by Phoef Sutton
Two kids banged a door open and ran in from the room where the TV blared. They pelted each other with Beanie Babies and collapsed in a tangle behind the sofa before I had a chance to see what age or sex they were.
On the whole, pies excepted, the house gave off the usual aura of barely controlled desperation and budding chaos you find in suburban homes throughout this country. Normal, even amusing, but hardly a place to go for an answer to the meaning of life, I thought.
Then June Cleaver walked in.
Or Harriet Nelson. Or Florence Henderson. Pick the perfect TV mother of your choice. Not that she was wearing a pleated housedress, exactly. Actually, she was in a blue chambray shirt and pair of Back to Basics Gap jeans. But being June Cleaver is all in the attitude.
She scooped the two wriggling kids up from behind the sofa, one in each arm. I saw now that they were a boy and girl, around three; they weren’t identical twins, though they were the same age and were, at the moment, co-joined at the hands and throat.
“Why you don’t you take all your Beanie Babies and tuck them in bed and sing them a song?”
They leapt to their feet, gathered the dolls until they overflowed in their arms, and raced up the stairs. From chaos, order. Mrs. Day switched off the TV in the other room, a door slammed upstairs, and all at once, peace, harmony, and the blessed smell of pies ruled supreme.
Okay, she could teach me the meaning of life.
FOURTEEN
Keep your mind a total blank.”
Never been a problem for me, as the joke goes. Funny thing was, for once I actually knew what she meant. My mind felt clear, open, empty. The clutter and feedback that always buzzed in the background—unpaid bills, unwritten letters, snatches of half-forgotten songs—were silenced. The inside of my head felt swept clean and receptive. I was not creating static. I was tuned to receive.
If I was ever going to pick up any messages, it was going to be now. I took deep, steady, cleansing breaths and let myself fly.
It hadn’t started well.
“So, what makes you think you’re a medium?”
This annoyed me. For one thing, there was that silly word, medium, conjuring up images of a fussy Margaret Rutherford in Blithe Spirit or a hysterical Julie Harris in The Haunting. For another, there was the question itself. I wasn’t here to justify myself; I was here to learn.
“I don’t know if I do think that.”
“Then why are you here?”
We were sitting at the kitchen table, like a happy family around the coffee cups and pie. Mrs. Day had a benignly pretty face. Up close, she wasn’t as old as I’d thought; late thirties, tops.
“Well, Joe brought me—”
“Yes,” patient, but stern, “I know Joe brought you, but you asked him to bring you. So?”
“Well, he thought—”
“Joe’s not the one I’m talking to. What do you think?” There was nothing harsh in her voice, but she broadcast a beam of motherly authority.
“Look, I don’t know what to think. That’s why I’m here.” I glanced over at Kathleen and wished I wasn’t sounding so ineffectual.
Mrs. Day nodded. “Not knowing what to think can be a very intelligent position. But only as a beginning.”
She stood up and started clearing the table. Kathleen and Shara immediately moved to help. I made a few piles with the plates, and Joe kept looking for beer in the fridge.
“Now,” she said, when the table was all neat and tidy again, “you have to understand that the ability you claim to have—”
“I don’t ‘claim’ anything.” This whole thing had gotten off on the wrong foot altogether. One thing I’d never been, the beginning of that Ouija board session aside, was a faker. “To tell you the truth, I don’t believe any of this myself.”
“Then I’m stumped, Mr. Kehoe. Stumped and bewildered. If you don’t think you’re a medium, what do you think you are?”
Well, that’s everybody’s sixty-four dollar question, isn’t it? “I just, I think I see things—”
“You think you see things?”
“Well, it appears to me that I see things—”
“You either see things or you don’t see things, Mr. Kehoe. If we’re not talking about concrete reality, I don’t want to talk at all.”
Well, this was hardly the approach I’d expected from my spiritual mentor. “But…so you don’t believe either?”
