Ghosts in the House
Ross was giving a lecture in Bridgeport. Even though I was out of immediate danger, settling into a dullness of mind and a gimpiness of limb, he felt guilty about deserting me for the evening. He had agreed a long time ago to speak as a favor for an old friend and supporter, and stood at the threshold of our front porch vacillating whether to stay or go, silhouetted in the open doorway, brilliantly backlit, the sun setting red and gold behind him: a black-garbed priest wrestling between different righteous paths, a cat that won’t go in or out once the door is opened for it. Paul could fill in for him, he reasoned, even at such short notice; everyone knew the drill.
Having ulterior motives, I pushed him to go. “I can call Rachel if I need anything. And, anyway, she went to the drug store for me, so she’s coming back and she’ll know if I need anything before she heads home,” I lied rather too breathlessly. “She left just before you came home.” Which was true. What wasn’t true was that she had gone to CVS for me and was planning on coming back here.
“What did she have to get for you?” he asked, suddenly suspicious.
Damn him. Why couldn’t he let anything go? “Hand lotion.”
“You have a ton of that crap.”
“I have to have something else—the smell makes me nauseous now.” Ross still made no move, stuck in his indecision. “Would you just go? Go . . . I’ll be fine. You’re gonna be late.”
“What’s with the bum’s rush—your lover’s hiding in the closet?”
Oh, a joke. I see. Vestiges of the old banter would poke through from time to time, uttered as a matter of habit, without charm or gentleness, and received without appreciation. Finally, I got him to leave. Actually, I think deep down he was glad for the escape. In my mind’s eye I could see him drawing a deep breath of fresh air once he shut the door behind him, getting into his car and throwing it into reverse. Go try to save somebody else. He wouldn’t be back home till after ten or so. I figured I had just enough time. I had an agenda to carry out and boundaries to cross.
* * *
After several shaky stabs with the key, I managed to lock the front door. The tide was rumbling ominously right behind my ears, eating away at my resolve with every crash. I had not released myself on my own recognizance for some time, and standing out there on the porch, I felt vulnerable to the elements and uncertain. The residue of my infection coursed through my veins, burdening me with its full weight: an anvil pressing down on my head, aching shoulder blades and back. But I needed to gather together all my remaining meager resources tonight, because this was the night I had to make a decision. The power of an individual decision. The nights were turning sharply colder; the geese were honking their way south. Once more it was the time of ghosts, the separation between living and dead at its thinnest.
Bouncing my hand along the stone fence, using it as a guide and a support, I made my way on unpracticed legs through the advancing twilight down the hill to Ilana Dent’s house. I felt quite high with defiance, but at the same time ridiculously timid, afraid of being seen, even, as if the infirm weren’t allowed free passage or association. My bad knee suddenly buckled, and I stumbled and half leaned/half fell into the beach plum bramble, startling a resting flock of birds, causing them to burst forth with such a terrifying racket that I wheeled around—grabbing the sharp branches for balance, scratching my hands badly—envious of their agency as I watched them ascend to the sky. Because these wings are no longer wings . . .. I was positive my misadventures had been spotted by somebody, but the street block was as eerily quiet and still as before. Some of the windows of the houses were reflecting the last remnants of the sunset’s glow. In others, the lights had already come on, including Ilana’s.
I had often seen her, Mrs. Dent, while passing her house as I walked home from the corner store. She might be sitting at her kitchen window, shaky chin in the palm of her shaky hand; she might be standing in her back yard staring at the ground. I avoided directly catching her eye, fearful of looking directly at the eclipse, looking directly at the Medusa head of loneliness. Once engaged, you would not easily escape, turned cold stone bored, trapped in her neediness for human contact. Ilana had that fiercely expectant look of one who had waited an unbearably long time to tell someone what she had been thinking. She had been thinking a lot. So I would always slip loose from that noose of a look, sometimes waving vaguely toward her while scurrying off in the opposite direction. But I finally stopped and talked to her one day last year when our paths crossed unavoidably, coming across the ancient white-haired woman, precariously down on her knees as in an attitude of prayer, trying to pry a weed out of a crack in her front walk, her cat asleep on a sunny patch of grass nearby. It was through her cat, Maso, a fat, long-haired beast, that I discovered Ilana’s secret.
After that initial encounter, I often stopped and chatted with, or rather listened to, Ilana offload whatever she had stored up during her lonely silent hours; an ensnarement impossible to avoid now whenever she spied me going to and fro on my own missions that I certainly deemed more important. Caring for Maso was becoming too much for her, she’d always tell me, and eventually I began stopping by her house to help so she wouldn’t have to give him up. He was an old cat and wouldn’t have survived any changes. I didn’t mind. I missed having kittens underfoot, afraid to have one or two share our home due to the constant comings and goings and the killer road. Maso, though not much more than a furry lump, filled the void for now. It was during one of these visits that Ilana told me her intentions.
Image: Envy of ascension. Source: Detail from Carnival Evening, Henri Rousseau, 1886. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.