Holy Ghost Girl (19 page)

One morning I woke up convinced that two of my youngest uncles were there. I had seen them roll a new red tricycle into the house for me during the night. It was the same tricycle one of them had backed his car over and mangled three years earlier. I climbed out of bed that morning eager to find the tricycle (never mind that I was too big to ride it now anyway) and eager to see my uncles. When I couldn’t find either, I asked Pam and Randall where they had gone.

“Who?”

“Uncle Ron and Uncle James Earl.”

Pam scraped the last of her grits away from the side of the bowl. She raised her head and paused before licking her spoon. “What are you talking about?”

“My uncles. They brought me a new tricycle last night, but I can’t find it.”

Randall smirked. “Keep looking. I bet ’chu find it before we get back from school.”

Before Sister Waters put me out for the day, I peered in every corner of the house and looked under the bed and behind the sofa again and again. I pulled back the grimy little curtain that hung from the kitchen sink and watched as the cockroaches scattered. Outside, I searched under the bushes at the edge of the bare dirt yard and around the outhouse. Every few hours I sucked up my courage and knocked on the door to ask Sister Waters if she had found the tricycle yet. She looked out of her hard little eyes and issued a grunt that I took as a no. I threw myself down on the wooden front steps and tried to figure out why no one admitted seeing my uncles or the tricycle. I reviewed the places I had looked and realized there was still one place I had overlooked: underneath the house.

The pier-and-beam house sat high off the ground and I could see halfway back, but no farther. I crouched and took one step under the house, paused, then took another and another. Just as I reached the darkest part, a ball of daddy longlegs spiders fell on me and ran down my hair and over my face. I screamed and turned to run but smacked my forehead hard against one of the beams and fell onto the moist, mushy ground. Several spiders slipped under the collar and down the bodice of my dress. I yanked at the fabric with one hand and crawled back toward the daylight as fast as I could, yelling as I went. As I emerged from under the house, two plump hands grabbed me under my armpits and shook me in the air.

“What’re you doing under there?”

“The spiders. My tricycle.” I cried and flailed and whipped my head from side to side, trying to get the spiders off me.

Sister Waters put me under her arm and carried me into the living room. “I don’t want to hear no more about no stinking tricycle. And I’ll teach you to lie.”

She threw me on the unmade couch and grabbed her switch from the corner. I danced a mad jig as the switch cut through the skin on my arms and legs. After a few minutes, she threw the switch aside and dragged me into the bathroom. The door slammed. She turned on the water at the sink, pushed my face under the faucet, and jammed a bar of soap into my mouth.

“This is what happens to kids who lie. Are you going to tell the truth from now on? Are you?”

I tried to answer, but my mouth and nose and eyes were full of water and soap and I was gagging. I tried to nod but it was hard because she was holding my face under the water faucet. Finally I went limp, stopped crying, and tried not to gag.
It’ll be over soon. It’ll be over soon.
My brother called my name from the other side of the door.

Sister Waters pulled my face from the sink and pulled the soap from my mouth. “Don’t lie to me about nuthin’ ever again. You hear me? Well, do you?”

I stared straight at her belly and nodded.

“Now tell me there wasn’t no tricycle.”

I started to cry again. “There wasn’t no tricycle.”

“Tell me you lied.”

“But.”

“You want some more?”

I shook my head no. “I lied. I’m sorry.”

“Tell me you lied about your uncles.”

“I lied about my uncles.”

“Were they here?”

“No.”

“What?”

“No, ma’am.”

“No, ma’am what?”

“No, ma’am, my uncles never came.”

“You made up that story about your uncles and that tricycle to get attention, admit it.”

I admitted it, thinking all the while,
But it’s true, it’s true, it’s true.

“Good. Now go on ahead and git your bath before Pam and Randall get back from school. We’re going over to Sister Currie’s for the prayer meetin’. You understand?”

I nodded, but it was years before I understood. The red tricycle had been a dream. I had mistaken a dream for the real thing.

We stayed with Sister Waters for three months, six months, a year, less than a year. I couldn’t really tell you. And then one day it was over. My mother drove up in her old black Ford, the same one we had driven away in when we first started traveling with the tent. We flung ourselves on her and jumped up and down and pulled her in every direction as she packed Gary’s teddy bear and my one-armed doll and Etch A Sketch and all our clothes into a box. We were going to live with our mother in Houston. Pam and Randall would stay behind. They were in school when we left, so we didn’t get to say good-bye. Mama said it was probably easier on everyone that way. She offered no explanation for our time with Sister Waters, and no explanation for why it had ended. I figured that was how life was. Things happened, and then they were over. No hard feelings.

When Gary and I saw Sister Waters at revivals in later years, we ran to her and she gathered us with those big soft arms and brought us to her breasts.

“My kids, my kids,” she said.

We kissed her sweaty neck and told her we loved her, and it was true, in a way. I had not forgotten how she had treated us, but I had set aside those memories in favor of the kind, sweet woman who seemed so happy to see us. Then Pam reminded me one day of all that had happened during our time with The Waters, and I never loved the woman again.

MAMA EXITED THE FREEWAY AND GUIDED THE FORD INTO A LABYRINTH of suburban streets. Gary and I bounced up and down on the front car seat. “We’re here. We’re in Houston.”

My mother was a self-described high-strung woman. Put her in a car with two attention-starved kids for five-hundred-plus miles and those strings were ratcheted about as tight as they could go. Each time she stopped the car in the middle of the street and consulted the directions she had scribbled on the corner of a page she had torn from a phone book, she breathed a little harder. She backed up and turned onto another street that led nowhere.

