Ghost Story

You know how it is when you wake up sleepy and you can’t be sure if you’re still in a dream? Was it a dream or reality? Did my eye misguide me? I was still shaking the last strands of somnolence from my hair as I looked around for my mother. My mother? She’s 4-foot-10, a real Tokyo Japanese lady who weighed about 95 pounds. In my dream I hadn’t been in cozy quaint antiquated Frazier Park. The fuzziness was something from my teenage years: she’d been seeing me off at the train station. Grand Old Union Station, Amtrak’s flagship station in the Midwest and not Frazier Park. But it felt so real.

I could smell the cheeseburger she’d bought me for lunch, sense the weight of the lunch sack sitting on my lap as I stared out the train’s window. She was waving to me from the dusty platform. But that’s not right. I’m here now. Mom’s been dead for over 35 years.

So, who was in the kitchen? I lay in bed, slightly more awake, listening to the soft sounds of puttering in the other room. There was no doubt about it. Someone was walking barefoot across the tile floor, opening cupboards and setting down dishes, flatware, cups. I lay so still I heard my own breathing, slow, stealthy, steady. Pulling back the covers I realized I hadn’t worn pajamas the night before, so I grabbed a silky beige robe from the nightstand. Too impatient, too curious, I didn’t put it on correctly; I just clutched the cloth to my chest and stood up.

“Mom?” I asked tentatively. I wasn’t actually afraid because if it was my mom, she’s a pretty small person. Even smaller than my 5’4”, 160-pound self. And besides that, wasn’t she “Mom,” after all? The person who used to make school lunches that included jelly and cream cheese sandwiches? The person who bought Hostess cupcakes? And said things like “It doesn’t matter,” just when you most wanted to hear that something didn’t matter?

I wasn’t scared, I was just curious as to how a person who has been gone more than 35 years and 6 months and 11 days figures out how to get back into my locked apartment without even scaring the cat. But then, animals always liked my mother, accepting her as one of their own. My mother’s best friend, Carolyn, had a dog the size of a small pony: a Giant Schnauzer that did not strike me as a very friendly looking beast. He may have weighed over twice my mom’s weight, and yet didn’t that monster curl up and die just to be next to my mother? Always fighting to sit at her feet, sniff out her shoes, and rigidly come to a protective stance if anyone else approached her? What was that all about? The big black Clifford had been Carolyn’s dog. But I digress.

As I stepped into the hallway, I walked past the second bedroom. Seated on the guest bed with her face toward the wall was my mother. Sitting in an unlit room, which wasn’t too dark because yes, the sun had come up and was wafting through the Southeast window, making rainbow glints on her jet-black hair. That bothered me because I had to start dying my hair at the ripe old age of 40, but far into her 50th year my mom had been plucking out single white hairs while the rest of her hair remained a strong natural black. Like the Tales of Ise, I began to wonder had she come to me or had I come to her? Was I still in a dream? Or was it real?

Long ago it was more acceptable for the ghost world to overlap with our world, completely matter of fact. When I was a child (and she was not a child, my mother had been 32 when she told me this) my mother said a ghost lived in the same little town as we did back in Canada. Our neighbor, my mother explained, lived with a grumpy old man ghost. Every day this apparition would appear, in an old rocking chair, sitting in her kitchen, smoking.

One day the neighbor roared at him in exasperation. “Why don’t you ever help me?” She demanded. “Why do I have to gather the wood myself from the basement and start the fire in the wood stove while you sit there doing nothing?”

Without a word, my mother said, the man complied. From that day on he lit the kindling before the neighbor awoke, her wood stove merrily burning before she even got up to brew coffee. As I was already 10 and living with our family in Chicago, I no longer had access to any of the characters in this story. I took her at her word. She’d been only too happy to move away from Canada when I was less than two.

~~~

I had a beloved mother as familiar as my sheets or my well-worn robe, and the distance of her death reminded me of my loss. But here she was, inexplicably sitting on the edge of my bed. She fit in perfectly, even though that had never been her room. And this house, this life that I had made for myself after the last dog died and last husband left, this wasn’t a life she’d even been part of.

I missed her profoundly. I lost my mother when I had just barely turned 20 and basically have no adult memories of her. She was gone before I graduated college, before I had a child myself, before I married the first time. I have no idea what it would have been like to discuss career choices with my mom, who hadn’t really even started her career until just before she died. And here she was—sitting calmly in a narrative that made no sense.

“What are you doing?” I asked her, hoping she would turn around and yet hesitant to fully enter that room myself.

“Just sitting,” she replied as if this were the most obvious thing in the world.

She was wearing a bone-colored top and matching pants as if her wardrobe had come with her from 1985. But her hair was long, as if it kept growing in the grave. That didn’t make sense because we’d had the body cremated in the Japanese style.

I thought about all the Obon I had never danced. I’m American in my own way. And in my defense, it’s not like Frazier Park was some booming Mecca of Japanese culture. No temple? No dancing. As simple as that. But if my mom was here to complain about my lack of ritual, she was certainly taking her sweet time to get around to it.

Maybe she just missed me? That seemed like too much to ask—I wasn’t the only kid in the family, and was certainly not the most successful. But I had been the only girl, and it was girl’s day: March 3rd.

I started to pull my robe on correctly. Why not? It seemed silly to stand there half-dressed when she might turn around and see me. From behind, in the kitchen I heard another soft sound. A tap, like wooden chopsticks being set down on a rice bowl.

“Hashi no hashi,” I had once joked to my young cousin (a bridge made of chopsticks). I had punned when I put them down over my rice. Rika had laughed a silvery chime of a laugh when I said that. My Japanese was so terrible, but who doesn’t like a pun?

That was all so long ago, what made me think of it? Out of the farthest corner of my eye just as I turned, I saw my mother standing in my kitchen putting away the chopsticks—with a preternatural knowledge of where they should go.

This time I glimpsed the side of her face. I can’t rightly remember what she looked like but the scent of Chanel No. 5 that she used to wear filled me. I was struck by a sudden onslaught of related memories, so brilliant that for a moment I forgot where I was. And then it was over. As strangely as it began, I found myself alone. I don’t own any perfume. So why? How? Is it possible someone walking down the street had been wearing it? But surely no one walks down my street in Frazier Park, my unpaved trail, let alone wearing an expensive toilet water from last century. The fragrance was not buried in my polyester bathrobe. It certainly hadn’t been coming out of my pores.

If my mother had meant to pass on some pearls of wisdom, I can’t rightly say why she chose this day, neither her birthday nor mine to show up on my guest bed. If she had been looking for the dolls she used to own as a child, that she had displayed proudly on “Girls Day,” I didn’t have them. Any and all of them were long gone. Young people nowadays, they don’t collect things, especially not decorative items that don’t seem to have use. We prefer things like cheeseburgers that can be readily enjoyed.

I thought about the dream I had recently awakened from; the one where she had bought me lunch, and as the train started lurching forward I’d been unable to discern if I were really moving at first, or if it had been the train to my left pulling away from the station.