I’ve never told anybody about those kids before. Probably because if they asked questions I might break down and blab the whole story and that would just start trouble, knowing my family. Isn’t it weird how people think they know their own mother when she’s carried this secret for over seventy years?

My daughter-in-law spends time with me now and then when my son, Georgie, brings her down from Pennsylvania where their house is. He runs a business here in New Jersey and stays with me during the week while she’s usually alone at home in the mountains with woods all around and a lake in front. They have bears and coyotes and fisher-cats and all kinds of critters there, but she says she isn’t scared when Georgie is gone. I probably would be. Her name is Suzanne.

So I decide out of the blue to mention to Suzanne that even though I’m blind, I see those kids, and she says, “What kids?” And I say, “Two blond ones, a boy and a girl. They’re always playing near me; they’re here right now playing on the table.”

“What? Where?” she says.

I wave across the table to my left (her right). “Over there, they’re standing and playing with toys, on the table.”

“You see kids there? Who are they?” she says in that voice people use when they’re talking to a crazy person.

“I don’t know,” I tell her, but I’m lying.

“Maybe they’re ghosts,” she says. “Who lived in this house before you?”

“Maybe,” I say. “Who knows?”

I was married to my kids’ father George for sixteen years before he up and died due to medical incompetency at the hospital. It was Fourth of July weekend and his ulcer started bleeding. He threw up blood. They’d told him never to drink alcohol, but he didn’t listen. Russians immigrants and their sons never listened, they had to be macho. Though George wasn’t really a big drinker; just his father Alexi was.

Alexi hated me. “You’re bringing all of us down!” I heard him yell at George. “She’s a good for nothing whore! Did this on purpose, got you to knock her up so you’d have to marry her! She’s from trash and she’ll always be trash!” 

That’s what he said about me and maybe he wasn’t far wrong. We were poor as dirt and my father was a drunk and all of my brothers too. George’s family weren’t Rockefellers, but they had more than we did and though they drank, they didn’t show it much, being Russian. Though while they were judging my messed-up crew, Alexi was beating the crap out of George’s mother. She looked like one of those tired old dogs you see lurking around where people toss out food – bony with matted fur and sore from being kicked.

Suzanne suddenly pipes up and says, “Are they still here? The kids, I mean?” 

I’d forgotten she was there for a moment, lost as I was in thought. “Yeah, they’re still here.”  They’re always around if I’m awake and thinking about them, but they usually disappear when I go to bed, though not always. One time I woke up and both of them were leaning over me, the boy right in my face. Funny how clear they look even though nothing else is visible to me, only a bit of light. I can see a bit of that but not much else.

“How long have they been around?” Suzanne says.

Well, now, that’s getting into dangerous territory. “Long time,” I mutter and then I mention to her that there’s some nice lunch meat in the fridge and does she want a sandwich?  That distracts her so she gets up to open the fridge.

I was born in 1927, right before the Depression hit and by the way, I feel that kind of thing might be coming again now, but that’s another story. Glad I’m ninety-three and probably soon out of here, that’s all I can say.

We were real poor growing up, and my mother took in laundry to keep us afloat when my father went on his binges and his employer let him go. Sometimes his boss would take him back after he sobered up. I wasn’t blind in those days. This thing I have, it’s called retinitis pigmentosa and it started in my late teens and then kept getting worse over the years. So I could still see fine when I was fourteen and my mother took in this man as a boarder, some distant cousin of hers name of Gerry. My brothers were off in the war and we had the extra room and could use the money. From the start, he gave me the creeps. Well, long story short, he started in on me when she wasn’t around and forced me one day in the basement while I was down there helping with that laundry. She was off somewhere and wouldn’t believe me anyway, saying I was a tramp and had tempted him. When it turned out I was pregnant, she made me marry the bastard and then she kicked us out.

Well, those twin babies came, and Gerry wasn’t as bad as I had expected though he was almost twenty years older than me and I couldn’t stand to let him touch me. After those children came, I got strength for some reason and wouldn’t take any crap from him. It was a strange thing, but it was kind of like I became the boss. And then he got injured at work; he worked on the railroad and he got pinched somehow and lost his right hand and couldn’t work. After that he took to drink, pretty much stopped eating and staggered in front of a bus. I was left with the kids who were almost four years old. By now the war was over and my brothers came home. They were good boys, not full drunks yet, and they made Mother take me back home. She did like those kids, I’ll give her that but soon as we got there, she had a stroke and died. Just thirty-eight, she was, that was all.   

About that time, polio was going around and Sofie and Peter caught it, probably from the next-door neighbor kid who survived but became a cripple. My children got that fever and then three days later, they both died, within half an hour of each other.

“Eleanor,” says Suzanne all of a sudden, “are you crying?”

I didn’t know I was. When you can’t see, you tend to forget others can. I wipe my eyes and lie, “Probably my allergies. They get pretty bad this time of year.”

“Yeah, I get the sinus thing,” she says back. “I’m going to make us sandwiches, okay? You want mustard or mayo?”

“Mayo,” I say. She’s a good wife for Georgie. I liked her the minute he brought her here.  “And get those bread and butter pickles out, they’re real good.”

So anyhow, now I was alone and childless and not yet turned nineteen. Some of the people in the neighborhood had moved and been replaced by others who didn’t know my past. Not that it mattered; I’d been a married woman after all, but I decided not to bring it up to anyone. Those that knew didn’t talk to me about it out of respect for my having lost the babies and my brothers knew not to bring it all up.

