Well, she had me dead to rights. Something very like that had been in my head. Her face was preternaturally grave. She said, ‘You think I’m too small. I’m not.
‘You think I’ll get sick if I keep on eating like this. I won’t.
‘You think if you bought a whole department store for me, it would be enough. It wouldn’t.’
‘I won’t – well, I can’t get a whole department store for you,’ I said. She said, ‘I know.’ Then she got up and tucked the box of Mars Bars under one arm, throwing over the other my green plastic poncho, which she always carried about with her now.
‘I’ll get you anything you want,’ I said. ‘No, not what you want, A. R., but anything you really, truly need.’
‘You can’t,’ said the Little Dirty Girl.
‘I’ll try.’
She crossed the living room to the front door, dragging the poncho across the rug, not paying the slightest attention to the astronomical photographs that had so enchanted her before. Too young now, I suppose. I said, ‘A. R., I’ll try. Truly I will.’ She seemed to consider it a moment, her small head to one side. Then she said briskly, ‘I’ll be back,’ and was out the front door.
And I did not – would not – could not – did not dare to follow her.
Was this the moment I decided I was dealing with a ghost? No, long before. Little by little, I suppose. Her clothes were a dead giveaway, for one thing: always the same and the kind no child had worn since the end of the Second World War. Then there was the book I had given her on her first visit, which had somehow closed and straightened itself on the coffee table, another I had lent her later (the poems of Edna Millay) which had mysteriously been there a day afterwards, the eerie invisibility of a naked little girl hanging out of my windows and yelling; the inconspicuousness of a little twirling girl nobody noticed spinning round and shrieking outside the merry-go-round, a dozen half-conscious glimpses I’d had, every time I’d got in or out of my car, of the poncho lying on the back seat where I always keep it, folded as always, the very dust on it undisturbed. And her unchildlike cleverness in never revealing either her name or where she lived. And as surely as A. R. had been a biggish eight when we had met weeks ago, just as surely she was now a smallish, very unmistakable, unnaturally knowledgeable five.
But she was such a nice little ghost. And so solid! Ghosts don’t run up your grocery bills, do they? Or trample Cheez Doodles into your carpet or leave gum under your kitchen chair, large smears of chocolate on the surface of the table (A. R. had), and an exceptionally dirty ring around the inside of the bathtub? Along with three (count ’em, three) large, dirty, sopping-wet bath towels on the bathroom floor? If A. R.’s social and intellectual life had a tendency to become intangible when looked at carefully, everything connected with her digestive system and her bodily dirt stuck around amazingly; there was the state of the bathroom, the dishes in the sink (many more than mine), and the ironing board still up in the study for the ironing of A. R.’s dress (with the spray starch container still set up on one end and the scorch mark where she’d decided to play with the iron). If she was a ghost, she was a good one and I liked her and wanted her back. Whatever help she needed from me in resolving her ancient Seattle tragedy (ancient ever since nineteen-forty-two) she could have. I wondered for a moment if she were connected with the house, but the people before me – the original owners – hadn’t had children. And the house itself hadn’t even been built until the mid-fifties; nothing in the neighborhood had. Unless both they and I were being haunted by the children we hadn’t had; could I write them a pychotherapeutic letter about it? (‘Dear Mrs. X., How is your inner space?’) I went into the bathroom and discovered that A. R. had relieved herself interestingly in the toilet and had then not flushed it, hardly what I would call poetical behavior on the part of somebody’s unconscious. So I flushed it. I picked up the towels one by one and dragged them to the laundry basket in the bedroom. If the Little Dirty Girl was a ghost, she was obviously a bodily-dirt-and-needs ghost traumatized in life by never having been given a proper bath or allowed to eat marshmallows until she got sick. Maybe this was it and now she could rest (scrubbed and full of Mars Bars) in peace. But I hoped not. I was nervous; I had made a promise (‘I’ll give you what you need’) that few of us can make to anyone, a frightening promise to make to anyone. Still, I hoped. And she was a businesslike little ghost. She would come back.
For she, too, had promised.
