Ghostbread Read online

  Our mother begged Tony not to and punished him when he did, but the temptation to feel acres pounding underfoot, the soft power of the horse in his hands, the tall grass at his heels, the wind at his back—these things proved too much for Anthony, who hopped onto those horses’ backs whenever someone wasn’t looking.

  18

  The fields out back were loaded with strawberries, which we picked and ate in bowls with milk. My mother also boiled them into jams and jellies. We grew vegetables in a muck garden near the house. Carrots, lettuce, and tomatoes mainly. We ate homegrown vegetables and fruits in season, and otherwise survived on the foods my mother canned. Homemade pickles, peaches poured into cobblers, strawberry preserves scooped onto warm biscuits.

  My mother stored her peaches and beans in mason jars high up in a pantry that was too large to fill. The pantry a room of its own practically, with scalable shelves layered in thick enamel. The shelves were soft from a century of springtime paintings, the surface so giving my fingernails left half-moon imprints on its skin as I climbed.

  19

  In September, a school bus stopped in front of the house and took us to Albion Primary and Secondary schools. The driver was thick-featured and rarely moved from his cushioned perch, except on holidays, when he handed out treats from a plain brown bag—candy canes at Christmas, red wax lips on Halloween.

  One day after leaving the bus, my oldest sister cried. While the rest of us bawled as needed, Lisa was more stone than girl, her face never crumpling to tears. I kept my eyes on her, and followed close. As we watched for cars and crossed the road to the house, I asked why. She walked away. Fast. Her face was hard and wet.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “The kids were picking on us,” she said, and pushed away. Lisa was mean, but my curiosity about what had broken her was bigger than my fear, so I followed.

  “Why would they pick on us?” I asked. Why? Why? Why?

  “Why do you think?” She lashed out like a whip of salted ocean spit. “Our house is ugly, our clothes are shit—they hate us because we’re poor!” She let it all out in one angry sob, then ran into the house.

  Before that day, I’d been sent home with boxes of donated clothes from a teacher in the primary school a few times. I had always felt happy with my oversized loads, feeling proud to have been trusted with a special cargo. But after Lisa’s crying, I refused the boxes; I lied, made excuses.

  I once opened one of those boxes. Back before my sister cried. Back when I still took them. During a slow ride on the school bus, I broke through a wide strip of tape and pushed my fingers into a small pot of solid perfume. I oiled my finger, rubbed the scent of jasmine blossoms onto my wrist and felt pretty.

  20

  At school, I learned to read and write and use spit in creative ways. I had a crush on a sweet-faced boy who looked like Randy from the Jackson Five. “Rhinestone Cowboy” was the big song. At school, I shined. Other than having the silver dollar that had been left by the tooth fairy stolen from the coat closet during recess, I loved school; it was big and bright, a gem in my pocket. Everything was just right. Until Zaida.

  Zaida was the only girl poorer than me, and in an effort to be more like them and less like her, I agreed to help the other girls put a tack on her seat, pretend-laughing as she lowered her bony behind onto it.

  Days later, my mother steered the car out to Zaida’s house. Sober rows of zucchini and eggplant lined both sides of the shack whose paint had faded and run gray. My mother shocked me by not only knowing Zaida’s family, but by stopping to drop off something for them.

  The skinny girl with the apron dress and crane legs stood still as a giant bird in her dusty yard and did not look my way when my mother mentioned our being in the same grade. The air between us pulsed, though no one else seemed to notice. She flickered a bit, then faded; looking as tired as the dirt at her feet.

  As we pulled away, I felt some of Zaida’s grit. Inside me. Grit and shame and dust. It got inside, and stayed.

  21

  We’d return to the city on some holidays, but usually stayed in the big old house in Albion where we’d gather around the heat and make the most of whatever day was to be celebrated.

