A Ghost Story Is Born

Things know what they want. I gave away an evening gown and jacket, covered in blue and white sequins. I was relieved when it was gone though it had not been easy to give up. My mother had kept it for forty years. I remembered how it held her body in its weight and beauty. The dress was more alive than my mother's smile. It not only held her tight but also seemed to live for her, giving up its shine so that she with the frozen smile could come alive and sparkle as if happy. Hanging in the wardrobe box next to other boxes in my garage, the dress felt warm when I removed it. I hesitated, thinking I should keep it as a commemoration of my mother. I alternated between fear of giving my mother something to inhabit and concern that in giving it away I was discarding her. After the Goodwill truck left—boxes filled with furs, suits, and gowns including this, the most beautiful one—I walked back to the garage. There on the floor lay a small sequined belt. I picked it up and held my mother's tight little waist in my hand.

* * *

For as long as i can remember my mother wanted me to come home. Whether she was in Atlanta, Georgia, where I was born and raised; or later, after losing her home, and distracted in an apartment on an orthodox block in Brooklyn, New York—with men in black hats, a yeshiva next door, and her landlady who had survived the holocaust— she kept asking me when I was coming home. This morning, two months after her death, I realize that my home here in Nashville has changed utterly. The kitchen has become a place where the oven burns my knuckles and knives cut my fingers, as it turns into the surround where I help to commemorate the woman who never completed one of her baking stints without blisters and blood.

It is not easy to tell a ghost story that is not meant to frighten. How can I render this ghost who alive so loved me that she took the life out of me? Or summon this woman who dead has decided to give herself to me? Perhaps this is not yet a ghost story but instead the subdued prodding of an unquiet spirit who wants me to remember her skin, who wants me to be disciplined enough to know each day how strongly her hand held mine, pulling me into her secrets, teaching me to know that my home would soon be her own.

After leaving Haiti at the age of thirteen, never again did my mother know beauty or hope. Everything after the mountains, the lizards, the dirt, the drums in the night, and the mangoes was never right. Things were alive in Haiti, the stones that killed the lizards, the fires that burned Jews in effigy, the gourds that held the gods. Everything that followed her departure and her marriage at seventeen to my father who was thirty-four years old seemed useless or dead. My mother tried hard to make things live. She accumulated them, handled them, sought them and kept them, thinking that if she treasured them enough she might create vitality where there was none.

Was there something in her manner of cherishing, the piling up of things that made her feel more alive? Throughout my mother's life the press of objects meant everything to her. They piled up in her drawers. Lingerie became hiding places for jewels. Coat pockets held gold and diamonds, as well as pieces of licorice or pistachio nuts. She never threw anything away. Eyeliner, mascara, and all kinds of rouge and powder accumulated over the years, spreading into drawers that had been reserved for photos, charge cards, and address books. I had no idea how vital dead matter could be until the residue of my mother's life arrived in Nashville from Brooklyn: not only the oil-splattered recipe books, golf trophies and bunches of keys, but also paintings, silver, crystal, furs, clothes and the boxes...