Doomed (4 page)

My nana’s gaze bounces from me to the skirt of her dress, from me to the sequins and velvet that fall away to reveal her aged legs, and the woman says, “For crying out loud … would you just
look
at the whore’s costume your mama buried me in?” With one shaky, bejeweled hand she reaches to the bedside table and plucks at the pack of Gauloises. Saying, “Come on and give your Nana Minnie a light,” she brings the butt of a cigarette to her mouth, and her slack, wrinkled lips collapse into a kiss shape around the filter tip.

Gentle Tweeter,

Sprawled on the satin coverlet of my bed, Nana crosses her spindly legs at the ankle, affording me an unwelcome glimpse up her slit skirt. Cringing, I ask, “Did we bury you … not wearing underpants?”

“Your stupid mama,” she says by way of an answer. Her gown is sleeveless, and she stares down at a thorny tribal tattoo that encircles her wrist and marches up her arm to her elbow, continuing to her shoulder. The inky black forms barbed letters, like briars, that spell out, “I [heart shape] Camille Spencer … I [heart shape] Camille Spencer …” with a tattooed rose blooming between each iteration. Nana spits on her thumb and rubs at the words on her wrist, saying, “What’s this happy horseshit?” She can’t see it, but the words run from her shoulder to circle her neck like a choker, terminating in a large tattooed rose that covers most of her right cheek. These repetitive declarations were needled into her aged, sunbaked hide postmortem, at my mother’s insistence.

Her head propped on the bed’s pillow, Nana Minnie glances down at the full breasts swelling within the bodice of her dress. “For the love of Pete … What did your mama do to me?” With the gnarled talon of an elderly index finger,
she pokes tentatively at one firm breast, obviously another postmortem renovation.

She’s smoking a ghost cigarette, blowing secondhand smoke everywhere, and with her free hand she pats the bed for me to come sit beside her. Of course I sit. I’m bitter and resentful and angry, not impolite. I merely sit, not talking, certainly not hugging and kissing her. My borrowed fake Coach bag rests on the bed beside my hip, and I dip a hand into it and dig among the turquoise Avon eye shadows, Almond Joys, and condoms. I fish out a strange PDA and start keyboarding my evil thoughts into words … sentences … bitchy blog entries.

If I’m honest here, you’ll decide that I’m simply the most hard-hearted thirteen-year-old ghost ever to walk the face of the Earth, but I am already wishing my beloved long-dead Nana Minnie would get lung cancer and die a second time.

Between drags on her coffin nail my nana asks, “You ain’t seen a spiritualist skulking around, have you? Terrible skin? A big, tall drink a water with his long hair braided down his back like a Chinaman?” She cocks a wrinkled eye at me.

To reassure you, HellHottieBabette, I am taking good care of your handbag.

My Nana Minnie was my mom’s mother, and in her palmier days she was probably a madcap jazz baby bobbing her hair and rouging her knees, dancing the jitterbug on cocaine-dusted speakeasy tables with Charles Lindbergh and roaring through the West Egg night in Stutz Bearcats, wrapped in raccoon coats and gorging on live goldfish, but by the time I knew her, my nana was fairly worn down to dust. Probably raising my mom didn’t help her stay young any.

By the time I was born Nana Minnie was already collecting buttons and nursing her sciatica. And chain-smoking. I remember that when I’d go visit her upstate, she’d brew tea by sticking an old pickle jar full of water in a sunny window. All that Norman Rockwell–ness aside, my nana’s house smelled like vacationing with dirty cavemen, as if she cooked every meal by combining raw ingredients she wrenched from some plot of dirt, and then heated to create food
right inside her house
and never just texted Spago or the Ivy or the Grill Room at the Four Seasons and had them deliver
moules marinières tout de suite
.

After you used my nana’s bathroom, no Somali maids slipped in quietly to sanitize everything and distribute new
pamplemousse
-scented shampoos. It’s no mystery why my mother opted to run away as a teenager, become a world-famous Hollywood star, and marry my billionaire father. There’s only so long you can pretend to be Laura Ingalls Wilder before that barefoot-hillbilly game wears thin. While I was banished to the Elba of tedious upstate, my mother would be off with a UNESCO film crew teaching safer-sex condom techniques to the bushmen of the Kalahari. My father would be orchestrating the hostile takeover of Sony Pictures or cornering the international market on weapons-grade plutonium, and I’d be stuck feigning interest in the rustic mating calls of wild birds.

