{"id":113173,"date":"2017-07-28T09:00:08","date_gmt":"2017-07-28T13:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=113173"},"modified":"2017-07-28T12:33:40","modified_gmt":"2017-07-28T16:33:40","slug":"emily","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/28\/emily\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Auguste Renoir, In the Meadow<\/em>, 1888\u201392, oil on canvas.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Although I have never seen a ghost, I have claimed to have seen one. This was when I was a child, and mistakenly believed this sort of lie gave me a certain obscure cachet. I wasn\u2019t a habitual liar\u2014I was never very good at it. In fact, as an adult I believe I can remember every lie I ever told. At the time, I was very troubled by my own wickedness. At six, I remember telling my reading group that I was going to be a flower girl in a wedding\u2014I think there was a little boy I wanted to impress with my importance\u2014and then, when I did end up at a rather crummy and impromptu wedding party later that summer, I grabbed a bunch of flowers off someone\u2019s lawn, and threw them, just to make my lie true.<\/p>\n

There was a girl on my block who was an inept and inveterate whopper-teller. Her name was Emily. She wore a lot of pink sweat suits and had a long, reddish braid. I knew she was \u201cdisturbed,\u201d as we said in those days\u2014something to do with her parents\u2019 \u201cbad divorce\u201d\u2014and I had been told to be nice to her, but the foolish and incessant nature of her mendacity irritated me. She\u2019d do things like claim to have seen The Blue Lagoon<\/em> and to have been in near-fatal helicopter accidents, or that her house\u2014which I\u2019d been to\u2014had an improbable number of rooms. Obviously she was one of the first people I knew to say she had a mythical boyfriend. \u201cHe gave me a diamond necklace,\u201d she told me once. \u201cI\u2019ll show it to you. My mom\u2019s going to say it was from my grandma, but that\u2019s just because she doesn\u2019t want me dating someone older.\u201d I did not like being taken for a fool; I despised her. We were probably eight.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Obviously, Emily said she\u2019d seen ghosts: dozens of them. Relatives, a \u201cneon-green wizard,\u201d a dwarf whom I later realized she had cribbed directly from the movie Willow. <\/em>I knew she was making it up, but I still felt a grudging resentment. Despite a brief obsession with the ghost of Ty Cobb, and despite telling myself that a small plastic baby doll I\u2019d lost had been taken by the fairies, I\u2019d never actually had an encounter with the supernatural. A part of me certainly felt it was my due.<\/p>\n

Whatever the reason, I told this girl I\u2019d seen a ghost. Not just that: I said I\u2019d traveled back in time. I remember I dropped the information casually, appalled at my own daring yet satisfied by her reaction. It had happened, I claimed, at the pamphleteer Thomas Paine\u2019s cottage in New Rochelle (a place I\u2019d actually been.) I\u2019d been on a guided tour, I said, and wandered off by myself, and suddenly, there was a little girl in seventeenth-century dress! And we\u2019d become friends. And then, she\u2019d sort of disappeared into the ether, in the approved spectral manner. And, I concluded, with a faraway look in my eyes, I\u2019d never really been the same since.<\/p>\n

This preposterous story owed a lot to books I was reading then; one where an orphan escaped into the past via a root cellar, another where a girl (possibly an orphan) traveled to the past via a milk truck. Both were immeasurably changed by their experiences, and if it had not actually happened\u2014as I told it I became half-convinced that it had\u2014it seemed like the sort of thing that probably would<\/em> have happened to me. My neighbor was very impressed. Besides, even if she knew it wasn\u2019t true, she was in no position to call anyone out for lying. And then that summer ended, and as kids do, we drifted apart, and while I heard she\u2019d had some mild teenage troubles, our paths didn\u2019t cross again.<\/p>\n

That might have been the end of it, but then, only a few years ago, I saw her wedding announcement. The wedding was very fancy and elaborate; it had taken place in an Italian palazzo (although no one involved seemed to be Italian) and featured a small army of bridesmaids. Her groom appeared to do something businessey. I studied the picture closely: she had become very thin and was wearing, of course, a gown. And at her throat glittered diamonds.<\/p>\n

I pored over that wedding announcement. I wonder if she saw mine?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is an advisory editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although I have never seen a ghost, I have claimed to have seen one. This was when I was a child, and mistakenly believed this sort of lie gave me a certain obscure, cachet. I wasn\u2019t a habitual liar\u2014I was never very good at it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29681],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tales-of-the-unexpected"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTales of the Unexpected: A Ghost Story<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Although I have never seen a ghost, I have claimed to have seen one. 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