Autumn came. I didn’t see the Little Dirty Girl. School started and I spent days trying to teach freshmen and freshwomen not to write like Rod McKuen (neither of us really knowing why they shouldn’t, actually) while advanced students pursued me down the halls with thousand-page trilogies, demands for independent study, and other unspeakables. As a friend of ours said once, everyone will continue to pile responsibility on a woman and everything and everyone must be served except oneself; I’ve been a flogged horse professionally long enough to know that and meanwhile the dishes stay in the sink and the kindly wife-elves do not come out of the woodwork at night and do them. I was exercising two hours a day and sleeping ten; the Little Dirty Girl seemed to have vanished with the summer.
Then one day there was a freak spell of summer weather and that evening a thunderstorm. This is a very rare thing in Seattle. The storm didn’t last, of course, but it seemed to bring right after it the first of the winter rains: cold, drenching, ominous. I was grading papers that evening when someone knocked at my door; I thought I’d left the garage light on and my neighbor’d come out to tell me, so I yelled, ‘Just a minute, please!’ dropped my pen, wondered whether I should pick it up, decided the hell with it, and went (exasperated) to the door.
It was the Little Dirty Girl. She was as wet as I’ve ever seen a human being be and had a bad cough (my poncho must’ve gone heaven knows where) and water squelching in her shoes. She was shivering violently and her fingers were blue – it could not have been more than fifty degrees out – and her long, baggy dress clung to her with water running off it; there was a puddle already forming around her feet on the rug. Her teeth were chattering. She stood there shivering and glowering miserably at me, from time to time emitting that deep, painful chest cough you sometimes hear in adults who smoke too much. I thought of hot baths, towels, electric blankets, aspirin – can ghosts get pneumonia? ‘For God’s sake, get your clothes off!’ I said, but A. R. stepped back against the door, shivering, and wrapped her starved arms in her long, wet skirt.
‘No!’ she said, in a deep voice more like a crow’s than ever. ‘Like this!’
‘Like what?’ said I helplessly, thinking of my back and how incapable I was of dragging a resistant five-year-old anywhere.
‘You hate me!’ croaked A. R. venomously. ‘You starve me! You do! You won’t let me eat anything!’
Then she edged past me, still coughing, her dark eyes ringed with blue, her skin mottled with bruises, and her whole body shaking with cold and anger, like a little mask of Medusa. She screamed.
‘You want to clean me up because you don’t like me! ‘You like me clean because you don’t like me dirty!
‘You hate me so you won’t give me what I need!
‘You won’t give me what I need and I’m dying!
‘I’m dying! I’m dying!
‘I’M DYING!’
She was interrupted by coughing. I said, ‘A. R.–’ and she screamed again, her whole body bending convulsively, the cords in her neck standing out. Her scream was choked by phlegm and she beat herself with her fists; then wrapping her arms in her wet skirt through another bout of coughing, she said in gasps:
‘I couldn’t get into your house to use the bathroom, so I had to shit in my pants.
‘I had to stay out in the rain; I got cold.
‘All I can get is from you and you won’t give it.’
‘Then tell me what you need!’ I said, and A. R. raised her horrid little face to mine, a picture of venomous, uncontrolled misery, of sheer, demanding starvat
ion.
‘You,’ she whispered.
So that was it. I thought of the pleading cats, whose open mouths (Dependency! Dependency!) reveal needle teeth which can rip off your thumb; I imagined the Little Dirty Girl sinking her teeth into my chest if I so much as touched her. Not touched for bathing or combing or putting on shoelaces, you understand, but for touching only. I saw – I don’t know what: her skin ash-grey, the bones of her little skull coming through her skin worse and worse every moment – and I knew she would kill me if she didn’t get what she wanted, though she was suffering far worse than I was and was more innocent – a demon child is still a child, with a child’s needs, after all. I got down on one knee, so as to be nearer her size, and saying only, ‘My back – be careful of my back,’ held out my arms so that the terror of the ages could walk into them. She was truly grey now, her bones very prominent. She was starving to death. She was dying. She gave the cough of a cadaver breathing its last, a phlegmy wheeze with a dreadful rattle in it, and then the Little Dirty Girl walked right into my arms.
