MANDY SHUNNARAH
cw – elder abuse
Summoning Circle
1993
I’m three, an age where I can walk, though never as fast as adults would like. Stubborn from birth, they know there’s no point in hurrying. If we need to get somewhere quickly, they heave me to their hips. My grandmother’s arm slides under me, lifting my bottom with her forearm, wrapping my legs around her still slender waist.
The hallway carpet is brown and shaggy, with a worn path lightened down the middle. Wood paneled doors line either side, some decorated with the resident’s name, some unadorned. For all the colorblock clothes of the 90s, and the hot pink and teal of my favorite winter coat, I remember the 90s in neutrals. So much brown.
Grandmother Joyce’s mouth is set in a line. The face she makes when she doesn’t have time to explain. For once, I don’t ask questions.
We reach the door we’re looking for.
Inside, my grandmother’s grandmother––my great-great grandmother, Nettie, 100 years old––lies in a hospital bed, mouth open, labored breathing. My mother, Eva, and great-grandmother, Eunice, sit in a half circle around her bed, holding her hand and each other’s, like a game of telephone. Eva and Eunice look up when we enter. They do not rise.
Grandmother Joyce sets me down and I go to my mother’s knee.
“Let’s see it,” Joyce says, teeth gritted. “Let’s see what they did to her.”
Great-grandmother Eunice shakes her head. “I can’t look. I don’t want to see.”
My mother wraps her arms around me, holds me tight against her chest. Her chin digs into my shoulder and I feel her lip quivering through my Minnie Mouse t-shirt.
Grandmother Joyce goes to Granny Nettie, leaning over the bed, whispers, “It’s me, Granny. I’m here.”
She takes the layers of thin blankets, easing them from under Nettie’s wiry-haired chin. She unfolds Granny Nettie’s hands clasped on her stomach and rolls the sleeves of her nightgown to her elbows.
The bruises are the deep reds and purples of forgotten plums, of red rose petals dried to crisps.
Mama Eva gasps. Great-grandma Eunice squeezes her eyes shut, one hand to her collarbone, the tourmaline rings spinning on her bony fingers. They shake their heads, but Joyce keeps rolling Nettie’s sleeves higher and higher. I squirm in my mother’s arms, wanting to look, and she covers my eyes.
“Who did this to you?” Grandmother Joyce chokes out.
But Granny Nettie can’t speak. Hasn’t been able to for months.
“It’s the nurses! Who else?” Eunice bellows.
“Hush, mama,” Joyce says. “She can still hear.”
I peek through the cracks of my mother’s fingers. In Eva’s sobs her hands shake and pieces of the room beyond find my vision, like a puzzle with the border pieces intact, but the middle full of holes. It is then I see the silent tears on Joyce’s cheeks.
My first memory is one of generational trauma. My first memory is one of abuse.
Stories don’t start at the beginning; stories begin at recognition. This is where my story begins.
“Don’t you never put me in a home when I get old,” Great-grandma Eunice says, retired but still spry. “Don’t never let them do me like that. I’d rather die.”
Two decades from this moment, Great-grandma Eunice will have tried for the last time to cook at 4 a.m. and leave the electric burner on. She’ll try for the last time to walk down the street before dawn, the dementia making her think she had to catch a bus. She’ll forget how to cook her classic banana pudding and what day it is and who I am, but she’ll remember she told us not to put her in a home. She’ll scream as we pack her clothes. She’ll tell us we’re killing her.
But now, no one speaks. Five generations of women surround the bed of the eldest among us, our matriarch. Silently, we reach for each other’s hands, forming an enclosure. My mother holding Granny Nettie’s hand, me holding my mother Eva’s hand, Great-grandma Eunice holding my hand, Grandmother Joyce holding Eunice’s hand, and Granny Nettie holding Joyce’s hand.
We’re a summoning circle, willing revenge, justice, healing. The golden light of the setting sun slides down the wall. Our shared blood hums in our veins.
* * *
1996
Theirs was a house of mysteries, Grandmother Joyce and Papa Earl’s.
The pink-carpeted sunroom that was off-limits. The upstairs balcony no one dined or sunned themselves on. The tiny door in the wall of the downstairs bathroom. The walk-in closet in the master bedroom that had a platform like a stage. What was hiding underneath that platform? The green guest bedroom that no guests ever slept in because no guests came to call. The upright piano––never played except for my occasional tuneless banging––so tall and wide, as though a coffin topped the keys. The long dining room table no one ever ate at, even on holidays, and that crystal punch bowl that never served a foamy mix of ginger ale and lime in my lifetime.
The mysteries did not cease inside the house’s walls. There was the door to the crawl space where kittens could regularly be found. The storm drain where crawdads peeked their whiskered heads. Even the house next door with its peeling paint and where no one came or went. Who lives there? I wanted to know. An old woman, Grandmother Joyce said. Why don’t we ever see her? I asked. Not everybody wants to be seen. She doesn’t like to be disturbed. I’d stand on the bridge over the culvert ditch in the backyard, staring at the house, looking for light and shadow in the windows. A dozen summers standing sentry and the most I saw was a rustle of the curtains.
Where there are mysteries, there are secrets. Like the backyard storage shed elevated a story on stilts that leaned at a precipitous angle and its wooden stairs rotten through. What’s in there? I’d ask. Nothing important, Papa Earl would say. Then why keep it? I’d push. Tell me, Papa! What’s in there? He’d cut me a glare. Nothing but snakes and spiders now.
