“Now, that’s not true,” Joan said.
“Even if she did see them, the pier is at least a mile from here,” Hugh added.
“Sharks do this thing called ‘swimming,’” I told him. “A mile is nothing to them.”
I turned to Madelyn, who had drawn a ten and, instead of moving forward like a normal, sweet sixth-grader, employed the card’s other option and took one step back, thereby returning my pawn to start, though I posed no threat to her whatsoever.
“You will grow up to be a terrible person,” I told her. “I mean, more terrible than you are now. If that’s even possible.”
“He didn’t mean that,” Joan called from out on the porch.
My goal on this beach trip was to find the snapping turtle I’d befriended the previous summer and feed him the lipoma I’d had cut out of me in El Paso. It had been in the freezer for nine months now, in a ziplock bag with DAVID’S TUMOR written on it. Every day I’d go down to the canal and stand on the narrow footbridge. The snapper I was searching for was as big as my rolling suitcase and had a hideous growth, a little top hat of flesh cocked just so on his head. There was no mistaking him for anyone else—that’s what I liked about him. He had style.
I mentioned him at the Sorry! board, and Madelyn, not caring that I’d called her a terrible person, said, “Didn’t Daddy tell you? That turtle is dead.” It seems she and Paul had gone looking for him earlier in the summer and were given the news by the man who lives beside the bridge and who had apparently found the body. So there went that.
Still, there was no reason to let a perfectly good lipoma go to waste. And so I went in search of another candidate. The one I chose lurks behind a shopping plaza. A lot of turtles congregate there—not just snappers but sliders as well—because vacationers feed them. There’s a coin-operated machine that dispenses what looks like dried dog food, so kids will buy a fistful and drop the pellets piece by piece into the water ten feet below. Others skip the dispenser and toss in their leftovers from the two nearby restaurants. French fries, onion rings, pizza crusts—the turtles will eat anything.
The day I brought out my defrosted tumor, a dozen or so people were gathered around the railing. I reached into my ziplock bag, realizing as I did so that what I was touching was myself, or what used to be myself. The egg-size lipoma had been diced into ten or so pieces and was greasy and blood-soaked, not like anything I’d put my hands on before. I threw a dollop to the fiercest of the five snapping turtles idling among the pylons, and he ate it with gusto. Then I threw in another bit, and another after that. Beside me stood a potbellied man in a baseball cap. His shirt had short sleeves and was unbuttoned almost to the waist. “I don’t know what you’re feeding that guy, but he’s sure loving it.”
I nodded.
He looked at my ziplock bag. “What is that, by the way?”
I emptied the last few bits and, realizing how complicated it would be to answer “My tumor,” I said instead, “Nothing much. Just some raw chicken.”
I’d brought a damp paper towel to wash my hands with, but my lipoma was messier than I’d anticipated, so I went to the Food Lion that’s attached to the shopping center to buy some wet wipes. The store was crowded with vacationers, renters who, grocery-wise, were having to start from scratch: salt and pepper, cooking oil, aluminum foil, ketchup. Carts were heaped. I got into the express line behind a middle-aged man in a T-shirt. I never saw the front of it, but the back pictured a Labrador retriever standing on the beach with a bikini top in his mouth. Below him were the words GOOD DOG.
Some people, I thought, opening the wet wipes so I could wash the tumor off my hands before I touched my wallet.
Over a game of Sorry! that night, I told Kathy and Madelyn about the turtle I’d thrown my lipoma to. I had four pawns on the board, more than anyone else, but it was too early to start gloating. Fortunes can reverse in a matter of seconds, especially when my niece is around. “I thought I’d be able to feed him a kidney as well, but it fell through,” I said, praying as my sister-in-law reached for a card that it wouldn’t have the word SORRY! written on it.
Kathy drew a useless twelve. “A kidney from a dog or cat?”
“No,” I said. “From a human teenager.”
Madelyn drew a one and released the first of her four pawns from the starting gate. “Who was the teenager?”
