A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  When she was done, she took off her black T-shirt and jeans and changed into a black sundress she’d laid out on the sofa. She stepped into flip-flops and went to the kitchen and took her will from the otherwise empty junk drawer, where she’d kept it with the take-out menus and magnets from banks and broccoli rubber bands. A will at her age: it was a perk of having a paralegal for a sister. All the estate planning you could ever want. Who cared that you had no property to speak of? “Yes, but what if you get hit by a bus?” Vee had argued when Lady and Joe were newly separated, “and your executor sues the city for millions and wins? Don’t you want a say in who those millions go to? Or who they don’t go to?”

  “You don’t have a will, though,” Lady pointed out.

  “Because if you die intestate without kids, the law gives everything to your spouse,” Vee said, “which I don’t mind. But you should.”

  The truth was that Lady didn’t care one way or the other. Let Joe inherit her rabbit-eared TV. Hell, let him inherit the fortune reaped by her estate after her imaginary collision with a bus. But Vee wasn’t having it. “Over my dead body,” she said, and she came by the next night with the document, ten legal-size pages although only two sentences in the entire thing mattered. The first of these sentences said, “I give and bequeath the rest, residue, and remainder of my property in equal shares to my surviving sisters.” The second one said, “It is my intention that this will shall not be revoked by my forthcoming divorce from Joseph Hopper.” All the rest was archaic gobbledygook.

  Lady hadn’t looked at the document since she’d signed it. But now, given that it was soon to take effect—to mature, as Vee would have said—now, before folding it into thirds and slipping it inside her purse, Lady stopped to skim it. She wished she could blot out the reference to Joe. The divorce was no longer forthcoming. It was done, it was history. Why did he still have to be a part of her story?

  She wished, too, she could cross out “the rest, residue, and remainder,” and replace it with a phrase that sounded like something she’d actually say. Something like “I give all my shit to Vee and Delph, although why they’d want any of it, I have no idea.”

  “The rest, residue, and remainder,” she’d said the evening Vee had presented her with the document, Vee proud of herself the way a kid is when bestowing a handmade Mother’s Day card upon the kind of mom who gets off on such things. “Doesn’t that sound like what’s left after you kick? Ash residue? Skeletal remains? Eternal rest?”

  Vee had been annoyed. “It’s just legalese.” She’d expected gratitude and admiration, not a bad review.

  “Why can’t it just be English?” Lady asked.

  “Jesus, Lady,” Vee said. “None of our clients who actually pay an arm and a leg for these things stop to read them. Why do you have to? Just sign whatever your name is these days.”

  Her name then, as now, was Lily Alter. No longer Frankl, our father’s name. No longer Hopper, her husband’s name. The new name was such a recent acquisition it still felt like an alias. As she wrote it, she felt as though she were committing fraud.

  “Okay, you can die now,” Vee said when Lady put down her pen.

  The witnesses, a Korean mother and her adult daughters who lived in the apartment next door, had scowled. They understood more English than they spoke. They didn’t like Vee’s sense of humor. Smiling comfortingly at Lady, they sang out a Korean word that sounded like “muenster,” as in the cheese.

  “Man-se,” the mother said, enunciating. “Means may you live ten thousand more year.”

  The final thing Lady did before leaving the apartment that Sunday was gather the diaries she’d kept on and off through the years. She took those small spiral notebooks filled with her dull day-to-day and threw them into a black trash bag.

  She knew that the most recent of the notebooks contained a recap of the soup conversation, and she considered stopping what she was doing to find it and read it over, see if she was remembering it correctly, but she forced herself to resist succumbing to nostalgia and fondness or anything else that might interfere with what she was planning to do later that night. Instead she slung the trash bag over one shoulder and left the apartment.

  It was a little past midnight. She trudged west, pushing through the thick heat of the night, the black plastic sack sticking to her back. Standing on the broken concrete and exposed rebar that was the bank of the Hudson, she hurled the bag as far as she could. Not very far, but far enough. She watched as slowly it sank.

