Gary loops his arms around my waist, tight, like we’re about to jump off a plane together. He whispers, ‘That’s the ghost I told you about,’ meaning one of the ghosts that just walked in.
‘Which one?’
‘The noisy one.’
Well, they’re all noisy at first, so I don’t know what he’s talking about until the really noisy one speaks up. She talks right to my husband, like she knows him.
‘Hey, Gary,’ she waves, elbowing one of the ghosts next to her. She has long black hair that’s full of waves and little braids. She’s wearing jeans and a black leather jacket. ‘Is this your special lady?’ She points to me.
Gary squeezes me so tight it hurts. ‘This is my wife.’
The noisy ghost laughs. ‘Then I guess she’s the one responsible for this lousy wallpaper.’
‘Lousy!’ I say, my mouth dropping open, but she’s laughing.
‘Hey, Gary, what’s your lady’s name?’
But I answer, not him, because now I’m pretty mad at her for insulting my nice bedroom, so I say, ‘I’m Angie.’
She loves it. She cracks up at that, like my name is a joke that I wouldn’t understand. ‘Classic,’ she says.
‘Why?’ I say. ‘What’s your name?’
And she spreads her arms wide, like she’s asking for a hug. ‘I’m Mystica.’
‘Humph,’ I say. ‘Doesn’t sound like you’re in much of a position to be making fun of names, then.’
Then Mystica does something that really freaks us out. She jumps to the bed. I mean, she jumps. Practically flies. Of course, I shriek, and I climb right over my husband and I duck behind him like he’s a shield. Gary’s a good man. He holds out an arm to protect me, and sticks his chin out. ‘I didn’t know you could do that!’ I say. ‘I didn’t know she could do that!’
‘Listen,’ Mystica says, stepping closer to us, pointing at us with her arm straight out in front of her. ‘I own this house now. These are my friends, and I’m in charge. You don’t want to mess with me.’
When she sees that we’re scared, and of course we are, she smiles and flies back to the dresser. And it’s so weird when she does it, she stays facing us, flying backwards like she’s being sucked back into the door. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she says to her friends, and they file out the tiny, brown door behind her.
At five’o’clock, we know Al’s is going to open up again soon, and Gary decides to tiptoe over to the closet. The coast is clear. He throws me a pair of my jeans and a Cardinals sweatshirt and some underwear. I have to be honest, we don’t look our best. Up all night isn’t a good look, and my hair dried kind of fuzzy from the bath. I try to smooth it down with some Jergens lotion, which I have on my nightstand. The Jergens I buy because I like the smell, even though it’s a whopping $6.99, even at Walmart, and it never goes on sale.
So we creep out of the house. We only see one tiny ghost on the way out. She’s on the kitchen counter, making herself a giant piece of toast. She gives us the finger, the middle finger, when we walk past. I make a mental note to put the bread in the fridge, and, oh yeah, a slice of toast is food for how many tiny ghosts? I picture her cutting it into twenty pieces, and twenty tiny ghosts dig in. It gives me the chills, and I’m glad when we’re safely in the truck.
‘What’s up, early birds?’ Marsh is whistling when we get there. His place smells like French fries and chicken nuggets, and it’s such a good smell I get hungry right away. He pours a silver prewrapped coffee packet into the machine and closes it. He flips a switch, and an orange light goes on, for brewing.
Marsh himself is a pretty little guy. I mean, he’s not tiny ghost tiny, but he’s a smallish man. ‘Bad night?’ he asks, when he takes a look at us. I’ll be honest, I don’t feel great. My hair’s a mess and I don’t live in a nice house anymore. I live in a haunted house. I’ve always thought of myself as more of a Jane Eyre, but right about now I feel like the crazy lady locked upstairs. And it bugs me to have Marsh knowing about it.
‘We couldn’t sleep,’ Gary tells him.
‘You guys okay?’
‘Nope. Our house is haunted.’
I jump in, defensive, ‘But haunted by tiny ghosts.’
‘Really,’ Marsh says, raising his eyebrows. ‘What do you mean, tiny?’
Gary says, ‘About the size of my hand.’