“A sixteen-year-old I met in Albuquerque last spring,” I said. “The two of us got to talking, and when I asked if he was getting a summer job, he said no, that after school got out he’d be checking into the hospital. One of his kidneys was dead inside him, so he was going to have it removed.”
Kathy looked up and frowned. “Poor guy.”
“There was something special about him,” I told her. “He was funny and remarkably articulate for someone his age. I asked if he had an iPad, and when he told me no, I said, ‘Well, you do now. I’m buying you one so you can use it in the hospital.’”
“Wow,” Kathy said. “That was really nice of you.”
“Wasn’t it?” I took a moment to feel good about myself. “In exchange he promised me his dead kidney, though I knew it was a long shot. Goddamn doctors. I understand not giving him the entire thing—it would be a lot to carry—but the least they could have done was break off a corner.”
“I don’t think kidneys have corners,” Madelyn said.
“Don’t be such a know-it-all,” I told her. “It’s a really bad trait for a child.”
I’d think back on this exchange the following day, after I’d repeated the story about the iPad to Hugh’s mother. You’re not supposed to talk about your good deeds, I know. It effectively negates them and in the process makes people hate you. If there’s a disaster, for instance, and someone tells me he donated five thousand dollars to the relief effort—this while I gave a lesser amount, or nothing at all—I don’t think, Goodness, how bighearted you are, but, rather, Fuck you for making me look selfish.
That said, Hugh’s mother could have given me a little more credit. What I got instead was “You bought a brand-new iPad for some kid you don’t even know? Now, that’s just showing off.”
“Now hold on a minute—,” I said.
“If you really want to help someone, you should think about those Syrian refugees,” she continued.
“I know, but—”
“I see them on TV, some of them drowning, their children dead, and it just tears me apart. That’s who you should be reaching out to, not some American who probably has a car and who knows what else.”
Syria, like Kosovo before it, was one of those stories that started while I wasn’t paying attention or, rather, while I was paying attention to something else—a celebrity wedding, perhaps. Then all of a sudden it was everywhere and I felt it was too late to get into it. The teenager, on the other hand, was right in front of me. Doing something nice for him was easy and immediate and didn’t lead to the mountain of junk mail you’re punished with whenever you give to an established charity.
We had lunch on the deck that afternoon—a salad with shrimp in it. As Hugh brought it to the table, his sister recounted the flight she and Joan had taken from Louisville. There was nothing much to her story—she’d asked a woman to swap seats so she could sit beside her mother, and the woman, quite logically to my mind, said no.
All I do is fly, so one-upping Ann was pretty easy. “A few years back, at a book signing, I met a pilot,” I began. “He flew the Newark to Palm Beach route, right? So it’s December twenty-third, and as they touch down in Florida, one of the flight attendants takes the microphone and delivers her standard landing speech. ‘Please remain seated until the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign has been turned off and be careful when opening the overhead bins. We’d like to wish you a merry Christmas and, to those of you already standing, happy Hanukkah.’”
Joan put down her fork. “Oh, now, she didn’t say that!”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because it’s prejudiced.”
“Of c
ourse it is, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t say it.”
“Well, that’s just nonsense,” Joan continued. “That never happened. The pilot was just pulling your leg.”
I hate being challenged over a story someone told me. “Really?” I asked. “And do you know him? Were you there?”
“No, but—”
“So actually,” I said, my heart racing as I pushed myself away from the table, “you have no idea what you’re talking about, do you?”
Hugh’s opening line when scolding me afterward in the privacy of our bedroom was “How dare you talk to my mother that way.”
I tried to explain why it had so bothered me, and he cut me off. “What’s it like to know that the best part of yourself just got fed to a snapping turtle?”
I then reminded him of the time my father came for Christmas. “It was 1998 in Normandy, and you told him to get the fuck out of your kitchen.”
Hugh crossed his arms. “Again, you’re wrong. What I said was ‘I need for you to get the fuck out of my kitchen.’”
“That’s not better,” I said. “It’s just…longer.”
