She lived in a white clapboard house, fashionably too large for herself, her husband, her one child and the Pekinese. On April weekends, she and the other suburban ladies squatted on the moist black soil, inserting pale shoots into carefully dug holes. On Saturdays in May, she shut the windows against the flurry of pollen and acrid smelling grass strips tossed airward by a hundred simultaneoulsy groaning mowers. In June, she invited the office staff for a barbecue in the back patio, urged hubby to keep the grille lit while she dutifully set out the citronella candles and complained about the mosquitos. On weekdays, she drove to her cubicle at Morgan Stanley, efficiently booted the computer to track market activity, explained to clients what annuities and bonds were, and promoted stock sales which would earn her a large commission.
"We have a good life,"her husband announced as a CNN newscaster mumbled about riots in a country with an unpronouncable name in an unknown continent.
"Yes," Mary Ellen replied. "A kid who behaves, a good address."
"And enough money to put in that swimming pool you've always wanted."
Mary Ellen nodded as she flipped through another client profile, printed on glossy paper with gains in green, losses in red, and a multicolored pie chart at the end showing what percent of assets were allocated to stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and a money market cash account. The family only needed a white picket fence, austerely black shutters framing the colonial windows and membership in a riding club where little Jenny could take lessons preparing her for the rigors of a foxhunt.
When cowarkers or neighbors asked Mary Ellen about her past, she recited her credentials - an MBA from the Wharton school, 5 years hustling at the New York stock exchange before moving to a Manhattan branch of AG Edwards and then to Connecticut as a district vice president at Morgan Stanley. When they asked for more personal details, she mentioned that she'd partied some and studied some in college, that her deceased parents were both tall brunettes and that her relatives lived too far away for visiting. She couldn't say more; she couldn't remember what they wanted to know.
Mary Ellen recalled every classroom photographically. The slanted, randomly nicked, pale maple desktops aligned in military columns in the first grade room, the white alphabet marching in bold print across a dark green paper strip atop the blackboard, the teacher's cluttered tan desk at front left, at far right the long corkboard on which the teacher tacked sunflowers and bunnies cut from faded contruction paper. Her sixth grade seat at a cold steel and vinyl desk, next to the clanking radiator and chipped pale green window sill, from which she'd watch shiny chestnuts fall and litter the asphalt playground. The cracked concrete floors and anemic plaster walls in the corridors of junior high, where a dark oak door moaned open to reveal a semicircle of desks and windows looking out on the gymn's long brick exterior. She could draw a blueprint of very school and every home she'd visited, describe how the front was built from fieldstone but the back from concrete, recall that the western roof lay flat while the eastern, higher roof pitched at a 45 degree angle. But she couldn't describe what interested others most. The faces of those teachers, students and parents had been smeared with white-out fluid. When she remarked that "Larry was overweight with blond curls", she read from a mental script as though she were reading a description in a novel; she didn't visualize anything, couldn't remember what she hadn't translated into prose years ago.
"I think you should attend the services", her husband asserted one night, just after a call informed them that Mary Ellen's last uncle had died. "I know you didn't see him very often, but they'll expect someone from that side of the family to be there"
Mary Ellen sighed. When her own parents died, there was no funeral; a CPA and an engineer, neither believed in spending thousands on a teak coffin and formulaic homilies for a rotting corpse. Mary Ellen had signed papers authorizing transfer of the bodies to a crematorium and had the ashes mailed to her. She hadn't flown back to the homestead or requested the family albums; she wasn't sentimental. A realtor sold the house and the photographs disappeared.
"No one there will know me and I won't recognize any of them," she protested.
"Well, it's the principle of the thing. And of course you'll know some of them. They'll be older, more wrinkly, but the essentials'll be the same. Same shape noses, same color eyes, same personalities. You'll just need a minute to orient yourself, see past the crow's feet. Not really so hard."
