A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  CHAPTER 10

  But, hey, are you feeling confused by all this info that’s just come at you? Would a timeline at this point come in handy? We think it might. So here—have a timeline:

  Just don’t give us any shit about it. Don’t call our lives a melodrama. Don’t bring up the term soap opera. Don’t tell us how hard it is to believe that so many terrible things can befall a single family in such a short time. They can. They did. Shut up.

  And don’t respond by telling us your own heartaches and tragedies. Don’t say, Oh, I know just how you feel because once I . . . We’re generally not competitive women, but when it comes to this period of our lives, we know we have you beat six ways from Sunday.

  Or . . . do we? Because isn’t it true that here in this vale of tears, there’s always someone who can out-tragic you? This world, after all, is nothing but a misery bazaar, and each of us just another merchant behind a booth, showing off her wares.

  We have a riddle.

  Q: Where can you run into all the suffering souls of this sorrowful world?

  A: At a Job’s fair

  And those Job’s fairs are everywhere; you never know when you’ll stumble into one. All you know is, you’ll never have to wait very long. Shortly before Christmas, 1979, the bare trees along the nicer streets of Manhattan decorated with blinking white bulbs—there was still an energy crisis, but how long could people refrain from bright lights and cheer?—Vee, who was still doing chemo, said to the oncology nurse hooking her up, “So how’s things?” And the nurse, an older woman with rucked cheeks and sunken eyes and Tweety Birds all over her smock, said that things weren’t so good, that she’d had to put her father into a home a couple of weeks before because of the dementia, and the next day her sister, heartbroken about his decline, and, well, there was some prescription abuse going on, too, had killed herself, and the day after that, the sister’s estranged husband, who’d been summoned to identify the sister’s body, the sister having failed to update her contact information when the marriage fell apart, gave the okay for organ donation, which the sister had definitely not wanted, her being a Catholic who’d need her body parts in heaven, not that she’d wind up there now, not after the suicide, but the nearly ex-husband goes oh, yeah, go ahead, sure, no problem, and so they take not only the sister’s eyes and liver and kidneys and heart and everything else, but also her skin, her skin, which, yes, of course, is an organ, but who thinks skin when they think organ donation, and besides she wouldn’t have wanted them to take anything at all, much less her skin. Only then, after all this, did they deliver what was left of the sister to a funeral home. Only then was the nurse informed her sister had died. The funeral director confided to the nurse that he’d never before in his life seen such butchery. That was the word the man used. Butchery. And you had to figure a New York funeral director had seen it all, from murder victims to people flattened by subways.

  “So how bad is something when a funeral director who’s seen it all says he hasn’t seen anything like it?” The nurse stopped to collect herself. “I don’t think it’s all sunk in yet,” she said after a moment. “But you know what? At least I still have my nephews and nieces,” she said. “And my friends. Thank God for friends.”

  While the nurse was saying all this, she’d inserted a needle into a vein in the back of Vee’s left hand, gently and perfectly, not even a pinch. She taped a square of cotton over the needle to hold it in place. She checked to make sure the cherry red fluid was seeping into Vee’s body. Vee would be there for hours. She was what they called a long-dripper.

  “But here I am, going on about myself,” the nurse said, “when you’re the one fighting for your life.” She patted Vee’s shoulder. “It helps me cope with my own troubles, when I see my brave patients like you.”

  “Jesus, Jan,” Vee said. She didn’t say, Is that your life or The Guiding Light? She didn’t say, It’s awfully hard for me to believe all this happened to you in just the last week. She didn’t say, One suicide? One measly suicide? She didn’t say, Hey, you think you got troubles? Remember that massacre at the Chock full o’Nuts last year? She didn’t say, I’ll see you your butchery and raise you my carnage.

  She said, “I’m not brave. What am I doing that’s so brave? I’m just going to lie here for a few hours and watch TV. I don’t have to lift a finger.”

  “C’mon, you’re sick as a dog,” Jan said generously. “And all the nausea and the throwing up.”

