1970s

Ghosted

/ Fran Haley / 18 Comments

A slice of memoir for my writing friends, who requested the story of my mail-order ghost…

******

The 1970s were steeped in tabloids, monsters, horror, psychics, UFOs, and ghosts.

Weird times.

And I was a weird little kid.

I thought I could see a lady sitting high atop a tree across the street from my house. Every day, year after year, she sat there, a regal bark-colored woman, never moving, just looking out over the world from her tall branchy throne.

I thought I saw feet in a pair of bedroom slippers left in my Grannie’s hallway…where was the rest of the person? None of the adults could make sense of my sudden hysteria.

Speaking of hysteria: My young parents, for some inexplicable, out-of-character reason, carried me through a haunted house before I was two. Just as they were exiting, a witch popped out from a secret chamber and her long hair swept over me. I have no memory of this. My father told me the story; he said I screamed and screamed, like I’d been burned. I figure it marked me permanently. Like a smallpox vaccination. I wonder what kind of immunity witch hair carries…

I recall being really being burned. I was afraid of cigarettes, of their red-hot circular tips, because some grown-up or other at a family gathering hadn’t thought to move his indolent hand out of the way when my preschool self went running through the living room. Maybe this is why I also feared flames shooting up from backyard charcoal grills (smell that lighter fluid?), from the flattop grill behind the counter of the local diner, and the whoosh of brilliant blue whenever someone turned the burner knob on a gas stove.

I was afraid of big smells. Like collards cooking. I’d gag and run out of the house (love to eat ’em now, though, with plenty of hot pepper vinegar).

My weirdest childhood fear (perhaps): Black toilet seats. Utterly terrifying. Why did anyone ever think these were a great idea? I wouldn’t even enter the bathroom at the doctor’s office, let alone “go,” because of that ominous seat. I sobbed and tried to get away from my mother. Not understanding, she became angry.

And I was afraid of ghosts.

So much so that I didn’t want to go to sleep the first night I stayed with my grandparents after Granddaddy retired and they moved back home to the countryside. Their cozy little house sat amid whispering woods, strange canals, and a tiny dappled cemetery situated diagonally to the left of their front yard, across the dirt road.

I took one look at those weathering old tombstones gleaming white in the dusk and thought Ghosts.

Grandma, I’m scared of that place.

Oh, honey. Don’t ever fear the dead. Fear the living.

It didn’t help.

Oddly enough, TV shows about monsters and ghosts did.

The Addams Family: How did Morticia move at all in that skinny black dress, drawn so tight ’round her ankles? How could a disembodied hand called Thing materialize from random tabletop boxes throughout the psuedo-gothic house to deliver mail or light cigars? My parents’ then-childless friends got a black Lab puppy and named it Thing. I loved that dog. She dug a big hole in our backyard; in the years to follow, I’d expand Thing’s hole many times over, along with my imagination.

The Munsters: Who could be afraid of Herman, with his goofy laugh?

Casper the Friendly Ghost: I quickly grew to love him and all the dark gray haunted-house scenery on the Viewmaster reels Grandma bought me. Casper wasn’t remotely scary. He was cute. And comforting. Somehow.

And so it was, one summer when I was nine or ten, I happened upon the little ad in the back pages of a magazine (or maybe it was in a novelty catalog, another 1970s staple):

Order Your Own Ghost!

I didn’t bother to read the rest of the details. The creepy illustration sold me.

I went in search of Grandma.

I would have it. My own ghost.

My land. What do you want this for?

I just do… please, Grandma?

She sighed, clipped out the form, addressed the envelope, enclosed the couple of dollars (?), and mailed it.

When the package arrived she helped me open it. One doesn’t want to slit a ghost by accident.

I’m not sure what I expected. I knew the ghost couldn’t be “real,” yet the ad had conjured a misty apparition in my mind, a filmy thing that would do my bidding. Could it be the allure of supernatural power? The need to overcome a fear by mastering it? Sheer curiosity? All of the above?

Would the the thing rise before me as soon as the package was opened?

Um.

No.