  We didn’t trick-or-treat on Halloween because the houses were so far from each other. Instead, our mother asked questions about past presidents or spun the globe and had us locate Istanbul or Uruguay. In exchange, we’d receive thick candy bars, with the game rigged to make sure everyone received equal doses of chocolate.

  For Christmas, Steph and I received twin dolls. The closest in age, we always got different versions of the same thing. Same winter coat, different color. Same dress, different pattern. She got the George doll, I got Georgina. Both of them were three feet tall with pink grins plastered on their faces. Their milk-white skin was sprayed with freckles and crowned with red hair. But no matter how charming their scrubbed Gaelic features may have been to some, their green-eyed, button-nosed look was the one that none of us had. As a result, and in a sole attempt at unity, we were repelled by the sweet-faced pair. Still, I didn’t hate Georgina the way that Steph hated George. The fact was, she despised dolls altogether, and was endlessly irritated by my mother’s sloppy inattention to this detail.

  “Oh Steph,” my mother said, puffing out disclaimers like other mothers blew out silky loops of smoke—“I forgot about you and dolls.”

  Another Christmas and she’d meet Steph halfway, get her a GI Joe. But there was no compromise in Albion, when Steph still hoped that every unwrapped gift would be the Erector set she’d never get. Unable to shake the disappointment of getting a doll, Steph refused to touch George at all until that spring when she beheaded him and hung his ugly red head from the treehouse perch. I cried, though in truth, I wasn’t so much mourning the doll as grieving the loss of the pair. Georgina was nothing without George.

  22

  One frozen blue evening, we took rides on a horse-drawn sleigh. A man came to the house and gathered us by the load, our laughter the only sound for miles. Looking up through the warmth of a scarf that covered everything but my eyes, I saw a sky that bloomed velvet flowers. Back and forth, the man took us along Route 31A, while those not in the sleigh clamored by the open door, our hot breath gunning fog as we begged for another run.

  The sleigh was decked in bells with holly boughs tied to its side. Or perhaps the driver just seemed festive. He liked my mother. Or owed her something. It all ended, however, when his horses and sleigh ran off the road into an icy ditch. My mother was harsh to him then. She shut us up inside, left him out in the cold.

  “He’s drunk,” she said, an unusual air of judgment darkening her voice.

  “Therese—Therese, Therese,” the sleigh driver called, “I can get her up and running again—I can, I can.”

  Pound. Pound. Pounding on the door.

  “Therese, Therese. …” he called after her from the frozen side of the door, joined with us at not wanting the fun to end. But she just stood there, silent. She would not look at us. She would not be swayed.

  23

  My mother worked in a gypsum factory just outside Batavia. The world passed from night to day and back again as she laced electrical wires through drywall boards. The only woman to work in the prefab metal building, she learned to drink coffee in hollow rooms with sawdust-laden floors. Every now and then, she had a day off, and I’d manage to fake sick to gain trips to Carrol’s for burgers, to the downtown diner for grilled cheese, to Ames for stiffly coordinated outfits stuck to plastic hangers. Those rare stolen days were such a treat that I had to remind myself to appear sick. Filling up on green glass bottles of ginger ale, I let the bubbles tickle my throat on the way down to a stomach already very much at peace.

  24

  We were Catholic, but only in Rochester. I was never sure if it was due to fewer churches to choose from in Albion, or simply the more relaxed attitude toward religion that wide-open fields encouraged, but we only attended church on return trips t
o the city.

  Once, at Sunday school, while coloring in Adam, Eve, and the Snake on black-outlined sheets, someone asked about how the original pair, living outdoors, went to the bathroom. I knew how, so I raised my hand and told the nuns about our outhouse. They didn’t believe. I insisted, told them about the black-eyed Susans and buttercups that grew on the path leading up to it. I left out the spiders, tried to make it sound pretty. Like Eden. The other kids laughed, and the nuns bristled. When my mother arrived, they spoke to her in hushes until she became red in the face. She’d never been so ashamed, she whispered not quite to me, on the drive home.