Marsh pours the coffee, and we tell him everything we know about the tiny ghosts so far, while we order and eat our breakfasts. Marsh can’t believe it. I say, ‘They’re jerks,’ a few times, to Gary and Marsh both. I say it so many times, I’m afraid they’ve stopped listening to me. ‘They’re jerks, they’re little, tiny jerks. That’s all they are.’
But the Saturday crowd comes into Al’s pretty early, and after there’s just crumbs on our plates, and we’re both looking jittery from the no sleep and all the coffee on top of it, we realize we’ve got to leave eventually. I look around and nobody else has anything on their mind but breakfast. They’re all doing great. Me and Gary are the ones who have to go back home, whether we like it or not. Back to our tiny ghost house.
The tiny ghosts stick around for months. Months! Think about how long that is. We learn the names of a few of the tiny ghosts, and recognize them on sight. The blonde one, the one that was making toast, is named Olivia, and the first tiny ghost that interrupted my bath? His name is Chad. As far as we can tell, there are at least a dozen of them, living in tunnels that wind around our house. The tiny doors appear for days at a time, disappear for longer.
We try to get rid of them. Gary comes home with a gray plastic Walmart bag full of mousetraps and bug spray.
‘It’s not like mice,’ I say to him, for the millionth time.
He sets the mousetraps up all around the usual places where the tiny ghosts pop out. He sprays the walls down with ant and roach repellant. But when Mystica sees it, she just laughs. ‘Oh, please,’ she says, hopping right over the mousetraps, the kind of big jump she’s so good at, where she hangs suspended in the air for whole seconds. ‘A for effort, Gary,’ she says.
The same with the BB gun, and time we try to light them on fire. Nothing works. Although we do leave a scorch mark above the kitchen sink, which we’ll have to paint over. Which is actually going to cost a fair amount, since we have to do the whole wall. And every time the tiny ghosts win, we start to feel dumber. They don’t like my hair, the way I talk, the way I decorate.
Finally, we give up. We even try to make friends with them. We’re friendly people. Even to people that are already dead, even if we’re not sure they were ever people at all. Even if they’re the meanest not-people we’ve ever met and they’re hurting our feelings every day. And what do you know? That doesn’t work, either.
Alright. I can tell you what did work, if you want. How we got rid of them, although I doubt you’ll believe it.
It starts one day, with me trying to be nice. ‘I love what you’ve done with your hair,’ I say to Mystica. Her hair is all looped up on top of her head, she’s wearing tall boots and lipstick. Me and Gary are in the TV room. We’re watching TV.
And she goes, ‘Thanks,’ rolling her eyes, ‘I’ve been dying for you to notice. I live for your approval.’
And it occurs to me: Mystica doesn’t live or die at all. She doesn’t worry. She doesn’t have dreams. She’s nothing like me, because I dream of the geraniums I’ll plant next spring, and I worry that we’ll get a late frost, and they’ll all die. Those are real dreams and worries. So I say, ‘Shut up.’
Mystica likes that. She laughs at first, then she jumps over to the coffee table. She stands between me and Gary. She goes, ‘You’re nothing, Angie. You’re worthless. You’re not very interesting, and you have an ugly house. You’re a boring, stupid bitch.’
And for a minute, I go back to feeling like she’s right. I look around my uninteresting, worthless house. My life here with my husband. I think, yeah. I am, actually, a boring, stupid b-word.
But then, I look at Gary. He’s frowning
, and he glances at me. He shakes his head, ‘No. Not true.’ He’s got his arms crossed over his belly, and his hairline is receding a little, and I love him. And I think about all of the things that I like about our house and our life together. I think about how it’s blue, pretty blue. With a clean, squishy carpet and two copies of Jane Eyre, which is a hip enough book for me. I think about how nice it is to open up the windows for fresh air. And I think that Mystica has no place in this house.
So then, I do something that’s a little weird but I don’t mind mentioning it. I lean forward, and I roar at Mystica. Like a roar, like how a lion roars. It’s not something I’ve ever done in my life, and I expect her to make fun of me, like she always does, but I don’t really care what she thinks about me anymore.
She pulls back for a second, and her eyes open wide. ‘Hey,’ she says.
‘You’re just a ghost!’ I say. ‘Get out of here! This is my house!’