Opening the package the rest of the way, I found a folded white plastic sheet, deeply creased when I shook it out, a white balloon to blow up and place under the thin plastic, white thread for tying under the balloon “head” and to be taped to the top of the plastic so that the ghost could then be hung from a door or hook, etc., where it might move a little whenever we passed by (or if I decided to turn Grandma’s floor fan on it).

Oh, and helpful directions to locate a marker for drawing draw eyes and a mouth, if desired.

I felt like throwing the worthless stuff straight in the trash. When I eventually learned the term rip-off, this mail-order ghost would drift to mind.

Grandma, who’d tried to discourage the purchase in the first place, now tried to placate me: Here, I’ll blow up the balloon…

We assembled the sorry specter and strung it on the old bedroom doorknob where it dangled in front of the metal keyhole. I hated the sight of it hanging there, grinning at me.

I didn’t know it then, but Lessons were afoot…

Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

It may not be at all what you thought.

Fears are exhausting.

Fears can be overcome by recognizing the inherent ridiculous (look up Harry Potter boggart).

Things and people will sometimes (oftentimes) turn out to be something other than they seem.

Above all: Life is a carnival, a strange journey of compelling facades and disappointing realities, a house of shattered mirrors with perpetual distortions and misperceptions obscuring truth, of false narratives and unseen, lingering harm lurking in the darkest corners, where occasionally flares a red-hot tip held in an indolent hand…

Ghosts are, in the end, about loss; what do we fear more than that?

I’d had enough. I balled up my ghost and smushed it into the trashcan where it belonged.

It was a beginning.

Ghost. David Ludwig. CC BY-SA

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

Juncos

/ Fran Haley / 9 Comments

Winter mornings
in the half-light
I leave home for work

out on the lawn
a stirring of birds
so small
I can’t quite see
if they’re actually birds

maybe they’re
gray-cloaked fairies
performing secret rites

or the grass itself
sprouting feet for a night
and ethereal wings
for breaking away
at dawn of day

tiny tufts
of earth, unbound
with promise of
heavenward flight

For a couple of months I’ve tried to figure out what little birds are flitting in the tufts of grass each morning. Gray and ghostlike, they’re elusive as fairies. I finally got a good look at a few of them through the kitchen window. I am pretty sure they’re dark-eyed juncos, which my Merlin Bird ID app has picked up and identified by song. They are sparrows, “birds of the ground,” hopping around on lawns looking for seeds. They even nest in the ground.

To me, they give the illusion of the grass transforming into birds.

I researched them and learned that the junco is a symbol of impending winter weather, nicknamed “Snowbird”.

Merriam-Webster says the first known use of “dark-eyed junco” was in 1974—when I was a child. “Junco” itself seems to have originated from a word meaning “rush”… as in rushes, synonymous with grass.

It just so happens that grass is a personal symbol for my father. I’ve often written of sensing his presence in the scent of fresh cut grass; this is steeped in childhood memories of him mowing the lawn. He was meticulous about it. Daddy enjoyed CB radio when it became a fad born of fuel shortages in the 1970s. I can’t recall his handle, but I recall the one I made up for myself, having never heard it before:

Snowbird.

It seems to have come to me around the same time the name “dark-eyed junco” was first used...

out on the lawn
a stirring of birds
so small
I can’t quite see
if they’re actually birds

maybe they’re
gray-cloaked fairies
performing secret rites

—Maybe they are memory itself.

Dark-eyed Junco. Kurayba. CC BY-SA 2.0.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the monthlong Slice of Life Story Challenge

I remember these

/ Fran Haley / 17 Comments

I just so happened to see it there in the store window next to the Chinese fast-food restaurant where my colleague and I were picking up lunch:

A big, round, tan-and-brown can of Charles Chips.

“Look at that! I haven’t seen those in years!” I shouted, to my colleague’s amusement.

These tins were delivered by truck to our house when I was a kid, if I recall correctly. Like Dy-Dee Diaper service…only not taking something horrifically pungent away (I remember that, too, up until I was about four; I had a sister two years younger).

