A Head Full of Ghosts Page 2

  Let me give you a small example before we really start.

  When I was four my parents attended two church-sponsored Marriage Encounter weekends. I’ve learned from second-third-fourth-hand accounts that Dad insisted they go with the hopes of getting them through a rough patch in their marriage and to rediscover God in their relationship and lives. Mom, at the time, was no longer Catholic or practicing any religion at all and was very much against the idea, but she still went. Why she went is subject to total speculation as she never told me or anyone else why. That I’m talking about it now would totally embarrass her. The first weekend went well enough with their A-frame cabin, walks in the woods, their group discussions, and dialogue drills; each couple would take turns writing down and then sharing their answers to questions concerning their marriage, with those questions framed within the context of some biblical lesson or text. Apparently the second weekend didn’t go so hot, with Mom walking out on Marriage Encounter and Dad when he reportedly stood before the entire gathering and quoted an Old Testament verse about the wife having to submit herself to the husband.

  Now, it’s certainly possible that story about Mom’s weekend walkout is an exaggeration based on a couple of facts: My parents did leave the second weekend early and ended up staying a night in a Connecticut casino; while Dad famously found religion again when we were older, he (and we) did not attend church, Catholic or other, for many years prior to the attempted exorcism. I mention these facts in the interest of accuracy and context, and to point out that it’s possible his quoting the Bible didn’t actually happen even if enough people believe it did.

  But I am not saying it isn’t probable that Dad quoted the offending verse at Mom, as it sounds totally like something he’d do. The rest of that particular story is easy to imagine: Mom storming away from the retreat cabin, Dad running to catch up with her, begging for forgiveness and apologizing profusely, and then to make it up to her, taking her to the casino.

  Regardless, what I remember of those Marriage Encounter weekends is only that my parents went away with the promise that they’d be back soon. Away was the only word the four-year-old me remembered. I had no concept of distance or time. Only that they were away, which sounded so weirdly menacing in an Aesop’s Fables way. I was convinced they went away because they were sick of my eating pasta without spaghetti sauce. Dad had always grumbled about his not believing that I didn’t like the sauce while he added butter and pepper to my macaroni elbows (my preferred pasta shape). While they were away my dad’s younger sister, Auntie Erin, babysat Marjorie and me. Marjorie was fine but I was too scared and freaked out to keep to my normal sleep routine. I built a meticulous fortress of stuffed animals around my head while Auntie Erin sang me song after song after song. What song didn’t really matter, according to my aunt, as long as it was something I’d heard on the radio.

  Okay, I promise I will generally not footnote all the sources (conflicting or otherwise) of my own story. Here in the pre-beginning, I only wanted to demonstrate how tricky this is and how tricky this could get.

  To be honest, and all the external influences aside, there are some parts of this that I remember in great, terrible detail, so much so I fear getting lost in the labyrinth of memory. There are other parts of this that remain as unclear and unknowable as someone else’s mind, and I fear that in my head I’ve likely conflated and compressed timelines and events.

  So, anyway, keeping all that in mind, let’s begin again.

  What I’m not so delicately saying with this preamble is that I’m trying my best to find a place to start

  Although, I guess I already have started, haven’t I?

  CHAPTER 4

  I HAD A playhouse made out of cardboard in the middle of my bedroom. It was white with black outlines of a slate roof and there were happy flower boxes illustrated below the shuttered windows. A stumpy, brick chimney was on top, way too small for Santa, not that I believed in Santa at that age, but I pretended to for the benefit of others.

  I was supposed to color the white cardboard house all in, but I didn’t. I liked that everything on the house was white and that my blue bedroom walls were my bright sky. Instead of decorating the outside, I filled the inside of the house with a nest of blankets and stuffed animals, and covered the interior walls with drawings of me and my family in various scenes and poses, Marjorie often as a warrior princess.

  I sat inside my cardboard house, shutters and door shut tight, small fold-up book light in my hand, and a book spread across my lap.

