paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hauntings
Every once in a while I get called back to the first house that I lived in with my parents. They bought it for $4,000 at an estate sale. For some reason, a lot of mental energy resides there. I still remember not just the general layout of the house, but every creak of the stairs, hiding spot in the closet floor boards, and cold spot in the rooms. The house has big, deep front porch, living room, dining room, den, kitchen, three bedrooms, a bathroom and a sun porch on the second floor, and two bedrooms and a sitting room on the third floor. In other words, it was huge. But the rooms were small and the closets were not even deep enough to accommodate a hanger on a rod. So despite the impressive numbers of rooms with doors, the house was not overbearingly big.
It is not an unusual house for this city. A shirtwaist Victorian kit home in a part of the inner city that is on the edge of stability, but still, fighting the battle. What ever gains made by the neighborhood are slow and fragile, and in that way they feel as accidental and random as life. It was on a one-way street that was fairly busy and had cars parked on both sides of the street. Sometimes it was treacherous to navigate the neighborhood.
The house was, and perhaps still is, haunted. More than the house being haunted, I sometimes feel I am haunted because from time-to-time I want to drive by and just look at it. It may be that I feel as though some clue about my hazy early life will become highlighted. There are theories about how memory is often jagged by smell� were I to walk into that house would there be a familiar, slightly musty smell that would bring it all back. Somehow give me the chance to think about it as an adult.
Even my mother, who has become incredibly rational and conservative over the years, believes and will tell others, that the house is haunted. Her eyes get big for a moment, a little wild, but then filled with a sadness, just for a moment, when no one is looking but me. Because even though we both experienced the haunting first hand, I think we both associate the phenomena with my father. Now that we all know everything that we know about Vietnam, about divorce, about young love and potential, she struggles sometimes with a feeling that she ran to suddenly. At the same time, she seems to feel that her life is working out and she has found a calmer, more settled life with the major.
Yet still, it is worth a few tales with a glass of wine. We had cold spots in the house that were easily 15 degrees cooler than the rest of the house, even in the heat of summer in a house without air conditioning. The bathtub faucet turned on, completely on its own. Sometimes when we weren�t home we would come home to a bath that had been drawn with my little rubber duckie floating around. Sometimes, during a bath, the hot would just come on gangbusters, or the cold, neither option particularly appealing. There were rhythmic knocks and banging. The doors opened and slammed shut. I saw lights and little elves, even when, completely freaked out and in my parents� bed. Once, after my mother came home from work and was getting ready to go to a night class, to keep me from roaming off and making her late, she set me on her bed while changing clothes. Just then both doors to the master bedroom closed and locked. We couldn�t get them open. We sat on the bed for about two minutes. I told her to take breath at one point, because she seemed peeked. Then I walked over to the door and opened it. We ran out of the house, got into the car, backed down the driveway and headed down the one-way street. There at the bottom was major accident that had just happened. The ambulance and police had not yet arrived, even. What ever happened back in the house, we may have been spared from the accident.
One night, several months later, after my bath, my mother ran into my room. I was playing my �Delta Dawn� 45 on my little record player and singing. She sat me down, with out picking up the arm of the record player � shhhchoogg, sschhhchugg � as the arm bounced in the gutter. �We are leaving. Pack one suitcase of whatever you want and take it to the car. Get in the car and lock the doors.� My father was quiet in that scary way that he sometimes got quiet just before exploding. One time when he was similarly quiet, I was playing around in the living room, and he picked me up, slammed me into the wall and let me fall on heap on the floor. And then he punched holes in all of my weekly readers and tied string through them, making a pretty book for me. He left it for me on the kitchen table that he made by gluing together strips of 1x1 boards. It was a cool little table that fit well in a small little space between two windows. I learned there to count to 100 and beyond. I learned to add and subtract. I learned the alphabet. I learned to make cookies and biscuits.
Life with my father was unsettling. Because he loved me so much and thought I was really a groovy little being. Because he did not know what to do with me. Because he was on the edge between life and oblivion. Because he was an incredibly sensitive man exposed to a great deal of violence during the war. These things didn�t mean much to me at 4. I didn�t know what to do so I tended to stay in my room. My mother didn�t know what to do, all of 24 years old herself, exhausted, confused, overwhelmed, so she rented an apartment in a horrible part of town � but we could afford it. She outfitted it with a bunch of hand-me-down furniture from her friends at work. Over the course of a week, she made a new nest for the two of us without saying anything. I packed my suitcase of toys and mother grabbed my few clothes, threw them in a trash bag. I ran down the stairs with my suitcase, in my jammies, with my pooh bear, got in the car and locked the doors. I could see my parents silhouetted in the window. My mother ran out of the house, with the bag of my clothes and a bottle of whiskey, crying. My father�s silhouette was still, in the kitchen, by the table. It is very clear to me, as much as anything that is remembered and learned over and over again during many different years, that he must have had a hand on that table bracing himself. Because the other hand held his face. As my mother backed down the driveway, I pressed my little hand on the window. It was early summer, but it was oddly cool, like a big rain was about to fall. With a marked lack of grace with the clutch, we chugged off into a whole new life.
Life without the haunting but also life without the protection, no matter how complicated, debatable, inconsistent or puzzling.
10:39 p.m. - 2002-08-02
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------