Instantly I was thrown back to the 1970s, beginning with this scene:

The sewing room that is supposed to be a dining room. Mama’s Singer sewing machine, threads, pins, patterns galore. The ironing board. Daddy’s shoeshine box and bench in the corner. The distinct scent of Kiwi shoe polish in hanging in this space…the Charles Chip can, long missing its lid, heaped to the brim with socks that had lost their mates. Mama calls it the sock box. How are there so many? The washer (that lasted over twenty-five years) ate them, maybe? Mama tries to keep socks matched by sewing a knot of thread in the toe tips, a different color for each pair… me, age seven, on the day of my baptism, walking down the baptistry steps into the surprisingly warm water, looking down at my white-socked feet, seeing the coordinating navy-blue knots…

All this, triggered by mere sight of a Charles Chip can after so many years.

I was there.

The Statler Brothers had a nostalgic song about things they remembered from their youth, entitled “Do You Remember These?”

Here’s what the Charles Chips started dredging up for me…see if any of you remember these, from the late 1960s to early ’70s:

The Archies cartoon (and the song “Sugar Sugar”)
Penelope Pitstop cartoon
Josie and the Pussycats cartoon
Rocky and Bullwinkle
The Flintstones
The Jetsons
H. R. Pufnstuf show
The Banana Splits show
The Munsters
The Addams Family (our family friends had a black lab named Thing)
The Wonderful World of Disney, Sunday nights
Wild Kingdom
Family Affair and Mrs. Beasley dolls
Easy-Bake ovens
The Wizard of Oz on TV once a year
Paper dolls, such as “Mod Maude”
Squirmles, the Magical Pet (a furry worm that “moved”)
Silly Putty for placing & peeling on the Sunday comics – so fun
The Pink Panther Show
The Partridge Family (how is it I can still sing every song?)
Donny and Marie
The Monkees
sea monkeys
bellbottoms
pet rocks
mood rings
tetherball
jacks
macrame
decoupage
Tupperware parties
Beeline parties
Avon ladies calling
Choco’Lite candy bars
Count Chocula cereal (back in stores now at Halloween!)
upper elementary girls wearing wigs to school
shag haircuts
The Brady Bunch
Gilligan’s Island
Viewmasters and reels
Spirograph art
Romper Stompers
Hippity Hop (ball with handle, for sitting on and bouncing wherever you wanted to go)
Super Elastic Bubble Plastic
rabbits’ feet (I am so, so sorry now, dear Rabbits)
Popeye
Looney Tunes
Star Trek
Lassie

and last but not least
Sonny and Cher

…these are just the first ripples in my memory. There’s a story surrounding each. There are more memories just below the surface, waiting to be stirred… so many, many more.

Funny, crazy, wondrous, strange, sweet slices of life. So long ago.

Seems fitting to end with this song (imagine me singing it with gusto around age five).

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the monthlong Slice of Life Writing challenge

Blithe memory

/ Fran Haley / 1 Comment

My grandmother loved music
all of her life.
She wanted me to love it, too.
And so she took me to
Murphy’s Mart
(if memory is correct)
to buy a child’s chord organ.
I looked at the pretty blue instrument
and chose a doll instead.
Grandma couldn’t understand.
But you love playing my organ…
don’t you want one of your own?
At the time I didn’t have words to say
I love music but it isn’t my destiny.

The doll, called Blythe,
had eyes that changed color
when I pulled a string:
blue
green
pink
orange.
I picked her instead
of the music.

Grandma, dismayed,
bought her anyway.
It was only the beginning
of my fascination
with seeing the world
through lenses
of many colors.

Maybe it was then
that a writer
instead of a musician
was born.

Neo Blythe ‘Bohemian Peace. MissBlythe. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

I have learned, in researching my Blythe doll, that Kenner only made them for a year (1972) in the U.S. A Japanese company bought them out. An original Blythe doll is now worth a couple of thousand dollars. I don’t know what became of mine, unfortunately. My grandmother’s own glossy-wood Roxy chord organ from the 60’s, however, stands in my foyer. In the end, it’s infinitely more priceless to me.

See another good example of Blythe at https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=897056547546831.