I’m not a snob. You can’t call me a snob, because I’d long ago forgiven my nana for living on a farm upstate. I’d forgiven her for buying domestic Havarti and for not knowing the difference between sorbet and gelato. To her credit, it was my Nana Minnie who introduced me to the novels of Elinor Glyn and Daphne du Maurier. To score a point in my
favor, I tolerated her obsession with growing her own heirloom tomatoes when Dean & Deluca could’ve FedExed us infinitely better Cherokee Purples. I loved her
that
much. But no matter how judgmental this sounds, I still have not forgiven her for dying.

Picking a fleck of tobacco off her tongue, using the chopstick-long fingernails my mom had her retrofitted with for her funeral, my nana says, “Your ma hired some fella to ghost-hunt you, so stay on your toes.” She adds, “I can tell you this much: He’s like a private dick who finds dead folks, and he’s here in this very hotel!”

Sitting here in my old hotel bedroom, surrounded by my Steiff monkeys and Gund zebras, all I can see is that lit cigarette. That legalized form of suicide. And, yes, in response to the comment posted by HadesBrainiacLeonard, this is distinctly ungenerous of me. Allow me to be frank. I’m not entirely without empathy, but to my mind she left me behind. My nana abandoned me because cigarettes were more important. I loved her, but she loved tar and nicotine more. And today, finding her in my bedroom I resolve not to make the mistake of ever loving her again.

My mom never forgave her for not being Peggy Guggenheim. I never forgave her for smoking and cooking and gardening and dying.

“So,” my Nana Minnie says, “Pumpkinseed, where you been keeping yourself?”

Oh, I tell her, around. I don’t tell her anything about how I died. Nor do I offer a word about being condemned to Hell. My fingers keep typing away on my PDA; my fingertips are screaming everything I can’t bear to say aloud.

“I’ve been there. To Heaven,” says Nana Minnie. She jabs
her cigarette toward the ceiling. “We was both of us saved, me and your Papadaddy Ben. The problem is Heaven adopted one of them strict no-smoking rules.” Henceforth, she says, in the same way office workers must brave the weather and huddle outdoors in order to puff their cancer sticks, my dead nana must descend as a ghost to indulge her vile addiction.

Mostly I just listen and search her face for signs of myself. Child and crone, we create a kind of before-and-after effect; her hooked parrot’s nose is my cute button nose, except irradiated by the ultraviolet rays of a hundred thousand upstate summer days. Her cascade of variously sized chins duplicates my dainty girlish chin, only in triplicate. I steer the conversation to the weather. Sitting on the edge of the hotel bed, where she lies inhaling a cigarette, I ask whether Papadaddy Ben is also skulking around the Rhinelander hotel.

“Sweet pea,” she says, “stop fussing with that pocket calculator and be sociable.” Nana Minnie rolls her ghost head from side to side on the pillow. She blows a jet of smoke at the ceiling and says, “No, your papadaddy ain’t hereabouts. He wanted to be in Heaven to welcome Paris Hilton when she come.”

Please, Dr. Maya, give me the strength to not use an emoticon.

Paris Hilton is going to Heaven?

This I can’t Ctrl+Alt+Fathom.

Sitting here, looking at my nana’s face, it strikes me that I can’t see her thoughts. Thoughts … thinking … the very proof which René Descartes cites for our existence is as equally invisible as ghosts. As our souls. It seems that if
science is going to dismiss the possibility of a soul for lack of physical proof, scientists should also deny that thinking occurs. With this observation I glance at my sturdy, functional wristwatch and observe that only a minute has passed.

My nana catches me with my elbow cocked, my wristwatch twisted for me to look at the time, and she says, “Did you miss your old grandma, kitty-kins?” She exhales another plume of smoke toward the ceiling.

“Yes,” I lie, “I did. I missed you,” but I keep keyboarding to the contrary.

It doesn’t escape me that this is the central conflict of my life: I love and adore all of my family, except when I’m with them. No sooner do I enjoy a reunion with my long-dead Nana Minnie than I yearn to have my chain-smoking, half-blind beloved granny euthanized.

The unhappy reality is that medical euthanasia is at best a onetime solution.

Then it happens: a sound.

From the PH foyer it comes: a laugh.

I ask, “Is that your long-haired paranormal private detective?”