He insisted I apologize to his mother, and then he stomped into the storage room in search of something—his cloak of self-righteousness, maybe. After he’d left, I changed into my bathing suit and joined my sister on her beach blanket. It was early afternoon, hot and bright. Gretchen was wearing a fudge-colored tankini that disappeared against her skin and made it look like she was naked. “Is that the swimsuit you bought the time we went to Hawaii together?” I asked, still stinging from my most recent arguments. Joan was right, of course, I had been showing off, but so what? A truly decent kid got an iPad out of it. It made him happy, and if it made me happy to tell a few dozen people about it, or, OK, a few thousand, what was the harm? As for the story the pilot told me, why would he have made it up? Why does everything that counters Joan’s worldview have to be false? Bad things happen: People are discriminated against and tortured. Kittens swallow fishhooks and get shot in the head. I’m not saying you should dwell solely on the negative, but why blot it out entirely, especially in a social setting where it’s practically your duty to spark debate and lively conversation?
Then too, why am I always the one to apologize? It wouldn’t kill me to return to the house and say I’m sorry, but I couldn’t have said it with any conviction. It would, in fact, make me the liar I’d just been accused of being, and how was that fair?
The people two doors down who’d been playing country music since we arrived had left, finally. Just as I was appreciating how quiet it was, a rescue helicopter appeared from the sound side of the island and soared off over the water, perhaps looking for a drowning victim or some poor swimmer who’d been mauled by a shark. It’s beautiful, the Atlantic, but at the same time so insistent, always advancing, always taking what it wants. When the helicopter eventually disappeared over the horizon, I meant to recount my recent battles with Hugh and his mother, to tap into the comfort and outrage that only my family can provide, but just as I opened my mouth, Gretchen sat up and said, lazily, almost like someone who was talking in her sleep, “Do you remember my old boyfriend Greg?”
“Sure.”
She lit a cigarette and took a deep draw. “He used to drink the liquid out of tuna cans.”
The story of my argument was insignificant now, dwarfed by this larger and infinitely more fascinating topic. I let go of my anger, all of it, and leaned back on the beach blanket, feeling palpably lighter, giddy almost. Feeling related. “Oil or water?” I asked.
Gretchen leaned back as well and brought her cigarette to her sun-blistered lips. “Both.”
Boo-Hooey
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people talking about ghosts. You wouldn’t think it would be that much of a problem—“Who are you hanging out with, for God’s sake?” someone might ask. “Camp counselors?”—but even friends I’d thought of as normal have something to say when the talk, as it invariably does, turns to haunted houses. Or apartments. Or dorm rooms. Or secondhand suitcases.
Leading the charge is usually Hugh. Don’t get him started on the farmhouse he and his family lived in after returning to the United States in the late 1970s, or you’ll never hear the end of it. And if his mother’s in the room at the same time, run. Though they sometimes argue over whether this particular ghost was wearing a red dress or a blue one with tiny checks, they’re generally in accord over her haunting style. She wasn’t a chain rattler. She wasn’t “aggressive,” but neither did she keep out of sight. “The poor thing,” Hugh’s mother says. “Trapped between one world and the next—it can’t be easy.”
“There must be spirits in your house,” people say when they visit Hugh and me in England. “A place this old has got to be crawling with them.”
“Nope,” I say. “Sorry.”
I thought the ghosts these people were referring to would have died in one of the bedrooms—a consumptive child, maybe, or a grandmother with buckshot wounds. But according to my sister Amy, who heard it from a reliable source, spirits can just as easily be brought in. “They travel in antiques sometimes,” she said.
“Like dressers and corner cupboards?” I asked.
“Or picture frames or candlesticks,” she explained. “They can attach themselves to just about anything. That’s why a lot of people won’t wear vintage clothes.”
I thought she was making this up, but it’s a real thing, apparently. “Dry-cleaning doesn’t kill them?” I asked.
“They’re not bedbugs,” Amy said. “They’re ghosts!”
