Stepping through a door or wall feels only slightly less unpleasant than sharing molecules with a Chihuahua. I notice the flurry of sawdust, the oily sensation of too many coats of pale blue latex paint.
My bedroom presents a tableau similar to the PH living room: It’s filled by a bed, a slipper chair, a bureau, each piece of furniture masked by a white dustcover… but stretched the length of my bed, hidden beneath the white muslin sheeting, is the prone shape of a person. At the foot of the bed, the shape peaks to suggest pointed toes, then thin legs. It spreads to suggest hips, a waist, a chest; then the muslin dips at a seeming neck and rises to cover a face, tented across the tip of a nose. In this Goldilocks moment, someone occupies my bed. On the muslin-draped bedside table a discarded wig of blond hair coils to form a nest. Settled in the center of that blond nest, like eggs, are a set of dentures, a hearing aide like a pink plastic jumbo prawn, a pack of Gauloises, and a gold cigarette lighter. Displayed beside these artifacts is a framed cover from Cat Fancy magazine, a two-shot of my mother and me hugging a bright-eyed orange-striped kitty. In contrast to my mom’s Botox-steeped features, my smile is a frozen moment of genuine blissful laughter. The headline reads: “Film Star Gives Cinderella Kitten a Happy Ending.”
To PattersonNumber54, yes, even a ghost can feel sadness and terror.
Death isn’t the end of peril. There are deaths beyond death. Like it or not, death isn’t the end of anything.
Nobody wants to wander into a lonely, way-quiet hotel room and find a dead body, especially not one lying in her very own childhood bed. It’s the corpse of an inconsiderate stranger abandoned here, no doubt some Honduran hotel maid who elected to commit suicide in my nice bed, surrounded by my imported Steiff bears and limited-edition Gund giraffes, probably with a belly full of my mother’s Xanax, decomposing her nasty Honduran bodily fluids into my hand-stitched Hästens mattress, ruining my sixteen-hundred-thread-count Porthault sheets.
As my mounting rage surpasses my fear, I step forward. I grip the top edge of the muslin dustcover and begin to draw it down, revealing the body: an ancient mummy. A hag. Her gums pucker and frill without teeth to support them. Sunk in a pillow, sparse gray hairs wreath her head. I pull back the white fabric in a single yank, throwing it to the bedroom floor. The old woman lies, legs together and hands crossed over her chest, every bony finger sparkling with flashy cocktail rings. Her dress I recognize, a haze of aquamarine velvet heavily trimmed with sequins, rhinestones, and seed pearls. A slit cut in the skirt reveals a skeletal leg from wasted thigh to the blue-veined foot encased in a Prada sling-back sandal. The shoes are so new the price tag pasted to the sole of one is still legible. The blond wig, the gown, they all look vaguely familiar. I know them. I recognize them from a funeral held about a hundred thousand years ago. Miracle of miracles, I can smell the old lady’s cigarette smoke. No, I swear, ghosts can’t smell or taste anything in the alive world, but I can smell the cigarette stench that wafts from her. And without thinking, without conscious intent, I say, “Nana Minnie?”
The old woman’s eyelashes flutter. The outside end of one spidery false eyelash is peeling off, making her look a touch demented. The old lady blinks, lifting herself to her elbows and squinting her milky eyes in my direction. A smile splits the wrinkled width of her face, and her pink lisping gums say, “Pumpkinseed?”
To CanuckAIDSemily, this blows. Even after you’re dead it hurts just as bad when your heart swells up, stretched bigger and bigger like an aneurysm of tears getting ready to boom.
My nana’s gaze bounces from me to the skirt of her dress, from me to the sequins and velvet that fall away to reveal her aged legs, and the woman says, “For crying out loud… would you just look at the whore’s costume your mama buried me in?” With one shaky, bejeweled hand she reaches to the bedside table and plucks at the pack of Gauloises. Saying, “Come on and give your Nana Minnie a light,” she brings the butt of a cigarette to her mouth, and her slack, wrinkled lips collapse into a kiss shape around the filter tip.
DECEMBER 21, 8:09 A.M. EST
An Ick-inducing Reunion
Gentle Tweeter,
Sprawled on the satin coverlet of my bed, Nana crosses her spindly legs at the ankle, affording me an unwelcome glimpse up her slit skirt. Cringing, I ask, “Did we bury you… not wearing underpants?”
“Your stupid mama,” she says by way of an answer. Her gown is sleeveless, and she stares down at a thorny tribal tattoo that encircles her wrist and marches up her arm to her elbow, continuing to her shoulder. The inky black forms barbed letters, like briars, that spell out, “I [heart shape] Camille Spencer… I [heart shape] Camille Spencer…” with a tattooed rose blooming between each iteration. Nana spits on her thumb and rubs at the words on her wrist, saying, “What’s this happy horseshit?” She can’t see it, but the words run from her shoulder to circle her neck like a choker, terminating in a large tattooed rose that covers most of her right cheek. These repetitive declarations were needled into her aged, sunbaked hide postmortem, at my mother’s insistence.
Her head propped on the bed’s pillow, Nana Minnie glances down at the full breasts swelling within the bodice of her dress. “For the love of Pete… What did your mama do to me?” With the gnarled talon of an elderly index finger, she pokes tentatively at one firm breast, obviously another postmortem renovation.
She’s smoking a ghost cigarette, blowing secondhand smoke everywhere, and with her free hand she pats the bed for me to come sit beside her. Of course I sit. I’m bitter and resentful and angry, not impolite. I merely sit, not talking, certainly not hugging and kissing her. My borrowed fake Coach bag rests on the bed beside my hip, and I dip a hand into it and dig among the turquoise Avon eye shadows, Almond Joys, and condoms. I fish out a strange PDA and start keyboarding my evil thoughts into words… sentences… bitchy blog entries.
If I’m honest here, you’ll decide that I’m simply the most hard-hearted thirteen-year-old ghost ever to walk the face of the Earth, but I am already wishing my beloved long-dead Nana Minnie would get lung cancer and die a second time.
Between drags on her coffin nail my nana asks, “You ain’t seen a spiritualist skulking around, have you? Terrible skin? A big, tall drink a water with his long hair braided down his back like a Chinaman?” She cocks a wrinkled eye at me.
To reassure you, HellHottieBabette, I am taking good care of your handbag.
My Nana Minnie was my mom’s mother, and in her palmier days she was probably a madcap jazz baby bobbing her hair and rouging her knees, dancing the jitterbug on cocaine-dusted speakeasy tables with Charles Lindbergh and roaring through the West Egg night in Stutz Bearcats, wrapped in raccoon coats and gorging on live goldfish, but by the time I knew her, my nana was fairly worn down to dust. Probably raising my mom didn’t help her stay young any.
By the time I was born Nana Minnie was already collecting buttons and nursing her sciatica. And chain-smoking. I remember that when I’d go visit her upstate, she’d brew tea by sticking an old pickle jar full of water in a sunny window. All that Norman Rockwell–ness aside, my nana’s house smelled like vacationing with dirty cavemen, as if she cooked every meal by combining raw ingredients she wrenched from some plot of dirt, and then heated to create food right inside her house and never just texted Spago or the Ivy or the Grill Room at the Four Seasons and had them deliver moules marinières tout de suite.