She's Not There (4 page)

Gammie, Hilda, and Aunt Nora were out in the living room, having this discussion:

GAMMIE: Hilda, do you know where you'd GET
(inhale, pause, exhale)
if you went—directly
—
EAST
—
from Surf City?

MRS. WATSON: Whoop? Whoop? Whoop?

GAMMIE: EAST!

AUNT NORA: I think we should leave. I think we're in danger!

GAMMIE: If you went EAST from Surf City, Hilda! Where do you think you'd get?

MRS. WATSON: Hm. Whoop? Mm. England? Whoop? Is it England you'd get to?

GAMMIE: SPAIN!

MRS. WATSON: Oh, no, I don't think it would be—

GAMMIE: SPAIN!

MRS. WATSON: Portugal? Perhaps Portugal? Whoop?

GAMMIE: SPAIN! That is where you would wind up. SPAIN!

I came out of my room and stood by the card table.

Aunt Nora said, “I think we should leave. I'm afraid!”

Gammie looked at her and rolled her eyes. “Don't listen to her, Jimmy. She's just a chicken. A SCARED CHICKEN! Cluck cluck cluck.”

“I think we should leave, too,” I said.

“Oh, nonsense.”

“I do,” I said.

“If you think I'm driving back to Philadelphia in this pouring—”

Aunt Nora took a look at me. She saw something.

“I'll drive,” she said.

“Oh, you will not,” Gammie said. “Don't be an imbecile.”

“Whoop?” said Hilda.

“We're going to pack up and head home,” Aunt Nora shouted at Mrs. Watson. Mrs. Watson adjusted her hearing aids. They squelched. “There's a hurricane.”

Mrs. Watson nodded. “Entirely sensible,” she said.

“You all go,” said Gammie. “I'm staying here.”

“We're all
going
,” said Aunt Nora. “Either you go, or you die,” she said. For a long moment, Aunt Nora and Gammie stared at each other.

“Jimmy,” Gammie said at last. “Go get the vodka.”

Years later, Gammie announced that when she died, she wanted to be a cadaver. She donated her body to Jefferson Medical School. “When you're dead, you're dead,” she explained. She talked her friend Hilda into being a cadaver, too. It was something they did together. At the time, I was horrified by this, by the idea of my grandmother's corpse being the private concern of a first-year medical student in Philadelphia, opening her up and holding her liver and her heart in his hands. Did he know, as he examined her innards, that this had been someone's Gammie, someone who once danced on top of pianos, whose first husband nicknamed her “Stardust”?

Now I'm less bothered by all this, though. Maybe she's right, when you're dead, you're dead. I don't know.

I looked out the back of Gammie's Dodge Seneca as Aunt Nora drove us into the storm. The boardwalk was visible as a dark shadow against the threatening sea.

“You're Gammie's little apple,” Gammie said from the seat next to me, and pinched my cheek. The windshield wipers slapped against the storm. I looked at my grandmother's earrings and at Mrs. Watson's wedding ring. Thirty-three years later, after I became a woman, my mother gave me Mrs. Watson's ring. Hilda and Gammie had been dead for thirteen years at that point. The ring has two big diamonds and eight little ones.

“Whoop? Whoop? Whoop?”

Aunt Nora looked at me in her rearview mirror. “It's all right, Jimmy,” she said. “We're going to be safe now.”

After the Bath (Winter 1974)

I had high hopes. My parents and sister had gone out. That left me alone in the place we called the Coffin House, built by Lemuel Coffin in 1890. It was just a few days before Christmas, and the war was over. This girl named Onion was coming over while my parents were gone. There were rumors about her.

We'd been living in the Coffin House only for a couple of years now, and it still didn't quite feel like home. The people who had lived in the house before us, the Hunts, had left quite a mark on the place. On the third floor, next to my room, there was one room that was kept locked. The ceiling was collapsing in the locked room. My parents used it as a storeroom. At night I'd lie in bed, waiting to hear footsteps on the other side of the wall, a door opening softly.

My parents took down the wallpaper in their bedroom and found, beneath the paper, old poems written in pencil on the plaster. One of them was a woman's lament for a man who had died. She'd signed her name: Mariah Coffin, 1912.

There were other stories about the Coffin mansion. Mrs. DePalma, who lived across the street, claimed that the people who lived in the house before the Hunts had kept a sick aunt in a back bedroom. When she was little, Mrs. DePalma said, you could hear the woman's fingernails scratching on the door at the top of the back stairs as she attempted to claw her way out. I'd been in that back bedroom, which didn't have any heat, and there were indeed scratch marks on the door.

Sometimes I'd go into the empty room next to mine and I'd put on some old dresses that hung in garment bags there. They smelled like mothballs. I'd stand around thinking,
This is stupid, why am I doing this?
and then think,
Because I can't not.
Then I'd take the dresses off and go back to my room and think,
You're an idiot. Promise you'll
never do that again.
Then I'd go back into the storeroom, try on a different one, and think,
Idiot.
I kept busy for hours that way—had, in fact, been keeping busy that way for years now. But no one knew.

