Lisa Mannetti, The Ghosts or the Hammer?

Originally published Hell Hath No Fury 2004

edited by L. Marie Wood

The Ghosts or the Hammer?

“It began with the fantasy of the mausoleum,” Eleanor said. No, this is not right, this is nothing to say on a first date. But as she looked at the man sitting across from her, his eyes dilated with interest, his strong hands curved loosely around thick bar glass, it tumbled out of her anyway.

“It was safe there,” she said. She looked longingly at her own drink, but merely licked her lips and sped on. “It was too much: the thin cries of the baby toward dawn, the shit on the shower curtain, Mother dying in my bedroom…it was too much.”

“Of course,” he said.

“The stress went on too long. I couldn’t just dump Mother into a nursing home.” She paused. “Everyone said I should, but I couldn’t.” The lights in the bar flickered signaling last call and she downed the rest of her frothy drink, and waved her glass for another.

The waitress came to the table with another round and Eleanor waited, not moving at all and merely observing while the man took his wallet out and thumbed through his bills. He laid a twenty on the table. “Just keep the change” he said; she watched the young woman scurry off, her rump tight under the short black skirt, the sound of her shoes lost beneath talk and smoke and yet another song Eleanor didn’t recognize on the jukebox.

“Thanks,” she said. Cautiously she tried to look at him, tried to remember what her face was supposed to look like when she was talking to a man, when she was trying to be kittenish without being sappy or slutty. She settled for moving her mouth upwards—that was a smile, she recalled.

“You said something about ghosts,” the man said, his eyes tilting with hers for the barest second.

Eleanor leaned forward. “Anything can be a ghost,” she said. “When you have to clean shit off the toilet ring twenty times a day, that’s a ghost. When you can never find the simplest things: measuring spoons or the coffee mugs that are supposed to be on the first shelf of the cupboard, or your black sweater or your dental floss or your shampoo or the telephone bill, those are all ghosts.”

He didn’t say anything, only sipped his coffee and Eleanor thought she had to explain better than that.

“It was like this,” she said, her hands spreading wide.

“Tell me how it was.”

“Everything was harder,” she said, letting a silence slip into the smoky air. He seemed good at silences, though, and she guessed he would wait without interrupting until she was ready. She tried to order her thoughts, and nearly giggled: which came first the chicken or the egg, the ghosts or the hammer?

“I think it was the thin cries of the baby toward dawn,” she whispered.

“Huh?”

Time had eluded her for a second, but she was on track now, she was sure of it. “The noise was continual and I couldn’t hear myself think.” She sipped the drink. He would ask soon if she’d taken to drink; he was intelligent after all, and she would tell him no. That was the truth. When she drank too much she heard ringing in her ears when she slept and sleep was one of her only escapes, too precious to subject to noise and dismemberment. She remembered reading once that surprisingly, the internees in the concentration camps had pleasant dreams…her dreams were often like that. Wonderful dreams. Alfie forgiving her. Old boyfriends re-emerging to let her know they loved her. They were never about sex, her dreams. They were always about love.

“The noise,” Eleanor explained. “The noise was constant. If it wasn’t Mother calling for something, it was the TV on 14 15 16 hours a day. The baby babbling. Mother babbled too. Everything always happened at once. I would cook and the phone would ring, the doorbell would ring, Mother would drop her cane, the baby would be choking on dry cat food she’d tweezed from the bowl. The lights were always on. Mother wouldn’t sleep without the lights on.” She sipped her drink, demurely this time she thought. That had been another horror to witness as she watched her own personality crumbling under the weight of her life. Table manners gone, tidying gone, dressing up gone. She had watched herself as if she were watching a movie and yet she never looked in the mirror. When had she last done more than wash her hair and bundle it into a rubber band, when had she last picked out which shoes went with which skirt? For more than a year, she plucked a wrinkled clean shirt from the closet, the chair, the floor and put it on, scarcely bothering with a bra. or panties—it just meant more laundry.

“Alfie was gone—”

“Your husband?”

“I don’t know if it was better or worse without him,” Eleanor said. “Some days he was just one more person to pick up after.”

“You gave up on picking up after people, didn’t you?” His voice was level, his eyes seemed kind.

“You couldn’t really pick up after them or keep things tidy. The aides who came to help with Mother—they broke things, lost things, stole things.”

“Like ghosts.”

She smiled, this time for real. “I gave up trying to keep my silverware straight in its own drawer,” Eleanor said. Now she laughed. “Soon, that didn’t matter because the aides had thrown out most of it. Threw it out!” She took a sip of the drink and nearly spit it onto the table, her eyes misted with laughing tears. “And that didn’t matter—because, because, oh God, because, neither of them used silver ware….yes, the baby ate with her hands and so did Mother.” She pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Ever see a grown woman pick up lettuce or butter with her fingers. Oh God,” she rasped. She cleared her throat and calmed again. This wasn’t going so badly, it was moving a little more smoothly now, and God, it felt great to be out of the goddamn house.

* * *

“Tell me more about the mausoleum,” he said.

