Teen Spirit Read online

  The kindness in her voice made my throat constrict under the necklace of my grandmother’s pearls and I wanted to get out of there before I really started crying.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY AFTER school, Clark came over to my apartment wearing a porkpie hat. My mom smiled at me in an annoying way as she shook his hand. She might as well have winked when I said we’d be in my room. Ugh.

  I asked if he was hungry, although all I had to offer was cold cereal or peanut butter sandwiches. But Clark took out his warm ceramic pot of kicharee from the insulated backpack, and we shared what was left over from lunch. It was surprisingly delicious, maybe more so because I hadn’t eaten a real home-cooked meal in a while.

  “Wow, you’re so healthy,” I said, scraping my bowl. “Do you plan on living forever?”

  “I didn’t always used to be this neurotic. If that’s what you want to call it. But shit happens, and if the worst thing I do in response is only eat kicharee, then, cool.”

  “What about when you can’t cook?” I asked him.

  “I’ll eat regular food if I have to. But I’m kind of scared that when I go to college they’ll force me to eat dorm food and then I may die from hydrogenated oils and artificial dyes.”

  I asked where he wanted to go, if food wasn’t an issue.

  “I’d like to get in to MIT,” he said. “If I can keep my grades up. How about you?”

  I told him what Ms. Merritt had said about financial aid for Stanford and Cal.

  “In that case we should print the forms for you now. Then we can watch Buffy.”

  So after I downloaded the applications for my dream schools, we got serious. He sprawled himself out on the floor, I sat against the bed, and we watched the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode where Willow and Tara make the rose levitate.

  “Now that is great television,” I said.

  “They are by far my favorite couple on this show,” Clark added in a somber tone as if he was discussing a very important matter. “And Whedon creates the perfect metaphor for their budding sexual relationship.”

  This raised him even further in my estimation.

  Next we watched “I Only Have Eyes for You,” in which the ghost of a dead high school student, who killed the teacher he was having an affair with, possesses Buffy. I didn’t enjoy the episode as much as I usually did because it made me recall the Ouija board in my closet.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” Clark’s voice was soft but it startled me; the show had affected my nerves. I couldn’t see his eyes under the brim of his hat in the darkening room.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”

  He shrugged.

  “Sometimes I wish they were real,” I surprised myself by saying. “Since my grandma died.”

  I told Clark the story of Grandma Miriam’s death, leaving out the lavender light and the music but including the last words she’d said. Then I told him how my mom lost the house, that we had to move, and about how I’d found the Ouija board in the new apartment.

  He was so quiet, I wished I hadn’t told him. I couldn’t afford to scare off my only friend.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Does that freak you out?”

  I could see his Adam’s apple move. “Not per se.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He paused. “I guess it sort of does. Anything to do with ghosts. I mean real stuff. Not TV or books.”

  “So I guess that means you believe in them,” I said.

  “Shouldn’t we work on our report?” said Clark. “It’s getting kind of late.”

  And, to both our relief, I guess, the conversation was closed.

  THAT WEEKEND MY MOM put on a push-up bra, a bright red halter top, tight jeans, and black patent-leather heels. She had trimmed and dyed her hair herself, and although she looked better, it seemed as if she was trying too hard and it bothered me that she was doing this for a guy she hadn’t even met yet. Also, she was wearing my grandmother’s Shalimar—citrus, flowers, and vanilla turned to amber liquid in a bottle that looked like a genie could come out of it. We kept the bottle on the mantel of the fake fireplace, beside Grandma’s ashes; as far as I was concerned the perfume was sacred, not something to be worn on a first internet date.

  I grunted at my mother when she tried to kiss me good-bye.

  “Don’t be mad, baby,” she said. “Maybe you want to invite Clark over?”

  “Mom! Don’t say it like that!”

  “Like what?” She batted her curled eyelashes.

  “Like, all cute. He’s just my friend. Whom I actually know. Unlike this person you’re going out with.”

  “I’m going to find out who he is.”

