Lynne Tillman - Haunted Houses

Grace wore black most of the time and when she visited her father he remarked that she looked like a Greek widow. Or as if she were still in mourning. Grace thought her father was crazy, and wondered when he’d find a woman to take care of him the way Ruth did, a widow or a young woman. Wash his clothes, Cook. Clean. Or maybe he’d just hire someone to come in every once in a while but that wasn’t like her father, or her family. Little things of Ruth’s, her knicknacks, sat primly on cupboards and shelves, as if waiting to be animated. Her father seemed reluctant to put them away and hadn’t touched Ruth’s clothes, which should have meant he missed her, but to Grace it was something about habit and the loneliness you’d expect after anyone’s death. She hated the apartment.

Grace’s shared apartment was all right, nondescript. She didn’t bring people home. She liked watching Sarah eat her wheat germ and yogurt. She was so serious, they didn’t talk too much, both avoiding the possibility that they might not like each other. But one night Sarah started screaming, a nightmare about a cat’s eating her kittens alive for which Grace liked Sarah better. You tell me your dream, I’ll tell you mine. And with this bond between them, Grace felt sympathetic to Sarah, who kept losing parts to real ingenues. Except for the time she played a young nun who becomes pregnant by a priest and should have an abortion but kills herself instead. Grace was not sympathetic to Sarah’s character the night she saw it. But she was offended for Sarah the actress when her final speech — before she puts the pills in her mouth — was violated by a man’s unwrapping a piece of gum and crinkling the paper. Sarah’s concentration impressed Grace, who decided to take a few acting classes with her, though Mark worried that she might lose some of her naturalness. Grace said that’d be fine.

As if she’d been coached by another kind of acting teacher, Grace had a fantasy or a dream and she wasn’t sure she’d been asleep. She is talking with Marilyn Monroe in her bedroom. They begin to masturbate with a vibrator, but they’re afraid someone will walk in on them. Grace says to Marilyn, “If I’d been your friend, would you have committed suicide?” Reciting this to Mark, who wanted as usual to find a way to use it, Grace was laughing, but Mark said he might commit suicide anyway, she slapped him a little harder than playfully. Mark said he felt the same way, that he could save her or that he wanted to. “I bet she didn’t even like sex,” Grace said. “And no one will ever know that, the mystery no one mentions.” Mark put his hands in front of his face, very Vincent Price; he said she took that secret to her grave.

Secrets. Ruth had plenty of secrets. Grace’s father alluded to incidents, family fights, fears, as if he were tying to produce a new Ruth, a different Ruth for Grace. Or maybe for himself. Or keep alive the old one. It turned out that Ruth had thrown out all Grace’s dolls and toys, her school papers and compositions. She didn’t want the clutter around.

Surrounded by the few things she hung on to after the move from Providence, some of it contained in a small closet, safe from Sarah’s cleaning up, Grace stayed in bed as long as she could, listening to Patti Smith and trying not to listen to Sarah rehearse for another audition. She painted her toenails red, though no one would necessarily see them. The red on her toes was a little trick to make herself feel better. She’d have to leave soon to go to her new job. Working behind the bar for a change.

It wasn’t so bad, except for the drunks. And now she was forced to hear stories as part of the job, which meant she couldn’t just walk away if someone bored her. She had to smile. Or look sympathetic, depending on the story. Grace walked into the kitchen, where Sarah was eating her yogurt with wheat germ and a banana. At the table Grace and Sarah were a study in opposites, Sarah engulfed by a flannel robe so large as to make her feel even skinnier and Grace in her underpants and T-shirt. Sarah took small spoonfuls of the yogurt into her mouth and rolled her eyes upward, saying, “Isn’t that good?” to Grace as if speaking to her cat, which she didn’t have anymore, while Grace fixed a pot of coffee to get herself going, as if she were a car that just needed a push. The two had recently signed a lease for three years, and Grace said to Mark, “Now it’s legal, I’m as good as married.” But as Grace was leaving, Sarah started complaining about the dishes and the roaches and how Grace hadn’t bought the milk in three days and as Grace didn’t answer, Sarah’s voice got louder and louder, Sarah maybe thinking that Grace hadn’t heard and that’s why she wasn’t responding. Grace hated yelling. When anyone yelled at her she stood taller, looked right through them, and wished they’d drop dead right there and then, but she wouldn’t show her anger, except to a lover or Mark. It was a point of pride, not to react, not to be the way they were, the way Ruth was. If there was a model in mind, it was one in opposition, although Grace wouldn’t admit to thinking that much about it. Her. Every now and then she did wonder whether Ruth had a soul and where it would’ve gone and where it was right now. Did Ruth know she didn’t miss her. Was Ruth hovering near her husband’s bed late at night as he slept, keeping him from a second marriage. Or making invisible appearances in the scenes of Grace’s life: the bars; when she said to Mark that Ruth could go fuck herself; when Grace was about to go home with someone, like that slightly older woman called Liz. Even though Mark said he hated his mother, he was superstitiously phoning her twice a month, and when his mother said things that made him sick, he told her he had to leave for the bookstore where he sold current fiction. He didn’t tell Grace about the phone calls.

“Marilyn just wanted love,” Mark was saying, slurring his words, looking as if he were about to cry. “A fifties girl or maybe a forties girl. Couldn’t survive in the sixties, doesn’t that make you sad?” Mark had discovered that in one of her acting classes with the actor Michael Chekhov she’d played Cordelia to his Lear. “That kills me. Doesn’t it kill you?” “No,” Grace said. “But can’t you see her, the girl who never had a father, at Daddy Lear’s knee?” Mark was pretty worked up, shouting that he hated retrospect because it was unfair to the dead. “Dead is dead,” Grace muttered. You look at Marilyn and she looks like she could make you so happy. So soft. She looks like you could make her happy. But no one could make her happy. Everyone tried. She looks like she can give you everything, that you’d forget with her. But she can’t forget, and she can’t be satisfied.

By now the rest of the bar was caught up in the Marilyn myth, and one woman said that Marilyn had wanted children with Arthur Miller but miscarried and then couldn’t have them. Mark, finding a comrade, walked over to the woman and threw his arm around her. “Is that biology is destiny in reverse?” Everyone agreed that life was hard, it was 4 A.M., bar-closing time, and Grace more or less carried Mark to a taxi, phoned his boyfriend and told him to be on the watch for him again. It was funny. She found it easier to talk about or read about Marilyn than to look at her, even though she could enjoy her films. Sometimes when she looked long enough, pity mixed with a kind of loathing, and a curious numbness came over Grace. She was fascinated.

Fascinated with her own fascination, Grace kept seeing all the horror films she could, especially the goriest ones. She’d even go alone. Poe would have been surprised, she was sure, at how gruesome they were, more disgusting all the time. But they weren’t haunting the way his stories were. She wanted to be left haunted, to walk out feeling haunted. It had to be what couldn’t be seen, wasn’t defined or specific. A bad feeling that someone or something is never going to let you alone. Is never going to go away. If someone reported to Grace that at this place, this corner, in this apartment so and so got killed, she’d walk past that place and wonder if the murderer had returned to the scene of the crime the way they’re supposed to, but more, did the murdered return? Did their souls rest? Or were they always watching, waiting to be avenged from the grave. The undead were vampires, but she was sure that the undead existed in other forms. People who refuse to die.