“I believe in what I see, Mr. Kehoe. What I see and what I hear and what I touch and taste and feel. But that doesn’t mean that what I see, hear, touch, taste, and feel are the same things everyone else sees, hears, touches, tastes, and feels. Now, I ask you again, what do you see?”
“Sometimes, usually in periods of stress, I seem to see things that don’t appear to be there.”
She looked at me, lips pursed, eyes squinting. “Sometimes? Seem? Appear? Why do you leave yourself so many escape routes?”
“Look, maybe I’m not using the words you like, but—”
“Words are things, Mr. Kehoe. They mean what they mean. I’m not disapproving of what you’re saying. I’m just trying to understand what it is.” She picked up an orange Fiestaware tea pot. “Do you see this?”
“Yes.”
“That was easy, wasn’t it? Now, these things you sometimes seem to appear to see, do they look as real as this?”
You know how it is when the mere act of putting things into words makes you think of them in a new way? “More real,” I said.
“How is that?”
“Just clearer. Too clear. You know, like those paintings that are supposed to be like photographs but somehow the lines are too sharp and reflections are too hard? It’s like that. So real, it doesn’t look real. Do you know what I mean?”
Her face softened. “Yes, I do know what you mean. Why don’t you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Why isn’t seeing believing for you?”
“Why should it be? I mean, why should I see something nobody else sees? I’m not so special.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Come on. The obvious explanation is that I’m hallucinating. That’s what I’ve always believed. Until now. Now something new has come up, and that’s what I’m here to talk to you about.”
“That’s what we are talking about, Sam.” What had I done to be promoted to first-name basis? “I’m interested in why you don’t think you’re special.”
“Let me count the ways.” I was trying to make a joke, but you don’t joke with people like Mrs. Day. They do that annoying thing of believing what you say.
“Why do you have such a low opinion of yourself, Sam?”
Good Christ, this was turning into Amateur Hour at the Group Therapy Coffee House. “Actually, I have a very high opinion of myself. I’m constantly frustrated that no one else shares it.”
“Most people like to think they’re special.”
“Yeah, well, most people like to fool themselves, don’t they? You know what I always hated? My mom and dad were both teachers, okay, and they always hated that whole Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood thing about every kid is special. ‘You’re special just because you’re you.’ That makes no sense.”
“You hated it, or your parents hated it?”
“We all hated it. I mean, think about it. If everybody’s special, then nobody’s special. Somebody has to be below average to make the special ones stand out.”
“And that someone is you?” Mrs. Day asked.
“According to Mom.” This I said with my charming, self-deprecating laugh that always melted hearts and showed people I was just joking. No one laughed. “That’s a joke. You know what a joke is?”
“A defense mechanism, usually.”
“No. Come on. You know what I can’t stand about people like you?”
“I didn’t know you couldn’t stand me.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not a mind-reader, Sam, I’m a medium.”
“Now you’re joking. What ar
e you feeling defensive about?”
“So you agree that jokes are a defense mechanism?” she countered.
She didn’t move at all. I, on the other hand, was squirming like a kid in church. “No, I think they’re jokes. Wit. A form of entertainment. Something exaggerated to get a laugh.”
“But what are you exaggerating, Sam, when you say your mother didn’t think you were special?”
“I didn’t say that. Did I say that?” I turned to the others for support. They said that I’d said that. “Why are we doing this? What does this have to do with me being a medium? Or a regular or an extra-large?” No one laughed at that either, but I couldn’t blame them.
“Actually, I like that joke,” Mrs. Day said with her gummy smile, “because it makes you think about the word. Medium. What does it mean?”
“Average. Small, medium, large.”
“And?”
“Uh, rare, medium, well-done. You know, something in between two other things.”
“And?”
“I guess it’s something that something is in, right? Fish swim in the medium of water.”
“And?”
“That’s it. Oh, I guess there’s like TV is a medium, or radio. Right? A way of communicating something?”
