“Ghost Stories” by Peter Orner

From Still No Word from You, which was published last month by Catapult.

On the black-and-white TV in the kitchen, my mother and I watched Richard Nixon’s helicopter slowly rise. My mother stood at the sink doing dishes. At one point, she stopped scrubbing but left her hands in the dishwater. The kitchen of the house on Hazel Avenue. The house no longer exists. It is less about her expression than that her hands remained in the water but were no longer scrubbing the dishes. Something to do with the stillness, her hands suddenly motionless in the soapy water. Maybe at that moment she wasn’t thinking about Nixon at all. She was staring out at the backyard. I don’t know what month of 1974 Nixon called it quits. I could check. It’s exhausting being able to check anything and everything. Let’s say it was spring, late spring, when Nixon resigned. My mother is looking out the window. She wouldn’t leave Hazel Avenue, with my brother and me in tow, for almost another decade. But I know I read something in her eyes. As if she’d already taken off. My mother, the sound of her splashing, scrubbing, and then, stillness.

My father’s story about how a couple of Irish kids once chased him around the old neighborhood in Rogers Park calling him a kike or a yid or a dirty Jew. He said it like they were fulfilling an obligation and he, too, was playing his role. A little Jew, he ran like hell. When they caught him, those two knocked him around, not too bad, enough to make a proper show. They were welcoming my father to the city he’d been born into eight years earlier. Get it? my father would say. They chased my ass around Rogers Park, not out of it. You want to know how Chicago works, that’s how Chicago—

I’m running out of stories. My father at the corner of Fargo and California, sprinting like mad, those two little Hanrahans gaining on him, kids who have no more idea what a Jew is than they’d have been able to imagine that close to eighty years later, someone, me, would be lying in a bed in Vermont next to a sleeping daughter and remembering that they once existed, two little shits who must be dead by now. As dead as the boy they once chased. Sometimes I fall asleep after reading to her and wake and grope around in the dark for a pen and a scrap of paper. Lately, I write down what I’ve already written. Some stories don’t get lost, they get repeated into oblivion.

I get it, Dad. Persecution as initiation.

He always told it like it was something he lived through so he could tell it later. This is how it was to be chased on a late summer day in the mid-Forties. His father was still in the South Pacific. (A Jewish captain in the Navy, although you didn’t, my grandfather always said, want to be too loud about it.)