  I never cared about the pigs and their silly picnic. I wasn’t interested in the dumb banana mobile, the pickle car, or the hot dog car. Dingo Dog’s reckless driving and Officer Flossy’s endless pursuit annoyed me to no end. I only had eyes for that rascally Goldbug even though I’d long ago found and memorized where he was on every page. He was on the cover, driving a yellow bulldozer, and later in the book he was in the back of goat-Michael-Angelo’s truck and he was in the driver’s seat of a red Volkswagen Beetle that dangled in the air at the end of a tow truck’s chain. Most of the time he was just a pair of yellow eyes peering out at me through a car window. Dad had told me that when I had been very little, I’d work myself into a lather if I couldn’t find Goldbug. I’d believed him without knowing what “a lather” was.

  I was eight years old, which was too old to be reading Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go as my parents constantly reminded me. What I was or wasn’t reading was once a big deal and the main source of familial Barrett angst before everything that happened with Marjorie. My parents worried, despite my doctor’s assurances, that my left eye wasn’t getting stronger, wasn’t catching up to her socket sister on the right, and it was why I wasn’t excelling in school and didn’t show much interest in reading books more appropriate for my age. I could and did read just fine, but I was more interested in the stories my sister and I created together. I’d placate Mom and Dad by carrying around various “chapter books,” as my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Hulbig, called them, pretending to be reading beyond my grade level. More times than not my pretend-reads were from this endless series of corny adventure books, each with its simpleminded plot essentially outlined in the title and usually involving a magical beast. Answering Mom’s what’s the book about question wasn’t difficult.

  So, I wasn’t actually reading and rereading Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. My quiet and private refinding of Goldbug was a ritual I performed before Marjorie and I would write a new story in the book. We’d added dozens and dozens of stories, one for almost all of the random bit players in Richard Scarry’s world, each story written in the actual pages of the book. I certainly can’t remember all the stories, but there was this one we wrote about the cat driving a car that had gotten stuck in a puddle of molasses. The brown goop leaked out of a truck with its tank conveniently marked MOLASSES in big black letters. On the cat’s face I’d drawn a pair of blocky black-framed glasses that were just like the ones I wore, and I’d drawn those same glasses on all of the other characters for which we’d created stories. In the space around the cat and between the molasses truck, and in my small, careful handwriting (but with terrible spelling), I’d transcribed the following story: “Merry the cat was late for work at the shoe factory when she got trapped in the sticky molasses. She was so mad her hat flew off her head! She was stuck all day and all night. She was stuck there in the middle of the road for days and days until a bunch of friendly ants came and ate all the molasses. Merry the cat cheered and took the ants home with her. She built them a huge ant farm so they would stay. Merry the cat talked to them all the time, gave them all names that began with the letter A, and she always fed them their favorite food. Molasses!”

  The stories in my Scarry book were short and weird and had oddly happy or reassuring endings. Marjorie was the main source of the stories and she named all the animal characters after me, of course.

  After finding Goldbug in the last scene, I scooped up the book into my arms,
exploded out of my cardboard house and out of my room, and ran down the long hallway to Marjorie’s bedroom. I ran with bare and heavy feet, slapping my soles against the hardwood floor so she could hear me coming. It was only fair to give her a warning.

  During that fall, new privacy protocols had been established. Marjorie had begun shutting her bedroom door, which meant “Merry, stay out or else!” The door generally was shut when she did homework and in the morning when she dressed for school. Marjorie was fourteen and a freshman. This new high schooler now took much longer to get ready in the morning than her previous youthful middle schooler had. She monopolized the upstairs bathroom, then cloistered herself in her room until Mom, standing expectantly in the foyer, would yell up the stairs that we were going to be late for school and/or some unnamed appointment because of her and that Marjorie was being very snotty and/or selfish. The selfish bit always made me giggle because Mom invariably would be yelling too fast to keep up with her own words and it would sound like she loudly proclaimed Marjorie was being very shellfish. I was secretly disappointed when Marjorie would storm down the stairs with her normal hands instead of giant pincer claws.