“Exactly. If you are a medium, you are all of that. Both the one in between two things and the medium of communication between them. And you are also the medium of the message, the thing it is in, so you yourself become a part of any communication that passes through you. You can’t help but distort the message in some way because you are a part of the message.
“But if you clear your mind, you can hear them. If you don’t listen, if you deny it and try to stifle it, they’ll still work their way through. Burst in on you like bad dreams. You can’t shut them out, Sam. You don’t have an off switch.”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t like what she was saying and, most of all, didn’t like that it was making sense to me.
“Did you ever tell your parents, your mother, about your experiences?”
“Can we talk about why we came here?”
“We are. Did you?”
“Yes. Not at first, but….” I gave them a brief recap of my Ouija board fiasco with dear Melody, leaving out anything that would make me look bad in Kathleen’s eyes, of course. “Charlotte wanted to know what the hell happened, so I told her. She believed me. She was thrilled, actually. Thought it was very exciting. Like having ‘Carrie’ for a brother. She wanted me to tell Mom and Dad. Like I was a gifted child and they could put me in a special class or something.”
“Did you know anyone who was in a special class?”
“My brother, George. But that’s because he was a math whiz. And, of course, I hated him for it and it warped me for life. I’m joking again.”
“I know.”
“Anyway, I knew it was a terrible idea, but I went and told Mom and Dad.”
“And they weren’t happy?”
“They’re educators, okay? My mother’s a math teacher; she didn’t believe in spooks. She just blew up. She couldn’t believe I’d done that to Melody. She said it was the cruelest trick she’d ever heard of, and she was so disappointed in me. I told her it wasn’t a trick, but that just made things worse. I got sent to every psychiatrist in the Washington area, and that’s a lot of psychiatrists. Had every test and scan and, God, you name it.”
“Did they find anything?”
“No.”
“Did you keep seeing ‘spooks’?”
“Sometimes. I couldn’t help it.”
“But you didn’t tell anyone?”
“No.”
“You never told your mother again?”
“No, but it didn’t help. There was distance after that. Like she didn’t trust me.”
“Had you ever really talked with her about this sort of thing before?”
“No.”
“But you knew it was a terrible idea to tell her. How did you know that if you’d never brought up the subject before?”
I glanced at the others in room. They were trying not to listen. Or trying not to look like they were listening.
“You just, you knew my mother, okay?” I said. “Even when I was really little and I’d wake up yelling ’cause, I don’t know, ’cause the Bogey Man was in my closet or something, she’d just come in, slam open the closet, switch on the light, and show me there was nothing there, and that was that. She didn’t have any patience for that crap.”
“Did you find that comforting?”
“Well, yeah, I guess. I mean, she showed me the closet was empty,” I said, sitting on the edge of my seat. “And if there had been anything in there, she’d have whupped its ass.”
“And she proved that you’d been wrong? About the Bogey Man.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And that’s pretty much how she reacted when you told her you’d seen Melody’s father?”
“Sure. Mom was always consistent.”
“Why do you think it bothered her?”
“What do you mean, ‘why?’ Because it’s crazy. Seeing visions? Come on. That’s for saints and psychotics and con men and old Gypsy fortune-tellers like Maria Ouspenskaya in The Wolf Man. It isn’t real.”
“And what’s real matters that much to her?”
“Not just that. Look, she was always disappointed in me, okay? If you want to get to the whole blame-it-on-my-childhood-it’s-all-my-parents’-fault bullshit. I was a below-average student in an above-average household. I didn’t like great art or the symphony. I liked scary movies and country music. My brother had science fair trophies on his shelf; I had an autographed picture of Jamie Lee Curtis. I think she thought the whole ghost thing was just my way of trying to get attention and, well, she hated that more than anything. She hated lies.”
“Do you think that’s really what she hated?” Mrs. Day asked, smiling.
“Do I think she hated me? Is that what you mean?”
