Ghostbread Read online

  8

  Annmarie VanEpps may as well have been rich.

  She had a dollhouse as tall as we were, and though my mother said Annmarie was spoiled, she sometimes let me cross Leighton Avenue to play with the girl and her toys.

  My mother was right.

  Annmarie was spoiled—but only in the way that poor children can be. She was given things, but they always fell short of what she really wanted. Still, she was the only girl, the youngest, and her mother doted on her in a small and nervous way. Annmarie’s mother was tiny. Dark hair curled around a heart-shaped face, and she would have been pretty had she not been so tightly wound, like a hummingbird, moving hard and going nowhere.

  In a neighborhood of untucked shirts and mismatched socks, Annmarie and her mother stood out. Her mother wore slacks with creases sharp enough to cut a hand and outfitted her daughter in periwinkle dresses that tied in the back and brought out the blue in Annmarie’s eyes.

  Annmarie had older brothers, and from them I learned not to play with sticks. One of the VanEpps boys had played with a stick and put a girl’s eye out. The girl was left with only one working eye, and after that, whenever any of us picked up a stick and pointed it at a face, my mother would remind us of that poor girl and her nonworking eye. The VanEppses were brought to court by the girl’s family, and who knows how that went. It could not have been too damaging, since Annmarie’s father had left them years before and other than the oversized doll-house and a working Lite-Brite, there wasn’t much to claim.

  9

  We had big plans.

  We were going camping.

  My mother placed an empty cardboard box in the kitchen and once a week deposited some camping essential into it. Toothbrushes and a flashlight one week, pop-up camping cups and a box of matches another. We were planning a big trip. To the Adirondacks, or maybe to New Hampshire, where we’d pick blueberries all day and see what a real mountain looked like. Maybe we’d go back to the house at the foot of Mount Washington. Back to the place my grandfather built, when he was alive and my mother was a girl. Back when the world was as sweet as it ever would be.

  10

  How to tell it so it’s not misunderstood: the hatchet was in her hand and we’d been jumping on beds.

  Again.

  My mother had told us time and time again not to, but we couldn’t resist the cushioned bouncing, the way our hair splashed in the air as we fell. Carol and her kids were visiting and we were bored, so we took to the bed and started bouncing. Then there she was, tight-eyed and in front of us with a hatchet fished out of the camping box.

  “In a line,” she said, and we made ourselves into a line along the kitchen floor and did what she said because she had a hatchet, and a hardness to her eyes.

  “In a line,” she said, “jumping.”

  So we jumped, feeling silly even at our young ages, knowing it was wrong somehow to be forced by hatchet into jumping. But it was no time for joking. My mother’s face was red, and though she was looking right at us, she did not seem to see.

  She pounded the linoleum with her hatchet, dull side down—jump, jump, jump, she said, and the blade was sharp and her eyes had never been colder and even good old Carol could not calm her and so pretended it was all a joke and told her children to keep jumping in my mother’s line.

  “Jump, you kids!” my mother said, eyes empty where there was usually blue.

  And we jumped. We kept our bodies in flight, feet slapping the floor, faces wet as we sobbed and called out to her to please stop.

  Who knows how it ended.

  So often, only the beginning of the story remains, like the base of a bridge long gone. We’re left with the things we notice as the adrenaline builds—the hairline crack in the floor, the orange and yellow flowered cover on the toaster. So often, the ending does not really matter.

  “Jump! Jump! Jump!” she said. And we did.

  Until she tired, or our legs gave out, and we fell, ragged, into a pile on the floor.

  11

  We moved.

  Like other people celebrated holidays, we packed our stuff and moved. Leighton Avenue. Bowman Street. East Main Street, upper and lower. All that movement may sound like something, but the places were within blocks of each other and nothing marked the moves as special. In fact, were it not for my mother saying we had a new address, I might not have noticed.

