The Horror

My husband and kids have always been drawn to horror.  As grade schoolers, my children moved from Goosebumps to Amityville Horror before they even hit double-digits.  While my daughter wore out our VHS copy of The Ring over her afternoon snack after middle school every day, I sometimes think that my son’s intense interest in film critique somehow erupted from watching Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which is one of my own favorite movies. Theoretically, I know a conscientious parent would never have permitted PG-13 movies until children were a chronological match for the labeled rating and content, but I could not produce enough fright to meet my family’s demand unless I unleashed the demons of hell.  Today I can count on my nuclear family to scoff at Paranormal Activity, but to adore The Omen.  As both children seem to have developed relatively normally, I guess we have not facilitated their entire developmental unraveling by permitting so much scariness at such a young age.  If anything, horror movies have prepared them for many of the unsettling conditions of this century.

For my part, I find war movies frightening and disturbing, and I tend to not want to view anything that is based in reality.  I guess my preference is fantasy horror, in which there is some kind of alternate reality: demons, ghosts, rituals.  I dislike gore, (I call films like Saw “Ghorror”,) and draw the line at torture.  I like fright and suspense. 

I am not really sure how to describe my bottom line on ghosts.  Like many, I have experiences that I cannot fully explain.  I still swear that I saw some kind of figure running from a stone memorial and hiding behind a tree at my college, but there are some likely explanations for my seeing something unusual in that my college brain sometimes had a little extra serotonin on board.  I also pledge that my mother’s house is haunted, but even the guys on Mythbusters would think the same---that’s a later blog entry.  Considering critically my actual ideas about ghosts, spirits, apparitions, I am pushed to admit that I believe on some level, but their existence doesn’t really intrigue or scare me.

In the late 80’s, my sister and I undertook a contract working in the Aleutians, the sweeping hook of an island chain off of Alaska in the Bering Sea.  We processed seafood, mostly crab and cod.  While the work was sloppy, back-breaking and relentless, we each had East Coast college educations that prepared us for the assignment.  We were poised to accept all duties when seafood wasn’t being offloaded and processed, and once my sister took a full 12-hr shift watching cement dry. 

The shifts were 12 hours on, 12 off.  I worked nights and my sister Lee worked days, which gave us some privacy in the cramped accommodations of the floating processing plant.  We shared a small cabin on a permanently docked barge that started out as a liberty ship, consigned to bring fallen soldiers back from the Pacific during WWII.  Ship gossip held that the barge’s abundant refrigeration system was originally constructed for a floating morgue. Our more creative colleagues described sightings of individuals in uniform roaming the decks, and many a beer was opened in libation to those souls originally transported on our barge.

Because we worked alternate shifts, and we bore a strong family resemblance, for a few weeks early in our contracts our colleagues couldn’t tell Lee and me apart and thought we were one woman working around the clock.  While we each felt like we were working endlessly, Lee and I were caught together over a meal in the dining hall to thundering remarks of, “Oh look everyone!  There’s two of ‘em!  That’s how they do it!!  Are you guys twins?”  While I am 4 years older than Lee, I am sure we administered twin glares in response to the unwanted attention.  We have a family and gender propensity toward disapproving stares that still gets me in trouble.

The meals Lee and I could easily take together were breakfast/dinner, due to our day/night shift work.  The food at our company, UniSea, was excellent, and it was common to have a choice among duck stir-fry, prime rib, salmon, tortillas, coconut shrimp for the 6pm meal, and full breakfast, compete with sausage, eggs, French toast, fruit for the 6am meal.  There were many generations and ethnicities represented and the dining hall seated 50-60 workers coming and going to the round-the-clock work. 

One of these busy meals found Lee and myself in an exchange something like: “You know, when you’re working and I’m sleeping, I sometimes wake up hearing sneezing and snoring and sniffing.  It always sounds like it’s coming from your bunk.”

“That’s funny, when you’re working and I’m sleeping, I hear the same thing, except it’s coming from YOUR bunk!”

