Ghost Hanging
he had been in the house for almost forty years. In fact, the anniversary of her moving in
would be in two weeks. Over time, however, she had forgotten the exact date. It had
become irrelevant: a blip on the radar of many connected, but not necessarily related,
events that made up her life. Lately, life felt like an endurance test. All good had been
tainted by sorrow. Even the house that she had once so cherished was now, simply a
place to exist. On several occasions, she had considered moving. Each time she
weighed the advantages against the disadvantages, the disadvantages were usually
several pounds heavier.
She thought of it again, as the plumber stepped down the hall. He looked puzzled and alarmingly sad.
"I swear, lady, in all my years doin' this, I've never seen anything like this." Sam Anderson said, shaking his head slowly, side to side, in disbelief.
"Can you fix it?" She asked, feeling a knot in the pit of her stomach. She had learned long ago not to ask questions for which she might not want to know the answer.
"Well, I'll do my best, but I can't guarantee anything." He warned.
"I can't ask for more than that."
Sam walked out to his van, a clean, white vehicle, as large as a UPS truck. On the side, in grand, enormous letters, were the words "Anderson Plumbing, professional service for the Coachella Valley since 1954." She had dated Tad Anderson almost fifty years before, when she was still in High School. She had had such a crush on him then. He had expired recently and passed the business he started so long ago, to his oldest son, Sam. To Sam; the woman figured, she was just some old woman with clogged pipes. She didn't feel like telling stories. It made her feel old. It's one thing to be old, she thought, it's another to feel old.
"Expired." She thought bitterly. It makes poor old Tad sound like a carton of milk, a driver's license, or a credit card. Unlike the last two, there was no renewal. No filling out of forms and getting updated for the next couple of years. This was it. This was true finality. It made her think of Mr. Stanwell, her biology professor back in college. Tests could not be made up and homework was not accepted late. There were no exceptions. She recalled one person in the class who missed a test because his mother had a heart attack just as he was getting ready to leave for class. Stanwell showed no mercy. Death was like Mr. Stanwell. The young man failed the class because he missed the test and she remembered hearing him vow to seek revenge on Stanwell. Part of her always hoped he did.
She had forgotten Tad over the years. He was her first true heartbreak. There were many more. Eventually, he became relatively insignificant. Now the pipes were clogged and when she looked in the phone book, she saw the name. No one else would do. There was something synchronous about it, as if it were fate. Life was an ongoing chain of events that eventually comes full circle.
Sam stamped back in, straining with the weight of an enormous tool box. He reminded her of a surgeon. "Crescent wrench. Pliers. Plunger," he could call out to some lovely assistant, who would quickly and dutifully hand him each item.
The plumbing was clogged and Sam headed to the back bathroom with a look of grim determination. It was such a solemn look that she had to fight back an urge to burst out with laughter. The look also frightened her.
"Could it be tree roots?" She asked, following him down the hallway.
"No, Ma'am. I'm afraid that it's probably more serious than that." He replied forebodingly.
"Oh." She said, mentally castigating herself for asking. "Well, I guess I should let you get to work. I'll be in the living room if you need me for anything."
"Yes, Ma'am."
It was the first Monday of the month. That was the day when all the "old timers" in the neighborhood got together for their monthly "coffee klatch." These gatherings were mainly for those who had lived there for more than ten years, but sometimes newer residents would appear. It moved to a different house each month, this day it was at Cheryl Rodriguez' home. Years before, she had enjoyed these meetings. That was when they were younger and the women would brag about their children and the men would talk about things like business and baseball. Now, these gatherings were becoming increasingly depressing as the talk turned more to failing health, the deaths of family and friends, increasing crime and all the other ills of aging and society. It made them all sound like weak, whining victims and she couldn't stand it. She forced herself to go, however, because she knew that if she didn't the phone would ring all day with people calling to make sure she was alright.