  My grandmother visited in Albion, one of only two visits with her I’d ever had. A stranger to me, she won my affection by giving me a bracelet strung with bits of shell and glass. I had never owned anything so lovely. It was from somewhere warm, which I kept saying was Hawaii, though my mother corrected me that this was not the case. Probably it came from Florida. Or Vegas.

  My grandmother was not like other grandmothers. She moved from place to place and drank whiskey like water. Besides the fact that my usually laughing mother became silent in her presence, I knew only five things about my grandmother: (1) her name was Anna Mae—first Jackman, then Baker, finally DeFrank; (2) she sewed my sister Lisa’s lace communion dress and matching veil by hand; (3) once, when we were still in the city, she’d left eight wrapped gifts for our eight Michigan cousins without any for us, and as soon as she pulled away, my mother simply tore away the eight Michigan names and gave the gifts to us; (4) she sprinkled salt on her apples and taught me to do the same, which tasted bitter, but I pretended was the best thing ever, if only to earn her admiration; (5) she was a hard woman, not given to admiration.

  25

  Will was the oldest in the family, the quiet one who, because of his age, his silence, and the fact that he’d spent the past year living with his father in Albany, was basically a stranger. In fact, by the time things went bad between he and his father, and he arrived in Albion, I had nearly forgotten about him. Thin and quiet, Will kept to himself, was shy with even my mother. He had been just a name while he was gone, a ghost really, and he remained one once he returned home—wandering from room to room without a word. Only a creak in the floorboard or a muffled sneeze would remind us he was there.

  Will was in high school and worked at the Swan Library, a job that I had no ability to hold but was jealous of just the same. All those books. When I was fortunate enough to get inside, I’d look through the shelves in the big old building, thinking how unfair it was that Will not only got to be around them so often, but was actually paid for it.

  A monk from the library brought Will to his house and stuffed him with sweets. Intrigued by the old man and his fancy home, we begged to go inside for visits when it was time to pick Will up. Sometimes my mother said yes and ran errands while we combed the red velvet cushions of his antique chairs with our fingers.

  White as the sugar waffles he always served, the monk told horrible stories while we gathered at his feet, eating caramels by the bagful and dipping our fingers into the powdered remains of those delicate waffles. He’d lean into us and screw up his face, telling us about three sisters who’d stayed out late at a party one night. He’d take his time with his stories, noting how the youngest had hair so blonde it shone in the sunlight and how each of the girls had dressed for bed in gowns of pink and gold and kissed each other goodnight.

  “The only problem,” he said in a quiet voice, bringing his white lips close to our foreheads as he spoke, “was that they forgot to lock their doors that night.”

  The girls in his stories were always stalked and attacked, their heads cut from the neck. The losing of heads should have ended things, of course, but the monk never stopped there. Heads could be reattached with a well-placed scarf or a pearl choker necklace, he told us, so that his story became one of girls trying to protect the remaining sanctity of their necks. For they truly only lost their heads when they allowed someone too close.

  This is what I learned from the monk, as I munched on sweets and swallowed his tales: No matter how smart or how pretty, girls were always conquered in the end. They’d forget their caution, allow some well-intentioned man to unclasp a cameo choker or blue silk scarf, and heads would tumble.

  Despite the monk (or because of him) I learned to like scary stories. In fact, my mother came to count on me as her companion for the creepy television shows that only she and I liked. Mainly they were detective shows like The Night Stalker or low-budget horror films involving some form of vegetation gone mad with desire for human blood.

  At times she drew an arbitrary line and said I was too young to see a particular show. She did this when Rosemary’s Baby came on TV. No matter how I begged, my mother insisted on watching Rosemary and her devil-baby alone. Certain that I had been wronged, I could not let go and stayed up soaking in whatever blurred sounds of poison-malted shakes and satanic chanting I could manage to catch from the other room. I fell asleep that night, triumphant, listening to Rosemary’s screams.

