Carole Maso - Ghost Dance

I hope my mother found comfort in the notion that perhaps she had prolonged her own mother’s life a little, that she provided her with a nurse when she needed one, that the medicine was always there, the tank of oxygen, the wav to the hospital. I hope she believed this and not the darker things which it undeniably suggested about her father. Diapers turned to pinafores. She did it for years.

As my mother grew more and more lovely, more radiant with each day, my grandfather’s plans for her grew, too. He dreamed she might be a beauty queen one day and took her every year as a little girl to the Convention I fall in Atlantic Citv, that cake of a building, to watch those hopeful women strut down the lighted runways: laurels and crowns; banners and bounce; red, w hite, and blue; Miss America.

“Look at Miss Mississippi,” my grandfather would say, nudging her. “Oh, Miss Horida, you’re breaking mv heart,” he shouted. “They’re like racehorses,” he sighed, “thoroughbreds.”

But mv mother, grow n out of pinafores, stepped back, awav from the toothy grin, the larger than life. My grandfather did not understand. Watching her walk onto the beach off the boardwalk, he shouted for her to come back, but it made my mother, only seven years old, walk faster and faster. As she ran in the sand, my grandfather dreamed her into a Rockette. He pictured the long line of women she would be a part of, lifting their legs in beautiful unison.

“That is my daughter,” he said, pointing to Christine who stood where the ocean met the beach. “One day you will see her in the Rockettes.” My mother turned to see him pointing at her and ran faster along the edge of the sea, kicking as she went — a different sort of dancer.

What was wrong with Christine? Silently, Sarkis blamed his wife. “You did not talk to her enough when she was in the womb,” he thought. “That’s why all this fuss about books, the need for so many stories. You were too weak, and it sapped the joy from her heart. You were too sick and it brought her inconsolable sadness.” Nearly immediately Sarkis regretted even thinking this, but it was too late; he could not call the thought back.

Marilyn Monroe, Veronica Lake, Jean Harlow — beautiful Marilyn Monroe, sexy, sweet Marilyn Monroe — Lana Turner, Carroll Baker, Dorothy Lamour in a sarong — these women populated my grandfather’s thoughts. In America there are blonde women. In America everyone has a big car, a Cadillac or a DeSoto or a Lincoln, with fins, with wings. They are the biggest and the fastest and the most beautiful cars that have ever been made, and the blonde women sit next to you in them. The windows are rolled down and music plays on the radio. Everyone smokes cigarettes.

No one worries about cancer yet; no one wears seat belts. They cannot help this feeling: that no matter what they do, how fast they drive, nothing can hurt them. They are indestructible. This is America. Everyone will have a job. There will be plenty of money. They will bounce back when hit. Everything will be fine. When they are lonely or sad, they can call up the blonde women on the telephone and go for a ride.

My mother was not the blonde my grandfather wanted. She tied her hair back, kept her legs covered by pants, rarely smiled or spoke; still, all remarked to Sarkis what a beauty she was. He nodded proudly but received no joy from it anymore; it was not a true pride. She could not be pushed. She would not fulfill the dream.

California in those days was a long way to go, especially for a poor man. A movie filled with the stars of the day must have been playing in my grandfather’s head, maybe hospital scenes spliced between the dance numbers, as he packed the car and coaxed my mother out of the shadows of the sick house.

“There is always sun there, my little songbird. You will never be cold again.”

She was only ten then; by the time they reached Hollywood, she was eleven. She would be a child star, he thought, bigger than Shirley Temple, bigger than Judy Garland.

“Where are the bighorn sheep?” my mother must have demanded, looking out the window of the car. “Where are the carpets of flowers?” she wondered as they walked into MGM for her screen test. Having been powdered and crinolined, perfumed and curled, all at great expense, she looked exactly like a movie star and Grandpa Sarkis swelled with pride. “Where are the bighorn sheep?” she asked as the camera rolled, and she began to cry. Having held it in across the entire United States she could not stop.

“In the old country we drown children like you,” Grandpa Sarkis muttered as they left the studio. “Turk-breath,” he cursed, and my mother cried harder. “Turk-breath,” he said, getting angrier and angrier until he too started to cry; just that morning he had received a telegram saying that his wife had taken another turn for the worse.

During the long, lonely trip back to Paterson, my mother sat crumpled in the back seat, barely moving, refusing to talk.

I imagine that she refused to talk. My mother never told me if this trip to California actually happened. What she did say was that they were poor and the bills were high and her father had once thought she should be a movie star. But it is not enough, Mother, what you have not said. It is not enough — your sadness with no explanation, your life of solitude, your retreats.

This must have been why my mother hated rides in the car so much. This, too, must have been why she would never go to the movies with Father, Fletcher, and me. She could still see the producer, fat forever in her mind, chewing on his cigar, whispering his rotten breath into her ear, “Don’t cry, sweetie, there, there, don’t cry. What the hell is this about sheep?”

I have seen my mother in a series of dime-store photographs as a teenager wearing black horn-rimmed glasses. She must have gone into Woolworth’s for a pair, wishing, I suppose, to appear more studious, to be taken seriously, to change the image of herself her father had given to her, as if it were a gift. I can see her sitting alone in that black photo booth, the velveteen curtain pulled, she positioned in different somber, intelligent poses. She liked the way she looked in glasses. She looked like someone to listen to. She looked like someone who had something to say.

My mother was always sure to tuck her glasses away in a safe spot after school so that her father, who was home by dinnertime, would not see them. But one day when he and his friends were let out early from work because of a power failure, he saw his daughter from the back on the way home from school.

“My daughter,” he told the men, “my American daughter.”

She was caught in a serious discussion with one of her classmates and did not see her father as he pulled up alongside her in his beat-up blue Chevrolet.

“What do you think you’re doing, Christine?” he yelled from the car window as he passed her. The brakes, which did not work well, left the car a good distance in front of her. “Come here,” he said in his old-world voice. His face grew red as she walked to him. “Why are you covering up those beautiful eyes?” his small black eyes said to her. “It’s unheard of. It’s not right what you’re doing.”

She stepped back, refusing to get into the car. She recalls that day perfectly: her friend, her father’s angry face, the people peering out from the dark car.

“What do you think you’re doing?” He could see her eyes, even behind the glasses, turning violet. Her stare was incandescent.

“It’s to keep men away,” she whispered, “men like your friends, men like you.”

“Four weeks,” he shouted to her as she ran down the street. This, she knew, meant no school, no friends, nothing but the sad, dark house as punishment. It did not matter. Her father could not hurt her anymore. She had said it. “Words,” she thought, shaking uncontrollably, “words.”