baggins’s charge to save the world, the utility of these powers is, like the best politics, local. Stranger with My Face’s Lia Stratton, whose body fills out just as she learns to hop out of it, learns to accept a different kind of family and a different kind of boyfriend. The Girl with the Silver Eyes’ lonely Katie Welker finds a new group of friends who also can talk to cats and like to take books out of the library (both are actionable, apparently), while Blossom Culp finds yet another use for her incisive insights, becoming closer to people, including Alexander Armsworth. But it’s Hangin’ Out with Cici’s Victoria whose time-travel jaunt produces, in my opinion, the most desirable power of all: She becomes able to get along with her mother.

  If we take the girls’ new powers as a metaphor for puberty, we find that these changes, with their physical aftereffects, can be occasionally disconcerting. Still, they rarely threaten to swamp a town in their all-encompassing evil. In fact, they herald new insights about one’s self, as well as a host of inviting developments on the horizon for friends, family, and future prospects, both romantic-and work-related. They are, in short, good news for the girls. And that’s good news for Tampax users everywhere.

  BOOK REPORT

  Ghosts I Have Been

  By Richard Peck 1977

  Ferry Me Across the Water

  I tell you, the world is so full of ghosts, a person wonders if there’s a soul to be found on the Other Side. Or anybody snug in a quiet grave.

  It can be generally agreed that any story is improved by the addition of a) a wry Southern narrator, b) an aggrieved ghost, and c) anything, anything, involving the Titanic. Hitting on all cylinders is Richard Peck’s Ghosts I Have Been, the turn-of-the-century story of would-be spiritualist Blossom Culp and her sudden rise from an adolescent Madame Blavatsky to a genuine, undead-espying psychic.

  In the first book of Peck’s quartet, The Ghost Was Mine, Blossom Culp, of the genteel, fictional Bluff City, is a brash secondary character and sidekick to narrator Alexander Armsworth, the far more well heeled neighbor who fights both his second sight and Blossom’s undeniable affections. In Ghosts I Have Been, Blossom takes center stage as a troublemaker, schemer, and seeker of attention, but even she is mildly taken aback when she learns that she is actually in possession of the same powers of second sight as her mama, a gruff, toothless gypsy given to speaking to Blossom mostly in grunts. The world fame that accompanies her newly found powers, however, she handles with relative aplomb.

  But I am, as Blossom often informs us she is, getting ahead of myself. We must first touch on the delights of the narrator herself, who has a knack for being around when curious events occur—or, as she puts it, “nearby, as I often am.” Bluff City, the small town where she’s lived her whole life, is “mainly divided into two camps: those who have already arrived and those who never will,” and even after she becomes a celebrity, she remains “something of a misfit.”

  When we meet her, however, she’s still grasping the short end of the stick, heading off to school unfed and leaving her home, a hovel by the streetcar—“Ours is a two-room dwelling which we have rent free, it being abandoned,” she informs us—then passing the Armsworths’ house nearby, from which drift pleasant, bacon-oriented smells. “Some people live high on the hog and no mistake,” she says:

  I consider that I was always well off without such advantages, as they tend to kill your initiative. As the poet says, necessity makes the mule plow. And I for one would not care to pass my life up on a porch, gazing into an embroidery hoop.

  Naming no names, there are some people who still say I do not know my place. How wrong they are. I know it well and always did. But I have always meant to better myself, and when you are on your own in this life, it is uphill work.

  Now, I am not vain when it comes to looks. If I was, a trip to the mirror would cure me. But I am vain about my resourcefulness. There is more to be learned about a town from the wrong side of the tracks than from the right. I made a study of this town long before I had the power to see beyond it.

  The revelation of Blossom’s powers—and the appearance of the ghost whereof the title speaks—are set off, as it were, by a scene involving an outhouse, a gang of boys, Blossom in a sheet, and an old man with a shotgun filled with rock salt. The events of the night are too various to relate in full, but I hope you will forgive my placing the scene below, where Blossom bursts in on the old man in question, as it is one of the funniest in modern literature:

  My intention was to step just inside the privy and pull the door shut. Then when the gang approached to tip it over, I planned to step out, with the lighted candle, and moan eerily. If this wouldn’t strike them half-dead with horror, what would? I grinned under my mosquito bar at my plans. Alas, I grinned too soon.

  As there was no breeze that night, I fished the matches out of my shoe top and lit my candle as I stepped up to Old Man Leverette’s privy door.

  At this point, things went seriously wrong. I had one foot inside when I come face to face with Old Man Leverette himself. He was in his privy, using it. His nightshirt was hitched up above his hips. My candle threw dreadful shadows in the tiny room, and light fell on Old Man Leverette’s startled face and on the torn pages of the Montgomery Ward catalogue in his aged hands.