  With this being a lazy Saturday afternoon, I was not expecting to find her bedroom door shut. I respected Marjorie’s closed-door policy as much as any little sister could be expected to, but Marjorie surely had to have heard my bounding down the hallway.

  I stood nearly panting outside Marjorie’s grand door, which was the only door in the place that was original to the old house. Solid oak, darkly stained to match the floors, it was wall thick, built to withstand barbarous hordes and battering rams and little sisters. So unlike my cheapo, pressed sawdust door that my parents let me decorate and desecrate how I pleased.

  Oak, schmoak. Since it was Saturday, I was within my well-delineated and negotiated rights to knock on Marjorie’s door, which is what I did. I then cupped my hand around my mouth and the keyhole and yelled, “Story time! You promised me yesterday!”

  Her high-pitched giggle sounded like she couldn’t believe she was getting away with something.

  “What’s so funny?” I frowned hard and everything inside me sank into my toes. The door was blockaded because this was a joke and she wasn’t going to make a new story with me. I yelled, “You promised!” again.

  Marjorie then said in her normal voice, which wasn’t as helium-high as her laughter, “Okay, okay. You may enter, Miss Merry.”

  I did a quick little dance I’d seen on SpongeBob. “Yeah! Woo!” I shifted the book so its top was tucked under my chin and partly pinned against my chest by my elbows. I didn’t want to drop the book to the floor, that was bad luck for the book, but I needed both hands free to turn the doorknob. I finally bullied my way in, grunting and ramming my shoulder against the stubborn, monolithic door.

  Because I was convinced that I was going to grow up to be exactly like Marjorie, entering her room was like discovering a living, breathing map of my future, and a map with consistently shifting geography. Marjorie was always rearranging her bed, dresser, desk, assorted bookcases, and milk crates filled with the most current accessories of her life. She even would rotate her posters, calendar, and astronomy decorations on the walls. With each permutation, I’d remodel the interior of my cardboard house to match hers. I never told her that I did that.

  On this Saturday her bed was wedged tight into one corner and underneath her only window. The curtains were gone and only a thin, lacy white treatment remained. Her posters hung crookedly, overlapped, and clustered haphazardly on the wall across from her bed. The rest of the walls were bare. Her dresser and mirror were shoved into another corner, with her bookcases, nightstand, and milk crates filling the other two corners so that the middle of the room was wide open. The room’s floor plan was an X without the crossing part.

  I slowly tiptoed in, careful not to trigger any unseen trip wires that might set off Marjorie and her increasingly unpredictable mood swings. Any perceived transgression on my part could spark an argument that would end with either my crying and running to my cardboard house or with Dad’s brutish method of mediating (i.e., his yelling the loudest and longest). I stood in the center of her room’s centerless X, and my heart rattled like a quarter loose in a dryer. I loved every second of it.

  Marjorie sat cross-legged on her bed, in front of the window so that she was silhouetted by the graying light. She wore a white T-shirt and her new, soccer-team-issued sweatpants. They were Halloween-orange with the word Panthers stenciled in black along the side of one leg. Her dark brown hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail.

  She had a large book open on her lap. By large, I don’t mean thick like a dictionary. The book spanned the width of her crossed legs. The pages were splashed with color, and they were tall and wide, about the size of the pages in my Scarry book that I still held against my chest like a shield.

  I said, “Where’d you get that?”

  I didn’t really have to ask. It was obvious that Marjorie had a kid’s book in her lap, which meant that it was one of mine.

  Marjorie sensed the twitching and grinding in my head and started talking thirteen thousand miles per hour. “Please, please, please, don’t be mad at me, Merry. I had this amazing story just suddenly come to me, and I knew it wouldn’t quite fit in your book. I mean, we already have a molasses story in your book, right? So, okay, I just gave part of the story away, that it’s another molasses story, but this one is so different, Merry. You’ll see. And, anyway, I figured maybe the Scarry book was full and it was time to start a new book so I went into your room, and, Merry! I found the perfect book! I know it was not fair of me to go into your room without asking when I know that if you did the same to me I’d be so mad. I’m sorry-sorry, little Merry, but wait until you hear it and see what I drew.” Marjorie’s face was a giant smile; all white teeth and all wide eyes.

