Halloween Story

Her bathroom is soundproof. Lest anyone else in the house be able to listen in on the slur and the press of a body’s relinquishing, she paid many thousands of dollars to soundproof the space in which it all happens. The hallways are carpeted and the doors equipped with “quiet closers,” which were purchased via an ad on late-night TV, somewhere between Seth Meyers and Hulu. Thus we don’t even know when she begins or ends her journey to or from the bathroom.?Do ghosts have to pee, we wonder?

She is not concerned with the personal habits of others, nor does she chew her quiche behind a veil or pour her chardonnay in a closet.?It is a thing we don’t talk about, not even to use words like weird or peculiar.?We look away.?She is not hurting anyone after all.

We are the others in the house. Me, the daughter; my father (that’s what we call him); grandfather (dad’s dad); Tremor, my brother. Father lives in the studio upstairs, down the long hall from his wife. His dad makes his life in the downstairs guest room, which has its own small freezer and hotplate. Tremor and I have the run of the rest of the house. Sometimes I stay in the guest room on the third floor,?but I also fall asleep, not so rarely, on one of the three matching floral (subtle though) couches in the so-called family room. Me, myself, and I, the little kids sing in my memory.

Tremor often stays in the fully fitted pool house, down the bluestone path among the dying ash trees. Other times, he takes one of the two other couches and we take turns dozing and then staring at the dance floor-sized screen until dawn. Dad’s dad gets up first, puts on coffee and then retires to the sunroom to meditate. Every morning, the smell rises to meet me.

The mother, Tremor’s mother, who is not my mother by the way, is always cheerful in the morning, heads right for the coffee and tosses in a couple of pieces of rye bread for toasting. No offers are made from one to another; everyone fends for themselves. The coffee though is for everyone, although the maker doesn’t drink it. Meditation ends once the last dish is placed in the dishwasher. Dad’s dad comes into the kitchen and pokes at the boxes in the cabinet and at the cartons and to-go containers in the refrigerator but nothing much catches his eye. Maybe a handful of pecans or what’s left of a yogurt. It is not an unhappy house. Perhaps to you it seems strange.

I wonder though, if I were to travel into the wombs and rooms of your youngerhood, take the bus or hike through the meadows, to your houses and apartments and every shape a home can take, what would I find? What assortment of habits and rituals did you and yours follow without a serious thought that things might be done differently in other kitchens and bedrooms. Did you sleep on the fire scapes to avoid the heat and the yelling? Who was invited to speak? Just how many cats did you have? Who took the blame, and who got the credit? Who was ignored? Who did you look down upon even as you looked up? Who polished your gilded cage? Who snuck out the window at night??

Or, would I find dimmer passageways? Were the prayers mixed with bruising; painted smiles and gritted teeth; your father in open conversation with his guardian angel??Over there, the path to the safe house (shhh, it shifts by unwritten degrees as the seasons change, or at night, or when Aunt Meg is around). And, here take it, the seven and one-half commandments; don’t break them, don’t tell them.?

No, this house is not unhappy.?It’s just I am a bit lost without my very own mother. This is not to say I have animosity toward those who inhabit this place, just that I miss her. When you visit, you will simply notice that our ritual is one of forgetting, of not talking about the lost people, the missing mother, the little girl who is missing her. This woman who lives upstairs in the way that she does with my father, she’s okay.?Their private map is theirs.?I am okay with it.?

I do think we should talk about the bathroom though. I am afraid she will fall one day and hit her head terribly hard. We won’t be able to hear it and so won’t be able to save her. Then there will be two missing mothers in this one house.?

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