And it wasn’t as if there were other alternatives available to her. What was she supposed to do? Mail a get-well card? Send a balloon bouquet?
The first time we heard the curse spoken was in 1963, the weekend of the Kennedy assassination. Along with our mother—along with the entire country—we spent those November days watching TV. There was no work, no school. Our mother set up the ironing board in the living room, directly in front of the blond console. She was wearing a quilted bathrobe the color of canned salmon. She had a Lucky between her lips and a can of Tab that was 50 percent vodka on the wide end of the board. A kerchief of pink netting covered her hair except for her bangs, which were bobby-pinned around a black wire roller. Her exposed calves were skinny, and her veins were varicosed. This wasn’t an aberrant or slovenly look. It was what tired mothers looked like, at least during the daytime, in 1963.
That assassination weekend was when the 1950s turned into the ’60s. We were watching something we’d never before seen. We don’t mean the assassination itself, though there was that too. We mean the fact that the coverage of the assassination was twenty-four/seven and uninterrupted by commercials. We mean the way the reporters were shoving their gargantuan microphones in the faces of anyone and everyone, the famous and ordinary alike. Eisenhower said something ponderous and canned about praying, and that was as expected, we were used to that sort of thing. But immediately after, live from Rockefeller Center—only four miles from where we sat, folding sheets—a teenager in an open coat, a girl with braids whose black face was brightened with tears, said, “I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do,” and this startled us.
Those two sentences: they seemed meaningless, and then they seemed heartbreaking and profound, and then it seemed as if the God we didn’t believe in might have put those sentences into her mouth, that they might have been the sentences God would have uttered if someone had pushed a mike in his face. Or maybe the girl was God.
It seemed impossible that anyone would dare say another word after that girl had uttered those sentences. It struck us that maybe no one would ever say another word ever again.
That’s when our mother spoke up. She raised the iron, hot water dribbling and sizzling down the sole plate cover and onto a pillowcase. “The sins of the fathers are visited on the sons to the third and fourth generations.”
How were we to know it came from the Bible? We thought she’d made it up on the spot. We thought she was being poetic. So poetic, in fact, we didn’t understand what she was talking about. Whose father? Our father? Which sons? Who had sons? She had to give us a primer on Joseph P. Kennedy. “You just wait,” she said. “Over the years all those children will go down like dominoes thanks to that father of theirs. Already three of them are gone. And watch, it’s going to get the grandchildren too. That’ll be the third generation. Then there’ll be one more to go.”
We thought about this a few days later when John-John up and saluted. We were incredulous. “Why?” we asked. “What do the grandchildren have to do with anything?”
Our mother shrugged. “What do I know?”
Nothing, it seemed. She knew nothing. For instance, she seemed oblivious to the curse’s applicability to us. Of course, back then we were oblivious too. It was Delph who first realized, so many years later, sitting by Lady’s hospital bed, that in this single and unenviable way we were in the same boat as the Kennedys.
Delph got the name of the tattoo parlor from her best friend, a gay bike messenger named Joshua Gottlieb. Every day Joshua came by the small office where Delph worked that summer. The office consisted of a single room filled with gray metal. Her boss’s big gray metal desk was pushed against the wall near the windows that looked out on Broadway and Gray’s Papaya. There was a gray metal air-conditioning unit in one of those windows, unplugged and bearing a handwritten sign that read, “Broken! If you touch this you will die!”
Delph’s small gray metal desk was pushed against the opposite wall. There were fist-size holes punched into that wall, and the linoleum throughout the room appeared to have been attacked with the claw of a hammer. The name of the business was Elite Information Exchange.
Elite Information Exchange sold subscriptions to dozens of daily newsletters, each newsletter devoted to one unique investment opportunity—gold, real estate, oil, cattle futures, cocoa, pork. Her boss dictated the content for each of the newsletters onto little cassettes at night, and Delph typed them up the next day, then walked to a copy shop to have them reproduced and collated and stapled, then returned to the office to address them by hand, then walked to the post office to have them mailed to the eager and gullible, the literally poor fools who believed that each newsletter had been researched and written by a different economist or investment guru, every one an expert in his particular field. The experts’ names were all long and Waspy and male—Hamilton M. Carlisle had been one, and Vee had asked, “Why not Chatsworth Osborne Jr.? Why not J. L. Gotrocks? Why not Carlisle M. Hamilton?”—while the subscribers had names that caused Delph to make assumptions she wasn’t proud of. Not quite Jed Clampett, she said, but close to, and their addresses seemed to be disproportionately in places like Mississippi and West Virginia and Oklahoma and North Dakota, places where, she knew, plenty of intelligent and educated people lived—William Faulkner! Booker T. Washington!—but still, she suspected that those intelligent and educated people did not reside at the specific addresses within those states to which she was sending those letters.
In short, the hours she spent in the Elite Information Exchange office that summer were guilt-ridden and lonely and boring. They were also criminal: soon after Delph returned to school, the boss was arrested for mail fraud and sent to Danbury for a couple of months.
On the other hand, Joshua Gottlieb was also a part of that summer. That was its saving grace.