  “He could be anybody. Aren’t you supposed to meet him for coffee during the day first?”

  “It’s just one drink. I’ll be back soon. You can call my cell if you need anything.”

  “I’m fine. It’s you I’m worried about.” I wanted to say that she was acting like a stupid teenager and dressing like a hooker, but I bit the fleshy inside of my lip and kept quiet. My grandmother would have understood. If she were here, I was sure my mom wouldn’t be dating some stranger from the internet. It made me miss Grandma Miriam more, especially when I smelled her perfume on my mom’s neck.

  “You’re wearing the Shalimar.”

  “So?” my mom said.

  “You act like you don’t even care that she’s gone.” I slammed down Wuthering Heights.

  My mother sat on the couch next to me and I got another whiff of the perfume. It made me sick to think of Descentman smelling it on her neck. “Of course I do,” she said.

  Then why don’t you talk about her? I wanted to shout. Why don’t you ask me? I was there when she died and you’ve never asked me about the moment of her death. My mom hadn’t brought it up after our first brief discussion. I was suddenly rigid with anger at being unable to tell her what I had seen and heard when my grandma died, even though it had been my choice to keep it a secret at the time.

  Of course my mom wasn’t aware of all the questions in my mind. She was still defending herself from the one accusation I had verbalized. “I just need something to help me forget. I sit around all day thinking about her.”

  “Don’t!” I said. “Go out and get a job.”

  “I’m trying,” she told me, and I knew by her shaky voice and the way she fanned her face to hold back mascara-wrecking tears, that I had pushed too far.

  Then she left me sitting by the window, looking down at the palm trees and cars and people with good hair heading out for their Friday night dates. Usually she would have stayed to talk things out if we had an argument, but now it seemed like she just wanted to get away from me, to see some guy she hardly knew. That was when I realized how bad things were between us.

  To numb my anger and my guilt at being so harsh with her, I watched a Japanese movie about ghosts and ate a whole frozen pizza and a pint of frozen yogurt. Maybe it was the movie or too much dairy or sugar or the argument with my mom, but every sound seemed magnified ten times and made me jump.

  Alone in the apartment at night for the first time, I wanted to talk to my grandmother, to feel her stroke my hair and call me her turtle dove.

  In that moment after she died, she was more intensely with me than she had ever been before. But now there was no lavender light, no strange music, not even any dreams. Only a cold longing.

  A heavy stillness in the apartment made it hard to breathe so I got up and opened a window. The night air smelled of car exhaust and the intimations of rain, and I heard a siren in the distance. It seemed I was always hearing sirens, ever since the only one that really mattered had left, carrying Grandma Miriam away from us.

  I regretted, then, how my mother and I had gotten rid of so many of my grandmother’s things, unable to face the pins that had held up her hair, the dishes on which she had eaten. There were only the photo albums that I kept under my bed, and the jewelry, shoes, and clothes. I was wearing her red satin kimono and I stroked the sleeve. Th
e skin on my fingers was dry, and the material caught and snagged.

  I got her photo album from under my bed frame. There were pictures of my grandmother as a chubby, towheaded baby, grinning in white lace, and as a young girl. Those green eyes that seemed to glow in the black-and-white shots. There were pictures of her at family functions, relatives I didn’t recognize leaning in around a table, my grandmother in the middle, smiling brightest of anyone. A beaming, over-posed graduation portrait. There were wedding pictures of her with my grandfather, Maury. She and my grandfather both looked stiff and self-conscious but happy, Grandma Miriam in a white taffeta dress that showed off her shapely legs and a short, neat veil. In the honeymoon pictures taken in Hawaii, she absolutely shone—pure, curvy, vintage beauty with a hibiscus flower behind her ear. Her first secretarial job in a tailored tweed suit with a gardenia pinned to the lapel. The pictures of my mother as a baby, her father holding her up to the light from a window in their Brooklyn brownstone. Maury and Miriam and my mom on a vacation in Hollywood, posed in front of the Chinese theater.

