A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  Here was the thing: she did feel lucky, so much so that she pushed her hair out of her face. She hoped he couldn’t read her thought bubbles, although her thought bubbles weren’t completely negative. He was as garrulous as she was taciturn. This was good because it meant she didn’t have to worry about holding up her end of the conversation. And he was giving her plenty of time to come up with a snappy rejoinder to his silliness. She liked that too.

  She even liked that he was deafening, which, rather than feeling like a gale wind blowing her out of her seat and onto her butt, felt like a warm, bright spotlight.

  She swiveled in her chair so she was looking directly at him. Maybe it was his pale green grin. Maybe it was that she wanted to be professional and helpful and, just for once, friendly and personable on this, her first day at work at her first ever job. Maybe it was because he was obviously weirder than she was. Whatever it was, Delph felt as though the gods who’d abandoned her as pretty much everyone else had—father off to wherever, mother off to the murky river, therapist off to a less disturbing clientele in Brattleboro, even her English teacher off to the next eighth-grade geek—it seemed those gods had for some reason, on this day, noticed her living down there between the cracks and decided to do something about it. Not that the gods had rescued her. Not that they’d reached in and pulled her out and up into the sunlight. But they’d sent Joshua Gottlieb spelunking down between the cracks too. They sent Joshua to keep her company.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but your information regarding President Fillmore is not sufficiently elite for an exchange of that nature.”

  “Shit,” he bellowed happily. “Okay, what’ll you give me for it? I’ll take whatever you have.”

  “I could see my way to giving you i before e except after c.”

  Witty repartee, she thought. Try that, people on the autism spectrum.

  He grinned. “Done,” he shrieked and reached out to give her a hug. She managed to dodge it, wheeling her chair away as he lunged. She hadn’t lost complete track of herself. But she’d lost track just a little, and that was a pleasure.

  His being gay was just one of the many things that made him perfect for her. Saturdays were his date nights with other homely boys like himself. None of the dates turned into long-term things. Just because he was ugly, Joshua said loudly and exuberantly, didn’t mean he wanted to date ugly or commit to ugly or look at ugly in bed for the rest of his life.

  “Don’t be mean,” she would say.

  He’d say, “How am I being mean? I don’t see anyone falling in love with me either.”

  “Maybe you should broaden your horizons,” she’d suggest, but if he guessed what she meant, he wasn’t saying.

  Thursdays and sometimes Fridays and occasionally Wednesdays were the nights he went out to acquire the dates that never turned into anything. Those were also the nights Delph went out with him. He’d stop by Elite Information Exchange to fetch her.

  “Pardon me,” he’d roar, “but I was wondering what elite information I could get in exchange for Ethel Merman won the Tony for Call Me Madam.”

  She’d give him something—bulbs should be planted in the fall or Greenland isn’t green—then lock up, and they’d go downtown or to Ninth Avenue. They’d enjoy the scene: the good, the bad, and then there was their crowd, the lovable ugly, the boys who required no conversation from her, but who taught her how to do the Hustle and her eyes, the latter requiring her to let them see her face, which for reasons she could never fathom they insisted on telling her was beautiful.

  “I’m not beautiful,” she whispered into Joshua’s ear. “I have a man’s face.” And, screaming over the music and chaos, he said, “Ain’t nothing wrong with that, kidlet.”

  She was only nineteen, and a young nineteen. She was often the only woman there, unless you counted the drag queens, which she didn’t in those days, something she’s sorry about now. She was also the only one not doing drugs, unless you counted alcohol, which she didn’t in those days and still doesn’t.

