Season Of Ghosts

My wife and I are both what Ray Bradbury called “October people.” We revel in the pyrotechnics in the trees, in the tangy air, in the numbed nose and cheeks, in the lighting of fires in the wood stove, in the blanket of early darkness in which nature wraps us in this too-short season.

While we do not share our neighbors’ obsessive fascination with Halloween decorations, we do enjoy the approach of the holiday most churches abhor and try to drown out with their silly Reformation Day activities, the staginess of which reminds me of Kwanzaa and Earth Day.  We live too far out in the sticks to be visited by trick-or-treaters, a fact which displeases my generous-hearted and gregarious wife. Our own Halloween festivities are limited to watching old horror movies, most of which don’t feature even a single drop of blood.

I made an exception this past week, choosing to view for the first time in 42 years Brian DePalma’s version of Stephen King’s Carrie. We had great fun watching it, commenting on the measured pace, the very Nineteen Seventies vibe of the film, the lack of gratuitous gore. We were both shocked at the number of teen girls shown in full frontal nudity in the opening shower sequence, however; neither of us remembered it being so, well, frontal back when we saw it in the days when Vietnam and Watergate were still fresh in the national mind.

While I enjoyed the movie, especially the moment when Sissy Spacek’s Carrie transforms from wallflower to avenging demon in the blink of an eye, neither the plot nor the thrills compelled me to keep watching. What held me within the movie-world was a deep mournfulness, brought on by the main character’s home situation.  Watching Spacek skillfully play the awkward telekinetic teenager, I focused on things that I probably noticed back in 1976 but perhaps chose to ignore.

Carrie White lives in an un-affluent part of town in what we can infer is a rental house (her mother, in an attempt to sabotage Carrie’s upcoming prom date, threatens to take Carrie and “just leave, just move away,” something most mortgage slaves don’t usually do). The old house is shadowy, filled with religious bric-a-brac, and is almost a movie character itself. Each room of the house contains the old pre-World War II fixtures and dressings that figured so large in my childhood home, the little rental house in which I grew up. Old fashioned bathtubs, large kitchen sinks with the curious elephant trunk spouts, ceiling light fixtures that were little more than a bare bulb in a porcelain socket (in fact, in our little house, that’s exactly what the ceiling fixtures were, with no adornment, no globe, no glass covering). Tall, screened windows, doors with crackled, painted-over frames and glass knobs, pantries with brick interior walls, beds with spartan iron frames and home-made quilts. Smudges on the cheap paint in the hallway, beveled mirrors on the bathroom wall with black spots on the perimeters where the silvering had worn away. But a sense of impoverished safety, of a refuge from a world populated by cruel, sneering people who drove cars and whose mothers never cried over the bills.

I watched the scenes unspool and felt the ache of the undercurrent of the sadness of my childhood, a sadness of which I was almost completely unaware until I was a young man living far from my boyhood home, a young man who had learned to be introspective and analytical about his own beginnings and path.

Carrie’s mother, played with eerie fanatical precision by Piper Laurie (and bearing an uncanny resemblance to Carrie Fisher), badgers her introverted daughter with a distorted version of Christianity and a venomous man-hating sexual phobia that I’ve personally witnessed in a handful of church women in my life. But her mother also provides security and the fragile peace that accompanies what awkward children think of as the safe harbor of home. This security and peace are the twin engines that drive blood-soaked Carrie back home after her night of humiliation and supernatural revenge. Even as she is dealt a mortal wound by her insane mother, Carrie retreats inside the heart of the house, embraces her mother’s corpse, and brings the whole thing down around herself as penance and self-annihilation ignite the flammable material she’s carried around inside herself for her entire short and tragic life.

But in the earlier scenes in which Carrie is shown coming home, living her life with her mother, Carrie is resting inside the only real peace she knows. As long as she shows no interest in boys, there is no one, nothing to mock her or belittle her or frighten her within the walls of the house. And that is the string that vibrated within me as I re-watched the movie. My childhood was very peaceful in comparison with those who have been sexually abused, or who grew up in war zones, or had a drunken parent. But because of my (for those days) unusual family situation, because of our poverty, and exacerbated by my extreme shyness and sense of worthlessness, my childhood away from the sheltering walls of our tiny house was terrifying and traumatic. There was always a bully, always a mocker, always a tormentor. Some of them were children, some were adults who should have known better. I was called names, belittled, sneered at. Worst of all, attention was called to me for being different, for having a different sort of family and living situation. And we were very poor, which can in some circles be an unforgivable sin.

I can clearly remember coming home from school, retreating inside after yet another day of name-calling and mockery, and finally feeling safe when that heavy, glass-paned door would shut behind me. Then I could change out of my school clothes into my play clothes, and my adoring little black cat Tink would run to give me her purring love, and I had stacks of comic books and real books, and I would sit at the kitchen table or sprawl on the worn linoleum floor and read until my eyes ached, and I would act out scenes from books, and I would discuss the plots with my mother while she stood at the kitchen sink or the stove and watched me with her sad smile and the same blue eyes with which I scan this computer screen at this very moment.

Later, in high school, when I had visited the homes of some of my classmates and been awed at how rich they were (looking back, I realize how lower-middle-class their homes were, but in comparison with us, they were Rockefellers).  I would return home after these visits and look at the bare-bulb fixtures and the smudged door frames and the little gas stoves in each room and the dingy paint on the walls, and I would swallow the certainty that God did not love my family, that we were different, that I would always be different, that I did not then nor ever would deserve happiness or anything nice. But the soft drone of the AM radio in the kitchen while Mother cooked a humble supper and smoked a cigarette, and the golden glow of the unshaded light bulbs, and the hiss of the glowing cathedral of gas stoves, and the plaintive meow of my sleek little black companion, and the musty ink smell of my books…these things would join together in a ballet that pushed the cruelty of my school hours aside, and would lead me back into the dance with the things that were familiar, the things that proved I mattered, that proved someone loved me, and there she was, cooking supper, and there the other one was, with the jingle bell on her collar, and no one within those walls called me names or smirked at me, and I was a prince in a palace as I ran and played in the dim, tiny rooms, because the reality was the words on the pages, and the pages were bound together in books, and the books were the bricks that built the wall, and no force could bring down that wall, that wall that kept the mean people at bay.

Not even Carrie White, with her uncontrollable telekinetic power, could have toppled the walls I erected out of necessity around myself when I was a little, little fellow. The walls were not a trap, not a prison. They were protection. And within them, with me, were those who loved me and provided for me and accepted me. Even to this very day, I am happiest at home, with those who truly love me, those who never speak a harsh word to me. Even now, with failing body and silver hair and diminished abilities, there is a faithful animal who shows me her love, and there is a beautiful woman with sadness in her blue eyes who cooks my supper and holds me in the dark nights when the banshee wind comes out of the mountains and tells me that there are monsters loose in the night. But there are no monsters in my house. Just love, and a tv screen on which we sometimes watch old horror movies. And what ghost on earth could haunt a man like me, with all that I possess?

~ S.K. Orr