A Haunting

Beyond the golden years of trick-or-treating, Halloween morphs into a high-pressure holiday, like New Year’s Eve or the 4^th of July, when you feel like you must have plans or else endure a long night of loneliness and self-loathing, a night pierced by the cackling laughter of fun-havers outside your window, a night most unhallowed. If you happen to have plans, your suffering is of another sort: weeks in advance of the party, you have to figure out what you’re going to “be.” And then you must buy and assemble components of a costume, and then you have to wear it all.

Having a child relieved me of that burden: the moment I dressed my infant as a pea pod the focus shifted to her, and because of my ever-advancing age, thank god, I will never attract such attention again unless some darkly or too brightly humored person one day dresses me as a pea pod, and by then I will be too far gone to know or care.

I suspect that people who like Halloween are drawn to the lure of the carnivalesque. They want to be someone else for a night, to flout the rules of society and self without reprisal. There’s chaos to that behavior; there’s chance and misrule. No wonder I don’t like it. I’ve had enough trouble without borrowing more.

Even so, I have tried. I have been game. In college, I convinced my roommate to don a blue blazer and black fedora and to pencil in a thin mustache so that she could be pimp to my prostitute. (Our friend, whose feminism surpassed our own at that time, dressed in black and held a sign condemning our costumes. She stayed by our sides all night.) A year after, having taken a Women’s Studies class and watched a few hours of CSPAN, I borrowed from my mother a satiny Coke can costume and affixed to the top of it a black squiggle of yarn: it was a pubic hair, condemning Clarence Thomas and supporting Anita Hill.  And then there were the years of the blond wig. I wore it with prison duds and carried a muffin pan: Martha Stewart. I paired it with press-on nails and tight jeans: Carmela Soprano. For its swan song, the blond wig transformed me into Britney Spears. She and I, pregnant at the same time, were a page out of US Weekly, “Who Wore It Best?”: sunglasses, pink sweats, shirts that bared midriffs 6-months-swelled, and, in our hands, packs of Kools, venti coffees, and babies not wholly attended to—mine a doll, hers, her son Sean.

Three months after that last Halloween, Britney shaved her head, apparently in the midst of a crackup or maybe to hide traces of drugs in her hair so she wouldn’t lose her boys. I was in a hospital room with my infant daughter. She had been born with something wrong, a defect, you could say, although I do not use that word. We had learned about her problem, her father and I, on Halloween, two days after the costume party. “There is no stomach,” the ultrasound technician had said. “Maybe she hasn’t eaten recently. You can’t see the stomach unless there’s something in it. Or maybe it’s still small.” In time we were to learn that our daughter’s esophagus was divided in two. She would be born in Seattle so that we’d have easy access to a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, or NICU, and then she’d be moved to Children’s Hospital, where we would live, she and I, until the ends of her esophagus grew close enough together for the surgeons to finish the work that nature had abandoned. This stay would extend for months and then, after a surgical complication that nearly ended her life, months more, a great lonely and frightening swath of time that would cauterize the split between my past self and who I am now.

Who needs Halloween? Every day—I do not exaggerate—I live with fear; I give some thought to my child’s life, to her being alive. In the mornings, Thank God she has woken up; when I drop her off at school, Please let her survive this day, let no madman enter this place and kill her; when I put her to bed at night, Is her window locked? Is my door open so that I can hear her call out? I know why this is. It’s because once, I left her in a hospital room while I went to have a shower, and while I was gone she almost died. A nurse was there; my mother was there; but even so, an intravenous line had burst my child’s superior vena cava and filled her chest cavity and scarred her lungs with poison. Her lower organs had shut down because her blood could not reach them. Her head had swelled because where could the blood go? She lay there, only three months old, dying.

In a way, I saved her. When I saw how she looked—her head too large, a line running across her chest, above it dark red, below it yellow—I ran from the room, searching for the head of the NICU. I found him amidst a bunch of physicians, leading morning rounds, and I interrupted to say, “Dr. Brogan, something is wrong.” Why should he have listened to me? I am an English professor, not a doctor. He is a doctor, and was busy. And already a nurse and a surgical resident had downplayed my concern. But during my week in Intensive Care, he and I had gotten to know each other, had bonded over literature, in fact. (Before med school Dr. Brogan had been an English major: never let it be said that ours is a useless degree.) So he had reason to trust me, and he dropped what he was doing and followed me. They all did. He told me later that the expression on my face had been enough to convince him to come. I looked like I had seen a ghost.

Emily Dickinson wrote, “One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted – One need not be a House.” “The Brain has Corridors” more suitable to ghosts; “Ourself behind ourself, concealed – Should startle most.”  I am haunted by the events of that morning. I wish they would let me be. In that moment, I was awake, definitive, intent. I acted. Doctors and nurses and technicians acted. My child lived. But it left me with the knowledge that such things can happen: a mother can go to have a shower and, because she hasn’t done so all week, take a few extra minutes to apply her makeup, and when she returns, her child might be changed, her child might even be gone. That mother—myself behind myself, concealed—lives in my brain. She doesn’t startle me much anymore; I’m used to her rattling around, and I’m learning to limit her circuit. But there she is, and there she’ll stay, watching my daughter and waiting, waiting, waking me from my sleep, ever watchful and waiting still.  

