Ghost Girl at the Genetti Hotel
Allison Weissman
On Matthew and Bronte’s wedding website, there’s a wide shot of them touching noses on a sprawling blue-gray lake. The day looks foggy and cold—as if the sky could wring out at any moment. The clouds are made of gauze. My cousin Matthew looks more unguarded than I’ve ever seen him. His face, cracked open like a soft fruit. I have yet to meet Bronte in person, but on my phone, I study the way her nose crinkles up to her eyes, so I will know the feeling when it comes to me. She has red-brown hair down to her chest, only a couple shades darker than mine. It’s as long as mine was once, too, back when I was in high school. If I squint the right way, I can almost convince myself it’s me standing there, touching noses on a lake.
We are going to be late for this wedding.
In the hotel bathroom, my grandmother stands naked before a mirror, waiting for my hand to pop through the door with her dress. “Allie,” she says, every other minute now. “Where are my clothes?”
Somehow, she lost them in the distance between the car and the hotel room, and my mother has gone searching for them up on the eighth floor, where she’s sharing a room with my father. My brother, too, is sifting through bags down in the car trunk, leaving me on Grandma duty.
Time to the wedding: forty-three minutes.
“They’re looking,” I tell her. “I’m sure they’ll find them soon.”
My grandmother sighs.
ALLISON WEISSMAN
We are staying in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, at this old hotel called the Genetti. It was originally built in 1921, and the entire building is laid out with red velveteen carpets. The halls, too, are lined with photos of the dead: Eleanor Roosevelt, Gene Kelly, Babe Ruth. They all stayed here at one point or another, and while this is of great interest to my father, who just about pressed his nose to Babe Ruth’s dusty glass frame on our way inside, I’m just trying to make it through the weekend.
In the mirror, I swish a black cocktail dress back and forth. Try to tuck my shoulders back into my body. I’m nonbinary— transmasc—but my mother does not believe in trans people, and I have, momentarily, given up. There is too much fighting when I am myself in her presence, and so, for the weekend, I am playing ghost.
I’m tinkering with one of Mom’s large silver hoops, trying to thread it through a hole in my ear when she calls.
“Hey,” I say. “Grandma is still naked. Did you find it?”
“Allison,” my mother is sobbing. “I’m lost in the hotel corridors,” she says.
“What?”
“I don’t know where Dad is. I don’t know where I am. I’m lost.”
“Okay,” I say. “Hang on.”
“No,” she says. “You don’t understand.” She presses the phone closer to her mouth then, lowers her voice to a whisper. “I keep hearing noises,” she says. “I hear something. I don’t know where I am.”
“Do you want me to come get you?” I say.
“No,” my mother says. “You will only get lost.”
“Allie,” my grandmother calls. “Where are my clothes?”
Today is my cousin’s Big Day, I remind myself. In just twentyeight minutes, he will marry the love of his life, Bronte, who he met on Hinge. Today is their Big Day.
“Have you tried going back the way you came?” I say.
We are, no surprise, late for the wedding. The arch overlooks a cornfield at the bottom of a bowl of mountains, and my family run-walks to the benches two minutes before my cousin walks down the aisle. As we sit, my aunt whispers, “They were waiting,” but I only shrug. I don’t know why she expected today to be different from any other. We are always late.
My grandmother’s clothes were in the car all along, and having made it here, my mother has started to come back to herself. Through her big brown sunglasses, she watches the ceremony with immense focus, and I try my best to mimic her attention.
It’s a beautiful ceremony. I’ll concede this. My cousin Matthew wears a navy-blue suit. The sky is tinged with golden light. His older brother is crying. On days like this, I know they must think of their father, my uncle, who died of a heart attack ten years ago on Valentine’s Day. There’s a space up there where he’s supposed to be, as if they know today, he will be in attendance. How old was Matthew when he found him? When he tried to do CPR? Fifteen? Sixteen? I am always forgetting this.
I glance over at my father then—the one living person who connects me to all these people. If he thinks of his older brother today, he does not show it. In the reflection of his sunglasses, I can only see the warped stalks of the cornfield, the mountains stretched like melted taffy, my cousins up there in their navy-blue suits, and the father-shaped gap between them.