  Perhaps they were happy, the moves—our running onto new porches, stretching under sun-filled windows, sitting in front seats of moving vans, fiddling with the loop of keys hanging from the ignition. More likely, though, the moves were nonevents, as moves from one slum apartment to the next tend to be, marked only by a neighbor poking out her head while our olive green sofa was maneuvered through the twists and turns of the entryway, and saying, “Oh, so you all are over here now, hmmm? Well that’s all right, it’s an okay place, at least you’re still close by.”

  This was the way things were, our moves tiny and circular, until the end of my fifth year, when we packed our belongings and headed out of the neighborhood entirely.

  Another move.

  But this one was different. We left the small streets that snaked through the northeast quadrant of Rochester. We left Annmarie VanEpps, her bird of a mother, her well-stocked toy box. We left the one-eyed girl, and the empty desk in my brother’s classroom. We left the teacher with the owl earrings, Carol and her gift purse, and everything we knew.

  This time, we headed west.

  West, but it was nothing like a gold rush. Nothing so grand as California. We didn’t even make it out of the state, barely left the county. Still, given our history of movement within the same zip code, the move was big.

  The reasons for our leaving were unknown to all but my mother. She just packed up the station wagon and pointed it west. About an hour away. Near Albion, where her cousins had a house and where, it turned out, our camping supplies would come in handy. It was not the Adirondacks, but we pitched a tent in their wide yard and slept beside rows of cow corn. It was not Mount Washington either—no blueberries, no stands of tamarack—but at least there were crickets, and she seemed happy there, my mother, walking up and down the gravel road out front, spending her free time lying on her back, running a flashlight back and forth over the canvas of our green tent.

  12

  As they often reminded us, the McCullens were not our actual cousins; they were my mother’s. But they were relatives nonetheless, and served as hosts for us and our tent until my mother could find a better place.

  Aunt Jane was a Jehovah’s Witness who had married one McCullen brother, had five girls, then married another and had two more. Polly and Molly were the oldest. Large-bottomed twins with a trail of suds perpetually falling from their ripe hands, the pair was most often found in the kitchen, preparing and eating meals, washing an endless pile of dishes. Linda was heart-faced, golden-haired, and serving time in the local prison for being with a man who’d robbed a store and killed someone in the process. Judith was small and bitter, a prickly weed squatting in the middle of the yard. Tess was a dark and moody tyrant whose magic made even the old barn out back shine with glamour and intrigue. She doled out parts and led us in daily reenactments of The Wizard of Oz. Dori was my age and so agreeable she faded from every scene. Tammy, the youngest, was the dark-haired favorite: her pink ruffled bedspread and access to a flush toilet made her a princess, to us.

  As a bunch, the McCullens were wildly creative—energy unleashed. Sitting at her electric sewing machine, Aunt Jane would whip off a stream of halter tops to outfit a yard full of sweaty girls. And the stories they told! They laughed and cried as they discussed long dead relatives with children listening from every corner of the room. But the McCullens were also quick to anger, and comfortably aware that their position was much more solid than our own.

  Aunt Jane pressured my mother into beating us the time we tried to make cement by peeing in the sand. I felt worse for my mother than for my own behind. She tended to laugh off
things like pee-cement, but was in charge of nothing at Aunt Jane’s place. I hated my mother’s being stuck, the way she finally smacked our bottoms without heart, how even our punishment seemed inadequate compared to the soulful whippings Aunt Jane meted out to her own clan.

  13

  I wanted Tess to like me.

  She was a dark-spirited teenager who talked of kidnappings, the Bermuda Triangle, and the power some people had to bend spoons with their brains. They did this, she said, by thinking hard and wanting it enough.

  Tess was the only interesting cousin I had, the sort made more interesting by her rejection of me. Death in general, and ghosts in particular, were big with Tess. She’d burn candles, use the Ouija board, sit Indian-style and call out to John F. Kennedy to “please appear.”

  “I saw him, I saw him!” she’d cry after looking into the flame of a candle and chanting. And anyone with a voice agreed, though we hadn’t caught sight of him, wouldn’t even have known what he looked like, would have had an easier time conjuring an Osmond brother than the dead young president. Still, we shot our eyes to the floor and said we saw him too, knowing it was a lie, but saying it because Tess wanted it so badly.