Mary Ellen shrugged and began packing for the journey. She could still smell the tangy aroma of her mother's cooking, see the coils of steam rise from the simmering tomato sauce, feel the moist heat and golden glow envelope her; her eyes could still feel their way across the hexagonal terra cotta tiles, up the gleaming cherry cabinets to a rectangle of indigo sky framed by hand stitched calico curtains. She could smell the chalky mint of the toothpaste that solidified in dropped nuggets and streaks inside the upper drawer of the bathroom vanity, the choking dustiness of face powder, the musty mother scent that oozed from one closet and the acidic father scent that lingered in the other. She could see the orange Chevy, the contorted crossing of her own legs under the dashboard, the hand in dark brown kidskin as it clutched the steering wheel. She saw again the wide magogany bed covered with a tasseled white spread and the stout legged dark bureau topped by a looming mirror in her grandmother's bedroom, the slats of vertical veneer paneling and shaky iron railing that flanked the carpeted staircase in her uncle's house. She'd always recognized her parents and grandparents and uncle on sight, but she could visualize only featureless forms, vaguely shaped like humans. The verbal catalogue in her mind told her that the dead uncle had been short, fat with a pot belly, and bald, but she visualized none of this. Her's was a past without faces.
At the service and burial, she didn't recognize anyone and no one recognized her.
Afterwards, she joined the others for refreshments at the widow's house. The tiny first floor, crowded with men and women in black, smelled luxuriently of cinnamon, fudge and pecan from the pies and casseroles which neighbors had already arranged on the dining room table. Mary Ellen thought of such feasts as festivities of forgetting.
"Well, at least old Dick had a good life, healthy until the Big One"
"If I had a choice, that's the way I'd go. Happily flicking the remote in bed one minute and then, pow, one knock down punch to the chest that does it all."
"Yeah, but I think his mind might have been going a little at the end. To hear Flo tell it, he was starting to see ghosts. Right Flo?"
Aunt Florence fumbled for a knife and shakily cut the apple pie. "Oh, I think they were more like bad dreams. He was on medication, had a little heart attack five years ago, and the pills sometimes messed up his sleep. He'd be half awake and half alseep, with part of a dream still in his mind."
"Yeah, but didn't he always see the same ghost? A teenage girl?"
"You mean this place is haunted?," a wiry young man with lank dark hair quipped, then gulped a handful of macaroons. "Maybe old Dick'll haunt us here too, right while we eat."
"Shut up, Hank, have some respect," an older man growled. "He hasn't been dead long enough to haunt anyone; you don't know a thing about ghosts. So let Florence finish what she was saying."
"Well, it was probably just a recurring dream."
Florence's hands trembled as she handed servings of pie to her guests. "It was a teenage girl with long straight dark hair, always sitting on the end of that couch reading a novel. He said she looked the way you did, Mary Ellen, around the time you graduated high school. But he was thinking a lot about you towards the end. The last of the Hoffman line, wanted to know what happened to you"
"It's Rushmore now," Mary Ellen reported. "Married, one kid".
"Your mother was never very good at keeping in touch," Florence continued. "Ran off to Florida and just sent us Christmas cards with fifty bucks and a note that all was fine. And we didn't hear from you after you ran off to college; Dick was always curious about what happened."
"I'm a vice president at Morgan Stanley."
"A stockbroker, who'd have thought?" Florence shook her head. "We had you pegged as writing a novel or teaching poetry at a college".
"A novel?" Mary Ellen frowned. "Finance is a marketable skill. Mother may have spouted all that nonsense about finding your bliss and realizing your potential when she was in public, but at home she always made sure I knew how important it was to be practical; the world wasn't going to give me handouts so I had to have a salale skill. Wasn't smart in engineering, so I went the MBA route." Mary Ellen couldn't hear her mother's voice droning such advice, couldn't visualize a place where mother had imparted this wisdom. But a paragraph from the verbal script in her head told her that such advice came to her often in adolescence; sometimes, however, she wondered if she'd revised that script during the intervening years, fleshing it out with fantasies and speculations that later seemed like memories.
"Yes, when you got all those writing prizes -"
"Prizes?" Mary Ellen frowned, perplexed. "Oh....prizes. Well, they weren't much, went to any kid who could write coherently. They just meant that I'd paid attention in grammar class."
"Maybe," Florence mumbled into the apple pie.
