She's Not There Read online

  It was at this point that I realized I still had the rest of the night free. My mother’s optimism lifted me up. It wasn’t too late to make the best of things.

  I went back to my parents’ bedroom. Onion’s bra and T-shirt were lying right there. I sat on the bed and picked up the bra. I held it in my lap for a moment. It was warm, the bra.

  I closed my eyes, thinking. If you have breasts, I thought, they go right in here. If you’re a girl, you wear one of these and you probably don’t even think about it, it’s just what you do.

  I thought about it for a while. I definitely liked Onion’s taste in clothes better than my mother’s and sister’s. It would have been a great relief to have been a person in life whose body fitted into them. There was no reason I shouldn’t put on her stuff—heck, she was passed out upstairs. But I didn’t do it. It would be too creepy and, quite frankly, a little bit rude. I owed Onion a certain respect, even if she had passed out naked in her own puke in my parents’ bathroom, and it wouldn’t be polite to wear her shirt. So I picked up the bra and the T-shirt and carried them up to the room where Onion was lying unconscious and laid them on the bed next to her. I stroked her hair.

  “You’re going to be okay,” I whispered to her, then kissed her lightly on the cheek.

  I went back downstairs and sat at the piano bench. The second half of my Hi-C and bourbon was still there, the ice cubes melted. “Good evening,” I said. “It’s great to be back in Philadelphia.”

  I started up with “Mrs. Robinson” again, seeing as how I hadn’t even got to the chorus last time. I was still in the key of G, back in a crazy jam. I was a sixteen-year-old transsexual, high on fruit juice, and I had a naked girl passed out in my grandmother’s bed upstairs. Life is a mysterious thing, was my conclusion.

  The doorbell rang, and I stopped playing. “Jesus,” I said. “It’s like Grand Central Station in here.” I finished the bourbon in one gulp, went to the front door, and opened it wide.

  A guy in a Santa Claus suit was standing there. He held a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  “Merry Christmas,” I said.

  “Are you St. George?” he asked.

  This question wasn’t quite as insane as it might sound at first, because St. George was actually the name of one of the Hunt boys. I wasn’t him, though.

  “Are you Bill?”

  Another Hunt sibling. I shook my head.

  “Well,” Santa said. “Are you Hoops?”

  Hoops Hunt was the oldest of the boys. His real name was Al, and Al Hunt later grew up to be a famous journalist with The Wall Street Journal. He’s also a regular on Capital Gang, one of those shows where reporters shout at one another. He’s married to Judy Woodruff, the CNN newswoman.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Santa said, annoyed. “Who in hell are you, then?”

  “I’m Jim Boylan,” I said. “We live here now. The Hunts moved. Dr. Hunt died.”

  “Oh,” Santa said. He felt stupid now. “I been away. Vietnam and all.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, jeez,” I said. “You want to come in?”

  “Maybe just for a second,” Santa said. “It’s freezin’ out here.”

  He stomped across the threshold. Cold rain was falling on Onion’s car. “You want something?” I said. “A drink, or whatever?”

  “Nah,” Santa said. “I just figured I’d stop in. They been having this party for twenty-five years.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I thought about this party a lot when I was over in ’Nam and all. Thought about it a lot.”

  It suddenly seemed very sad to me, this guy in his rented Santa suit, thinking about coming home all those years for the Hunts’ party and finding only me.

  “So you were in Vietnam?” I said.

  “Yeah.” Santa sat on a chair by the fire, warmed himself.

  “Marines. Since Tet.” He shook his head as if the words should mean something to me. “After I got back I lived in California for a while. Man, some wild times out there!”

  A small puddle formed around Santa’s boots.

  “Should have called first, I guess,” he said.

  He looked around, examining our furniture, which didn’t really fill the place. His eyes fell on the piano.

  “Was that you playing before?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What was that? Sounded all right.”

  “Just like a jam,” I said. I thought about it for a second. “You want me to play you something?”

  “Whatever,” Santa said. He held the bottle of Jack Daniel’s toward me. “You want some of this, kid?”

  “No thanks,” I said. I went back to the piano and sat on the bench. “You want to hear anything in particular?”

  “Nah,” Santa said.

  For the third time that night, my hands fell on the keys. I started playing “Mrs. Robinson,” a crazy jam in the key of G. Santa put his feet up on the ottoman and drank some Jack Daniel’s. He looked up at the oil painting of my grandfather.

  I sang. Look around you. All you see / Are sympathetic eyes. / Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home. . . .

  It took me about twenty minutes to get done with all three verses and the chorus and three more long jams. Finally I finished.

  Santa applauded. Thank you, Philadelphia. Thank you all very much.

  “Sounds all right, kid,” Santa said. He stood up, put the cap back on his whiskey. “Well, I gotta go. Merry Christmas and all.”

  “Merry Christmas,” I said.

  Santa went outside into the rain. I stood in the front hallway until I heard his car drive off.

  Upstairs, the hallway was full of light. Onion was up. It sounded as if she were in the bathroom.

  “Onion?” I said, and opened the door.