  It was a relief to be rid of the weight of the journals. The literal weight, she meant. The contents of the notebooks weren’t weighty at all; she never wrote anything revealing. She rarely wrote anything that was true. She didn’t lie, per se. She just committed literary sins of omission. Sleeping with a married dentist? Who’s sleeping with a married dentist? She was drowning those notebooks not to prevent people from learning the discouraging facts of her life, but to prevent them from laughing at all she’d left out.

  She reflected, too—how could she not?—on our mother’s leap into this river the year before. Vee had called her. Lady was answering phones then.

  “Mom’s not here,” Vee said. “She hasn’t left the house in weeks, and now suddenly she’s not here.”

  “Enjoy the time off,” Lady said.

  “We thought she might be with you.”

  “With me? When has she ever walked the four blocks to see me?”

  Later in the day Vee called her again.

  It was not Lady’s choice to die the same way our mother had. The method Lady preferred had come to her almost immediately. She would hang herself in the basement laundry room of the Riverside Drive building. She might have done it in her own building, where there was no chance that her sisters would be the ones to discover her, but she was being a little selfish: she didn’t want to die among roaches and rats. The basement in our building was cleaner.

  But although she debated over which building to die in, she never wavered when it came to the method. She was actually good with ropes and knots; she’d made a number of intricate wall hangings and plant hangers from rope over the years: the macramé craze.

  Walking away from the river, she saw few people. The professional pyrotechnics of the holiday were over and done with. All she heard now were the occasional explosions of cherry bombs in nearby Spanish Harlem. Tomorrow, the last day of the long weekend, the last day of this wretched vacation, there would be newspaper articles about the accidental mutilations of reckless boys by reckless boys, about the deliberate mutilations of cats. She was glad she wouldn’t have to read any of it.

  It was already tomorrow—the early hours of Monday—when she reached our building. She let herself in with the key she’d had since always, and boarded the waiting elevator. Without thinking—a muscle memory—she pressed the button to our floor. It was only when the doors opened and she heard music seeping out from under our apartment door—Buffy Sainte-Marie, all that vibrato, and the volume much too loud considering the hour—that she realized she’d gone up when she’d meant to go down.

  For a brief moment she stood in the elevator, annoyed and uncertain. When the doors started to close, though, instead of letting them, instead of pressing B as she should have done in the first place, she extended her hand, and the doors reopened.

  She stepped into the hallway and stood on the welcome mat, a little rag rug that had lain before the door for three generations, the fibers frayed, the colors rubbed away. She was unsure what to do next. Then she made a decision: she reached into her purse, retrieved her keys again, and let herself in. Leaving the door ajar, she stood inside the foyer, just stood there, as if she had no idea how she’d come to be where she was.

  Vee and Delph, on the other hand, reacted as if they’d been expecting her. They were both awake despite the hour, and in the kitchen, Vee in a ruby-red Gap T-shirt and cutoffs, Delph in a calico granny dress, both in bare feet.

  “Hey,” Vee said. “There you are.”

 
Delph was leaning against the fridge, eating a peanut-butter-on-pumpernickel sandwich. “Want some?” she said, advancing toward Lady, holding the sandwich out. “I’m eating it, but I’m not even hungry.”

  “No thanks, and don’t get peanut butter in my hair.”

  That this is what came out of her mouth surprised Lady as much as any of the other surprising things she’d done that weekend. Concern for her hair, her terrible wiry hair. Although the truth was that Lady had made a bit of an effort with her hair that night. She was hoping to look halfway decent when she was discovered. There’d be the broken neck, the Basenji-blue tongue, the bulging eyeballs, maybe (she was sorry to say) a horrid mess on the floor beneath her, but at least she’d be wearing a nice dress and her hair would look attended to, restrained with one of her leather barrettes, her turquoise earrings gently undulating back and forth.

  By way of apology she said to Delph, “That is one very brown sandwich.”

  Delph smiled. “It’s really dry too.” She took another bite as she closed the front door with her ass.

