Pat Boone Fan Club (7 page)

Concerning Cardboard Ghosts, Rosaries, and the Thingness of Things

The moment I see the Halloween cardboard ghost hanging in the grocery store window, I unexpectedly enter its secret life. As I approach the ghost, walking home from high school, I sense the papery beat of its heart, a flutter so thin no one else hears. I pause on the sidewalk to confirm that the rhythm isn’t the tap of my penny loafers on pavement—me in my autumny orange-and-brown wool outfit with matching kneesocks. I stand still, silent, now certain the sound emanates from the direction of the window, heartbeats twining with sunrays pulsing off glass.

Outside the grocery store, red and yellow leaves scatter among jugs of apple cider, pots of chrysanthemums, pyramids of polished apples. I recount these details only because, in many ways, the day is seemingly ordinary. Yet because it
is
Halloween, surely the earth trembles in October winds. A day moon, almost transparent, casts pale shadows. Trick-or-treaters, preparing to spook neighborhoods as pirates, skeletons, witches, cause the everyday world to shiver. And
in
this tremble, this shadow, this shiver—just as I pass the grocery store—I know how the cutout ghost feels.

This isn’t an apparition. It’s not as if I’m hallucinating. I don’t conclude the cutout is real. I
know
the ghost is cardboard. It won’t loosen the string that secures it in the plate-glass window. It won’t escape to basements or attics. At midnight, it won’t con
jure itself at a dead-end street at the edge of town. Nor do I fear the ghost will haunt me.

I step closer until my own vague image is superimposed upon the glass. The skin on my face pales in this palimpsest of ghost, glass, me. I feel the gossamer hem of the ghost’s body. My veins sense the hoarfrost in its torso. I inhale ether on its breath. As I evanesce into this cutout, I sense the cardboard ghost’s soul—transparent as the day moon and as lovely, inevitable, unambiguous. It is reliable in its “ghostness.” So in
this
way, yes, I admit the ghost
is
real: to me. In this way,
I
am the one to haunt
it
.

Then, quite simply, the moment ends. I continue walking home from school, my kneecaps above my orange kneesocks now chilled cool and white. Mandee’s Dress Shoppe, People’s Bank, Rock Ridge Pharmacy, all are in their correct places on the sidewalk, nothing amiss. Mothers with kids drive station wagons down Rock Road. The ghost remains hanging in the window, floating behind glass, while I seamlessly reenter this other—what some would call the “real”—world. No one witnesses my brief absence.

This event isn’t entirely unexpected. For years I’ve known how, by mentally deliquescing, to divine the soul of inanimate things. Of my own free will, I allow objects to thrust me into their paper or glass or metal states of being, to decipher their hidden lives. So even when a ghost in a window is depicted in cardboard—immobile, lifeless—I know that molecules can be magically transformed. Things are alembic. I am.

In this particular way the ghost is no different from my own handkerchiefs. One square of cotton shows a drawing of Pluto, the cartoon dog. Another hankie is filigreed magenta. On another, my white interlocked initials,
“SWS
,
”
are embroidered on a white background. At least this is how the handkerchiefs appear when neatly folded in my bureau drawer.

They amaze me only when, fresh from the clothesline, I lovingly iron them.

In first grade, to reach the ironing board, I stand on a small stool, sprinkling water—stored in an old bottle of my father’s bay-rum aftershave—onto the material. As I slide the iron, Pluto wags his tail. Magenta explodes in streamers. My initials bloom like orchid petals in bay-rum mist. The rolled hems sway, ghostlike, a mirage of heat, shimmering. I lift the edge of cotton to see what breathes beneath.

As soon as I finish ironing my hankies, I wrinkle them, simply to magically iron them all over again. I pause if my mother draws near while I iron, not wanting her to know the special power I possess . . . the mystical secrets that
things
possess. This is not a world adults understand.

After we leave the States and move to the West Indies, my mother, in fact, chastises me when I linger on the verandah watching the sky through a prism of garnet rosary beads. I’m given the rosary my first day at All-Saints Anglican School. But since I’m a little Jewish girl (only temporarily attending All-Saints because the nondenominational school is full), my mother insists I put that silly thing away.

I can’t.

