I'm Looking Through You by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Author:Jennifer Finney Boylan [Boylan, Jennifer Finney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2008-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The house to which I had returned after taking my leave of Wesleyan University in the late spring of 1978 bore little resemblance to the place that had been flooded five years earlier. In part, this was because the insurance company had been surprisingly generous with the post-flood reconstruction funds, allowing my parents to bring the house well into the twentieth century.

But there was more to the house’s transformation than this. In the years that had just passed, my father’s star had risen. Now, in my father’s powerful middle age, the Coffin House—though no one called it that anymore—had changed again.

My parents had hired a gardener named Ziggy, a huge Italian guy who not only cut the grass but also cleaned the pool and weeded the perennial garden. When he was working, I’d come through the door and sing, in my best David Bowie voice, “‘Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly, and the spiders from Mars.’”

My mother would look at me confused. “Ziggy doesn’t play guitar,” she’d say, thoughtfully. “Does he?”

No one, in the old days, could have mistaken the Boylans for a family of means. Now, as I stood at the edge of adulthood, it seemed we had become something else entirely, a family with its own gardener.

All of this created the other big difference in the place. As the walls were repainted, the drywall sealed, the new floors stained and buffed, the windows and doors replaced, the house felt less and less haunted. By the time I got out of high school in 1976, I could feel the difference: its spirits were gone.

By the time of my sister’s wedding two years later, all that haunting seemed like a crazy memory, something I’d imagined or invented out of boredom or confusion, a dementia born out of sheer loneliness. Had any of it been real, when you came right down to it? I wondered, sometimes, whether my memories of my own life could be trusted.

“‘He took it all too far,’” I’d sing to my mother. “‘But boy could he play guitar.’”

“Who’s this we’re talking about?” she’d ask.

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