  Lady dropped her purse on the hall chair. She stepped into the living room. “Is that my album you’re playing?” she asked.

  “You’re the one who left it behind,” Vee said. “That old saw about possession being nine-tenths of the law? It turns out to be true.”

  “I don’t want it back,” Lady said. “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m happy you like it. Mi shit es su shit.” She looked around. “Where’s Eddie?”

  “Exhausted. Asleep.”

  “I’m going to make you a sandwich of your own,” Delph said. “With jelly. I think you’ve lost weight. You look terrible.”

  “Especially the way she has her hair pulled back,” Vee said. “So tight. She looks like Olive Oyl.”

  “Well, she’s not that skinny,” Delph said.

  We ate in the living room, Delph transporting two sandwiches, two glasses, and a bottle of Southern Comfort, managing everything at once, though this meant she had to carry her sandwich in her teeth and wedge the bottle under her armpit.

  “Since when Southern Comfort?” Lady said.

  Vee shrugged. “We’re listening to Buffy and drinking like Janis.” And when we were situated, the sandwich-eaters on the couch, Vee on the floor, she said, “Delph’s right, Lady. You do look like crap.”

  “I got it. I didn’t think the Olive Oyl comparison was a compliment.”

  “Look at your eyes. It’s like you’ve been crying.”

  “When have you known me to cry?”

  “Well, you don’t cook, so I know you weren’t peeling onions.”

  “I cook,” Lady said.

  “Spaghetti’s not cooking.”

  “I cook things requiring peeled onions all the time.”

  “So you were peeling onions?”

  “No.” The record had ended. We listened to the sound of the needle lifting, returning to the first track, same side. “They’re painting the halls outside my apartment,” Lady said when the music began again, the song about the sexy woman who was pursued by every man in town. The three of us used to sing it together in Lady’s room, wiggling our hips, using roll-on deodorant bottles as microphones. “What’s hoochy koochy mean?” Delph would ask. “What’s oversexed?”

  “Really?” Vee said. “The slumlord’s painting the halls?”

  “The fumes are killing me. My eyes keep watering.”

  “So stay the night here,” Vee said.

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Stay two nights. Stay forever. Come home. Nobody understands why you don’t.”

  Lady looked down the hall to the master bedroom’s ever-shut door. We’ve long called that bedroom the Dead and Dying Room. Our grandmother Karin died in it after many years suffering with an unnamed illness we assume was cancer—cancer back in the day when no one said the word out loud. And a couple of weeks after she died there, our grandfather Richard died there too—although technically speaking he didn’t die in there, but from there: he’d opened the window, hoisted himself up on the sill, wobbled for a moment, then propelled himself forward. Our mother had been in her bedroom across the hall doing math homework when she heard the screams from neighbors as his body passed each floor.

  Like her father, our mother hadn’t literally died inside the Dead and Dying Room, but it had been her bedroom when she drowned herself across the street.

  “I don’t know,” Lady said. “Sometimes I do think about moving back. But it’s a little haunted house-ish here.”

  Delph nodded. “Tell me about it,” she said.

  As botched as Lady’s attempt ended up, that’s how promising it had seemed at roughly four in the morning when she left her old bed where she’d been lying in her dress. She stepped into her flip-flops, patted her hair back in place, and headed to the front door. She stopped before she opened it, took a moment to look into the living room, where her half-eaten peanut butter sandwich remained on the coffee table, where the empty bottle of Southern Comfort lay on its side on the carpet. She could hear Vee and Eddie and Delph snuffle and snort in their sleep. She gazed out the window and saw the park and the Hudson and, when she looked uptown, the George Washington Bridge, its necklace lights ablaze for the holiday after two years of energy-saving darkness.

  But once she was downstairs in the laundry room, she didn’t dawdle. She headed straight to the rusted shelving units where tenants kept cardboard boxes of detergent with their apartment numbers marked on the sides and where the super kept old wooden soda boxes filled with hammers and nails, electrical cords and rags, things like that. A few Phillips-head screwdrivers. Lady recognized them now.