Well, I got a job across town working the notions counter at Woolworth’s. It was pleasant work; I enjoyed looking at and handling all those items for sale, pretty colored threads and buttons and ribbons, and the ladies who bought them were nice to chat with. One day this handsome young man came in. You didn’t often see men at the notions counter; notions are a woman’s thing. He said he had to get thread for his mother, pink and navy, and so I helped him with that, and then he asked me out to the movies. I remember it was “Key Largo” with Lauren Bacall everyone thought was so sexy. We all wanted to look like her with that hair over one eye and her husky voice.  

We lived on the opposite ends of town from George’s family, so he’d never heard of me or my past or any of that and I thought why tell him?  What difference did it make? The past was the past and I was done with it and none of it was my fault. I had him pick me up after work at the store and drop me off at the end of my street.

“You want a cookie?” asks Suzanne, who’d been eating silently, and I wondered, not for the first time, if people stared at me while I ate. “Yeah, I’ll take a couple, honey. Penny for your thoughts.” A nice thing about being old is that you don’t care about your figure and you eat whatever you want. I’m skinny now no matter what I eat. And hate to imagine what I look like. Maybe it’s merciful I’m blind.

“Oh, I was just thinking about an idea for a story,” she says. “I need some new material.’

She’s a writer. They tell me she’s had a book published and a lot of stories. Too bad I can’t read them, though occasionally she reads one to me. Some are that science fiction stuff, not my usual cup of tea, but pretty entertaining nonetheless.

“Too bad I can’t help you,” I say. Though it crosses my mind to tell her who those two children really are. But why open up a long-sealed can of worms? “I don’t know much about aliens and all that.”

“You know I don’t just write about aliens and space stuff,” she says. “I write stories about people’s lives. I’ve read you a couple of those.”

People’s lives, I think, most of them full of secrets. “Uh huh,” I say. “You feel like making us a cup of tea?”

So George and I took to going out together and eventually I brought him home to meet my brothers, but they were pretty drunk when he arrived. Even so, none of them said anything about you know what, nor did they ever. It was one of the things in life that amazed me but then possibly they just forgot, having soaked their brains. My brothers were good to me in their ways, I’ll give them that.

“Well, I don’t think I have any stories right now,” I tell Suzanne. I can hear her filling the tea kettle. “I told you the one the other day about Charlene down the street and that big fight she had with Sears and Roebuck.”

“Uh huh,” says Suzanne, “that was a pretty good one. Here’re your cookies.”  She moves my hand so it touches the plate.

“Thanks,” I say, feeling for them.

“Are those kids still here?” she says.

“Don’t see ‘em now,” I tell her though that isn’t true. They’re right there playing with little wooden farm animals. But she’s getting a bit too close on this subject. I can tell she is fishing.

George took me to a dance. A fancy thing up in New York City. We took the train all dressed up and there were famous bands there like Artie Shaw and we heard Billie Holiday sing. We stayed overnight at some friends of his and it turned out we did what we shouldn’t have in one of their beds. And that turned out like you’d expect – I was in the family way and George and I had to get married.

Was I happy about it? Was he? I don’t know if he was or wasn’t. He stopped saying “I love you,” there’s that. I was pretty much gaga over him, so I guess you could say I was happy. His family raised a godawful fuss, his father calling me trash and every other name he could come up with, so we ran off and eloped. Just imagine what the old man would have done if he’d known about those two kids, so I kept my mouth shut and never told George. Oh, there were times I was tempted, but I never did. And what was sad was that I lost that baby we had to get married for and it took four years before I got pregnant with Nancy, another six before Laura and then came little Georgie and three years later George up and died. And that mean old man, George’s father didn’t want anything to do with his son’s kids. We were at the mercy of other relatives and whatever help I could get from the state. One of George’s brothers did his best to cheat us out of whatever we had from George and I wasn’t smart and mean enough to fight him back.

Add to this, my retinitis pigmentosa started growing worse, but I managed to get assembly line work in a sweeper factory, and somebody picked me up every day and brought me home. The kids were good kids and they helped me. We managed though at times we didn’t know where the next meal was coming from. But I worked right through that dark curtain falling over my eyes and then some until finally Nancy and Laura got me better government assistance and Laura and her husband lived here and took care of me. It was about then I started seeing those kids. For some reason they were about seven years old and they’ve stayed that way ever since.

It was like they knew I was lonely and came to reassure me they were doing okay. Either that or to make me feel guilty for never telling the rest of my family about them. But like I said, a can of worms. My daughters aren’t exactly open-minded, and they tend to turn everything into a big drama. They’re both wacky religious too. That’s why it’s peaceful to be with my daughter-in-law sometimes. She doesn’t care what I did or didn’t do; it’s all no skin off her back.

“So tell me a story,” Suzanne says after settling back down with our tea. “Anything will do. I don’t get out much,” she adds, laughing.

I stir my tea, not saying anything, thinking. I’m getting near the end, so what can my family do to me anyway? The grandkids don’t care. Those kids stop playing and look at me expectantly, Sofie and Peter with their blond hair hanging in their pale blue eyes, so unlike my other children, dark as they are.

After a long, long pause, I say to my daughter-in-law, “Well, Suzanne, I do know who those kids are. I know very well who they are.”

– Margaret Karmazin