by Peter Straub
Most of these women’s husbands are in care or dead or living with younger women. The old women sleep two to a room. They like hotels with buffet lunches and saunas, clean pillows that smell good, chocolates on the pillows, firm mattresses. Louise can see herself wanting these things. Sometimes Louise imagines being old, waking up in the mornings, in unfamiliar countries, strange weather, foreign beds. Louise asleep in the bed beside her.
Last night Louise woke up. It was three in the morning. There was a man lying on the floor beside the bed. He was naked. He lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling, his eyes open, his mouth open, nothing coming out. He was bald. He had no eyelashes, no hair on his arms or legs. He was large, not fat but solid. Yes, he was solid. It was hard to tell how old he was. It was dark, but Louise doesn’t think he was circumcised. “What are you doing here?” she said loudly.
The man wasn’t there anymore. She turned on the lights. She looked under the bed. She found him in her bathroom, above the bathtub, flattened up against the ceiling, staring down, his hands and feet pressed along the ceiling, his penis drooping down, apparently the only part of him that obeyed the laws of gravity. He seemed smaller now. Deflated. She wasn’t frightened. She was angry.
“What are you doing?” she said. He didn’t answer. Fine, she thought. She went to the kitchen to get a broom. When she came back, he was gone. She looked under the bed again, but he was really gone this time. She looked in every room, checked to make sure that the front door was locked. It was.
Her arms creeped. She was freezing. She filled up her hot water bottle and got in bed. She left the light on and fell asleep sitting up. When she woke up in the morning, it might have been a dream, except she was holding the broom.
The woman brings their food. Anna gets a little dish of peas, brussels sprouts, and collard greens. Mashed potatoes and bread. The plate is green. Louise takes a vial of green food coloring out of her purse. She adds three drops to the mashed potatoes. “Stir it,” she tells Anna.
Anna stirs the mashed potatoes until they are a waxy green. Louise mixes more green food coloring into a pat of butter and spreads it on the dinner roll.
“When I was a dog,” Anna says, “I lived in a house with a swimming pool. And there was a tree in the living room. It grew right through the ceiling. I slept in the tree. But I wasn’t allowed to swim in the pool. I was too hairy.”
“I have a ghost,” Louise says. She wasn’t sure that she was going to say this. But if Anna can reminisce about her former life as a dog, then surely she, Louise, is allowed to mention her ghost. “I think it’s a ghost. It was in my bedroom.”
Anna says, “When I was a dog I bit ghosts.”
Louise says, “Anna, be quiet for a minute. Eat your green food before it gets cold. Louise, what do you mean? I thought you had ladybugs.”
“That was a while ago,” Louise says. Last month she woke up because people were whispering in the corners of her room. Dead leaves were crawling on her face. The walls of her bedroom were alive. They heaved and dripped red. “What?” she said, and a ladybug walked into her mouth, bitter like soap. The floor crackled when she walked on it, like red cellophane. She opened up her windows. She swept ladybugs out with her broom. She vacuumed them up. More flew in the windows, down the chimney. She moved out for three days. When she came back, the ladybugs were gone—mostly gone—she still finds them tucked into her shoes, in the folds of her underwear, in her cereal bowls and her wine glasses and between the pages of her books.
Before that it was moths. Before the moths, an opossum. It shat on her bed and hissed at her when she cornered it in the pantry. She called an animal shelter and a man wearing a denim jacket and heavy gloves came and shot it with a tranquilizer dart. The opossum sneezed and shut its eyes. The man picked it up by the tail. He posed like that for a moment. Maybe she was supposed to take a picture. Man with opossum. She sniffed. He wasn’t married. All she smelled was opossum.
“How did it get in here?” Louise said.
“How long have you been living here?” the man asked. Boxes of Louise’s dishes and books were still stacked up against the walls of the rooms downstairs. She still hadn’t put the legs on her mother’s dining room table. It lay flat on its back on the floor, amputated.
“Two months,” Louise said.