“It might sound a little crazy,” Eleanor said. He tilted his hand out in a so what gesture, and she smelled warm brandy. The coffee must be laced with brandy; perhaps they could fly—just a little—together.

“Not to me it won’t,” he said.

“After a while most of my friends dropped away, you see,” Eleanor said. She looked down at the pale little hillocks of her drink, faintly green, and thought about crystal gazing. Just lose yourself and speak. She glanced at him through her lashes. “That’s why the mausoleum idea was so crazy—” her voice flew up. “I mean I was alone and I wanted more alone—”

He reached across the table and took her wrist. “You just take your time and tell it, your way.” She saw there were small dark hairs on his knuckles; they were fine, glossy—like something an artist might paint with a detail brush. She tried to remember if ghosts had knuckle hair. It wasn’t unattractive, and his hands had a beautiful shape to them. Strong and well-muscled and slender at the same time.

“When I went to sleep, I would imagine a mausoleum….with thick one way glass….it was built into a hillside. There was peace there…I would sit and look…it was very beautiful inside, more villa than mausoleum, but small, you see.”

“Yes.”

“No one could look in, no one could see me.”

“Yes.”

She paused. She must tell him about the house or he wouldn’t understand. “It was connected to a house. Just behind the fireplace, where the wood bin would be, when you opened the door, you could go down through the floor. A little set of secret steps. They opened on the kitchen, the kitchen of the house.

“The house was very long and narrow, like a shoebox, but beautiful. No one, looking at the front of it, would guess that the mausoleum built into the hillside belonged to it.

“There were corridors along each side of the central portion….on one side you could hear the ocean, on the other it was all one long atrium, filled with plants and fountains and all of the ceiling, yes, all of it was a skylight.”

“And the mausoleum?”

“There was everything you needed, kitchen and dining room, library, living room, all in a row, all flanked by the sound of the sea and the sunlit fountains in the atrium. That was the first floor, you see. Above, the same arrangement, only bedrooms…..a balcony looked down on the atrium from there, too.

“And always, really it was magical, everything was clean, everything was neat. Everything was always in its place and nothing was dirty or broken. And the only sound was the clean sound of water and ocean.

“At first, there were no people, just me--”

“But then there were people?” he said

“Yes. That was part of the magic,” Eleanor smiled. “There were people, but everything still stayed clean.”

“Who were the people?”

“I didn’t know them,” she shrugged.

“But were they friends, did you think friends came to visit or—”

“I never gave them faces or names, I just knew everything stayed clean….and quiet.”

“And the mausoleum?”

“Like the house, peaceful, clean, inviolate….I couldn’t hear myself think in that house, couldn’t even read, couldn’t even brush my goddamn teeth in peace. They were always after me and when they talked, just made regular talk, it was all the same. The same words over and over and over again. The two of them repeated everything…after a while, I think they did it just to get under my skin. What day is it? What time are we having dinner? What’s for dinner? What kind of meat is this? Today is Wednesday. It’s Wednesday, right? And tomorrow is Thursday….A B C… One, two, three, four, one and one is two. The two of them, all of the time, the same no talk talking, the same whining and crying, the same shit and the same needs. And always after me. Get me this. I need that. My god, and I had no one but them, they were the island I lived on—I won’t say survived, because I didn’t survive. Survival means fighting and….and I just gave in.”

“Gave up?”

His conversation was unorthodox, but he understood a lot, a lot for a man on a first date and she had to give him that.

“Yes, I gave up all right. When you can’t imagine your way out of a cage, when you no longer want to leave the cage, you’ve given up.”

He nodded.

“The mausoleum?” he prompted.

“It was never for them, just for me. A place I could lie still and feel peace dropping slow and inevitable as tides.”

“Do you remember when, how…which day it was, I mean?”

“I couldn’t even read a book. A grown woman, I couldn’t even read a book because they were always after me. And when they weren’t after me, my family—my so-called sister and aunts and ex-husband—were on the phone or at the door and after me. Do this and do that and do this and it never stopped. Never.”

“When—”

“I’d like another drink,” Eleanor said.

The man across from her nodded and a woman in a black uniform came over and opened the top of the Smoothie and put the straw deep into the thick plush of the liquid. Eleanor sipped. It was cold, she thought, it tasted of the peace of a mausoleum.

The man across from her slid glossy photographs into her line of vision.

Everything was black and red.

No there was a bit of tile, white tile.

“Do you remember how? Or when, or which day?”

She shook her head.

“The coroner believes they were lying there at least a week.”

“Such a mess.” Eleanor said. There was shit on the shower curtain no matter how many times she washed it because her mother wiped her ass; then, before she cleaned her hands, she pulled at the curtain to tug herself up and shitted it again. There was always shit, Eleanor couldn’t even keep a rug on the floor, couldn’t even place it over the edge of the tub because her mother would wipe herself and lean on it and get shit on the bath mat, too, and that would be one more thing to wash. Along with the sheets and the baby’s things, and the baby’s clothes already stank of her mother’s shit in the wash. Even here, the camera caught the shit on the curtain, on the ring of the toilet.

“Which was first,” the man asked her.

“Which came first,” Eleanor giggled, “the ghosts or the hammer?”

END

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