  After that trip they moved to Los Angeles and lived in a Santa Monica bungalow until Grandpa Maury died. There was a picture of Mom in her twenties at a dinner in a new black dress with shoulder pads, and bad ’80s poodle hair, celebrating her first writing job. There she was with better hair and a better outfit, looking happy and pregnant. The photo album ended with a baby picture of me.

  Wanting more of my grandmother, I went to her glass-topped filigree jewelry box on my bureau. The rose satin-lined interior was full of tangled strands of pearls and chains, rhinestones and shell cameos as well as the silver and turquoise and chunks of amber she wore later in her life. I stacked my arms with some mother-of-pearl bangles and a silver cuff in the shape of a calla lily and hung a delicate silver cobweb necklace, studded with pearl dewdrops, around my neck. Lastly I pinned the silver watch shaped like a lady to my kimono.

  My grandmother’s voice came to me again in that moment: There’s something I must tell you.

  What had she wanted to say? I wished with a deep pang in the empty jewel box of my heart that I could go to find her, wherever she was, and ask her.

  Then I heard something fall inside my closet, a small and sudden disruption with no obvious cause. I opened the door to see. The Ouija board box had toppled onto the floor.

  I got it out of the closet and set the board on my knees. It was only a child’s toy, but maybe it was something more. Again I wondered why the Ouija board had been left in our apartment in the first place. In my room as if for me to find. And it had fallen at exactly the right moment as if someone was trying to tell me something. If Ouija boards could really help you communicate with the spirit world, there was only one person I wanted to reach.

  I rested my fingers lightly on top of the marker that was shaped a little like a heart. I held my breath and let my hands skate across the board’s surface, pulled by some unseen force. “Grandma,” I whispered to the air. “Miriam. Miriam Klein?”

  The marker looped and skidded around the board, not stopping anywhere, until it slid off and landed on the floor.

  There was no answer and I felt silly for trying.

  AROUND MIDNIGHT I WOKE to the sound of my mom’s car, as if I had been listening for it in my sleep, and went to the window. I watched her parallel park. It took her a few times. Behind her car was a truck. The internet guy got out.

  He followed her to the front door. I covered my head with a pillow and squeezed my eyes shut like a child trying to make herself disappear.

  MY MOM WAS LIKE a different person after her date with “Descentman,” aka Luke. There were scrambled eggs or pancakes for breakfast and hot meals for dinner for a week. She got dressed every morning and sat down to peruse the want ads online. Luke took her out to dinner and a movie two weekends in a row and she came home flushed and literally beaming. But I still didn’t like the idea of this virtual stranger. She hadn’t had a boyfriend since before I was born, and I knew it was important, but who was Luke? Maybe I am just jealous of him, I thought guiltily. I missed the takeout and foreign film nights with my mom more than ever.

  I told Clark at school, but all he said was, “At least she’s happy.” Which wasn’t helpful at all. But he must have known I needed a little more support than that because the next day at lunchtime he handed me a CD he’d burned.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Just some music I thought you’d like.” Arcade Fire, The White Stripes, Radiohead, Adele, The Kills, Pixies, Breeders, Smashing Pumpkins.

  He really was a pretty cool guy. I thanked him, touching his arm, and he blushed, the color rising up from his jawline.

  Luckily I had him. For the next few weeks we ate his kicharee together every day in the quad and he came over almost every afternoon. We listened to music, watched Buffy, and studied.

  Sometimes we walked to the library instead. The Beverly Hills Public Library was a large, white, red-roofed building like the high school. Palm trees flanked the entrance, and leaded-glass windows lit the interior with sun. Clark liked to read about as much as I did, but he preferred writers like Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, and Stephen King.

  “I don’t get why you like that stuff but you don’t like to talk about Ouija boards,” I whispered to him one day as we sat across from each other at the table, sharing the light from a reading lamp.

  “I told you, it’s different when it’s not real,” he whispered back.

  “So you think Ouija boards can really summon the dead?”

  Clark adjusted his glasses on his nose. “I don’t know. There’s something about them that just seems wrong to me.” He shrugged. “Sorry, I’m a wimp.”

