She's Not There Read Online Free PDF Page B

Ethel King Redding, I assumed they’d named it after her.
    Gammie, Hilda, and Aunt Nora were out in the living room, having this discussion:
    GAMMIE: Hilda, do you know where you’d GET
(inhale, pause, exhale)
if you went—directly
—
EAST
—
from Surf City?
    MRS. WATSON: Whoop? Whoop? Whoop?
    GAMMIE: EAST!
    AUNT NORA: I think we should leave. I think we’re in danger!
    GAMMIE: If you went EAST from Surf City, Hilda! Where do you think you’d get?
    MRS. WATSON: Hm. Whoop? Mm. England? Whoop? Is it England you’d get to?
    GAMMIE: SPAIN!
    MRS. WATSON: Oh, no, I don’t think it would be—
    GAMMIE: SPAIN!
    MRS. WATSON: Portugal? Perhaps Portugal? Whoop?
    GAMMIE: SPAIN! That is where you would wind up. SPAIN!
    I came out of my room and stood by the card table.
    Aunt Nora said, “I think we should leave. I’m afraid!”
    Gammie looked at her and rolled her eyes. “Don’t listen to her, Jimmy. She’s just a chicken. A SCARED CHICKEN! Cluck cluck cluck.”
    â€œI think we should leave, too,” I said.
    â€œOh, nonsense.”
    â€œI do,” I said.
    â€œIf you think I’m driving back to Philadelphia in this pouring—”
    Aunt Nora took a look at me. She saw something.
    â€œI’ll drive,” she said.
    â€œOh, you will not,” Gammie said. “Don’t be an imbecile.”
    â€œWhoop?” said Hilda.
    â€œWe’re going to pack up and head home,” Aunt Nora shouted at Mrs. Watson. Mrs. Watson adjusted her hearing aids. They squelched. “There’s a hurricane.”
    Mrs. Watson nodded. “Entirely sensible,” she said.
    â€œYou all go,” said Gammie. “I’m staying here.”
    â€œWe’re all
going
,” said Aunt Nora. “Either you go, or you die,” she said. For a long moment, Aunt Nora and Gammie stared at each other.
    â€œJimmy,” Gammie said at last. “Go get the vodka.”
    Years later, Gammie announced that when she died, she wanted to be a cadaver. She donated her body to Jefferson Medical School. “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” she explained. She talked her friend Hilda into being a cadaver, too. It was something they did together. At the time, I was horrified by this, by the idea of my grandmother’s corpse being the private concern of a first-year medical student in Philadelphia, opening her up and holding her liver and her heart in his hands. Did he know, as he examined her innards, that this had been someone’s Gammie, someone who once danced on top of pianos, whose first husband nicknamed her “Stardust”?
    Now I’m less bothered by all this, though. Maybe she’s right, when you’re dead, you’re dead. I don’t know.
    I looked out the back of Gammie’s Dodge Seneca as Aunt Nora drove us into the storm. The boardwalk was visible as a dark shadow against the threatening sea.
    â€œYou’re Gammie’s little apple,” Gammie said from the seat next to me, and pinched my cheek. The windshield wipers slapped against the storm. I looked at my grandmother’s earrings and at Mrs. Watson’s wedding ring. Thirty-three years later, after I became a woman, my mother gave me Mrs. Watson’s ring. Hilda and Gammie had been dead for thirteen years at that point. The ring has two big diamonds and eight little ones.
    â€œWhoop? Whoop? Whoop?”
    Aunt Nora looked at me in her rearview mirror. “It’s all right, Jimmy,” she said. “We’re going to be safe now.”

After the Bath (Winter 1974)
    I had high hopes. My parents and sister had gone out. That left me alone in the place we called the Coffin House, built by Lemuel Coffin in 1890. It was just a few days before Christmas, and the war was over. This girl named Onion was coming over while my parents were gone. There were rumors about her.
    We’d been living in the Coffin House only for a couple of years