  “That’s true,” Vee said. “But even then I’m just lying there. Facedown instead of faceup. But still, just lying there.”

  “You see?” Jan said. “You’re being brave right now.”

  As they argued, the Alphonse and Gaston of life’s vicissitudes and shit storms, Vee was facing a pain-scale poster taped to the wall. Indicate your pain level on a scale of one to ten, the directions said. She wondered if there were scales like this for emotional pain. On a scale of one to ten, one being life’s a bowl of cherries and ten being you’re Jan this week, where do you see yourself?

  Even now Vee doesn’t give herself a ten. Maybe an eight. Because she isn’t saying that she hasn’t had some lousy days, what with the father’s desertion and the first round of cancer and the mother’s suicide and the husband’s murder and the sister’s attempted suicide and the cancer again and the sister’s second and third suicide attempts, and the death of the love of the poor baby sister’s life from AIDS, which happened in the early 1980s, just when we thought things had calmed down.

  So, fine, Vee says. So, she’s suffered. But has she suffered any more than Jan? Or any more than Joshua Gottlieb, who in the end lost his job and his health insurance and so had no choice but to move back to his parents’ home in Winnetka, where his mother catered to him, but his father refused to put through the phone calls of his distraught New York friends? The price for staying in his childhood bed, for being tended to by family, for the luxury of round-the-clock nurses and the best of everything, was his admission that he wasn’t gay, that he’d never been gay, that he’d only said it and gone so far as living the life and contracting this vile disease because he wanted to piss off his parents. Teenage rebellion gone amok. We’d have written more about Joshua in the era of the plague, but Delph forbade it. She still can’t bear it. So perhaps, in a way, even Delph has suffered more than Vee. At least Vee was loved in return.

  In fact, Vee will tell you, even Nim Chimpsky has suffered more than she has. That innocent taken from mother after mother. That sentient being raised in homes with children, showered with affection and attention and conversation, who could say play and tickle and hug, was abruptly taken from everything he knew and turned over to a primate farm in Oklahoma. The funding for the linguistic study had not been renewed. His caretakers wanted to get on with their own lives. How he’d screamed and clung to the last of his caretakers that day. She had to pry him from her, finger by finger. She left Oklahoma as fast as she could, before she had to see him locked into his cage.

  At least Vee has sisters who will never leave her. At least she’s the one making the choices. At least she—at least we—know how to open locked doors.

  PART TWO

  The Reunion

  CHAPTER 11

  In July, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane went down, and we had our usual arguments. Vee insisted the crash was not the result of any curse. Nor, she said, did it have any meaning. The only lesson to take from it was that new pilots shouldn’t fly over water at night. Delph, meanwhile, argued that the disaster was the universe’s way of affirming our decision to kick the bucket. If we didn’t do it ourselves, the gods were telling us, they would. They’d exhale their mighty breaths, and a storm would come and literally turn us upside down.

  “Really,” Vee said. “You think God killed John-John as a way of sending a message to us? Whatever happened to the days when he just wrote messages on walls?”

  “You want writing on the wall?” Delph indicated her calf. “Here’s the writing on the wall.” She so
metimes talked about her tattoo that way, as if it had mysteriously appeared on her leg one day through none of her own doing, as if she hadn’t gone out and requested it and paid for it with a personal check.

  Vee told her as much, called her ridiculous, a wee tad narcissistic. And yet, days after the Coast Guard retrieved the wrecked fuselage with the beautiful bodies still strapped inside, it was Vee who began reading Jung.

  She’d been wandering through the library, she said, looking for things to read during these, her final six months, when she’d noticed a thick book on one of the return carts. The call numbers on its spine were more discernible than its black-on-black title, but she picked it up anyway and opened it to the title page. Only then could she see that it was called Synchronicity.