  26

  Green shoots poked through the melting earth.

  Snowdrops, my mother said. She knew about flowers and liked to tell us about them. Sometimes she’d talk about other things. On a sunny day in spring, she shared a secret.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said, while lying on her side in tight blue jeans, all curves as she informed her children that another was on the way.

  A baby! I heard the words and curled into her side. I touched my mother’s denim-clad leg, wrapped both arms around the fullness of her upper thigh.

  “A baby,” I said.

  “Yes,” came her voice, “but not for a while, though.”

  I closed my eyes and began to imagine the soft skin, the sweet-smelling hair. I had baby dolls, of course, and a younger sister already, but at five, Mallory was too big to wrap into a blanket and carry around. A baby, I thought again, imagining the ruffled clothes and bottles of white talcum. A real baby, I thought, and began to feel as though I might rise up off the mattress and float. In fact, I may have risen to the ceiling with happiness, but I checked myself—I had learned the foolishness of letting go before cutting my first tooth. My mother had always swelled with promise, talked of milk and honey, but was as hard to hold on to as the wind. Remembering this, I pulled myself back to the reality of the overcrowded mattress.

  Pulling away a thick wave of cinnamon hair as she spoke, she looked into our faces to make sure we heard.

  “We’ll have to give the baby away,” she said.

  27

  I hated Peg and Leroy.

  They were strangers pretending to be friends because my mother was giving them the baby. Our baby, who was going to be half-Indian, my mother had told us, like Cher.

  Stringy clumps of hair the color of strained carrots twined round Peg’s thin neck. The chalky line of her lips receded into a small chapped face. Eager to show that they liked kids, they chose me to spend the day at their house, a house that smelled of Pine-Sol and too much scrubbing. Lacy afghans of brown and orange draped the backs of plaid couches. The place was quiet, with no books or toys. I fell into a chair and waited for time to pass.

  I left the chair only to accompany them to the grocery store, where Peg bought me a pack of barrettes—a plastic-wrapped row of twelve hair clips, the kind clipped to the shiny heads of pretty girls at school.

  Wow, I thought, maybe Peg is not so bad after all.

  I pushed a banana-yellow barrette into my hair and took a nap near an open window, clutching the prize of the others. When I woke, the barrettes were gone. I ran downstairs. My fingers raced back and forth under a hedge of prickly shrubs. Back and forth. Back and forth. Until my hands were rubbed raw by privet and holly.

  The barrettes were not to be found. Peg, of course, thought I’d thrown them away, became enraged when I told her I couldn’t find them; her face snapped shut. Leroy, who was little more than the red beard that masked his face, comforted her w
ith a steady hand to the shoulder. They drove me home in silence, and as soon as my mother opened the door, Peg told her about the barrettes. She heated up as she spoke, said how ungrateful I was. I ran to my mother, turned to Peg, and screamed that I hated her. When the redheaded woman did not flinch, I went further.

  “And you’re never gonna get our baby!”

  My mother dug into my skin with her hands, told me to shut up, while Peg hissed, then buried her head into Leroy’s flannelled chest and cried.

  28

  We kept her.

  My mother decided that Lynne would be her middle name, and allowed us to vote on the first. Rachel or Amy.

  “Rachel means little lamb,” my mother said.

  I sensed her nudging us toward the name, but I chose Rachel primarily on account of a girl named Amy in my class with a tiny row of rotted teeth.

  As the weeks went by, my mother’s stomach pushed the limits of her clothing. Her auburn hair grew thick and curled around her face like a wild crown.

  We watched, intent on the mystery of another of us growing inside her body. We watched, and life continued around us.

  29

  My cousin Judith cut my hair off one day while my mother was at work.

  “I wanted practice cutting, and the shag is in style,” she said when my mother walked through the door and stood staring at the strands of hair drying on the floor.