A Haunting

Today has been a decidedly "off" day so far. Maybe it's because:

1. I've been waiting for about a week for important information from my daughter's surgical team;
2. I was awake for part of the night (see #s 1 and 3); 
3. I'm wavering on what scholarship I want to work on this summer; 
4. my dog almost attacked a fledging blue jay in my back yard, and, because he's nearly deaf, I had to yell loudly and forcefully at him to stop, scaring him and causing him to yelp loudly and forcefully--all this before my coffee;
5. my balance was for shit in yoga this morning.

But things got happier when by boyfriend reminded me to look at Creative Colloquy's website. This local, online literary journal publishes on Mondays, and we knew that my essay "A Haunting" would be included in the June 9th issue. I feel good to be some small part of this organization, and I look forward to participating in live readings in the months to come. Thank you, Creative Colloquy!

Now I need to turn my attention to my other work. If you have any brilliant ideas about what I should write about pioneers Susanna Moodie and Caroline Kirkland, drop me a line in the comments section! I'll thank you in a footnote if the article finds its way to print.

Thanks for stopping by!

Flight

T. S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruelest month,” and even though he penned the line while his mind was aground in the wreckage of WWI, I know that had he been sitting in row 9 alongside “Carl” and me on a Southwest flight from Chicago to Seattle last April, he would have raised a knowing eyebrow and nodded his assent when I uttered those very words to him.

I had the misfortune to be in Group C, so I boarded the plane with a simple plan: grab a window seat close to the front, better than suffering the middle position for 4.5 hours.  On the aisle of row 9 was a large man. When I saw him I quickly calculated that only a small woman would sit in the seat next to him--no man would choose to have his wide-knee, wide-elbow stance compromised--so I snagged the window seat in the full expectation of a relatively comfortable ride. It was not to be. Carl, “with blue uncertain stumbling buzz,” lumbered up the aisle and deposited himself between us. He was 70-ish, white, a bit fumbling. He reminded me of my dad.

When drink service began, the man on the aisle ordered a Coke; I ordered a soda water. Carl removed his headphones—he had been listening to a Dean Koontz book—and ordered two bourbons. It was nerves, maybe. Fifteen minutes later he ordered two more, accompanying the request with a whoop of “Why not!” and a gesture I can best describe as jazz hands. Carl was partying on a private jet while the rest of us flew coach.

Of course, any baller eventually has to hit the head. And so Carl made his way to the front lavatory, hovering in the aisle for a while as he waited for the VACANT light to flash. Only the wait was long. I noticed, and I’m sure the people over whom Carl was standing noticed. After a while he headed to the back of the plane. Just as he did, the bathroom door opened. What luck! I would visit the lav while Carl was also up and about and so give the nice man on the aisle a break. (I knew he was a nice man because when Carl spilled bourbon on him, he said, “No problem. No problem,” whereas had Carl spilled bourbon on me it would have been a big problem.)

I made a beeline to the front. Too late, I noticed that the woman exiting the lavatory was wedged into the door. She was the occupant of row 1, an old-ish woman who was traveling with her husband and had, it appeared, purchased two seats to accommodate her size.  I had noticed the two of them, and the empty seat between them, upon boarding and had remarked their appearance. Something about them suggested to me that they hadn’t flown before, or at least not much. Now the woman was caught in the doorway, and I was standing there, and her husband sprang in between us to help her get out. He succeeded, and I proceeded to the doorway.

Again too late to process what was happening or to change course, I detected a foul odor. I remember catching the eye of the flight attendant in the galley—the same guy who had suffered through Carl’s jazz hands—and then entering the lavatory and closing the door behind me. The smell was terrific. I determined to be as efficient as possible: turn around, lift lid, line seat with tissue, pee, close lid, flush, wash hands, empty basin, toss towels, leave. Only, when I turned around and lifted the lid, I was met with a sight unholy, a pile of excrement so large and heavy that it momentarily stunned me. What had this woman done? What had she neglected to do? And why? I thought fast and identified only two options: 1) leave the lavatory and alert the flight attendant to the problem; 2) deal with the problem myself. Option one would embarrass the woman further than she had already been embarrassed (if she had been embarrassed). At the very least, it would draw attention to her and to me. Remember, we were in the front of the plane, and halfway in to a 4.5-hour flight, people are looking for things to interest them. It would also make the flight attendant’s day, pardon my pun, crappy, whereas mine had already taken that turn. So I went with option 2.