---------
The mourners licked crumbs of pecan pie from their lips, commented that nothing beat home-brewed cappuccino, and remarked that Florence might be lonely without her husband; others commented that she was well provided for, with a large life insurance policy and dividends, then discussed the best techniques for ice fishing. When Florence passed with a tray of cookies, they intoned the litany "We're so sorry for your loss". Mary Ellen wandered to the bookshelves, lifting framed photos of Uncle Dick and Aunt Flo at various ages, tring to memorize the sepia and pink faces that she could never visualize. Glancing to her left, she noticed another solitary figure in the crowd, a slender girl sitting forward on the couch, with long dark hair hiding her face and spreading over her sprawled fingers; in her, through her, the crimson of the dusk lit window behind her glowed.
Mary Ellen glanced again, stared, then slowly approached. The girl rose, dropping a dog-eared novel on the cushions; through her, Mary Ellen traced the dark rectangle of a landscape hanging above the sofa. The girl stroked her chin, then clutched it with her hand, as Mary Ellen had always done when feeling hesitant.
Mary Ellen couldn't visualize her own teenaged face but she remembered the dress, a white smock with flowers embroidered around the low circular neckline, puffed short sleeves and skirt falling in ripples of loose cotton. She remembered the gaudy gold high school ring, studded with red glass, that she'd lost in the freshman laundery; the familiar thick silver, turquoise studded, bracelet gleamed. The girl spread out her arms and beckoned. Mary Ellen glanced at the mourners and approached; no one was looking at her or the girl.
"You've returned, it's about time," the girl murmered. "You're home. Come home fully."
Mary Ellen raised her eyebrows quizzically, glanced around, and moved closer.
"Touch me," the girl whispered. "Touch my finger, my hand".
Mary Ellen shook her head, scowling, but extended her hand. A warm electric tingle pulsed up her arm when her finger touched the girl's; an image of Uncle Dick as he'd looked years before, balding with three brown tufts arcing from his shiny forehead flickered in her mind. Then a fleeting image of her mother, boxy granite chin under a sliver-thin mouth and stubby nose.
"I'm beginning to see," Mary Ellen gasped, as she eased into the girl's open arms. Larry, the chubby blond boy who sat in front of her in grade school, lisped in a falsetto and wore patched flannel shirts discarded by his father. The seventh grade French teacher stood before her, arms crossed on chest, frowns gouging her brow under poodle curls dyed orange. The tenth grade math teacher paced back and forth, rapping the board with her piece of chalk and squawking until Mary Ellen's ears rang. "I'm seeing it all, again"
"You're home," the gentle young voice behind her intoned.
Aunt Florence glanced towards the sofa. Young arms embraced Mary Ellen, then clasped her tightly. As Mary Ellen fell backwards, into the arms and towards the cushions, her figure shimmered; the embracing arms pulsed with light, then faded, becoming scarcely visible outlines across Mary Ellen's chest, then shadows indistinguishable from other shadows in the room.
"I've been listening to Old Dick's ghost stories too long," Aunt Florence told herself. "It's just these old eyes, I need a new prescription. And the reflections off that window; reflections can look like anything, play tricks on your eyes".
Mary Ellen leaned forward on the couch, calling forth the images of those faces; warts and wrinkles and squinting eyes emerged from the white-out. She heard gruff baritones and nasal squeaks recounting the old stories, saw parched flaking lips and pink glossed lips and lips thin as slivers. Even this dim room full of mourners vibrated with new sights and sounds. Dried meringe flecked sagging jowls; tufts of gristle poked out between yellowed teeth. Coke fizzed impatiently in styrofoam cups, almond nuggets jutted from fissured cookies, naked pits huddled on a porceline plate beside arcing, wide-pored orange skins.
A Yeat's poem sang in her mind; she'd forgotten it for years.
"We have a good life, my husband and I," she recited to herself, "All we need is the picket fence"
"I'm a Morgan Stanley vice president,"she thought. "I push papers, my husband pushes papers. When I die, my gravestone will read 'She was born, she pushed papers, she bred, she died'."
"One could write a whole novel about Wall Street mania," she thought, "About the decades of virtual reality that we call life... When she's old and in death's bed, of her it will be said...what?, that she lived a good and happy life devoted to evening TV and selling symbols that no one could touch or taste? That she watched every sit com and plotted graphs; that she lay in death's bed, recalled the TV shows and called this her life? ....Maybe I can find some other way of juggling the childcare, encourage hubby to join those sports clubs, get time to write that way"
Write? Mary Ellen sighed; she was a sensible woman, a successful broker. That night, she'd have to fly home; wasn't it time to put away childish thoughts?
