2

Julia didn’t have to interact with her ex-husband, Donald, on a regular basis to get her money. She often said to herself that if she had to face Donald each month to get her money, she would have lost her courage to create a new life as she was now doing.

Julia’s money was put into her account on the first of every month. It really was a pitiful amount she received in the eyes of the world; it would not have demanded much strength on her part to grab a big chunk of her rich husband’s money. Instead she requested only a tiny fragment of his wealth. Julia could be living in a fancy townhouse in downtown Pittsburgh. She was, however, now living in two rooms and a bath over a drugstore in a grimy crowded inner city neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

Julia had a secret that she felt nobody would understand. It was this secret that kept her from squabbling with Donald over money and possessions. She envied blue collar people, men who worked in the steel mills and lived with their wives and children in row houses and sent the children to public schools. When she would allow herself, in the past, to dwell on the imagined joys of clocking out after pulling a double shift at the steel mill, hot and sweaty, or having to stretch dollars in Star Market to feed a family for a week—a different part of her brain began to argue. Part of her longed for a life where she could plant a garden herself, and bake cookies for the PTA—The fancy, snooty boarding school her boys attended did not have bake sales and Read a Book week, and on March 2^nd did not have Dr. Seuss Day—but then the other voice berated her for being ungrateful and phony, like the hippies from her college days. Rich and comfortable but wearing ragged jeans.

But now the fight was over and the cycle made up of the conflicting voices in her head was at its end. Julia was getting a monthly amount that allowed her to live a bare existence. When she went walking the streets of the poor side of Squirrel Hill—sitting at the edge of Greenfield, which was all working class—she looked at the houses and watched the people sending their kids off to school, hauling brown paper bags full of groceries from their cars to their houses, cutting the grass in their little yards in summer, then knocking off for a cold beer under a tree.

Julia knew she could never be a real part of these lives; and maybe her sons were right when they accused her of acting in a perverse way, just to give Donald a big fat finger. But Julia didn’t care. At 60 nobody knew how much time he or she had left and Julia decided that for whatever time was portioned out to her, she was going to be poor.

Julia dived into a life of watching every penny with relief. She threw off the old ways of living. Fighting with her husband had taken up most of her psychic energy, along with trying to find things to do with her time. She had spent hours, it seemed, standing at the front window of the house she called “the mausoleum” gazing out at the houses that were separated from hers by acres of green velvet lawn but appeared to her to be crowded and close together, uncomfortably so.

Getting a library card cost nothing. Sitting in a window seat of the 61C bus and watching Pittsburgh fly by cost very little, and it was fun to do on rainy days. Walking also was free and educational as well; look how much she had learned from her daily rounds, pacing the streets and looking at houses.

Julia found that talking cost nothing as well. Days had passed in her old life when she would barely say ten words, if that. Now there was time to “Loaf…and invite her soul.” Julia knew this quote was from Walt Whitman. Everybody was in so much of a hurry, a friendly word was appreciated by the bus drivers, the librarians, the people downstairs (her grandmother would have called them “the downstairskes”) who ran the drugstore.

All this was wonderful and fine and joyous, except for the giggling ghosts.

Julia was not exactly afraid of them. They were wonderful but in a different way. She didn’t hear them all the time. Maybe she was imagining them. But then she began to see what she thought was them—a boy and girl, teenagers it looked like, the girl wearing a pink two piece bathing suit with straps that tied on her shoulders in little bows, the boy in swimming briefs. She sometimes saw them hanging upside down from things; roofs, the steeple of the black stone church, in the Star Market, where she bought her food. When she saw them, she wasn’t scared. She laughed out loud the day she saw them in Star Market, and the people in front and in back of her gave her strange looks.

The mysterious part of all was the fact that they reminded her, dimly, of someone or something. She decided that one day soon she would pull her courage together and speak to them.