  Was it a meaningless coincidence that she’d been drawn to a book on meaningful coincidences? Yes, she thought at first, but later, halfway through the tome, she thought maybe not. She began lecturing Lady and Delph on the subject. Jung’s theory of synchronicity, she said, didn’t hang on the whims of meddlesome gods nor on the efficacy of generation-spanning curses. Jung was a man of science, and he was confident science would eventually explain the reason for coincidences. Answers might be unknown at the moment. That didn’t mean they were supernatural. It didn’t mean we had to think like primitives, invent gods and curses.

  “He used to meet with Einstein, and they’d talk about it,” Vee said. “Next thing you know, Einstein came up with relativity and Jung came up with the collective unconscious.”

  “Neither of which anyone understands,” Lady said. “Probably not even Einstein and Jung.”

  We imagined the two men in a coffeehouse, leaning toward each other, talking excitedly, cake crumbs in their mustaches, each pretending he got what the other was saying.

  “Jung had this client,” Vee said. “She dreamed someone had given her a brooch in the shape of a scarab beetle. As she’s telling Jung the dream, he hears something tapping on the window behind him. He turns, and it’s a large insect trying to get into the room. It’s attracted to the light. So he opens the window and the bug flies in and he snatches it up in his hand and it’s a freaking scarab beetle! A scarab beetle! A species that doesn’t even live in Europe!”

  She was perspiring a little. It was a hot July day, but she was also agitated. Also: perimenopause. She wiped her bare forehead with her hand.

  “He says the two things—the dream and the bug showing up—were linked by meaning. Not by cause and effect, but meaning. He says it’s a different type of time.” She looked at Lady and Delph intently. “Have I been wrong about everything?” she asked.

  “Looks like it,” Delph said, but Lady said, “Oh, who knows? To him the patient’s talking about beetles, and then a non-native beetle shows up, and he thinks it’s such a crazy coincidence, it has to have meaning. But maybe the reason the patient had the dream about the brooch in the first place was because she’d seen a non-native beetle in her bathtub the day before. Maybe there was an odd infestation of non-native beetles in western Europe that year. So he’s running around saying there was no discernible cause and effect between the dream and the beetle at his window, but it turns out there was plenty of cause and effect between the beetle in the tub and the dream.”

  “Yes,” Delph said. “Or, alternatively, Vee has been wrong all these years, and I’ve been right. Occam’s razor. The simplest answer is always the correct answer. Ergo, coincidences have meaning. I rest my case.”

  “I suspect everyone contemplating their own death has at least one moment of wondering if they’ve been wrong about everything,” Lady said.

  “Acausal time,” Vee said. “That’s what he and Einstein called it. Time linked by meaning, not by this past, present, and future thing we cling to.”

  We looked at each other helplessly. We’d reached the limit of our understanding.

  “He was into the I Ching too,” Vee added. We all sighed nostalgically.

  Not long after that Vee—yes, Vee!—went out and had a small iris tattooed at her ankle. “Why didn’t you tell me it hurt like hell?” she said to Delph when she came home.

  But there was more than that little tattoo. The tattoo artist Vee had visited, a young woman in a white sundress and bare feet, her toenails painted black, her arms sleeved with a rain forest motif—red bougainvillea and dark green grasses and the eyes of jungle cats—had taken a shine to Vee. “I love how you wear your hair,” she’d said.

  “Or rather how I don’t wear my hair,” said Vee.

  “It’s very bold. Very strong.”

  “It’s chemo,” Vee said.

  “I have an idea for you,” the woman said. She offered no condolences. This was just a fashion opportunity as far as she was concerned. Vee had to admit she was well put together. Her own hair was thick and curly and profuse, much like Delph’s, though off her face and blacker and glistening from product. She had a hoop through an eyebrow and a large diamond by her nostril.

  “No piercings,” Vee said.

  “No more pain,” the woman agreed. “Just my powders and brush.”

  She’d hennaed the blank canvas that was Vee’s bald head. Glossy brown diamonds now emanated from the crown of Vee’s head and made their way down to her forehead and ears and nape.

  Enlightenment, Vee told us, was the meaning of the pattern. The woman had other designs that were prettier, one that she said brought good health and one that guaranteed long life, but Vee said she figured she’d go with something she still had a shot at.