“Oh, sh-i-t.”

Gary and I stopped bouncing and looked intently up and out the front window. He pointed at an airplane low in the sky without saying anything. I nodded. Mama said she had been here once before, last month, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember how she got to the house; besides, all these streets looked the same. A few more stops and starts and she pulled into a driveway, turned off the engine, and let go a long sigh.

“Finally.”

Our house—we claimed it as ours at once—was a slightly run-down replica of all the other houses in that unfinished but slightly run-down neighborhood of chain-link fences and dead-end streets. It was a rental with dark brown trim and, as my mother pointed out, “a real picture window” that looked out on the field across the street. I flung open the car door and Gary and I ran to the front door.

Mama stood on the stoop and fumbled through her keys, trying one, then another. “This one? No. Maybe this one. That looked like the one, no, must be the other one. I know it’s one of these.”

Gary and I twitched and shuffled until the key clicked and we stumbled through the front door. It was clean and modern with dark paneled walls, avocado-colored drapes, and a breakfast counter. We rushed to the gold sofa and honey-colored end tables, then down the hall to the two bedrooms, one with a double bed, the other with two singles. I stood in the hallway, stretched my legs and arms as far apart as they would go, and touched my fingers to the doorways of both bedrooms, ours and Mama’s.

Gary ran back to the living room and looked out the big window. “It’s got everything, even airplanes.”

I threw myself on the couch. “Where did all this stuff come from? Is it ours?” I wanted it to be ours.

Mama stood in the middle of the living room and looked around. “Belongs to the landlord.” Her voice trailed off the way it did when she had something else to say.

“Where’s the table?” I pointed to the space under the hanging wagon-wheel light.

“We’ll have to get one later. Right now, we have these.” Mama walked over to the pantry in the corner of the kitchen and pulled out metal trays with stands. “TV trays.”

“TV?” Gary looked around.

“She said TV
trays.
”

 

 

There was a peace about our early days in Houston that I found unnerving. I missed the chaos and the closeness of Pam and Randall. They had been a part of our lives for almost as long as I could remember, and there was too much room, literally and figuratively, without them. Mama assured me they were no longer living with Sister Waters; they were with their mother, she said. I hoped so, for their sakes. I never told her about life with Sister Waters, and she never asked. The quiet immobility of our new life made me jumpy. I missed the sound of car wheels moving on blacktop. When the sun went down in Houston, I begged my mother to take us for a drive on the freeway.

“Let’s leave the windows down like we used to. It’s warm enough.”

My request brought long strange looks from Mama, as if she were trying to figure out what kind of kid would ask such a thing. But I think my mother understood my loneliness for our old life, because on some nights, she put us in the car and we drove all over Houston without saying much of anything.

From my bed at night I watched my mother’s fish-belly-white legs lying inert on top of her blue-and-white bedspread, illuminated by the dim light cast from her bedside lamp. Her feet pointed straight up at the ceiling. I couldn’t see the top half of her body, but I knew she was propped up on pillows, reading her Bible. When Gary or I woke in the night, she was by our beds before we could call out. She sat beside my brother on the tub while he soaked his flat feet in warm water and Epsom salt. She massaged away the growing pains in my legs. Every morning I padded into the living room, flopped on the couch, and watched dust mites slide down the shafts of light that streamed through the picture window. Mama made bacon and cinnamon toast while Gary charged in and out with a bath towel for a cape calling, “There’s no need to fear. Underdog is here.”

Gary had become enamored of Underdog while pretending to not watch the neighbor’s TV. I threw him on the floor and tickled him until he begged for mercy.

Mama sounded a warning from the kitchen. “Kids, stop that. Go wash your hands. Breakfast is ready.”

We ran to the bathroom, stuck our hands under the faucet, and flung water drops in the air as we passed the empty spot where the dinner table was supposed to go.

“Are we ever going to get a table?”

“One thing at a time.” My mother set our plates down on the breakfast counter with a sigh.

I bit into my toast and studied her. “You tired?”

“Not exactly.”

Her thin slippers slapped back and forth between the stove and the counter. More toast, more bacon, scrambled eggs, too, please. More, more, more. The beige plastic radio she kept on the counter broadcast one preacher after the next. Garner Ted Armstrong, Carl McIntire, A. A. Allen. The harvest was ripe and the workers were few and they made sure we didn’t forget it.

“Can we turn off the radio? Please?”

We could not. The radio was my mother’s lifeline. Brother Terrell was on twice a day now, and though the programs were exactly the same, Mama listened both times.

After breakfast, Gary and I met the neighbor kids in the field across the street to watch airplanes land and take off at nearby Hobby Airport. We lay in the tall weeds while the jets screamed over us like fierce metallic insects. My stomach dropped to my toes, and I breathed in the acrid odor of jet fuel. I could not believe how lucky we were to live so close to the airport.

As it turned out, it was design, not luck, that determined our location. Mama stopped us one morning on our way out the door to tell us she had a surprise for us; two surprises, really. Brother Terrell was coming to visit and we would go to the airport later that afternoon to pick him up.

We jumped up and down. “The airport! The airport!” It would be the first time my brother and I had been inside an airport.

I stopped and thought for a minute. “But where will they all sleep?”

“Who?” Mama brushed the hair from my eyes.

“Everybody. Pam. Randall. Brother Terrell. Betty Ann. The baby.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”