  She was sitting on a green stool, drying herself with a bluish white towel. She’d been taking a bath, of all things. One hand was raised in the air. I could just see the vague shadow of her pink nipple at the upper perimeter of the towel. An orange robe belonging to my grandmother was draped across the green stool. The room was thick with the steam from her bath, giving everything a shimmering, twinkling quality. The old blue tub stood behind her, still full of water. The crazy wallpaper of the Hunts surrounded her—rippling patterns of pink and purple and white.

  Onion’s hair was tied up in a bun over her head. She looked perfect, like a painting by Degas. Sitting there, drying herself, one arm raised, she looked immortal, the embodiment of what Goethe called the “feminine eternal.” This vision of her filled me with a profound, aching sorrow.

  The raised arm dropped to her side, and she looked up at me. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Like, what happened?”

  She seemed embarrassed.

  “You passed out,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She turned toward me, and I saw the blue bruise on her upper arm again. “Whoo-hoo. Maybe I’m fuckin’ insane.”

  “You’re all right,” I said.

  “I don’t know about that,” Onion said. She gathered up her clothes, and I watched her put them on. “Did you, like, carry me up here?”

  I nodded. “Whoo-hoo,” she said. “Weird.”

  We stood in the pink-and-purple room for a long time, not saying anything. She was still wet.

  Onion looked at her watch and shrugged. “Oughta get going, I guess,” she said.

  “You have to go?” I said as if I didn’t know the answer.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Listen, I’m sorry, you know? Maybe some other time we could . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Yeah, that would be good,” I said. “Sometime.”

  I didn’t follow her downstairs but stayed in that bathroom, looking out the window at the snow, now turning to rain. I heard the door open downstairs, then I saw her rush out into the night. She got her car off the azaleas, went do
wn the driveway, and turned onto Sugartown Road.

  I made the bed in the guest room, hung up the orange robe. Last, I let the water out of the tub. It made a sucking sound.

  Then the house was quiet. I walked out into the hallway, wanting to do something, to yell or punch out a wall or weep or smash up the car.

  I went up to the door of the locked room where my mother’s and sister’s dresses hung in their garment bags. I slid back the dead bolt and walked in. There was only one light, and it was way across the room. I had to walk through the dark to get at it, a single lightbulb hanging from a wire in the ceiling.

  The swinging light shone on the shunned room, shadows moving across the piles of boxes, a safe, an American flag. I looked at the garment bags full of dresses, but I didn’t open them. There was the smell of mothballs.

  On one wall, written on the bare plaster, were the words Al Hunt. I’m sick. Wednesday, October 3, 1956.

  I stood in there for a while. It was funny to be in the place where I usually feared the ghosts would be. Shit, man, I thought. Maybe I’m the ghost.

  My parents got home an hour later. I was already in bed. They stomped up the creaking stairs.

  I should have just let them go to sleep, but my conscience was too guilty about the evening. I had to know if they suspected anything.

  “Hi, honey,” my mother said as I came down the stairs. I went into my parents’ bedroom. My father was already brushing his teeth. “Did you have an all right time?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Watched television.”

  “Good.” She sat on her bed and took off her jewelry. “We had a lovely time with the McGatts. You remember John McGatt, honey? He used to bring you Silly Putty when you were little?”

  “I remember.”

  My mother shook her head. “It seems just like yesterday, when you were my baby boy.”

  “Mom,” I said, annoyed.

  She took off her watch, put it on her table. There next to the alarm clock was Onion’s diaphragm, sitting in its soft brown case. She hadn’t seen it yet, but Mom would see a lot of things in the time that was coming.

  The Failures of Milk

  The phone rang in the Coffin House. “Eleanor, you’ll never believe what happened,” Aunt Nora said. “I just died.”

  My mother checked the clock. It was late. “Nora,” she said,“what are you talking about?”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Aunt Nora continued. “But listen. I’m dead now.” She paused. “Don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

  “Nora,” my mother said,“you’re not making any sense. Of course you’re not dead. You’re on the phone.”

  My aunt made an irritated sound. “You never take me seriously!”

  “Nora, are you listening to me? I want you to put the phone down. I want you to go get yourself a glass of milk. Will you do that for me, please?”

  “You want I should get some milk?”

  “Put the phone down and get yourself a glass of milk. When you have the milk, come back to the phone.”

  My aunt put the phone down begrudgingly. My mother, alone in her big house, sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the sounds of Nora moving around her apartment. Whatever it was she was doing, it was clear she hadn’t traveled in a straight line to the refrigerator. My mother heard furniture moving, a toilet flushing. Aunt Nora was singing something to herself.

  About ten minutes later, she came back to the phone.

  “I have the milk, Eleanor. I’m still dead.”

  “Did you drink it?” my mother asked. “Did you drink the milk?”

  “I drank it. It tastes like milk.” There was a pause. “Being dead doesn’t change the way things taste.”

  “Nora,” my mother said,“I want you to stop. I want you to drink the milk and go to sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”

  “Why should I need sleep?” Aunt Nora said. “I’m dead. I’m not tired. I’ve got all this energy! Maybe I’ll make the children sock puppets.”