  “A very cool one. With great taste in music. I listen to that CD all the time.”

  “I figured you could use something to take your mind off things,” he said. “Music’s usually kind of great for that.”

  I ESPECIALLY NEEDED TO have my mind taken off things when I met Luke that night. I was sitting up in the living room reading Anna Karenina when they came in. He wore all black and had shoulder-length hair that looked as if it had been dyed to match his outfit.

  When my mom introduced us, he shook my hand. His grip was weak and his palm felt clammy. “Well, I better get going. Just wanted to say hello.” Even from where I stood, his breath smelled of alcohol.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to stay for a drink?” my mom said.

  I couldn’t believe she was actually asking for him to stay when I was sitting right there. I tried to give her the evil eye, but she ignored me; she was gazing at Luke.

  “Next time, beautiful Rachel.” He kissed her cheek and I heard the sound of his saliva.

  My stomach lurched. Outside, as if on cue, the storm that had been threatening poured from the clouds.

  I went to my room to shut out the rain of my thoughts with Clark’s music.

  “UGH, I FINALLY MET the boyfriend,” I told him the next day at school.

  “What’s he like?”

  “Aging rocker dude with a dead-fish handshake.”

  “Sounds bad. Have you been playing lots of music?”

  “I think this is something even your music mixes can’t help,” I said.

  Clark bit his lip and tapped his knuckles against his chin. “Well then, I think you need something else.”

  So, after school he took me to a secondhand clothing shop on Pico I’d never been to before.

  “We can find you appropriate attire for when you become a famous psychologist with a degree from Stanford,” Clark told me, leading the way inside.

  Treasure Hunt smelled mothball-woolly and musty and was jammed with cool stuff—furniture, lamps, tchotchkes, books, accessories, and clothes. A small back room with a round rack held extra-special finds. I was riffling through the dresses when one of my grandmother’s cameo rings caught on a lilac lace gown. I carefully unsnagged it and held the dress out to get a better look. Clark heard me gasp and c
ame over, wearing a fedora with a small, tattered feather in the brim and carrying some clothes over his arm.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This looks just like one of her dresses,” I said.

  “Whose?”

  “My grandma. Miriam.” It was the first time I’d mentioned her to him since he’d come over to watch Buffy. “I mean, it’s the same dress.”

  He frowned at the lace draped in my hands. “Did you give it away?”

  “I didn’t think so. I remember it from when I was little. I used to try it on. We would never have given it . . .”

  “Well, maybe she did?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe it’s a different one?” Clark offered. “Maybe you have the other one at home?”

  “I don’t remember seeing it lately,” I told him. I checked the label, remembering the gold lettering: MADEMOISELLE DENTELLE.

  An elderly saleslady with rhinestone-studded eyeglasses and unmistakably blue hair came over to ask if we needed help. She looked at us suspiciously, and Clark grinned back at her. “We were wondering if you know where this dress came from?” he said.

  “I have no idea,” she replied with a sniff that implied we smelled like unwashed used clothing.

  “Well, we’d like to buy it,” he told her.

  Clark got a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, a wool argyle old-man sweater, and a tie, and he bought me the mysterious dress, although I tried to argue with him and pay for it myself. Perhaps I imagined it, but I could smell Shalimar wafting from its fabric. I had no idea if it was the same dress or not or how it had gotten there, but I held it against my heart, thinking of my grandmother. I thanked Clark and considered kissing his cheek but decided against it to keep from embarrassing him.

  When we left I noticed a HELP WANTED sign in the window among the mannequins dressed in recycled Halloween costumes, and asked Clark if he minded if I went back inside. The saleslady (and owner), whose name was Mrs. Carol, was more friendly after we’d made an actual purchase and handed me an application that I filled out right there, with Clark’s encouragement. I knew I needed a job to take my mind off things, not to mention make some spending money, since I couldn’t depend on my mother for much anymore. And the dress, whether it was my grandmother’s or an exact replica, felt like a sign.