We Others

by Steven Millhauser

  I walked her home from school one day, a warm October afternoon that felt like summer. Under branches of sugar maple and red maple we walked through flickers of sun and shade—here and there, in the still air, a yellow-red leaf came drifting down. I carried my books against my hip and my autumn jacket slung over one shoulder. Emily had tied her burnt-orange sweater around her waist, like a backward apron, and she carried her blue pebbly three-ring binder and her crisply covered schoolbooks in an upward-tilted pile against her white blouse. Speckles of sunlight danced on her as she walked, as if bits of light were being tossed at her through the leaves.

  She lived in an older neighborhood, on a street where the houses had wide front porches, and tree roots pushed up chunks of sidewalk. On her porch sat a glider with faded flowery pink cushions, beside a green wicker table that held a glass of lemonade. A rake stood up against a window shutter; a bicycle leaned against a cushioned wicker chair. Everything about the house pleased me—the tarnished brass knocker on the gray front door, the living room with its dark blue couch and its deep armchair next to a pair of old moccasins, the scent of furniture polish mixed with a bready sweetish smell of baking, the sunny yellow kitchen with its bright porcelain rooster on the windowsill. On top of the refrigerator sat a cookie jar shaped like a bear hugging his belly. Emily’s mother was standing at the sink, washing a big breadboard sticky with dough. Over a flowered dress she wore an apron decorated with richly red apples, each with two green leaves. She turned and began wiping her hands briskly on the apples. “Oh my, I can’t shake your hand or I’ll—Emmy, take the young man’s jacket, why don’t you. I’m Emily’s mother, and you must be—Will. Well, Will. Would you like a soda? A piece of raspberry pie?”

  I spent that afternoon creaking in the glider in the warm shade of the front porch, sipping root beer and eating raspberry pie. Emily sat next to me with an open French grammar facedown on her lap, pushing with one leg to keep us gliding—into the sun and back into shade, into the sun and back into shade. From time to time her mother opened the front door and asked if I’d like another piece of pie or a brownie with walnuts or an oatmeal cookie. Some girls were jumping rope across the street; farther off came the quick clean sharp bursts of a basketball against driveway tar. At the same time I heard the scratch of a rake pulling over leaves. I could feel myself settling into those sounds as into my own childhood—and the warmth, the slap of the rope, the creak of the glider, the dripping sunny hands of Mrs. Hohn, the square porch posts, the dip of the telephone wires between poles, all seemed to me, as I half closed my eyes, to be part of Emily herself, as if she were flowing into the peacefulness of an October afternoon.

  2

  I began walking home with her every day, dragging my feet through unraked leaves that sounded to me like waves drawing back on a beach. As the weather grew colder we moved indoors—sometimes to the living room, where we sat on the dark blue couch beside the armchair, sometimes to the kitchen table, with its maplewood chairs that had floral-patterned cushions tied to the seats. After a while we’d go upstairs to Emily’s room, where I straddled the wooden desk-chair and faced Emily, who sat on the big bed with her back propped up against the headboard and her legs stretched out on the pink spread. I admired her desk, an old-fashioned one with pigeonholes and a writing surface that swung out on brass hinges. In one corner of the room sat a small bookcase no higher than my waist. It held a pale blue leather jewelry box, eight or nine books, a Ginny doll with one arm, and many boxes of puzzles. The small number of books surprised me, since I had two large bookcases in my room, a row of books on my dresser, and piles of books on the floor by my desk. But I quickly came to connect the absence of such things with Emily’s calmness, as if books and edginess belonged together. We talked, we laughed, we did homework—I at the desk, she on the bed. Sometimes, turning over my shoulder, I would simply look at her, as she sat reading calmly on the bed with her black flats on the floor and her ankles crossed, reaching now and then to scratch the back of her left hand with two fingers of the right.