I closed the lid and flushed the toilet. I opened the lid. The shit was still there, unmoved, uncaring, unperturbed. I closed the lid and flushed again. Reader, I will spare you the details of the shit’s exodus. I will only say that it took 3 flushes—super-vacuum, airplane-toilet flushes—to clear the runway. When I exited the lavatory, the flight attendant was still there. He, my T. S. Eliot, raised a knowing eyebrow and said, “Would you like a glass of water?”

“Beware death by water,” I thought. And, besides, I could not drink at a time like this. I could only make my way back to the aisle 9 window, past the stares of the couple in row 1—Is she really trying to make eye-contact with me after what she just put me through? Does she think those flushes were mine?—past the nice, large man in the aisle seat, past Carl’s still-empty perch. I buried myself in the book I was prepping to teach, and I tried to ignore the smell of bathroom and bourbon that clung to Carl upon his return. I tried to forget.

A few minutes into our final descent, Carl struck up a conversation with me.

“I can’t help but notice that you’re reading and taking notes,” he said. “Are you writing a paper about that book?” 

I should mention here that I had laryngitis at the time of this flight, so I could barely croak out a response: “No, I’m teaching it.” One would think that the sound of my voice—so pained, so nearly inaudible—would have closed the conversation. But not for Carl. He continued:

“You’re a teacher? What level do you teach?”

“College,” I say.  He raised his eyebrows, not in the T. S. Eliot way, but as if to say, “Wow, I’m impressed. And surprised! And strangely intrigued.” He proceeded to ask me where I teach, and how long I’ve been teaching, and what I teach. He asked me what book I was reading.

“The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells,” I said. I began to tell him something about it, something short, to give him an idea of when it was written and why, but he interrupted me to say that he knows the book. My ass he knows the book. Why would anyone know this book?

“I’m retired,” he said. “I do a lot of reading.” He showed me the long list of audible books he had on his phone.  He actually had some Dickens in there. “To me, work is a four-letter word,” he said, proud of the joke. “I’m taking culinary arts classes at community college.”

The guy wouldn’t stop. Each time I returned to my book, he came at me with more questions and with more unsolicited information about himself, like, “I was traveling to see my son and his kids and, uh, his wife. I don’t know what you’d call her.”

“That’s your daughter-in-law,” I told him.

“Why were you traveling?” he asked.

“I was at a professional conference.”

“Do you have a card?” he said.

“No.”

“A phone number?”

“No.”

And that’s when things got real. “Come on!” Carl said. “Give me a break! I’m trying to pick you up here.”

When I was young, this sort of thing happened with some regularity, always with older men in whom I had no romantic interest, and always taking me by surprise. There was the time that I thought I was getting pre-professional advice from a divorced lawyer twice my age, but in fact I was being auditioned as step-mom for his children, who were, you know, my peers. There was another time when I believed I was learning the ropes of broadcast journalism from a mustachioed producer who, as for himself, thought that he was enticing me to his cabin at Tahoe. All was quiet in my 30s and early 40s, until I met Carl. I won’t be fooled again. I believe that I have reached an age at which I classify as “younger woman” to the retirement set, and I refuse to comply.

“That’s not a good idea,” I told Carl.

“Why? You have a boyfriend? a husband?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Both?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and with some satisfaction, for it is true and it befuddled him.  Fellow feminists, I know I should have replied, “It doesn’t matter if I have a husband, if I have a boyfriend. I’m a free agent, and I’m not interested in you.” But I was flustered, and I took the path of least resistance.  And so it should be no surprise that he answered, “Tell him I tried to pick you up. It’ll make him appreciate you more.”

“He appreciates me plenty,” I said.

“Trust me,” he said. “He’ll appreciate you more.” And then he added for good measure, “Can you blame me, Tiffany? You’re a very attractive woman.”

At this point in my dystopian dream, the plane had landed, and people were beginning to stand up and gather their belongings. I noticed that others had been listening to Carl and me, for they were turning to look at us, and they were chuckling. Really, could this flight get any better?

Here’s how the story wraps up: the passengers of aisle 9 finally, mercifully, began to disembark, when Carl realized he’d left his jacket in the overhead. (“See? You’ve bewitched me, Tiffany. You’ve cast a spell on me.”) He pulled off to the side, prepared to make his way, against the current, back to aisle 9, a determined salmon denied his chance to spawn but ever hopeful, hopeful. I walked at hyper-speed up the gangway, through the terminal, and into the nearest women’s room (sweet refuge from mankind), my lavatory experience all but forgotten. I took my time. Even so, when I exited, Carl was only five paces ahead of me. Unseen, I ducked behind a pillar and waited for a full two minutes before venturing toward baggage claim.

My dear boyfriend was waiting for me. We hugged, we kissed. He took my carry-on bag. We held hands as we made our way to the carousel.  As we waited, Carl approached, wearing the grin of a degenerate Pete Campbell. He sashayed past us—there is no other way to put it—shaking his head with good-humored regret, and said to my boyfriend, “You’re a lucky man.”

I wondered, what does that make me?