Research: Journals
The Journal
Issue 33.1
J. David Stevens
Ghost StoryShe buys a house, a Victorian. It's larger than she needs but will give her daughter room to run and explore. The realtor calls the neighborhood "established." The trees in the front yard are coated with a chalky white substance, but a voicemail from the city assures her of plans to spray.
Her daughter is not really the run/explore type. Instead she resembles a muppet: blue eyes like miniature dessert plates and blond hair strung so perfectly to her waist it seems plastic-coated. Five years old, she has a penchant for inappropriately adult comments. For example, "Have you considered gastric bypass surgery?" Or, "Maybe he's not satisfied in the boudoir." It should go without saying she watches too much TV.
The ghost is in the TV. It moves between channels. It is not so much a ghost as the detritus of cancelled pilots, miniseries filled with forgotten actors, preempted sporting events, and half the State of the Union addresses since 1959. It wants to be loved.
Conversations ensue. The TV makes promises. Her mother enters the room just in time to see her Hello Kitty sneakers disappearing into the picture tube.
The woman tries to follow, sure, but it's a picture tube, a sheet of glass. And the screen's all white noise, maybe too late already.
So she sits down and talks to the TV–to her daughter inside the TV–hoping that something of the real world might draw the girl back. She says "I love you" more times than she can count, then lists the other people who love the girl, then lists the girl's stuffed animals, in particular her bear, Mr. Crispin. Then lists the places they have been together, and the places they might go, and the things that might keep them forever–mother and daughter–drawn unto each other.
But it doesn't work. So, in desperation, she recounts the story of the girl's birth: first just the parts about holding the girl after her birth, but then the parts about the birth itself–the blood, the sound of her screams, and her body unseaming itself. The pregnancy before that: nausea, swelling, a constant urge to pee. And because it seems somehow appropriate, the night of her conception: a last-ditch effort to save a marriage destined to fail, a foreign city, lights over a river, too much wine, and the hubris of desire.
To her amazement, a finger appears–half of it anyway, the tip emerging from the TV snow, a small child's print pressed against the inside of the glass.
So the mother talks faster. She lists every one of the girl's father's affairs, his dick small and scalloped like a jarred pickle. She even says it like that: his dick–and his German cars that she was never allowed to drive, his MENSA membership, his belief in no ailment that money could not cure. As she speaks, a hand takes shape in the TV, a bit of wrist.
With nowhere else to go, she pushes back through all the men she has known–a short history of vegetable metaphors (carrots, cucumbers, one Chinese eggplant) and ends with a pencil of a boy from high school sophomore year who would satisfy himself with a thumb and forefinger as they kissed. She talks about things she has done, things done to her, how they felt, how they could have felt better–not in an obscene way, but more honestly than she ever has, even when talking only to herself. Her body: she can feel it, the thing that keeps her forever encased, apart, even from the daughter who once shared it, a ghost she cannot shake.
On the TV, her daughter's arms appear, the top of her head, her shoulders rolling forward. Her hands punch through the glass, and her mother grabs them, pulling until her small body belches from the TV in a final electric whoosh. They lie on the floor, not so much connected as momentarily tethered to each other.