I hold the beads toward open windows, squinting, even during school. I ignore the teacher’s strict warnings to pay attention to lessons. Besides, I
am
paying attention. The sky fireworks ruby suns refracting all the ions in the universe. Since none of my schoolmates hold their rosaries toward space, I believe only mine reveals this secret: there is more than one sun in the sky. At will, galaxies of suns glitter like gems, like stars—atoms dazzling the atmosphere—redder than all the hibiscus and frangipani flowers on the island. Even though I am in the tropics, this warmth, offered by the rosary, is deeper, casting light into my soul.

The light disappears only when I put the rosary in my pocket. Rather than feel sad, I am pleased. For things are predictable, remaining where I leave them, unmoving, waiting for me to return
to them. And warmth
does
return . . . the moment I once again hold a bead toward the sky. It is this consistency—much more consistent than people—that reassures me, that offers comfort, always drawing me back.

Beauty is in allowing a thing to fulfill its potential: infusing the cardboard ghost with hoarfrost or a rosary bead with sunlight. Beauty is in hearing, in tasting, in sensing the inner life, the secret seed of a thing. The Beauty of Things is a religion; I am resolute in my belief.

We return to the States, settling in Glen Rock, where I discover that Miss C., my eighth-grade teacher, is one particular person who offers no comfort. Her handkerchief perches stiffly in the pocket of her tweed jacket. I picture
her
pressing handkerchiefs with a humorless, iron-like hand, the same humorlessness with which she reads my essays.

On the day of our final papers, for example, Miss C. requests that we each write a three-paragraph essay, with at least six sentences in each. I develop the first two paragraphs, as instructed. When I reach the third, however, I know only one sentence belongs, will fit. Confidently, I write what I’m certain is a sentence that completes the essay with clarity, with perfection. But in front of the class, after praising other students’ papers, Miss C. turns to mine, claiming you
can’t
have only one sentence in a paragraph. It isn’t acceptable, she says.

Why not? I want to know.

But I’m too timid to ask.

Instead I learn that, compared to things, Miss C. is unknowable. I don’t understand why she wants me to write an ordinary essay like other students. She is unpredictable, too. One moment she praises students; the next, she is fearsome with me. She is just like my mother, who bakes cookies, only later to call my beloved rosary “silly.” Such contradictions confirm that
things
are more reliable. People like Miss C. are opaque, whereas the
world of handkerchiefs, of beads, is transparent, is like ghosts, like glass.

How easily I step from one world into the other and back again as if I’m living two lives. In one, I pray to the secret life of things; in the other, I play games and attend school. How effortless to cross thresholds, invisible borders between worlds. It’s perfectly natural, say, to warm my fingers on rosary beads one moment and the next to eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in the cafeteria.

In this way the world isn’t less real. It’s
more
. For it’s confabulated with other realities, ones that are intoxicating, primary-color bright and kinetic. Not static. Not dying. Not lifeless. Not weighted with sorrow or despair. Neither inconsistent nor dogmatic.

I’m transported, with one glance, into the reality of a seemingly monadic dime store marble, a sliver of white in transparent glass. One moment this white is frozen in its glass cocoon; the next, the tips of my fingers feel moisture from its cloudy molecules. Now free, it twists and spins, elements spewing from its core. Snow melts to oleander petals. Frost seeps ghostlike into the atmosphere, white-ing the Milky Way. Waves drizzle foam, lacy as crinolines. Beams from the moon bathe my feet. I taste the vanilla of swan feathers, of pearls. Next I gaze through quartz, enveloped in polleny sunlight. Or I see animals roam a savannah inside tigereye marbles. My tongue against glass, I lick lemon spumoni, lime agates, iridescent gumballs, wet red polish, mango crystals, a blueberry freeze, amethyst ice, the luster of mint. My marbles are planets in motion, even when they’re at rest.

The more I understand the soul of things, the more I know I influence things as much as they influence me. A marble, for example, initially contains, in its purest form, one certain aspect. Then, by peering beneath the surface, it’s as if my very senses violently cause a thing not necessarily to act differently, but to fulfill all its realities, be
more
of itself, down to its tiniest quark:
a marble yields the earth; a bead yields a sun; a cardboard ghost yields a heartbeat. A marble, then, isn’t only a chunk of glass. A marble has scent and taste that’s beyond—deeper than—a cool, glassy skin.