  Still, those were her best days, her only days of belonging to something. She would get home at 3:00 a.m., later. She’d stumble and stagger and bump into furniture. Eddie would put his arm around her shoulders, lead her to the kitchen, require her to drink two quarts of water before Vee put her to bed. Delph would resist. She wanted to stay up. She wanted to talk about how at ease she felt in those clubs with those boys, the white boys from the city and Long Island and Jersey, the black boys from Harlem and Nigeria, the brown boys with Cuban accents and Brooklyn accents, the angry Asian boys who wore leather and the mellow Asian boy who wore kimonos and pearls just like our great-great-uncle Rudi, all the boys, every boy, but especially with Joshua, how happy she felt with Joshua by her side and the DJ playing “Love to Love You Baby” and five or six Harvey Wallbangers sloshing around her stomach. She wanted to tell Vee how Joshua would playfully hip-check her into one of his friends, who would hip-check her back to him as if they were pinball flippers and she a silver ball, a larger version of the one in the actual pinball machine in the corner, a smaller version of the one spinning on the ceiling. She wanted to list all of Joshua’s nicknames for her. He called her Philadelphia and the Oracle of Delphi and Elf and Ellie Information and Kiddo and Kidlet, and then so would everyone else.

  “I’m queer,” she’d tell Vee and Eddie as they tried to persuade her to lie down, sleep. Vee and Eddie would smile supportively, waiting—hoping—for the other shoe to drop. “That would explain so much,” Vee often whispered to Eddie. But Delph would laugh and sit up and say, “Oh, God, no no no. Not queer queer. Just regular queer. The dictionary kind of queer. The you don’t fit in with the regular world, but it turns out you fit in with this other world and it’s so much more fun kind of queer.”

  “Except it’s also the men all pair off at the end of the night and you come home drunk and alone kind of queer,” Vee would say, although by then nothing Vee said could faze Delph. “But I’m happy,” she’d say. “Look at me. This is happiness,” and Vee would say, “Short-term happiness,” and Delph would cry, “Sold!”

  Joshua Gottlieb had a tattoo, and not a cheap-looking tattoo, the kind that most people had back then, a faded scar the color of rotten banana peels, but a beautiful, brightly hued tattoo, and this was the tattoo that got Delph thinking about acquiring one of her own. He’d shown it to her on a hot night outside a disco that was once a church. While they waited on line, he’d wriggled his shorts down—this may not have been for her exclusive benefit—and she saw the muscled merman lounging from one end of his rear pelvic girdle to the other.

  “He’s gorgeous,” Joshua said. He twisted his head one way and his spine the other, an effort to glimpse and admire the little sprawled body on his own body. “Am I right?”

  Now, Lady in the hospital, her neck slathered in goo, Delph called him from the lobby pay phone. “I’ll trade you the meaning of life for the name of the guy who did your merman,” she said as soon as he picked up.

  “The meaning of life, huh?”

  “Hey,” she said, “when I say I’ve got elite information to exchange, I don’t mess around.”

  He didn’t ask why she wanted the tattoo, not then anyway. He was too excited. “I’ll go with you,” he shouted. “You’re gonna love the subgenre of men there.”

  She did. Cross a pirate with his parrot, and those men were what you’d get, big and burly and bandannaed, with long braided beards and skin bright and tropical—turquoise, emerald, orange. They were comically courtly, the kind of men who were always saying fuck this or fuck that, then asking you to pardon their French. They drank warm bourbon from old jars—not Ball mason jars, but peanut butter jars or jelly jars or pickle jars, which you could tell from the shape and the just-barely-there smell of the former contents. One of the men, tall and potbellied and wearing a bowling shirt with “Gurley” stitched on the pocket, which, like his Born to be Wild and Mom-inside-a-heart tattoos, turned out not to be ironically intended—Gurley
was his Christian name, and he belonged to a bowling league, as evidenced by several trophies behind the counter—poured her a hefty four fingers as she waited her turn. Bourbon with the faintest whiff of apricot jam—lovely, really—and she downed it as if it were a shot. Because he didn’t know her, Gurley was impressed. He whistled and praised her and poured her some more.

  Even so, the longer she waited, and even though Joshua was right there by her side, the more she realized she wasn’t as comfortable with these tattoo artists as she was with the boys at the clubs. She could feel herself getting nervous, angsty, stomachachy, as she sat on the window bench waiting her turn. The storefront window was soaped instead of curtained, and there were green-headed flies dead in the corners. She flipped through a Zap Comix that was old and crunchy from too much sun. She read a panel about a cow-woman who was tied to a chair and the chair pushed over onto the floor and her legs forced open so men could lick her. “You guys must have all hated your mothers,” the cow cried as she struggled to free herself.

