I am the ghost that haunts the Midwest. I apparently look like a lot of people, as their relatives tend to tell me. Maybe my blank stare is a blank slate onto which they can easily project the images of their loved ones, many of them dead. Maybe I'm just sort of generically Eastern European in my build and gait. Sometimes I think I was engineered for the bearing of children and the digging up of potatoes.
Anyway, I walked through the doors of this building today, shuddering from the cold and stomping the snow off my feet and generally making enough of a commotion to drown out the majority of what a woman said to me as she sat in a wheelchair in the entryway. All I caught was, "Sister."
At first I thought she was expressing some sort of kindred womanly greeting. I'd already pulled open one of the second set of glass doors and was halfway through. "I'm sorry, what?" I said.
"You look just like my sister," the woman replied. She was waiting for her ride, with her chair angled to look out the glass doors. As she spoke, I noticed the gaping spaces where most of her teeth had been in her youth. Now she sat hunched in her chair, her elbows propped up on the armrests and her hands clenched together and held tight to her chest.
I wasn't sure how to take this as I imagined how much younger and more attractive her sister could possibly be, and I was just about to say, "Oh, that's nice." But I only got as far as, "Oh," before she continued.
"She died from leukemia when she was 39."
"That's--"
"You look just like her when she was young."
I was somewhat at a loss and finally said, "Oh...well, I'm sorry."
Then this hunched and toothless woman turned her face from the ghost of her long-dead sister and stared out the door into the winter damp. As I continued through the door, she quietly ended our awkward little talk. "Sorry to have to tell you."
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2 comments:
I'll take some potatoes, if you're digging them up anyway.
You know, this might be a good opportunity for some John Edwarding.
woman: You look like my dead sister who died of lieukemia.
you: That's funny, because I've always had this strange sympathy about lieukemia, like I had it in another life. I also keep thinking of the letter E. Did your sister have an E in her name?
woman: Yes! Her name was Mildred! That's amazing!
you: Mildred, I knew that was it. I keep seeing this ring too, like a family heirloom.
woman: Well, she had an old necklace.
you: That's it! And the necklace is in a safe with a combination of 4-30-12, right?
woman: No, it's 5-11-13.
See where I'm going with this?
Great work.
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