Shoe poem

/ Fran Haley / 2 Comments

For VerseLove on Ethical ELA today, Andy Schoenborn invites teacher-poets to write “tumble down poetry” about shoes:

“For the small spaces they occupy, poems can cause writers to freeze. To break a poem free, try writing a paragraph or two of prose and, then, watch a poem tumble down with this process… today let’s write about shoes. Please take three minutes and write in prose about a pair of shoes that you’ll never forget… Once your paragraph is written, look for naturally occurring repetition, alliteration, striking images, and moments of emphasis fit for enjambments. Then play with the structure and form as a poem ‘tumbles down’ the page.”

It’s amazing, when you stop to think about it, how many shoe stories we have… this memory from long ago quickly overshadowed all others for me today.

Shoe Story

Fifth grade
studying mythology

the teacher says:
Now you will write
your own myth

sometimes myths
are about inventions
or journeys
or transformations

what can I write
about any of these?

I think
I sigh
I look
around the room

rainslapped windows
there was a time when
my parents would have made me
pull galoshes over my shoes

I hate hate hate my shoes
saddle oxfords
— I call them sadlocks—
black and white
or in my case, 
black and gray
needing polish
again

everyone else
wears Hush Puppies
suede desert boots

Be grateful
for what you have
I’ve been told
by various grownups
in my life

(who do not have to wear
sadlocks)

I wonder
who ever invented
these stupid stupid shoes

I wonder when shoes
were invented

—wait—

a picture forms in my mind
a boy, living in a village
by the sea
where the sand is soft
where no one needs shoes…

I grab my pencil

I write him into being

this boy who had to save
his village by climbing
the mountain
where sharp rocks cut his feet
where he made shoes
from big leaves, tied
with strips of bark

on his return to the village
everyone started wearing shoes
in honor of their hero,
Shoeani.

Saddle oxfords. MBK (Marjie). CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Ancient shoes. Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints. CC BY 2.0.

Unexpected poem

/ Fran Haley / 10 Comments

with thanks to Araceli, Deanna, and Michelle at #verselove on Ethical ELA today, for the invitation to write about someone who’s influenced your life, incorporating sensory details. My first inclination is to write of my grandparents – as I often do – but today, my aunt came to mind. I expect she’d be so surprised.

I am.

This one’s for her.

On Day Twenty-Two of National Poetry Month

A Poem for Earnie 

I didn’t expect to write of you today
but here I am, remembering
of all things, the tape recorder
your ready, set, go!
the click of your finger pressing play
and singing for all we were worth,
you, my little sister and me:
Wherever you go,
wherever you may wander in your life
Surely you know
I always want to be there…
one of us flubbing the words
all of us cracking up
you saying, I’ll rewind
let’s try it again

I think of your laughter
wild, free, contagious
your raucous humor
trailing you like an ermine robe
rich, resplendent, priceless
cloaking loneliness
I may not have perceived

The only one of my mother’s sisters
never to marry or have children
which didn’t keep you from giving advice
pressing Mama’s buttons
like no one else on Earth
yet she went and named her youngest daughter
after you

Then there were the wigs on
the featureless disembodied heads
sitting on your dresser
you could pick whatever 1970s hair you wanted
each day
how cool was that?

I can’t recall a thing you ever cooked
only that you loved eating
Mama said you were picky
you didn’t look it
Mama said that’s why you weren’t married
so picky that you didn’t get got

I wondered why you never really left home
living with Grannie most of your life
you’d break away for an apartment once or twice
but would always go back
like you needed to be
within the borders
of her shadow

Perhaps it will surprise you
that I recall the ceramics class you took
and the Pepto Bismol pink statuette
of Hotei, the Laughing Buddha
god of happiness and contentment
that you made for me
his hands thrown high to the heavens
Rub his big belly for good luck
each day, you said
and I could hear the pleasure in your voice
only much later did I flip him over
to find your inscription of love
on the bottom of his pedestal

Funny how the dress you wore to my wedding
was Pepto Bismol pink
I am glad I asked you to be my wedding director
at Mama’s prodding
I remember the books you ran out to buy
to do the job well
for me