The first Monday of every month was the only day she ever missed reading her newspaper first thing in the morning, over a cup of coffee. She sat down in her favorite recliner and scanned the headlines. After all these years of routine, reading the paper was a compulsion. The day just didn't feel complete without it. As she skimmed the headlines, working her way to the comics, she listened to the various noises emanating from the back bathroom and was startled to hear what sounded like weeping.
After about fifteen minutes, a puffy faced, red-eyed, Sam stood before her.
"It's just what I thought." He said solemnly.
"Yes?" She asked, bewildered at his bizarre behavior.
"Well, I can't really explain it," his voice broke and he fought to keep himself together, "I think it would be better if you came and see this for yourself.
"My father told me about this, once." He said quietly, as she followed him down the hall. The knot in her gut was cinching tightly and she noticed that her hands had begun to shake. What could be so horrible? She asked herself. She had been dealt some pretty hard knocks in life. She figured that she should be able to handle some bad plumbing. When they reached the door to the bathroom, he stopped and motioned for her to go ahead of him.
At first, she didn't see it. The only thing she noticed was that the toilet had been completely removed and was lying on its back in the middle of the floor. There were tools strewn about in some sort of order, the large box she had seen him carry in, an old throw rug wadded up in a corner and then she saw it. The thing that had compromised all of the plumbing in her house, that had plugged the entire system so that nothing could flow in or out of the house. Lying on the floor, looking neglected and crushed under its own weight, was a broken heart.
Oozing out of the heart was all the sadness she had known throughout her life, but never allowed herself to face. "Why look back?" She had said throughout her life, or, "what good's crying gonna do?" There was her son, Jimmy, who had died in Vietnam, her daughter, Elizabeth, who spent more time in mental hospitals than out of them. She had inherited a long list of mental illnesses that her own mother fought with all her life. Almost on top of one another were her two husbands, Cliff and William. Cliff was the father of her children and had died in a car accident a year after the death of their son. She had married William eight years later and he died of a heart attack after their second anniversary. There were the other men who had come and gone out of her life like teeth being extracted. Tad Anderson was there. Victor Manning and Larry Foster were also there. She had been engaged to Larry, but he had broken it off two days before the wedding. She and Victor fell in love during her first marriage, at a time when things were rough. She broke it off with him and told herself that she mustn't dwell on something so wrong. She saw the miscarriage of what should have been her first child. There was the statistics class that she failed in college, that had kept her from graduating on time. There was the knowledge that Santa is a fiction and the realization that she wouldn't become a great writer. There were shattered dreams, broken promises and hopes that never materialized..
The bathroom was littered with all of this that poured out of the broken heart. As she took it all in, a wail broke from her throat. It was a sound of incomprehensible sorrow that filled every crack, crevice and corner of the entire house. The house plants drooped from its weight and even the neighbors, who were away when it happened, complained of feeling an inexplicable sense of depression when they returned home. Her knees buckled. Before she could hit the ground, Sam Anderson grabbed her by her arms and propped her up. He carried her to her bedroom and laid her gently on her bed where she wept uncontrollably for two weeks. She wept all of the tears that had collected in her lifetime, and had never been allowed to fall. During that time, Sam checked on her twice a day. His mother, Arlene Anderson, had volunteered to stay with her, but Sam had told her no. "It's not something you should see, Mother," he explained.
The scene in the bathroom had been too much for Sam and it was several days before he felt he would have the strength to clean up the mess. After a week, he summoned the courage to look into the bathroom and was amazed to find that the heart and all that had poured out of it, was fading away. He felt a strange pang of sorrow when he saw that his own father was only a pale, ghostly outline. Some of the things had disappeared entirely. He decided to leave it all there and just see what happens. One of the other men seemed to be disappearing right before his eyes.