We laughed it off, possibly because it seemed extremely real, or maybe we were too disinterested to delve too deeply.  Listeners to our conversation explained that there was a long-told tale of a seafood worker leaping or falling to his death from the deck outside the porthole of our cabin, and the sneezing sounds we heard were probably him, lost to an eternity of sinus trouble.  Still others imagined the Sneezer was one of the officers originally occupying our cabin, because we were in the commanding officer’s accommodations.  It was certain that the bunks, safely space-efficiently build into the walls with drawer compartments beneath, hadn’t changed location, and therefore it would be easy for a ghost to always find its berth, head cold or not.  Somehow none of this was scary, and if there were a spirit haunting the room, Lee and I had nothing but compassion for the poor thing.  It was really sickly.

Today, I look more for signs than I do for spirits.  I like to notice hawks, because I really admire them and try to imagine what it’s like from their vantage point, and they remind me of my dad.  I put bees and wasps that I find in the house outside, safely, asking that they tell their friends that I am a kind ally and therefore they don’t need to sting me.  My husband, daughter and I compare sightings of our deceased cat, Eartha, whom we lost last summer.  Catching her just out of my field of vision is a great comfort because I feel she is still with us.  If there are ghosts about, I wish them well, and request that if they are bored and they have a little time, could they throw in a load of laundry or two, or run the vacuum?

Jobs I had as a teenager

My friend at work told me once that she worried that her teenaged kids would have negative first job experiences, and this would impede their desire to work hard and get ahead.  I considered my early job history and wondered if my current ethic has somehow been compromised by my initial encounter with the working world.

Like many other girl-children of the 70's, my first jobs were babysitting.  Before the advent of modern parenting paranoia, any local tween or teen, known or unknown to a family, was a candidate for watching bratty children while parents cavorted about town.  During the 70’s people drank, and that included parents.  Expected parental activities included: donning excruciatingly visible attire; driving to pick up an strange local teenaged gal; kissing the kids goodbye after explaining what kind of goodie could be expected for dinner and dessert; driving to an exciting local eating establishment; quaffing significantly with other willing adults at the restaurant bar while waiting for a table; driving home to pay a strange local teenager $1/hour for keeping the household children alive; and then driving the strange local teenaged gal home. 

Generally, the trip from my house to the family’s house alone in the car with the strange dad was disturbing.  The hallmark, “So what grade are you in school?” never really broke the tension and I am sure I presented as uptight and dull.  However, the frightening drunken dad drive home nearly smashed any innate desire I had for seriously working.  I felt small, insignificant and ashamed as I was ushered home by a gin-and-tonic-breathing local baron of industry, only to be further dismissed by a handful of folding money and a dangerous, “Sheeya later kiddo….I left ya ya a little tip in there.”

The summer after my Junior year in high school, I obtained a job at a local cultural resort where my family sometimes vacationed.  I lived in a cramped, stifling bunkhouse over the kitchen of a rotting Victorian hotel with “fast” kids who sometimes couldn’t get up in the morning to go to work.  Because I could type and miraculously traveled downstairs to work each day, I was awarded extra tasks of banging together the daily menu and mimeographing it on an ancient tumbling machine in addition to my waitress duties.

Possibly due to my taking on extra work without complaint, (read: malleability,) I was recommended somehow to do some personal tasks for an elderly woman whose caregiver had to leave for a week.  She was a round woman of old-fashioned slumping enormity.  Her body sagged like suet melting in a woodpecker feeding bag. Her hair was shaped rather than styled, and somehow the combs that held it together seemed wedged into her skull.  You could detect the exact smell of her head from any corner of the room.  Smiling, she somehow reminded me of those drunken dads driving my home from babysitting, expecting that I would seem subservient and grateful to earn a small wad of bills.  She found me at the restaurant and explained, “I need a girl to do some things for me while Miranda is away.”