My grandparents worked to keep the snakes and spiders from the house. Even after a long day at the railyard and the hospital, they cleaned with meticulous effort––mopping, wiping, scrubbing, and never speaking. The outside was kept out, only invited inside in the form of fake flowers; artificial life, vases never needing water.
It was never the snakes and spiders that needed to be kept out––it was the ghosts. My grandmother shooed them away as though dusting for cobwebs and both grandparents refused to speak of them. They did their work, but the ghosts remained.
And there were the vines. Not the quick kudzu whose swift growth is a constant reminder of its need to be maintained, yanked from the earth and cut with a quickness. These vines would strangle a house, though it’d take a decade or so. They’d grow imperceptibly, until the day you’d pull back the curtains and the room would remain dark, the window blanketed by leaves.
Didn’t we used to be able to see out that window? And you’d wonder how you missed it; how years of dimming light had escaped your notice.
Like the memories of my grandparents and their shadowy house, the vines come unbidden, ghosts moving to a new haunt.
* * *
1999
Across the old Pratt Highway from the House of Mysteries is the House of Ghosts, where Great-Grandma Eunice lives.
The ghosts invaded my grandparents’ house, as curious about its mysteries as I was. However, at Great-Grandma Eunice’s place, I didn’t have to look for the ghosts because they never made themselves scarce. The house itself wasn’t haunted––Eunice brought the ghosts with her. They trailed her like a game of Follow the Leader.
First in line is her baby brother who died of polio before the vaccine was invented. Next, her brother who sank with the U.S.S. Indianapolis, either drowned or eaten by sharks, his body never recovered. Then her husband, one-legged from diabetes and addle-brained from alcohol. Her mother, Granny Nettie, a centenarian who’d rather have been reading a grocery store western. And all the ladies from her bowling league, immortalized in the golden likenesses on the tops of her bowling trophies, and for whom she issued the constant lament, All my friends are dead. Hope to God you never live so long as to outlive all your friends.
We hoped the dementia would help her forget the ghosts, just as it made her forget everything else. But she only saw her phantom hangers-on more clearly. In the many emergency room visits necessitated by the deterioration of her brain, she would stare blankly at the ceiling, reaching out with a gnarled hand, lips mumbling gibberish in an attempt to decipher their messages. Each time, they would push her hand away, sending her back to the land of the living.
Tired of the ghosts, or at least needing to keep a better eye on them, my grandparents decided they would sell both houses and buy one where they and Eunice could all live together. For sale signs spiked the yards of the House of Mysteries and the House of Ghosts on either side of the old Pratt Highway that was hardly a highway at all.
The move didn’t rid them of the ghosts. They followed their leader to the new house too––whispering in Eunice’s ears until they seemed more real to her than the living.
In a photo album held in her tangled fingers, she knows the names of the dead. Where they’re from, how she knows them, when and where the photo was taken, and intricacies and intimacies of their long-gone lives.
Toward the end of the album, she flips a page.
“Who’s this little girl?” she asks, tapping the face of my third grade school picture. She pokes at my cheek as if a good prod will bring my younger self to life.
“That’s me.”
“No, can’t be. You’re here,” she insists.
“That’s me as a little girl.”
She shakes her head. “I’ve never seen that little girl in my life.”
I’m here and not a ghost yet. If I had been, she’d have seen me.
* * *
2019
When you Google “Pratt Highway, Alabama” my grandparents’ and great-grandmother’s old houses are the first two image results. Right across the street from one another.
The houses were remodeled before they were sold, my grandparents and great-grandma already having moved into their new house together, so I never saw the insides remade. On Realtor.com I browse the photos. New carpet where there were hardwoods before, hardwoods where before there was carpet. Fresh painted walls where wallpaper once stuck. An eco-friendly toilet where there was previously a gargling, water guzzler with gasping suction loud enough to frighten children.
I’m not looking for the ghosts, but I spot them. They linger in the corners as specters do, refusing to be swept out with broom or feather duster.
From as far back as I can remember until I was about twelve, I would go into what my family would call trances. So consumed was I by my own thoughts––replaying the mental movie of what had happened and scripting the movie of what I feared or anticipated would happen––that I would stare off into space. My concentration would go unbroken until someone, usually Mama Eva, would grow tired of my staring blankly or require my attention. They’d break my trance with a Helloooo? Anyone home? and wave a hand in front of my face.
“She’s in one of her trances again,” my mother would say.
“Wonder what she’s thinking about so hard,” my grandmother would say.
“If she keeps on like that her eyes’ll go crossed,” my grandfather would say.
“Leave the child alone,” my great-grandmother would insist. “Just let ’er think. She ain’t hurtin’ nothin’.”
The difference between memory and apparition is negligible. What are memories if not ghosts inside your head? What are apparitions if not memories that live outside your mind?
More often than not, in my trances I stared at the space where the wall met the ceiling. Stared until my eyes relaxed and I could see the air ripple.
Mandy Shunnarah is an Alabama-born, Palestinian-American writer who now calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Entropy Magazine, The Normal School, Heavy Feather Review, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skaters and Skateparks in Middle America, will be out from Belt Publishing in fall 2022. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.