Of course there’s Jenny…
a love of your life
Siamese as picky as yourself
who’d curl in my lap
purring
That’s rare,
you’d say

Jenny who lived twelve years
who died in the fire
when you woke in the middle of the night
choking on the smoke
phone in your bedroom
hot to the touch
calling 9-1-1 for the first time
because it was
a brand-new thing
I don’t know how you roused
Grannie and Papa G in the other room
nor how any of you climbed out of the windows
onto the roof
into the freezing midnight air
and safety
as the firemen arrived
but you did it

in my mind, Mama’s voice:
It took three firemen to hold her
from going back in
for Jenny.
They found her
the next day
under Earnie’s window.

I hear your anguished sobs
even now
in those wee hours when you
arrived at our house to stay
reeking of smoke
so that the fur coat you wore
would have to be destroyed

I remember the clothes
you bought for my first baby
in bright, beautiful colors,
expensive
so lovingly chosen

You didn’t live to see my youngest
never knew of his gift for music
how you’d have loved it
I can see you right now,
tape recorder in hand

As the disease took your lungs
and reached its insidious fingers
into your brain
I recall the peculiar shine in your hollowed eyes
against the yellowing of your face

when you asked:
Are you still writing?
Have you published anything yet?

Yes and no, Earnie.
I am still writing, yes.
Long, long after we laid you to rest
in your pink dress
(Grannie had your nails painted to match)
and this isn’t really published
but it’s for you
I didn’t expect to be writing of you today
or singing Olivia Newton-John all of a sudden
after all these years,
but here I am
and here you are,
wherever I may wander
in my life
snatches of song, rolling laughter
here in my morning
here in my night.

Kiss

/ Fran Haley / 25 Comments

I taught him how.

When I was about fourteen.

He was so enthusiastic.

Of course, I had to lean over a bit.

It was hard for him to jump that high, with those short little legs.

“Kiss?” I would say.

And he would try. He’d jump for all he was worth, with joy.

He was my first dog. I named him Onyx. Onnie for short.
He and his brother Bagel (named for Barry Manilow’s dog) were born across the street from my childhood home.
Daddy said we could NOT have any of those puppies.

–We got them anyway.
Onyx startled me the first time he jumped high enough to “kiss” me.
Then he learned the command. It was his favorite way of greeting.
It is his word.

*******

The annual Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers is underway, meaning that I am posting every day in the month of March. This marks my fifth consecutive year and I’m experimenting with an abecedarian approach: On Day 11, I am writing around a word beginning with letter k.

Hair

/ Fran Haley / 37 Comments

Gimme a head with hair
Long, beautiful hair…

—from Hair, title song of the musical (Rado/Ragni)

It was all because of a boy. I will call him Casey.

He sat behind me in eighth grade math class.

One day while working out some algebraic thing (that should give you an inkling of my math prowess), I felt a gentle tug on my hair.

“Don’t look back,” Casey whispered. “What did you get for number one?”

I froze.

I shouldn’t do this. It is wrong.

But I leaned ever so slightly to the right, shifting my paper to the left…

I heard Casey’s pencil scraping away against the paper behind me.

He was cute. At least, I thought he was.

I had long straight hair and glasses. I was shy. A good student, mostly. Except for math.

I should probably tell him this.

As the papers were being collected, I turned around: “I’m not all that great at math.”

He leaned back in the desk. “I ain’t either. It’s my third time in this class!”

He smiled. He had curls.

My heart melted.

I worked a lot harder on my math and made sure my paper was aligned just so…

One day as the class was filing in, Casey took his seat behind me and said, “Your hair is really long.”

This was before I’d heard of Never state the obvious… I replied, “Yeah.”

“It’s like, almost touching the seat.”

“Yeah.”

Inside, I glowed.

Outside of math class, I only saw him from a distance. Wearing his jean jacket, standing quietly with a group of friends, mostly girls who smoked and wore makeup and large hoop earrings that peeped through their feathered hairstyles…

This must have been what gave me the idea.

I told my mom: “I want to cut my hair.”

