“I know it’s none of my business, but he sounded. . I don’t know. . kind of funny.”
“Funny” is my mother’s word for any kind of fucked-up, her manners too delicate to have ever allowed her to call attention to my glassy eyes or musty breath. What does it matter, she would argue, when that girl I was is all water under the bridge, a bridge that she has seen me dismantle piece by piece? After the flagging, there came a winter of waitressing that cured me. By the next fall I was enrolled in law school, which was what she’d been telling me to do all along.
Still, she recited the number slowly: whenever circumstances force her to revisit my youth against her will, she likes to draw the details out to make me squirm. By the time she was finished, the line between us glowed red-hot, and I made sure she heard me crumpling my transcription, seconds after I wrote it down.
“I didn’t think you’d want it,” she remarked offhandedly. “He was the one who kept insisting that I pass it on.”
This is the kind of warfare waged by ghosts, these ghosts from whom there is no durable escape. Years later, even if you’ve gone to the trouble of covering your tracks, they will remember the name of your hometown and call your mother up. If they’re feeling especially vengeful in their oblivion, they might even try to describe for her what you looked like all those years ago when they had you tied to that bed. And while sometimes you can banish the physical vessels in which these ghosts travel, the psychic border skirmishes will continue on forever. To mark the boundary between you and them, there will always be a dotted, provisional line.
And then there is also the matter of the border itself, the literal border across which we fled. The first crossing of it had made everything glitter, as if we were snakes with new clear eyes, having peeled off our old skins. But the drive back seemed only oppressive and dreary, the sea walled off by fog. And the surf that had aroused us with its persistent violent crash now sounded unbearably repetitious, like the person sitting next to you on the bus with a hacking cough.
At the ferry dock, they steered us into a gated area where the tarmac was marked off into lanes. We waited there while the customs officers came through, asking the usual questions concerning fruit. The officer who approached the MG was a stout matron about his age, how funny that a woman his age turns into a matron, her breasts large in her white blouse. As soon as she took one look at him in his wraparound sunglasses, it was as if she knew. She knew, goddammit. And she waved our car over into the special parking strip, where our bags were taken from the trunk and searched. They found the last bit of pot wrapped in one of his dirty socks.
My bag was clean, though, and the one last favor he did for me before we parted company forever and for good was to say that I didn’t really know him. I didn’t know him at all. I was a girl he’d just met in the bar of a Chinese restaurant; he was giving me a ride home because my boyfriend had left me stranded after we’d had a lover’s spat. And what with the age difference between us, the enormous volume of my tears, they let me cross.
The whole trip back I stood outside on the deck, watching the birds that floated on the water, which was gray and still and dimpled by rain. I was supposed to call his sister as soon as I got back to the States, but instead, when I reached the ferry terminal on the other side, I hitchhiked home.
And I didn’t see him again in town, even though, being the flagger, I saw everyone eventually. For weeks, whenever we started work at a new site the first thing I did was scope out some bushes into which I could dive should he come driving through. But he never did, and when I tried to make sense of it, the only explanation I could get anywhere with was that he had to be a ghost. He was like the phantom that appears in those hitchhiker/truck driver stories, where depending on the version either the hitcher or the trucker has died a long time ago and yet there’s this one piece of evidence left behind to prove the visitation. A jacket, say. A baseball cap. Don’t think I am insensitive to the irony that my mother is the only person who could back me now about the fact of his existence.
(But on second thought, I know she wouldn’t. In a clipped voice she’d say: “Is this really a matter on which we want to dwell?”)
What the man left behind was the last shot left on an old roll of film that I had in my camera, taken on our way over on the ferry, when we were smiling and the sun was beaming on our heads. I’m the one who’s braless, wearing the indecent peasant smock: a yard of see-through cotton with elephants embroidered on the yoke. He’s got his arm around me, he’s wearing his shades, his head tilted over mine. And even though I’m the one in the filmy shirt, if you look close enough you can see that in fact he’s the one who’s insubstantial, as if at any moment he might turn into smoke. And when he does, I’ll make a ninety-degree turn and walk right through him. And my solidness will churn whatever’s left of him to wisps.
CAVALCADE OF THE OLD WEST
Though the two sisters had grown apart over the years, one routine they kept up from childhood was going together to the little fair that lodged itself for one week every August between the warehouses and the bay. The fair was nothing to write home about: curly fries, Ferris wheel, carny boys with broken teeth. But when they were kids there had also been a hootchie-cootchie tent and a show called Cavalcade of the Old West, which held on through all the years of the girls’ growing up, until the times changed.
The Old West included Snoguish the Indian, who wore a fancy bustle made of eagle feathers, and a blind woman in buckskin named Bull’s-Eye Vi, who shot at targets with the aid of a mynah bird. The bird squawked out directions: left, right, up, down. Also appearing was Left-Hand Zach the Lumberjack, who’d been maimed in a logging accident and wielded an ax with the one arm he had left. Sampan the Chinaman juggled railroad spikes that were rubbed with petro gel and set aflame. And Leroy the Salmon Boy. What Leroy did was smoke.
Because Stella was older, she put herself in charge, and her practice of fair-going as it evolved over the years led her to hold off on the Old West until the tail end of the night. First she made Ginny prove that she could ride the Hammer without throwing up, after eating a whole caramel apple, seeds and all. Then it was on to games of chance, where Stella stole softballs out of the bushel baskets and fired them at the pyramids of fuzzy clowns while the carny screamed whatever obscenities were in circulation that year until Stella ran off with Ginny in tow. They were girls then, nimble and skinny, skinny enough to slip through the narrow spaces between the stalls. Behind the stalls, they trotted along the timbers that edged the wharf. Stella would kick off her flip-flops, the pads of her feet growing black with creosote. She laughed at the way Ginny flinched when the herons screeched and flew up beside them from the mudflat.
At the wharf’s north end, they came up against the back side of the hootchie-cootchie tent, where the girls dropped off the wharf to stand on the riprap piled below, so that their eyes would be level with the tent’s bottom edge, which Stella lifted. Inside, the hootchie-cootchie ladies wore filmy gowns that Stella called nugleejees.
“That means nightgown in French,” she explained.
The ladies paraded around while the barker made embarrassing claims about their bodies: If she gets up running and comes to a stop, she’ll jiggle like a bowl of jelly. The women giggled, but the girls could tell that their laughter was fake, and not because they were being wounded, no — they were only bored.
And it was from within the cocoon of their boredom that they took off their nugleejees, one by one. Though the promise made out front was that the men who paid to come inside would get to see the women naked, Stella had already clued Ginny in on the fact that this was just a trick. Under the filmy gowns the women wore two-piece bathing suits made of spangly iridescent satin, with scarves attached that were also tethered to their wrists. Whenever a man tried to touch them, the women would use the scarves like dental floss, slicing between their bodies and his hand, drawing the arm away with the scarf, as though the scarf were a kind of net.