Haunted Houses Read online

  Jane’s sunburn was turning into a third-degree burn right on the spot between her breasts, as if the sun had drilled a hole in her. The sky was a cloudless blue. Larry was in profile against the horizon, and he was speaking to her about things no one else ever had. Jane startled at the mention of her sex life and his, the possibility that they were connected. She felt adult and tragic. That night they went into Miami Beach and Jane fell in love with a college friend of her cousin’s. But you only saw him for a minute, her cousin insisted. The next five days, until they went home, Jane ate as if there were no tomorrow. “Doll,” Larry laughed, “slow down. You don’t want to look like me, do you?” Jane flew home eight pounds heavier. It was a bad flight, the plane hit an air pocket and dropped a thousand feet. Her uncle stuck some nitroglycerin under her nose. She tried to ignore all the people who’d been drinking heavily before the plane dropped as they vomited around her. This is the way the Romans did it, Jane thought—on purpose. Of course the Romans weren’t in a plane flying back from Florida to the suburbs. They did go to the sea, and they ate apples for headaches. And as she thought all this they came closer and closer to earth.

  She decided to lose weight, not for her prom, which she wouldn’t go to on principle, but for life after it, and found a diet doctor who supplied her with multicolored tablets in small plastic boxes. Jane lost weight and talked constantly or not at all. Asked to be the bridesmaid at her middle sister’s wedding, having spent three hours combing her hair, trying to get it right, she didn’t smile as she walked down the aisle. Jane’s inappropriately sober attitude indicated to her father that his youngest daughter was still unmanageable, and somehow improper. Jane’s always been wild, he said. She did lose twenty or so pounds and was as slim as a branch whose leaves had just fallen off.

  Her newly married sister fixed her up with a guy who had just graduated from college. He asked her out again and then again. He liked to go into the city and see a play or talk about movies or the war in Vietnam. But when he placed his hand on her breast, Jane felt sick to her stomach. She said she had a headache, as if she had memorized a Victorian manual written for skittish brides. He took her home and kept calling. She dreaded his calls and began to hate him, even though there was nothing hateful about him. He took her to see The Balcony and she spent the whole of the second act in the bathroom, like a Roman. Finally she was mean to him and he never called again. She felt a moment of guilt, then a curious blankness, and then relief.

  It was to be Jane’s last summer in the suburbs. On graduation night her name was called to accept a $100 award for a mixture of virtues, including good citizenship, given regardless of race or religion. It was the only award so designated and Jane walked forward wondering what, if anything, she had done to deserve it or if she appeared so bland, so colorless that this award had been designed for somebody just like her. Miss Anderson handed her the piece of paper and said, They won’t love you if you’re good, only if you’re rich, and winked.

  Jane spent the summer driving around, playing tennis, going to the beach, and fighting with her parents about finding a job. She said there were none. Her mother would say do you mean that in all of Manhattan and Long Island there are no jobs? Her father didn’t push her to look for a job the way her mother did. Jane was still taking a lot of pills, to maintain, as the diet doctor recommended. She was the thinnest person in his waiting room. She soaked up the sun as if it were food. Her tennis partners were two sixteen-year-old boys and she played both of them at the same time. She had never gotten so dark and it seemed like an achievement. Jane saw no one from school, but visited Jimmy in the city once or twice. She gave him some of her pills and they drove around Manhattan. She drove him home and she kept driving when no one was on the streets except the police. She drove aimlessly, thinking that the police must be suspicious of her. Expecting to be stopped, she drove slowly. Jane began imagining that her father wanted to kill her and she couldn’t sleep.

  The days passed. The nights passed. Time disappeared as she stared at her reflection in window and in mirrors. She lay in the sun for hours with nothing on her mind, nothing that she could account for later. Or occasionally an image came to mind. She wrote in her diary: She was walking downstairs and I was at the bottom of the stairs and her hair was long and full. She looked old to me because her breasts were so big and she had a small waist. Maybe that was by comparison. I guess I was about seven and she was sixteen, she was just a little younger than I am now. Jane stopped writing and walked into the bathroom, visualizing the scene, looking at the metal toothbrush holder which used to be her mirror when she couldn’t see over the sink.

