Silencing the Ghosts

Fiction
Füsun Atalay © 2000

I come down to the kitchen for coffee and toast. Wanda and Wayne are sitting at the table, rolling their day's supply of cigarettes. They look suspended in time sitting at the kitchen table, facing each other but neither looking at the other.

Wanda has dark circles under her eyes and she's quiet as if she's absorbed in deep thought. With her yellow discoloured thumb, index and middle fingers she picks loose tobacco from the open pouch, places mounds of equal portions on the rice paper and spreads out the contents of the pouch evenly’ rolling the cigarettes with amazing agility. She licks the glued edge securing the tobacco inside, and stacks her treasure in a zip lock bag.

Wayne prepares his with the same precision. This is the highlight of their day. After this Wanda will remain in her seat, occasionally getting up to make herself a cup of instant coffee, then sink back onto her worn out, red-vinyl chair to stare blankly out of the little window by the sink.

"Morning, you two," I chime, hoping to elicit some sign of life from them. Wayne acknowledges my presence with a nod of his head. Wanda doesn't move; she is far away in her own world. Wayne motions a downward spiral with his index finger. I understand. It's time again for Wanda to check herself into the Waterford.

Wanda must weigh close to three hundred pounds, and she exudes an odour of tobacco, sweat and fried food. Wayne differs from her only in his weight. I shudder when an intimate picture of the two flashes through me, but sometimes we have no control over our own minds and what they conjure against our will.

The image disappears almost as instantly as it appeared and I feel annoyed at myself, but I cannot help my bizarre fascination with both.

"Why don't we open the window?" I ask. "It's so nice out- the air's fresh."

Wanda's eyes turn to me briefly but their look suggests that my words didn't register. I point at the spades of Easter lilies and bearded irises grown wild in the little patch of land that passes for the backyard. They survive and multiply in spite of the owner's neglect of this place.

Wayne gets up from his chair and lifts the window as far as it'll go. He's been more responsive lately since he found part time work building cabinets at the Waterford. His pride and slowly building self-esteem are reflected in some of his actions.

"They don't take just nobody," he assured Wanda. "They're picky. " I'm happy for him because the privilege that goes with his skill is a free monthly bus pass. That gives him mobility to go anywhere in the city anytime he wants. It's a new thing for him.

Sometimes he goes out to use his free pass, but he has nowhere to go. He's mobile without a destination, as Wanda's alive without a purpose. They sit in this old, painted clapboard house- in this bare kitchen all day smoking cigarettes, bored, depressed, lost in their own void.

They must eat before I return home, for everyday, the same odour of fried food greets me. I feel nauseous until I get used to it. I think they're awed by my shake and bake chicken, boiled carrots and broccoli.

Sometimes I offer them what little I can afford on my student loan, but they shake their head . Perhaps they're aware of my budget, or perhaps they're not used to diverse food. I feel relieved. The left over will be my lunch the next day.

Wanda has checked herself into the Waterford.

Icould see it coming.

I've grown accustomed to her cycles by now. She goes in, starts her treatments, improves, gets released, continues her medication for a while and then fools herself into believing that she's cured for good. That's when the melancholy and the downward spiral begin and her hidden ghosts sneak up on her until she can no longer endure.

I've seen her smile for brief periods after she comes out of the Waterford. She's affectionate towards Wayne then. When they receive their checks, they go out to eat chips and gravy at Chess's on Freshwater Road.

They return, hand-in-hand, sit on the steps for a while smoking before they enter into the decrepit place we all call home. Sometimes in the middle of my sleep I hear Wanda walking around confined within the impenetrable walls of her enclosure, devoid of sleep. She hardly speaks during those periods- not even to Wayne.

Wayne looks totally lost when Wanda's at the Waterford. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he goes there to build cabinets, but he's not allowed to see her. ards are locked, the patients are allowed out only at mealtimes to congregate at the dining hall. I tell him there is a free Easter concert at the Masonic Temple. He can get there by number 3 bus. He might like it.

He stares back at me as if I've spoken to him in a foreign language. Then, in a delayed response, he mutters that he doesn't understand music without words. I assure him music can be beautiful and soothing when it is free of words that obstruct its purpose.

I want to tell him that instrumental music can liberate his spirit, open the iron doors that've imprisoned his soul and clear the cobwebs in his head. But he's already staring far away at something, at nothing in the distance. I feel enraged. I'm angry at what I cannot name.

Maybe it's me for failing to reach him. I'm mad at myself for not shaking him up from his comatose state and snapping him into some kind of action that resembles living.

"Shit, Wayne! Snap out of it!" I rebel. "You can't go on like this for the rest of your ***** life! How old are you- thirty? Thirty-five? Look at you sitting here unshaven, unwashed, reeking of smoke and grease! Stop feeling sorry for yourself, for Wanda and for your miserable life . . . . and do something about it!"

He wipes a tear with the heel of his palm and reaches out to his medicine bottle- his blessing and his curse. Dave, the previous boarder, told me those pills sedate Wayne into oblivion. That's the only way he can silence his ghosts, escape flashbacks of the accident in which both of his parents perished, and the memories of his grandmother who raised him while she was fighting the cancer that slowly reduced her to skin and bones before claiming her when Wayne was barely sixteen.

What a lousy hand he's been dealt! I wonder if it's better not to know one's parents than to know and lose them in such a horrendous way. We all carry our ghosts in one form or another.

Wanda returns from the Waterford.

The cycle is on again. She looks relaxed, teases Wayne about being a good boy in her absence and smiles bearing her bad teeth. Wayne plants an awkward kiss on her cheek. They go out to buy a case of coke and replenish their tobacco. It's May, nature is bursting with life and new promises. Blue jays and sparrows alight on the solitary spruce in the lot. I've completed my degree and I'm ready to move on.

I cannot wait to leave this miserable place: the decrepit room covered in torn blue wallpaper, creaky narrow bed, splintery desk, the ugly chair. I box my books, my records, my computer and the mismatched plate, fork, spoon, knife and mug. I pack my clothes in the small, worn-out suitcase and load up my car. My sentence is over.

As soon as the landlady shows up, I'll turn in my keys and flee. I sit at the greasy kitchen table, in what's Wanda's chair. The seat has sunken with her weight and conformed to her shape. A dog barks far away in the distance punctuating the existential feeling of the day.

The landlady arrives. She brought a new boarder to rent my room. He goes upstairs to see the place while we settle the account.

Wanda and Wayne return with their case of coke and a plastic shopping bag.

They exchange trivialities with the landlady. Bruce comes down- he'll take the room. I bid goodbye to my companions of the last eighteen months. I wonder how many different faces they've seen and adjusted to in the seven years they've been boarding here. People must've come and gone like waves on a beach. Wanda and Wayne have been the only constant on this shore surviving the storms with the help of their Lithium or Prozac.

They'll succumb to their distraught lives and endure their insignificant presence in time and space on these shores until the day when they'll be no more. I get into my hatchback, roll down the window, turn on the ignition and insert Dvorak's "Ninth Symphony From The New World" into the tape deck.

I catch a sight of Wayne and Wanda standing at the door of the clapboard house, waving goodbye. They remind me of the old couple in "The American Gothic". I honk an acknowledgement and turn up the volume of music to drown my thoughts.

As I drive away, the two figures grow smaller and smaller in my rear view mirror until I'm so faraway from them that they become specs of dust swallowed in the still life I leave behind.


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