  At 4:00 there would be a knock on the half-open door and Mrs. Hohn would sweep in with a tray bearing glasses of milk and a plate of chocolate chip cookies. At 5:30 I would hear Emily’s father opening the two front doors, the storm door and the wooden door, and ten minutes later he would drive me home. Mr. Hohn was a mild, balding man with large melancholy eyes and a rueful smile. He did something in insurance, collected plate blocks and first-day covers of every newly issued American stamp, and liked to ask me serious questions about whatever book I was reading. He said things like “Can you hand me that thingamajigger?” and “That’s for darn sure.” I felt so welcomed by the Hohn family, so bathed in their atmosphere, that when I entered my own house, with its bookcases and its polished dark piano with piles of yellow music books and its faint sweet odor of pipe tobacco, it was always with a slight shock of estrangement, before familiarity settled over me.

  I kept planning to invite Emily to my house, but I never did. At my place, we would have done my kinds of things—I’d have shown her my books, and my records, and my twin-lens reflex, and my collection of labeled minerals from quarries all over Connecticut. I would have played the piano for her, a piece by Chopin or Debussy, and then, to show that I wasn’t stuck up, a boogie-woogie by Clarence Pine Top Smith. My parents would have welcomed her and made her feel at home. And as I imagined these things, all of which had happened many times before, a tiredness came over me, as if I were rehearsing for a play that I’d just finished performing in. It was as if, in my house, I could feel a continual soft pressure on me—emanating from the piano, from the reading chair in my room, from the mahogany bookcase in the front hall—to be the person I was, the one I felt I somehow had to be. What I liked about Emily’s house was that I didn’t have to be anything at all.

  On weekends my father graded papers at home and let me have the car. When I asked about a curfew, he looked up from the armchair by the lamp table and said, “Your mother and I expect you home before the year is out.” Every Friday night I would drive over to Emily’s house, and every Saturday I would drive over in the late morning and stay past midnight. We did homework in Emily’s room; I helped Mr. Hohn rake leaves and clean the roof gutters; I sat in the kitchen peeling carrots and cutting the ends off string beans while Mrs. Hohn prepared the pot roast or the roast lamb. After dinner, Emily washed the dishes and I dried them with a thick dish towel decorated with little bluebirds. Then the four of us would play Scrabble at the dining room table, under a small brass chandelier with narrow bulbs shaped like flames. Mrs. Hohn liked to press her hand to her chest and say that, good gracious, with me around, who needed a dictionary, but she was a skillful and relentless player and usually won—the two of us always came in first or second, while Emily and her father trailed far behind. Something gentle and unaggressive in Mr. Hohn’s play, which reminded me of his melancholy eyes, seemed to invite defeat; but I was merciless. “I can’t believe these letters,” Mrs. Hohn would say, or “Em, don’t do that,” as Emily reached over to scratch the back of her hand. Mrs. Hohn liked to win; we inspired in each other a spirit of friendly fierce combat. At times, lashed to competitive fury by Mrs. Hohn, I glanced at Emily as she sat staring mildly at her tiles. For a moment her calmness baffled me, as if we were playing different games. Then the battle was over, with laughter and headshakes, and Mrs. Hohn served cookies and cider and apple crumb cake, while outside the winds of November rattled the dining room windows.

  One Saturday afternoon when I was in the backyard helping Mr. Hohn repair a wood-framed storm window that we’d taken down and set against the house, he looked up and said, “Looks like we need a plane. Wait here and I’ll—or heck no, come on down.” He opened the sloping door, led me down six steps, and reached for a key hidden on the ledge above the red cellar door. In the deep basement he led me past the furnace and boiler to a shelf that held a ball-peen hammer, a spirit level, and a shiny black plane with a wooden knob. “Since we’re do
wn here,” he said, and motioned me along with two quick curls of a forefinger. We came to a wall piled high with boxes; a tall metal cabinet with two doors stood in a corner. Mr. Hohn opened the metal doors. I saw a row of little dresses all hanging on small white plastic hangers. “Emmy’s,” he said. He took one out, on its hanger, and held it up for me—a little blue dress with a white collar. “Three years old.” He shrugged, rubbed the back of his neck, and hung up the dress. “We kept planning to give them away, but somehow—” He sighed. “Well!” he said, and closed the doors. Turning abruptly, he led me back up the steps into the backyard.