  So when she offered to teach me to ride a bike, I had no choice but to agree. In truth, I didn’t want to learn, was not as motivated by the prospect of independent travel as some children. More than anything, I did not want to fall.

  The bike was bent in places, and finished with the dull paint of houses. Aqua with sea-foam edging. Tess told me to get on and try pedaling.

  “I’m afraid,” I said.

  “Try,” was all she said, while crossing her arms over her bony chest.

  I wanted to please her, wanted her to like me so much that I’d be given a proper role in the next séance, would be invited as full participant in the next game of Mystery Date. I wanted it, but my legs refused to move. And Tess, who was not given to patience, had used up all the kindness she had access to with her offer to teach me.

  So she pushed me.

  Hard.

  Then screamed for me to pedal, pedal, pedal.

  And I did. I rode in a straight line for two full seconds, then banged into the trunk of a thick old maple. The bike’s fender was bent even worse than before and I had a fat and bleeding lip, but was proud as I climbed into the station wagon and headed to the Orleans County fair. I replayed the scene from my place on the merry mixers, from the cushioned inside of a bumper car, and from my seat at the very top of the Ferris wheel.

  14

  The pink took. It was not sweet or giving, as pink should be. The color was fixed to our walls in Albion, the place we moved to after camping out in our cousins’ yard. The house my mother found was big and old. White plaster crumbled through the pink walls like whitecaps on a Pepto-Bismol sea. I stared into those breaks night after night. The festering plaster took hold of me; I was a knuckleheaded girl with more time than options, so I stared and stared into those frothy white holes and waited.

  Everyone loved Cher. My oldest sister, Lisa, and meanest cousin, Tess, sang her gypsy songs while sashaying under trees. They were girls becoming women, their bodies pained with growth. They had no choice but to dance under dappled leaves, to soak themselves in the black-magic salve of Cher. And though my own body was far from womanhood, I needed her too, that buck-skinned woman looking out to me from the top of a lopsided pile of my mother’s music. Cher was radiant astride her palomino and cool even in the desert heat. At night, she’d leap from her album cover and come for me on that very same horse, entering my room through an opening in the crumbling walls.

  First came the gallop, hooves sounding with heartbeat swish and rhythm. Then her. Glowing, shining, a sword of light, a stream of hair following crescent moon eyes as she scooped me up from the bed I shared with two or three sisters and my mother. She’d shake me gently, call me “little bird.” And off we’d fly. To the dusty mountain pass of her album cover, to the blinding glitter of Hollywood, or to anyplace else that ginger-soft horse would take us.

  15

  On warm nights, the family spread throughout the house like lounging cats. But when it was cold, we slept in the same room, the pink room being the only one with heat. My mother and her six children gathered hungrily around the large furnace that squatted in the center of the room. Some shared a big bed, others slept on the floor; it was like camping out in our cousins’ yard, only warmer.

  There was no working bathroom in the house. We had a small room complete with tub and toilet, but no pipes were attached to either. It was simply a room to wander into and wonder over. But for bathroom services, we used the outhouse behind the house. Sometimes we’d drag the old claw-foot tub, like a porcelain bear, into the living room, where we’d plug the drain and fill it with water heated on the kitchen stove, then hop into it in twos and threes.

  I got a twin bed once, for some occasion or because my mother found one at a good price. I had it for about two days, but lost it when I peed on purpose. I was afraid to go to the outhouse alone, so I peed right on the bed, right through the Raggedy Ann and Andy sheet set. The mattress had a plastic sheath whose protective powers intrigued me and which I convinced myself I was testing, but mainly, I was afraid of the spiders that spun on silver strands along the outhouse path. Someone saw the wet sheets, and I was found out. And so, as punishment for my freestyle peeing, the secondhand bed and its new mattresses—even the pee-stained sheets—were taken from me and given to my sister Stephanie, while I got Steph’s old sleeping bag. I cried hard about losing my bed, but in the end, I didn’t miss it, and was somehow comforted by my return to the floor.