“Really? All you ever wanted was long hair.”

True, due to years of horrible, life-scarring shags, Mom… “I am tired of it. I want to do something different.”

“Well, Rachel is going to cosmetology school. I bet she’d cut it for you.”

And so it was that Rachel from across the street came over to our kitchen one afternoon.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked. She regarded me with wide green eyes full of apprehension.

“Yes. I am sure.”

“How short do you want to go? What sort of style do you have in mind?”

“Maybe to my shoulders and feathered back.”

She nodded. It was the current rage. Everybody was wearing it.

She sat me on a chair, draped me with a cape, brushed my long brown hair that fell past my waist. She put the brush down and picked up the scissors and the comb.

“Are you SURE you’re sure?” she asked.

“Yes. I am ready.”

“Okay then.”

She put a ponytail holder in my hair at my shoulders, and with a couple of grating slices, my long ponytail fell in the floor. She picked it up, placed it in my lap, and began to cry.

She cried the whole time she snipped, sliced, and created exactly what I’d envisioned.

“I love it!” said my mom. “You look like a different person!”

That was, after all, the point.

“Your hair!” gasped my friends at school. “It looks great! I can’t believe you cut it!”

I got to math class early and tried to make myself busy…

Here came Casey, ambling in, taking his seat…

It took a minute, but then:

“Whoa. You cut your hair.”

Warmth flooded my face; I dared not turn around. I bowed and let my newly-layered locks sweep over my cheeks.

“Yeah.”

Worth it, worth it, worth it!

At least, I thought so.

And that’s the end of the story.

I do not know what ever became of Casey. I can’t recall seeing him after that year, really. I presume he passed eighth grade math, finally. I somehow managed it. He must have been in dire straits, indeed, to copy off of me. For the record: the teacher knew. I saw her watching us one day, which terrified the life out of me, but she did nothing…did she figure there was just no point, or no hope, for Casey? Or for me? I wonder…just as I wonder about the outcomes of many decisions made for the most dubious of reasons, but the truth is, I never regretted cutting my long hair.

It still grows pretty fast.

*******

Hair Photo: Peter Berger. CC BY-SA

The annual Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers is underway, meaning that I am posting every day in the month of March. This marks my fifth consecutive year and I’m experimenting with an abecedarian approach: On Day 8, I am writing around a word beginning with letter h. I’ve often modeled Georgia Heard’s “first times” and “last times” Heart Maps with students and teachers as a means of brainstorming writing ideas. Sometimes I’d list “the last time I had really long hair” or “the first time I cut my long hair” as a possibility. Here’s one of my “last times” maps. I’ve written a few of these stories. I’ve finally gotten around to writing the hair one here, at last.

The bullet

/ Fran Haley / 24 Comments

 

Bullet

“Dodged” a bullet. John Spade. 

I don’t often get reader requests for posts here on my blog, but after sharing an exercise on writing about your past —”When you look back at your life, what do you see?”— a phrase about my childhood home stirred some curiosity and I promised to tell the story behind it.

So if you read Dust motes and asked about “Bullet in the living room rug, in the floor, if you know where to look,” today’s post is officially dedicated to you.

To recollect these details, I had to submerge a good while in Long Ago. When this event occurred I was around eight years old. That part’s blurry.

The rest, however, is all too vivid . . .

Mom lifts the curtain again but there’s only blackness beyond the picture window. I know by her sigh that the street is empty. No sign of Deb. She has never been this late before. She’s usually here before supper but tonight we had to go ahead and eat, hours ago. Baby Aimee—Deb’s baby—is fussy because she’s ready to go to bed and can’t settle. Mom holds her on one hip, says “Shhh, shhh, you’ll be going home to sleep soon.” Something icy glitters in my mother’s black eyes as she looks out of the window into the night.

Aimee’s eyes are almost as black as my mother’s. Big and round. They make me think of Looney Tunes characters when they’re sad, how their eyes go all huge and dark. Baby Aimee’s eyes always look like this, huge and dark, even when she’s standing in the playpen staring up at me in the daytime when I get home from school. She can stand without holding on now but isn’t really walking yet because she’s only one year old. She hangs onto my mother, her cheeks pink and watery, her big eyes shiny.