  Aunt Nora was a seamstress. She worked at Lillian’s Bridal Salon in Newtown Square, which was just down the street from the place where I took piano lessons in the mid-1960s. After my lesson I would often walk over to the salon and watch her sewing veils.

  Aunt Nora was the one person with whom I had thought my secret would be secure. Like me, she seemed to live in a world of her own, although the reasons for her distance from the world were unimaginable to me, at least they were when I was a child.

  I would go to her apartment sometimes and sit on the floor in front of her grandmother’s clock, eating the cookies she baked (shaped like Scottie dogs, or stars, or running men), and think about telling her. I formed the sentences in my mind.

  Aunt Nora, what would you do if I told you I didn’t feel like myself, but like someone else? Well, not someone else, exactly, but myself, me as a girl. It’s the person everyone thinks I am that isn’t real.

  What would she have said? Would she have put me on a stool and have me raise my arms into the air and take my soundings with a tape measure? Would she have taught me to sew, how to make darts and pleats? Would she have shown me how to curl my hair, how to make cookies shaped like dogs, how to move through the world as a woman bearing an inconceivable grief? It’s all right, Jennifer. You just try not to think about it.

  But I remained silent. I knew what she’d say.

  I sat on the floor and listened to her clock chime.

  Sometimes Nora showed me the dances she was learning in her dance class. She’d put on a crazy record from the 1940s called “Old Vienna,” which featured an accordion band and a narrator describing a landslide of falling strudel. To this music, Nora did the tango. Sometimes I danced with her.

  “By order of zee emperor, zere will be no strudel eating on zee mountain today. . . .”

  Nora’s life had changed when she married my uncle Francis at age thirty-five. It was as if, after all her long years alone, the sun had finally decided to shine in her life.

  There are black-and-white pictures taken of her during that time, in which she stands by the sea with Francis, holding a spotted beach ball. She wears an expression I never saw firsthand—a look of complete contentment and joy, the look of a woman who finally finds that she does exist after a lifetime of believing that she does not.

  Uncle Francis died less than a year after they were married, of a brain hemorrhage.

  Soon Aunt Nora was working as a seamstress again, sewing together white dresses for other women to wear at other weddings.

  When my mother went to her apartment the morning after she’d received the phone call in which Nora explained that she was dead, she opened the door to find the place empty. Aunt Nora had vanished without a trace.

  My mother called around, checked a few hospitals. It didn’t take long to find her. Apparently Nora had the wherewithal, at some point, to call 911 and explain the situation.

  It was midafternoon before my mother finally arrived at Bryn Mawr Hospital. There was Nora, tied to the bed. She broke down in tears when she saw her sister.

  “Eleanor, I’m so sorry,” she said. “The milk didn’t work.”

  Come Down in Time (Spring 1979)

  I looked up at the top of the piano. The bartender placed another Guinness at the end of the long row of beers that stood there. There were seven pints on top of the piano now, plus the one on the music stand.

  Outside, on Oxford Street, rain was hammering down. Everyone in the pub was drenched, and the pub smelled like wet English people. It was a Saturday night at Mr. Pitiful’s, where I had a job playing piano in the corner. Sometimes my friend Johnny Cooper from Manchester played tenor sax with me, but he wasn’t there that night. Johnny was a student at the London School of Economics, which was right across the street from where I lived in Marylebone, just off Fitzroy Square.

  I’d been in London for four months now, studying literature. One day, I’d left my flat with an ad in my pocket that I’d torn o
ut of the back pages of TimeOut magazine. “British Center for Gender Study,” read the ad. “Support and Information Services.”

  It was a long walk down to Soho, but it was pleasant enough to follow Tottenham Court Road down toward Oxford Street and Piccadilly. The British Center for Gender Study was just off Piccadilly Circus. They had counselors you could talk to.

  I got to the British Center for Gender Study, which had no sign on it. I feared it might just be some guy’s apartment, some hairy beast in a sleeveless T-shirt who would answer the doorbell and say, Okay, c’mon in, dude. You can call me Tinky.

  I stood outside the British Center for Gender Study for a long time.

  I didn’t go in.

  The next night, in Mr. Pitiful’s, I was playing the blues. It was raining hard. There was something maniacal about the way I was playing. During a break, one fellow came and sat next to me and said, “Are you all right, Yank?” and I said I was fine. Then I played “Bye Bye Blackbird.”

  Mr. Pitiful’s—which was really called the Plough—was a dark cave, with a black tin ceiling and faded red velvet booths and a gas fire that always seemed to be on the edge of flickering out. It was full of old men who sat there not talking to one another, smoking. They liked hearing me play the old songs, though, and when I particularly pleased one old fart or another, he’d buy me a pint and have the bartender place it on top of the piano.

  I was pretty good at playing rinky-tink. “Me and My Shadow,” “Sugar Blues,” “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out.” Occasionally I’d throw in something cheerful like “Here Comes the Sun,” but this was almost never a good idea. The denizens of the Plough didn’t come in there to get cheered up.