Haunted Houses (2 page)

It was a hot summer, and on a particularly hot morning her father suggested she go to a movie on Forty-second Street. It was about 10 
A.M.
and Jane asked the woman in the box office if it was all right to go in. The woman said, You just pay your money and you go in, which Jane could figure out for herself, having paid her money and gone in to many movie houses. She took a seat near the aisle and the attendant looked up her dress, bending down, being very obvious. She moved to a middle seat and a young man in a light tan cap sat down next to her. The place was empty. She moved; he moved. She couldn’t go back to work so soon. She moved again, he moved again. He placed his hand on her knee and Jane looked at it. It lay there for a while. Jane wondered if he thought he was Holden Caulfield, with that cap on. She kept looking at his hand. It was dark and she could have done anything and no one would have seen or known. She felt something, and it wasn’t exactly that she felt sorry for him. His hand moved a little and feeling that she didn’t care what happened she got up and walked out. Jane wandered around Times Square, settling on playing Fascination till enough time had passed and she could return to her father. Two Doris Day reruns, she heard herself telling him. You know, they’re always the same.

Lois said she wanted to go to
UCLA
to study acting, and then try to get roles as a comedian or a character actress. I’m not that pretty, she stated indifferently, I couldn’t be the romantic type, but somebody has to be Rosalind Russell. Jane didn’t know what she wanted to do. None of Lois’s friends were as determined as she was. One of them called Jane on a Sunday morning and told her to sit down. It was very early. Jane said what’s wrong and the friend said Lois is dead. She was killed in a car crash.

A funeral for a sixteen-year-old is awful. Lois’s friends weren’t allowed to go to the cemetery. All of them stood together in one part of the chapel, far from the family, so as not to remind them of their loss. Jane’s parents respected her silence and didn’t fight with each other that day. Jane saw Lois everywhere, when she took a bath, when she turned off the lights. There was a glow that she decided was Lois. Without knowing it she mourned her death for nearly eight months until spring came and a boy from another school made her laugh about death. She felt she was betraying Lois in one way, and in another way she knew Lois would understand. There was something horribly funny about death. For Lois’s sake Jane pledged to change her life, to become different so that her death wouldn’t seem so stupid. Jane had always wanted to live her life differently.

The same guys who’d been her friends in grade school were now hanging out in the halls and smoking dope or taking advantage of girls, and Jane might wave or say hello to Michael but that was all. Her childhood was definitely over, she thought, each time she saw how far apart they had grown.

Almost imperceptibly she grew to have what her mother called a weight problem and her father, baby fat. He offered her Dexamyl for pep, as he put it since both he and Uncle Larry took a capsule or two every day like vitamins. Jane put on and took off weight like gloves and began not to know what she looked like. She looked at Miss Anderson, her English teacher, who didn’t wear a bra, even though she must have been over thirty. To her bleached blond hair and knowing, long-legged swagger Jane turned with fascination; here, she thought, was someone different. Miss Anderson’s brother was the biology teacher and he had a plate in his head from the war. It was also rumored that brother and sister were too close. In the classroom the sun shining through the windows reminded Jane of a life that existed elsewhere. Miss Anderson stood at the front of the class, framed by the blackboard, her blond hair and black roots, her white skin, a kind of flag of independence. Her lipstick was a deep red, like her sweater, her mouth moving slowly as she spoke with a drawl that matched her walk. If only, Jane thought, Uncle Larry had met Miss Anderson instead of his new, skinny wife.

For Easter vacation, in her senior year, Larry took her to Florida with his new wife, an ex-dance instructor her mother thought was a tramp, and his daughter from his first marriage. Even in a bathing suit Larry’s wife had no hips at all and what stuck out most was the cigarette that hung from her broad mouth. Her lips were big, a feature so unlike the rest of her that Jane considered them almost a deformity. Larry was broad everywhere, and the couple had a Laurel and Hardy quality that made Jane laugh secretly. Her uncle had known Bugsy Siegel—“he’d kill ya if you called him that, though”—and Frank Costello, from a steam room he frequented in the forties and fifties. “Frank saw me at the tables of one of his joints down here and he said to me, ‘Larry, what are you doing here? You know these tables are fixed.’” Her uncle told her stories about gangsters and her grandparents that her father never would have. “Your grandmother sent your grandfather away. He was a nice man, too, but we hated him because she told us he was bad.” They were on a boat getting terrible sunburns. “Your father took care of me, protected me. He should see a doctor, too, but he won’t.” Later that day Larry asked her, “How’s your sex life?” No one had ever suggested that she might have one. She said she didn’t have one. He said he started late too. Larry was driving a rented convertible along the highway that fronted the ocean. The sun was still brilliant.

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.

G
race 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 exposed 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.