  “It looks good,” Lady said.

  Vee lifted her hand to run it over her scalp, but stopped herself. She was still afraid to touch it, afraid it would smear or stain. But she was pleased. “I should have done this fifteen years ago,” she said.

  Lady laughed. “And thus has the enlightenment begun.”

  Another non-momentous but atypical thing we did this summer—this in late August—was leave the house on a Saturday for no other reason than to be outdoors. We don’t love nature, we don’t particularly enjoy experiencing it without a damned good reason. But it was a nice day, and we thought we’d try, just as an experiment, to be normal. We knew how one did this Saturday-in-the-park business: you placed a bottle of wine and several red plastic cups into a satchel and then, along with every other Upper West Sider who had not left the city for the shore or the mountains, you took the subway to Zabar’s and fought your way in, and ten minutes later you fought your way back out with a cantankerous loaf of French bread, a few offensive wedges of cheese, and an early edition of the Times so you could do the Sunday puzzle and, if it was the right week, the acrostic.

  We handled all of this splendidly, expertly. We walked down through the park to Zabar’s, then up through the park to our neighborhood. We sat on as isolated a bench as we could find, and we ate and drank and fed squirrels. We could hear the tennis matches a few blocks down. We have no interest in tennis, but we liked the heartbeat sound of volleys, the steady thwock thwock.

  As we listened and ate and got tipsy, we studied the ebony arteries and rounds in the tree bark and the burnt-orange caps of acorns. We studied the grass, the sharp and stubby blades, green until the pale brown tip, like a dye job gone bad.

  We had the kind of conversations we used to have back in college. Topic: is the beauty of nature a learned construct or are trees, flowers, and grass just intrinsically the most goddamn beautiful things not only on Earth, but in the universe? That is, if a Martian landed his craft in Riverside Park, would he be struck to near tears by the bark and the grass and the chevrons of geese leaving town, even by the pigeons, the sheen of their feathers the same silver-purple as rainbows in puddles? Or would he cry because what we find beautiful is ugly to him, especially when compared to the rough red gravel of Mars?

  We talked about less ethereal matters as well. How would things turn out in Kosovo and East Timor? Who would the next president be? What would they do about Columbine? We’d never know.

  “My one
hope is that before we go, they reveal who Deep Throat was,” Delph said. “I’ve been dying to know since nineteen seventy-four.”

  And what about the destruction of all humankind? That was something else we wondered about as caterpillars the color of limeade scrunched and stretched their way from here to there. By which method would mankind lay waste to itself? Because it seemed inevitable that it would, and soon.

  But how? Poison gas in the subway like in Tokyo? Fertilizer bombs in the hands of the angry or insane or obnoxious like in Oklahoma City? Or would life end as a result of the already discernible environmental calamity?

  It’s impressive—don’t you think?—that our controversial ancestor had a hand in or actually led the way with respect to each of these potential means of annihilation. Even nitrogen fertilizer, once considered the savior of mankind, has turned out to be lethal, a prime cause of air pollution, water pollution, soil acidification, dead zones, acid rain, holes in the ozone layer, smog, and accelerated global warming. “Among other things,” the literature always adds, lest that list isn’t sufficiently horrifying.

  It was late afternoon. We packed our things. Delph quietly sang as we walked home. She’d begun singing more often, and frequently in front of Lady and Vee. The song she sang most often was “Waltzing Matilda.” It was no accident that the song was about a guy who kills himself.

  “He’s a sheep rustler who’s about to be busted by the cops,” Vee said after Delph had gotten through all three verses, all the billabongs and tucker-bags and jumbucks. “Not exactly our situation.”

  “We all have our reasons,” Delph said.

  Sometimes Lady and Vee sang along with Delph. We all liked the tune. It was like having a theme song.

  The day we went on that picnic was lovely. Still, we haven’t done it again. Our goal is withdrawal from the world, not participation in it. A single picnic did not change our minds about anything.