  Delph didn’t understand why she had such terrible reactions to things like this, why she identified so closely with the cow. She knew why she reacted badly politically. She’d read her Millet, her Brownmiller. But why did she feel so personally attacked? No man had ever held her down, forced her to do anything. No man had hurt her in that way, or, when you got down to it, at all, unless you counted the shoving and public ridicule by adolescent classmates. (“I had a dream,” a boy said, a total stranger of a boy, but a boy popular enough to command total silence in the cafeteria as he spoke. “There was this sign and it said, ‘Delph Frankl Knows All There Is.’ And then the words rearranged themselves, and it said, ‘There is Delph Frankl, All Nose.’”) But this was just a cartoon: a cartoon of a cow. Although—cows. The brown eyes, the sweet mooing. They were probably her fifth favorite species.

  “You guys must have all hated your mothers,” Gurley said, hanging over her shoulder, reading the dialogue out loud, thinking about it, then laughing like Heckle or Jeckle.

  Joshua glanced at the magazine too. He saw what she was reading—not the specific panel, just the cover with Mr. Natural—and he waggled his finger, brayed “Keep on truckin’,” and she nodded, but she also felt herself turn into Delph. She ducked her head, let her hair fall forward. She thought about that popular boy in the cafeteria. She thought about Lady in the hospital. She thought about the curse, remembered the first time she’d heard it, and that made her think about the teenage girl in Rockefeller Center all those years ago. Where had the girl gone that day, after the reporter moved on? What had she done?

  Delph no longer felt up to talking. She wasn’t sure what to do about it. “I’m falling between the cracks,” she whispered to Joshua.

  “Don’t worry, Delft China, I’m on it,” he said. He put an arm around her, and she leaned closer to him. (“We’re perfect for each other,” she would tell Vee on those late Saturday nights, “because neither of us wants to marry each other or have sex,” and Vee would say, “Honey, he wants to have sex; just not with you,” and Delph would say, “Vee, I know what homosexual means,” and Vee would say, “Delph, I’m not sure you do.”)

  When her tattoo artist was ready—she was relieved it was someone other than Gurley—Joshua accompanied her into the back room. He recited the curse and traced his finger around the part of her calf where she wanted the ink placed. Delph’s tattoo artist nodded, recited the curse back. He seemed to be the only one with any customers. The other guys were just hanging around, drinking and kibitzing.

  “So what’s the story?” Gurley asked. “Who’s the sinning father? And what sins are we talking about here exactly?”

  “The father’s her great-grandfather,” Joshua said. “Huge sinner. His sins poured down on the family like maple syrup.”

  “Sounds delicious,” the tattoo artist said blandly.

  “Yeah, well, it’s not. Poor Delph here—she’s the fourth generation, right?—she’s taking the flak. She’s drenched in his sins.” He smiled at Gurley. He was flirting. “A big sticky mess.”

  The men looked at her for confirmation. She looked to Joshua.

  “For example,” Joshua continued, “the great-grandfather I mentioned? He was kind of a notorious loudmouth. A big shot. A look-at-me kind of guy. And now she has trouble talking in front of people she doesn’t know. See how it works?”

  “No,” Gurley said.

  “So that was his huge sin?” her tattoo artist asked. “Being a horse’s ass?”

  “Well, that and the fact he was an infamous and unrepentant murderer.”

  “Far out.” The tattoo artist was interested at last. “So who did he kill?”

  Joshua frowned. “Well, no one really.” He thought about this. “Or, actually, everyone. It was World War One.”

  Then the men, even Gurley, understood that the deaths weren’t lurid and scandalous, just statistical and sanctioned, and they stopped pressing for details. They focused on the curse itself, what it said, where it came from, what it guaranteed.

  “I’ve known other families like that,” one of the quieter men said. A wild duck was taking flight on his bicep. “Generation after generation,” he said, his passion rising like that duck, “no one can catch a fucking break. They can’t fucking win for fucking losing.”

  “The fucking Kennedys,” said the tattoo artist, by way of example.

  “Fucking exactly,” Joshua said.

  Delph nodded too. It was 1976. Bobby was long gone. Also: Chappaquiddick.