For a second, it seems like she’s going to get even meaner. But then, ‘Rawwwr!’ That’s Gary next to me. He does the same thing. ‘Beat it!’ He points to the door she came out of. ‘Go back to your little ghost-hole.’
Mystica doesn’t know what to do with that. So I roar again. And so does Gary. We’re roaring, it’s like a jungle in there, and the most amazing thing happens. Mystica leaves. Right back out the tiny door. And of course, we’re cracking up, because we just made lion noises. Gary puts his arm around me, and I give him a kiss on the cheek.
So that’s it. From then on, the tiny ghosts come out every once in a while, but we just roar at them like lions. We start collecting lion stuff. Lion figurines. Gary buys me a Lion King sweatshirt, which he ordered online for $19.50, and I wear it whenever I want. Because this is my house, and my life, and I do what I want. Tell that to your tiny ghosts.
‘THE PINK HOUSE’
REBECCA CURTIS (AMERICAN, 1976–)
First published in the New Yorker in 2014.
From an interview with Rebecca Curtis by Willing Davidson in the New Yorker:
There’s something lively about ghost stories – ha! – because the story contains built-in excitement and horror. Of course, you still need to create conflict and a plot, if you’re a traditionalist, but you’re starting on stilts, maybe, because you have a dramatic element that a normal, two-people-drinking-coffee-and-complaining-about-their-bunions story doesn’t have.
Rebecca Curtis is a New York-based fiction writer whose work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s and n+1.
THE PINK HOUSE
Rebecca Curtis
‘But it’s tawdry,’ the woman said.
‘Petty. I still can’t figure out what happened …’
She was tall, pale, and had dark hair and a heart-shaped face. She looked to be in her early thirties. ‘I made a series of mistakes,’ she said, ‘due to being hasty, or influenced by who knows? And each led to the next, and they seem to have ruined this man’s life—my ex-boyfriend’s—or else changed it completely. And the initial mistake was that, when I moved from Manhattan to a bleak town upstate, I took a house sight unseen.’
‘That doesn’t sound so bad,’ someone said.
‘Yes,’ a man, a novelist, said, and nodded. ‘If you didn’t like it when you got there, you could have just switched houses.’
‘But I didn’t,’ the woman said. ‘I didn’t realize the truth about the house until too late, and then I stayed. I was too lazy to move, or else sick in the head.’
The woman sat down at the table. It was the first time she had that evening. Rain smashed sideways against the bungalow’s steel siding. The rain had begun halfway through dinner. Then thin straws of lightning appeared beyond the dark windows, and hail fell on the tin roof. The woman had served jumbo shrimp sautéed in garlic butter; chicken quesadillas with goat Cheddar cheese; refried black beans, sautéed onions and peppers; a pear-and-bitter-greens salad; and flourless chocolate cake with raspberry-vodka sauce. Everyone had drunk Lone Star beer. Her guests were a Korean-American crime-noir novelist, a Lebanese fantasy writer, a Thai journalist, and three Brazilian painters. None of the seven people around the table knew one another well; they’d all been flown to this mountain town on the Mexican border by a foundation that was putting them up and paying them to practice their respective arts for six weeks. They were all unsuccessful, middle-aged, and hard up for cash. None of them knew who’d selected them for the residency, or why. The woman had agreed to host a dinner, because her bungalow was the largest. Three of the group were divorced; four never married. Over dinner, they’d discussed politics and failed relationships, then moved on to ghost stories. The guests were full, tipsy and reluctant to go out into the rain. They’d heard about the boot steps on the stairs of the old Virginia fort, and the Northern California gold-rush-era hotel where female guests woke with hand-shaped bruises around their necks. A ghost story about a man’s life getting ruined seemed better. They leaned forward.
The novelist opened a bottle of wine and poured it into glasses. ‘Tawdry,’ he said ‘I like it.’
The woman spread her hands. ‘The mistakes were trivial.’
‘It’s always like that,’ a painter said. He smiled. ‘Everything on earth is trivial. Also tawdry.’
‘You think you ruined a mans life,’ the novelist said. ‘But all women think that.’
A few people laughed.
‘Maybe I didn’t,’ the woman said. ‘That would make me happy.’