Bronte walks down the aisle in a white dress. There is a kiss. My cousin seems uncomfortable, like a wooden plank before all
these people—nothing like their engagement picture. As we take family photos on the lawn, I learn he and Bronte already had a private ceremony—that they were already married by the time my family pulled up late to their wedding. I take solace in this, knowing he couldn’t take the pressures of the day, either.
After pictures, we walk up to the old stone barn that overlooks the cornfields. It’s been renovated with shiny wood floors and shimmery chandeliers, and if you look out through its back windows, you can just make out the TRUMP 2024 sign gleaming across the street. Six months from now, when he’s president again, and there are seven executive orders alone targeting trans people, I’ll have wished I wore my suit. But right now, I only look on with mild discomfort as Matthew and Bronte share their first wedding dance to a country song about trucks.
My mother looks on, too, with a fondness I know I’m never going to elicit from her. This isn’t something owed, I know, but I can only seem to feel the weight of her gaze—how much I’m going to hurt her when I fail at all this.
My mother is lost in the face of my transness. It seems to come up at every crux, whenever I have an important life decision to make—moving, changing jobs, applying for a master’s program. When I ask her for advice—which maybe I should learn to stop doing—the conversation devolves in steady leaps until we’re talking about gender. “Do you know how jarring it was for me,” she says, “when you came home with your hair like that? Like a man’s? I mean, what am I supposed to do?”
At my most empathetic, I can allow myself to see she’s never had a roadmap for this. She’s not close with anyone who has an openly queer or trans kid. She’s never had to accept this as part of her life. It’s not an excuse, I know. She should not need instructions to be kind, but I wonder sometimes what our relationship might look like if there was someone I could point to and say, See? That’s what unconditional love looks like.
Instead, here I am, haunting my own body. Playing ghost to keep the peace.
The wedding party is really getting started now. The DJ is playing “Hotel Room Service,” and Bronte is spinning with my cousin on the dance floor. Under the disco lights, the mass of bodies dancing, I almost miss it. The thin line of Bronte’s spinal fusion scar, peeking out from between her shoulder blades. It’s the same one I have, like a thin purple marker tracing the center of my back. As my feet move to the synth, I whisper to my aunt, “We have the same scar,” and she looks at me as if I’ve said something socially unacceptable, but I only turn back to look again.
Mine is from a run-in with childhood scoliosis—a spine twisted like a gnarled tree that three back braces couldn’t contain. I don’t get to ask what Bronte’s is from because it’s her wedding night, and that feels wrong, but all through the night, I find myself staring, looking for it like a compass needle under the fractals of light. This, I think, the version of me that could have been. Bronte, the girl my mother wanted.
When the wedding is over, and my family goes back to the Genetti, I stay up late into the night Googling “hotel genetti ghosts” and “genetti hotel haunted.” All day, my father has been fixated on the possibility of ghosts here. “No hotel is this old,” he said, “without being haunted.” In the dim light of my phone, I scroll through Tripadvisor reviews that read, “Creepiest hotel I’ve ever stayed at,” and “There’s an isolated feeling, almost like you’re being watched by someone or something you cannot see.”
As my brother snores in the bed next to mine, and the air conditioner sputters its mold spores out into the dark, I keep scrolling on Google—until, on the sixth link down, I stumble upon the girl who shares my first name: Allison Stoddart. Legend has it, she was staying up on the eighth floor, around the corner from my parents, when she fell down the laundry chute. She was only
a kid—five, maybe six years old. Thought it was a great spot for hide-and-seek.
A few feet away, my brother shifts. The bed creaks, and I pull the covers up to my chin, not unlike a child myself, thinking of my mother on the phone saying, I hear something. I don’t know where I am. Online, the employees say they can still hear her giggling through the halls.
There’s even a photograph. A little girl blurred in the back right corner, despite the fact that, according to the photographer, there was no one there when he took the picture. I know there’s a logical explanation for this. That the exposure on the photo would have taken several minutes—long enough for a kid to wander into the frame, for the camera to pick up their outline, ethereal and ghostlike. But as I pinch my fingers apart, zoom in closer on Allison’s gauzy figure—her blurred face and her little white dress—I can’t help but imagine what it might’ve been like. To open up that metal vat and peer down its dark, rectangular mouth. Think, This here This is where I’ll go to hide.