  The diet doctor stopped her pills suddenly. It was crazy, but it was only later that she knew that, after her father had kicked her out, into the city, where she wanted to live anyway. You’ll see, she intoned to Lois as she threw her stuff together, “that these dead shall not have died in vain,” the Gettysburg Address coming to mind, her father having recited it so often from the hardcover book he loved. Everything fit into two cardboard boxes; Jane didn’t take her yearbook with her name in gold letters on its white cover. She didn’t take her tennis racket.

  CHAPTER 2

  Grace thought her dolls came alive at night, after midnight, and talked with each other only when she’d fallen asleep. Most likely she’d been told the story of The Nutcracker Suite, but Grace, like most children, took stories to heart. She waited up nights, a captive to the secret lives of her dolls, and feared they might say terrible things about her. Against her young will Grace would fall asleep, though sometimes she’d make it past midnight, or what she thought was midnight. To stay awake she danced on her bed, wondering if they were watching. The dolls never spoke, at least she never heard them, and Grace reasoned that they knew she was awake and could wait longer. In a way she never gave up the notion that her dolls came alive. Later, when she stopped playing with them, she forgot it.

  Play was Grace’s job, the way doing the housework her mother Ruth’s. Ruth did her work defensively, keeping Grace out of the kitchen, telling her humorously to go play as if she were saying go away. Grace found play a lonely job, and she hated her dolls, especially Kitty, the grown-up-looking blond, with breasts much bigger, proportionately, than Grace’s, an anomaly not missed by Grace, who found it impossible to mother her. She would hit her dolls for no reason at all, then try to make it up to them. Grace liked animals much better, and any animal, even a stuffed one, was preferable to a doll.

  Ruth liked animals better than people. They’re loyal, she told Grace, but you can expect more from your family because you’re related by blood. Even so, Ruth distrusted her relations. And being related by blood doesn’t mean much to a child, but because she was related to them, they were there, rather than other people, at a bungalow colony in her sixth summer. Running out of the cottage naked, Grace liked to wake her relatives early, knocking on their doors and calling out that it was time to get up. They thought of her as uninhibited. With abandon Grace ran into the ocean, carrying an inner tube, and floated as far away from her blood as she could, until her mother called her out of the water and angrily slapped her across the face. You could’ve drowned made no sense to her; it had no relation to her. Six years later she became afraid of the waves when an especially big one knocked her down and dragged her under. She couldn’t catch her breath and she wondered how she had ever not been afraid.

  Relatives told Ruth what a bright little girl she had, how cute she was. Ruth accepted their praise with reservations, keeping to herself the thought that these people were after all only family. Grace’s true test would come in the world. Fascinated by an older cousin who had, as Ruth put it already developed, as if Grace were a photograph still in the camera, Grace resented having to play with a younger cousin only because they were the same age. Ruth told her husband, Grace doesn’t know how to play.

  The sand, the ocean, the bugs, the snakes. The people with newly red flesh advertising their bodies in bathing suits that expos
ed the red and the white, the lines demarcating the private parts. Grace even thought of herself as an explorer, a Columbus coming upon a new world. She took long walks with her older brother, Richard, who had been mandated by Ruth to look after her. Each time they set off they went farther and farther, miles and miles away. Grace thought, not exactly clear what a mile was, but farther than she had ever been from her mother. A sense of danger accompanied her like a best friend. Once upon a time there appeared a stream, so wide that it had a bridge across it, and standing on it was a boy Richard’s age. He was holding a burlap sack that had kittens in it, he told them, and then he hurled the bag over the bridge. Grace and Richard stood by, dumb, and watched the bag disappear under the water, bit by bit. Finally it was all gone. Richard told her that farmers were like that, that they had a different attitude toward animals, because they raised them to eat or to kill. “Then I’ll never be a farmer,” she said belligerently, “if they kill kittens.” Richard laughed at the idea. Grace announced that she would never live in the country, “if that’s the way people are.” And she never did, though her reasons were different when she got older. She said the country made her nervous. In her memory the boy who drowned the kittens became like a picture in a family photo album, still and frozen. But the scene was too horrible to have been real, and Grace often thought it was a dream.