  The tattoo’s unveiling took place on the following Saturday morning. It was too soon, really, for its first public appearance, Delph’s skin still pink and oozy in places, but she didn’t like keeping secrets from Lady and Vee; it felt too much like lying. She didn’t believe in lying. Lady didn’t mind lying, and Vee could take it or leave it, but Delph disliked it intensely. Lying was one of the many things in this world that made her feel bad, which is why, that morning, she removed the Saran wrap she’d been admonished to keep around her calf and patted at her skin with the shirt she’d worn the day before.

  Dressed in the oversize T-shirt she slept in, she padded into the kitchen and made herself a V8 and vodka, her usual breakfast. She carried the mug to the dinette table, which was covered with flyers and form letters and circulars and bills and a baggie of grass and, in the trough of Eddie’s Blonde on Blonde double album, rows of sifted-out seeds. There were also textbooks and notebooks and a week’s worth of New York Times, each one karate-chopped into thirds by Vee for better subway reading. There was a pile of unread issues of Ms. and Rolling Stone and the Barnard Alumnae Magazine—three copies of the latter, one for each of the graduates and one for Lady, the dropout. Also a pile of Mamm: The Magazine for Breast Cancer Patients and Survivors that, though Vee had twice written to cancel her subscription—her freakish diagnosis at twenty-two an entire year behind her now—continued to show up in our mailbox as if the circulation department knew something Vee didn’t, which of course it did not, although a couple years later when Vee was diagnosed for the second time, it certainly would seem like it did.

  Delph sipped her spiked juice. She picked up one of the Barnards. She turned to the back and read the class notes for Vee’s year and what would have been Lady’s if Lady had graduated. Everyone who’d sent in news was doing great. Good jobs or grad school, and of course, the kind of doing great that resulted in the name your classmates knew you by being corralled between parentheses. Marsha (Margolis) French. Donna (Harpootian) Davidson. She could write in on Lady’s behalf, Delph thought: “Lily (Frankl) (Hopper) Alter is doing very well. The psychiatric nurse said so just last night.”

  She was engrossed in her thoughts when Eddie emerged from his and Vee’s room. She hadn’t realized he was home and gave a small shriek—“You scared me,” she said—even though he was one of the men she felt completely at ease with. Sometimes she wriggled between him and Vee on their mattress so the three of them could do the Sunday Times puzzle to
gether. Warm and cozy. This was what she enjoyed, this was her idea of going to bed with a man.

  He was wearing only his jeans and was still half asleep. He was a bony and rangy boy, not terribly good-looking by the world’s standards. His eyes were small and would disappear when he laughed. The bridge of his nose was so flat that Vee once balanced a little silver saltshaker on it while he snored on the sofa. “Don’t you just love him?” she’d said, her eyes glinting with tears.

  And he had enormous ears and his cheeks and chest were sallow and hairless, though a thin line of dark hair emerged from his pants and trailed up toward his navel. Delph tried never to look at that line of hair; Delph was always looking at that line of hair. As for the hair on his head, it was usually braided into a long single plait that reached to the middle of his back. But now, because he’d just woken up, it hung crimped but loose, an ear sticking through on each side.

  Delph tucked her tattooed leg beneath her as Eddie took a seat across the table and rolled, tongued shut, and lit up a joint. “Vee’s already at the hospital,” he said. “She says for you to come spell her, so she can get half a day in at work.”

  If Vee had been the one asking, Delph would have made a face and said she was going to get ready in a second; in the meantime could she please be allowed to finish her breakfast without the guilt trip. But it was Eddie, so Delph brushed back her hair to let him see she was smiling, and she nodded and put down the paper. Father-hunger in action. It looked a lot like man-pleasing, but it was something else.

  “Vee’s at the hospital,” Eddie repeated. “Man, I never wanted to have to say that again. I used to pray for it. Never again, please and thank you very much, Vee in the hospital for any reason. Well, having a baby. But not for any shitty reason. But I forgot to say I never wanted Lady in the hospital either.”

  “You have to be careful with wishing,” Delph said. “It’s so easy to screw it up. You make a wish to lose ten pounds and the next thing you know your leg’s being amputated because you forgot to specify you wanted the pounds to come exclusively from the fat storage cells in your ass.”