I'd had a car accident earlier that fall, on the first day of eleventh grade. I was showing my friend Bunting how to drive a stick, which he actually mastered relatively quickly. Unfortunately, a few miles down College Avenue in Haverford the car started fishtailing wildly, and within seconds it swung off the road, smashed into a fire hydrant, flipped over, soared off a small cliff, and disappeared into a ravine.

Other than that, school was going pretty well. I was in Mr. Prescott's Nineteenth-Century Poetry class, as well as one Mr. Meehan was teaching entitled The Individual Versus Society.

Bunting and I got thrown out of the wreck. I flew through the air. As I did, I wondered,
Okay, I'm about to find out if there is life after
death—is there? Is there?
There was a crash and a gong and many layered curtains that I passed through on my way out, each one finer and more delicate than the one before it.

Suddenly I saw a dark blue form in the middle of a light blue field, and light was shining all around. A deep voice said,
Son? Are you
all right, son?

And my first thought was, Cool! There
is
a God! Excellent!

What this was, though, was a cop with a blue hat bending over me as I lay in the middle of the road on my back. I was looking up into the blue sky. My glasses had flown off in the collision, which was why everything was soft and blurry.

Bunting was okay. He was standing next to a fire hydrant, which was erupting like the fountain in Logan Circle. My ear was falling off. “You're going to the hospital,” the cop announced happily, as if I were going to the circus.

Before I got into the ambulance, I insisted on climbing back down into the ravine to get my books out of the back of the Volkswagen. Coffin and Roleof's The Major Poets was on the floor of the backseat. There was a little blood on the cover. Mr. Prescott was having us read “O Rose, Thou Art Sick!” for the next day.

I'd arrived at early adolescence having inherited my mother's buoyant optimism. In spite of the nearly constant sense that I was the wrong person, I was filled with a simultaneous hopefulness and cheer that most people found annoying. My mother had been levitated her whole life by a corklike faith in the goodness of people, by the belief that things would somehow “work themselves out.”

This legacy of cheerful wit became the thing that sustained me and also, at times, burdened me. In spite of a sense of ever-present exasperation with my own body, I was rarely depressed and reacted to my awful life with joy, with humor, and with light. (In the nineties, when various critics reviewed some of my early novels, they would question how it was possible that the characters in these books could react to the conflicts in their lives with comedy. I never understood this comment. What else should they use to express their sorrow? Tears?)

Wearing my sister's and mother's clothes wasn't exactly satisfying, though. For one thing, it was creepy, sneaking around. Even
I
knew it was creepy. For another, the thing that I felt wasn't satisfied by clothes. Dressing up was a start; it enabled me to use the only external cues I had to mirror how I felt inside. Yet it was the thing inside that I wanted to express. I was filled with a yearning that could not be quelled by rayon.

Still, the nights when I was alone in the Coffin House,“being female,” were always a great relief for me. For a few short hours, I felt as if I didn't have to put on a show, constantly imitating the person I would be if I'd actually wound up well-adjusted.

It was nearly Christmas. Light snow was falling, dusting the rhododendrons and azaleas that lined the driveway. A few minutes after my parents and sister were gone, I put on a peasant skirt and a paisley top. The sad thing was how normal I looked in this. As a boy I looked thin and startled. As a girl I just looked like a hippie.

After a while, I got back into my boy clothes and went downstairs into the kitchen. I saw my distorted reflection in the toaster. I had shoulder-length blond hair and glasses that were shaped like television tubes. I checked the clock. Ten of eight. Onion wasn't expected till late, if she came at all.

The encounter with Onion had been arranged by a guy I knew in my rock band, which was called the Comfortable Chair. I played a Vox Continental, a classic draw-bar organ with the black keys white and the white keys black and the whole business supported by two chrome Z-shaped legs. The Comfortable Chair—which was a name the guitarist had stolen off a television show—didn't actually play anywhere other than people's basements. But it was great fun being in a band, making all that noise. We played songs like “Turn on Your Lovelight,”“Hard to Handle,” and, occasionally, “Stairway to Heaven,” if the extremely cool flute player deigned to join us.

Onion hung out with the band. She went to one of the local public schools, unlike most of the girls I knew, who went to Shipley or Baldwin or Agnes Irwin—the right-wing finishing schools of the Main Line. I was coached, briefly, for my upcoming encounter by my worldly friend Zero, who went to the same private school I did, the all-male Haverford School. Zero and I had been best friends since the seventh grade, when we were both sent to summer school. Each of us had learned the “new math” at our public schools, and now that we were going to Haverford we had to unlearn this and master the old math. My problem, of course, was that I didn't
like
math. The Haverford School decided to solve this problem by making us do five hundred math problems each day—literally,
five hundred.
We started at eight in the morning and kept going until five. I guess their thinking was,
This'll
make 'em like math! They called it
“immersion learning.”