We’re all of us shy, but Delph is the shyest. You only have to look at her to know it. She slouches when she walks, slumps when she sits. She keeps her head down, letting her hair fall across her face. That hair. When we were young, the three of us in the same tub, Lady would shampoo it, massaging the green glob of Prell until it coated and straightened every strand with thick white suds and she could style the foamy concoction atop Delph’s head—here’s how you’d look with a slicked-back ponytail; here’s how you’d look with a French twist—in an effort to convince Delph it would look better, even be better for her, if she did something about the way she presented herself, if she tried to look more like everyone else. But Delph wasn’t interested in looking more like everyone else. She still tells stories about the magical properties of her hair, about how, in school, she would sit at her desk bowing her head as if in prayer and her hair would flop forward and conceal her face, and she would be rendered invisible. Teachers who might have otherwise asked her to stand and recite a geometric proof or conjugate a verb in a language not her own would suddenly forget her name and harass someone else. Kids who normally tormented her could no longer detect her presence. She still likes her cloak of invisibility. She likes keeping a distance between herself and others. People are her third favorite species, she says. First cats. Then dogs. Or, no, wait—fourth favorite species. The Central Park horses are number three. Those enormous sad eyes, those heartbreakingly silly hats.
Crowds of people, she says—that she doesn’t mind. You’d think she would, but she doesn’t. Hustle and bustle, New York City, that’s all right with her. It’s actual encounters with one of the individuals who constitute those mobs that she dislikes. She doesn’t mean Lady, she doesn’t mean Vee, she never meant Eddie. It’s outsiders she means. Literally—the people outside our apartment, with all their gossip and clever bon mots at the expense of others. Imperfect beings who spend their lives judging other imperfect beings. Frauds and liars. Scolds and snobs. She’s afflicted, Delph says, with the ability to read the thought bubbles over other peoples’ heads. Those other people, they never—not ever—have anything nice to say about anyone.
&nb
sp; “Such meanness,” she says.
But there are exceptions to every rule, and now and then she has run into a person with whom she feels comfortable. These people—all of them men—have been so few she can count them off on one hand.
There was her eighth-grade English teacher, whose love of England up through the Elizabethans touched her for reasons she could never explain. For almost all of eighth grade he’d buy a couple of BLTs from the teachers’ cafeteria, and they’d eat in his classroom, Delph safe from meanness and thought bubbles for a full forty-five minutes, as he told her stories about British kings and queens and she recited passages she’d memorized from Shakespeare because she wanted to give him gifts but didn’t know what a man his age would want. The Shakespeare, it turned out, was just the thing. He would beam. He would say, “Who can say more than this rich praise, that you alone are you.” How she mourned when June and promotion to high school came along. It was like a death for her.
Later, at a time when our mother’s craziness was peaking, Delph found herself able to talk to a therapist at the nearby free clinic. This was a young man with jutting cheekbones and protuberant eyeballs and a habit of sitting quite literally at the edge of his seat, so that every part of him seemed to be leaning toward her, eager to hear the next thing she had to say. His manner, however, was tentative, almost shy. He’d only just begun to meet with clients, he confided, and she’d feigned surprise, though she was confident she’d have figured that out on her own, given his tendency to talk about himself at length and his habit of alternating long periods of silence with blurted interpretations that were always wrong and sometimes inappropriate. “Sheesh,” he said, interrupting Delph as she came to the fourth family suicide during their initial session. “Is this your life story or the plot of The Guiding Light?”
“Really?” Vee said. “He honestly said that? A therapist?”
Delph’s initial reaction was also shock, but the more she thought about it, the more she thought his response had been fair. Who could deny that our family history was a little soap-opera-ish? “I think he was nervous,” she said in his defense. Unlike Vee, Delph didn’t hold it against him, the fact that he was not the world’s greatest therapist. He was working at a free clinic where the fees were determined by a sliding scale. She was being charged five dollars per session. If he was mediocre—well, you get what you pay for, don’t you? She believed he was doing the best that he could, and she was pleased, even proud, as he improved over time. He interrupted less frequently. He generated fewer cynical thought balloons. Finally, he changed her life when he told her that he didn’t care what his supervisor or anyone said, he would not put her on the autism spectrum, he would put her on the introversion spectrum—at the low end of that spectrum, perhaps only a scooch away from the high end of the autism spectrum—but on the introversion spectrum nevertheless.
“But did you ever think you were autistic?” Vee said when Delph reported the good news.
“Not until he told me I wasn’t. But then I started thinking. You know, he’s not very good at this therapy stuff. So what if he’s wrong and I am autistic? High-end autistic? Super-high-end autistic? Then I’d be doing great just to be getting up and going out into the world every day. If I were autistic, it would do wonders for my self-esteem.”