  The box that interested her was the one containing a few old clotheslines. She chose a waxy white rope that seemed cleaner and stronger and less likely to burn her fingers or abrade her neck than the ones of brown hemp. She was also drawn to the obsessive tidiness with which it, of all the clotheslines, had been stored. It had been curled around and around itself until it lay in a flattened circle, a pretty coiling pattern like a sisal placemat.

  Her head began singing. A pretty coil is like a melody. She questioned the lyric. Was melody right? Or was it memory? A pretty girl is like a memory? She was feeling a memory coming at her now, she was recalling Joe Hopper during their happier years, which had lasted from her freshman year of college right up to her weak-kneed decision to marry him spring semester of her junior year. She was remembering the way he used to cheese down the docking line of the small sailboats they’d sometimes rent on City Island. Cheese down. It meant to coil the tail of the line to give a neat appearance. He’d taught her the phrase, couldn’t believe she knew so little about sailing. “New Yorkers think they’re so sophisticated,” he’d said, “but the truth is, you’re all rubes in your own way.”

  She thought he hadn’t minded that she was an unsophisticated New Yorker. She knew he liked educating her. “You’re probably wondering why I’m going to all this trouble,” he said the first time he wound the line so it lay on the sunny pier like a hairy snake nuzzling its own tail.

  She hadn’t been wondering. She’d been gazing out at the bleached horizon, trying to distinguish the migrating strips of white that were clouds from the subdued circle of white that was the sun from the broad canvas of white that was the sky. But she listened as he explained. She knew that was her job. She didn’t mind it. She liked learning new things.

  “It’s a seaman’s tradition,” he’d said of the whorled rope. “A gesture of courtesy for the next sailor.”

  He said this as if he’d come from a long line of seamen rather than a long line of life insurance agents. He said it as if taking out an eight-foot dinghy once or twice a summer made him John Paul Jones or Popeye. When he’d been fifteen, his parents had made him transfer from his local public school to an all-male prep school in New England, the kind with mandatory chapel and a dress code involving navy blue blazers and rep ties and an impressive record of sending its students on to the Ivies. This wa
s where he’d learned to sail. But, as he later told Lady, he’d also found himself having sex with his roommate, which had freaked him out, and he returned the next year to the coed high school in his hometown in Connecticut, a comfortable suburb on the outskirts of a moribund mill city.

  This had been the shameful secret he’d told her that night, the secret that had been so hard for him to utter that he’d bitten through his lip trying to get it out. The sex with his roommate. She and Joe had been getting high on the roof of Lehman Hall on the small Barnard campus when he’d told her. He’d taken a hit off the joint, inhaled, exhaled, posed. Then he’d come out with it. He’d never told anyone else about it, he said. He teared up a little as he told her, not only because he was ashamed, but because he was relieved. And as he confessed, his front teeth tore into his lip and the blood dribbled into his lip beard, turning a few strands a deep, sticky mahogany. She blamed those mingy tears—the tears of saline, the tears of hemoglobin—for her accepting his proposal that night.

  He had draped his arm over her shoulders. He had begged her to keep his secret. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone,” he said.

  “Of course not,” she said. “Who would I tell?”

  He cut her a look. They both knew perfectly well who’d she tell.

  “My sisters wouldn’t care. Don’t lots of boys experiment that way?”

  “I wasn’t experimenting,” he muttered. “I was doing what I had to do.” He looked grim and resolute, as if recalling a march into battle. “It wasn’t homo sex,” he said. “It was prison sex.”

  Lady took the white clothesline to the long table where tenants folded warm clothes fresh out of the dryers. Sitting on the metal folding chair that she planned to stand on in a few minutes, she began to coil the rope, this time not a flat coil but a three-dimensional coil, a cobra-rising-from-a-basket coil, and not merely a pretty coil, but a coil with a purpose, a function, a goal.

  When she was done, she looked at her creation and was pleased. At the same time she couldn’t squelch the thought: no noose is good news.