  Meanwhile, in school, I waited for the day to end so that I could walk home with Emily. I liked to look over at her, in the classes we took together. Unlike me, always restless, always a little bored, Emily gazed at the teacher with full attention, or else bent her head over her notebook and wrote steadily. Sometimes she would give a subtle yawn, which revealed itself as a slight stiffening of her under-eye skin. Sometimes she would reach over and scratch the back of her left hand with two fingers of the right.

  One day as I sat down in the cafeteria with my shepherd’s pie and my Devil Dog, I noticed that the back of Emily’s hand was a little red. “How’s your hand?” I asked. She immediately placed it on her lap. “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s this dry heat.” She pointed to a hissing radiator.

  3

  On a dreary Monday morning shortly before Christmas break, when the sky was so gray and dark that the school windows glowed, as at a night dance, I arrived late at the lockers and rushed into homeroom seconds before the bell. Emily’s seat was empty. Her desk, without her, seemed to be drawing attention to itself, like a lamp without a shade. It struck me that she’d never been absent before—it wasn’t the sort of thing she did. All that day her absence pressed on me. She seemed, absent, more insistently present than when she was actually there. Under the fluorescent ceiling lights I had the sensation that she was visibly, luminously, missing. At my house I let myself in with my key. I dropped my books on the kitchen table, where they slowly began to topple, and dialed Emily’s number. Mrs. Hohn answered the phone as the books slid along the tabletop. Emily was fine, there was nothing to worry about. She had gone to the doctor for a checkup. She was resting now, she’d be back in school probably tomorrow. Could I think of a six-letter word for “enliven”?

  When I entered homeroom the next morning, Emily was sitting at her desk. Her ankles were crossed under her chair. The yellow collar of her shirt lay neatly on her dark green sweater. On the back of her left hand was a small white square of gauze, taped on all four sides.

  On the way to English she said, “He doesn’t want me to scratch it.” She gave a little shrug. “Some sort of skin thing. It’s embarrassing.”

  “No it isn’t,” I said. “No way. Absolutely not.”

  During Christmas vacation I spent so much time at the Hohns’ that my mother started saying things like “We hardly see you anymore” and “I hope you aren’t wearing out your welcome over there.” Once she looked sharply at me and said, “Is everything all right, Will?” Every morning I took the long cold walk to Emily’s house; I returned only at night, driven by Mr. Hohn. Late one afternoon the sky turned dark and a heavy snow began to fall. I was invited to spend the night in the upstairs guest room, under a sky-blue quilt covered with pictures of gray cats and red balls of yarn. I wore a fresh-laundered pair of Mr. Hohn’s flannel pajamas, too wide and too short, striped white and dark blue. Emily, looking in on me, said, “You look—you look—” and gave a whoop of laughter, then covered her mouth with her hand. “Just let me know if you need anything,” Mrs. Hohn said, and closed the door.

  I lay in bed, in the quiet house, under the thickly falling snow. A novel by Turgenev rested open and facedown on my stomach. On the dresser stood a little porcelain man playing a fiddle, a blue glass bird, and half a dozen tiny dolls seated on two wooden benches, facing a miniature teacher standing at a blackboard. Over the dresser hung a painting of a deer in a forest, drinking from a sunlit stream. When I turned out the lamp on the night table, I could sense, behind the drawn shades, the snow falling in slanting steady lines. I imagined the streetlights shining through the falling snow.

  For a long time I lay awake and peaceful in the dark, listening to quiet bursts of warm air coming through the vent at the base of the wall and a faint creak of floorboards in the attic. When at last I went to a window and pulled aside the heavy stiff shade, with its strip of wood in the cloth above the shade pull, I was startled to see a clear night sky. In the light of streetlamps, a glowing snow lay over sidewalks and bushes. It covered the fire hydrant across the street, rose thick along tree branches, swept up to the top of a corner mailbox.