  “When did you go into my room?” I didn’t want to start a fight, but I had to know how she did it. Knowing where Marjorie was at all times in our house was my business, and if her door was shut, I always had one satellite-dish ear aimed toward her room, listening for the door to creak open.

  “I snuck in while you were playing in your house.”

  “No you didn’t. I would’ve heard you.”

  Her smile avalanched into a smirk. “Merry. It was easy.”

  I gasped with my then usual hammy over-actor exuberance, dropped my book, and balled my hands into fists. “That’s not true!”

  “I heard you talking to yourself and to your stuffed animals, and so I tiptoed in, holding my breath to make me lighter, of course, and I walked my fingers through your bookcase, and after, I even stood over your house and looked down the chimney. You were still talking to yourself and I was a big, horrible giant considering whether or not to crush the peasants’ house. But I was a good giant. Rawr!”

  Marjorie leapt off her bed and stomped around the room saying, “Fee fi fo ferry, I smell the stinky feet of a girl named Merry.”

  I yelled, “Your feet are stinky!” and I laughed, roared my own righteous roar, and scampered around and through her too-slow giant arms and poked her in the sides and slapped her butt. She eventually scooped me up in her arms and fell backward onto her bed. I scuttled behind her and wrapped my arms around her neck.

  She reached behind but couldn’t get hold of me. “You’re too squirmy! Okay, okay, enough. Come on, Merry. It’s story time.”

  I shouted, “Yay,” even though I felt played. She was getting off way too easy for sneaking into my room and stealing a book, and worse, listening to me talk to myself.

  Marjorie pulled the book back onto her lap. It was All Around the World. Each page featured a busy cartoon version of a real city or foreign country. I hadn’t read or thought about that book in a long time. It was never a favorite of mine.

  I grabbed at the book but Marjorie roughly pushed my hands away. “Before you see what I drew, you have to hear the story first.”

  “Fine. Tell me!” I
was all revved up, twitching in my skin.

  “Do you remember when we went down to the aquarium and the North End in Boston this summer?”

  Of course I remembered: First we went to the aquarium where Marjorie and I pressed our faces against the glass of the three-story-tall, tube-shaped tank, waiting for one of the snaggletoothed sharks to swim by and scare us. Later, when Mom and Dad wouldn’t get me a rubber octopus, I pouted and jellyfished around the gift shop, my arms and legs all slippy-sloppy. Then we walked to the North End and ate dinner at some fancy place with black tablecloths and white linen napkins. On the way back to the parking garage we found this dessert place that was supposed to be the best in the city. Mom ordered us cannolis, but I didn’t want one. I told her they looked like squished caterpillars.

  Marjorie said, “Well, this story happened like almost one hundred years ago in the North End. Back in the old days, they kept all their molasses in giant metal storage tanks that were fifty feet tall and ninety feet wide, as big as buildings. The molasses was brought in by trains, and not trucks like in your book.” Marjorie paused to see if I was paying attention. I was, though I wanted to ask why they needed all that molasses given that the only time I’d seen the stuff was in the Scarry book. I didn’t ask. “It was the middle of winter, and for more than a week before the accident, it was really, really, super cold, so cold people’s breath-clouds would freeze and then fall out of the air and smash to bits on the ground.”

  “Cool.” I pretended to breathe some of that ice breath.

  “But after all that cold, Boston got one of those weird warm winter days it gets sometimes. Everyone in the North End was saying, ‘My, what a beautiful day,’ and, ‘Isn’t it the most perfect, beautiful day you’ve ever seen?’ It was warm and sunny enough that all kinds of people left their apartments without their coats and hats and gloves, just like little ten-year-old Maria Di Stasio, who was only wearing her favorite sweater, the one with holes in the elbows. She played hopscotch while her brothers were being cruel to her, but it was a regular everyday cruel so she ignored them.