As was the case with her erudite English teacher, she loved the incompetent therapist dearly—and by this time she knew what transference was (she’d taken out every book in the Barnard library on clinical therapy to learn how to avoid doing or saying anything that might make her less than a perfect patient), so she just let herself enjoy her adoration of him. Not that she ever discussed that adoration with him. Why should she? she thought. She’d also learned what countertransference was, and she didn’t notice him talking about his adoration of her. “By now you must have developed sexual feelings for me,” he once said—they talked a lot about her lack of interest in sex—“because it’s only normal, just part of the process.” And you for me, she thought as she hid behind her hair and said nothing. He said nothing, too, waiting. They sat like that, in silence for the rest of the session. What a job, she thought on the walk home. You sit there staring and nodding, while people sit across from you all day long, falling in love with you and wanting to screw you.
Then—long before she was ready—the therapy terminated. She still becomes enveloped in misery when she remembers the day the therapist told her he was moving back home, Brattleboro, Vermont, and opening a small practice there. He’d had enough of the city. Also, he didn’t like working at the clinic. Some of his patients were kind of disturbing, he told her. “I’ve started carrying a knife,” he said.
“How long have you known you were leaving?” she asked.
“It’s been in the works for a while now,” he said.
“What does that mean, ‘a while’?”
He pursed his lips. “Now, you know we’re not here to talk about me.”
Since when? she thought, but what she said was, “I’m just thinking about my abandonment issues.”
“I think I’ve mentioned before,” he said, “that what goes on in here is a reflection of what goes on out there. If my leaving triggers old fears or traumas, that will be very useful when you begin work with someone else.”
“My therapist is moving to Vermont,” she told Eddie and Vee that evening. “Doesn’t that sound like a line from a Woody Allen movie?” Then she’d gone into her bedroom and sobbed for the rest of the night. She continued sobbing at night throughout the next week, the next month, long after he was gone. She sobbed in her room, in Vee and Eddie’s room, in dark movie theaters, everywhere but in her therapist’s office, where she gritted her teeth and got through it and when the time came shook his hand and wished him luck. And although it wasn’t the first time she’d contemplated suicide, her suicidal ideation, as the therapist enjoyed calling it, had never before been quite so detailed, quite so step-by-step planned. She’d have told him all about it if he’d still been a few blocks away.
Even now, at her current job, where she runs the file room for a company that administers tests to life insurance agents, tests that determine the strings of letters that come after the agents’ names, she finds herself able to talk to one of the partners, an old guy who is loud and comical and comes into work wearing cowboy boots and a Stetson and a belt with the buckle oversize and rhinestoned. Once, the two of them alone on the elevator, she got up the nerve to say, “I know you’re from the West Side, but this is maybe too much.” Her head was down when she said it, her face largely concealed as she whispered her joke, but she’d known her audience, and though it took him a beat to get it, he guffawed and gave her a hug that literally lifted her off her feet, and that she thought about for a long time after.
Sometimes the partner comes down to the basement, where the file room takes up the entire floor. He sits in the chair next to her desk and tells her that technology is soon going to render the firm’s services, and certainly her position, completely and forever obsolete. He says, “I’m an old man. I’ll just retire or die. But what about my people? What about you? You’re too young to quit and too old to learn new tricks. What’s your future going to look like?”
These are the men who have been the men in Delph’s life.
And then there was Joshua Gottlieb. On her first day at Elite Information Exchange, as Delph sat by herself on a shiny leatherette secretary’s chair with slashes in the fabric, trying to make sense of what she was hearing through the Dictaphone’s headset, Joshua had barged in, dressed in his messenger duds. Nothing sleek, nothing Spandex. He wore red high-tops and fringed denim cutoffs and a ripe purple Sticky Fingers T-shirt with an actual zipper.
“Hey Elite Information Exchange,” he shouted. “Package for the boss.”
He didn’t wait for her to respond, didn’t seem to notice that she’d said nothing at all. He put the package on the big metal desk. He jerked his thumb toward the sign on the air conditioner and rolled his eyes. He stuck
the dangling plug into the socket, stood in front of it as it blasted cold air onto his sweaty T-shirt. When he was cooled to his satisfaction, he crossed the room and perched on her little metal desk. She lowered her head, let her hair fall forward. She pretended to be concentrating on the pork predictions for August.
“So, hey,” he said, shouting as if he were talking to her from New Jersey, “I’ve got some elite information I’d like to exchange: Millard Fillmore was the thirteenth president of the United States. What’ll you give me for that? How about some elite info about, oh, I dunno, two-letter words in Scrabble?”
While she tried to figure out what to do about him, he kept talking.
“And don’t think you can have Fillmore in exchange for some shit-ass two letter word like to or as or it. I want some kick-ass two-letter Scrabble words if I’m giving you Fillmore—”
Her initial reaction was panic with a jigger of regret for not locking the door. He didn’t seem normal to her, and given her own mode of navigating this world, she had a generous definition of normal. Part of it was that he was not easy to look at, a startlingly unattractive young man with an acne-purple forehead and overlapping front teeth that, under the fluorescents, seemed the palest green. He was flat-nosed and scrawny with stark white bleached hair emanating from his head like a child’s drawing of the sun’s rays. Yet there he was, sitting on her desk, grinning at her as if she were the luckiest girl on earth because she was getting to spend time with him.
A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel Page 10