  Near enough to the grave himself, he let out a kind of Indian war whoop. He rose up, thought better of it, and flopped back down on the seat. I was as startled as he was, and the wind from his gasping breath set the candle flame bobbing.

  “Whoooo, whoooo, whooo in the Sam Hill are y
ou?” Old Man Leverette howled.

  “I beg your pardon, I’m sure,” I said, not wanting to identify myself. “…I just happened to be passing.”

  “So was I!” Old Man Leverette roared.

  As Blossom would say, “Remember this. It bears on the story later on.” (Blossom’s syntax may be even more catching than HARRIET M. WELSCH’S CAPS.) In a roundabout way, the twists and turns of which are too various to relate at present, Blossom’s prank results in an extremely begrudging invitation to the house of the school’s queen bee, Letty Shambaugh (and a free wardrobe from her parents’ Select Dry Goods Company, in another twist too complicated to relate). Blossom accepts, thinking it will simply be a champion opportunity to torment the prissy, obnoxious Letty, something she does as often as possible. (“‘You mean you won’t come?’ [Letty] said, brightening. ‘I mean I will,’ I said. And I did.”)

  At Letty’s house, Blossom turns events around so that she can give one of her famous faux seances, planning to use the opportunity to reveal that two girls in the assembled group cheated on a recent test, a piece of information she picked up on one of her many visits to the office of the long-suffering Miss Spaulding, the school’s principal. However, it’s she who’s shocked by what happens:

  “Don’t be too long,” Letty warned, “or we’ll give you a broom, and you can fly home on it, ha ha.”

  I began to sway in my chair then, starting up slow. I have always been able to roll my eyes up into my head so only the whites show. As a kid I practiced that by the hour. “Oh, look what’s happening to her eyes, isn’t that sickening!” somebody said.

  I moaned low in my throat, wishing I’d thought to ask for a candle. Candlelight always adds a touch.

  But I proceeded without it…. But then something happened that even I could not explain. My eyes did not roll back, yet I seemed to go blind for a second. There was a peal of thunder that nobody else seemed to hear. Then a strange flash, like lightning at night—jagged and blue. The room and the girls flickered and faded from me, and I spoke without conscious thought:

  “Oh, dear,” I said. “Newton just fell off the back of the trolley and was run over by Miss Dabney’s electric auto.”

  It’s true. Letty’s plump, braying brother has just fallen off the trolley (he emerges unscathed) and Blossom has been revealed to have the Second Sight, much to the consternation of her mama, who had long groaned with unconvincing regret that the gift had died with her. Beyond gaining her some small recognition among her peers—including Alexander, who is displeased to have the supernatural rear its ugly head again—it also gains Blossom somewhat of a protectoress in the form of the elderly but sharp Miss Dabney, who has a supernatural problem of her own she asks Blossom to clear up—namely, a maid who hung herself in the pantry nearly 100 years ago, who’s still hanging around in the back kitchen, banging pots ominously:

  “Minerva, I’ve come to tell you something to your advantage.” She waited. I was reminded of how a cat will freeze on a fence with one paw drawn up, to see if you are friend or foe. I was exploring new territory…“Mr. Dabney, he won’t send you packing. He died…here a while back.”

  “In 1892,” Miss Dabney whispered behind me.

  …“And so you’re to settle down and quit your fretting. Mr. Dabney’s little girl—”

  “Gertrude,” Miss Dabney muttered.

  “—Gertrude is all grown up now, and she would consider it a privilege to share her home with you.”

  “But tell her to be quieter, for Heaven’s sake,” Miss Dabney murmured.

  After successfully changing Minerva from an angry spook into one who likes to bake spectral cakes and set them out at teatime (“‘I really ought to pay her a wage, if I knew how,’ Miss Dabney would often say in a vague way”), Blossom is on a roll, ridding the town of a traveling spiritualist huckster in a spectacle that is universally successful, except in that it lands her yet again in Miss Spaulding’s office. This time, the weary principal is at her wit’s end, and decides that the best way to tamp Blossom down is to engage journalist Lowell Seaforth, the husband of Alexander’s older sister (“What he ever saw in Alexander’s big sister, Lucille, is the deepest mystery of this account”) to write a story on Blossom’s spiritual powers for the daily Pantagraph. Miss Spaulding, not the spiritual type, is quite certain that this will solve the problem of Blossom’s being “nearby” at any given conflagration. First, it will give her the attention she is obviously desperately seeking. Next, it will reveal that she has no special powers, as such a thing would “fly in the face of Science.”