“Mama,” she cries over and over. “Mama.” And she buries her face in my mother’s shoulder.

I am sorry for Aimee because she’s little and doesn’t understand things yet. I am starting to feel sorry for Mom because it’s not easy to take care of someone else’s baby while they work all day and then don’t show up and you don’t know why . . . 

“Mom! What if something has happened to  . . . “

She turns on me, her mouth a tight line under those icy-hot eyes. “Shh!” she nearly spits.

And I know, I know why.

Mom’s afraid.

Just then headlights shine through the window. Mom snatches back the curtain. Her body softens like a flower in a glass of water. 

“Thank God.” 

She squeezes past the playpen—it takes up the most of our living room floor space—and goes to open the front door.

I hear Deb’s laughter before I see her.

Someone is with her.

They come in.

Deb is short with shoulder-length reddish hair and glasses. She dresses in what teachers at my school call “mod.” Sometimes short skirts and boots or chunky shoes, sometimes vests and bell-bottoms. Deb smiles a lot but tonight she can’t stop laughing about something. Even when she says to Mom, “I am sorry it’s so late, had some car trouble…this is Ab. My boyfriend.”

Ab, standing partly behind  Deb, is very tall. His face is thin and white, his hair black, curly, reaching past his shoulders. He’s wearing a long fur coat. I’ve never seen a man in a fur coat before. He nods to my mother when Deb introduces them but he says nothing. 

Mom looks at me, hard. “Go to bed now.”

I know this really means “I’ve got things to say that you don’t need to hear” and so I head down the hall without a word—

—BANG—

—a flash of light, the loudest sound, thunder in the house, like a car hitting it, shaking it, rattling the windows—

—a scream, not sure whose, my mother’s or Deb’s—

—baby screams—

I run the few steps back to the living room.

There’s a funny smell, something smoky.

Pieces of brown fur, hundreds of pieces, floating through the air. 

Deb’s crying now, her screaming baby in her arms. Ab’s face is whiter than before. I stand, frozen, as my mother demands the gun he has in his pocket, or the pocket he had a minute ago, before he blew it to smithereens.

“HOW DARE YOU bring a gun into this house, around other people, around children! To stand here with your finger on the trigger…Give. It. To. Me. NOW.”

And Ab places the handgun in my mother’s open palm.

As her hand closes around it he hurries out of the door, away from her, back into the night.

*******

After Deb and Ab were gone—and after she vacuumed up all the fur—Mom ran her fingers over the rug. She found the hole and the bullet lodged in the hardwood floor beneath. For as long as we lived in that house, I could find the bullet, too.

The house still stands, so as far as I know, the bullet remains there to this day.

I can’t recall what became of Deb and her beautiful baby, Aimee, or how quickly after the bullet they quit coming to our house. I changed their names in case they’re still alive out there, somewhere. I wonder if they are. And what their stories are. And if I could stand knowing.

I really wonder about Ab.

All I know is that my mother kept his gun a long time. I’m not sure she ever gave it back. Or where in the house she hid it. Somewhere far away from children…

I think a lot about the darkness of that night, of a baby’s big, frightened eyes, of being completely at the mercy of others and their choices, not just sweet baby Aimee, long, long ago when I was still a child…but my mother, who didn’t drive, who babysat for many years to make ends meet, who accommodated other people’s schedules and whims, who was dependent on others to go anywhere or get anything she needed. Some might say powerless.

But they didn’t see her take a gun away from a strange man who towered over her, a man who, as far as I know, never darkened our door again.

I did.

The moment reverberates in my mind still. Lodged deep, so deep in my memory, lying there all this time, covered by layers and layers of stuff …

The power remains, if you know where to look.

