ghosts as signaled by our barking dog, a misplaced object, a door slamming when a certain name was spoken. My mother was sure that what was uncertain in the real world could be accounted for in the supernatural one. There the possibilities of what happened and why were boundless. And because my mother still believed I was sensitive to the other world, she often asked me to use a Ouija board to communicate with the ghosts of my father, my brother, and sometimes her mother, my grandmother.
I had never met my grandmother. In 1925 she swallowed a large amount of raw opium, and my mother, then a girl of nine, watched her die. Yet in another sense I saw my grandmother every day. She was in our living room, in the form of an oil portrait my mother had commissioned, based on a sepia-toned photograph. In this portrait, my grandmother’s face was larger than life. She was a beautiful young woman in her thirties with straight-cut bangs and a neat bun. Her dress was blue with a high collar. Her expression was enigmatic, her gaze ethereal, eyes focused on a spot beyond the artist, out into the future. The painting hung near the piano, where I practiced every day for one hour, with my grandmother peering over my shoulder.
This was the face I also saw in my mind as I sat before the Ouija board. My fingers would be poised on the planchette, my tearful mother opposite me. She was always hoping for one last good-bye, one more message of love. “Do you still love me? Do you miss me?” It was heart-wrenching even to me, the heartless teenager who would not permit herself to show any kind of emotion. I would give the answers my mother hoped for: Yes. Yes.
Pragmatic woman that my mother was, she would eventually seek advice about daily living. For some reason, she thought the ghosts had as much interest as she did in the Dow Jones. “IBM or U.S. Steel?” she would say, hoping for insider-trading tips of the best kind. And I, the supposed purveyor of these spiritual answers from Wall Street ghosts, pushed the planchette to whatever came to mind just to get the ordeal over with. Buy. Sell. Yes. No. Up. Down. Upon reflection now, I see that my spurious advice was probably no worse than that of most stockbrokers. My mother did amazingly well in building up her modest portfolio.
She turned to the ghosts for child-rearing advice too: “Amy treat me so bad,” she once said as I prepared to divine the answer. “What I should do—send her Taiwan, school for bad girls?” The planchette deftly scooted to the correct answer: No.
Another time my mother wanted to know whether she should open a Chinese restaurant. Everyone loved her potsticker dumplings, and she dreamt she could make a million selling them. I pictured myself washing heaps of greasy bowls and pans with burnt dough stuck to the bottom. Bad idea, came the Ouija’s answer. Lose money.
In my memory, which I admit can be subjectively poor and riddled with a wild imagination, I recall that our sessions with the Ouija board were often accompanied by eerie signs that ghosts were indeed in the room. It would suddenly become not just cold but windy. A flower would snap from its stem as if in answer to an important question. A sound would be heard in the distance—first by my mother, then by me—seemingly the voice of a crying woman. And once the board rose in the air several inches, my fingers still attached to it, then crashed to the floor. That is what I remember, although logic tells me it was the result of either hysteria or peanut butter stuck to my fingertips.
Besides using the Ouija board, my mother continued to find advice in other, less traditional places. One time she looked under the kitchen sink, where she stored cleaning products. She was cleaning the kitchen after dinner, and my little brother and I were watching TV nearby. I saw her pick up a can of Old Dutch cleanser and stare at it as if it possessed the lucidity of a crystal ball. “Holland,” she announced to us. “Holland is clean. We moving to Holland.”
A few months later, my mother, my brother, and I boarded the SS Rotterdam. Our mother had sold the ranch duplex, the maple colonial furniture, and the Plymouth, and otherwise reduced our worldly possessions to the contents of three new Samsonite suitcases and a huge duffel bag. Once in Holland, my brother and I realized our mother had absolutely no plan. We stayed in The Hague, then Amsterdam, then Utrecht. In each city, my mother used idiosyncratic sign language to inquire after the nearest Chinese restaurant. We would find these miserable way stations, and there she would eat with the hunger of the starved, Chinese food tinged with Indonesian ingredients and prepared for a Dutch palate. Awful, my mother would pronounce, and drink copious amounts of tea to wash away the bad taste. (This would be her pattern in every city, town, and hamlet we visited in Europe over the next year—this hopeful search for Chinese food, her disappointment in every dish she tasted.)
We located an international school in a small town called Werkhoven, as well as lodging in a woman’s house. This landlady did not allow us to keep our lights on beyond nine at night, making it difficult for my brother and me to finish our homework. Equally bad, her housekeeping skills did not satisfy my mother’s notions of Old Dutch cleanliness.
After two weeks in Holland, we took a train to Germany and landed in Karlsruhe, where we lived as guests of a U.S. Army chaplain, an old friend of my father’s. We attended an American school, where students thought it a fun prank to aim lit Bunsen burners at one another. This, I told my mother, was not the kind of education she had had in mind when she had envisioned us studying abroad. With that, she bought a Volkswagen Beetle and a handbook of English-speaking schools, and off we went, heading south, letting ourselves be guided purely by the twists and turns of European highways.
By such maps of fate, we wound up in Montreux, Switzerland, at the shores of Lake Geneva. In this resort town, my mother quickly found our new home, a fully furnished chalet, complete with cuckoo clock and feather-tick beds, renting for the equivalent of one hundred U.S. dollars a month. The largest room served as living room, dining room, and my brother’s bedroom, and its entire length was lined with mullioned windows showcasing a spectacular view of the lake and the Alps. Every day, I would stare at this amazing scenery and wonder how I came to be so lucky. I would then remember that my father and older brother were dead, and that was the reason I was here.
Half a mile from our chalet, down a cobblestone path, lay an international school. It was within eyesight of Château de Chillon, where the dashing Lord Byron was said to have chained himself to write his poetry in religious agony. By happy chance, there were two openings for day students. My mother weighed the benefits of a four-to-one pupil–teacher ratio, the mandatory ski outings as physical education, the private piano lessons and one-to-one drawing classes, the Spanish teacher from Spain, the French teacher from France, and English teachers from England, and decided it was all worth the extravagant cost of six hundred dollars per year.
This marvelous school was attended by the sons and daughters of ambassadors and company presidents, rich kids the likes of whom I had never known. One girl wore a lynx coat atop a bikini to class, much to the amusement of the young male teachers. There were two Persian kids in the lower grades, a six-year-old boy and his nine-year-old sister, who were followed everywhere by bodyguards. The girl who became my closest friend had also recently lost her father, and she had a clothing allowance of a thousand dollars a month—this was in 1968, mind you—yet she was forever broke and showed no shame in bumming cigarettes and a few francs off me on a regular basis.
The male teachers were handsome, not that much older than the junior and senior students. I promptly fell in love with one of them. I was by then a somewhat pudgy girl, usually blind because I would not wear my glasses. I had thick glossy hair that fell to my waist, which complemented my flower-power mini-shimmy. Whenever I had to go to the piano practice room, I would sit on the window ledge there and smoke cigarettes, watching the swans and geese at the lake, thinking my cynical and silly thoughts, most of which concerned ways to sneak off to meet my boyfriend. In America, I had been a dateless dork, the sisterly friend to boys I had crushes on. In Switzerland, I was an exotique, sought after by the regular customers in the café, the young drifter from Italy, the factory worker from Spain, the radicals from Germany. At last, I was a popular sex object. Life had begun! This, sad to say, was the quality of my thoughts.
My boyfriend was the “older man,” as CliffsNotes described him. Franz was, in fact, the first boy who ever said he loved me. He wrote me a twenty-four-page love letter, all in German, of which I was able to translate the first line: “My darling Angel, who dims the heavens above me …” Who wouldn’t