At the same time I, myself, appropriate the essence of each of these things. This confluence of energy flows between these familiar, intimate, unambiguous things—and me.

How, I wonder at times, can a thing, able to be conjured into a deeper self, be considered unambiguous? It’s because all I need to do is blink or swallow, stretch my limbs or place an object in a pocket, for it to revert to its ordinary, simpler self. A marble is
also
still a marble. It never loses its essence, its natural, basic core.

A marble never loses its “marbleness.”

Unlike these knowable things, however, it is
people
who hide behind masks. People are afraid to reveal themselves or show their various properties or dimensions. You never know what to expect, for you can’t observe or contain all of any particular person. How could I have known, for example, that Miss C. would fail to see the significance of my one-sentence paragraph, of each carefully selected word?

For words, too, when written on paper alchemize into tangible objects, more reliable, more magical, more potent than people. The first word I fall in love with is “ventriloquist,” twisting the letters around my tongue. In this word I understand that the ghost speaks for me just as I speak for it—that I am the light around the bead as much as I discover its own warmth within. Words are spoken with ears, noses, fingertips. By unmasking words, syllables and letters appear. Words reveal meanings of things I savor, a constant source of intrigue and afterthought. I mull a word for hours as if I hold it, too, up to the light to inhale all its facets.

But because of this, in my same English class, I am unable to learn dictionary definitions for vocabulary tests. The word
“marble,” for example, is defined as “a hard ball used in children’s games.” Nowhere does it mention iridescent gumballs, the luster of mint.

I never tell anyone about the hidden life of things. Not that I’m ashamed. Nor do I think people will laugh at me or doubt my certainty that a rosary bead transfigures into “sun.” Rather, it would be as if a magician revealed the tricks of the trade. It just isn’t done. But because of my silence, because I’m unable to learn vocabulary words and write six-sentence paragraphs, I am sent off to summer school. I’m urged to try harder, spend more time on my studies.

I slouch at my summer-school desk one dull day after another. With all my mistakes, all my incorrect definitions and unsatisfactory essays, the eraser on my pencil shrinks. It dwindles toward a nub. I mourn the loss of each pink particle, almost as tiny as dust. So rather than pay attention to the teacher, I focus on saving them. I gently brush the rubber bits across my paper, careful they don’t gust onto the floor. My palm hovers at the edge of the desk ready to catch them, like crumbs. When only a few pink polka dots remain on the paper, I press a moist fingertip against them until they adhere. I open my plastic change purse. I brush my hand. The motes emigrate to live with nickels and dimes.

Or I hold the eraser beneath my nose. I lick it. And soon . . . soon I am barefoot on a trail in the Malaysian archipelago among towering rubber trees with glossy leaves. The air is burgundy and hot. Halved coconuts catch latex dripping from bark. But watching the incisions—liquid rubber weeping from them—it’s as if my arms and legs, my own limbs, feel the cuts. Just as when I sensed the ghost’s papery heartbeat, I now equally understand the quiddity of rubber. Soon, I myself no longer exist, as if I perished in a plane crash or was lost at the bottom of the sea. I am rubber.

The skin on my arms and legs remains sore for days. My fingers smell of pink acid, a hint of smoke, a trace of bark. I still feel each particle as if it, alone, holds me to the skin of the earth. Or
as if each pink seed will blossom into all that’s pink in the world: pigs and petunias, bubble gum and lipstick, nail polish and cats’ noses, ballet slippers and dogs’ tongues. Pellucid dawns. Pink tastes like sugar, satin ribbons, sapphires. Like tender wounds. All that is lush with pleasure, frail with pain.
Pink
, I say to myself, the long vowel sound lingering, inviting me into the word—the world of pink—before the quick consonant at the end snaps shut, holding me forever.

I understand that living a life of things has repercussions. I’m so consumed, not only do I fail high school essays and vocabulary tests, I also fail the
SAT
s, barely getting accepted into college. Even college classes hold little interest. I’m much more content, say, observing imbrications on a pinecone, wondering how the bracts feel overlapping in their ornamental pattern. No, I
know
how they feel, each bract hugged and loved by its neighbor.