Nana Minnie points her cigarette in the direction of the ruckus, a man’s laugh, and she says, “That’s how come you ought not be here, duckling.” She taps the ghost ash off her ghost cigarette and brings the butt back to her mouth. “Myself, I’m conducting a little covert investigation,” she says, taking another puff. “You think I enjoys laying here surrounded by your lousy kiddy toys? Maddy, honey,” she says, “you done walked into a stakeout.”

Gentle Tweeter,

From elsewhere in the hotel suite comes the sound of a door, the dead bolt snapping open with a heavy clunk. No knock heralds it. No polite announcement of “Housekeeping!” or “Room service!” It’s the door which opens from the hotel hallway into the living room. The latch clicks. The hinges give a little sigh, and muffled footsteps sound against the marble tile of the suite’s foyer.

Sad to say, the dead can still suffer excruciating bouts of self-consciousness. Like you, the predecomposed, the postalive can feel utterly mortified by their own sordid confessions.

Take, for example, the following admission: I spent the fondest hours of my childhood with my ear pressed to the outside of my parents’ bedroom door. On the not-infrequent occasion when sleep eluded me in Athens or Abu Dhabi or Akron, I took great pleasure in eavesdropping on my parents’ carnal panting. Their coital groaning acted upon me as the sweetest lullaby. To my childhood ear those grunts and snorts were assurance of continued familial bliss. My parents’ bestial ejaculations guaranteed that my home wouldn’t crack up as had all those of my wealthy playmates. Not that I had playmates.

Rapping. Tapping. The culture of spiritualists is rife with
ghosts knocking loudly. For souls stranded in a physical world it’s only common courtesy. Plainly put, no one wants to enter a room and witness a predead person pooing or vigorously engaged in performing the Hot Nasty.

Thus, ghosts always knock before they enter a room. Including me. Especially me. In the PH of the Rhinelander hotel, as I follow the sound of my father’s laugh, the unmistakable Thoroughbred stallion
clip-clop
of his shoes, accompanied by the time bomb
tick-tock
of Manolo Blahnik high heels, my pursuit leads to the closed door of my parents’ New York bedroom. The instant before I step through the enameled wood, a voice from within says, “Hurry, my love; we’re desperately behind schedule. We should’ve been screwing hours ago.…”

The voice, my father’s voice, arrests my entry. What’s there to say concerning the renowned Antonio Spencer? The shape of his head is like that of a very handsome boulder. A landmark. Usually he speaks with a phony NPR intonation, but today his voice sounds naked and hairy.

In lieu of dissolving through the door and possibly witnessing a primal scene, I pace the foyer, enervated with guilt.

In the PH foyer, an electrical outlet catches my eye. We’ll revisit this practice in greater detail soon, but for the present please accept the fact that I pour my ghost ectoplasm into the tiny holes of a three-pronged outlet and worm along the copper wires buried within the hotel walls. Picture Charles Darwin navigating the steamy Amazonian river system. Arriving at a junction box, I guess the next wire and follow it to a new outlet. Soon I encounter the prongs of an extension cord. Shimmying along copper, I jump the gap
of an open switch. Tunneling upward, I reach a dead end, lodged within a lightbulb. Not a roomy Thomas Edison incandescent bulb, mind you; this is a convoluted compact fluorescent lightbulb installed in a bedside lamp. Surrounding me, a vellum shade screens my view of the hotel room. I’m twisted inside a dark bulb, exactly the energy-efficient, eco-friendly option that my parents would choose, and the mercury tastes Ctrl+Alt+Foul. Surrounded by the lamp shade, I can only gaze down onto the wood-grain surface of a bedside table. There, like the elements of some torrid modern still life, my cramped view includes a PDA, a room key attached to a brass fob, an alarm clock, and the torn packaging leftover from a not-present condom.

Hark, the comforting slurp-some din of my parents frantically taxing their aged pleasure centers.

Please note, you future dead persons, whenever you shut off a fluorescent bulb or a cathode ray tube and see a residual photon-green glow, that glow is trapped human ectoplasm. Ghosts are forever being snared in lightbulbs.

Even now, coiled within a dark bulb, I indulge my ghost self by covert eavesdropping. Screened as I am, I can’t see them, but I can detect my father’s hoarse endearments. “Oh,” he says, “slow down.” My dad says, “I love what you’re doing, baby, but wait.” He says, “You’re going to send me right over the edge.…”