Hugh claims the reason I’ve never seen one is that I’m not perceptive enough. This is his way of telling me that I’m self-centered, suggesting that if I weren’t so concerned about, for example, meeting my daily Fitbit goal, I’d realize there’s a six-hundred-year-old milkmaid living in our silverware drawer. He’s saying that he, his mother, and all the other people who detect flickering shadows on their bedroom walls are special in a way that I am not.
“And what about people who see pixies?” I ask.
“Well, they’re just crazy,” Hugh says.
If there are no ghosts in your home or office, if your parking deck and toolshed are spirit-free, you don’t have to feel left out. There are any number of places that advertise themselves as haunted—inns and such. “Did you see Headless Hazel?” the owners ask over breakfast, no doubt silently chuckling as guests cry, “I did! She was at the end of the hall when we came up from dinner last night, stabbing a doll with a knitting needle!”
I refuse to support the poltergeist industry, so would sooner sleep in a cardboard box than at the Belle Grove Plantation or the Albert Shafsky House, or any of the other places listed in the Hundred Most Haunted Hotels and B&Bs in America, none of which is named the Scarriott for some reason.
The number two thing I can’t stand hearing about are dreams. “How did you sleep?” I’ll sometimes ask Hugh.
If his answer has anything to do with piloting a plane made of meat, or handing a poker chip the size of a trash-can lid to a sea lion with Yoko Ono’s face, I’ll either put my fingers in my ears or walk out of the room.
All that said, I do believe the dead can visit us in our sleep—though not in anything I’d call a dream, and not in a form I’d consider in any way “ghostly.” Take my mother, for instance. Every time I see her she’s seated at a table in an otherwise empty room. She is never outlandishly dressed. She’s not transparent or oversize or tiny. The tone of our visits is almost formal. She asks how things are going, and I answer the same way I would if I were awake. Like, for example, when I quit smoking. She wondered what was new, and I held up my empty hand.
“Wow,” she said, noticing the cigarette that wasn’t there. “How’d you do that?”
The longest she ever quit was for two weeks. “I just wasn’t strong enough to put it behind me,” she said.
“Well,” I told her, “don’t beat yourself up over it. I suppose it was all part of
what made you you.”
In our visits my mother is always sixty-two, the age she was when she died. In 1991 that seemed old to me, though now, of course, I’m almost there myself. Before I know it, she and I will be contemporaries. Then I’ll overtake her, and how strange will that be, to have a mother young enough to be my daughter? When that day comes, will I think her naive? “What do you know about being old?” I’ll ask, me with white hair or, likelier still, bald. “You never even reached retirement age!”
Already there’s so much she’s missed out on: email; ISIS; reality TV; my niece, Madelyn. I have to watch what I say—otherwise I spend half my visit explaining what something is. “They’re pictures you take of yourself with a phone and send to the people you no longer communicate with by talking.”
When it’s time for my mother to go, she stands up and brushes her hands on her skirt. Sometimes she has her big beige purse with her and sometimes not. Her hair is always done. She’s made-up and has her octagonal glasses on. We hug, and then she leaves, not eagerly but not regretfully either. It’s the same with Tiffany, though she tends to stand rather than sit. My sister was never what you’d call a big listener, but in my sleep she’s all ears. “Really?” she’ll say. “And then what?”
In fact, we never talk about her. Just me.
“That’s how you know it’s a dream,” Amy says.
But it’s not, it’s real. I’m not alone in this. It happens to other people as well, and unlike with a nightmare or a ghost story, I don’t mind hearing about it. “I talked to my dad last night,” Hugh will tell me at least once a year.
“Give me the details,” I’ll say, as I liked his father. Sam could be intimidating, but he was an original thinker when it came to politics. “Did he talk about the election?” I’ll ask. “Oh, he must be furious.”
I can never predict when Tiffany or my mother will show up. I can’t conjure them, nor can I control how long they stay. The following morning I’ll feel content, recharged. When I think of Mom or my sister the day after a visit, I remember only the good times and wish it could always be this way. I don’t like recalling their faults or the arguments we had, though with my mother there were only a handful, and they were usually over within an hour or so.