For the next week, he brought her food that his mother had prepared, and would check the bathroom twice a day.. He had gathered his tools and cleaned up his own mess. The rest seemed to be taking care of itself. Each day the heart's contents grew dimmer, their presence less distressing. Toward the end of the second week, her tears slowed a bit. At first she was able to regain her composure for moments at a time, then an hour, then hours. As this occurred, Sam noticed that the mess in the bathroom was vanishing completely. He saw that the few items that were left, were fading so slowly that they might never completely disappear. He also noticed, not without some sorrow, that his own father had disappeared entirely.
At the end of the second week, it appeared that she had regained control of herself and vowed never to ignore her tears again for as long as she lived. Most of the mess in the bathroom was gone now. All that was left was her immediate family and the miscarriage. All of it, though, was so faint that it could barely be seen. She didn’t know what to do with it. She couldn't stuff it in a closet. She feared that if she placed it out of sight, the images would regain their strength. No, she had to deal with them.
An idea occurred to her one day as she was stepping over the ghosts of her past, in order to take a bath. Under her bed, she kept a large box full of pictures. At one time, these pictures had hung on the walls of her home. Over the years they came to serve only as grim reminders of tragic losses and incomprehensible sorrow. One by one, she removed them. Now, it was time to return them to their rightful places.
She reached under the bed and grabbed the box with a determination that surprised her. She feared that it would be a Pandora's box, like the broken heart in the bathroom. She had made up her mind, though. Once the box was out in the open, she could not allow herself turn back. She felt silly as she closed her eyes, reached for the lid and with a flourish, pulled it off.
"Oh, such drama! Stop being such a coward," she admonished herself and opened her eyes.
Staring up at her was her second husband, William. It was a picture that she had taken when they had gone on vacation in Carmel. He was on the beach, with his back to the ocean. He was smiling at her and she was reminded of how he could say so much with his smile. She expected that seeing these pictures would bring back that overwhelming sadness that had possessed her for those two horrible weeks. Instead, the memory of him on that beach, of him smiling that smile at her, only made her smile.
The pictures were arranged in backwards order in time. The deeper she got into the box, the younger she had been. There were pictures of Cliff and it impressed her that there were no pictures of him by himself. In every picture he was in, was at least one of the children, her, or the whole family. She recalled just how much he loved the children and feeling secure in the knowledge that there wasn't anything he wouldn't do for his family. There were pictures of Elizabeth before she became ill. She remembered that as a child, Elizabeth had a tremendous capacity for experiencing and sharing joy. There were pictures of Jimmy and she was surprised at the number of photo's in which he was wearing a cast, using crutches or showed some other sign of injury. She was reminded of how curious and tenacious he had been. To Jimmy, there were no barriers that , and the word "no" simply wasn't in his vocabulary. There were pictures of the family together, holidays and vacations. Birthdays, graduations and other special times, like when Jimmy became an Eagle Scout, or Elizabeth bought her first car with money she had saved. There were also several pictures of herself and she was amazed to recall how easy it had once been for her to smile.
This is; she realized, not gone. As she came closer to the bottom of the box, she felt her heart fill with a warmth that took so long to lose, that by the time it was gone, she didn't notice it missing. It came to her that no ending is ever the defining moment in one's life. Neither are the beginnings. The moments that matter most, that say the most about who we are, are those fleeting moments in between. Those golden moments that, when they occur, seem insignificant yet fill our hearts like photos covering an empty wall. These photographs were no longer sad reminders of a past that could not be recaptured, but they were her. With this revelation, she grabbed the entire pile, hugged them tightly to her chest and laughed uproariously.
She spent the next several days searching her house for the "right spot" for each picture. Each one seemed to have a special place in her house, a place where it rightfully belonged. She filled walls, tables, mantles and counters with pictures. She made several trips to the arts and crafts stores for frames that were just as right as the places they would go. At first she thought of this as an homage to the past, but came to realize that her efforts were to honor herself and her life. When she was done, she surveyed the house and everything was where it should be. She checked the rest room and found that her ghosts had disappeared.