“Well, he’s probably been living here longer than that,” the man from the shelter said. He cradled the opossum like a baby. “In the walls or the attic. Maybe in the chimney. Santa claws. Huh.” He laughed at his own joke. “Get it?”
“Get that thing out of my house,” Louise said.
“Your house!” the man said. He held out the opossum to her, as if she might want to reconsider. “You know what he thought? He thought this was his house.”
“It’s my house now,” Louise said.
Louise says, “A ghost? Louise, it is someone you know? Is your mother okay?”
“My mother?” Louise says. “It wasn’t my mother. It was a naked man. I’d never seen him before in my life.”
“How naked?” Anna says. “A little naked or a lot?”
“None of your beeswax,” Louise says.
“Was it green?” Anna says.
“Maybe it was someone that you went out with in high school,” Louise says. “An old lover. Maybe they just killed themselves, or were in a horrible car accident. Was he covered in blood? Did he say anything? Maybe he wants to warn you about something.”
“He didn’t say anything,” Louise says. “And then he vanished. First he got smaller and then he vanished.”
Louise shivers and then so does Louise. For the first time she feels frightened. The ghost of a naked man was levitating in her bathtub. He could be anywhere. Maybe while she was sleeping, he was floating above her bed. Right above her nose, watching her sleep. She’ll have to sleep with the broom from now on.
“Maybe he won’t come back,” Louise says, and Louise nods. What if he does? Who can she call? The rude man with the heavy gloves?
The woman comes to their table again. “Any dessert?” she wants to know. “Coffee?”
“If you had a ghost,” Louise says, “how would you get rid of it?”
Louise kicks Louise under the table.
The woman thinks for a minute. “I’d go see a psychiatrist,” she says. “Get some kind of prescription. Coffee?”
But Anna has to go to her tumble class. She’s learning how to stand on her head. How to fall down and not be hurt. Louise gets the woman to put the leftover mashed green potatoes in a container, and she wraps up the dinner rolls in a napkin and bundles them into her purse along with a few packets of sugar.
They walk out of the restaurant together, Louise first. Behind her, Anna whispers something to Louise. “Louise?” Louise says.
“What?” Louise says, turning back.
“You need to walk behind me,” Anna says. “You can’t be first.”
“Come back and talk to me,” Louise says, patting the air. “Say thank you, Anna.”
Anna doesn’t say anything. She walks before them, slowly so that they have to walk slowly as well.
“So what should I do?” Louise says.
“About the ghost? I don’t know. Is he cute? Maybe he’ll creep in bed with you. Maybe he’s your demon lover.”
“Oh please,” Louise says. “Yuck.”
Louise says, “Sorry. You should call your mother.”
“When I had the problem with the ladybugs,” Louise says, “she said they would go away if I sang them that nursery rhyme. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.”
“Well,” Louise says, “they did go away, didn’t they?”
“Not until I went away first,” Louise says.
“Maybe it’s someone who used to live in the house before you moved in. Maybe he’s buried under the floor of your bedroom or in the wall or something.”
“Just like the opossum,” Louise says. “Maybe it’s Santa Claus.”
Louise’s mother lives in a retirement commun
ity two states away. Louise cleaned out her mother’s basement and garage, put her mother’s furniture in storage, sold her mother’s house. Her mother wanted this. She gave Louise the money from the sale of the house so that Louise could buy her own house. But she won’t come visit Louise in her new house. She won’t let Louise send her on a package vacation. Sometimes she pretends not to recognize Louise when Louise calls. Or maybe she really doesn’t recognize her. Maybe this is why Louise’s clients travel. Settle down in one place and you get lazy. You don’t bother to remember things like taking baths, or your daughter’s name.
When you travel, everything’s always new. If you don’t speak the language, it isn’t a big deal. Nobody expects you to understand everything they say. You can wear the same clothes every day and the other travelers will be impressed with your careful packing. When you wake up and you’re not sure where you are. There’s a perfectly good reason for that.
“Hello, Mom,” Louise says when her mother picks up the phone.
“Who is this?” her mother says.
“Louise,” Louise says.
“Oh yes,” her mother says. “Louise, how nice to speak to you.”