  The house had once been a stop for stagecoaches, but by the time we arrived, it was divided into two large apartments. People moved in and out of the other apartment all the time, as though stagecoaches still pulled through—made stops, loaded up, then pulled off again. Brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends stepped down from unseen coaches, stayed awhile, then packed up again, left. People were here and not here, in a ghostly procession of comings and goings. Except men. There were no fathers or boyfriends in either apartment.

  A young woman lived upstairs. If she had a husband, he had wronged her, or died. The scent of male tragedy clung to her. She painted her toenails red, wore ankle bracelets, and drove without shoes. My mother, who painted no part of her body, pointed out that barefoot driving was illegal.

  The woman had several cats and gave me one of the tiniest, a kitten so soft and white I named her Fluff. She was warm, I was cold: that was the basis of our love. My mother warned me about holding the cat, said she’d die if I didn’t let her be, that I’d make her sick by carrying her around so much. But I couldn’t stop. I was crazy with desire for Fluff, and nuzzled my face into her fur every chance I got.

  16

  Albion is in Orleans County, one of the poorest counties in New York State. And in the poorest of counties, the poorest of people came from West Virginia, though the reason for their northern migration was unclear. Perhaps they’d simply followed the eastern tip of Lake Erie up through Pennsylvania till it washed them to the southern shore of Lake Ontario where they could go no further. Or else they came to pull fruit from freckled branches, to cut the blue-green balls of cabbage that grew in lines close to the earth. Or maybe they knew something special about the place, some secret or well-disguised potential.

  Mrs. Drake was a West Virginian, and moved into the upstairs apartment after it was vacated by the woman who’d worn her sadness like a perfume. Mrs. Drake was old. A clutch of nappy gray hairs sprang from her head so that she looked like a dandelion gone to seed. Small as a girl, Mrs. Drake had a voice that sounded like the yellow paper I helped scrape from her worn kitchen walls. She repapered the small room with my mother’s collection of newspapers from the day JFK had been killed. My mother, shocked at seeing the headlines she’d been saving glued to walls, couldn’t make sense of Mrs. Drake’s crazy ways. She saw her as a bug of a woman. But I was mystified. Nothi
ng was off limits to Mrs. Drake, not someone else’s belongings, not the eating of weeds, not indelicate bits of personal advice. That was her main appeal.

  “Listen up, baby—you ever getcha an ear infection, jes’ get yourself some sheep’s urine, soak it up with cotton balls, an’ stuff the whole mess up inta your ear—it’ll clear things out in no time.”

  Mrs. Drake picked wildflowers from the field out back and boiled them into remedies. For Christmas, she gave each of us four girls a smooth-handled wooden mirror. She served hot tea and told stories while teaching me to braid a long line of yarn with a stubby crochet hook.

  17

  The backyard was the flattened acres of abandoned farms with a few clumps of trees left here and there. We built a fort in one of those tree stands, an oasis amid tall grasses and weeds. Whole days unwound there. We hung from homemade swings, chewed on monkey vines, told big stories about the land, saying that some child had died in the bottomless pond out back. We imagined quicksand in those places where no one but our bravest brother, Anthony, ever ventured.

  Anthony stole rides on Mr. Stragg’s horses. Mr. Stragg owned the house and the land. He lived in a small ranch-style house built to the side of the clapboard giant in which we lived. His face was waxed and red—a glistening turnip—and when they came, his words were mangled and choked, as though sifted through a wad of burlap in his throat. A farmer paid by the government not to farm, Mr. Stragg was quietly kind, my mother told me years later, and left groceries on our steps when he knew we had nothing. But in Albion, all I knew was that Mr. Stragg was crotchety and preoccupied and not to be pestered.

  His wife was sick, her body curled into a wiry gray ball. When things got quiet, she’d surprise everyone. She’d have a fit, unwind herself, claw the clothing from her body, then run wild and naked from her bed. She required constant care. To add to Mr. Stragg’s troubles, Anthony would not stay off the horses kept out back, horses that Mr. Stragg had clearly stated were not for riding.