Calypso(42)

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.