There is an awkward pause and then her mother says, “If you’re calling because it’s your birthday, I’m sorry. I forgot.”
“It isn’t my birthday,” Louise says. “Mom, remember the ladybugs?”
“Oh yes,” her mother says. “You sent pictures. They were lovely.”
“I have a ghost,” Louise says, “and I was hoping that you would know how to get rid of it.”
“A ghost!” her mother says. “It isn’t your father, is it?”
“No!” Louise says. “This ghost doesn’t have any clothes on, Mom. It’s naked and I saw it for a minute and then it disappeared and then I saw it again in my bathtub. Well, sort of.”
“Are you sure it’s a ghost?” her mother says.
“Yes, positive,” Louise says.
“And it isn’t your father?”
“No, it’s not Dad. It doesn’t look like anyone I’ve ever seen before.”
Her mother says, “Lucy—you don’t know her—Mrs. Peterson’s husband died two nights ago. Is it a short fat man with an ugly moustache? Dark-complected?”
“It isn’t Mr. Peterson,” Louise says.
“Have you asked what it wants?”
“Mom, I don’t care what it wants,” Louise says. “I just want it to go away.”
“Well,” her mother says. “Try hot water and salt. Scrub all the floors. You should polish them with lemon oil afterward so they don’t get streaky. Wash the windows, too. Wash all the bed linens and beat all the rugs. And put the sheets back on the bed inside out. And turn all your clothes on the hangers inside out. Clean the bathroom.”
“Inside out,” Louise says.
“Inside out,” her mother says. “Confuses them.”
“I think it’s pretty confused already. About clothes, anyway. Are you sure this works?”
“Positive,” her mother says. “We’re always having supernatural infestations around here. Sometimes it gets hard to tell who’s alive and who’s dead. If cleaning the house doesn’t work, try hanging garlic up on strings. Ghosts hate garlic. Or they like it. It’s either one or the other, love it, hate it. So what else is happening? When are you coming to visit?”
“I had lunch today with Louise,” Louise says.
“Aren’t you too old to have an imaginary friend?” her mother says.
“Mom, you know Louise. Remember? Girl Scouts? College? She has the little girl, Anna? Louise?”
“Of course I remember Louise,” her mother says. “My own daughter. You’re a very rude person.” She hangs up.
Salt, Louise thinks. Salt and hot water. She should write these things down. Maybe she could send her mother a tape recorder. She sits down on the kitchen floor and cries. That’s one kind of salt water. Then she scrubs floors, beats rugs, washes her sheets and her blankets. She washes her clothes and hangs them back up, inside out. While she works, the ghost lies half under the bed, feet and genitalia pointed at her accusingly. She scrubs around it. Him. It.
She is being squeamish, Louise thinks. Afraid to touch it. And that makes her angry, so she picks up her broom. Pokes at the fleshy thighs, and the ghost hisses under the bed like an angry cat. She jumps back and then it isn’t there anymore. But she sleeps on the living room sofa. She keeps all the lights on in all the rooms of the house.
“Well?” Louise says.
“It isn’t gone,” Louise says. She’s just come home from work. “I just don’t know where it is. Maybe it’s up in the attic. It might be standing behind me, for all I know, while I’m talking to you on the phone and every time I turn around, it vanishes. Jumps back in the mirror or wherever it is that it goes. You may hear me scream. By the time you get here, it will be too late.”
“Sweetie,” Louise says, “I’m sure it can’t hurt you.”
“It hissed at me,” Louise says.
“Did it just hiss, or did you do something first?” Louise says. “Kettles hiss. It just means the water’s boiling.”
“What about snakes?” Louise says. “I’m thinking it’s more like a snake than a pot of tea.”
“You could ask a priest to exorcise it. If you were Catholic. Or you could go to the library. They might have a book. Exorcism for dummies. Can you come to the symphony tonight? I have extra tickets.”
“You’ve always got extra tickets,” Louise says.
“Yes, but it will be good for you,” Louise says. “Besides I haven’t seen you for two days.”