And began to cry. I felt her crying right up from her belly. She was cold and stinky and extremely dirty and afflicted with the most surprising hiccough. I rocked her back and forth and mumbled I don’t know what, but what I meant was that I thought she was fine, that all of her was fine: her shit, her piss, her sweat, her tears, her scabby knees, the snot on her face, her cough, her dirty panties, her bruises, her desperation, her anger, her whims – all of her was wonderful, I loved all of her, and I would do my best to take good care of her, all of her, forever and forever and then a day.
She bawled. She howled. She pinched me hard. She yelled, ‘Why did it take you so long!’ She fussed violently over her panties and said she had been humiliated, though it turned out, when I got her to the bathroom, that she was making an awfully big fuss over a very little brown stain. I put the panties to soak in the kitchen sink and the Little Dirty Girl likewise in a hot tub with vast mounds of rose-scented bubble bath which turned up from somewhere, though I knew perfectly well I hadn’t bought any in years. We had a shrieky, tickly, soapy, toe-grabby sort of a bath, a very wet one during which I got soaked. (I told her about my back and she was careful.) We sang to the loofah. We threw water at the bathroom tiles. We lost the soap. We came out warm in a huge towel (I’d swear mine aren’t that big) and screamed gaily again, to exercise our lungs, from which the last bit of cough had disappeared. We said, ‘Oh, floof! there goes the soap.’ We speculated loudly (and at length) on the possible subjective emotional life of the porcelain sink, American variety, and (rather to my surprise) sang snatches of The Messiah as follows:
Every malted
Shall be exalted!
And:
Behold and see
Behold and see
If there were e’er pajama
Like to this pajama!
And so on.
My last memory of the evening is of tucking the Little Dirty Girl into one side of my bed (in my pajamas, which had to be rolled up and pinned even to stay on her) and then climbing into the other side myself. The bed was wider than usual, I suppose. She said sleepily, ‘Can I stay?’ and I (also sleepily) ‘Forever.’
But in the morning she was gone.
Her clothes lasted a little longer, which worried me, as I had visions of A. R. committing flashery around and about the neighborhood, but in a few days they too had faded into mist or the elemental particles of time or whatever ghosts and ghost-clothes are made of. The last thing I saw of hers was a shoe with a new heel (oh yes, I had gotten them fixed) which rolled out from under the couch and lasted a whole day before it became – I forget what, the shadow of one of the ornamental tea-cups on the mantel, I think.
And so there was no more five-year-old A. R. beating on the door and demanding to be let in on rainy nights. But that’s not the end of the story.
As you know, I’ve never gotten along with my mother. I’ve always supposed that neither of us knew why. In my childhood she had vague, long-drawn-out symptoms which I associated with early menopause (I was a late baby); then she put me through school, which was a strain on her librarian’s budget and a strain on my sense of independence and my sense of guilt, and always there was her timidity, her fears of everything under the sun, her terrified, preoccupied air of always being somewhere else, and what I can only call her furtiveness, the feeling I’ve always had of some secret life going on in her which I could never ask about or share. Add to this my father’s death somewhere in pre-history (I was two) and then that ghastly behavior psychologists call The Game of Happy Families – I mean the perpetual, absolute insistence on How Happy We All Were that even aunts, uncles, and cousins rushed to heap on my already bitter and most unhappy shoulders, and you’ll have some idea of what’s been going on for the last I-don’t-know-how-many years.
Well, this is the woman who came to visit a few weeks later. I wanted to dodge her. I had been dodging academic committees and students and proper bedtimes; why couldn’t I dodge my mother? So I decided that this time I would be openly angry (I’d been doing that in school, too).
Only there was nothing to be angry about, this time.