‘Tell us and we’ll judge.’
She sipped her wine.
* * *
‘The year I met this man, I was twenty-five and lived in New York City, where I’d moved to become a writer. But no journal responded to the stories I mailed them—I knew myself they were no good—and I spent all my time tutoring and proctoring exams for a test-prep company. Most days, I taught at the test-prep center, others I travelled to Riverdale or White Plains to sit in grand dining rooms with people my own age and show them how to combine tricky if-then statements so as to improve their scores on the law- and business-school entrance exams. The students’ parents paid the company exorbitant sums, but my checks were so small I barely made rent. I had three dollars a day for food; every day I bought a bagel and a small carton of milk to go in my oatmeal. When I was accepted to a Master of Fine Arts program in Syracuse, I was thrilled, even though I was rejected from the fiction track and accepted only for poetry, and even though the city was a frigid, depressed backwater, because the program offered me a fellowship with a stipend.
‘When time came to secure housing, I was too broke to make the trip to Syracuse, so I called the program secretary and asked if she knew of any apartments. She demurred, but called back the next day; a student was vacating an apartment. Several others had lived there before him, and had also broken the lease; she didn’t know why. It was cheap, and close to campus. The apartment was a two-bedroom for four hundred and thirty-five dollars a month; how could I go wrong?
‘Here comes the tawdry part of the story. I couldn’t afford a U-Haul. I didn’t know how I’d manage the move—but at the last minute my father called me. He’d recently bought a trailer. He offered to drive with my mother from Maine, where they lived, to Manhattan with the trailer hitched to their station wagon, and pick me up on a Friday morning in August; if we left early, he said, we’d beat weekend traffic. They’d have me in Syracuse by 2 P.M., and they could drive the eight hours from Syracuse back to Maine that same day, My father guessed, he said gruffly, that I was broke. He was embarrassed to offer this help; he guessed that, since I had some pride, I’d refuse.
‘My parents and I were not close. They were typical New England parents; they showed my sister and me little affection, and we showed them little back. My father always told me that if I accepted any assistance from him after he’d paid for college I’d be a loser. My mother was a housewife who believed that all non-Catholics and women who had premarital sex would burn in agonizing flames forever after death. As a kid, I wished I felt a sense of k
inship with my parents, but I never did. Like many people, I suppose, I fantasized that I’d discover I was adopted, and had ‘real’ parents somewhere far away who were intelligent, well-read, sophisticated, and cared about improving the world. But because I resembled my parents physically— my father’s eyebrows, my mother’s round face, their pink skin—I knew I was not adopted.
‘I’m an ingrate, I know, but my parents’ control of my sisters and my bodies and movements, when we were kids—over the organization of the clothes in our closets; the minute of our return, should we go out to see a movie—was so total that after I left home the idea of their entering any space of mine was repulsive. They left a scent behind them. Maybe all parents do. It didn’t help that my mother had a habit of ‘fixing’ whatever room she entered—rearranging pillows on beds, dusting windowsills, and finding hidden spots of mold—and my father of ‘checking’: he opened cupboards and desk drawers when he thought no one was looking, and he always peeked under loose couch cushions for lost change. So I didn’t want to accept my parents’ help. But my father had said that they’d drop me off in Syracuse and leave immediately, and so I slyly felt that I’d get something for nothing.
‘My father warned me that I must have my boxes on the sidewalk in front of my apartment by 9 A.M. that Friday. He didn’t want to spend money on a hotel, or stay overnight in Syracuse. Of course, I swore I’d be ready at nine. But I managed to fuck things up. I’d been dating a handsome black banker-by-day who did standup at night—one of several handsome black men I’d dated that summer—and when he suggested we have dinner on the eve of my departure I agreed, because I suspected romantic pickings would be slim in Syracuse; besides, I enjoyed his company. After dinner, we went to a bar with an outdoor patio and had drinks; the time when I should have gone home to pack came and went. I thought, Ah, how important is packing? I can stuff things in boxes between 1 and 3 A.M.! We had such fun that the banker suggested we continue to date once I was in Syracuse; he could drive up, he said, and I could bus down to see him. But I was intoxicated, also caddish, and replied, “That’s silly—it’s too far to drive.”