“Not at all.”
“Well, she loved me, okay? She took care of me when I was sick, she liked my girlfriends, she laughed at my jokes, which is more than I can say about some people. It’s just that she expected more. Can you blame her for that?”
“I don’t know.”
God, I knew the familiar pattern of those non-committal answers. “Are you a shrink? Is there a degree on the wall I’m not seeing?”
She smiled. “No.”
“See, this is the basic con man approach. You do a little cheap psychoanalyzing, then you tell people what they’ve already told you. Just like Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz.”
Mrs. Day wasn’t offended. “Sam, I can’t tell you why you’ve resisted this for so long. But if you’re willing, if you’re ready to accept it now, I can help you listen to what they have to say.”
“What who has to say? Spooks? Ghosts? That’s ludicrous!”
She took my hand in hers. Her fingers were squat and thick, her nails blunted from housework. But the flesh was soft and warm, and her touch was the gentlest I’d ever felt. “Sam, you don’t have to fight it anymore. Whether they’re real or not, they can’t hurt you. And there’s no one here who’ll disapprove of you.”
“Maybe I will.”
She smiled. “Maybe you will. Are you willing to risk that?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
“Mean it, Sam. This ability you have, if you have it, it doesn’t come along every day. It does make you special. Are you willing to find out the answer to the question you’ve been afraid to ask all these years?”
Put it that way and I had no doubt.
“Yes,” I said.
The Town Museum is a barn behind Mrs. Day’s that had been expanded by volunteers to twice its original size and four times its original ugliness. It’s filled to the rafters with the debris of three centuries or more of life on the island. Old sleighs and carriages; broken bookcases and dinner tables; ancient stone axes and arrowheads; fading photographs of grim-faced Civil War soldiers and t
he equally grim-faced women they left behind; letters and legal forms and yellowed maps; splintered, flaking, rusting, threadbare, shattered toys and eyeless dolls. Whenever an old man or an old woman finally died on the island, surviving relatives would swoop down to sell and disburse all his or her belongings and the belongings of their shared ancestors. Off it would all go to antique stores and auction houses in New York or Boston. Only what was too busted or too unappreciated to garner a profit would stay on the island, would make it here, into Mrs. Day’s loving hands.
She’d take these fragments and mount them over finely lettered parchment labels: “Boy’s tin toy ‘The Dancing Jigger’ found at Indian’s Head Cove, circa 1840”; “Second page of letter sent from the Battle of the Wilderness, 1864, found in top drawer of desk at the Dump, author and addressee unknown”; “Lace doily, made by Millicent Ainslie, 1912.” This was the heritage and history of the island, kept by one of the few natives who seemed to care. I hope to God that when Emily Day dies it doesn’t all show up on an auction block at Christie’s or in an antique shop in Soho. Or in the Dump off the Quarry Road.
Mrs. Day led us into the dark, freezing room, switched on the fluorescent tubes Ticket Costello had fixed to the high rafters, and, as they flickered reluctantly to life, she turned up the thermostat. The furnace kicked in, and I figured the place would be warm and comfortable come April.
“You okay?” Kathleen whispered to me privately, her breath smoky in the cold.
“I guess. I mean, it’s all pretty crazy. We can leave if you want.”
She glanced to where Mrs. Day and Shara were setting up chairs at a circular dinner table in the middle of the room. “No, I want to see this through. It’s not like she’s crazy or asking for money or anything.”
“You think she’s legit?”
Kathleen crossed her arms beneath her breasts to keep warm, and I tried not to notice what the cold was doing to her nipples. “I think she believes what she says.”
Not the same thing at all.
“We’re ready!” Mrs. Day called out, as if tea were being served.
Mrs. Day sat us around the table, fingers touching. Déjà vu all over again. An old Tiffany lamp was our centerpiece; the light diffused by the multicolored leaded glass shade was gentle and soft once she’d turned off those unforgiving fluorescents.