“Can’t do it tonight,” Louise says. “What about tomorrow night?”
“Well, okay,” Louise says. “Have you tried reading the Bible to it?”
“What part of the Bible would I read?”
“How about the begetting part? That’s official sounding,” Louise says.
“What if it thinks I’m flirting? The guy at the gas station today said I should spit on the floor when I see it and say, ‘In the name of God, what do you want?’”
“Have you tried that?”
“I don’t know about spitting on the floor,” Louise says. “I just cleaned it. What if it wants something gross, like my eyes? What if it wants me to kill someone?”
“Well,” Louise says, “that would depend on who it wanted you to kill.”
Louise goes to dinner with her married lover. After dinner, they will go to a motel and fuck. Then he’ll take a shower and go home, and she’ll spend the night at the motel. This is a Louise-style economy. It makes Louise feel slightly more virtuous. The ghost will have the house to himself.
Louise doesn’t talk to Louise about her lover. He belongs to her, and to his wife, of course. There isn’t enough left over to share. She met him at work. Before him she had another lover, another married man. She would like to believe that this is a charming quirk, like being bowlegged or sleeping with cellists. But perhaps it’s a character defect instead, like being tone deaf or refusing to eat food that isn’t green.
Here is what Louise would tell Louise, if she told her. I’m just borrowing him—I don’t want him to leave his wife. I’m glad he’s married. Let someone else take care of him. It’s the way he smells—the way married men smell. I can smell when a happily married man comes into a room, and they can smell me too, I think. So can the wives—that’s why he has to take a shower when he leaves me.
But Louise doesn’t tell Louise about her lovers. She doesn’t want to sound as if she’s competing with the cellists.
“What are you thinking about?” her lover says. The wine has made his teeth red.
It’s the guiltiness that cracks them wide open. The guilt makes them taste so sweet, Louise thinks. “Do you believe in ghosts?” she says.
Her lover laughs. “Of course not.”
If he were her husband, they would sleep in the same bed every night. And if she woke up and saw the ghost, she would wake up her husband. They would bo
th see the ghost. They would share responsibility. It would be a piece of their marriage, part of the things they don’t have (can’t have) now, like breakfast or ski vacations or fights about toothpaste. Or maybe he would blame her. If she tells him now that she saw a naked man in her bedroom, he might say that it’s her fault.
“Neither do I,” Louise says. “But if you did believe in ghosts. Because you saw one. What would you do? How would you get rid of it?”
Her lover thinks for a minute. “I wouldn’t get rid of it,” he says. “I’d charge admission. I’d become famous. I’d be on Oprah. They would make a movie. Everyone wants to see a ghost.”
“But what if there’s a problem,” Louise says. “Such as: What if the ghost is naked?”
Her lover says, “Well, that would be a problem. Unless you were the ghost. Then I would want you to be naked all the time.”
But Louise can’t fall asleep in the motel room. Her lover has gone home to his home which isn’t haunted, to his wife who doesn’t know about Louise. Louise is as unreal to her as a ghost. Louise lies awake and thinks about her ghost. The dark is not dark, she thinks, and there is something in the motel room with her. Something her lover has left behind. Something touches her face. There’s something bitter in her mouth. In the room next door someone is walking up and down. A baby is crying somewhere, or a cat.
She gets dressed and drives home. She needs to know if the ghost is still there or if her mother’s recipe worked. She wishes she’d tried to take a picture.
She looks all over the house. She takes her clothes off the hangers in the closet and hangs them back right-side out. The ghost isn’t anywhere. She can’t find him. She even sticks her face up the chimney.
She finds the ghost curled up in her underwear drawer. He lies face down, hands open and loose. He’s naked and downy all over like a baby monkey.
Louise spits on the floor, feeling relieved. “In God’s name,” she says, “what do you want?”
The ghost doesn’t say anything. He lies there, small and hairy and forlorn, facedown in her underwear. Maybe he doesn’t know what he wants any more than she does. “Clothes?” Louise says. “Do you want me to get you some clothes? It would be easier if you stayed the same size.”