 

Roadside treasure

/ Fran Haley / 10 Comments

Spock & Kirk

Star Trek Monthly Magazine Poster Book (cropped). Joe Haupt. CC BY-SA

The following is a narrative/memoir written several times with students in grades 3-5. I wrote a bare-bones version in front of students, then revised to model the vast difference of “showing, not telling” by adding detail and dialogue. “I can see it all happening!” the kids always exclaim, as the narrative comes to life. Yesterday’s eclipse brought this piece back to mind – the fascination with space, the many hours I spent watching and playing Star Trek when I was the age of these students. During the writing process, the kids ask countless questions. My favorite moment is when they realize what the story is really about.

I shake the device in my hand before I flip the lid and press the button to speak. “Do you read me, Spock?”

Nothing, not even static.

I pull the antenna out as far as it will go. I bang on the device a couple of times with my fist. I shout into it: “COME IN, SPOCK!”

My sister pokes her face from around the corner of our house. “This really ain’t logical!” she calls. She’s not even holding the device up to her mouth.

I sigh.

My sister is eight, I am ten, and we are tired of playing Star Trek. The batteries in the communicators we got for Christmas have quit working, and it’s no fun for Captain Kirk (me) and Mr. Spock (my sister) to keep yelling messages to each other across the yard, which has just one decent tree. There’s only so many pretend worlds we can explore when it all looks the same, with nowhere to hide from alien life forms.

My sister meets me at the street in front of the house. We leave our useless communicators behind in the grass and sit down on the curb as ourselves, not Kirk and Spock anymore.

“Let’s walk to the 7-Eleven and get a Slurpee,” says my sister. She likes the straws with the spoon on the end. She plays with them more than she drinks her Slurpee.

“I’m broke. I spent my last fifty cents on cinnamon Now-and-Laters and green apple bubble gum day before yesterday and it’s all gone already.” Our dad can’t stand green apple bubble gum. He says it stinks but I think it’s delicious, even though it turns my teeth and tongue green. “Do you have any money?”

“Nah, I thought you did,” says my sister, kicking at the grit beside the curb.

“Not anymore.”  I wish I had some green apple gum right now. I stretch my legs, which are getting long, out into the road. If a car comes, which isn’t all that often in our neighborhood, my sister and I will pull our legs up to our chests until it goes by.

I look down at the edge of the curb where it meets the street, at the little loose rocks lying there. I see a stubby twig and pick it up to write my name in the dust when I notice tiny chunks of pale blue-green glass. I wonder where these came from. Someone must have thrown a Coke bottle out of a car and shattered it.  I push the pieces around with the twig, inspecting them – they don’t look sharp. Time and weather, maybe, have smoothed away the roughest edges.

“What would you do if you had a million dollars?” asks my sister.

“I don’t know.” I pick up a bumpy chunk of the glass and roll it around in my hand; it sparkles in the sunlight. “Maybe I would have a horse and a big house. Maybe I would travel all over the world and be famous. What would you do?”

“I’d give some to poor people for their kids to have toys and bikes and then I would get me a bunch of dogs. What is that?”

I show her the bit of glass in my hand. I smile: “It’s an aquamarine. March’s birthstone. If you were born in March I would give it to you but since you weren’t, I will sell it for thousands of dollars.”

“Hey!” My sister is half amused and half irritated. “Look here—I got my own aquamarine!” She plucks up another bit from the curbside dust.

Suddenly we’re both on a wild treasure hunt, crawling along the curb so fast that we’re scraping our knees. We find bits of brown glass; we say it’s topaz. Green bits are emeralds, my birthstone. The clear ones are diamonds, of course. We can’t find any sapphires, my sister’s birthstone. We forget that this is trash, just pieces of bottles tossed out because someone else didn’t have the manners to put them in a trashcan. In no time we have amassed enough jewels for a princess, maybe two.

The sun shines warm on our backs and a couple of cars go by, slowing down, almost stopping, as they pass. Maybe the drivers are nervous about two girls crawling so close to the street or maybe they’re just trying to figure out what we are doing there in the dirt, but the quartz in the pavement winks at us, glinting like gold, and I know my sister and I are rich beyond compare. We are not afraid to pick our jewels out of the dirt, because dirt is just part of the world, and right now, we own the world.

Broken glass

Broken glass, curbside grass. Orin Zebest. CC BY

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