Maybe it was the weather. It was one of those clear, still times we sometimes have in October: warm, the leaves not down yet, that in-and-out sunshine coming through the clouds, and the northern sun so low that the masses of orange pyracantha berries on people’s brick walls and the walls themselves, or anything that color, flame indescribably. My mother got in from the airport in a taxi (I still can’t drive far) and we walked about a bit, and then I took her to Kent and Hallby’s downtown, that expensive, old-fashioned place that’s all mirrors and sawdust floors and old-fashioned white tablecloths and waiters (also waitresses now) with floor-length aprons. It was very self-indulgent of me. But she had been so much better – or I had been – it doesn’t matter. She was seventy and if she wanted to be fussy and furtive and act like a thin, old guinea hen with secret despatches from the C.I.A. (I’ve called her worse things) I felt she had the right. Besides, that was no worse than my flogging myself through five women’s work and endless depressions, beating the old plough horse day after day for weeks and months and years – no, for decades – until her back broke and she foundered and went down and all I could do was curse at her helplessly and beat her the more.
All this came to me in Kent and Hallby’s. Luckily my mother squeaked as we sat down. There’s a reason; if you sit at a corner table in Kent and Hallby’s and see your face where the mirrored walls come together – well, it’s complicated, but briefly, you can see yourself (for the only time in your life) as you look to other people. An ordinary mirror reverses the right and left sides of your face but this odd arrangement re-reflects them so they’re back in place. People are shocked when they see themselves; I had planned to warn her.
She said, bewildered, ‘What’s that?’ But rather intrigued too, I think. Picture a small, thin, white-haired, extremely prim ex-librarian, worn to her fine bones but still ready to take alarm and run away at a moment’s notice; that’s my mother. I explained about the mirrors and then I said:
‘People don’t really know what they look like. It’s only an idea people have that you’d recognize yourself if you saw yourself across the room. Any more than we can hear our own voices; you know, it’s because longer frequencies travel so much better through the bones of your head than they can through the air; that’s why a tape recording of your voice sounds higher than–’
I stopped. Something was going to happen. A hurricane was going to smash Kent and Hallby’s flat. I had spent almost a whole day with my mother, walking around my neighborhood, showing her the University, showing her my house, and nothing in particular had happened; why should anything happen now?
She said, looking me straight in the eye, ‘You’ve changed.’
I waited.
She said, ‘I’m afraid that we – you and I were not – are not – a happy family.’
I said
nothing. I would have, a year ago. It occurred to me that I might, for years, have confused my mother’s primness with my mother’s self-control. She went on. She said:
‘When you were five, I had cancer.’
I said, ‘What? You had what?’
‘Cancer,’ said my mother calmly, in a voice still as low and decorous as if she had been discussing her new beige handbag or Kent and Hallby’s long, fancy menu (which lay open on the table between us). ‘I kept it from you. I didn’t want to burden you.’
Burden.
‘I’ve often wondered–’ she went on, a little flustered; ‘they say now – but of course no one thought that way then.’ She went on, more formally, ‘It takes years to know if it has spread or will come back, even now, and the doctors knew very little then. I was all right eventually, of course, but by that time you were almost grown up and had become a very capable and self-sufficient little girl. And then later on you were so successful.’
She added, ‘You didn’t seem to want me.’
Want her! Of course not. What would you feel about a mother who disappeared like that? Would you trust her? Would you accept anything from her? All those years of terror and secrecy; maybe she’d thought she was being punished by having cancer. Maybe she’d thought she was going to die. Too scared to give anything and everyone being loudly secretive and then being faced with a daughter who wouldn’t be questioned, wouldn’t be kissed, wouldn’t be touched, who kept her room immaculate, who didn’t want her mother and made no bones about it, and who kept her fury and betrayal and her misery to herself, and her schoolwork excellent. I could say only the silliest thing, right out of the movies:
‘Why are you telling me all this?’
She said simply, ‘Why not?’
I wish I could go on to describe a scene of intense and affectionate reconciliation between my mother and myself, but that did not happen – quite. She put her hand on the table and I took it, feeling I don’t know what; for a moment she squeezed my hand and smiled. I got up then and she stood too, and we embraced, not at all as I had embraced the Little Dirty Girl, though with the same pain at heart, but awkwardly and only for a moment, as such things really happen. I said to myself: Not yet. Not so fast. Not right now, wondering if we looked – in Kent and Hallby’s mirrors – the way we really were. We were both embarrassed, I think, but that too was all right. We sat down: Soon. Sometime. Not quite yet.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 130