  Late the next morning I sat in the warm yellow kitchen peeling potatoes onto a paper towel, while Mrs. Hohn reached into a chicken and pulled out glistening dark innards, like wet stones. Emily and her father were out doing errands. “You know,” I said, “I can’t help thinking about Emily’s hand. I was wondering—”

  “There’s not a thing to worry about, Will,” Mrs. Hohn said. “It’s just a pesky rash. Be a dear and fetch me down that platter, the bone-china one with the windmills. I don’t know what those people were thinking, putting up shelves fit for a giant.”

  4

  School startled me. It was as if I’d forgotten all about it during that snowy vacation, composed, it seemed to me, of long evenings playing Scrabble with the Hohns under the flame-shaped bulbs and one brilliant blue afternoon in the backyard building two snowmen with Emily: one with a wide-rimmed red hat on its head and a paper rose stuck in its chest, the other with a pipe in its mouth and an empty can of Campbell’s tomato soup on its head. School was a clash of olive-green lockers, a scraping of many desks. Already I was looking forward to summer. I would be sitting near Emily in the warm shade of her backyard, in an aluminum chaise longue with six adjustable positions, reading a library book whose stamped card served as a bookmark, while beside me, on a round white wrought-iron table with an openwork top, a glass of homemade lemonade with a slice of lemon in it stood next to a plate of fresh-baked brownies with walnuts.

  One morning toward the end of January I stepped into homeroom and saw that Emily wasn’t there. I could feel disappointment spreading in me like tiredness. And yet, at the very center of my disappointment, I was aware of a prickle of satisfaction—for hadn’t I known she was bound to be absent again? All that day I tried to savor her absence. It would, I told myself, make her presence all the more vivid and dramatic. The next morning, when I entered homeroom, I didn’t allow myself to look in the direction of her desk. Instead, I imagined Emily seated there in her dark green or burnt-orange sweater, with the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms and the collar of her shirt lying on both sides of her neck. When, overcoming my reluctance, I turned to look at her, I was so shocked by the sight of her empty desk that I glanced down at my watch, as if to see how much time was left before she really wasn’t there.

  At home I sat on the wooden steps between the kitchen and the back porch, with the telephone cord squeezed in the closed door, and called Emily. Mrs. Hohn answered. Emily was fine. She’d had to have a little work done on her hand; she was resting now. I wanted to know what kind of work. “Some minor surgery—nothing to worry about, Will. She came through with flying colors. I’m so proud of her. She’s resting now. She ought to be back to school in a couple of days. I’ll tell her you called. She’ll be so pleased.” Only in my room, as I sat bent over my typewriter on its rattly metal table next to my desk, did I understand what I’d wanted to say to Mrs. Hohn. Why didn’t you tell me? Why? In my mind I shouted into the telephone. Anger burned in me like fever.

  She was absent the next day, and the next. I called each afternoon; always Mrs. Hohn assured me that Emily was resting. The medication had left her feeling a little woozy, Dr. Morrison had said it might have that effect, she’d be up and about in no time. The next day Emily was absent again. At
home I sat on the wooden steps, on the cold porch, with the phone in my lap, and did not call. I understood that Mrs. Hohn would tell me nothing—that my questions disturbed her. I called my friend Danny and invited him over for a game of chess.

  The next day she wasn’t at her locker. I was unsurprised—so deeply unsurprised that I felt no disappointment—and as I entered homeroom I glanced wearily in the direction of her desk, which when it was empty always stood out sharply, like a chair in an old View-Master reel. Emily was sitting quietly there. I’d been so certain of the empty desk that for a moment I became uneasy, as if I were in one of those TV dramas where you open a familiar door and enter another world.

  She was sitting very still. Her books rested in two neat piles on the rack under her chair, and her forearms lay on the blond writing surface. She was wearing a pleated tan skirt and a dark red wool pullover with the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms. On her left hand she wore a white glove. The glove was tight at the wrist and then flared out a little. Her gloved hand lay motionless, the fingers curved and slightly spread, facing down. She sat upright and stared straight ahead. The whiteness of the glove, the stillness of her arms, the slight tension I could see in her neck, all this made me think that it must be another girl, who was wearing Emily’s clothes and taking her place in class, so that the other Emily, the one who didn’t wear a white glove, could continue to lead her life elsewhere, for reasons she would later explain to me.