  Miss Spaulding accomplishes the first of the goals with great dispatch. Unfortunately, the second eludes her when Blossom slips “through a crack in time, like a termite through splintered floorboard.” She lands in a cabin on the swiftly sinking Titanic, where a British couple is fighting violently over how best to escape the icy looming mountain while their son, Julian—the ghost Blossom has been seeing around town—lies sleeping, totally unaware of the events unfolding around him:

  With no thought of anything but themselves, his own flesh and blood had left poor Julian for fish bait…. If this was an instance of English child care, I for one would settle for Bluff City and my mama.

  There’s no fighting fate, or changing what’s over and done with. Still, I struggled to wake Julian and send him flying for the lifeboats. I yanked on his blanket, but my poor transparent fingers poked right through it. I darted over to where his life jacket hung on a peg, but my hands scooped through it like a fork into whipped cream. I couldn’t have lifted a matchstick, let alone a life jacket, for I was a ghost, haunting the past. History can be very cruel….

  Then the first bodies hurtled past the porthole as people dropped into the sea. I tumbled back across the cabin and threw my weightless body across Julian…. He woke and struggled against the band that held him fast. His mouth was a startled circle. And in that moment I knew he saw me. Working one hand free, he reached for where my face was, and his fist closed in the air.

  The electric lamp failed and water roared through both portholes under heavy pressure. In the last second I found I could clasp Julian’s small hand. He clung tight. This was a miracle, but we were soon parted.

  The rest of Ghosts I Have Been involves much in the way of fun, including a transatlantic journey, a meeting with the queen of England, and an unauthorized dramatic exhibition at Madame Tussaud’s. But whatever happens, I still keep coming back to that touching last scene where Blossom attempts to grasp the boy’s hand, and is able to hold it only briefly before he’s swept away to his end, and she back to her own world.

  While Blossom is surely delightful as a comic character, and impressive as a spirited pioneer (as her mama puts it, “She’s a willful little…thing”), Blossom’s true power lies in her ability to bridge worlds of all kind. Between this world and the next, yes, but also between her side of the tracks and Alexander’s side of the tracks; between Miss Dabney’s barren spinster life and the queen of England’s; between formal Miss Spaulding and the world of the yellow press; and between loneliness and intimacy.

  Because, while Miss Spaulding fears Blossom leaves a trail of chaos in her wake, but actually, Blossom’s exploits set to rest wounds that have been raw for far too long. (What is a ghost, after all, other than the embodiment of unfinished business?) There are actual ghosts, like Minerva and Julian, whom she puts to rest as best she can, but the world is full of people stuck in a life that needs a drastic nudge to get set to rights. She may, as she proclaims, be a misfit. But her most miraculous power is the ability to put people, living or dead, in a better place.

  BOOK REPORT

  A Gift of Magic

  By Lois Duncan 1971

  Options and Futures

  Nancy pulled herself awake and sat up in bed. “Mother’s crying,” she said.

  If every author has their redheaded stepchild of a book (John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick—WTF?) every author also has the book that, whether it’s
a reader favorite or not, seems the purest expression of their very authorial being. For Lois Duncan, A Gift of Magic is that work—and all the more strikingly for eschewing the trademark of her many other beloved novels (namely, being fucking terrifying). Instead, it takes an ordinary character dealing, as most of us were, with the changes of puberty right alongside changes in her family. In A Gift of Magic, there’s no evil twin, no menacing stranger—only a girl who can see the past, future, and present far, far away, fighting with a power she does not yet understand or control.

  When we first meet our pre-, present-, and post-cogriffic heroine Nancy Barrett, she, older sister, Kirby, and younger brother Brendon have just been taken by their mother, Elizabeth, back to Elizabeth’s childhood home in Florida. Elizabeth has amicably separated from their father, a war photographer who dragged his entire family all over the world on an endless international heat-seeking jaunt that left them global travelers but curiously sheltered. So sheltered, actually, that the entire family takes Nancy’s gift for knowing who’s on the phone or that someone is coming to the door completely for granted. Even the reader, in the first line above, learns about Nancy in a blink-and-you’d-miss-it way.

  Like all (sigh) middle children, Nancy is the emotional lightning rod for the family, and while Brendon and Kirby handle the separation with relative equanimity, Nancy’s violent reaction to their new circumstances is rife with Duncian foreboding:

  It was a stupid question. Of course, there was something wrong. There had been something wrong for days, for weeks, for months even. Now that the words had actually been spoken, Nancy could feel, with a sick kind of acceptance, the great wave of wrongness rising higher and higher above them, ready to come toppling over to swamp them all. With a violent effort she braced herself against it and made her mind go closed.