  Grace missed her room at home. Small as it was, it was hers and she grew to love it as if it were human. After school she’d kiss its floor, with passion, pursing her lips, opening her mouth slightly, the way movie stars did. In this room she invoked her fantasies, directing herself to choose the best one, going over it and over it, it always giving her pleasure. She directed her friend Celia too. They had a special game and Grace was tyrannical about being the girl, letting Celia be her only once in a while. Celia the man would come upon Grace the girl, unaware, innocent and grab her from behind. The girl would pretend to fight and then abandon herself to the man. They enacted this scene over and over again, Celia fighting Grace more and more about getting the chance to be the girl. They lived in the same apartment building, with older brothers the same age, and mothers who didn’t like each other. Ruth thought Celia’s mother had too many airs. “Like mother, like daughter,” Grace’s mother intoned.

  For one of Ruth’s birthdays Grace bought her a cheap pin, a cluster of fake seed pearls around a blue enamel center, which she’d found, all by herself, at a street fair several blocks from home. Returning, she had to pass the gypsies on the corner. They had appeared on the block suddenly, different and strange, and when they beckoned to Grace, waving their arms covered in shiny red and blue material, she hesitated, stuck to her spot on the sidewalk. They waved and smiled, their white teeth bright against their dark skin. Grace stared and ran, not knowing why they wanted her, or what they would do with her. Ruth was given her present. She said it was ugly and that she’d never wear it. She opened the top drawer of her mahogany dresser, put the pin with other junk jewelry and shut the drawer with finality. As she shut it she told Grace that it was important to tell the truth. The gypsies wore much uglier jewelry. Weeks later Grace dreamt that her mother was killed by a runaway train. Ruth had been tied to the tracks and no one could save her. That made sense because Ruth always refused help. If you do things by yourself, you won’t owe anyone anything, she’d tell Grace. Grace woke screaming and asked to sleep with her mother, who told her she was being silly. And added, You’re not a baby anymore.

  There was something calm about Celia, as if she had a big secret that she wouldn’t tell anyone, most of all Grace. Grace always wanted to find out what she knew. When Celia refused to play their special game anymore, saying they were too old—they were now ten—they set up a make-believe office, reviving Celia’s father’s dead business files and ledgers. Their business was an imaginary army of women. The names of their female soldiers were alphabetized and placed on cards in a small metal box. From Celia’s room they sent their soldiers on maneuvers and they punished and rewarded them as they had done their dolls. But added to their older responsibilities—discipline and feeding—was administration, end they took to it as if called to it. Grace was stricter, more punitive than Celia, who wanted to give the girls longer leaves and more dances. Grace no longer danced on her bed when listening to the radio, and, wearing real baby clothes that Ruth bought because they were more economical than doll’s clothes, Tiny Tears and Kitty sat on a shelf in the farthest part of Grace’s closet, as if that shelf were her childhood.