Between meal shifts, I arrived at her boarding house on the day and time upon which we agreed.  She greeted me with smug enthusiasm, lightly asking how my summer was going.  She requested that I take all of the contents out of her handkerchief and scarf drawer, and iron them, which I did straight away.  She asked me brightly from across the room to turn down her bed, and to move a suitcase from under her bed to under the bureau.  After a light dusting of the interior of her modest cultural retreat abode, I was dismissed, and told to return the following day at the same time and place.  She paid me a couple of bucks for my time.

The next day, I returned to a duplication of tasks: empty the handkerchief and scarf drawer; iron everything; turn down the bed and lightly dust.  I did these items quite cheerfully and silently, and again received payment and instructions to return again tomorrow. 

On the third day, Madam requested me to start on the handkerchiefs while she went into the bathroom.  I considered not actually ironing them, as they were still quite crisp from two days of hot flattening.  I could hear her start a bath, and I dutifully did what I was told.  After ironing several handkerchiefs, Madam called for me to come into the bathroom.  There, in the stagnant bathroom that smelled of poorly ventilated antediluvian woodwork entombing a half-century of mouse nests and old lady fannies, stood Madam, wearing only a full-body corset that laced in the back like a pair of ice skates. 

At that moment all the questions I had about why she needed her damn handkerchiefs ironed everyday were answered: Madam was trapped in her ancient brassier.  She was held together by sepia-colored undergarments engineered like suspension bridges and without the nimble fingers of Miranda or some girl to unlock her cage, Madam was not going to have her weekly bath.  My stomach fell into my knees.

First I had to unlace her, which was way too intimate for a 16-yr-old girl who presents as uptight and dull, away from her home for her first real summer job.  I could smell Madam’s ancient flesh and knew suddenly that my doggedly ironing and folding the handkerchiefs was a test to see if I could take direction and be trusted to be quiet in her presence.  After peeling the cruddy garment from her body, I had to help her with her granny pants, and then assist Madam into the tub.  Looking away from her and around the crumbling bathroom to maintain both of our dignities, I saw with horror a similar stained old back-lacing brassier hanging from the shower rod.  Only Miranda could have put it there, and I anticipated the awfulness of my next obvious task.

She told me that while she was bathing, I would have to soak and then scrub her brassier.  Then I would scrub her back, help her from the tub, dry her off and contain her body in the dry torture garment in the bathroom that Miranda had left her.  I was mortified as I completed these ghastly instructions.

When I look back upon this day, I am ashamed that I was disgusted with an elderly matron who loved culture and summer, but could only retain her caregiver for the first week of her annual stay.  She was so very alone and possibly trying to maintain a lifetime tradition of three weeks on Lake Chautauqua, attending the symphony and strolling on the mall, noting every building and tree of her youth, joining an author discussion or historical lecture.  I was 16 years old, and it was 1979.  My unpreparedness for being Madam’s bra and girdle scrubber and bath valet spooked me and I was so embarrassed I could never return, nor could I tell anyone about it.

Madam came looking for me at the restaurant later in the week.  I saw her hairdo bobbing up and down out the window and hid from sight.  She asked the other waitresses in a loud, entitled, impatient tone why I didn’t come back to work for her; sadly, after that bath she’d wanted me to return in a couple of days and I could tell that she wasn’t going to have me iron the dusty handkerchiefs anymore.  It would be all baths and bras from now on.  I hastily told her I would do it but then I never showed up.  As I hid from her at the restaurant, I could tell she was desperate for a bath and a change of undergarments, but I couldn’t bring myself to assist her.

I hope that I grew from these early work experiences.  Today I consider myself to be a hard worker, but clear about what the duties are up-front.  I don’t like to be surprised by anything and always ask a lot of questions.  I can speak truth to power.  I show up when I am supposed to.  After the initial embarrassments that I experienced of not being able to discern intimacy from service in the cars of my babysitting bosses and in Madam’s bathroom, I better understand that sometimes I have to be able to talk to people I don’t know, and sometimes I have to roll up my sleeves and get the unpleasant tasks underway.  These are soft skills, learned the hard way.