Another thing I'd learned at the Haverford School was how to tie a hangman's noose. It was fun; we all loved doing it. The window shades that fell from the blinds were all tied in hangman's nooses, dozens of them across the huge study hall. The master, a sour man named Mr. Deacon, had to come around and untie them all, one by one.

It was like going to high school in a Charles Dickens novel. Haverford's Upper School was a decaying haunted house, with desks from the 1930s and a headmaster from some era even earlier than that. In the corner of each of our desks was a hole for an inkwell. My classmates in the class of 1976 included Mike Mayock, who later played for the New York Giants, and John DiIulio, who went on to direct George W. Bush's Faith-Based Initiative. And then there was Zero, and me, and another guy we just called “Doober.”

I didn't know a lot about Onion. She was very blond, and she was missing one finger, the pinkie on her left hand. And she did boys. She had boys the way some people had a paper route.

I got out a tall glass and filled it with ice and Hi-C orange punch. Then I poured in about half a cup of Virginia Gentlemen, which was my father's brand of bourbon. I mixed this around with a swizzle stick my parents had got at some hotel. I raised the glass to my lips and tasted the drink. It was sweet.

The ice cubes clinked in the glass as I carried my drink through the house. Moments later I was in the rec room, which had been decorated by the Hunts in a kind of Wild West motif. It had wagon wheel chandeliers and zebra-striped paneling and red curtains and no heat. I turned on NBC, and for a moment I imagined myself watching the whole Friday night lineup with Onion:
Sanford & Son
,
Chico
& the Man, The Rockford Files, Police Woman. I took a sip of the Hi-C and whiskey, shivered, and turned off the set. This wasn't the way I imagined myself.

The way I figured, I'd get Onion a drink, maybe one of these Hi-C things I was having, then we'd sit in my room upstairs and talk. I'd try to show her I was not like the other guys she knew.

Once I had sex I wouldn't keep wanting to be someone else all the time; at least that was my newest theory. I hadn't given up on
Love
shall cure you,
either. I still believed that.

I walked up the creaking stairs to the beat-up library. Coals from a fire my father had lit were still glowing in the fireplace. Large sheets of stained wallpaper hung down from the ceiling where a pipe had burst. I got out a book my mother owned called
Art Masterpieces of
the World,
looked at some of the great paintings.
Starry Night. Sunday
Afternoon at the Island of La Grande Jatte. Nude Descending a Staircase.
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.
There was this one called
The Turkish
Bath
that I liked. Lots of nude women, sitting around. They all looked very clean.

A car pulled in the driveway and sat there idling for a few moments, then drove off. I wasn't surprised. Mrs. DePalma had told us that the Hunts had had an enormous Christmas party every year since 1958. They were the kind of people who went nuts in December, covering the house from roof to shrub with strings of lights. The Friday before Christmas they always had a wild black-tie party. Every year since we'd moved in (in 1972), strangers had showed up at our door this Friday, sometimes in costume, hoping to attend a party given by people who no longer lived there.

I went back out to the living room. A portrait of my grandfather James Owen Boylan hung over the fireplace. I'm named after him, or at least I was then. I was always a little afraid of that painting and frequently suspected that the eyes followed me around. Even now, twenty-five years later, I often see my grandfather's portrait in my dreams, grinning at me.

I lay down on the couch. You weren't supposed to sit on the furniture in the living room, which was kind of odd considering the fact that the ceiling was collapsing. I got out my parents' wedding album and looked for a while at the pictures. It was April 1956, and my grandmother was still with her third husband. My uncle Sean looked pretty sane, too, so you knew it was a while back.

The phone rang. I picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Hello? Is this Jim Boylan?”

“Yes, this is me,” I said. I didn't recognize the voice. “Who's this?”

“It is?” the voice said. There were other voices in the background, laughing. “It's Boylan?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You're a fag, man.”

He hung up.

I stood there holding the phone. Somebody somewhere was having a big old time.

I put the phone back in the cradle, picked up my orange Hi-C and bourbon. It wasn't the kind of phone call you wanted to get, actually.

Grampa looked at me from the wall.
That kid on the phone
, Grampa said.
He's right.

I walked across the room and sat at the piano. I put the glass on the windowsill behind me.

“Good evening, everyone,” I said. “It's great to be back here in Philadelphia.”

I blew into a microphone that wasn't there. “Check, check,” I said. “One two. One two. Check.”

I looked out into the audience. “Well, all right,” I said. “I said, yeah.”

The audience said,
Yeah.

Then I started playing “Mrs. Robinson” in the key of G. I did a long crazy jam before I went into the main riff. When the audience recognized what tune I was playing, they went nuts. People in the front row were standing on their chairs.

We'd like to know a little bit about you for our files. . . .
Thank you. Thank you very much.

There was a screeching of tires in the front driveway, a car engine revving, then falling silent. Footsteps came up the stone stairs. The doorbell rang. A moment after that, the knocker that no one used was swinging.

I got up and opened the door. A girl with nine fingers was standing there.

“You're Boylan?” she said. “The piano player?”