  Childhood ends in all different ways. One way was by understanding her parent’s fights, which she watched like a spectator at a tennis game. “If you don’t like the way we live,” her father yelled, “get a job.” “I’ve had your children and you’re going to support me,” her mother yelled. He slapped her and she slapped him. Or it ends when the facts of life, as they were called, are flaunted in your mirror, at a stage called puberty, a dumb word Grace thought. Or childhood ends on the playground, where she once played potsy and now was being shown pornography, a word she knew without knowing how but didn’t tell Little Louie. He shuffled the pastel-pink playing cards much too fast, so that the naked bodies blurred as if they too were shocked. Little Louie had dark circles under his eyes Grace attributed, as she did his diminutive size, to early coffee drinking. He was a naughty, ugly boy, in love with Grace, who didn’t know it. They got reported to the principal—Grace’s first brush with the law—and he threatened to call in their parents. Louie acted as if he didn’t care, but Grace cried and begged the principal not to. The principal let the kids off as though he were commuting a death sentence to life. Grace could never again face the principal, and Louie could never again face Grace, and she will have no memory of his presence on that playground or in her life ever again after that time. She was convinced now that she was a sinner, because she had looked at dirty pictures. When she had asked her mother, Do you, we, believe in sin? Ruth had said yes, because there is evil in the world. Real evil, Grace asked, like the devil? Ruth looked at her daughter seriously. She didn’t believe in talking down to children. There may not, she said, be an actual devil, but there is a lot of evil in the world, a lot of sin, and sometimes I wonder. It’s best not to trust people too much. Grace couldn’t trust Louie; he was a little devil, getting her into trouble, making her sin. Grace didn’t tell anyone what she’d seen, learning to distinguish between good and bad knowledge.

  Now she too had a secret, a secret she took to camp with her, where she was sent away for three weeks. An unwilling camper—Ruth told her it was time to grow up—Grace lived in a bunk with seven other girls her age, but her friend was Sandy, an older girl of fifteen who had a broken nose and biceps. All the girls thought Sandy was strange, but she was devoted to Grace, doing favors for her, taking pictures of her in front of the bunk. And late at night, giving her back rubs, and Grace knew her power, another secret. She played the special game when things were innocent, because one was unaware, or thought to be unaware. Sandy went home unacknowledged. Years later Grace wondered what had happened to all those pictures of her looking so cute, and what had happened to Sandy.

  That summer her breasts grew and Grace mailed away for “Sally, Mary and Kate Wondered,” a twelve-page pamphlet with diagrams and line drawings of the girls in the title. When it finally happened, Ruth announced it at dinner. Richard looked like he was about to laugh and her father cleared his throat and said, Now you’re a woman. Grace stared at him, then continued making drawings on a paper napkin, remembering that two years before she thought she might be an adult. Out shoe-shopping, the salesman had measured her feet and told her mother Grace was now a size five. “We’re going,” Ruth stated, as if insulted by the salesman, who had always measured Grace’s feet. She pulled Grace after her, leaving him with a shoe in his hand. “That’s an adult size,” Ruth whispered to Grace, marching her toward that other world, Ruth’s favorite shoe store, and Grace felt her childhood had reached another ridiculous end. Now, at the table two year
s later, her father pronounced her a woman. Was there such a difference, she wondered as she colored in, with a Crayola, the tiny patterns on the paper napkin. Richard was horrible, she thought, looking at his familiar face, but one of his friends was so cute, Grace died whenever he came to the apartment. She hoped he wouldn’t say anything to him about her being a woman.

  All the girls stopped speaking to Grace. It was her turn. The last year before high school, the girls ignored her for months and months, way beyond the normal time for exclusion. It did something to Grace, walking to school alone, being ignored in the halls, or whispered about behind her back. “You must have done something wrong,” Ruth said, perceiving her daughter’s imperfections as personal insults. Even her brother assumed it was her fault, but he took her to a movie now and then, meting out the angry sympathy a seventeen-year-old boy offers a younger sister. She made friends with a nice, unpopular girl called Marlene, who was striking in her indifference to her unpopularity. This distinguished her in Grace’s eyes, and while Grace couldn’t understand how she could stand it, she admired her for it. The boys kept talking to her and asking her to parties she couldn’t attend because the girls would be there. Grace was set strangely upon her own devices.

  During the trouble, as her family called it, as if Grace were pregnant out of wedlock rather than out of sympathy with her friends, she tried to see herself as enduring a trial by fire from which she had to emerge stronger. She read more than she ever had and wrote down sentences that applied to victims like herself, to read over and over when the phone rang and she knew if she picked it up someone would just hang up. Her dog Lady kept her company. Ruth had gotten Grace the dog three years before, for her birthday, mother and daughter still linked by their love of animals, although Ruth got rid of them when they got in the way or were too much trouble.